Leading scientific journals 'are censoring debate on global warming'
Telegraph
01/05/2005
Two of the world's leading scientific journals have come under fire from researchers for refusing to publish papers which challenge fashionable wisdom over global warming. A British authority on natural catastrophes who disputed whether climatologists really agree that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, says his work was rejected by the American publication, Science, on the flimsiest of grounds.
...
Prof Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama, a leading authority on satellite measurements of global temperatures, told The Telegraph: "It's pretty clear that the editorial board of Science is more interested in promoting papers that are pro-global warming. It's the news value that is most important."
He said that after his own team produced research casting doubt on man-made global warming, they were no longer sent papers by Nature and Science for review - despite being acknowledged as world leaders in the field.
44 comments:
Just read this. Not a new article, but interesting...
http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/06/nclim06.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/04/06/ixhome.html
Middle Ages were warmer than today, say scientists
Telegraph
06/04/2003
Claims that man-made pollution is causing "unprecedented" global warming have been seriously undermined by new research which shows that the Earth was warmer during the Middle Ages. From the outset of the global warming debate in the late 1980s, environmentalists have said that temperatures are rising higher and faster than ever before, leading some scientists to conclude that greenhouse gases from cars and power stations are causing these "record-breaking" global temperatures.
Such claims have now been sharply contradicted by the most comprehensive study yet of global temperature over the past 1,000 years. A review of more than 240 scientific studies has shown that today's temperatures are neither the warmest over the past millennium, nor are they producing the most extreme weather - in stark contrast to the claims of the environmentalists.
http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/05/16/do1602.xml
Global warming generates hot air
By Neil Collins
16/5/05
[Scientists] have just published a paper arguing that cosmic ray intensity and variations in solar activity have been driving recent climate change. They even provide a testable hypothesis, predicting some modest cooling over the next couple of years, as cosmic ray activity increases cloud cover.
...
Climate change is an important, perhaps vital, debate, but it remains just that. Warning of disaster has become a global industry, and the livelihoods of thousands of scientists depend on our being sufficiently spooked to keep funding the research. The worry is that many of these researchers have stopped being scientists and become campaigners instead.
James Lovelock, respected scientist of Gaia fame, thinks we're doomed on global warming and it's already too late to stop it:
Global Warming May Kill Billions This Century
James Lovelock: The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years
A question of priorities: hunger and disease or climate change?
The Economist
Jun 22nd 2006
TWO years ago, a Danish environmentalist called Bjorn Lomborg had an idea. We all want to make the world a better place but, given finite resources, we should look for the most cost-effective ways of doing so. He persuaded a bunch of economists, including three Nobel laureates, to draw up a list of priorities. They found that efforts to fight malnutrition and disease would save many lives at modest expense, whereas fighting global warming would cost a colossal amount and yield distant and uncertain rewards.
That conclusion upset a lot of environmentalists. This week, another man who upsets a lot of people embraced it. John Bolton, America's ambassador to the United Nations, said that Mr Lomborg's “Copenhagen Consensus” provided a useful way for the world body to get its priorities straight. Too often at the UN, said Mr Bolton, “everything is a priority”. The secretary-general is charged with carrying out 9,000 mandates, he said, and when you have 9,000 priorities you have none.
So, over the weekend, Mr Bolton sat down with UN diplomats from seven other countries, including China and India but no Europeans, to rank 40 ways of tackling ten global crises. The problems addressed were climate change, communicable diseases, war, education, financial instability, governance, malnutrition, migration, clean water and trade barriers.
Given a notional $50 billion, how would the ambassadors spend it to make the world a better place? Their conclusions were strikingly similar to the Copenhagen Consensus. After hearing presentations from experts on each problem, they drew up a list of priorities. The top four were basic health care, better water and sanitation, more schools and better nutrition for children. Averting climate change came last.
The ambassadors thought it wiser to spend money on things they knew would work. Promoting breast-feeding, for example, costs very little and is proven to save lives. It also helps infants grow up stronger and more intelligent, which means they will earn more as adults. Vitamin A supplements cost as little as $1, save lives and stop people from going blind. And so on.
For climate change, the trouble is that though few dispute that it is occurring, no one knows how severe it will be or what damage it will cause. And the proposed solutions are staggeringly expensive. Mr Lomborg reckons that the benefits of implementing the Kyoto protocol would probably outweigh the costs, but not until 2100. This calculation will not please Al Gore. Nipped at the post by George Bush in 2000, Mr Gore calls global warming an “onrushing catastrophe” and argues vigorously that curbing it is the most urgent moral challenge facing mankind.
Mr Lomborg demurs. “We need to realise that there are many inconvenient truths,” he says. But whether he and Mr Bolton can persuade the UN of this remains to be seen. Mark Malloch Brown, the UN's deputy secretary-general, said on June 6th that: “there is currently a perception among many otherwise quite moderate countries that anything the US supports must have a secret agenda...and therefore, put crudely, should be opposed without any real discussion of whether [it makes] sense or not.”
Steyn rants in his usual entertaining fashion:
The cult of global warming
Mark Steyn
Jerusalem Post
17/1/06
Using this thread as a generic "we're all gonna die" placeholder:
A new slogan for the environmental pressure groups: Some Gain, No Pain
Anatole Kaletsky
The Times
November 02, 2006
Like almost every other rational human being who is not in the pay of the US oil industry or the Bush White House, I believe that doing whatever we can to prevent, or at least mitigate, global climate change is one of the most important tasks facing the world today. Like almost every other media commentator and economist, I therefore welcome the Stern report published this week by the British Treasury and I strongly support Tony Blair’s promise to take urgent and decisive actions to put its conclusions into effect. In contrast to many of my colleagues, however, I will not respond to Sir Nicholas Stern’s extremely convincing admonitions about the horrors that lie ahead if the world continues to spew out carbon by suggesting that we restrain air travel.
I will make no promises to take the train instead of driving. And I will not disfigure my house with ugly double glazing, install a windmill or turn down the thermostat on my central heating now that the winter has set in. Does this make me a hypocrite? I don’t think so, because I intend to do something more constructive — and in the present climate of opinion, more difficult — to advance the cause of environmental sustainability.
Unlike most other commentators who have emphasised the visions of apocalypse conjured up in the Stern report, I will focus on the report’s economic and political logic — and take it a step beyond the formal conclusions into territory where I am sure Sir Nicholas would have ventured, were it not too controversial for a Blair government official.
The logic of the Stern report implies that the greatest enemies of constructive policies on climate change today are not President Bush and Exxon, culpable though they are. They are the environmental pressure groups and anti-capitalist zealots who have persuaded the public, the media and the political classes that any serious action against climate change will require huge economic sacrifices and a virtual abandonment of the modern, materialistic way of life. These are the real enemies of the planet: the people who chant that the world will come to an end if we go on flying, driving and consuming, who inveigh against globalisation and economic growth, who form human chains to stop nuclear power stations or hydro-electric dams.
read on...
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Global ecosystems 'face collapse'
BBC News
24 October 2006
Current global consumption levels could result in a large-scale ecosystem collapse by the middle of the century, environmental group WWF has warned. The group's biannual Living Planet Report said the natural world was being degraded "at a rate unprecedented in human history".
Terrestrial species had declined by 31% between 1970-2003, the findings showed. It warned that if demand continued at the current rate, two planets would be needed to meet global demand by 2050.
The biodiversity loss was a result of resources being consumed faster than the planet could replace them, the authors said. They added that if the world's population shared the UK's lifestyle, three planets would be needed to support their needs.
Lots of pretty graphs:
The living planet: facts and figures
BBC News
24 October 2006
The planet's natural resources are being consumed faster than they can be replaced, according to the WWF. If current trends continue two planets would be needed by 2050 to meet humanity's demands.
I think Kaletsky is quite sensible on this issue. I'm not convinced that 'green taxes' are a way out of the mess we're in. It looks to me like all the major parties are playing king of the hill with the moral high ground and are seeking to introduce taxes to which objection would appear immoral.
Given that this is a global problem, I think it needs a global solution. I don't think it's realistic to get everyone in the world to cut back on their energy consumption. I think a more realistic strategy would be to cut pollution while allowing energy consumption to remain the same, or even expand. In other words, we should be looking at alternative energy. Cars in Brazil run on Ethanol. Tidal energy is recognised as a viable energy source but has struggled to attract the investment needed.
When it comes to climate change I believe in two things - 1) Our inability to put long term interests ahead of short term interests. 2) Our capacity for invention and innovation.
I hope that the second is the solution to the first.
Here, Camilla Cavendish argues that the need to reduce carbon emmissions presents the most transformative business opportunity since the internet. (I haven't quoted any of it as it's worth reading in its entirety.)
Who will clean up on carbon?
This is a more serious and more soluble issue than global warming, I think.
All seafood will run out in 2050, say scientists
By Charles Clover, Environment Editor
03/11/2006
The world's stocks of seafood will have collapsed by 2050 at present rates of destruction by fishing, scientists said yesterday. A four-year study of 7,800 marine species around the world's ecosystems has concluded that the long-term trend is clear and predictable. By 2048, to be exact, catches of all the presently fished seafoods will have declined on average by more than 90 per cent since 1950.
The study, by an international group of ecologists and economists, says the loss of biodiversity impairs the ability of oceans to feed the world's growing human population — expected to rise by 50 per cent to nine billion in 2050. Over-fishing also sabotages the stability of marine environments, profoundly reducing the ocean's ability to produce seafood, resist diseases, filter pollutants and rebound from stresses such as climate change.
...
Despite the problem of the oceans being on a time-scale comparable to global warming, the Government appears to have scrapped plans to introduce its promised Marine Bill in the Queen's Speech this month, the environmental group WWF said yesterday.
The Great Global Warming Swindle
Channel 4
08/03/07
I'm just watching this fascinating documentary now. I'll keep an eye out for it on You Tube, but in the meantime have a butcher's at this:
arguments | trailer
Watch this if you can. It's amazing stuff:
The Great Global Warming Swindle on YouTube.
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Evidence of the power of the political movement that is the Global Warming brigade (see above vid at 5'30', where the co-founder of Greenpeace refuses to refer them as an 'environmental' movement) comes from the Tories' latest policy:
Cameron calls for new Air Travel taxes
Given a choice between Cameron and Kaletsky (below), I'm voting for the latter. His attack on the logic of current air travel policy and of the necessary role for emissions trading is highly persuasive:
Rise above the hot air and carry on flying
Anatole Kaletsky
The Times
January 11, 2007
Cracking down on air travel won’t stop climate change
Workers of the world unite! We have nothing to lose but our airline tickets
Anatole Kaletsky
The Times
March 09, 2006
I'm with Kaletky on this one too. The Tory Air Travel proposals made me groan. Honestly, what a crock. Rationing air travel to once a year after which you hit them with heavy taxes? Nice way to penalise the lowest earning travelers. Welcome to the return of the old paternalist Tories everyone.
I've just watched The Great Global Warming Swindle - very good. It's an extremely strong challenge to the Global warming consensus. Enjoyed the twist that one of the first supporters of global warming was Thatcher as the theory served her interests in her battles against the miners. Respect to Thatcher though, according to Lord Lawson she was strongly pro Nuclear because she needed an alternative to coal and oil as she didn't trust the miners or the Middle East. Now that's my kind of Tory!
Caution urged on climate 'risks'
BBC News
17/03/07
Two leading UK climate researchers have criticised those among their peers who they say are "overplaying" the global warming message. Professors Paul Hardaker and Chris Collier, both Royal Meteorological Society figures, are voicing their concern at a conference in Oxford.
They say some researchers make claims about possible future impacts that cannot be justified by the science. The pair believe this damages the credibility of all climate scientists.
They think catastrophism and the "Hollywoodisation" of weather and climate only work to create confusion in the public mind. They argue for a more sober and reasoned explanation of the uncertainties about possible future changes in the Earth's climate.
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Michael O'Leary, head of Ryanair, has a rant. Amid the rage some reasonable points are made.
'You can't change world by wearing sandals'
Telegraph
17/03/2007
Some more stuff I've found, maybe I'm the only one interested but hell, that's blogging:
Swindle-maker Martin Durkin apparently has form, having been made to apologise for bent reporting in the past:
The Great Global warming Swindle - why is anyone giving Martin Durkin the time of day?
Yahoo answers
Most of the commenters heartily agree with the Durkin-bashing, though one of them, "amancall", raises some interesting points and references these anti-GW articles by Christopher Monckton:
The sun is warmer now than for the past 11,400 years
Christopher Monckton
Sunday Telegraph
05/11/2006
Wrong problem, wrong solution
Telegraph
Christopher Monckton
15/11/2006
Gore Gored
A Science-based response to Al Gore’s Global Warming Commentary in London’s Sunday Telegraph
Christopher Monckton
19 November 2006
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The Independent's view on the doc, also mentioning Durkin's unsavoury past. The earlier article makes an attempt at balance, the later one blasts the program:
Global warming: An inconvenient truth or hot air?
Geoffrey Lean
Independent
04 March 2007
The real global warming swindle
Steve Connor
Independent
14/3/07
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Not a very good interview on the Today Program of 14/03/07, where the pro-GW guy promises to demolish the Swindle doc and ends up by saying nothing more than "it's not true because it's not true":
0835 Why has the Channel 4 programme "The Great Global Warming Swindle" caused such huge controversy?
Permalink | Listen
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There was a better interview on Newsnight on 12/03/07, but I can't seem to find any vid on it. There, the pro-GW guy conceded that in the past, warming had led CO2, not the other way round (as the doc alleges), but quite plausibly suggested that CO2 was still a greenhouse gas and could still cause warming in the future. Unfortunately the idiot editors had invited a non-climatologist guy as debating partner, who quite rightly refused to talk about a field he's not trained in.
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Final point: why has this program sparked such debate while the Dispatches - Undercover Mosque doc was totally ignored?
Wodja reckon, will there be an eco-backlash over this, which may slash trans-atlantic air fares? There's no mention in the article of recent cross-party policy-making on the issue.
EU backing for 'open skies' deal
BBC News
22/03/07
There are few people better qualified to comment on climate-based economic-enviromental trade-offs than a man who is chairman of the London Stock Exchange; a practising Earth scientist for 20 years, who has a PhD in Earth chemistry; and a former member of the Sustainability Commission.
To begin to understand climate change, it needs to be emphasised that we are actually in the middle of an ice age, he says...
We're hurting Britain, not saving the planet
By Chris Gibson-Smith
Telegraph Comment
01/04/2007
Thanks to Andy for digging up this even-tempered and balanced discussion on Global Warming. None of the panel are climatologists, so the discussion stays away from most of the hard science.
Video: Man Causes Global warming: Fact or Fiction?
The End of the Day show features a debate between Dominic Lawson, Professor Ivor Gaber and the rest of the panel about how much global warming is happening, what is causing it and what we should be doing about it.
I was particularly interested by Professor Gaber's comments about how climate change is ruining Uganda, as I was in Kenya last year (where they have also suffered terrible droughts), and have little doubt that the cause is, in fact, massive and illegal deforestation across the entire country. Interestingly the diminution of neighbouring Kilimanjaro's ice-cap is also thought to be down to the resulting dessication rather than any temperature rise.
And Gaber's reciting of the Economist article that explains Dafur's conflict as being down to climate change having caused tension between nomads and pastoralists reminds me of similar comments about Rwanda and the massive birth rate causing pressure on the land. The truth is of course that complex events have multiple causes, and the morally relevant causes are vicious racist propaganda and deliberate incitement to and planning of genocide.
Summary
the Snows of Kilimanjaro
Original article
Why Is Mt. Kilimanjaro Melting?
Der Spiegel (in English)
20/2/2006
Durkin sounds like a twat, but the fabricated data did not, [Friis-Christensen] said, make any difference to the overall view he takes but he is still critical of the way the film handled the scientific evidence.
Repro'd in full cos the Indie is shit.
C4 accused of falsifying data in documentary on climate change
Independent
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
08 May 2007
The makers of a Channel 4 documentary which claimed that global warming is a swindle have been accused of fabricating data by one of the scientists who participated in the film. The Great Global Warming Swindle was broadcast on 8 March and has been criticised by leading scientists for errors, distortions and misrepresentations.
The film has also been referred to the regulatory watchdog Ofcom which is considering a complaint from 37 senior scientists that the programme breached the broadcasting code on the misrepresentation of views and facts.
Now even a climate sceptic whose dissenting views were used by the film- makers to bolster their claims about the "lies" and "swindles" of global warming has accused the documentary of promulgating falsehoods.
Eigil Friis-Christensen, director of the Danish National Space Centre, has issued a statement accusing the film-makers of fabricating data based on his work looking at the links between solar activity and global temperatures.
Dr Friiss-Christensen said that a graph he had produced some years ago showing the link between fluctuations in global temperatures and changes in solar activity - sunspot cycles - over the past 400 years had been doctored. The documentary used the graph to pour scorn on the idea that the global warming in recent decades is the result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide. Solar activity, the programme stated, is the cause of global warming in the late 20th century.
However, Dr Friiss-Christensen has issued a statement with Nathan Rive, a climate researcher at Imperial College London and the Centre for Climate Research in Oslo, distancing himself from the C4 graph. He said there was a gap in the historical record on solar cycles from about 1610 to 1710 but the film-makers made up this break with fabricated data that made it appear as if temperatures and solar cycles had followed one another very closely for the entire 400-year period.
"We have reason to believe that parts of the graph were made up of fabricated data that were presented as genuine. The inclusion of the artificial data is both misleading and pointless," Dr Friis-Christensen said.
"Secondly, although the commentary during the presentation of the graph is consistent with the conclusions of the paper from which the figure originates, it incorrectly rules out a contribution by anthropogenic [man-made] greenhouse gases to 20th century global warming," he said.
Dr Friis-Christensen, a physicist, believes that solar cycles play an important role in climate change and that not enough effort has gone into addressing the theory. The fabricated data did not, he said, make any difference to the overall view he takes but he is still critical of the way the film handled the scientific evidence. Asked by The Independent whether the documentary was scientifically accurate, Dr Friiss-Christensen said: "No, I think several points were not explained in the way that I, as a scientist, would have explained them ... it is obvious it's not accurate."
The C4 programme also used out-of-date solar cycle data relating to the past 30 or 40 years which made it appear as if temperatures and solar activity were rising together when in fact solar activity has levelled off for the past few decades. "After 1985 we don't see any rise or shortening of the solar cycles compared to what we saw in the temperature [record]," Dr Friiss-Christensen said.
Dr Friis-Christensen is the second scientist to appear on the programme who has criticised the way the film was made. Professor Carl Wunsch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that the way his interview was edited gave the misleading impression that he was not concerned about rising levels of carbon dioxide - a diametrically opposite view to his stated position.
Martin Durkin, who wrote and directed the programme, was unavailable for comment but admitted in an email to Mr Rive that the graph was wrong. "Thank you for highlighting the error on the 400-year graph. It is an annoying mistake which all of us missed and is being fixed for all future transmissions of the film. It doesn't alter our argument," Mr Durkin said.
However, the graph and its fabricated data will still be included in the DVD of the programme which went on sale yesterday. The advertising for the DVD says: "Everything you've ever been told about global warming is probably untrue. This film blows the whistle on the biggest swindle in modern history."
Mr Durkin has already apologised for an error in another graph used in the film which had to be corrected before the film's second transmission on the digital channel More 4.
The scientists who have written to Ofcom include Sir John Houghton, the former chief executive of the Met Office, Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist and past-president of the Royal Society, and Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. In a letter to Mr Durkin they call for changes to the programme before the DVD version is released, even though DVDs are not covered by the Ofcom Broadcasting Code.
"So serious and fundamental are the misrepresentations that the distribution of the DVD without their removal amounts to nothing more than an exercise in misleading the public," they say.
Haven't seen much coverage of this, wonder why? Still, we can all look forward to the replacement of "Toxic Texan" banners with ones depicting some Chinese dude at future Anti-Warming rallies, right?
China speeds towards 'biggest greenhouse gas producer' title
Tuesday April 24, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
China could overtake the US as the globe's biggest producer of greenhouse gases later this year, far earlier than expected, one of the world's leading energy bodies warned today.
If left unchecked, within 25 years emissions from China will be double those of the combined output of the US, EU, Japan and all other industrialised nations, said Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The Paris-based organisation, which advises wealthy countries on energy policy, had previously said China was on course to become the world's biggest such polluter no earlier than 2009. But such is the country's untrammelled economic growth, much of it driven by coal-fired power stations, this could potentially happen within months, Mr Birol told Guardian Unlimited. "If Chinese economic growth, and therefore coal consumption, continues to surprise us, this may well be this year or next year," he said.
China's economy, which overtook that of the UK to become the fourth biggest in the world in late 2005, has grown by more than 10% a year for four straight years. Last week new data showed Chinese GDP grew 11.1% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2007, increasing fears the economy might be overheating.
While the country's government has begun tentatively investing in alternative energy sources, the bulk of the power for this economic transformation is being produced by domestically mined coal. According to forecasts, in the next decade China will build new power stations equivalent to the output of the entire EU.
Beijing has consistently refused to place restrictions on its emission of greenhouse gases, arguing that it should be allowed to follow the lead of western nations in industrialising rapidly through traditional power sources. It is a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, but is exempt from its restrictions because it is a developing country.
If its policies were left unchecked, China's greenhouse gas emissions would mean any efforts in other countries to combat global warming would effectively be useless, Mr Birol warned.
"Within the next 25 years, CO2 emissions which come from China alone will be double the CO2 emissions which will come from all the OECD countries put together - the whole US, plus Canada, plus all the European countries, Japan, Australia, New Zealand etc," he said. Over the same time period, India's emissions were forecast to grow such that they were half the OECD total, Mr Birol added, calling this "very, very significant".
Any international efforts to find a successor to Kyoto, which expires in 2012, would be pointless without China and India signing up, Mr Birol said.
Sun's activity rules out link to global warming
11 July 2007
NewScientist.com
Direct satellite measurements of solar activity show it has been declining since the mid-1980s and cannot account for recent rises in global temperatures, according to new research. The findings debunk an explanation for climate change that is often cited by people who are not convinced that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are causing the Earth's climate to warm.
"If you change the output of the Sun you will undoubtedly change the climate it's just a matter of how much," says Mike Lockwood, of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council in the UK. Sceptics commonly point to climate research's reliance on computer models as a reason for doubting the link between global warming and human greenhouse gas emissions. "We decided to do a simple and direct analysis of the potential role of the Sun in recent climate change without using any model output," says Lockwood.
Lockwood and colleague Claus Fröhlich, at the World Radiation Center in Switzerland, used direct measurements only for their study. As Lockwood puts it: "This is just what the spacecraft have seen." Looking at data from the past 40 years, the two researchers noticed that solar activity did what Lockwood describes as a "U-turn in every possible way" in the mid-1980s.
"The upshot is that somewhere between 1985 and 1987 all the solar factors that could have affected climate have been going in the wrong direction. If they were really a big factor we would have cooling by now," Lockwood told New Scientist. He adds that he wishes he knew why the Sun's activity had changed in this way.
The number of sunspots peaked twice during the 20th century, once in 1960 and then again in 1985 (see graphs, right), but have been dropping since. Sunspots are used as indicators of solar activity, and people have tried to link the growing number of sunspots during the 20th century with rising global temperatures. Others have suggested that cosmic rays help generate clouds, which would cool the atmosphere. But Lockwood and Fröhlich's results show that cosmic rays reached a minimum around 1985 and have risen since.
Correspondingly, the magnetic field that shields Earth from cosmic rays also reached a maximum at about the same time, in 1987.
Measurements of the Sun's brightness – which indicates of the amount of energy coming from the sun – only began in 1977. Yet here too the data suggests solar activity is playing a negligible role in current global warming: irradiance rose between 1977 and 1985, but has been dropping since. Lookwood says the only way of reconciling the data with the idea that solar activity is causing global warming is to propose that there is a time lag between the Sun's activity changing and those changes affecting the Earth's climate. But even with a lag, climatologists would have noticed a slow-down in the rate at which temperatures are rising around the globe, says Lockwood.
"We have had 20 years of the cosmic rays and the irradiance going in the wrong direction, and yet we've not yet seen any effect on temperatures," says Lockwood. "It would have to be an extremely long lag – at least 50 years – which would invalidate a lot of the previous sun-climate proposals." Lockwood and Fröhlich's results suggest that even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has overestimated the Sun's influence on the Earth's climate. In February, the IPCC published a report stating that the Sun had roughly 10% of the warming effect of human activities.
The truly miraculous properties of carbon dioxide
Melanie Phillips
July 24, 2007
As inevitably as night follows day, the cause of the torrential rain and consequent flooding in Britain is being attributed to our old friend man-made global warming. No matter that the reason for the flooding lies in man-made political and administrative incompetence — money-starved flood defences, badly maintained drainage systems, irreponsible over-building of houses so that the water cannot seep into the ground through its ever-spreading concrete overcoat. No –according to newspaper stories, a paper being published in Nature this week fingers global warming as the culprit.
...
[I]n any event, aren’t we simultaneously being told that global warming will mean parched summers and winter deluges? Sure — but global warming is a truly miraculous theory. It means that, without a shadow of a doubt, we will have dry summers and wet winters, and wet summers and er, well, wet winters. As Dr Stott says:
‘In the UK wetter winters are expected which will lead to more extreme rainfall, whereas summers are expected to get drier. However, it is possible under climate change that there could be an increase of extreme rainfall even under general drying.’
As it gets dryer, it will get wetter. Truly, this global warming theory has some extraordinary properties.
Bewildered? Wake up at the back there —haven’t you got it straight yet? We’re going to be frying and freezing, drowning and dehydrating at the very same time. And carbon emissions will be to blame for the planet getting hotter and getting colder, getting wetter and getting dryer. Because global warming means that whatever happens to the weather, wet dry, hot, cold— it’s all our own fault.
If anyone can think of a worse idea for the environment than fucking biofuels I'd like to hear it. Why aren't the eco protestors doing something about this? Orang-utans are the least of it, btw, it's just an appalling idea all round.
Orang-utans home destroyed for bio-diesel
Telegraph
14/08/2007
Good man, David. Last para should be writ large up and down the country.
BBC Shunned David Bellamy for Denying Climate Change
Daily Express
Wednesday November 5,2008
For years David Bellamy was one of the best known faces on TV. A respected botanist and the author of 35 books, he had presented around 400 programmes over the years and was appreciated by audiences for his boundless enthusiasm. Yet for more than 10 years he has been out of the limelight, shunned by bosses at the BBC where he made his name, as well as fellow scientists and environmentalists.
His crime? Bellamy says he doesn’t believe in man-made global warming. Here he reveals why – and the price he has paid for not toeing the orthodox line on climate change.
"When I first stuck my head above the parapet to say I didn’t believe what we were being told about global warming I had no idea what the consequences would be. I am a scientist and I have to follow the directions of science but when I see that the truth is being covered up I have to voice my opinions. According to official data, in every year since 1998 world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002 Arctic ice actually increased. Why, then, do we not hear about that?
The sad fact is that since I said I didn’t believe human beings caused global warming I’ve not been allowed to make a TV programme. My absence has been noticed, because wherever I go I meet people who say: “I grew up with you on the television, where are you now?”
It was in 1996 that I criticised wind farms while appearing on Blue Peter and I also had an article published in which I described global warming as poppycock. The truth is, I didn’t think wind farms were an effective means of alternative energy so I said so. Back then, at the BBC you had to toe the line and I wasn’t doing that. At that point I was still making loads of television programmes and I was enjoying it greatly. Then I suddenly found I was sending in ideas for TV shows and they weren’t getting taken up. I’ve asked around about why I’ve been ignored but I found that people didn’t get back to me.
At the beginning of this year there was a BBC show with four experts saying: “This is going to be the end of all the ice in the Arctic,” and hypothesising that it was going to be the hottest summer ever. Was it hell! It was very cold and very wet and now we’ve seen evidence that the glaciers in Alaska have started growing rapidly – and they’ve not grown for a long time.
I’ve seen evidence, which I believe, that says there has not been a rise in global temperature since 1998, despite the increase in carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere. This makes me think the global warmers are telling lies – carbon dioxide is not the driver. The idiot fringe have accused me of being like a Holocaust denier, which is ludicrous. Climate change is all about cycles, it’s a natural thing and has always happened. When the Romans lived in Britain they were growing very good red grapes and making wine on the borders of Scotland. It was evidently a lot warmer.
If you were sitting next to me 10,000 years ago we’d be under ice. So thank God for global warming for ending that ice age; we wouldn’t be here otherwise. People such as former American Vice-President Al Gore say that millions of us will die because of global warming – which I think is a pretty stupid thing to say if you’ve got no proof. And my opinion is that there is absolutely no proof that carbon dioxide is anything to do with any impending catastrophe. The science has, quite simply, gone awry.
In fact, it’s not even science any more, it’s anti-science. There’s no proof, it’s just projections and if you look at the models people such as Gore use, you can see they cherry pick the ones that support their beliefs. To date, the way the so-called Greens and the BBC, the Royal Society and even our political parties have handled this smacks of McCarthyism at its worst. Global warming is part of a natural cycle and there’s nothing we can actually do to stop these cycles. The world is now facing spending a vast amount of money in tax to try to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist.
And how were we convinced that this problem exists, even though all the evidence from measurements goes against the fact? God knows. Yes, the lakes in Africa are drying up. But that’s not global warming. They’re drying up for the very simple reason that most of them have dams around them. So the water that used to be used by local people is now used in the production of cut flowers and vegetables for the supermarkets of Europe.
One of Al Gore’s biggest clangers was saying that the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan was drying up because of global warming. Well, everyone knows, because it was all over the news 20 years ago, that the Russians were growing cotton there at the time and that for every ton of cotton you produce you use a vast amount of water.
The thing that annoys me most is that there are genuine environmental problems that desperately require attention. I’m still an environmentalist, I’m still a Green and I’m still campaigning to stop the destruction of the biodiversity of the world. But money will be wasted on trying to solve this global warming “problem” that I would much rather was used for looking after the people of the world.
Being ignored by the likes of the BBC does not really bother me, not when there are much bigger problems at stake. I might not be on TV any more but I still go around the world campaigning about these important issues.
For example, we must stop the destruction of tropical rainforests, something I’ve been saying for 35 years. Mother nature will balance things out but not if we interfere by destroying rainforests and overfishing the seas. That is where the real environmental catastrophe could occur.
A Bush Legacy: Preserving The Oceans?
CBS Evening News
President Bush Designated Huge Swaths Of Pacific As National Marine Monuments
Jan. 6, 2009
Rare birds and fish as well as unique geological formations are now under federal protection. President Bush designated three areas in the Pacific Ocean as national Marine Monuments - the largest marine conservation project in history, CBS News correspondent Jim Axelrod reports. "For seabirds and marine life, they will be sanctuaries to grow and thrive," Mr. Bush said.
Nearly 200,000 square miles are covered: The Mariana Trench near Guam and waters surrounding a string of islands far south and west of Hawaii. And Rose Atoll, an Island east of Samoa. The area is home to colorful deep-water fish, sharks, whales and dolphins. The Mariana Trench is deeper than Mount Everest is tall, with gasses from the earth's core bubbling through. And the only bird known to incubate its eggs with heat from a volcano.
Mr. Bush had already set aside 140 square miles of Hawaiian Ocean in 2006.
"Long after this president is gone and after many of the edicts of his presidency are long forgotten, these places and the life they contain will still be there," said Josh Reichart of the Pew Environmental Group. And so as George Bush leaves office, the president many environmentalists loathe will have protected more ocean than any other person in history.
I recently read Nigel Lawson's An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming (reviewed in the Guardian), and thought it excellent.
And now here's another reason to sigh and shake heads:
Hijacked by climate change?
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website
27 August 2009
As the UN climate summit in Copenhagen approaches, exhortations that "we must get a deal" and warnings that climate change is "the greatest challenge we face as a species" are to be heard in virtually every political forum. But if you look back to the latest definitive check on the planet's environmental health - the Global Environment Outlook (Geo-4), published by the UN two years ago - what emerges is a picture of decline that goes way, way beyond climate change.
Species are going extinct at perhaps 1,000 times the normal rate, as key habitats such as forests, wetlands and coral reefs are plundered for human infrastructure. Aquifers are being drained and fisheries exploited at unsustainable speed. Soils are becoming saline, air quality is a huge cause of illness and premature death; the human population is bigger than our one Earth can currently sustain.
So why, you might ask, are the world's political leaders not lamenting this big picture as loudly and as often as the climate component of it? Has climate change hijacked the wider environmental agenda? If so, why? And does it matter?
...
[C]limate change has acquired its huge profile largely because it is a far more convenient truth than poor air quality or biodiversity loss or fisheries decline, where the actions needed are more likely to be national or local - and certainly more convenient than tackling the issues that underpin everything else, the size of the human population and our unsustainable consumption of the Earth's resources.
...
A couple of years ago I added up the number of articles we had written on the BBC News website within the preceding nine months about various issues. The scores were four for deforestation, four for desertification, 17 for biodiversity - and on climate change I stopped counting when I reached 1,000.
...
Climate Hijack is broadcast on BBC Radio Four at 2100 BST in the UK on Thursday 27 August
Decidedly mixed feelings about this. In general, it's science, not a return to pre-science, that will get humankind out of its messes, if anything can. But - particularly after reading the Lawson book - I'm doubtful there's much in terms of CO2 levels in the atmosphere that needs fixing, and we'd probably just mess up something else for no benefit by putting giant mirrors into orbit etc.
One thing you'll notice in all of this is how the environmental purists don't actually want a technological solution. It's not about "saving the planet", it's about changing our evil capitalist ways. I actually think a lot of our ways are very environmentally destructive (fisheries, forests, biodiversity) and should be changed, but I'm not a frustrated Marxist looking for any non-discredited ways of having a bash at America and capitalism.
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Engineering Earth 'is feasible'
1 September 2009
BBC News
A UK Royal Society study has concluded that many engineering proposals to reduce the impact of climate change are "technically possible". Such approaches could be effective, the authors said in their report. But they also stressed that the potential of geo-engineering should not divert governments away from their efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
Such engineering projects could either remove carbon dioxide or reflect the Sun's rays away from the planet. Suggestions range from having giant mirrors in space, to erecting giant CO2 scrubbers that would "clean up" the air. Ambitious as these schemes seem, the report concluded that many of them potentially had merit, and research into them should be pursued.
more
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'Artificial trees' to cut carbon
27 August 2009
BBC News
Illuminating the Future of Energy
NY Times
David JC MacKay
August 28, 2009
...
Is it realistic to imagine a comfortable return to renewable energy sources?
...
The average energy consumption on earth is 56 kilowatt-hours per day per person. You can visualize this personal energy consumption in terms of light bulbs: 56 kilowatt-hours per day is the energy consumption of 56 ordinary 40-watt bulbs left switched on all the time. The world’s population density is roughly 50 people per square kilometer, or 0.4 square mile. Countries, of course, vary significantly around the world average.
…
The countries with the highest power consumption per area are those, like Bahrain, that have high population density and high per-capita consumption. Bahrain consumes more than 10 watts per square meter, or 11 square feet. The lowest are countries like Botswana and Sudan, at less than 0.01 watt per square meter.
…
Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Mexico all have a power consumption per unit land-area roughly equal to the world average, about 0.1 watt per square meter. China, in 1990, was close to the average, but it has since moved considerably away from that line.
…
Concentrating solar power stations in deserts, for example, can produce 15 or 20 watts per square meter, on average, year-round, day and night. Germany’s famous solar parks in Bavaria produce about 5 watts per square meter of land area, on average. A hydroelectric facility in Scotland has power per surface area of 11 watts per square meter of lake.
Wind farms, if they are in windy locations, produce roughly 2.5 watts per square meter of land or sea, on average. The best energy crops in Europe deliver about 0.5 watt per square meter.
…
Just taking physical factors into account, if a country’s energy consumption per unit of land is the same as the world average, 0.1 watt per square meter, then the power densities of the renewables just listed — 0.5, 2.5, 5, or 20 watts per square meter — are all bigger.
...
Countries whose power consumption per unit area is bigger than 0.1 watt per square meter, like those where most people in the developed world live, are countries that should expect renewable facilities to occupy a significant, intrusive fraction of their land, if they ever want to live on their own renewables.
Countries with power consumption per unit area of more than 1 watt per square meter, like Britain, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Belgium and South Korea, would have to industrialize much of their countryside to live on their own renewables.
…
The power per area of nuclear power facilities, by the way, is about 1,000 watts per square meter — much higher than that of renewables.
…
Today, the average European consumes 120 kilowatt-hours per day. … What sort of building project is required to deliver that much energy?
For illustration, imagine getting one-third of that energy from wind, one-third from desert solar power and one-third from nuclear power.
To obtain 20 kilowatt-hours per day from wind, one person would require roughly 330 square meters of wind farm — or, to put it another way, would need to share a big 2-megawatt turbine with 600 friends. To get the same power from deserts would require roughly 50 square meters of concentrating solar power station — the same area as a typical British house. And 20 kilowatt hours per day from nuclear power would require roughly a one-millionth share of a modern nuclear power station.
If a country with the size and population of Britain — 61 million people — adopted that mix, the land area occupied by wind farms would be nearly 10 percent of the country, or roughly the size of Wales. The area occupied by desert solar power stations — in the case of Britain, they would have to be connected by long-distance power lines — would be five times the size of London. The 50 nuclear power stations required would occupy a more modest 50 square kilometers.
…
Before you bother with "carbon offsetting" your next Easy Jet flight, read this.
Who's to blame for Climategate?
Telegraph
27 Nov 2009
A little over a week ago, hundreds of internal emails written by scientists working at [East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit] were obtained by a hacker and posted on the internet, some of which appeared to show that researchers had deliberately faked evidence of global warming by manipulating statistics.
...
[H]ere in the UK, although the main political parties agree that global warming does exist and is man-made, there have been calls for the head of the CRU to resign over the scandal, and demands for a full-scale public inquiry from the former chancellor Lord Lawson who, this week, launched a new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, to challenge the consensus on global warming policy.
Phil Jones, the 57-year-old director of the CRU, is the man who has suddenly found himself the number one target of climate change conspiracy theorists the world over after he sent the most damaging of all the emails exposed by the anonymous hacker.
In one message, dated November 1999, he wrote: "I've just completed Mike's trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 to hide the decline."
Gotcha! say the global warming sceptics who have argued for years that average temperatures on Earth are, in reality, either stable or going down. Professor Jones defended himself by claiming the word "trick" was used out of context and simply referred to a legitimate method of handling data. But there was more.
An email sent by one of Prof Jones's colleagues said: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."
Prof Jones, whose department has for years refused to release its raw data on temperatures, wrote another email in which he said sceptics "have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send it to anyone". By chance, he now admits he has "accidentally" deleted some of the raw data.
Another message said the CRU's method of collating data "renders the station counts totally meaningless... so, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"
Prof Jones, who at first refused to confirm even that the emails were genuine, finally issued a statement on Wednesday, in which he said: "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well." On that point, at least, no one is likely to argue with him.
...
Many critics have expressed incredulity that Prof Jones has not been sacked
...
However Bob Ward, a climate change expert at the London School of Economics and Political Science, believes world leaders will pay little attention to the scandal surrounding the CRU, arguing that politics, not science, will decide the fate of the Copenhagen summit.
"The politicians won't be swayed by this," he said.
…
Mr Ward does not believe the emails reveal any evidence of impropriety, but supported Lord Lawson's calls for an independent investigation so the matter can be cleared up.
Good spot by blogger Stefan Karlsson, an article by Charles Krauthammer where he shows how the "climate change" movement is the new socialism. As Karlsson says:
Socialists have long wanted to impose extra taxes, control the economy and redistribute wealth to the third world on the basis of alleged wrongs done to the third worlds by industrialized nations. The "climate change" movement offers them all of this. This explains why leftists almost universally have signed up to it.
------
The New Socialism
Dec 13, 2009
JPost
Charles Krauthammer
Now there's an accusation that the Met Office's Hadley Centre was cheating (cherry-picking favourable results) when it released weather station data as a response to the Climate Research Unit email scandal. Note that the accusation comes from the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis, a Russian think-tank, which is unlikely to be agenda-free itself.
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Met Office 'manipulated climate change figures' says Russian think tank linked to President Putin
Daily Mail
17th December 2009
-------------
Climate Change 'Lies' by Britain
Daily Express
December 17,2009
THE Meteorological Office was last night facing accusations it cherry-picked climate change figures in a bid to increase evidence of global warming.
UK climatologists “probably tampered with Russian-climate data” to produce a report submitted to world leaders at this week’s Copenhagen summit, it is claimed.
The Met Office’s study, which says the first decade of this century has been the warmest on record for 160 years, is being used to trumpet claims that man is causing global warming.
But experts at the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis say the British dossier used statistics from weather stations that fit its theory of global warming, while ignoring those that do not.
They accuse the Met Office’s Hadley Centre of relying on just 25 per cent of Russia’s weather stations and over-estimating warming in the country by more than half a degree Celsius.
Last night, leading global warming sceptic Dr Fred Singer, of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, said: “I have long suspected that this selective fiddle took place but have not assembled all the evidence.
“We know, and have published, that between 1975 and 2000 the number of weather stations was reduced from nearly 7,000 to only 3,000 with many of them in the former Soviet Union.
“The effect of this would be to produce an artificial temperature trend which we don’t see in the satellite data. So the warming of the past 30 years is likely to be an illusion.”
Note: Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science and who I hold in high esteem, is in fact a denier of climate change denial - ie he thinks it's real.
Underrated - Vaclav Klaus
Standpoint
December 2009
... Klaus is not just a leading Eurosceptic, he's also the world's top global warming sceptic. ... Trained as a Marxist economist, Klaus was exposed to free markets and free-market economists during short academic stints in Italy and the US in the 1960s. He saw that communist economies were failing and capitalist ones were succeeding. And he found the reasons why in the economic analyses of the Chicago and Austrian Schools.
Klaus was the last man standing against the [Lisbon] Treaty, but he finally gave in and signed it on 3 November after obtaining an opt-out for the Czech Republic from the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights. It was inevitable that he would lose that fight, but it is worth asking whether Europeans will have reasons to regret it for decades to come.
Klaus opposed the Treaty because of the threat it posed to individual freedom, prosperity and his country's sovereignty. As he often reminds people, he has personal experience of central planning. What he lived through in Prague was more brutal and stupid than anything the centralisation of power in unaccountable Brussels is likely to produce, but Klaus's point is that it is part of a larger movement in the wrong political direction.
...
Klaus is currently also losing his fight against global warming alarmism and the energy-rationing policies required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions dramatically in the next 40 years. However, he is almost certain to end up on the winning side of the climate debate eventually.
That's not because Klaus is part of a powerful international cabal lavishly funded by Big Oil and King Coal (the reality is that most oil companies support cap-and-trade programmes, such as the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme, and coal's kingdom has been reduced to a principality). In fact, he's one of only three prominent political leaders in the world to oppose global warming alarmism vociferously and persistently — the others being US Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma and Britain's Lord Lawson. Klaus's position is eventually going to prevail simply because reality is on his side. The wheels are beginning to come off the global warming bandwagon. But until that happens, Klaus is going to be lonely and isolated.
It is no coincidence that Klaus is the only head of state who knows something about climate science and a lot about the economics of cap-and-trade and other energy-rationing policies and is also the only head of a country who is a global warming sceptic. He correctly argues in his 2007 book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles, that the policies proposed to deal with global warming will certainly be much more ruinous than any negative impacts of higher temperatures.
But as with Lisbon, Klaus is fundamentally opposed to the global warming agenda because "the largest threat to freedom...at the beginning of the 21st century is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism." No wonder he's unpopular with the chattering class in London and New York.
Perhaps the truest estimate of Klaus's stature comes from an unexpected source. Klaus has made a point of trying to engage Al Gore. The two are invited to speak at many of the same conferences. Klaus always asks to debate Gore. Gore always declines. This may seem odd given that the audiences they speak to are overwhelmingly on Gore's side, but the reason is obvious: Gore has the fantasy, Klaus has the goods. Vaclav Klaus may be underrated by many people who are annoyed by his courageous stands, but he's not underrated by Al Gore.
Overrated - Al Gore
Standpoint Mag
December 2009
[Gore] says that global warming is happening even faster than predicted: the global mean temperature has been flat for the past decade. He continues to warn of 20 feet of sea level rise in the near future and has recently talked about 220 feet: the mean estimate of sea level rise in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report is 14 inches by 2100. Dozens of other discrepancies between the science and Gore's science fiction could be noted.
There's a new type of fission reactor (the "the accelerator-driven sub-critical reactor", or ADSR), still in the design phase, which could be a Very Good Thing. But not this year or next.
Powerful Attraction
David Wark
Standpoint Mag
January/February 2010
UN must investigate warming ‘bias’, says former climate chief
The Times
February 15, 2010
‘Every error exaggerated the impact of change’
The UN body that advises world leaders on climate change must investigate an apparent bias in its report that resulted in several exaggerations of the impact of global warming, according to its former chairman.
In an interview with The Times Robert Watson said that all the errors exposed so far in the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) resulted in overstatements of the severity of the problem. Professor Watson, currently chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said that if the errors had just been innocent mistakes, as has been claimed by the current chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, some would probably have understated the impact of climate change.
The errors have emerged in the past month after simple checking of the sources cited by the 2,500 scientists who produced the report.
The report falsely claimed that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 when evidence suggests that they will survive for another 300 years. It also claimed that global warming could cut rain-fed North African crop production by up to 50 per cent by 2020. A senior IPCC contributor has since admitted that there is no evidence to support this claim.
The Dutch Government has asked the IPCC to correct its claim that more than half the Netherlands is below sea level. The environment ministry said that only 26 per cent of the country was below sea level.
Professor Watson, who served as chairman of the IPCC from 1997-2002, said: “The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.”
...
Dr Pachauri has not responded to questions put to him by The Times, despite sending a text message saying that he would do so.
Professor Watson has held discussions with Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, about creating a new climate research group to supplement the work of the IPCC and to help restore the credibility of climate science.
...
A spokesman for Mr Gore’s office in Nashville, Tennessee, declined to comment on the project.
Meanwhile, a member of the inquiry team investigating allegations of misconduct by climate scientists has admitted that he holds strong views on climate change and that this contradicts a founding principle of the inquiry. Geoffrey Boulton, who was appointed last week by the inquiry chairman, Sir Muir Russell, said he believed that human activities were causing global warming.
...
Fascinating stuff from Lovelock - there's a bunch of short videos from the Today interview which are well worth watching.
Lovelock: 'We can't save the planet'
BBC News
30/10/2010
Professor James Lovelock, the scientist who developed Gaia theory, has said it is too late to try and save the planet. The man who achieved global fame for his theory that the whole earth is a single organism now believes that we can only hope that the earth will take care of itself in the face of completely unpredictable climate change.
Interviewed by Today presenter John Humphrys, he said that while the earth's future was utterly uncertain, mankind was not aware it had "pulled the trigger" on global warming as it built its civilizations. What is more, he predicts, the earth's climate will not conveniently comply with the models of modern climate scientists.
As the record winter cold testifies, he says, global temperatures move in "jerks and jumps", and we cannot confidently predict what the future holds.
Prof Lovelock does not pull his punches on the politicians and scientists who are set to gain from the idea that we can predict climate change and save the planet ourselves. Scientists, he says, have moved from investigating nature as a vocation, to being caught in a career path where it makes sense to "fudge the data".
And while renewable energy technology may make good business sense, he says, it is not based on "good practical engineering".
At the age of 90, Prof Lovelock is resigned to his own fate and the fate of the planet. Whether the planet saves itself or not, he argues, all we can do is to "enjoy life while you can".
An incomparably greater threat to us all than global warming. Genuinely scary.
New 'superbug' found in UK hospitals
BBC News
11 August 2010
A new superbug that is resistant to even the most powerful antibiotics has entered UK hospitals, experts warn.
Call for overhaul at UN climate panel
FT
August 30 2010
The UN climate change panel needs a thorough overhaul of management and procedures, the world’s scientific academies said on Monday.
They said the response of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the revelation of errors in its last assessment was “slow and inadequate”, and the IPCC review process needed strengthening to catch mistakes before publication.
But the InterAcademy Council, whose members include the US National Academy of Science and Britain’s Royal Society, did not challenge the fundamental conclusion of IPCC reports – that the world needs to tackle man-made climate change by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
This is an environment story that actually does alarm me, though not because of carbon, just cos of the damage being done to the forests. A march against deforestation I would join, though that doesn't really fit in with anti-capitalist politicking so I can't see it happening.
----------
Amazon rainforest 'could start contributing to global warming after droughts'
Telegraph
03 Feb 2011
Two severe droughts have hit the Amazon rainforest in the space of five years, raising concerns over its ability to counter greenhouse gas emissions.
In 2005, the Amazon was struck by a ''one-in-100 year'' drought that killed huge numbers of trees.
The event led to the release of an estimated five billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from rotting vegetation and the forest's reduced ability to soak up the greenhouse gas.
But a new analysis of rainfall across 5.3 million square kilometres of Amazonia has now shown that another drought last year may have been even more severe.
The new drought caused the Rio Negro tributary of the Amazon river to fall to its lowest level on record.
Experts fear that if such extreme droughts become more frequent, the Amazon may cease to provide a natural buffer to man-made carbon emissions.
Dr Simon Lewis, from the University of Leeds, who led the research reported today in the journal Science, said: ''Having two events of this magnitude in such close succession is extremely unusual, but is unfortunately consistent with those climate models that project a grim future for Amazonia.''
The vast rainforest covers an area around 25 times the size of the UK and in a normal year absorbs an estimated 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.
This counter-balances emissions from deforestation, logging and fire across the Amazon and scientists believe it has applied a brake to climate change in recent decades.
Scientists predict the rainforest's carbon absorption rate for both 2010 and 2011 will be cut. A further five billion tonnes of carbon dioxide is expected to be released over the coming years as trees killed by the new drought rot.
Further droughts could eventually turn the Amazon from a carbon sink to a carbon emitter, say experts. Some global climate simulations suggest that this is a likely scenario.
Dr Lewis added: "Two unusual and extreme droughts occurring within a decade may largely offset the carbon absorbed by intact Amazon forests during that time. If events like this happen more often, the Amazon rainforest would reach a point where it shifts from being a valuable carbon sink slowing climate change, to a major source of greenhouse gasses that could speed it up."
Co-author Dr Paulo Brando, from Brazil's Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), said: "We will not know exactly how many trees were killed until we can complete forest measurements on the ground.
"It could be that many of the drought susceptible trees were killed off in 2005, which would reduce the number killed last year. On the other hand, the first drought may have weakened a large number of trees so increasing the number dying in the 2010 dry season.
"Our results should be seen as an initial estimate. The emissions estimates do not include those from forest fires, which spread over extensive areas of the Amazon during hot and dry years. These fires release large amounts of carbon to the atmosphere."
Interesting, though I don't know enough to comment on the accuracy of the technical claims.
------
Wind power: Even worse than you thought
The Register
By Lewis Page
7/4/2011
But your 'leccy bill will keep going up to buy more of it
A new analysis of wind energy supplied to the UK National Grid in recent years has shown that wind farms produce significantly less electricity than had been thought, and that they cause more problems for the Grid than had been believed.
...
In general, then, one should assume that a wind farm will generate no more than 25 per cent of maximum capacity over time (and indeed this seems set to get worse as new super-large turbines come into service). Even over a year this will be up or down by a few per cent, making planning more difficult.
It gets worse, too, as wind power frequently drops to almost nothing. It tends to do this quite often just when demand is at its early-evening peak:
At each of the four highest peak demands of 2010 wind output was low being respectively 4.72%, 5.51%, 2.59% and 2.51% of capacity at peak demand.
And unfortunately the average capacity over time is pulled up significantly by brief windy periods. Wind output is actually below 20 per cent of maximum most of the time; it is below 10 per cent fully one-third of the time. Wind power needs a lot of thermal backup running most of the time to keep the lights on, but it also needs that backup to go away rapidly whenever the wind blows hard, or it won't deliver even 25 per cent of capacity.
Quite often windy periods come when demand is low, as in the middle of the night. Wind power nonetheless forces its way onto the grid, as wind-farm operators make most of their money not from selling electricity but from selling the renewables obligation certificates (ROCs) which they obtain for putting power onto the grid. Companies supplying power to end users in the UK must obtain a certain amount of ROCs by law or pay a "buy-out" fine: as a result ROCs can be sold for money to end-use suppliers.
Thus when wind farmers have a lot of power they will actually pay to get it onto the grid if necessary in order to obtain the lucrative ROCs which provide most of their revenue, forcing all non-renewable providers out of the market. If the wind is blowing hard and demand is low, there may nonetheless be just too much wind electricity for the grid to use, and this may happen quite often.
...
Take the mickey back
Nick Cohen
Spectator
Sunday, 27th May 2012
[...]
The green movement is losing the goodwill. It is in danger of becoming a hypocritical, selfish, anti-intellectual movement of rich-world faddists with a closed mind and vicious temper.
The debate about nuclear power gave a taste of what was to come. The best green thinkers, including James Lovelock, Stewart Brand and George Monbiot, argued that if their comrades were serious about combatting global warming they had to accept all alternatives to fossil fuels including nuclear power. Their comrades would do no such thing. Opposition to nuclear power was one of the founding tenets of the green faith, and its zealots would not countenance blasphemous revisions of the gospel.
The double standards over combatting global warming are as nothing, however, compared to the attitudes on display at the Rothamstead Research Institute today. Demonstrators are descending on the laboratory because it has an experimental planting of genetically modified wheat. Independent scientists, not the lackeys of some evil corporation, are running tests to see if they can create a strain with a natural resistance to pests. The activists in the absurdly named Take the Flour Back campaign do not care that scientists are not seeking private profit. They have broken the GM taboo and must be punished.
Professor John Pickett, who heads the research, has published a refutation of the protestors’ claims which is well worth reading. Non-scientists may not be qualified to test the validity of his arguments but we can recognise a quasi-religious movement when we see it. The language of the Rothamstead protests contains an almost pagan delusion that nature is pure and must be saved from ‘contamination’. So confident are the faithful they will not only threaten to destroy an experiment rather than wait until they can debate its results, but they will also refuse to debate with Professor Pickett and his colleagues on a public platform.
Instead of arguing, Jenny Jones of the Greens asserts that ‘we need a new green revolution… but not one based on a science and technology riddled with patents and corporate control’. We certainly need a new green revolution. The world’s population is increasing by 160,000 a day. Without new ways of increasing yields, environmental degradation, starvation and war will follow. The idea that an agricultural revolution cannot be based on science and technology is mystical dreaming. Every advance in agriculture since the 18th century has been based on science and technology. It is impossible to imagine an advance based on anything else. Patents and corporations are not necessarily evil, it depends on who owns them and what they do with them, and what controls public authorities place on their exploitation. Indeed I find it hard to know what an agriculture that didn’t incorporate the profit principle would look like. When the communists tried collective farms in the 20th century they created mass starvation.
Only a very privileged and spoilt westerner, who lives in a country that has not known famine for centuries, could afford to dismiss science and technology without a qualm. Only a know-nothing could reject an experiment in advance. And only a dilettante wills the ends of combatting global warming and food insecurity but screams with rage when anyone proposes means. The warm, vague feelings I had about the greens are cooling by the day.
The world would be a lot better off if the environmental movement focussed all the energy currently spend on climate change on combatting the rape of our fisheries instead.
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Fishing: A story of less for more
BBC
Richard Black
26 May 2011
Paying fishermen to fish doesn't pay. That's the conclusion of a report just out which looks at how profitable European fisheries would have been over the last 20-odd years without subsidies, and compares those numbers against what actually happened
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Subsidising fishermen means they continue fishing even after stocks begin to plummet, because a substantial share of their income is now coming from the subsidy rather than from profits on fishing.
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Subsidies do not make the sexiest or most fashionable aspect of fisheries - in contrast to discards, they're not the kind of thing that environmental campaigners or TV chefs will get too excitable about.
But some academics would argue they are the single biggest thing needing reform if the progressive degradation of fish stocks around the world is to be halted.
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Within Europe, a relatively new venture called fishsubsidy.org is turning up some fascinating and revealing statistics on how much is being spent, and for what, on the fishing fleet.
Some of the highlights involve the dual payments that some owners have received - a subsidy for buying or building a boat, and then another one for scrapping it.
In one case, the interval between the two payments was a mere 17 days.
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Shortages: Fish on the slide
BBC
Roger Harrabin
18 June 2012
The sea exemplifies the world's on-going failure to govern shared natural resources.
There's widespread agreement among nations on the need to conserve fish stocks but often disagreement on the details of how to do it.
And the need for unanimity in the UN process consistently allows a handful of countries to put the short-term interests of fishing crews before the fish stocks themselves.
It all means that globally about 85% of stocks are said to be fully exploited, over-exploited, depleted or slowly recovering.
Through the lens of history the depletion of fisheries looks even worse.
Using data from 1889, researchers assessed catches of bottom-feeding fish like cod, plaice and sole in England and Wales.
They calculated that over 118 years of industrial fishing, the productivity of this fishery dropped by 94%. Not to 94% but by 94%.
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