Summers come, and summers go

Posted by TonyN on 14/08/2009 at 11:09 pm The Climate 8 Responses »
Aug 142009

When the Met Office predicted a ‘barbecue summer’ this year they were giving a hostage to fortune, and reality has visited savage retribution on them. If the public were sceptical about the ability of scientists to warn us about climate change before this debacle, they are now downright scornful.

The climate seems to be as unpredictable as it ever it was, but the natural progression of the seasons is not so capricious, nor are computer models required to tell us what is in store. As the gradual – or occasionally dramatic – warming of spring leads into the holiday season, our expectations – or hopes at least – grow ever more optimistic; will this be one of those truly memorable summers? And later, as the days begin to shorten noticeably, and leaves turn from rich green to brown, we know that soon the trees will once again be bare poles outlined against a cold sky, with morning frosts and the chance of a flurry of sleet or snow in a passing shower not too far away. Then, as the cold months near their end, the first signs of growth in sheltered spots reassures us that the whole cycle will start again.

There is a point in the passage of the seasons that always makes a deep impression on me, Continue reading »

Who owns the The Royal Society?

Posted by TonyN on 09/08/2009 at 11:17 am The Climate 11 Responses »
Aug 092009

There is no doubt that The Royal Society has a position on climate change, but to what extent is this venerable and distinguished organisation able to express a truly independent and objective opinion on a matter of current public policy?

Here is what the Society say at the head of the main page on their web site dealing with climate:

International scientific consensus agrees that increasing levels of man-made greenhouse gases are leading to global climate change. Possible consequences of climate change include rising temperatures, changing sea levels, and impacts on global weather. These changes could have serious impacts on the world’s organisms and on the lives of millions of people, especially those living in areas vulnerable to extreme natural conditions such as flooding and drought

http://royalsociety.org/landing.asp?id=1278

At a glance, this appears to be a reiteration of the current orthodoxy, but a more careful reading reveals it is remarkably cautious. There is no reference to conclusive, or even compelling, scientific evidence but only to ‘international scientific consensus’, it speaks of ‘possible consequences’ rather inevitable consequences, and suggests that these ‘could’ be serious rather than predicting certain disaster. There is plenty of wriggle-room here should opinion change. Continue reading »

Eco-towns, what scientists are for, and a bit about education

Posted by TonyN on 01/08/2009 at 11:11 pm The Climate 10 Responses »
Aug 012009

It’s a while since I’ve written a post, ‘John A’ having contributed last week’s piece. So here are a few things that caught my eye over the last fortnight while I’ve been doing other things.Our small and crowded island is still fortunate in having some lovely countryside which has been preserved as a result of sensible planning laws. On the other hand it has been recognised for some time that there is a housing shortage. The problem here is that more houses means less countryside, and this is likely to lead to protests. What to do?

Our very resourceful government — in matters of spin at least — had no difficulty finding an answer; a bit of creative re-branding:

The village of Ford in West Sussex was turned on its head last April when the Government  announced it was a “favoured location” to become an eco¬town. One of 10 spots to be transformed into a carbon¬neutral settlement, it would have more than 5,000 sustainably powered homes built on and around it. To encourage residents to take up a more eco-friendly lifestyle, it would be given impeccable new ‘”green” credentials.

Car journeys  would be curtailed by a l8mph speed limit. Bath water would be recycled and fed to communal flowerbeds. Each home would pump excess power generated by its solar panels and turbines back into the National Grid. It all sounded very  worthy.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/5858971/How-Ben-Fogle-helped-save-his-village-from-becoming-an-eco-town.html

And very expensive too. Bog-standard houses are expensive enough to put them beyond the reach of first time buyers, and the urgent need is for low cost housing. Eco-homes come with so many bells and whistles that they are something that only the affluent can afford.

When the then housing minister, Caroline Flint, unveiled the towns shortlisted to be “eco-fied”, she stated that “we will revolutionise how people live”. It sounded more like Nineteen Eighty-Four than the dawn of a green revolution. New developments, given a lick of green paint, could be forced onto towns like Ford, where similar projects would previously have been rejected. The word “eco” would make residents feel guilty if they voiced opposition. It would allow the Government to feel smug about its environmental friendliness, and to steamroller its developments through. Wrap something in green recycled paper and you’ll get away with anything. But Flint hadn’t reckoned on the power of local feeling.

That was a mistake, because the people of Ford seem to be a pretty feisty lot who were quite ready do a bit of campaigning and demonstrating to prevent a vast area of Grade 1 agricultural land being concreted over and their rural community being destroyed. They even attempted a bit of consultation with their opponents: Continue reading »

Lindzen, Holdren, the Erlichs and Lysenko; Progressive moral fashions.

Posted by John A on 24/07/2009 at 2:58 pm The Climate 3 Responses »
Jul 242009

Richard Lindzen (CCNet, 22 July 2009) was too generous by half in his assessment that “although ideally science is independent of moral fashions, in practice there is undoubtedly an influence”.

The history of science is rife with examples of political, social and moral fashions which not simply influence, but pervert the scientific method and corrupt the conduct of scientists. Einstein faced off the political and moral fashions of Nazism and eugenics but plenty of his colleagues happily incorporated those twin systems into their own research. Eugenics also laid the foundations for the moral crusade against alcohol in early 20th Century America which was again a supposedly scientific assessment delivered as a moral panic which must be addressed immediately lest America fall into a deep pit of moral degeneration.

The example of Trofim Lysenko and the political outlawing of Mendelian genetics in Stalinist Russia is a particularly scary example of a political fashion given to be a moral and political imperative by a dangerously unstable man who became President of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The parallels with the modern global warming scare are obvious.

Another example would be neo-Malthusianism as popularised in the 20th Century Continue reading »

Ed Miliband and the windmills of the mind. Part 1

Posted by TonyN on 17/07/2009 at 11:24 pm The Wind 2 Responses »
Jul 172009

A comment elsewhere on this blog drew my attention to an article in the Daily Telegraph by James Delingpole; Wind Farms: the death of Britain. This is truly a cri de coeur in response to the government’s Low Carbon Transition Plan, from someone who obviously still values our countryside. The new white paper on energy sets out plans to build up to 10,000 more wind turbines, 6000 of them onshore, in order to ‘save the environment’, thus setting the scene industrialising most of our countryside and large parts of the coasts.

I just hope that someone is listening to James Delingpole.

On the very day when the Low Carbon Transition Plan was published I had to go to Birmingham, and drove back over Wenlock Edge in late afternoon sushine with the whole of the Shropshire plane and the Welsh Marches laid out in one glorious vista before me. I wondered – and rejoiced – that there could still be so much unblemished rural landscape left in the heart of our small and overpopulated island. It was a sight of stunning beauty and a reminder to anyone who cares to look at it that humans once lived in sympathy with the natural world rather than pretending that the natural world is something that they have control over. And all this within easy reach of a vast urban population living in the West Midlands. Continue reading »

The G8 in La-la Land: warm words but no promises

Posted by TonyN on 10/07/2009 at 11:01 am The Climate 8 Responses »
Jul 102009

Does anyone remember the unanimous statement on decisive action to combat the global economic crisis that the world leaders handed down from their meeting at L’Aquila this week? You don’t? Well nor do I, actually.

But global warming has its uses if you are a politician stuck for some good headlines, and as second item on the G8’s agenda it seems to have come in handy to save the leader’s blushes.

Apparently the climate is not to be allowed to change by more than 2 °C, and everyone agrees that carbon emissions  should be reduced dramatically by 2050; about the time that most of those gathered at L’Aquila will be learning to play the harp. As to what will be done to achieve this, how it will be done, or when it will be done, they are silent.

But for politicians, with a mighty spin machine to back them up and a poorly informed public as an audience, climate change is so much easier to deal with than economic woes. Here is a selection of first reactions after the meeting that buck the trend:

World leaders, including the developing nations, committed themselves only to “substantially reducing global emissions by 2050”, but failed to agree a specific target. The lack of a substantive agreement, other than the desire to keep global temperatures down, leaves world leaders facing daunting negotiations to reach agreement at the Copenhagen conference in December, which is due to set the entire climate change framework covering the period from 2012 to 2050.

Patrick Wintour and Larry Elliott, The Guardian, 9 July 2009

So all the “Gs” gathered in Italy this week appear to be floundering in their efforts to craft some sort of meaningful deal on climate change. Rich countries agreed to far-off, ambitious targets on emissions reductions, but shuddered at any more immediate commitments. Developing countries basically punted altogether. None of that bodes well at all for the year-end climate confab in Denmark.

Keith Johnson, WSJ Environmental Capital, 9 July 2009

Brazil’s chief climate negotiator criticized the Group of Eight rich nations on Thursday for not taking more forceful steps to curb global warming, saying proposed long-term targets were meaningless.

    Reuters, 9 July 2009

Does the 50% cut by 2050 sound familiar? The same countries agreed at the 2007 G8 summit to “seriously consider” such a target. By 2008, they had moved to “consider and adopt” it. Come 2009, well, we can consider it well and truly adopted.

David Adam, The Guardian, 9 July 2009

So the planet is saved after all. Before you crack open the low-carbonated champagne, consider the weasel wording of the Group of Eight summit communiqué. Are such carefully-hedged words worth the paper they are printed on? What are these politicians committing themselves to do during their own term of office? Most will be dead and buried by 2050.

Paul Taylor, Reuters, 9 July 2009

And of course the BBC, who must have been at a different meeting:

BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin says the declaration is a significant step, with all big countries – rich and poor – agreeing there is a scientific limit on the amount we can warm the climate.

http://www.harmlesssky.org://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8143566.stm

(Hat tip to Benny Peiser of the incomparable CCNet)

Coed Aber Artro and the Meirionydd Oakwoods Habitat Management Project

Posted by Peter Lucas on 07/07/2009 at 9:42 am Woodland Trust and Aber Artro Woods No Responses »
Jul 072009

1. In the heyday of the Welsh gentry there was at Aber Artro a dower house of the Corsygedol estate.  From beech planted in its grounds may have come the compact beech wood, beautiful in all seasons and spectacular in bluebell time, celebrated in Anne Stevenson’s poem, “May Bluebells, Coed Aber Artro”, and in Dave Newbould’s photograph –

aberartro-woods2.jpg

No more.  The brutal culling of the beech (some felled trees are over 3ft in diameter, no recent arrivals) is captured in Stephen Coll’s photographs (“after-comers cannot guess the beauty been”: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Binsey Poplars felled 1879) –

img_1271_ed.jpg

2. To attempt to unravel the mystery of the damage gratuitously inflicted on Coed Aber Artro (“the Coed”) by Woodland Trust (“WT”) and Countryside Council for Wales (“CCW”) – bodies charged with its protection and wholly or partly funded by the taxpayer – is to embark on a strange and surprising journey to Brussels Continue reading »

Obama adviser: ‘How to become an extremist'

Posted by Robin Guenier on 05/07/2009 at 8:43 am The Climate 14 Responses »
Jul 052009

On this blog, many of us have commented from time to time on the remarkable unanimity of politicians, the media, public institutions and, sadly, scientists about what they see as the clear truths that mankind’s Co2 emissions are the cause of potentially dangerous global warming (now “climate change”) and that painful action is essential to curb such emissions if we, and in particular our grandchildren, are to avoid a dreadful future. As many of us see it, it is extraordinary how these opinions are expressed with such utter certainty in view of the powerful arguments that question that thinking – arguments that rarely get even a hearing in mainstream public discourse. We wonder – how can this have happened?

Well, I have just read an article that may provide the answer. Entitled To become an extremist, hang around with people you agree with, it’s by Cass R Sunstein – who is author of the much admired “Nudge” and an adviser to Obama. It can be found here.

Using the rise of fascism, 1960s student radicalism, the growth of Islamic terrorism, the Rwandan genocide and the 2008 financial crisis as examples, Sunstein argues that there is a general fact of social life that: Continue reading »

The perils of being a space virgin?

Posted by TonyN on 04/07/2009 at 9:37 pm The Climate 4 Responses »
Jul 042009


The other evening, Newsnight had a story about the future of space exploration which included an interview with Buzz Aldrin, who was the second man on the moon and by all accounts is a climate change sceptic, although he certainly wasn’t asked about this.

Earlier in the programme, the focused had been on suggestions that instead of leaving everything to NASA, the private sector should play a bigger role. The idea is that technology being developed for space tourism could also be used for other purposes.

There was an interview with a man called Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic who plan to operate the first scheduled passenger trips into space. They have recently signed a contract with NASA to put a climate research satellite into orbit and are also considering the possibility of feeding back solar power from space and developing server farms in an environment were air conditioning would definitely not be needed. Having established that Virgin intend to diversifying out of passenger transport, which they obviously understand, into the realms of fantasy technology, he then said this:

What people must realise is that space is crucial to the survival of mankind on the planet. Without being in space we wouldn’t even know, to any extent, about the climate change issue.

Mr Whitehorn is clearly not a fool, and he is obviously aware that concern about climate change can open up opportunities for Virgin. What is more puzzling is that he is evidently also aware that the much hyped ‘evidence’ of potentially catastrophic climate change over the last century has actually been so inconspicuous that, if it were not for the space programme, we probably wouldn’t even have noticed.

I’m sure we all wish Virgin Glactica every success, whatever planet they live on.

New report for government nails wind power

Posted by TonyN on 02/07/2009 at 12:15 pm The Wind 21 Responses »
Jul 022009

On Wednesday morning, a story headlined Wind ‘can revolutionise UK power’ appeared on the BBC News website. Note the quotation marks; the age old device that hacks love so dearly when they know that what they are about to say may not withstand scrutiny.  These are the opening paragraphs:

Wind has the power to revolutionise the UK’s electricity industry, according to a study published on Wednesday.

Research from analysts Poyry says that the UK can massively expand wind power by 2030 without suffering power cuts or a melt-down of the National Grid.

The cost of electricity would then be determined not by consumer demand, but by how hard the wind is blowing.

When it is windy power will be so cheap that other forms of generation will be unable to compete, the report says.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8127177.stm

Well that’s good news, or is it? Continue reading »

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