Bishop Hill Briefer please
Oct 25, 2012 Climate: Sceptics Ros Donald of the Carbon Brief talks about sceptics in this recent YouTube video.
I like the bit where she criticises George Osborne for saying that green measures are loading consumers with cost "as if it were fact".
(I think he said this because it is fact, something that she acknowledges later in the talk when she says says that the cost increases due to gas prices changes are larger than those due to green costs. Ergo green prices are loading consumers with costs.)
Some familiarity with the concept of a controllable cost might help Ms Donald's understanding of these issues I think.
Also raising a wry smile was the bit where she equates conservatism and authoritarianism; the bit where she seemed to criticise sceptics for the underhand tactic of using scientific arguments was laugh-out-loud stuff though:
Scientific arguments are part of sceptics' reserve of rhetorical currency.
Reader Comments (43)
I don't know when this video was recorded, but in the section on Artcic sea ice loss, she say's sceptics focussed on ice gain in the Antarctic. Thus implying some sort of bait and switch, quick change the subject. I thought sceptics focussed on the giant storm in the Arctic that broke up the sea ice.
meh..
Well she has some science GCSE's which seem to be aboutthe Crabon Brief science requirements
A Levels: Philosophy, French and Music
BA (1st class) French and Spanish
PG Dop Journalism
this made me smile
School of Oriental and African Studies, U. of London
MA: Distinction, International Studies and Diplomacy
2010 – 2011
Modules: International Economics, Diplomacy, Energy and Climate Change Policy
Dissertation: How climate contrarian bloggers are affecting climate change science and policy. Investigating whether critical bias is having a moderating effect in IPCC findings.
Activities and Societies: Part of the organising committee for the course's trip to Geneva, practical negotiation exercises, media training, speechwriting training
http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/rosalind-donald/26/984/4bb
Spare us from people who know nothing about the subject.
She was a 'competition law journalist and analyst'?? OMG.
Competition law involves understanding economics, and law, which she has neither studied nor demonstrated any understanding of in the video.
I’m always highly suspicious of anyone who hides who they are and how they are funded, the climate brief hides who has registered their website:
Domain ID:D160849954-LROR
Domain Name:CARBONBRIEF.ORG
Created On:06-Dec-2010 10:35:05 UTC
Last Updated On:06-Jun-2012 10:49:08 UTC
Expiration Date:06-Dec-2016 10:35:05 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Mesh Digital Limited (R1728-LROR)
Status:CLIENT DELETE PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:MNTFAA158206
Registrant Name:Identity Protection Service
Registrant Organization:Identity Protect Limited
There is no transparency, if you look the company director is Thomas Brookes who is also registered in partnership with Ms Eloise Todd who is a director at the one campaign under a company called TODD BROOKES LLP.
I’m a bit sick of all these advocacy and policy groups that claim to be independent from each other and then you find out there are links to every other group. So what happens is that they concert their efforts to shout down dissenting voices when really it’s all one big Advocacy group controlling many apparently non-affiliated groups like the Carbon Brief. If the science was so sound why would they ever need to co-ordinate like this, oh right almost forgot the science isn’t sound.
This is the summary from the Carbon Brief web site:
Back to what she actually says, how bizarre. A central tenet of CO2 induced AGW is that the poles (PLURAL) will warm first and fastest. So the alarmists highlight the 2012 Arctic Sea Ice minima (which is fair enough - they don't have much else to scare us with) albeit the satellite records only go back 30 years and there is much historical evidence that the Arctic experiences similar 'mild' periods every 60-80 years or so - historic variation in Arctic ice - she then makes out that the realists are being underhand by pointing out that the Antarctic Sea ice is doing the opposite? Is that all she can come up with?
At least she accepts that sceptics are usually well informed and know the science.
The Carbon Brief About Us
We are grateful for the funding and support provided by the European Climate Foundation. Carbon Brief’s Director, Tom Brookes, is director of the Energy Strategy Centre (ESC) the communications unit funded by the European Climate Foundation (ECF)…
Christian Hunt heads up Carbon Brief and writes about science and energy in the media. He previously worked as an editor for Greenpeace and as a researcher for the Public Interest Research Centre. He holds an MA in Conflict Resolution, and a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of York.
Robin Webster covers energy policy and analysis. She holds an MSc in Conservation from University College London (UCL) and previously studied biology at Bristol University. She worked for Friends of the Earth for six and half years, including as a Senior Campaigner on Climate and Energy, and has worked as a freelance environmental researcher…ETC
http://www.carbonbrief.org/about
Phillip's snippet of this woman's CV is an excellent illustration of the problem:
Highly trained advocates with a keen understanding of how the wheels of power turn; with the motivation and ability to influence the state; with no grasp of the scientific or engineering issues other than by heresay. This is the skillset responsible for the massive squandering of the public purse and the looming energy crisis. She's doubtless sincere and believes she's working to save the plannit.
The Guilty Men are the government science advisors. They are the ones who should be sorting sheep from goats; advising ministers on the distinction between solid science and green hysteria; differentiating between genuine threats and those trumped up by special interests. Ministers rely on them to give sound advice.
In this vein I would recommend "Most Secret War" by R. V. Jones. Spotted by Churchill as a brilliant, clear-minded science analyst, Jones consistently identified enemy advances in navigation technology and was given the power to organize the countermeasures against microwave beams and V-weapons.
On second thoughts, perhaps we SHOULD place the blame at the door of the politicians: they're unable to distinguish between a physicist and a snake-oil salesman. If Churchill had chosen a Beddington or a Houghton, Britain would've been reduced to rubble in WWII.
confused: "I don't know when this video was recorded..."
If you click the "More Info" button at top right, it reveals that the talk was recorded at the "Psychology of Climate" seminar, 28 Sept. 2012.
Brent H:
Yes. Absolutely right with one minor quibble: our Ros may be an 'advocate' but with the best will in the world no one could describe her as 'highly trained'.
your Ros Donald youtube has no comments, bish, and only 26 views including yours and mine & perhaps some others viewing from your website.
The Carbon Brief's Roz Pidcock linked to ThinkProgress, Guardian, SkepticalScience, Media Matters, Bob Ward & Potholer for "rebuttals" to the Met Office’s own data. only one comment was below the article when i first read it; there are now 7, with only 5 showing until u expand to get to the original one by Sheldon Wilson. (Roz was a climate guest blogger on thinkprogress on 10 Oct - New Tool Tracks CO2 Emissions In Cities: Could It Spur More Movement In The U.S. Toward A Climate Treaty?) :
19 Oct: Carbon Brief: Roz Pidcock: This week’s top six rebuttals to David Rose’s “warming has stopped” claim
COMMENT by Sheldon Wilson: Terrible Carbon Brief. These are a collection of ad hominem attacks – potholer for instance doesn’t even look at the technical details of the graph, and why don’t you quote Judy Curry who writing in her blog says that the Guardian’s analysis is shallow, or that in their blog the Met Office actually agreed with David Rose.
Shallow, partisan, biased, uninformed, one-sided. Judy Curry is right – you ought to raise your game, though I don’t suppose many people read this anyway.
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2012/10/this-weeks-top-six-rebuttals-of-david-roses-warming-has-stopped-claims
Rosalind Pidcock
Science Writer and Freelance Copy Editor
http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/rosalind-pidcock/38/758/a75
The Carbon Brief (about page) is out there in plain sight, a project of the European Climate Foundation (95% reduction of CO2 in EU by 2050)
Watts Up With That has looked at them twice ;-)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/18/the-carbon-brief-the-european-rapid-response-team/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/14/smear-job-by-the-carbon-brief/
If the 'Carbon Brief' was serious in its biased organization, would it not be preferable to employ someone who is able to impart propaganda in a credible format and with better presentation, um er, um er.
"I'll scweam and I'll scweam and I'll scweam........................ until you believe me - so there!"
Someone should also inform Ros, that the NH and the SH are two halves of one biosphere, the atmosphere of both is inextricably linked to the other in more ways than man can yet actually perceive let alone imagine.
presumably Ros was there with Tom, or were there simultaneous seminars in all the major cities of the world?
28 September: A SEMINAR ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CLIMATE
Program 28.Sept.2012 - at BI, Norwegian Business School, Nydalen Oslo
Part II: The Shift to an Ecological Mind-set
12.20 Tom Brookes: director Energy Strategy Centre (ESC) Deadly Denial:
How the sceptic mindset impacts our ability to address climate change
http://www.bi.no/Info-avdelingFiles/Forskningskommunikasjon/Climate%20Psychology%2028%20Sep%202012.pdf
How can you blame the poor girl? Hansen and his co-defendants fooled most of the World's scientists into believing the Earth emits IR as an isolated black body in a vacuum in order to purport that the heating effect of gravitational potential energy on atmospheres [Earth, Venus, Mars] is really because of the GHGs!
This is the cleverest scientific hoax the World has ever seen.
Is she for real ? Um, err, err, um.
Like all good parodies it's got some plausibility but with the weirdness turned up to 11. Is it a man in drag?
if u think ros could have been briefer, try david. both youtubes are "Published on Oct 3, 2012 by handelshoyskolenBI" so we are talking about the Oslo Seminar:
43 mins approx: Youtube: David Abram -- Climate and Psyche
Published on Oct 3, 2012 by handelshoyskolenBI
A broader view on the connection between the climate -- the very air we breathe -- and psychology. Recorded at the Psychology of Climate seminar, 28 September 2012. http://www.climatestrategy.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzZ41o3VU7M
hopefully my final comment on this thread!
well-travelled. certainly sounds more fabulous in wikipedia than on youtube:
Wikipedia: David Abram
In 1988, while pursuing his doctorate, David was invited by the maverick ecologist Paul Shepard to temporarily fill Shepard's teaching position (while Shepard pursued a year's research overseas), as Visiting Professor of Ecology and Natural Philosophy at the Claremont Colleges in California. Since that time, Abram has offered seminars at universities around the world, while nonetheless maintaining his independence from the institutional world of academia...
In 2001, the New England Aquarium and the Orion Society sponsored a large public debate between David Abram and distinguished biologist E. O. Wilson, at Faneuil Hall in Boston, on science and ethics. (An essay by Abram that grew out of that debate, entitled "Earth in Eclipse," has been published in several versions). In the summer of 2005, Abram delivered a keynote address for the United Nations “World Environment Week” in San Francisco, to 70 mayors from the largest cities around the world. Abram founded the Alliance for Wild Ethics with several colleagues in 2006. He is profiled in the 2007 book, Visionaries: The 20th Century’s 100 Most Inspirational Leaders and was named by the Utne Reader as one of a hundred visionaries currently transforming the world, He has been the recipient of numerous honors, including fellowships from the Rockefeller and Watson Foundations...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Abram
Hi Jack
I've met Ros and have noabsolutley no doubt she is a highly intelligent, sincere young woman,
just in my mind caught up in the CAGW cultural phenonmem, like Corner, she frames things according to her world view and abilities. lacking the scientific knowledge to confront the scientific questions.
She says sceptics use the same methods as advocacy groups and NGOs (what a horrible thing to be compared to). There are two things to this:
Firstly, it is rarely that sceptics originate claims in the climate debate, rather than respond to them. Do you ever see sceptics claiming climate change gives rise to good weather? Rather, you see activists, in co-ordinated fashion', using' 'extreme weather' to campaign for their cause and sceptics responding to that.
Ros falls into a pit here. She thinks claims on her side of things - that Arctic ice was terribly low for instance - are 'news', pieces of normal, accepted facts and axioms of the conversation, whereas what sceptics say is reactionary concoctions. This has no basis. It is clear that it is the activists and their influence with the media that has worked hard for years to establish such things as 'Arctic ice' as though they had any meaning in human conversation, things that otherwise elicit only an 'umm ok' or barely an acknowledgement.
Secondly, the climate debate is a protracted contest of ideas and framing of ideas. Argument structures are inevitably bound to funnel into certain forms. Sceptical argument takes on the contours of those put out by advocacy groups because they basically contest claims by advocacy groups. For years, several indices pointed unequivocally up or down (temperature and ice, for instance) and alarmists had a field day. Suddenly Antarctic sea ice increases and temperature refuse to increase and you find sceptics using these as weapons in similar fashion. Ros uses this as an opportunity to compare sceptics to NGOs?
it seems to go over her head she is employed by a project of an NGO/advocacy group ;-)
Who have spent millions of Euro pushing for CO2 reduction poliies in Europe.
62 pages of grants (I wonder how much the CB got)
http://www.europeanclimate.org/en/component/grant/
given that the director of Carbon Brief, TomBrookes was in charge of the ECF's European Stratgey Centre (the ECF's media arm)
http://www.europeanclimate.org/en/programmes/energy-strategy-center
Mission
The Energy Strategy Center (ESC) is the communications unit of the European Climate Foundation.The role of the ESC is to act as a centre of expertise on energy and climate change communications. Its objective is to help create political, media and public endorsement for strong action to address climate change at international, national and sector levels.
using pr techniques to 'smear sceptics' see WUWT article..
Ros says sceptics use the same strategies that are employed by a 'a lot of the policy operators we are used to...'
! Here is a person who hasn't examined any of her own prejudices but has conducted research on a whole bunch of other people.
But then why would want to let clear thinking or common sense get in the way of a good rant?
Yeah, much vacuity, waffle and contradiction there as usual. I think I am beginning to see a theme ;)
I like how she starts by saying sceptics work as network within the "climate policy system" and that she can trace a line from sceptic blogs to influence politicians and the media, but then concludes:
!?
The common thing with all these pseudo-intellectual musings between projection screens with empty phrases and facing audiences with empty heads is the underlying despair that is showing. The fact that these people have effectively held, and still hold, the ground in policy and influence for many years now and yet the evidence they are actually achieving nothing and only adding burdens to the public can only keep getting ever more patently obvious. They have nothing to offer and the cracks are showing.
These inane attempts to find excuses and turn to pseudo social psyche palliatives - bleating about "sceptic networks" making their life hard, bless! - will only increase I suspect.
@ Oct 25, 2012 at 9:40 AM | pat
The number of views recorded by YouTube is inaccurate. YouTube tends to not count people coming in from blogs. (I think this is done because some bloggers have included links to YouTube videos for the purpose of driving up the view number.)
If this is the 'quality' of the people who they expect to be taken note of at this stage of the debate - then we have already won... Just keeping putting them in the public eye, they are truly their own worst enemy now.
The government sponsored John Hills report very specifically identifies green taxes as contributing to fuel poverty and related deaths which in the UK has reached a shameful level.
"The Guilty Men are the government science advisors. "
Oct 25, 2012 at 9:25 AM Brent Hargreaves
The guilty ones are the top management of the scientific civil service, who permitted whole empires, with associated careers, to be built on the creation and perpetuation of myths. They also nominated the govt science advisers.
[Snip O/T. Next time you do this you are banned.]
I dunno...she's kinda cute, but...
Quoting Mother Jones -1
Conservatives=Authoritarian? Hmmm...
Interesting how Greenpeace, on Arctic melt, is at the extreme end but still mainstream science and skeptics are not because they only mentioned the Antarctic ice gain. GW theory used to say the poles would warm first, not just the northern one. Then she quotes WUWT, which is funny because WUWT ran articles on historical Arctic melts and the storm that broke up the sea ice this year. The "skeptics are not interested in science" theme continues as she she states that the "scientific factbase is secondary to skeptic worldview". I find it contradictory that she says skeptics are knowledgeable about the science but the factbase is secondary, and, that you "won't find the reason for skeptical views in the science argument." I see this assumption a lot on the warmists sites and I see it as more of a way to dismiss inconvenient facts contrary to the warmist message.
"Skeptics adapt their message"...This is the pot calling the kettle black. Here is a little something I remember from the warmist camp: "The global temperatures are unprecedented". "Yes it's been this warm before but the rate of warming is unprecedented." "Yes the current warming trend rate has been seen before but it's not about surface temperatures, it's about ocean heat content".
This debate is not science versus right wing politics, advocacy exists on both sides and the science is burdened by it.
Professor Wadham, John Vidal (Arctic Meltdown) - think Met Office and government scientists are 'in denial' about the arctic !! ;-)
Youtube vid to prove it somewhere
'Sea ice extent fell to 3.41 million square kilometres....'
Yep - and has now reformed at what David Shukman described, when characterising the melting recently on the BBC, at 'astonishing speed'...
Yet another Inconvenient Truth....
Re: green costs...In the talk the DM's estimate of £200 per year per household was derided, but no alternative figure offered. Is there any reliable estimate of green costs, either in total or calculated on a per-household basis? The largest such cost would no doubt be the ROCs, but I suspect there's a fair amount extra, e.g. FITs and support to quangos.
Sorry, only managed about five minutes. Couldn't take any more err, umm, errm's
Are you sure she is an advocate? Can't be a very successful one.
OK, I sure she is nice girl but the rest of that statement - is total contradiction, if she was a "highly intelligent, sincere young woman" - she would endeavour to acquire the "scientific knowledge to confront the scientific questions" - would she not Barry.
There are, too many purblind young things, pretty and nice they may be but however nicely sincere they are - they are still dangerous people who are biased and unlistening - the "green taliban" succinctly sums them up - nicely.
Athelstan 'green taliban' is good. Some prefer 'useful idiots'
This explains why women cannot do science...fluffy marketing stuff....sorry but that's the way it is.
Come on, kingkp, don't generalise, that is a ridiculous statement. Some women - and some men, maybe .....
[snip. Manners] When [this woman] equated more individualistic, politically conservative with Authoritarian, I had to BS. Collectivism is far more authoritarian, as it requres the power of government to execute it's desires. Indeed, collectivism is 100% dedicated to increasing the span of governmental control over populations.
Where do these people go to school? Did they never look up words in a dictionary? No wonder they're losing this debate.
Re Green Taliban.
Credit where credit is due. This is George Osborne's reported comment.An a very good one too.
Out of curiosity I logged onto carbonbrief.com. One paper is titled 'Analysing the 900 papers supporting climate scepticism': 9 out of 10 top authors linked to Exxon Mobil. The title refers to a paper on the GWPF blog. Is anyone willing or able to check out the validity of this article. If the claims are untrue maybe the outcome should be passed on to a mainstream media blogger like James Delingpole. Cheers from a gradually warming up Sydney.
I never laid claim to it Philip - I just rather liked the linkage between Green and Taliban - rather apt is it not?
;-)
SOAS - very left-wing, even by UK standards.