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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Let’s not forget that the management are workers too. The owners, under capitalism, are the shareholders. But they, especially the shareholders of the auto industry aren’t doing too well at the moment. What are the chances that in five or six years time the big Detroit car factories will all be either State owned , although I’m sure another term for nationalisation will be found, or closed down?
………….
It’s has been said the the US Republicans have been traditionally weak on the environment. Ronald Reagan, who may well have agreed with Tony that the environment doesn’t exist, is quoted as saying “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.” Do some of you guys still think that? It could be argued that he had the best scientific advice that money could buy at the time, so it must have been right.
It is, however, comforting to know that President Reagan had other good and proper reasons for ignoring environmental problems. His Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, a committed rationalist, who was responsible for making environmental policy, once said “We don’t have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand.”
Max ,
You understate your case. Global warming, according to the Hadley Centre’s own graph, didn’t just stop in 1998 0r 2001. It also stopped in 1974, 1978, 1983,1985,1992,1996, and 2005.
If we look even closer at their graph we’ll probably find that there are other period when Global warming has stopped too. And that is even before we start looking at the monthly figures!
These scientists! They don’t tell you that, do they?
Sorry, Peter, there was no 8 (or 10-year) decline in temperature since the mid-century cooling period, which the “scientists” have tried to rationalize as having been caued by anthropogenic aerosols (a very weak argment, which is full of holes upon closer examination).
That is what makes the current period “anomalous” (and why Hadley have to send out PR releases that “hey, it isn’t REALLY cooling (despite our thermometers)”.
Watch for a new “rationalization” (anthropogenic, of course, since man is the principal driver of climate). Will it be aerosols again (this time from China and India)? Who knows what silly story the “climate scientists” will dream up? (But you can bet they will come up with something to keep the AGW myth alive.)
Regards,
Max
A tip for Peter.
Forget Hadley rationalizations that attempt to keep the AGW myth alive when the thermometers say otherwise.
Watch the sun.
Regards,
Max
JZ Smith,
It strikes me that with the nationalisation of Fannie and Freddie, and the big bail out for AIG , not to mention the $700 billion bail out package for Wall Street; comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke indeed have started transformation of the US into the USSA (United Socialist States of America).
It’s not of course socialism as is generally understood in the world. I doubt if we’ll see free health and education schemes for all regardless of ability to pay. I doubt too that there will be much, if any money, to help out those poorer families who have been suckered into taking out big mortgages that they now can’t afford. Or, for all the workers who will lose their incomes.
Maybe there is something in this theory of yours; that it is the “elites”, and unlike most other countries, in the USA who are the most left leaning. It looks like they have decided that socialism is too good to be left in the hands of the working classes. They can have the best of both worlds. They’ve been able to privatise their profits for the last twenty years, or more, and now they can can socialise their losses!
Hi Peter,
You wrote, “It’s has been said that the US Republicans have been traditionally weak on the environment.”
Don’t know where you dug up that bit of misinformation, but the US Environmental Protection Agency was set up in 1970 under the administration of Republican president Richard Nixon, with a Democratic-led Congress. Pretty much a bipartisan effort, I’d say, with Nixon taking the lead.
The current AGW hysteria (which has nothing to do with pollution control or true environmental issues, but is more of a tax raising gambit) seems to be a predominantly Democratic-led initiative. Fortunately it is only supported by a minority of US voters, so the Congress is also divided.
Interestingly, Republican John McCain is a bit stronger on this issue than his Democratic counterpart, Barack Obama.
Regards,
Max
Max,
The Republican Party has produced some good Presidents in the past. So, you are quite right, Presidents Reagan and Bush, shouldn’t be held up as being completely typical of Rep opinion in the USA.
The Republican even have a group called “Republican for Environmental protection” who seem quite enlightened on the science of global warming.
However they do themselves admit they have an image problem.
http://www.rep.org/opinions/speeches/85.html
The author of this paper “It’s Easy Being Green—And Republican” cautions her audience against too much laughter over the title of her talk!
Hi Peter,
In the whole discussion of “environmental issues” it is probably wise to make a clear distinction between the true ecological issues of air and water pollution and the more recent hysteria surrounding AGW.
The former is a true “environmental” issue of today, which is being successfully addressed in most industrialized countries.
The second is more nebulous. There is no clear scientific evidence supporting the hypothesis of AGW; it is a purely computer-model generated “problem”, which may or may not become real some day in the future (and which does not appear to be evident today, in view of global cooling concurrent with very low solar activity, despite all-time record human CO2 emissions).
Think about it. Can you see the essential difference here, Peter?
It is really quite obvious if you think about it.
Regards,
Max
Brace yourself, Peter – there’s more from Dr Akasofu here.
Hi Peter,
The ranking of past US Presidents by the University of Illinois at Chicago is listed below:
http://www.uic.edu/depts/paff/opa/releases/2000/preseval2_release.html
1. Lincoln
2. F. Roosevelt
3. Washington
4. T. Roosevelt
5. Truman
6. Wilson
7. Jefferson
8. Jackson
9. Polk
10. Eisenhower
11. Reagan
12. Monroe
13. L. Johnson
14. McKinley
15. Adams
16. Madison
17. Cleveland
18. J. Q. Adams
19. Kennedy
20. Bush
21. Carter
22. Clinton
23. Nixon
24. Hoover
25. Taft
26. Hayes
27. Van Buren
28. Ford
29. Coolidge
30. Taylor
31. B. Harrison
32. Grant
33. Arthur
34. Tyler
35. Fillmore
36. A. Johnson
37. Pierce
38. Harding
39. Buchanan
Looks like Reagan barely missed the top 10 list (at #11). Who knows where Bush#2 will end up? I seriously doubt if he will be in the “top half” (above his father, Carter, Clinton and Nixon). My guess is that he will end up in the bottom 10.
Interesting stuff.
Regards,
Max
Robin,
Dr Akasofu can’t even get it right when he claims he is ‘Alaskas most famous climate change skeptic’! Contrary to what Dr A , and Max, say that the Hadley Centre is saying about warming having stopped in 2000, and that we are now in a cooling phase; the Hadley Centre themselves are saying that the warming is continuing at +0.09 deg C per decade. Since the mid 70’s the overall trend has been 0.17deg C per decade and reached 0.33 deg C per decade in the 90’s. The last time we had a cooling spell was in the early 80’s.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/news/warming_goes_on.pdf
If Dr A has something useful to contrubute he should write it up as a full scientific paper. But he’s somewhat lightweight in this respect and seesm to prefer articles in mining journals.
Max,
What was the criteria for the presidential list? If Reagan came out so highly, scientific knowledge can’t have been one of them.
Pete,
Maybe it was the “consensus” view?
Would you take a moment to explain this graph to me?
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/MSUCRUCO2.jpg
Climate case built on thin foundation
John McLean | September 09, 2008
ROSS Garnaut made it clear in his interim report that his climate change review takes as a starting point – not as a belief but on the balance of probabilities – that the claims made in the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are correct.
Had he made even a cursory examination of the integrity of those IPCC claims he would have found a very troubling picture.
The IPCC encourages us to believe that about 2500 climate scientists supported the claim of a significant human influence on climate. It fails to clarify that the claim was made in chapter nine of the working group one contribution and that the contributions of working groups two and three were based on the assumption that the claim was correct. The first eight chapters of the WG1 contribution were mainly concerned with climatic observations and the authors expressed no opinion about the claim made in chapter nine, and chapters 10 and 11 assumed the claim to be correct. The entire IPCC thesis therefore stands or falls on the claims of just one chapter.
We are also led to believe that chapter nine was widely supported by hundreds of reviewers, but just 62 IPCC reviewers commented on its penultimate draft. Only five of those reviewers endorsed it but four of the five appear to have vested interests and the other made just one comment for the entire 11-chapter WG1 contribution.
As is the normal IPCC practice, chapter nine has co-ordinating lead authors, who are responsible for the chapter as a whole; lead authors, who are responsible for sections of the chapter; and contributing authors, who provide their thoughts to the lead authors but take no active part in thewriting.
The IPCC procedures state that the authors at each level should reflect a wide range of views, but this is not true of chapter nine.
The expansion of the full list of authors of each paper cited by this chapter reveals that 37 of 53 chapter authors form a network of people who have previously co-authored scientific papers with each other: or make that 38 if we include a review editor.
The two co-ordinating lead authors are members of this network. So are five of the seven lead authors. Thirty of 44 contributing authors are in the network and two other pairs of contributing authors have likewise co-authored scientific papers.
In other words, the supposedly 53 independent voices are in fact one dominant voice with 37 people behind it, two voices each with two people behind them, and perhaps 12 single voices. A closer check reveals that many of those 12 were academic or work colleagues of members of that larger network. One lead author was from the University of Michigan, as were three contributing authors, two of whom were not members of the network. Another lead author was associated with Britain’s Hadley Centre, along with eight contributing authors, one of whom was not included in that network of co-authors.
All up, the 53 authors of this chapter came from just 31 establishments and there are worrying indications that certain lead authors were the superiors of contributing authors from the same organisation. The very few viewpoints in this chapter might be alleviated if it drew on a wide range of references, but among the co-authors of 40 per cent of the cited material are at least one chapter author.
Scientists associated with the development and use of climate models dominate the clique of chapter nine authors and by extension the views expressed in that chapter.
Perhaps the increase in the processing power of their computers has increased their confidence in the software they have been nurturing for years. Imagine, though, the consequences were they to imply that the accuracy of the models had not improved despite the extra funding.
These models are said to require a human component to reasonably match historical temperatures and the modellers claim that this proves a human influence on climate, but the human factor is an input so a corresponding output is no surprise. A more plausible reason for the mismatch without this influence is that the models are incomplete and contain errors, but of course chapter nine could never admit this.
Garnaut didn’t need to evaluate the science behind the IPCC’s claim to find that its integrity is questionable and that the report’s key findings are the product of scientific cronyism.
The IPCC has misled us into believing the primary claims were widely endorsed by authors and reviewers but in fact they received little support and came from a narrow self-interested coterie of climate modellers.
We should now ask what else the IPCC has misled us about and why Garnaut, a skilled academic, so blithely accepted its claims.
John McLean is a climate data analyst and a member of the Australian Climate Science Coalition.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24315169-7583,00.html
Worst and most violent winter we’ve ever seen
Great commentary by Philip Brennan
http://www.iceagenow.com/Worst_and_most_violent_winter_we_have_ever_seen.htm
Overview of conditions
Arctic sea ice extent on September 23, 2008, was 4.59 million square kilometers (1.77 million square miles), an increase of 77,000 square kilometers (30,000 square miles) above the minimum extent of 4.52 million square kilometers (1.74 million square miles) measured last week.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Oops! Nets Wrong On Warming; Arctic Ice Still There
Wrong again! It must stink being a network global warming alarmist. They just can’t seem to get their stories straight.
It’s only been a couple months when the networks were screaming about Arctic ice disappearing this summer. And, no surprise, they were entirely wrong. By 1.74 million square miles.
As Maxwell Smart used to say: “Missed it by that much.”
Less than three months ago, NBC’s Anne Thompson was warning ominously of ice loss. “But this summer, some scientists say that ice could retreat so dramatically that open water covers the North Pole, so much so that you could sail across it.”
Or not. According to a September 16 National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) report, such predictions were off. Way off.
NSIDC reported ice loss was less than in 2007. “On September 12, 2008, sea ice extent dropped to 4.52 million square kilometers (1.74 million square miles). This appears to have been the lowest point of the year, as sea has now begun its annual cycle of growth in response to autumn cooling,” according to the organization.
Two days after Thompson’s report, on July 30, ABC weatherman Sam Champion told the “Good Morning America” audience that Arctic ice loss was on a record pace. “Every summer we’re on a record pace for losing it last summer and this summer we’re at the exact same pace.”
The NSIDC assessment makes it clear that claim was also wrong, calling it “above the record minimum set on September 16, 2007.” “The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the second-lowest extent recorded since the dawn of the satellite era. ”
Earlier in the summer, media outlets warned ominously that the ice could melt away. “Today” host Lester Holt described the story as “surprising and, frankly, alarming news from the scientific community, a new report that says the North Pole could soon be ice-free.”
This fits an ongoing pattern of media hype about climate change where networks no longer report the issue with any sense of objectivity. A study published by the Business & Media Institute earlier this year showed how rarely dissenting voices were included in the climate debate. The study found that global warming proponents overwhelmingly outnumbered those with dissenting opinions. On average for every skeptic there were nearly 13 proponents featured. ABC did a slightly better job with a 7-to-1 ratio, while CBS’s ratio was abysmal at nearly 38-to-1.
—Dan Gainor is director of the Business and Media Institute.
What is the Australian Climate Science Coalition? Do they have any links with real science or is it one of these ragbag sceptics organisations?
Peter: In his short article “Global Warming has Paused” Dr Akasofu says
The truth of his observation was illustrated by the graph Brute mentioned yesterday. The Hadley paper’s comment that
is doubtless correct – but doesn’t contradict Dr A any more than does the temperature increase from 1906 to 1940 when, as Max has noted, the increase per decade was higher than post 1975.
Re: 1740, 1746 & 1748, Max and Peter
I agree with much of what Max says, but the assertion that I made in my #1732 was:
Neither of you have addressed this, Peter referring to the definition of environmentalism, which is not an issue so far as I am concerned.
What I am interested in is the use of the word ‘environment’ in its singular form by the media, politicians, ENGOs and, worst of all, scientists.
Is there such a thing as ‘the environment’, and if so, how can it be defined?
This is one of the most commonly used terms in contemporary political discourse, so presumably we all accept that there is such a thing and we know what it means.
Tony: how about this?
Robin
Your definition is of ‘environment’, not of ‘the environment’, unless of course, you consider that there is no distinction to be made between the two usages of the term.
So what is the definition of this seemingly all-embracing entity, which can be referred to specifically as ‘the environment’ rather than as ‘an environment’?
[entity
? noun (pl. entities) a thing with distinct and independent existence. Oxford definition]
One can certainly refer to ‘the environment’ of a field mouse, or bacteria resident in the gut of a wildebeest, but can one talk about ‘the environment’ in an all embracing, general sense? And if so, what is it?
I know this sounds arcane, but I think that it is important, and I am not pretending that I know the answer. If a term which is essential to the climate debate is meaningless, then what does it say about the debate?
Incidentally I am reading Lindzen’s latest paper which you referenced above. Thanks, it’s fascinating!
OK, Tony – try this:
Via: Wikipedia. Webster’s was a bit more ambiguous.
This definition would include skyscrapers, coal fired power plants and automobiles…..in the sense that human beings are naturally occurring creatures of the Earth and anything that they do or create is an extension of them. A skyscraper (or a wind turbine) is the same as a bird’s nest or a beaver’s dam.
Whether a person’s personal preference is that a beaver’s dam is more aesthetically pleasing than a skyscraper is immaterial; both are created by natural processes, (the skyscraper being the result of mankind’s natural endeavors; both will return to dust eventually.
Some would argue that the “rights” of the plants and animals are being violated by mankind’s endeavors; (which would be a different topic).
Is this the point you are trying to illustrate Tony?
I would suggest all participants read this one. It now looks like this eco-zealot’s ox has been GOREd, (pun intended). The zealots of any “movement” eventually get around to eating their own…..such is their methodology.
If there was a energy source invented tomorrow that was absolutely free and posed no “environmental hazard” these idiots would oppose it……Al Gore and Hansen would still want to tax it.
A bunch of con artists; every last one.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4836556.ece
Robin: surely that definition ties ‘the environment’ to living things, and I seem to remember that geologists use the term too. A pebble at the bottom of a deep ocean trench has an environment just as much as a swallow sitting on a telephone line thinking about moving south towards the sun.
Brute: your definition would make things rather difficult for astronauts, as it applies only to our own planet. Does ‘the environment’ cease when we leave Earth? Where is the boundary at which ‘the environment’ stops? Spacemen may take an environment with them on their travels, but if their capsule disintegrates, they will quickly be exposed to a different environment that is no less real. Their rapid demise will not be caused by lack of an environment, but by the hostility of the one that they are exposed to.
The point that I am interested in is that there is certainly a vast multiplicity of environments, perhaps an infinite number. My environment is different from that of a city dweller, and both our environments are different from that of a dung beetle in the Namibian desert, and that is different again from the environment of an antelope standing close to the pile of droppings in which the dung beetle lives, or that of a bushman who is stalking the antelope. I do not see how one can rationally use the term ‘the environment’ when each environment is different.
The word environment must always apply to an entity. It is more or less a synonym for habitat, and would we talk about ‘the habitat’ when we each have a subtly different habitat?
It seems to me that the use of the term ‘the environment’ is meaningless, and that its constant use points to a lack of intellectual rigour at the heart of the climate debate. Constant, mindless repetition has lead to people thinking that it can mean anything that they want it to, even though this is a term that has immense importance in the world of science at the moment. But does it have a definition, or is it just a portmanteau term used to conceal the fact that we do not really understand what we are talking about?