An Independent contribution to the climate debate?

Posted by TonyN on 02/04/2008 at 6:13 pm The Climate No Responses »
Apr 022008

Yesterdays April Fool’s Day post doesn’t seem to have taken in too many people, and what follows in this post should put the record straight anyway. Incidentally the butterfly (or is it a moth?) in the picture that I took was collected in Kashmir by my late father-in-law while on leave from a posting in India during WWII. You can just see the pin that was used to mount it in its case if you look carefully. Sadly none of this is in quite the same league as the BBC’s superb flying penguins. See here.

When I read the article in The Independent that I posted about yesterday, my first reaction was that it could be reprinted verbatim as an All Fools Day spoof. If you didn’t know that it was a front-page story in Brittain’s greenest newspaper, it could easily be mistaken for satire.

Passing swiftly over the obvious fact that the changing behaviour of lepidoptera, common wild flowers and trees, tells us only that there has been a slight variation in temperature over the last century –a commonplace – what are we supposed to learn from The Indipendent’s story? This kind of ‘evidence’ says nothing about the cause of any warming, whether natural or anthropogenic, only that it has got warmer, and who would doubt that? Continue reading »

A climate sceptic comes in from the cold

Posted by TonyN on 01/04/2008 at 12:01 am The Climate 5 Responses »
Apr 012008

(Update 02/04/2008: Please note the date when this was posted!)

This is the last post that I will be making at Harmless Sky. It is very difficult to admit that you are wrong, but there are times when overwhelming evidence makes it impossible to do otherwise.

I started this blog after much research had led me to believe that some activists and scientists were exaggerating the evidence for human caused global warming and misleading perfectly harmless and respectable people about the effects that CO2 emissions were having on the climate. How wrong could I be?

Now I realise that I have been the victim of disinformation in the media spread by oil companies and tobacco salesmen. Their sceptical claims, backed up by plausible sounding but feeble and distorted scientific research seemed so convincing.

This ‘Damacus moment’ happened just before Easter, after reading a front-page story in The Independent. It was headlined, ‘How blurring of the seasons is a harbinger of climate calamity’. No other newspaper could have made such a profound impression on me, and instantly I knew that what they were saying was a blinding revelation of the truth.

To hammer the point home, the editor had thoughtfully provided a picture of a red admiral butterfly contentedly feeding on snowdrops. Yes really, snowdrops!


Martin Warren

Now we all know that a picture is worth a thousand words, and that the camera never lies, so it was almost superfluous for the author to add, “Although many people see the changes as quaint or charming – butterflies certainly brighten up a January day – they are actually among the first concrete signs that the world is indeed set on a global warming course which is likely to prove disastrous if not checked. … It is undeniable confirmation that a profound alteration to the environment, the consequences of which are likely to prove catastrophic, is under way.” Continue reading »

Did the IPCC mislead the media about its own report?

Posted by TonyN on 27/03/2008 at 12:41 pm The Climate No Responses »
Mar 272008

It is now just over a year since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its most recent assessment of the scientific evidence that human activity is changing the climate. As a media event this was a spectacular success, with alarming global warming stories dominating the headlines for many months thereafter. But did the news services and papers report what the scientists actually said, or what the IPCC wanted policy makers and the general public think that they said?

On 2nd Feb 2007, the UN News Service launched the Summary for Policymakers (Working Group 1) of its Fourth Assessment Report with a press release that started like this:

Evidence is now ‘unequivocal’ that humans are causing global warming – UN report

2 February 2007 – Changes in the atmosphere, the oceans and glaciers and ice caps now show unequivocally that the world is warming due to human activities, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in new report released today in Paris.
Here

Note that the headline uses the word unequivocal in quotation marks, indicating a direct reference to what was said in the report, but in fact the word unequivocal is only used once in the report, and not in this context. On page 4, the following paragraph refers to warming of the climate, but not to the cause: Continue reading »

News: Tony Blair - Return of a Shop-soiled Messiah.

Posted by TonyN on 18/03/2008 at 8:58 pm In the News, The Climate 3 Responses »
Mar 182008

According to The Guardian (14/03/2008) Tony Blair has found yet another retirement occupation to add to his assorted roles as a Middle East fixer, divinity lecturer and merchant banker. He is to spearhead a task force aimed at picking up the broken pieces of last year’s Bali World Climate Conference and broker an international deal that will lead to a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. Welcome back to the politically safe ground of climate alarmism Mr Blair!

For an experienced and ruthless politician with a rather tarnished reputation, the climate bandwagon has so much to recommend it. No one is likely to criticise you for trying to save the planet. Scepticism about even your most ill-founded and exaggerated claims will be silenced by a sententious barrage from the media powerhouses of the green NGOs. Targets for CO2 reduction are so far in the future that there will be no need to kick them into the long grass; they are there already. If all else fails, and the media notice that you are not making any progress, then blaming the American and Chinese governments will win public approval and get you off the hook. As one wag said when asked why the Blair government was so keen on saving the planet, ‘Well, you know, it’s so much easier than saving the National Health Service’. Continue reading »

Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs.

Posted by TonyN on 17/03/2008 at 9:34 am New Statesman 10,000 Responses »
Mar 172008

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.

(Click the ‘comments’ link below if the input box does not appear)

 

Admin

Posted by TonyN on 16/03/2008 at 7:12 pm Admin 80 Responses »
Mar 162008

Continuation of the New Statesman blog

Size matters

The most pressing problem at the moment is the success of this thread. With 650+ comments and 100,000 words it is becoming noticeably slow to load. Also the very much-improved preview plug-in that I installed at the weekend can’t cope resulting in infuriating delays when typing comments.

This thread cannot be allowed to grow indefinitely; WordPress simply is not designed for such vast amounts of verbiage. Here are some ideas about this:

1) A contributor has suggested that when there is an overload like this, a new page should be started, which seems very sensible. In this case I would move the most recent 30-50 comments to the new page. Somewhere around 400-500 comments would seem to be the limit if WordPress is to function efficiently This is NOT a plea to write fewer or shorter comments.

2) The total number of comments since the NS published Paul Whitehouse’s article on global cooling in December is heading for the 4000 mark. Although the group is now a far smaller one than it was at the NS (more about this below), it is generating comments at a similar pace and these cover a very wide range of topics. However the totally unstructured nature of the thread means that it is very difficult to find interesting and useful information that was submitted even a few weeks ago. One solution would be to open new threads (within the New Statesman Category – see right hand sidebar on this page) for particular topics. I’m thinking particularly of JZ and Max’s very interesting statistics on per capital CO2 emissions, but there are many others, such as Arctic Sea Ice, the ‘iniquities’ of the IPCC AR4 SPM etc. This would spread the load of comments among a number of threads while retaining the hurly-burly spontaneity of the main unthreaded pages as that exists at present. It would also mean that there are obvious places to post on particular topics and that these can be revisited as new development occur.

3) In response to a request from JZ I have uploaded a searchable archive file with all the pre-Harmless Sky comments here:

http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/ns_comments_all.rtf

Please will someone try downloading this so that I know that it is accessible to all, but beware, the file size is over 3.6 Mb.

4) Any other suggestions will be welcome.

New blood

As I said above, the group is quite a small one and it would seem sensible to think that we encourage new participants. The simplest way of doing this is always to leave a link back to the NS thread when commenting on other blogs. Example:

http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=63

You might copy this URL to a Notepad or other text file on your desktop and then it will always be handy for a quick copy and paste. If the site you are on has a button for making a hyperlink live, then remember to use this.

Before long I intend to change my domain hosting arrangements and when that happens URLs should become a bit more user friendly.

My webstats – the information that I get about visitors to the blog – suggest that there are a lot of people reading the blog, but not contributing. This seems to be common to most blogs.

The dreaded blog rules

I have said just about all I want to on the subject in this comment on the NS thread:

If you look at the top of this page you will see the title of this blog, and a strap-line that defines the subject matter that it was set up to deal with. My blogname also appears.

I do not want either world politics or comparative religions discussed here, except in the very narrow context where these topics have a direct bearing on climate, the countryside and landscapes. There are plenty of other forums that deal with such things. What happened yesterday was nobody’s fault. A stray remark got blown up into a major issue. It is in the nature of an electronic forum that this should happen; one of the unique advantages of blogging is that ideas are developed by the participation of a group of – more or less – like-minded people.

The blog rules were drafted in a considerable hurry at a time when I had no experience of running a blog and little expectation that anyone would read them. It may be time to have another look at these. But I must make it clear that, although I am very happy to discuss them (and genuinely grateful for spelling corrections), what is said on this thread has an impact on Harmless Sky as a whole, and that is obviously a matter that concerns me. At present we are averaging over 1000 hits a week and the trend is strongly upwards.

I am delighted that the NS threads have successfully transferred to Harmless Sky and astonished to see that, in the four months since this happened, over 650 comments have been submitted, amounting to over 100,000 words; the length of a 250 page paperback.

At this point I think that we need to consider a few administrative matters. Later today I will post a special page with some suggestions and a request for feedback. Please do not respond to what I have said in this comment here, but do so on the special page when it appears.

Perhaps I should add that I am very conscious of the fact that I am the host of the NS thread and not its proprietor.

I do not believe that rules should be automatically and rigidly enforced, but there do have to be one or two lines drawn in the sand if we are to escape the flaming, rancour and mindless abuse that afflicts some other sites that deal with controversial subjects. So far we have been free of it and I want things to stay that way as Harmless Sky continues to grow.

I look forward to hearing what people think about all these things. There probably will not be solutions that will suit everyone, but with luck a consensus (Oh! how can I use that term?) can be found.

The problem with comment overload on the present thread is pretty urgent.

Warm Words II: When facts become fantasies.

Posted by TonyN on 05/03/2008 at 10:57 am The Climate 2 Responses »
Mar 052008

In a previous post (here) I described how recommendations in an Institute for Public Policy Research report called Warm Words were adopted by the government as a template for all communications on climate change. Even the most charitable reading of this spine-chilling document reveals it as a cynical strategy for misleading the public about anthropogenic climate change for political purposes.

In February 2005, a consultancy called Futerra prepared some recommendations for the ClimateChange Communications Working Group which comprises DEFRA and five other government departments and agencies. This is how Futerra describe themselves on their website:

Futerra is a communications company. We do the things communications companies do; have bright ideas, captivate audiences, build energetic websites one day and grab opinion formers’ attention the next. We’re very good at it. But the real difference is that we’ve only ever worked on green issues, corporate responsibility and ethics. Here

Their brief seems to have been to develop a climate communications strategy that would convince the public about the undeniable existence of anthropogenic global warming even if the facts don’t quite bear this out. With the government already beginning to introduce measures to ‘win the battle against climate change’, this was a matter of some importance if they were to avoid accusations of alarmism.

Recommendation 1: Objective

We recommend that the objective for the strategy be:
To use effective communications to encourage attitude change and acceptance of policy change for climate change in the UK.

Recommendations

The reference to ‘attitude change’ looks innocent enough on its own. A campaign to change people’s attitudes to drink driving, food hygiene or child neglect would be perfectly reasonable for any government to undertake; it is beyond doubt that drunk drivers, contaminated food and negligent parents do harm. But the situation with climate change is very different. The government’s intention in this case is to persuade the electorate that a threat undoubtedly exists, although it was tacitly acknowledged in Warm Words that there are uncertainties. And they are doing this after they have introduced policies to avert this supposed threat, apparently to retrospectively justify their proposed remedies. This is to be achieved by pretending that no uncertainties exist, when they are aware that the existence of the risk has yet to be verified.

An interview that Sir David King, the government’s very influential chief scientific adviser, gave to Radio4’s Today programme on 20th December 2007 throws some light on how policy was being formed at that time. Continue reading »

The Visual Issue: Wind Farms and Virtual Landscapes

Posted by TonyN on 27/02/2008 at 4:19 pm The Wind 7 Responses »
Feb 272008

As more and more of our precious British landscape is disfigured and by wind farm developments, many of us may wonder how planning authorities can justify some of the decisions that they are taking. On what evidence are they deciding that an important part of our heritage should be sacrificed?The outcomes of planning applications for wind farms largely depend on images that predict what the development would look like. These are produced by photographing the proposed site and then creating a photomontage by superimposing representations of the turbines. There is an old adage that the camera never lies, but this seems not to apply to visual impact assessments. If you want to minimise the visual impact of an elephant in your garden, it is quite easy to do so by photographing it with a wide-angle lens that shows as much background as possible and a very small elephant.

Someone kindly sent me a fascinating document called The Visual Issue that I might not otherwise have seen. It is a detailed, closely reasoned, and very well written critique of the way in which photomontages are used by developers to predict what proposed wind turbine developments might look like. I say ‘might’, because even this scrupulously fair-minded paper cannot disguise the extent to which plausible, but misleading, visual representations are used for this purpose.

The two images below illustrate this problem dramatically. They were both taken from the same viewpoint, using a standard lens, and demonstrate the shrinking technique employed by developers, although these are simulated images and not pictures of a real wind farm .

Courtesy of Alan Macdonald, http://www.thevisualissue.com/

 


Clearly the visual impact of the turbines is quite different. In the upper picture they seem quite inconspicuous, small and far away. In the lower one they dominate the landscape and the viewer in a way that is almost threatening. They also seem much nearer although a telephoto lens has not been used.

Alan Macdonald, author of The Visual Issue, is an architect who, for the last 15 years, has specialised in preparing images for clients to use in planning applications, initially in the Far East, but more recently in Scotland. When small rural communities in the Highlands approached him because they were concerned that developers were submitting misleading photomontage for visual impact assessments, he was astonished by what he discovered. Continue reading »

News: When science and politics mix

Posted by TonyN on 21/02/2008 at 11:45 am In the News, The Climate 2 Responses »
Feb 212008

Below is a comment that Dr Judith Curry posted recently on Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit blog which gives some insight into the close relationship between science and politics in the minds of many climate researchers.

The author is chair of the school of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US and a very influential member of the climate science community. She has published research papers that attempt to link an increase in hurricanes to climate change and she serves on various panels related to climate science including the National Academies’ space studies board and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate-research working group.

Andrew #115, I agree with your statement. While I am not skeptical about increasing CO2 causing warming, there is much to be skeptical about in future projections regarding how much warming. The IPCC makes no pretense of having nailed down “how much warming”, it gives a range of temperature increases even for a specific scenario (Steve, your request for proof of 2.5C sensitivity doesn’t make sense in this context, which is why no one has responded). What do about the warming, given the scientific uncertainties, is a great challenge. However, decision making under uncertainty is something that is routinely faced in all aspects of our life, from government policy to individual decisions. The challenge is to come up with policies and strategies that make sense, even if the warming turns out to be less than expected and will cover us even if the warming is greater than expected. In the U.S. there is a national mandate for energy security, which is almost totally consistent with reducing greenhouse gases. There are numerous health concerns associated with continued pollution of our environment from energy generation. What can we do about it? There is much to be gained from energy efficiency and conservation (for georgia tech’s efforts in this, the largest power user in atlanta, see http://www.stewardship.gatech.edu/2007stewardshipV3.pdf). There are existing alternative energy technologies that are not quite cost competitive with the subsidized fossil fuels we currently use (change the carrots and sticks, and these technologies are cost competitive). There is much promise in a number of new technologies, that need further investment. The other thing we need to do is focus on the socalled adaptation strategies. Whether or not global warming is increasing hurricanes, surely it makes sense to make our coastal cities more resilient to hurricanes. Whether or not global warming is going to increase droughts, surely Georgia needs to figure out how to manage its water resources better and make it more resilient to drought. etc. The bottom line is that such policy decisions don’t hinge on the science of whether the sensitivity is 2 or 3 or 4 degrees.

Dr Curry appears to be saying:

1) We know that there is anthropogenic global warming, but we can’t quantify its extent.

2) We must do something about this even if our understanding of the problem is so limited that we do not even know whether it poses a significant threat.

3) Even if the threat turns out to be illusory, never mind. There will still be benefits from our mistaken and futile attempts at mitigation provided we ignore the economic and social knock-on effects.

This has nothing to do with science, but everything to do with politics, and even in that context it is not a basis for formulating public policy. The desire to address the very real problems associated with pollution and resource management are not reasons for persuading policy makers and the general public that human activity is changing the climate. There seems to be a belief among some climate scientists that AGW alarmism is a legitimate vehicle for drawing attention to these problems and is therefor justified. Again this has no part to play in scientific research, but draws climate science further away from its supposed purpose – to increase our understanding of atmospheric processes – and ever more deeply into the political arena.

If an astronomer who is engaged in research has, let us say, extreme racialist views, then it is unlikely to affect their work. This would not be true of a geneticist, anthropologist or historian. There is an obvious political bias towards environmentalist among climate scientists and it seems unrealistic to expect that this will not compromise their objectivity, however conscious they may be of this danger.

I am not equating racialism with environmentalism, simply using it as an example of a deeply held political belief that is likely to have a profound influence on a person’s world view. I also accept that certain aspects of climate research may lead to the belief that humans are destroying the planet, although this discipline is as likely to attract those who are already sympathetic to this hypothesis. But the risk of unconscious bias is still the same. Only sceptics can provide a counterbalance by questioning the scientific basis for anthropogenic global warming. It is increasingly important that their voices are heard and that their views, if rational, are respected and not dismissed out of hand. This rarely happens at the moment, although Dr Curry’s willingness to engage in discussion on a sceptical blog is a courageous and most welcome development.

News: King of the North Pole

Posted by TonyN on 12/02/2008 at 9:24 am In the News No Responses »
Feb 122008

The problem with retirement is that you still need to have something to do. For many the chance to devote more time to the garden, redecorating the house, compiling a family tree or taking long walks in the countryside may be enough. Others will be content to take each day as it comes, doing a little of this, a little of that, and not being too concerned about doing nothing at all. But what if you have spent your whole life scrabbling your way to the very top of a competitive profession? What will replace the daily adrenalin rush of being in the public eye once you are no longer a main player?

At the end of last year Sir David King stepped down as the Government’s chief scientific adviser after seven years in that post. This is, perhaps, the highest profile job that a scientist can aspire to in this country, and King is not a man to shrink from the attention of the media. Indeed he seems to thrive on any opportunity to keep his name in the headlines. A well calculated sound bite about global warming being a more serious threat than terrorism even landed him in trouble with 10, Downing Street, but he seemed quite unrepentant as he explained on BBC Radio’s Today program recently.

I think there is no other statement that raised the profile at the time of the issue of climate change more. And as a result I’ve actually travelled very widely around the world at the invitation of foreign governments all over the place to talk about climate change and what needs to be done.

BBC Radio4 Toady 20/12/07 8:30am Listen Again

That’s quite a boast, and all that travelling must have been fun too. Continue reading »

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