THIS PAGE HAS BEEN ACTIVATED AS THE NEW STATESMAN BLOG IS NOW CLOSED FOR COMMENTS
At 10am this morning, the New Statesman finally closed the Mark Lynas thread on their website after 1715 comments had been added over a period of five months. I don’t know whether this constitutes any kind of a record, but gratitude is certainly due to the editor of of the New Statesman for hosting the discussion so patiently and also for publishing articles from Dr David Whitehouse and Mark Lynas that have created so much interest.
This page is now live, and anyone who would like to continue the discussion here is welcome to do so. I have copied the most recent contributions at the New Statesman as the first comment for the sake of convenience. If you want to refer back to either of the original threads, then you can find them here:
Dr David Whitehouse’s article can be found here with all 1289 comments.
Mark Lynas’ attempted refutation can be found here with 1715 comments.
Welcome to Harmless Sky, and happy blogging.
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10,000 Responses to “Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs.”
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Well said Tony. I crafted a reply last night, reflected and deleted it, figuring if you didn’t snip it, I was at the very least lowering myself to a certain level we don’t want.
Peter M I will say this though. It was an embarrassing comment, and one as a fellow Antipodean I am ashamed to hear or see all to often when intelligence fails and ignorance takes over.
Its one thing being direct an to the point, in true antipodean custom as exemplified by Plimer or Carter, but quite another to comment on someones personality without knowing them. There is a time and a place reserved for this, usually Rugby or Cricket.
TonyN,
I’m not sure that all ‘abuse’, although that’s not the correct word, is mindless. There can be quite a bit of thought put into some of it.
The publisher’s blurb describes Andrew Montfort as having “studied chemistry at St Andrews University”.
Maybe I’m being over cynical, but isn’t this the sort of phrase used by those who didn’t do very well or even got kicked out before completion? Anyone know how well he did?
In any case, if he’d been listening, he certainly wouldn’t have been taught the sort of nonsense that we’ll no doubt shortly see in yet another book of disinformation.
Max,
I notice that most of your references which you claim disprove the possibility of a localised MWP are from http://www.CO2science.org
who are run by:
Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.
It all sounds very impressive. But just exactly what are they the ‘center’ of? Going by their ‘address’ its the center of a mailbox somewhere in Arizona.
No sensible person would buy the smallest item from those many on-line stores which have no proper address, no phone number, no list of people involved, no VAT or GST number etc.
Bu you are prepared to buy a whole heap of nonsense on something so important as the planetary future?
Anyone know how well he did?
Or how relevant that might be? I neither know nor care how good a chemist he is – his piece titled ‘Caspar and the Jesus Paper’ is one of the finest and most accessible pieces of technical writing I have read, and I speak as a technical author.
Peter M
CO2 Science simply compiled some of the papers on MWP, which I cited; they did not write them (or fund them).
The papers were written by 80 some independent scientists, not by CO2 Science.
Forget your 8678 red herring.
The MWP was real and global, with temperatures slightly above those at present, as all the papers clearly show.
Max
PS If you keep coming up with red herrings like that, I will respond with the equally silly red herring of writing off everything IPCC has reported, simply because it came from IPCC, a “UN-based organization dedicated to prove anthropogenic origin for essentially all observed warming with predictions of drastic future climate changes in order to support a world-wide system of carbon caps and multi-billion dollar taxes, to be administered by its parent organization, the UN”
Can’t you see how totally foolish such red herrings are?
Peter M
You wrote (8677):
You mean like Al Gore (the oracle of climate knowledge) who got a degree in “government” (whazzat?) from Harvard and then studied one year at the Vanderbilt School of Divinity before dropping out?
But, hey, Al got an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize; but, then again he’s older (and a lot richer) than Montfort, and what-the-hell, Obama got one of those peace prizes, too, before he even did anything (except getting elected as US president).
And then there’s college drop-out, Bill Gates…
Max
Here’s an example of the utter insanity to which world leaders have committing us as a result of the Kyoto treaty, renewed at Copenhagen last week.
The massive Indian conglomerate, Tata – currently putting British steel workers on the dole by closing its steel works at Redcar – is to get, as well as cheap international loans, over £500M’s worth of “carbon credits” (paid for, inter alia, by energy companies in the UK) to develop a new project in Gujarat.
What is this worthy project?
Well, it’s a giant coal-fired power station – which alone (and Tata is building more such plants) will increase India’s CO2 emissions by over 600 million tons. It will be one of the biggest such power stations in the world. It qualifies for credits (which incidentally are making entrepreneurs such as Al Gore very rich) because, using what is claimed to be efficient coal burning technology, it is expected to produce fewer emissions than it would have done had it used older technology. The reality, of course, is that, using the Greens’ number one enemy coal, it will massively increase India’s overall CO2 emissions.
Yet the Indian plant will use the same technology as the UK’s Kingsnorth plant so vilified by the Greens (and James Hansen) even though, were it allowed to go ahead, that plant would be obliged to increase its operating costs by buying those wonderful carbon credits in return for being allowed to operate.
And the Indian plant will be four times bigger than Kingsnorth – as will other similar plants in India.
The text below was sent to me by an Australian friend. It sort of puts things into proper perspective (whether you are Australian or not).
I suspect many will have seen this analysis of Dr Pachauri’s (IPCC Chairman) many conflicts of interest. If not, I suggest it’s a must read.
Dr Pachauria’s technical background is railway engineer. Not the best qualification perhaps for someone described by the BBC as the “top climate guru” – but I liked the suggestion that he might be just the man to sort out the Eurostar’s Channel Tunnel problems.
Robin
Thanks for the link to the Telegraph piece. Funny how critics are always being taken to task (see 8677) for lack of or inappropriate qualifications, while the head of the IPCC’s degree is in economics.
Glad to see both Booker and North on the case, though…
Max
just 12 millimetres
Which equates to 1 second out of a 24-hour day, to borrow another analogy. One second to midnight, if you like!
JamesP,
Is there any reason why the head of the IPCC should not be an economist providing he, or she, closely works with members of the IPCC who are climate scientists? Economists, such as Prof Garnaut of Australia, can make valuable contributions to a general understanding of the scale of the problem, but, of course, they shouldn’t make the mistake of straying outside their own area of expertise.
Max,
The atmospheric level of CO2 is 385ppmv. Right?
There are 1 million mm in a km.
So, yes, 385ppmv does correspond to 385mm or 38.5cm for those who are mentally challenged by any units that don’t have the dimensions of length.
The pre-industrial level, the natural level of our recent era, was 280ppmv.
385/280 =1.37 Which means that the human contribution has increased the natural level by 37%. So where does your figure of 97% come from?
Yes, figures of around 300ppmv are small. But there are many compounds which are toxic at these and much lower levels. For instance the safe, but not desirable, working level of carbon monoxide is 50ppmv.
Would you want your drinking water to contain 385ppm of arsenic? Why not? If we were to represent that water by the length of one kilometer……………
Max,
Are you trying to compare the IPCC with some 20 dollar a year mailbox ‘center’ in Arizona?
But it is interesting you mention that the IPCC have a UN connection. That is largely down to President Reagan. He set up the IPCC to be a sort of umpire to give a decision on AGW.
Do you think that the old fox knew that the decision was likely to be unfavourable to ‘his team’? And that attaching a UN tag to it would encourage the world government conspiracy theorists in the US to just dismiss it anyway?
Peter
Let me turn that around, is it right that the man leading the “un-bias” and “non-political” branch of the UN responsible for providing advice to world on how mans understanding of climate change is advancing, stands to financially benefit massively (enough to make Al Gore jealous) from promoting human induced climate change?
No thoughts of “conflict of interest” creeping in there?
Peter
(Max, please forgive me for jumping in, it a very dull afternoon here).
Your drinking water already contains a high lvl of CO2 (don’t know exactly how high but i’m certain its not zero), or an extremely high level if it’s sparkingly. I’m assuming you’ve managed to live to whatever ripe old age you are while drinking water without falling down dead (unless you are typing from beyond the grave), in fact being Australian i’m guessing you may have enjoyed certain other carbonated beverages without becoming terminally afflicted with CO2 poisoning.
So could you please explain to me the point of comparing an known organic poison i.e. arsenic with something that is vital to all life (ok, there are a very small number of exceptions), is at a historic low, and would need multifold increasing in concentration before becoming toxic to humans (so much so, that they’re aren’t enough fossil fuels available to reach the necessary concentrations)?
Looking forward to the answer to this one.
Barelysane,
Your most obvious mistake is to say that CO2 “is at a historic low”. History is defined as a “formally written chronological record of events”. So, historically, CO2 is actually at a record high according to the measurements taken at Mauna Loa and other sites.
If you meant at a pre-historic record low, you still aren’t correct. It was much lower during the ice ages.
There is a tendency for many people to think “gee whiz the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is tiny. Surely it can’t make any difference in the overall scheme of things.” Well yes it can and yes it does. No-one is suggesting that atmospheric CO2 is toxic. In fact it is good that it exists. If it didn’t the world would be extremely cold, but you can have too much of a good thing. Let me explain it another way.
Going back to Max’s analogy of CO2 representing 38cm of thickness in a kilometer; it might be worth rembering that the atmosphere is effectively several km thick or would be if it had a uniform density from the ground up to a defined edge. That’s of the order of a metre or two of CO2 which absorbs IR radiation from the ground. It doesn’t absorb all of it. Just some of it, but the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere the more it will absorb and the warmer becomes the earth’s climate.
Peter
Then i’ll refine the question to better qualify the time period for you, geological history.
Incidently, apart from your redefining the scope of the question, your 8691 was essentially just waffle.
Peter
It was much lower during the ice ages.
Are you sure about that? This is from geocraft.com, and perhaps explains why geologists are such a sceptical lot, possibly because they have a longer view than most:
“The Carboniferous Period and the Ordovician Period were the only geological periods during the Paleozoic Era when global temperatures were as low as they are today. To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then were nearly 12 times higher than today– 4400 ppm.”
Barelysane,
There is no such thing as geological history. History goes back 3 or 4 thousand years at the very most. The period before that was known as pre-history. Like in pre-historic monsters!
You sure you aren’t Max? he always accuses anyone of waffling whenever he can’t think of anything else to say.
JamesP,
Yes, according to what the ice cores have recorded re ice age very low CO2 levels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok-ice-core-petit.png
Yes they have been higher than that too but you need to go back to earlier geological times.
JamesP,
Yes, geologists do seem to be more highly represented with AGW denial than most. I’d always put that down to their connections with the mining and oil industries!
However, I doubt if you’ll find any information on university geological websites which oppose IPCC conclusions. Maybe you’d like to try?
There are many possible explanations for ice ages in this period. They don’t disprove the link between CO2 and temperature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordovician
It was half a billion years ago. The sun was weaker then. There could have been strong volcanic eruptions, meteor strikes. Who knows? Its hard enough to work out the cause of mass extinctions 65 million years ago.
Peter (8687): I have no objection to Dr Pachauri’s being an economist – after all, Nigel Lawson is also an economist and I have considerable respect for his views (vindicated BTW by the hopeless outcome at Copenhagen). What I object to is that Pachauri – who presents himself to the world as a disinterested civil servant – turns out to have extensive interests in organisations that benefit from his recommendations that drastic action must be taken on climate change.
I suggested earlier that Pachauri – a railway engineer – might be the man to solve the Eurostar (won’t run in cold weather) crisis. I may have been wrong: what I overlooked was his current employment on the gravy train. Apologies.
Barelysane,
I think I’ve asked this question before but maybe you missed it, and you may in fact know the answer because you write “….stands to financially benefit massively (enough to make Al Gore jealous) from promoting human induced climate change”
How is this done? Really I’d like to know. I don’t want any waffle now – just tell me exactly what I need to do to benefit ‘massively’.
I’m not talking about research grants or IPCC fees and salaries. They are just peanuts. I presume you mean at least ‘bankers bonus’ amounts of loot?
Peter: you want to know how Pachauri may “benefit massively” from promoting the IPCC’s agenda. I suggest you read the link I posted at 8684.
Peter M (8698)
You wrote (of climate research costs):
One estimate puts the climate related research expenditures in the USA alone at more than $79 billion since 1989 and more than $50 billion since 2000.
http://www.mahalo.com/answers/science/how-much-money-was-spent-on-global-warming-research-between-2000-and-2009
That is one helluva lot of “peanuts”, Peter.
Max
PS That is not to say that a fraction of this expenditure may have been addressed at specific non AGW-related climate issues, which may have been worthwhile.
But a major portion went to feed into the IPCC reports, in order to “sell” the IPCC premise of potentially alarming and threatening AGW.
This money would have been better invested to reduce disease and poverty in the most impoverished nations of the world (not by a blanket handout from the citizens of the developed nations to the Mugabes of this world under UN supervision to “right past climate wrongs”, but by concerted actions by serious relief organizations).