Somehow

An amusing paper in which the great and good of the climate narrative sit around and mull over what they have achieved and what they would like to achieve. This appears to have been recorded at a series of panels in front of an invited audience a few months back. There are several panels, but the interesting one involves Mike Hulme, Roger Harrabin and Oliver Morton:

I was amused by some of Harrabin's contributions, in particular this one:

What we appear to have constructed in climate change is a bunch of people who say, ‘I’m really worried about the future. I’m really worried about climate change’; a small group of people who say, ‘I don’t give a damn. It’s not going to happen. Humans can’t change the planet’; and quite a lot of people in the middle who say, ‘Well actually, I don’t know. I hear these competing voices and I don’t know’. Now, there is another potential narrative which runs like this: ‘There is massive consensus that humans have changed the planet already and will almost certainly change it some more. There is not a great deal of consensus about  quite how future climate change will impact and what emission scenarios are tied to temperature outcomes and at the extreme end those scenarios are extremely scary and at the narrow end they are probably quite simple to cope with. We don’t know which we are going to end up with’. That becomes more of a narrative of risk and risk avoidance and takes you into politics. Somehow we have failed to tell that [narrative]. It’s not taken very long for me to tell it but over the years those of us in the media have failed properly to inform people about this issue because we’re constantly pulled into ‘Oh, we’ve got to have somebody saying something completely different’. Climategate was a real problem for the public consciousness. It seemed like something dodgy had gone on. Now I’ve looked very deeply into Climategate and I can’t find any smoking gun at all. But I’ve also followed the enquiries into Climategate, and in my view they were all inadequate. So if you were looking on from the outside, from a suspicious viewpoint, you would be continuing to say, ‘There is a scam. They are cheating us. The enquiries haven’t looked into the issue properly’ — because they haven’t. It allows this continual erosion of a middle ground position.

I love the way he says that "somehow" he and his colleagues in the mainstream media have failed to give a balanced view of the climate debate. One can't help wondering whether his own long-term campaign to remove sceptical voices from the airwaves might not have something to do with this failure, at least as far as the BBC is concerned. After all, the idea that man is changing the climate but that the effects will be limited and well within the scope of human adaptability is mainstream among sceptics. But these are the very people Harrabin believes should not be allowed a voice. When he was inviting people to his 2006 seminar on climate change coverage, how many of those sceptics espousing such middle ground positions did he invite? It seems clear that he invited almost nobody but green campaigners and moreover he put Lord May in charge of the sessions. This is not the action of someone who is trying to expand the middle ground or, if truth is told, even someone who is trying to "erode" it. It is the action of someone who is trying to utterly destroy it to advance a political agenda.

We don't know whether the BBC seminar covered climate change economics, but we could wonder how many mainstream economists would be invited to such an event at the BBC. Since the Stern report appeared, the extreme assumptions on which Stern based his findings have gone almost unmentioned on the BBC. Time after time after time we are presented with Stern's conclusions as if this was a piece of mainstream academic work. "Somehow" the truth has never been told here either.

And what about the Climate Wars programme or anything passing the lips of Richard Black? Expansion of the middle ground or a voice for extremists on one side of the argument? Or the treatment of McIntyre, the man who has had the temerity to point to problems with the paleoclimate reconstructions but accepts the manmade global warming hypothesis; the man who has been nominated as one of the most important people on the face of the planet but whose contributions to the climate debate have "somehow" been virtually ignored by the BBC. Expansion of the middle ground? Truth-seeking behaviour?

You decide.

Update on Dec 27, 2011 by Bishop Hill

I wonder how many "middle-grounders" were in the audience for the event on which this paper is based? There were certainly none on the list of speakers.

Comments

[hro001]

One would be very hard-pressed to dispute our gracious host's assessment that this is "an amusing paper"! I haven't yet reached the section on which he has commented. Being very methodical or taking great risk with my blood pressure - depending on one's perspective - I'm sorta reading the whole thing, fortified by (purely medicinal, you understand) occasional sips of red wine.

In the section on "Anatomy" and in response to moderator, Quentin Cooper's question (p. 69):

What if, rather than the artist bringing climate change to the wider public, the public brings climate change to the art work? I’m thinking, as a concrete example, of something like the exhibition ‘The Ship: The Art of Climate Change’ at the Natural History Museum. Ten years earlier or ten years later, I imagine there would have been a very different reaction.

Charlie ["Kronick, senior climate advisor for Greenpeace UK"] replies:

Just up the road from the Natural History Museum, at the Science Museum, there used to be a very interesting gallery about the importance of the change in climate and responding to it. This has recently been re-branded as ‘The Shell Climate Change Gallery’ which, funnily enough, is a lot less forthright about the need to respond to climate change. Not, I would suggest, because of scientific uncertainties that have emerged as a result of Climategate, but because of the relationship between Shell as a sponsor and the cultural institution.

Well, there you have it folks! The "cultural" version of the Big Oil connection, from no less a cultural authority than the senior climate advisor for Greenpeace U.K. Incidentally, the accompanying "sidebar" note on Climategate reads as follows:

Climategate: journalistic shorthand to describe the hacking of over 1,000 emails and 3,000 other documents from the Climatic Research Group (sic) at the University of East Anglia, and the subsequent uproar on selective publication of the emails on websites in November 2009.

It is not entirely clear to me who is responsible for the content of these explanatory "sidebar" notes 'n narratives. This particular lack of clarity might be attributable to the fog of wine; nonetheless, in response to a subsequent question, Charlie from Greenpeace, the heretofore unknown great cultural interpreter par excellence, assures listeners that Gore's AIT is:

[...] a film about technological optimism. It’s a film about the belief that the American way of doing politics, where you have a town meeting and you explain things to people and you overcome their deficit in understanding, will lead to a change in behaviour. It could be ‘about’ that, as much as about climate change. You can view any object through any lens that you choose. I think that what’s really interesting about the negative response to Gore’s movie, is that it’s not that people hate the idea that carbon dioxide has a greenhouse impact in the atmosphere. What they really hate is that it says, ‘You are going to have to change’. They think it says, ‘You are going to have to change the way you live’. You are going to have to accept a set of political values that you don’t particularly like. That’s what they don’t like about that movie. They probably don’t like Al Gore and they don’t like his suits and they don’t like his visual effects, but all those things are wrapped up together.

Who knew, eh?!

[caroline]

Frederick

"For me, what’s been more challenging has been to take the idea of sustainability and ‘green living’ — for want of a better expression — and express the positive in it, and how much I’ve enjoyed it."

http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/my-life-in-travel-marcus-brigstocke-comedian-2211911.html

"I rarely fly for environmental reasons.."

[Punksta]

Climate-Science-by-Quotes:

Now I’ve looked very deeply into Climategate and I can’t find any smoking gun at all.

Runs a close second to

Why should I give you my data when I know you'll try and find something wrong with it?

Anyone noticed any other gems?

[Arthur Dent]

Presumably if thead jacking is the crime my lLord Bishop would countenance ZDB initiating discussion threads of her own, where ther would probably be a lively debate. As for dissent ZDB will surely not have failed to notice our current dissenter with a similar handle BBD

[Stacey]

[Snip -venting]

[Another Ian]

Bish,

In case this hasn't come to your attention

http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/17791

[Steve Jones]

It is well known that the BBC is infested with arts educated, liberal, elitist egotists. (Nothing against the arts by the way but taken with the other adjectives they are a poisonous breed.) Hence the, overall, appalling standard of science reporting. I used to think that at least we had Brian Cox and Jim al-Khalili trying their best to educate people in the true sciences but have recently noticed even these well-educated men making ridiculous comments about AGW that they know wouldn't stand up in their respective primary areas of interest.
The question is, how does the BBC regain its reputation?

[cosmic]

What I see is a political agenda sold on the back of a scare story because it couldn't be sold on its merits.

Scare stories have their own dynamic and this one is fizzling out leaving the political agenda, which no one would have wanted, standing naked. Harrabin can see this and he's eyeing the exits.

[Pete H]

Hmmm! They never give in do they!

http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/2011/12/bbc-pension-fund-hires-green-advisers.html

[GrantB]

ZBD is a blinkered zealot, but at least she doesn't rabbit on incessantly about radiative physics.

As if that is the end of any discussion. As if every commenter here is incapable of understanding 19th and early 20th century physics. As if if we are all total numpties with no qualifications in the subject.

Boring and passe.

[Josualdo]

Dec 28, 2011 at 5:12 AM | Theo Goodwin

[...] An accomplished professor of Humanities once asked me "Isn't the phrase 'empirical evidence' redundant; [...] I told him that such evidence is the evidence of testimony but not the evidence of personal experience. He was stunned.

They get stunned indeed, and we get stunned that they don't know what empirical evidence (and actual, real, unspoiled data) is. That's the difference between knowledge de re, from things themselves and de dicto, from what is said.

Moreover, the Phil. of Science description of the scientific method as "hypothetical-deductive" doesn't help at all. It seems like you sit down and come up with an hypothesis based upon deduction (almost like theoretical physics, which they usually don't know requires the experimental physics too). This is just part of the story, as it entirely skips two crucial aspects: validation by experimentation and reproducibility.

Hence they usually can't go past truth being what you say of things (narrative) and find the very idea of testing ideas against nature hard to conceive. The very possibility of it perplexes them.

[Pharos]

Reading between the lines I think Harrabin is privately disconsolate, at the realisation he has devoted his best years to a cause for which he gullibly duped himself into playing a leading role.

[Richard Drake]

Steve McIntyre:

In fairness to Harrabin and the BBC, he interviewed me on a couple of occasions and the interviews were always very fair. Whatever his prior positions were, he was fair minded about the Climategate "inquiries" - the context in which we met.

And I well remember walking with Steve from Dean Street to Upper Regent Street in July last year in order to make sure that he made his appointment with Roger, who with his wife remains very close to my best friend from school and his spouse, in the Gospel Oak area where I too used to live.

That's just to declare my interest, as I have done before. But in the last few days I have been having a fascinating email discussion with David Colquhoun, the UCL pharmacologist Josh and I were so impressed with at the Index on Censorship debate on open science on 6th December. In my first message to David I questioned Geoffrey Boulton's appointment to lead the Royal Society working group on openness and his response made me go back to the Muir Russell Inquiry into Climategate, in which Boulton played such a key part.

And that in turn led me to rediscover Roger Harrabin's excellent report for the Today Programme on 7 July 2010, the day Russell was due to report, giving place not just to Steve but the ex-chair of the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee Phil Willis on the outrageous 'sleight of hand' that had taken place in the construction and execution of the three Climategate inquiries.

I admit I haven't got a settled view of Harrabin as environemental journalist but I think we do well to listen to Steve. Certainly the 'prior positions' of the guy leave much to be desired but he was I believe rightly shocked by some of Climategate, not least because of his closeness to some at UEA, and did more than most on the BBC and many other parts of the mass media to report on this in an insightful and impartial manner.

[David]

Well - I have looked at Climategate not, I have to admit, very 'deeply' - and I seem to have discovered, as I'm sure have you all - not a 'smoking gun', but a positive machine gun volley...
But - hey - I'm not a BBC journalist - what do I know...

[Mike Jackson]

Richard
You are obviously a lot closer to the principal actors in this little drama than I am so I accept your view.
I do agree that Harrabin's reporting of Climategate was not by any means the worst but is that good enough?
If you work for an organisation that appears intent on closing down debate (perhaps for the best of motives – let's have a little 'benefit of the doubt' here!) and then an event occurs that casts considerable doubt on whether that decision was the right one, and when your employer is a news organisation with a very specific remit to tell the truth as it is, warts and all, do you not have a moral obligation to go further than Harrabin did?
I think, as Zed pointed out earlier, that the pension fund argument is a red herring. It's always fun, and usually very easy, to find some alleged skulduggery at work if you put your mind to it but the BBC problem is not overt bias or financial self-interest; it's a mindset and several of its own insiders have admitted as much. It's almost at the stage where some of them will need a brain transplant before they can break free from the AGW meme (or take a neutral view on the Middle-East, or US politics, or UK politics come to that).

[Richard Drake]

Mike:

I do agree that Harrabin's reporting of Climategate was not by any means the worst but is that good enough?

No. But let me tell you something that I did appreciate about Harrabin's 7th July report when I first heard it and when I listened to it again in the last few days.

The timing and manipulation of the three inquiries was devious in the extreme, not least (but by no means only) in the switching on and off of the most fundamental issue: was the science itself any good? Willis's committee was told not to look at that (they sure didn't want Graham Stringer with that brief) as Oxburgh would. Then the terms of reference of Oxburgh were subtly changed but that inquiry came before the 'big one' that the select committee had originally set up its own inquiry into whether its terms of reference were adequate. There was a veritable plethora of peas being moved under thimbles in other words.

But on the day Russell was going to report Harrabin gives voice to the outrage of the ex-chair of the committee about this voyage of deceit by Acton, Oxburgh and friends and lets Steve make the key point that none of the inquiries had interviewed him in person or anyone like him.

This wasn't necessarily the obvious moment to make such a double-sided point, in other words, but because of the studied deception involved it was in practice the only opportunity Roger had.

That is how I read it then and again this week. This one report was a very good job (obviously helped by Phil Willis and Steve themselves).

I do however agree with the Bishop and many others here that Harrabin should have declared his prior involvement with UEA and the Tyndall Centre before commenting on Climategate at all.

In summary, the world is complex and frequently pretty grubby. Few of us make all the right choices in the face of that. This week I remembered another reason I had some respect for Roger in his professional life, as well as getting to like him long before on the playing fields of Parliament Hill, Hampstead Heath.

[Mike Jackson]

the world is complex and frequently pretty grubby

Tell me about it!
One thought that was knocking at my mind while reading your previous post and composing my reply was what would I have done in the same situation. I like to think I would have had the courage to say, "No; this isn't right; this is not what we supposedly stand for." I'm not as sure as I would like that I would have done.
In my days as a reporter/editor I used to try in interviews to come down hardest on those I agreed with because I thought my first responsibility was to my readers, but it's a fine line to tread sometimes and I didn't have a proprietor breathing down my neck.
(Just the family and neighbours and pals in the rugby club and local councillors. Just the little people ... the ones that actually rely on you being right!)

[Bishop Hill]

Richard

There's a slight misconception in your take on Oxburgh. The allegation is not that the terms of reference were changed. This is the way Harrabin put it in his 7 July report, but he misrepresented what Willis said (although I believe he did this inadvertently). Willis actually said that the SciTech committee had been misled over what the ToR were. From Oxburgh's evidence to the second ScitTech committee, there was never any intention to look at the science.

[Pete H]

I think, as Zed pointed out earlier, that the pension fund argument is a red herring. It's almost at the stage where some of them will need a brain transplant before they can break free from the AGW meme (or take a neutral view on the Middle-East, or US politics, or UK politics come to that).
Dec 28, 2011 at 2:17 PM | Mike Jackson

Mike, lets get some perspective on all this and quoting ZDB is insane!

If I can quote an excellent post from another blog today maybe we can get some line on costs!#

"From the political point of view, if you can tax the populace for breathing and keeping warm while you regale them with tales of carbon doom, so much the better. Especially if you can contrive a situation where the measures put in place don’t actually reduce co2 emission. That way you get to continue the taxation indefinitely. 287 billion euro of public money wasted propping up the ‘carbon market’. The same money spent on flue management and new boiler systems for generating stations could have reduced European co2 emission by 40%. Where is that money now? Where is the buffer the public purse should be able to provide against economic swings which can wreck the lives of ordinary decent taxpayers"

That quote is from an engineering point of view and from a guy I have come to respect in a short time not some "Climate Scientists! The answer has been there but it gets in the way of grants etc and "the slippery slope of Lysenkoism"

ZDB has never had an answer to engineering solutions! Check her trolls over at the D.M.!

[Pete H]

By the way, Thanks to the guy who had his computer stuff ripped off for no reason ;)

[Mac]

to sum up

6 academics
4 green activists
4 writers
2 artists
2 enviro-journalists
2 architects
1 broadcaster
1 dancer
1 comedian

23 committed to the cause

[Richard Drake]

Bish: correction received and accepted. Thanks.

[Mike Jackson]

Pete H
I wasn't talking engineering; I was talking BBC and the tendency that we all have every now and again to take at pop at people about some aspect of what they do which "proves that [insert example here]. I mean, stands to reason, dunnit?"
Well, no it doesn't. Zed was right (on this occasion). The business about the Beeb reporters all being alarmists because their pension fund is all invested in Green companies is fatuous and irrelevant.
Sorry if I wasn't clear.

[DennisA]

"Time after time after time we are presented with Stern's conclusions as if this was a piece of mainstream academic work."

Much of Stern's report came from the Tyndall Centre, in particular, a time-served bureaucrat called Terry Barker.

He was a Co-ordinating Lead Author (CLA) for the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report taking responsibility for the chapter on the effects of greenhouse gas mitigation policies on the global energy industries and a member of the core writing team for the Synthesis Report Climate Change 2001. He was CLA for the Fourth Assessment Report, due 2007, for the chapter on cross-sectoral mitigation.

This commentary was on the Tyndall website at the time, I haven't checked back for a while:

"Terry Barker, leader of Tyndall’s CIAS programme of research (Community Integrated Assessment System) and Director of 4CMR, set up a project to conduct a meta-analysis of the literature on the costs of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) mitigation with induced technological change, funded by HM Treasury. This generated a report for the Stern Review."

"A Tyndall Briefing Note from April 2005 is available on Terry Barker’s area of Tyndall Centre research, called ‘New Lessons for Technology Policy and Climate Change. Investment for Innovation; a briefing document for policymakers’: Tyndall Briefing Note 13"

Terry Barker edited the Modelling Costs Chapter of the Stern Review.

The 4CMR institution mentioned above was formed in Jan 2006 and opened by Sir David King. Dr Barker made a speech which included a few noteworthy comments, not least of which was:

"The foundering (sic) members of the Centre, all of whom are here, have backgrounds in many disciplines: economics, engineering, mathematics, physics, ecology and geography. But the focus of our research is the special intersection of economics and engineering concerned with climate change mitigation – particularly by economic policies inducing low-carbon technological change. Perhaps surprisingly, we are one of a very few teams anywhere whose energy-economy models are based on an annual series of data."

"It may seem astonishing, but the global climate models, providing governments with estimates of the costs of climate stabilisation are nearly all reliant on one year’s data."

This type of flawed data of course went into the Stern Review. He was forthcoming about his new institute and its funding:

"There are 9 of us in full time and part time posts, with funding for 2 more. We are fully funded form (sic) competitive Research Council and FP6 bids making a full contribution to overheads. The thirst for knowledge in our area is such that we could easily become twice this size."

One of his best comments related to a company called Cambridge Econometrics, when he said, "I also want to thank Cambridge Econometrics, who is (sic) working closely with us to support the research programme. We would not have been able to build our global model without the company’s help."

However, he failed to tell his audience that he was actually the chairman of Cambridge Econometrics, as described on the web site of the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, updated in May 2006. 4CMR was formed 5 months earlier.

"Dr Terry Barker is Chairman of Cambridge Econometrics, the company originally formed by DAE researchers under his leadership to apply the Cambridge Multisectoral Dynamic Model (MDM) of the British Economy. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of EconomicSystems Research."

The Stern report was commissioned by Gordon Brown to try and push the agenda. There was a Stern team at DECC, maybe still is. In 2009, they held a symposium in Washington, "Academics, CEOs of large US corporations, cross party Senators, and staffers attended, with a view to gaining a global economic perspective on U.S climate change action."

"The event was sponsored by the World Resources Institute, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Centre for Global Development, the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change & the Environment, and with assistance from CISCO and The Climate Group.(Tony Blair). Lord Nicholas Stern chaired several sessions with other notable speakers including Tony Blair, who chaired the closed door session and press conference, Connie Hedegaard; Danish minister for climate and energy and Ed Milliband."

Stern is on the "scientific advisory board" of Schellnhuber's Potsdam Institute, with Jennifer Morgan of WRI, formerly WWF and E3G and Brian Hoskins of Imperial's Grantham Institute. Stern is Chairman of the LSE Grantham Institute and advisor to the carbon investment company, IdeaCarbon.

[Brendan H]

“I love the way he says that "somehow" he and his colleagues in the mainstream media have failed to give a balanced view of the climate debate.”

I don’t think Harrabin is arguing that there is a lack of balance in the climate debate. In my view, he is saying that reporting on climate has taken the standard adversarial style of journalism: “he said white/she said black”.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with this format, especially when you want to convey the existence of a range of opinion. But what it means is that participants will tend to be placed in either the affirmative or the contrarian box.

So, naturally enough, within this format, climate sceptics have been categorised as contrarians.

Harrabin is arguing that the focus should now be on how any changes in climate might affect human beings, rather than on whether human-induced climate change is actually occurring. (Of course, this narrative is also susceptible to the adversarial style.)

“Or the treatment of McIntyre, the man who has had the temerity to point to problems with the paleoclimate reconstructions but accepts the manmade global warming hypothesis…Expansion of the middle ground?”

I think the difficulty here is that, as I mentioned above, within the adversarial framework, the sceptic view slots into the contrarian side, ie within this format there is no room for the “middle ground”.

In some ways, climate sceptics have exacerbated the adversarial narrative, in that they have strongly focussed on claimed corruption within climate science.

It’s difficult to hold both that 1) the science is corrupted, and 2) the science is fundamentally sound without a degree of dissonance. In this case, (1) carries a greater emotional force, and tends to drown out (2), which could otherwise be termed the “middle ground”.

[coldlynx]

BBC could do a program about the big lakes that dried up in Sahara 6000 years ago.
CRU did some reserach about it but funny enough is that gone from CRU own website and also from their list of projects.
My guess? It did not show man was responsible for climate change.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/content/1/c6/01/04/18/megalakes.jpg
http://www.historykb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/archaeology/4372/The-Fezzan-project-geoarchaeology-of-the-Sahara
http://iesr.ac.uk/collections/1258123904-5994.html

[jamspid]

Get your arses stuck into the comments section of this on

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1273201/

Micheal Burke just said 50 million refugees by 2010 so where the f--k are they

The only refugees at the moment are thousands of Syrians pouring into Lebanon at the moment

20 years ago it was the other way round

[Stacey]

‘I don’t give a damn. It’s not going to happen. Humans can’t change the planet’

In all the time on the internet I have never heard anyone make the above statement in full and certainly not the last sentance.

Sorry my Lord for the inappropriate venting your snip is accepted with grace.

[Political Junkie]

Richard Drake,

Harrabin's piece was pretty balanced, up to the very end when he closed with the "98% of scientists agree...." line.

The actual number of course is 97% :-)

[Peter S]

Harrabin wants to present the public with "a narrative of risk and risk avoidance". If risks involve the possibility of something unwanted happening, we might wonder why humans have a long history of taking them. Without a perceived benefit as an outcome, any action involving risk becomes meaningless. It is the anticipated 'difference' such actions make which makes risks worth taking.

It may be that Harrabin's 'narrative' is against an outcome rather than the action involved in getting there. 'Difference avoidance' would be an ongoing project for anyone with an overriding interest in keeping things the same (or, who wished to unpick modern differences and return to an imagined refuge of earlier times). This same person, perhaps, has replaced his appetite and curiosity with an established (or Establishment) view of the world and lives in terror of anything that might make a difference to it. If this fixed position represented an unacceptable truth to its holder, he might choose a name like 'Progressive' - to hide the fact from himself.

Climate Change itself, of course, could easily be called Climate Difference... the idea being that man's actions cause a big bad difference which overwhelms any possible good differences they may bring. Therefore, the narrative implies, it is essential to get rid of difference altogether (a theme we see extended in Harrabin and the BBC's wish to get rid of voices "saying something completely different" from the airwaves).

The paradox in this semi-honest and spiteful demonising of difference is that the ongoing 'sameness' it seeks to protect and advance is, self-evidently, semi-honest, spiteful and demonising... and very stuck.