Bishop Hill A meeting of moderates
Jun 22, 2011 Climate: Sceptics Climate: other I am still pretty overwhelmed with "stuff" at the moment. Just life things, really - IT problems (Bill Gates, you are useless), school problems (Perth & Kinross council, you are worse) and of course the day job too. This is leaving precious little time for the blog and for thinking about peace conferences.
Almost off the top of my head, therefore, is the idea that the objectives for such a peace conference should be quite limited. So when Leo Hickman suggests as a starting point...
Unimpeachable, transparent, uncorrupted science
Energy security
"Clean" energy (if CO2 is not your concern, then surely reducing localised air pollution is a valid goal?)
Halting deforestation
Halting biodiversity loss
Conserving marine habitats
Avoiding economic instability
Protecting the poor and vulnerable
Ensuring global food supplies
...it seems to me that he is hopelessly overambitious. At the very most, a conference might address the first point. That would be an important objective. The rest is a wish-list, with many tradeoffs needing to be made. These are not questions to be decided at conferences.
Reader Comments (122)
-Hickman in the Guardian
Foxgoose 'Am I suffering from some kind of bizarre browser/cookie malfunction - or is something deeply weird going on?'
No its one of those feature of CIF , like its constant denial that it 'disappear' post ,despite the mountain of evidenced they do, that you have to get used too . Its their ball and they made clear they will take it home when and how they like .
JohnH
Pielke's 'iron law' of climate policy trumps idealism every time. What matters is how we address the problem within the constraints of realpolitik.
Bleating about greed is not a solution. Nuclear on the other hand might work. The climate concerned have done well to raise awareness of the CO2 issue. They have been remorselessly counter-productive when it comes to workable responses.
Time for a re-think in certain quarters.
-Hickman in the Guardian
There you have it. "Protestors" cleared for 'take-off (as in, violent and destructive action) by a court of law by acquittal.
How come climate sceptics arguing for good science something far less exciting and far more boring, and far more important than scaling walls at coal plants and airports, don't get any credit from Hickman?
"Peace conference" necessarily implies a war. A few years ago, I don't recall any such thing as a moderate warmist -- there was a consensus supposedly and disagreement was unscientific. Over the last few years, the alarmist boat has taken a number of direct hits, it is taking on water and beginning to list. Now something called a moderate has come along -- still believes in global warming, still wants to adopt massive policy changes, but they consider themselves "moderate" because they make an effort to use good manners.
I'm not sure I understand the point of a peace conference (other than to encourage people to use good manners). The demand for scientific integrity is non-negotiable. Period. And so far as I know, that's the only real demand that skeptics have. So what is the point of a peace conference. There isn't anything to negotiate.
Practice the best quality science. Period. When the science is being used to change the way the world lives and works, it has to be the best quality science society has to offer. Sloppy WON"T cut it.
BTW -- that is a point of difference between skeptics and warmists which seems to get glossed over when listing points of contention. Alarmists seem to think that they are relying on quality science. Skeptics point out all the jaw-dropping incompetence, corruption, and prevailing lack of quality control. The science quality sucks.
Anyone looking for common ground would do well to be prepared to stipulate that huge portions of the supposed consensus science have never been audited or replicated and have been performed by people with a track record for being sloppy. That's likely to be a sticking point for any peace confab.
JohnH
“it cannot be right for four or five greedy generations of mankind to consume all the fossil fuel that was ever laid down.”
We’re getting our own back on future generations who are going to use up all the thorium.
This "future generations / think of the children" schtick is a total crock.
If I decide to not use some petrol today - does this mean the unused petrol is available for my own grandchildren ? Or will it be someone else's grandchildren maybe in a different country ? Or maybe just used by someone else tomorrow morning - maybe used to fuel Al Gore's jet ?
And how do we even know what future generations will want ? Imagine if your own great-grandparents had shivered in the dark while stockpiling whale oil for your lantern, candles, fire-wood, hay for your horse ...
On the first point, I think the real question you need to address is "how does science relate to politics: how can the conservatism needed to retain rigorous certainty of scientific assertions interact with the world of politics where action must be decided on the balance of probability?"
Because if scientists change the way they present information to base it on the balance of probability and not scientific certainty, they can appear to suggest scientific certainty for something which is marginal at best", however if we leave the interpretation of science just to the political elite (most of whom have no grounding in science) it will be the (scientifically) blind leading the blind.
More importantly, if science begins to enter politics, how do we stop the reduced standards of politics filtering back into science, how do we stop science becoming part of an advocacy campaign in politics, moulding the science to fit the advocacy?
"Imagine if your own great-grandparents had shivered in the dark while stockpiling whale oil for your lantern, candles, fire-wood, hay for your horse ..."
Excellent point. Bish, when you're computer's fixed, can we have approval buttons? :-)
BBD - "The climate concerned have done well to raise awareness of the CO2 issue. They have been remorselessly counter-productive when it comes to workable responses."
I think you are missing a step here - where is the solid, quantifiable scientific work which stands sceptical scrutiny which properly identifies the context and boundaries of the "CO2 issue"?. Without this, the step to workable repsonses is premature and risks being a step in the wrong direction.
golf charley
"most of the proAGW comments at CiF were from people studying at UEA, or past graduates"
As I remember it someone misread the commenters' profiles having picked up:
"Has commented on: Education - UEA".
But I am open to correction.
A major problem will be in finding 'moderates' from the other 'side'. There does not seem to be many of them, although I guess the media tend to feature the most melodramatic players so I risk underestimating the numbers of more level-headed ones. Perhaps Mr Hickman might be able to locate some moderates, somewhere?
There is no "morality" in using fossil fuels or not using fossil fuels. Each generation does what it needs to do to survive in the environment it finds itself in, which in the case of those of us between 60 and 80 is a pleasant one. We (perhaps along with our parents) are probably the only generation to date, and as far as we can see into the future, with a carefree and comfortable retirement. For sure our children and their children will be less well-off in their retirement.
There is nothing we can do to change that and we do not know what we should or could do to affect the generations after that. In that respect we are no different from previous generations. Mankind will advance (or not) and will find solutions for the problems that face it generation by generation as it always has. By following the advice notably given by Stern and implied by JohnH we impoverish ourselves without a shred of a guarantee that doing so will benefit our grandchildren. Indeed it is much more likely that restricting our own and our children's development (by inter alia putting at risk our energy supplies and determining by government diktat the course that social and technological development is to take) will lead to dis-benefits for future generations which they will be worse placed to address.
We have not yet reached peak oil (in spite of the pessimistic predictions that surface with tedious regularity). We have most certainly not reached peak energy resource and as and when individual resources do start to become markedly scarcer we will find replacements (and probably better replacements) as we always have.
It was Sheikh Yamani (those of us who lived through the 1970s oil panic remember him well!) who said "the Stone Age did not end through a lack of stones ..." and the coal/oil/nuclear ages will not end because we run out of those resources but because we find something better, cheaper and more efficient.
Hopefully we will eventually learn to ignore those, like Ehrlich, who claim that "giving society cheap, abundant energy ... would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun." Just how wrong can you be?
Mike I disagree that our children and onwards are certain, or even likely, to be poorer than us. Possibly less of the resources of materials we now use will be available. However human technology will, short of all out war or similar, be considerably greater. Most of our goods today use fewer materials and higher technology - Univac having less computer capacity than a good mobile phone today is an extreme example - perhaps a better one would be Doc's comparison between the weight of a 1950s sedan and a De Lorean in Badk to the Future 2 is more apt.What we now do with coal and metals future generations will do smaller and more powerfully with fusion and ceramics.
Or alternarely we will industrialise space and have unlimited solar power and million ton iron/silver/gold/platinum asteroids going cheap.
The only immorality would be to prevent future generations benefiting from this wealth by suppressing technological progress in the name of ecofascism. Yhe last 40 years have gad a lot of that or the world would have plentiful, cheap power, probably from thorium reactors by now.
The only immorality would be to prevent future generations benefiting from this wealth by suppressing technological progress in the name of ecofascism.
Hear hear, Neil.
FYI, here is an analysis - which I don't necessarily agree with - of the impact of Islamofascism on knowledge and hence prosperity in the historical Middle East.
http://www.ninevehsoft.com/fiorina.htm
If we're going to start peering 100 years into the future we could do worse than to begin by looking at the past.
Or as Ibn Khaldun put it, "The future resembles the past as water resembles water".
"Univac having less computer capacity than a good mobile phone today is an extreme example"
My not-very-state-of-the-art mobile phone has more memory on it than (probably) existed in the world when I started working on mainframes in 1977. 1 meg filled a room.
The difference between us and the greens is that we believe there will be progress, and we don't need to worry about it. They fear change, and cannot conceive that things get better. This is so basic a part of human nature that there is no coming to a consensus over it.
Neil Craig
Our children will retire on a smaller pension (in real terms) and will probably have to work longer even for that. Of my children only my younger son (who is a civil servant) may be fortunate enough still to be in a final salary scheme when he retires but it's a racing certainty that he will have to work to 65 (at least). The state pension age will be at least equalised upwards and in 20 years will probably be 70.
Ours is the last generation where a relatively generous pension based on final salary will be anything approaching a "norm".
There are other assorted fiscal straws in the wind which do more than suggest that future generations will have to dig deeper into their pockets than we do for some fairly widespread activities. If government and the enviro-mentalists have their way visiting my sons in Scotland (we live in France) will become a major expedition (and probably a costly one) instead of a two-hour trip on a plane and "pick us up at the airport". Just as one small example. Trying to heat and eat at the same time is already an increasing problem for many old people and will get worse in the future.
As for the rest, I agree because those were the points I was making. My mother died never having heard of the internet or mobile phones or satellite television or digital cameras or thorium reactors or shale gas fracking or cheap flights (other than package holiday charters, of course).
My grandfather died in 1963. Think of all the things we take for granted that he had never heard of! Starting with colour television!
I was going to make reference to The Skeptical Environmentalist except that I thought I might be hogging the bandwidth(!) but Lomborg makes the same argument as you and I are making. Apart from anything else as soon as resources look as if they're about to start running out we find we don't need them or we find a better way of using them or we manage to find more of them.
Apropos my reference to digital cameras, one of my favourite of Lomborg's examples is the use of silver -- needed in relatively large quantities for photo-processing --- until digital cameras came along.
There are various estimates of the effect but there are a couple that suggest that silver reserves are now at least 20 years more than the official figures when Lomborg was writing.
What is important to remind ourselves and what our own recent history shows is that we cannot dictate the course of events. Future generations will have to sort it out for themselves because if we try to do it for them we will get it wrong.
All of history (and most especially the history of socialist attempts to dictate the future, which is all that 21st century "environmentalism" is) tells us this is so.
Mike even the pension thing isn't inherently bad, it is merely the downside of the rather good thing that most of us now live long past our 65th birthday. However you are right that, if the ecofascists get their way, travel, among many other things, will cost more. But only in countries where they win.I suspect that, at least for Ruanair, government parasitism makes up most of the cost already.
Sorry, Neil, but the "eco-fascists" have in may respects already won, at least insofar as loading the sheeple with taxes and other imposts in the name of "saving the planet".
That is the enviro-mentalists' aim. I am optimistic enough believe it won't happen. I also believe that there is a considerable degree of pain to come before those who make the decisions (who like the eco-nuts will be well insulated from the worst effects) are brought to their senses.I don't claim any copyright on the phrase "heat or eat" but I used it in a blog post last December and I have seen it used by others since. It is the first (and perhaps the worst) manifestation of the greenies ambition to make energy use as expensive as possible. And as usual it will not be the affluent greenies who will suffer but the poor.
It appears in those countries where the greenies are listened to -- which is to say the liberated and affluent West which can afford to be eco-conscious -- they have persuaded governments to do away with energy altogether except when the wind blows.
No gas-fired power stations; no oil-fired power stations; no coal-fired power stations; no nuclear-powered power stations. They have suckered politicians who are busily out-bidding each other in an Auction of Death to see who can be the greenest apparently blind to the fact that without either fossil fuels or nuclear it is impossible to maintain an electricity baseload. The Pied Piper lives!
It will all end in tears fortunately but only if we persuade governments to come to their senses. There is no need to elect the watermelons (Delingpole's description of them is quite accurate) when they have the ear of the great and the good. The Prince of Wales (whom I believe to be a "good person" by and large) has been nobbled mainly because he is a man of influence but, with respect Your Highness, not terribly au fait with the science.
Cameron was got at by Goldsmith years ago; Thatcher had the poison dripped in her ear by Tickell and she lapped it up as a means of fixing Scargill -- as Tickell well knew -- though she recanted later.
And in the right circumstances it all sounds so very plausible. Do away with this dirty, smoke-belching (actually most of the photographs in the Telegraph tend to be of water vapour but carefully shot to make it look darker, but what the hell!) sulphur-riddled muck and that nasty dangerous (remember Chernobyl, remember Windscale, remember Three-Mile-Island) nuclear stuff and we'll be back to a wonderful nice clean golden age before everything was made dirty by "progress".
Allow me (I'll shut up in a minute ...) to quote from my own blog:
Here is another court's judgement, out today - the US Supreme Court to be precise, for Mr Hickman's perusal. I wonder what thoughts it triggers first, in his mind. I cleaned up the text a bit and the emphasis is mine. It made me wonder, let me inform you, I wondered 'why they hadn't done this earlier'!
Here's Ralph Waldo Emerson
Re Neil Craig
This is the bit I really don't get about claims of resource shortages. There are plenty of resources out in the solar system but we're not investing in space exploration.