As the final freezing hours of 2008 fade into history, this would seem to be a good time to look back at the year and also at the short history of Harmless Sky, which is now just over a year old.The first rather tentative pages went live on 17th December 2007.It would be tedious to rehearse all that has happened, so I am going to focus on just one topic which encapsulates much of what this blog is about and highlights issues that are now at the heart of the climate debate.At the beginning of the year I came across two articles published by the New Statesman, which had generated a huge number of comments on their website. The first was by Dr David Whitehouse, an astrophysicist who was the BBC’s Science Correspondent from 1988-98 and then science editor of BBC News Online from 1998-2006. During this period he must have been ideally placed to see how concern about global warming grew from being the preoccupation of a few scientists and environmental activists into a new scientific and moral orthodoxy. His article was provocatively entitled, ‘Has Global Warming Stopped?’
After describing the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, Dr Whitehouse pointed out that although CO2 levels have continued to rise during this century, temperatures have failed to do so. He then explored a weakness in the hypothesis, demonstrating that, although it can explain the warming of the last decades of the twentieth century very well, it cannot explain why temperatures have levelled off, and then fallen, without a commensurate decline in CO2 levels. Dr Whitehouse did not in any way suggest that the hypothesis was bad science, but merely probed the way in which it relates to recent temperature trends that are quite unexpected. He also suggested that this flaw in the hypothesis might indicate that there are natural influences on global temperature of which we are still unaware, and questions whether our understanding of the climate is adequate to draw firm conclusions about what is happening.
So we are led to the conclusion that either the hypothesis of carbon dioxide induced global warming holds but its effects are being modified in what seems to be an improbable though not impossible way, or, and this really is heresy according to some, the working hypothesis does not stand the test of data.
It is the use of the term heresy that puts this thoughtful, cautious and scrupulously argued article in context. The Environment Columnist of the New Statesman is Mark Lynas, one of the high priests of global warming alarmism, and that venerable publication’s editorial policy on climate change is set accordingly.
A month later, a furious and somewhat hysterical response from Mark Lynas appeared. It started like this:
On 19 December the New Statesman website published an article which, judging by the 633 comments (and counting) received so far, must go down in history as possibly the most controversial ever. Not surprising really – it covered one of the most talked-about issues of our time: climate change. Penned by science writer David Whitehouse, it was guaranteed to get a big response: the article claimed that global warming has ‘stopped’.
But of course Dr Whitehouse’s article does no such thing, as the title makes clear. He merely points out that temperatures have ceased to rise in the way in which climate scientist have predicted they would, and that this is good reason for further scrutiny of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. But, as Dr Whitehouse obviously suspected when he wrote his article, posing questions about the validity of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis really is heresy so far as people like Mark Lynas are concerned. Readers may like to draw their own conclusions from Mr Lynas’ apparent need to enclose the word stopped in quotation marks, as though he hardly dares utter the term.
In an attempt to debunk a claim that Dr Whitehouse had not in fact made, Mark Lynas had only one argument to offer, and this was based on a graph showing global temperatures overlaid by what looks rather like a bird’s nest. On closer inspection this turns out to be a vast number of eight year trend lines – one for each year of the temperature record – and they create the impression that global temperatures have continued to rise during this century; which is, of course, rubbish. None of the institutions that publish annual global temperatures have produced such data.
Dr Whitehouse was scrupulous about citing well-accepted data on CO2 and temperature levels to support his arguments. It would seem that in order to find a way to attack these criticisms of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, Mark Lynas has been unable to find anything more convincing than a graph that relies for its effect on a highly contentious statistical construction. So we have a conflict between a scientist’s arguments based on empirical data on the one hand, and on the other hand the assertions of a layman based on a statistical confection. Although Mark Lynas is obviously very interested in climate science, his degree is in politics and history.
Perhaps Mr Lynas was aware that his response might fall rather flat, and this may explain why he ends his article with a gratuitous insult aimed at Dr Whitehouse, suggesting that he may have been intentionally trying to mislead the New Statesman’s readers. Why a respected journalist and scientist should wish to do such a thing is not made clear, but mindless vilification of opponents seems to be an essential weapon in the environmental activist’s armory.
Blog comments in response to these two articles continued to accumulate on the New Statesman’s website until they numbered over 3000, and I estimated that only about one in ten supported Mark Lynas views. The vast majority of contributors seemed to recognise the merit of sound scientific arguments from a professional, and deprecate the pseudo-scientific babbling of an avowed activist whose first claim to fame involved throwing a custard pie in Bjørn Lomborg’s face because he disagreed with his views.
Later, when the New Statesman closed the comments on the blogs associated with these articles, I offered to host a continuation of the discussion at Harmless Sky. Since then over three thousand more comments have been added, though the discussion has long since drifted away from the subject matter of the two articles that started it all. This massive thread is something of an outpost of Harmless Sky as I never intended that my blog should be concerned with detailed discussion of scientific controversies, but it makes an interesting contribution to the site nonetheless. The ratio of sceptics to warmers has stayed much the same.
Harmless Sky was launched just after the Bali climate change conference at which the head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer, burst into tears when he thought that he might not get his way, and massive media hype proclaimed that a rather vague road map – to be implemented at another conference at Pozna? a year later – was a giant first step towards saving the planet. Those were the days when global warming was riding high in the political firmament, and everyone was being encouraged to believe that climate change is the worst peril that the world faces. In other words, this was before the oil price spike of last summer that, we were told, signalled the end of the fossil fuel era, and the banking crisis of the autumn that heralded a descent in to recession, or even depression.
A year after the Bali conference I am writing this in the aftermath of the Pozna? conference which was supposed to carry forward the Bali road map. This gathering of 11,000 diplomats, politicians and environmental activists has failed to bring these aspirations any closer to reality, and the reaction of the media has been very different to the blanket coverage of the Bali conference. Instead of the squeals of horror that these abortive negotiations might have been expected this to generate in the media, little attention has been paid to the failure of Pozna?. Attitudes to global warming have changed, and changed very radically, in the space of a year.
The Whitehouse and Lynas articles seem to me to be a microcosm of the climate debate; a contest in which activists expect to rule supreme by attempting to suppress or discredit even the mildest questioning of their beliefs, and are prepared to use any means at their disposal in order to do so. To some extent they still seem to have the attention of politicians and the media, but opinion polls suggest that the public are by no means convinced. And in democracies, where pubic opinion leads, politicians and the media eventually have to follow.
As we move forward into 2009, another cold year has made Dr Whithouse’s question even more relevant, and Mark Lynas’ graph looks even less convincing. No amount of trend lines can disguise what is happening. Statistical gymnastics are unlikely to convince the public that humans are now in control of the climate, and until the advocates of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis are prepared to consider seriously the kind of questions posed by Dr Whithouse, rather than responding with accusations of bad faith, their case will only be likely to convince those who are predisposed to agree with them.
Much has changed during the last year, and I have no intention of joining the current fashion for prediction by trying to anticipate what will happen next, other than to suggest that next year will probably yield surprises, in the same way that last year did. I will welcome this as it is never knowing what might happen that makes blogging fun.
Very many thanks to all those who have contributed to Harmless Sky during the first year and helped to make it all seem worthwhile – for the proprietor at least.
I think a great deal depends now upon how much Goreaid Obama has consumed. If that democracy can influence political thinking to any degree, it might bring ‘real change’ and stop the funding of science by government agencies. A good way to save money with the advantage of putting a crimp in modellers, the real culprits here.
A Good New Year to you and to The Harmless Sky.
A very Happy New Year to you, Tony, and to the contributors at Harmless Sky! This is turning out to be one of the blogs I’ve been avidly following re the great climate debate; I usually check the Whitehouse/Lynas thread daily to see what’s new.
Am reminded of the ancient Chinese proverb/curse: “May you live in interesting times.” These are definitely interesting times, and I think 2009 will turn out to be just as fascinating as the past year, climate-wise!
Tony: a good summary of your excellent site’s year and especial thanks for continuing the New Statesman initiated discussion. One observation: you wisely say that you “have no intention of joining the current fashion for prediction by trying to anticipate what will happen next”. But, by implication, you make one that I suggest may be wrong – at least in the near term. You say that, although politicians and the media are still paying attention to the warming alarmists,
That used to be my view. For example, in a comment on the NS thread a year ago (6 January 2008) I said:
Now, although there’s still some truth in that – hence the Poznan failure – at least the UK government shows no sign of abandoning its AGW belief. If anything, it has hardened its position and, in doing so, is supported by the mainstream media and by essentially all opposition politicians. I naively expected that our politicians might by now have noted the electoral advantage to be gained from reflecting voters’ scepticism. But it hasn’t happened. And given the additional harm that “green” policies will do to our now critically damaged economy – damage not dreamed about a year ago – it’s hard to see what would make it happen.
It seems that our politicians are no longer interested in politics, and instead are wholly focused on what they believe to be their short-term personal interests.
Re: #2 Alex
I’ve taken a bit of a blogging holiday over New Year, so belated thanks.
I wonder if the ‘warmers’ (great tag!) have considered what might happen if/when they are proven wrong, as I seem to recall happened to the ‘Ice Age’ predictors in the 70’s? Maybe they were right after all – it’s certainly bloody cold at the moment!
This from the prescient pen of one L.Tolstoy:
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
Welcome James P
Your quotation from Tolstoy is a superb description of groupthink long before that term became current. It certainly has great resonance for part of the Wegan report on the Hockey Stick controversy.
http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/others/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf
See p4, para 3 and numerous other references to a social a network in paleoclimatology including a very interesting diagram on p44.
Robin,
I wouldn’t really argue with anything you said, but in the ‘implied prophecy’ I was looking at things like this.
At present we have a doomed administration that has reached the ‘clinging to the wreckage’ stage of survival tactics. Environmental policy is one of the more buoyant policies at their disposal. It’s about the only initiative that hasn’t yet run into heavy criticism, partly because the other parties have exploited the same kind of risk free politics themselves and fear accusations of U-turns. The public seem quite prepared to pay lip service to the government’s environmental rhetoric, just so long as this doesn’t lead to any real attempt to reduce CO2 emissions that would inconvenience them. It will be some time before the requirements of the Climate Change Bill have any effect, so the policy wonks don’t need to worry about that for the moment.
I’m not expecting government rhetoric to change any time soon, after all just how many pieces of flotsam do they have to choose from? But this is not a sustainable situation; clinging to the wreckage is usually a prelude to drowning.
At the weekend Gordon Brown announced that he will create a hundred thousand new public sector jobs, many in the environmental sector, but this was very short on detail. If the media’s reaction to a bloated public sector payroll during the economic chaos of the 1970s is anything to go by, this kind of policy will end in tears. But if these environmental sector jobs really are created, with a commensurate growth in the proportion of energy that is produced by untried, inefficient and expensive means just when the electorate are worried about their financial security, then retribution is likely to be swift.
Government pronouncements on AGW are unlikely to cease, but without action they will loose credibility. They must know that the electorate are clamouring for economic stability, not a crusade against climate change. These aspirations are not compatible, and political survival will surely be the politician’s priority.
All of which is, I suppose, just the kind of prediction that I said I would not make.
There seems to be a resounding silence on the subject of climate change (in UK politics) at the moment. I watched the Gordon Brown/Andrew Marr interview on TV at the weekend, and everything was about the economy. Yes, the environmental jobs were mentioned (once?) but he didn’t go into detail. My guess (and it is only a guess) is that the silence will intensify, bar a few platitudes in the run up to Copenhagen.
Alex
In view of what happened last month at the Poznan and EU climate talks, plus Australia’s decision to cut GHG’s by all of 5% by 2020, the run up to Copenhagen should certainly be interesting. Perhaps the situation will be saved by a summer heatwave in the northern hemisphere, but what would this say about the scientific basis for AGW alarmism?
Hi Tony, talking about heatwaves…
From the Telegraph today: “A specially-commissioned Met Office report has found that the weather could become so hot in the coming years that the poor and elderly could need help paying bills to keep their homes air-conditioned.
Just as the cold snap has the potential to kill large numbers of people, so heat waves can cause thousands of deaths through heat exhaustion and related conditions.
The Met Office said: “We may be going through probably the coldest spell since 1996, but it is probably a bigger medium-term problem that we are going to see some very hot summers, of the kind we saw in 2003 and 2006.””
Now this current cold snap seems to be coming to an end, I think it would be very instructive to compare the 2003 heatwave with the 2008/2009 cold spell, just to see how they match up in terms of lives lost, number of hospital admissions, and the general cost to society (infrastructure damage, accidents, etc.) I suspect that cold would beat hot, but it would be interesting to find out.
TonyN: referring to the apparent electoral advantage to be had by reflecting voters’ scepticism about the man-made global warming hypothesis, I commented above (post 3) that it seems “our politicians are no longer interested in politics, and instead are wholly focused on what they believe to be their short-term personal interests.” I think I can understand why this so – although I’ve been struggling to put that understanding into words. You suggested (post 7) “the public seem quite prepared to pay lip service to the government’s environmental rhetoric, just so long as this doesn’t lead to any real attempt to reduce CO2 emissions that would inconvenience them”. But, Tony, we are already inconvenienced – consider the cost of “renewables”.
I doubt if the public really “is prepared to pay lip service to … environmental rhetoric”: survey results and comments on articles (for example see this) make it reasonably clear that much of the public may even be actively hostile to such rhetoric. Yet I detect no change in UK politicians’ (from all parties) attitudes or actions despite, as you point out, the surely obvious truth that economic stability is incompatible with a crusade against climate change. What then is the reason for this strangely illogical position?
Well, I’ll start by observing that the mainstream media continues to take the truth of the man-made global warming hypothesis wholly for granted. There are daily examples of this. Here are just two from yesterday morning: (1) The BBC’s Breakfast show, in a piece on low energy light bulbs, wheeled out a professor to tell us about their (many) disadvantages. Gulp – I thought – an anti-AGW item! Not so. He went on to say that, of course, global warming was a major threat but the real solution was a lot more wind turbines. Needless to say, his interviewer nodded wisely. (2) The Daily Telegraph had an article, subtitled “Rising sea levels caused by climate change are threatening to destabilise island nations and spark conflict across the world over energy and food reserves, the Australian military has claimed”, that happily reported, without comment, statements such as this
And going on to note how the newly elected president of the Maldives said
Such reports are constantly there in the background – see, for another example, Alex’s post above. Inevitably this influences our media-driven political class.
My conclusion from all this is that UK politicians have been hoist by two petards of the Labour party’s own making. The first is the power of media scorn that the party used to devastating effect to bring down the Tory party in 1997 – remember “Tory sleaze”? Now that the media is totally convinced of the AGW hypothesis, all politicians fear the consequences of stepping out of line. And the second is the extraordinary success, especially with the media, of the Labour-inspired Institute for Public Policy Research recommended “Warm Words” method of pursuing the climate change campaign – a campaign identified by Tony nearly a year ago. Here’s an extract:
Add to these, the fear of all politicians of a being accused of a “U-turn” and the result is that they are stuck in a position from which retreat is close to impossible. The result is that it seems we are all condemned to suffer the damage “green” policies will do to our increasingly battered economy – not least the threat to our power supplies.
(My apologies for this inordinately long post.)
Alex
There is actually a large body of research that points to cold anomalies yielding larger increases in mortality than heatwaves. See:
Heath Protection Agency report: Health Effects of Climate Change in the UK 2008, p83, para 1 and references on p90
A report by the Royal Commission on Environmental Polution: The Urban Environment, also covers this.
More recently I came across some American research that indicated a ratio of about ten-to-one between cold and heat related mortality, with cold having the high score, but I can’t lay my hands on the relevant reference at the moment.
Incidentally, I notice that the figure given in the HPA report for deaths in Europe attributable to the 2003 heatwave is 14,000. This was generally reported as 30,000 at the time and for some time afterwards. Sir David King, as government chief scientist, frequently referred to the heatwave as the worst natural disaster to strike Europe in the last three hundred years. History was not his strong point, or perhaps he just forgot about ‘The Year without a Summer’ in 1816, with widespread starvation across the continent during the following winter, or the Irish potato famine which was caused by a run of unusually cool and wet summers which allowed the blight to spread.
Yes, in the HPA report: “Cold-related mortality is much larger than heat-related mortality, both in the UK and in the rest of Europe” on p83, puts it in a nutshell.
Re the effects of a really cold winter on the UK, I found this book very good (if somewhat grim reading at times): Frozen in Time: The Worst Winters in History, by Ian McCaskill and Paul Hudson.
The BBC story here reminded me of this book’s accounts of suffering wildlife and livestock in the winters of 1947, 1963 and 1979, including snowed-under sheep, and starving foxes and ponies. I don’t think 2009 will rival these bad winters at all, but it’s a reminder, all the same, of how much greater an enemy cold can be, compared to warmth.
IMO you’re right about the seeming ignorance of history among those who set this country’s policies. It’s as if all the past was a time of happy, snowy Christmas-card winters and mild, unthreatening summers (compared to the future, which will of course be an ever-worsening scorched hell on earth!) It does appear to be a curious sort of tunnel vision, unaffected by evidence to the contrary.
Robin
No need to apologise for a long and very thoughtful comment. We both seem to be groping for answers to the same questions.
I’m certainly not underestimating the problem that politicians will have getting off the global warming bandwagon. The Government obviously has a huge amount of its credibility tied up in environmentalism, but for how much longer will it remain in power? And they even managed to dump Clause 4 last time they found themselves in opposition.
For the Liberals, embracing climate scepticism would be like the Conservative’s rejecting capitalism; I certainly wouldn’t expect it to happen soon, but does that matter, given there showing in the polls? In fact, Nick Clegg seems to have been more interested in tax cuts than environmental matters in recent months. I wonder what his focus groups are telling him?
When David Cameron ‘detoxified’ the Tory image, green issues were crucial to his strategy, but that time has now passed. I seem to remember that sticking to Labour spending plans was another part of the detox strategy and there is now a certain amount of re-thinking in the light of altered circumstances. Could environmental policies go the same way? Not that anyone would suggest that they will be dropped altogether – heaven forfend – just they may have to wait a bit until we can afford them, a tacit acknowledgement that they will not be cheap may lead who knows where.
As you say, the cost of renewables (and the potential cost of mitigation) will impact energy costs, but householders are not yet seeing that connection when they open their utility bills. That is why I think that Gordon Brown’s announcement of tens of thousands of new public sector green collar jobs is significant. If the media attack a bloated public sector payroll then that connection may be made, and the realisation that cleaner energy means more expensive energy will get down to the grass roots. At that stage, will the media continue to promote AGW (successful editors don’t debunk scare stories) or will they line up behind their readers and lambaste the government for squandering money on a crusade against an unproven threat during a recession, and then handing the bill to the electorate?
The section that you quoted from Warm Words reveals the depths of the government’s deceit all too clearly; the phrase, ‘at least for popular communications’, makes my blood run cold every time I read it. The strategy has certainly been successful so far as politicians, the media, policy makers and the chattering classes are concerned, but no political party can win an election on the strength of their votes. Opinion polls, and other evidence like your reference to the support that Booker is getting, tell a very different story.
The other night I heard a throwaway remark from a reporter on Newsnight (Michael Crick I think) when discussing the performance of the main parties in opinion polls. He said that the greens had a 4% share of the popular vote until recently, but this had now evaporated. I have been unable to find a reference to back this up but, if true, it is fascinating.
To me it now seems inconceivable that climate change will be a major issue in a general election, and that alone would be evidence of a major convulsion in the political landscape.
Returning to the media’s apparent devotion to the cause of AGW, have you read Nick Davies’s ‘Flat Earth News’? This is a Guardian journalist’s expose of how reporting has been transformed into a money spinning sausage machine since the power of the print unions was broken and IT became available. He describes a world in which nearly all stories arrive on news desks (screens) pre-packaged with pictures and quotes from ‘independent experts’, and no one has time to check them before they go out. This material is provided by people who have a very good reason for wanting to get their point of view across to the public: politicians, government agencies and commercial interests of course, but also NGOs, activists and anyone else who has the time and an email connection. Very few journalists are now able to work up stories themselves or have the contacts to do so. Incidentally, you get a mention too.
You may well be right in suspecting that attitudes on climate change have become too entrenched to change, but I think that I can see some slight movement already. If climate scientists and activists are relying on politicians and the media to promote alarmism, rather than popular support form the majority of the public, then they would do well to remember just how fickle politicians and the media can be. I also suspect that the flurry of global warming articles that have appeared since New Year represents a rearguard action by activist organisations in the wake of Poznan and a lot of hard frosts; this at a time of year when news rooms tend to be quiet anyway; a process that Nick Davies would certainly recognise.
Tony:
I hope you’re right about a change in media attitudes to “climate change” – but I don’t see it. It’s not our media’s lazy regurgitation of AGW press releases without comment or criticism that really concerns me. What does is that, unlike other scare stories that have received such treatment (e.g. avian flu), this one is deeply embedded in our culture. Hence the routine and constant acceptance (direct and indirect) of the AGW hypothesis as an obvious truth. Such references appear throughout the media: for example, any list of the world’s problems must include, as well as terrorism, poverty, etc., “the need to address climate change” – and a space-filling article on, say, recycling or “gas guzzlers” will nearly always include a reference to “saving the planet”.
Thus, in the (IMHO unlikely) event that a leading politician were to decide that the hypothesis was of dubious validity, I doubt if he/she would dare risk the headlined and potentially damaging howls of astonishment, accusations of “U-turn”, accusations of opportunism, claims of scientific illiteracy, etc. that would greet an announcement. I say this despite the near certainty that it would be regarded by a large sector of the public as welcome and refreshing.
It is sometimes suggested to activists that, whatever we do about CO2 reduction, can have no practical impact as most other nations – and especially the developing economies – have no real intention of restricting their emissions. The standard reply is that “we must provide an example”. As “green” regulation and the seemingly inevitable and unchallenged replacement (under a Labour or Tory administration) of our older coal-fired and nuclear plants by massively expensive and inefficient “renewables” exacerbate our economic and social woes, I fear that the only example we may provide will be to demonstrate the extreme foolishness of allowing an obsession to override common sense.
Robin:
Again, I wouldn’t disagree with most of what you say except that I believe that sooner of later hysteria will be replaced by rational discussion. Just how long will people tolerate articles like this without a reaction?
Carbon cost of Googling revealed
And we laugh at our forebears for arguing about how many angels can stand on the head of a pin?
Is it possible that our failure to really do anything about carbon emissions will eventually provide the route back to a healthy scepticism? If politicians continue to talk without acting then the electorate will loose faith in the scare stories. If they do act and the consequences are damaging to the economy, and expensive and inconvenient for the individual, then the electorate is going to demand far more convincing justification than appeals for blind faith in the so called consensus.
The Ipsos-MORI polls on attitudes to global warming, which I have referred to elsewhere on this blog, show that scepticism grew between July 2006 and July 2007, (56% to 60%) in spite of all the media coverage of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and the propaganda campaign inspired by Warm Words. During the same period, the proportion of true believers remained static at 22%. Admittedly a large percentage of respondents considered that the government should act to prevent climate change, but this indicates confusion rather than a rational response to the issue. It is no more possible to avert a hypothetical risk than it is possible to die of a suspected heart attack or to be slightly pregnant.
I’m not suggesting that there will be a sudden collapse of AGW alarmism among politicians and the media, but that eventually attitudes will change unless the scientific evidence becomes far more robust. And I doubt whether either of us expect that to happen any time soon.
On the other hand, the radically changed economic landscape is likely to present a multitude of incentives to take a far more critical look at what we are being told about global warming. The large-scale creation of green collar jobs at public expense – on both sides of the Atlantic – should concentrate public scrutiny wonderfully. And in my view we are not yet even in sight of the end of the beginning of our fiscal woes.
If only we had “hysteria” to worry about, Tony. Hysteria is transient. No, the problem is the quiet, day-to-day, routine, matter of fact, unquestioning acceptance of the AGW hypothesis that underlies so much news, policy and discourse today. The consequences are legion: for a major example, see this.
I cannot see any prospect of all this being unravelled for a very long time – whatever the public’s view.
Robin,
RE: #17
Very sad.
This is a perfect example of the “domino effect” that is the lunacy of the environmentalist agenda.
This smelter will probably be moved to Africa or South America where wages will be much lower and, (hopefully), they can secure the infrastructure required. The ironic thing is that the smelter will probably produce more CO2 as third world countries don’t follow “environmental” practices thereby increasing the amount of CO2 into the atmosphere…..a consequence that the shortsighted “Greens” have overlooked.
In the meantime, an additional 500 employees will appear in the unemployment line for the rest of the taxpayers to subsidize.
Brute: it is sad. But I’m afraid we’ll see many more such absurdities so long as this lunacy holds sway. And, for the reasons I’ve tried to state above, it seems to me inevitable that that will be a very long time: I cannot envisage Tony’s “rational discussion” arising within the foreseeable future. God knows how much damage will be done to the fabric of our society before the nonsense comes to an end.
The public may feel there’s something wrong with all this – although few will articulate it. But, in any case, it seems our politicians listen only to the media and to “opinion formers”. As I said at 3 (above), it seems they are no longer interested in politics.
Re: #17, Robin & Brute
I don’t see hysteria as being a transient condition, and I am not suggesting that a re-appraisal of the public’s attitude to AGW will happen quickly. What I have said is that government policy on carbon emissions has yet to have any real impact on the population as a whole, and that when it does it will hurt. Then justifications will be called for in a way that is not happening at the moment.
The owners of the Anglesey aluminium smelter are negotiating with the government over a replacement for the cheap electricity that they presently obtain from the Wylfa nuclear power station, but will loose when it closes. The government at present claims that their energy policy priority is low carbon emissions. This means expensive energy.
Norman Lamont is still tortured by the memory of his claim that ‘Unemployment is a good and fair price to pay for low inflation’. The government is, in effect, is saying that high energy prices are a fair price to pay for controlling the climate. Sooner or later this is going to become a major issue with energy intensive industries haemorrhaging from Britain and the rest of the EU as Brute suggests. Hundreds of thousands of people who end up on the dole, together with politicians who represent their interests, will be asking whether we really can control the climate. How long will it be before some poor junior minister, dazzled by the studio lights, blurts out that this is a fair price to pay for saving the planet?
Ironically, the north end of Anglesey, where this drama is being played out, is already liberally scattered with vast wind turbines.
Yesterday’s decision to go ahead with the Heathrow expansion shows the extent of the disconnect between government rhetoric on AGW and its actions when economic reality intrudes. On Newsnight Geoff Hoon even tried to justify the decision by saying that it had been taken because millions of people in the UK want to fly more; a statement that contradicts everything that his colleagues have been saying about the crusade against climate change over the last four years.
I do not think that any amount of drip, drip, drip of certainty about climate change from politicians and the media will conceal the inconsistencies, contradictions and uncertainties that lie at the heart of this controversy from the public in the long run. And certainly not during a recession.
I’m sorry to keep banging on about this but I think there’s a real danger that most AGW sceptics may be falling into the trap of failing to realise the massive obstacle faced in even getting a consideration of possible doubts about the validity of the AGW hypothesis anywhere near the mainstream media and political agenda. I believe evidence of this is everywhere – a problem for too many sceptics is that, by overestimating the practical importance of the often excellent debate on AGW throughout the blogosphere, they are unable to see how totally irrelevant it seems elsewhere. As I said on the Whitehouse/Lynas thread this morning, “Huffington Post has got one thing right: the greater part of the mainstream media (and our politicians) truly believe that sceptical opinion is based on “the nonsensical junk science of the right-wing think tanks and their cadre of scientists for hire“”.
Driving home from a meeting this morning I heard a classic example. BBC Radio aired what was in many ways an excellent programme about the proposed Severn Barrage. It included a range of strongly held views – from environmental groups, business leaders, politicians etc. Some were strongly in favour and some (including local environmentalists) strongly opposed. The whole scheme is clearly massively controversial. But not one contributor even hinted at the merest possibility that reducing CO2 emissions might not be so desperately important – indeed all, included the presenter, seemed anxious to parade their “save the planet” credentials.
Tony: I posted the above (21) before I saw your 22 – although it doesn’t, I think, alter my basic view. But, as always with your comments Tony, I’ll mull them over.
Robin #21
I heard the same programme about the Severn barrage and was going to bring it up myself.
So far today I have heard two programmes relating to climate change/carbon. Yesterday there were no less than nine including ‘costing the earth’ the day before five. They can be summed up by the green peace spoksman roger harabin-didn’ he use to work for the BBC-on the 5pm BBC News programme. Entirely credulous, entirely accepting the carbon status quo. Thats a step change this year in the BBC AGW output.
TonyB
Re: #23, TonyB
Your comment here is also relevant to this thread.
To what extent would you say that the people who you come in contact with have had their views formed by conviction, and to what extent by their working environment? And to what extent do they believe all that they are being told?
Tony: I think the point of TonyB’s comment (and certainly of mine) is that it no longer seems to matter what people think or believe – all that matters to most commentators and policy makers is to observe the current “narrative”. That narrative today – and, as I have suggested for the foreseeable future – is that CO2 emissions are dangerous and must be curbed. I accept that, from time to time, practical reality may mitigate against this (as in Poznan and re Heathrow’s third runway) but, certainly so far as the UK is concerned, that doesn’t stop the constant thrust and expense of a policy that, for example, is bringing us wind farms and the disastrous power shortages that may well follow. Yes, as you say, people are going to notice when they get hurt. But, by then, much of the damage will have been done and much of that which is in train will be irreversible. And I really don’t think politicians are much worried about embarrassments they may suffer in the future – their concerns these days are almost exclusively short term. In any case, James P’s quotation from Tolstoy (item 5 above) sums up their attitudes perfectly.
And consider the Spectator article I referred to on the Whitehouse/Lynas thread – especially page 5.