Bishop Hill Pressure getting to you?
Oct 3, 2012 Climate: Sceptics James Murray, the editor of Business Green website, has penned an extraordinary screed about us wicked sceptics and what to do about us. From conspiracy theorising…
A small band of climate sceptics centred on Lord Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) have, through a hugely expert lobbying campaign, convinced an influential and sizable group of Tory MPs and right wing media commentators that climate change is not something to worry about
…to name calling…
Personally, I favour the terms "climate reckless" and "pollutocrats".
…and even hints at his underlying motivations…
The problem is that in the short term the continuing influence of climate sceptic thinking remains a serious threat to green growth.
…the article has the lot. Enjoy.
Reader Comments (58)
I couldn't agree more James...
Murray is seriously delusional.
I wonder what the clearly paranoid James Murray would think of this at "Watts up with that"
For some reason or other, I’ve been tracking this along with monthly natural gas and electricity billing. At the very least, it gives me some sense of what’s happening in the industry without paying much attention.
Over the last six years, the FPO prices in US dollars per therm(*) were:
Year "FPO" price
2007 $0.8925
2008 $1.2043
2009 $1.2835
2010 $0.8420
2011 $0.8126
2012 $0.6919
This is stunning – in three years the price of natural gas has fallen 46% – nearly half.
One thing I can tell Mr. Murray- it is not down to the increasing use of "renewables"!!
Question for Mr Murray:-
"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"
No. Businesses want to make money first, through innovation and new markets in necessary, but lastly to make the world a better place. The Greens don't see it, but Murray's backward formulation is delusional.
> remains a serious threat to green growth
At least we're saved from the usual litany of skeptics being a serious threat to the environment.
In other news: the death of the guy behind the first Earth Day has been relegated on the IHT to page 8, and the eulogy clearly spells out how much of a Marxist he was. "Business" green not so much.
I think this highlights one of our modern day problems.
In the past such thinking was badly punished in markets. Such thinking is now rewarded by governments.
Some good comments follow the article, including one from former ft science correspondent.
James was tweeting for another name for sceptics, mist if the replies were derogatory.
I just suggested - the Chinese
Every single comment on his blog, so far, gives him a kick in the nuts! He'll have to rally the faithful to come to his aid!
Scaggly CAGWy sat on a wall.
Scaggly CAGWy had a great fall.
All the green forces and all the great guld,
Couldn't make CAGWy put fear in the gulled.
=================
The lot it has aplenty indeed!!! However, please, somebody tell me what the hell is a Climate Sceptic or a Climate Denier? Is there anybody out there who denies or is sceptical about climate? The issue appears not what the Climate is doing, but what are the likely causes of perceived changes. He seems to forget that the last Ice-Age ended 12,000 years ago or thereabouts, it was warmer than today back then, Inter-glacials only seem to last for between 10,000-15,000 years, so we're on borrowed time, the last 4 Inter-glacials were warmer than today by about 5°C, that nowhere in the last half-billion years when we had nearly 20 times the CO2 in the atmoshpere was there any runaway Global Warming, & that changes in levels of atmospheric CO2 always followed changes in temperature, well all according to the data that is! When Arctic (with bear) sea-ice declines Antarctic (without bear) sea-ice increases near proportionately to the loss. Then again if you have an X-Box 360 Lara Croft fantasy puter world, anything can happen. As to replacing old & flawed technology, with what precisely? New & even more flawed technology? More importantly, before I thank the Corrupt Fossil Fuel Industry for my weekly invisible cheques, the oil industry doesn't give a rip either way as they will profiteer regardless unless they're closed down, which ain't going to happen anytime soon!
Ha Barry - the real deniers revealed. Very good.
The windmills save no CO2 emissions unless we build another 6-7 Dinorwigs pumped by 5-6 nuclear power stations. The solar cells produce half the power claimed. Green jobs are few and mostly semi-skilled. Real jobs are being destroyed in increasing numbers.
"....vast body of science proves..."
Puke.
Thanks for a great link, Your Reverence. Every canard on the AGW farm, quacking away to inspire the True Believer - quite wonderful. Perfect source material for a game of BS Bingo!
A small band of everyone in his comments.
Hilarious. If you changed 'climate sceptic' to 'climate alarmist' throughout, much of that article would actually make sense.
These people simply have no idea why sceptics are indeed sceptical and until they do we will always be a mystery to them.
And we ain't going away!
He writes a heck of a lot on a subject he finds bery boring doesn't he ? Its a bit like me writing about the works of Damien Hirst or the benefits of X-Factor to modern culture.
"A small band of climate sceptics centred on Lord Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) have, through a hugely expert lobbying campaign, convinced an influential and sizable group of Tory MPs and right wing media commentators that climate change is not something to worry about and that efforts to tackle the issue range from a costly waste of time to a diabolical Commie plot."
I thought Bob Ward was a PR 'expert' working for the other side, how can this be ? Oh yes - like DeSmogBlog has nothing but tumbleweed blowing through it's "Expert PR" heart.
"But if they [Business Leaders] want to see green growth accelerate further they might just have roll their sleeves up and wade into the muddy waters of this debate."
You want then to pick a side ? Deluded.
I gave up at this point.
What nonsense he writes, for example
"The first is the environmental campaigner George Monbiot's killer question, what would it take to convince you that you are wrong?
Any honest person can answer this question. On the scientific side of the debate compelling, peer-reviewed, evidence demonstrating either that climate change is not happening, or that mankind is not driving it would convince the vast majority of environmentalists that they had been mistaken."
As usual the vocal environmentalist has no understanding of the scientific method. The scientific question sould be what is the evidence which support CAGW. If you make up a hypothesis then you have to demonstrate its vailidity. The CAGW crowd continual try to turn this around just as the religious fundamentalists do.
Since the vast majority of environmentalists are not scientists and are politically motivated, they could easily be mistaken.
In the pay of Big Oil.
The biggest conspiracy story of them all.
@ Don Keiller
"Murray is seriously delusional."
Nope. Murray is doing what it takes to earn his monthly pay cheque. You have seen politicians arguing a lost cause before - remember the 'identity card'?
He knows as well as we do that the game is up - but he has to either go through the motions or resign. And he likes the money too much...
To Monbiot's/Murray's question, 'what would it take to convince you that you are wrong?', my answer is the same as it would be, fifty years hence, even if we were standing together on a raft made from the carcasses of dead polar bears at the entirely melted North Pole, floating on water 100 meters above what it is now... What stinks, James, is your politics.
Murray and his crew do not recognise their perspective as political -- as being grounded in certain ideas about the world and society's relationship with it which are far from scientific. It's these presuppositions of environmentalism than colour his view of the science, leading to his over stating it. Accordingly, his understanding of scepticism is no more sophisticated than the view that they argue only one thing: that there's 'no such thing as climate change'. It's a view that has become concrete in his mind by ignoring any view to the contrary. The corollary of his over-simplification of climate scepticism is that everything he thinks -- his entire perspective -- is legitimised on the basis that 'climate change is happening'.
If there was any sign that Murray and his staff were capable of -- never mind interested in -- debate, almost every post on my blog would be about articles on Business Green. Murray might find such a prospect annoying, but that's the point of democracy -- it is annoying that in order to get other people to do what you want them to do, you have to make your claims stand up to criticism, and scrutiny. And hostile criticism and scrutiny at that. In other words, it's not enough to be right about climate change, environmentalism -- i.e. politics -- is not given a mandate by objectivity, science or Mother Nature herself. Environmentalists like Murray have only convinced themselves that it is.
The myopia towards his own politics causes his sense of proportion to fail, and his analyses to become afflicted by a fatal case of innumeracy. For instance, following the Gleick/Heartland affair, Murray whinged about special interests, as though Business Green didn't serve special interests itself, and that its parent company had no interest in the interests of the special interests that Murray blamed for scepticism... http://www.climate-resistance.org/2012/02/true-colours-of-business-green.html Never mind special interests; Business Green is simply a cascade of special pleading.
Following the revision of the FITs rate for domestic solar PV, Murray also whinged that 25,000 jobs were at risk. If this figure were true, as I pointed out this would mean that,
Yet Murray pretends that green energy 'creates jobs'. Nobody believes that.
From the article:
None of those purported benefits require man made climate change to act as a vehicle for the policies being called for. Imo markets are constantly trying to achieve those things anyway. Stable energy prices means you can budget in advance. Greater efficiency makes us all wealthier and makes resources go further. Innovation will occur whether the state is splashing our taxes around or not. Stop dressing up politics as science.
IIRC Greg Craven makes the same fundamental mistake in excluding the outcome that the changes in our lives, societies and economies that are being demanded by CAGW advocates could be negative. The article even takes on board the point that opportunity cost results in spending money on windmills rather than better water, food and medical treatment for the poorest people on the planet but dismisses it arbitrarily.
Comparing the present desire for a green revolution with industrial and technological revolutions of the past is to massively and insidiously distract from the former requiring a strong state and high taxation while the latter did not. If the benefits of a green economy are self evident they do not need subsidy.
My comment to BG...
------
There seems little point revisiting James' economic, political, and scientific illiteracy here. This is revealing though...
"Like the original Luddites and their countless descendants through history, they resist technological progress because it makes them feel scared and insecure, clinging to any theory, no matter how crackpot, that helps to justify their position."
The original Luddites weren't afraid of technology or progress; their objection was that the mechanisation of industry left them without work, which in turn left them without food and homes. Hence they wrecked machinery.
James himself has defended renewable energy on the basis that it creates jobs. For instance, he complains in this article -- http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/james-blog/2120891/solar-shambles-leaves-industry-dark -- that 25,000 jobs in the solar PV sector were put at risk by the governments decision to reduce FITS payments. Said James,
"It might look like a small issue, but our revelation yesterday that DECC has failed to second a single representative from the solar industry, and failed to set up a promised government-industry working group, is symptomatic of the manner in which a solar sector that now employs more people than the nuclear industry is being grossly short changed."
Yet the jobs within the nuclear sector were *far* more productive. In 2009, the UK nuclear generators produced 69,098 gigawatt hours, whereas the UK's solar PV cells produced at most 66 gigawatt hours. in other words, each employee in the solar power sector produced just 300 watts of power -- 2,640 KWh per year.
James should revisit his use of the word 'Luddite' in its pejorative sense in the article above.
Well some politicians need a bit of convincing....Mutinies and Bounties...
http://fenbeagleblog.wordpress.com/2012/09/30/mutinies-and-bounties/
BUSINESSgreen is owned by Incisive Media. their Chair is a senior advisor to Romney's old firm Bain (LOL) and Dep Pres of CBI, which might explain James writing "Significant interventions from business leaders and groups such as the CBI criticising the Conservatives' recent wavering on green issues suggest they could yet be willing to do so:":
Dame Helen Alexander
Dame Helen Alexander is chairman Incisive Media...and senior adviser to Bain Capital. Dame Helen is deputy president of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) having been president until June 2011.
Dame Helen was Chief Executive of the Economist Group till 2008, having joined the company in 1985 and been managing director of the Economist Intelligence Unit from 1993 to 1997...
http://www.incisivemedia.com/static/dame-helen-alexander
James is merely the facecard:
Tim Weller
Tim is the founder of Incisive Media and is Group Chief Executive.
Tim was a member of the Shadow Cabinet New Enterprise Council, which advised George Osborne on business and enterprise prior to the 2010 General Election.
Tim is currently chairman of E-Trader Group, the UK’s leading online provider of solutions to market and sell surplus and returned assets on behalf of retailers and wholesalers.
http://www.incisivemedia.com/static/tim-weller
a good laugh:
26 June: Guardian CIF: Environmentalism is not a religion
Of all the nonsense climate change deniers throw at the green movement, there one criticism that does real damage, says James Murray
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/26/climate-change-skeptic-religion
20 Sept: News Ltd: AAP: The $60 trillion push to turn funds green
A GLOBAL project aims to encourage pension and superannuation fund members to shift some of their $60 trillion in savings into funds that support clean and green technology.
Deutsche Bank estimates less than two per cent of money held by pension, superannuation and sovereign wealth funds is invested in low-carbon assets.
Now the independent, not-for-profit Asset Owners Disclosure Project (AODP) is asking the world's largest 1000 asset owners to reveal how they are addressing climate change and the "green economy"...
http://www.news.com.au/business/breaking-news/the-60-trillion-push-to-turn-funds-green/story-e6frfkur-1226483864148
rebuffed and not taken lightly by the head of AODP, rightwing former leader of the Australian Liberal Party:
26 Sept: Asset Owners Disclosure Project: Investor Groups reject independent disclosure of climate risk management, and civil Society
“Given the magnitude and urgency of the climate challenge, this rejection by the Investor Groups is disappointing and dangerous from an industry that should be much more transparent and accountable to its members” said AODP Chair Dr John Hewson AM.
“It is time for these climate Investor Groups to help walk the talk within their own industry as despite some useful advocacy real material disclosure from funds has hardly moved forward at all.”...
The Investor groups, who are the IIGCC in Europe, INCR in the USA and IGCC in Oceania. and have several trillion of funds in their membership including many funds who are perceived to be leaders in managing climate risk.
Hewson Added “How is it other than hypocritical for these groups to demand independent disclosure of the companies they invest in, but when it comes to their own transparency, to want to play by a different set of rules? Also, they cannot continue to be gatekeepers for reluctant funds who may be members of these types of organisation but are actually doing very little to invest more responsibly”
“These are the same groups that have been working with the successful and important Carbon Disclosure Project that seeks independently managed disclosure from companies on similar issues. We urge their members individually to now disassociate themselves from this lack of openness, and work with ourselves and civil society to publicly demonstrate who is really acting over climate change and who is not”...
The AODP is chaired by former leader of the Australian conservative Liberal Party Dr John Hewson AM with Board members including the General Secetary of the ITUC Sharan Burrows, the former head of risk at Goldman Sachs Bob Litterman and Dr Andrew Hilton OBE, Director of the London based Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation.
http://aodproject.net/index.php/news/49-investor-groups-reject-independent-disclosure-of-climate-risk-management-and-civil-society
uh oh...
29 Sept: The Reference Frame: Lubos Motl: Gore’s investment firm: no green investments
Bill Gunderson, the president of Gunderson Capital Management, has looked at the portfolio of Al Gore’s investment management firm, Generation Investment Management. In fact, you can look at the list yourself; it’s at the SEC website…LINK…
You may check every individual company listed over there – I haven’t done so but Gunderson claims that none of them is concerned with carbon reduction or alternative energy sources. In particular, none of the companies produces solar panels, wind turbines, or biofuels. Instead, what you find are mundane commercial real estate, biotech, and healthcare companies, aside from Amazon, Procter and Gamble, Colgate Palmolive, Polypore (whose stocks they doubled: production of membranes for batteries and filters), and others...
http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/09/gores-investment-firm-no-green.html
Get over to James' [sic] Blog and say it. Many of the Boys from BH (I refuse “the BH boys” since it can lead to misunderstanding if pronounced in a hurry) have already been there, nice as pie and twice as nourishing.
OK, this recommendation will give him the excuse to talk of an organised conspiracy, but so what? So far he is refusing all dialogue. How long can that continue? When there are hundreds of reasonable posts from sceptics, and he still hasn’t replied, what will he look like?
Incidentally, I disagree entirely with our host’s assumption that the pressure is getting to James, or anyone else on the warmist side. He displays all the insouciance of a Charles or Louis (which doesn’t mean that we’ve won, or that he’s necessarily for the chop).
pat,
Could you please be so kind as to report your news tips to the Unthreaded? That's what everyone else does. The idea is to keep the threads ON topic and uncluttered, you see?
When these nasty and vicious skeptics are finally silenced, maybe they should get jobs in advertising. With tiny budgets they are able to convince millions, despite being so thoroughly wrong :)
Geoff -- I disagree entirely with our host’s assumption that the pressure is getting to James, or anyone else on the warmist side.
I'm not sure about your conclusion here. Why waste the effort, of so many words as James has thrown up, if there is no anxiety driving it? In the video on the previous post, there is a similar claim that sceptics have created a 'strategic problem' of some kind. Environmentalists have needed the myth of a "hugely expert lobbying campaign" behind scepticism. As it happens, Murray is talking about two men with minimal resources, in a tiny, dusty old office a few meters away from the contrasting buildings of the RS, which directs a budget of many millions. Peiser and Lawson must be hugely expert indeed to pull off the campaign that Murray believes. Not to belittle the GWPF, but Murray's account of them is a fantasy.
That need for conspiracy theories to explain the failure of environmentalism is driven by some sense of anxiety about their own lack of mandate, and the lack of legitimacy for their project. Their incapacity for debate, and their refusal to even consider that they might have to convince anyone of a positive argument betrays, not self-confidence, but its absence.
Pollutocrat is really good, first pejorative that i'd be comfortable answering to.
I can remember flying into Mexico City in 1980, taking a deep breath and thinking, Wow, this place must really be humming.
Insouciance really? Interesting. If this is him being insouciant then I’d love to see him when the pressure gets to him, he must be Jack Torrance bug nuts crazy on those occasions ;)
As it is that piece is just incoherent drivel to my eyes. He shows no convincing honesty of purpose for why he has even written it. From the start it is a bloviating pose about being reluctantly drawn into talking about a “boring” subject that doesn't interest him. As he gets going the rattling gets louder until he is all over the place with no anchor.
People like him don’t have an innovative or creative bone in their body -they know they depend on something that could be taken from them by the state because that is the situation they need like junkies - so they constantly wear their jittery angst on their sleeves. When he talks about the “boring” subject he is talking about the dissent that he sees as detracting from his own well-being. It is the kind of cry of powerlessness that an actual confident, innovative, creative people doesn’t suffer from. The fact he can personalise this to a group called “sceptics” makes is easier for him to direct his angst that’s all.
It is always projection with these non-entities - so when Murray says things like accusing his opponents of “protect[ing] their vested interests” this makes me suspect he has just had some bad news about some failed fix of a rent-seeking venture ;)
Nice post by Mr James Murray, the editor of Business Green website. Replace "climate deniers" by "Pagan abiding natives" and you have the narrative of the conquistadores when they eradicated the Inca people. "They do not know, so we will educate them or make them irrelevant".
What an arrogancy!
- - - - - -
Barry Woods,
'Independent and Critical Thinker' is a better name than Skeptic, with the emphasis on independent.
Independence is a necessary precondition of scientific skepticism.
John
- - - - - -
By critical in my alternate name for skeptic, I mean critical as the kind of thinking that CRU's Phil Jones did not like applied to his research work:
That kind of critical is skeptically scientific.
John
Pat
Your posts were on topic and loaded with great info, sHx does not run this blog and long may that continue to be the case..
James Murray
One assumes the article was aimed at sceptics since preaching to the converted would indeed be boring. However I have never seen so many words directed at a group which bores him about a subject (scepticism) which bores him. Time to visit the shrink mate.
Goodness me, reading an article like this and comprehending the language, manner and views contained therein; its satisfying to know that the author does not share the same perspective as "sceptics."
Reminds me of Darkness at Noon, the righteousness of the cause justifies the means...and look where that went
If the case for green technology were so clear, the Market would have spoken by now. The fact that vast subsidies are a requirement for success should be a tip-off. I suggest that rather than try to shout more and more loudly, he seek to understand - rather than convince. When he looks, he shall see that it ain't all that clear....and that the straw men arguments are meant to deflect and deceive from the facts of the matter.
Ben, Leopard
No doubt James’s waste of words is driven by anxiety: no doubt he is rattled and is wearing his angst on his sleeve. What I disagree with is the idea that the pressure is getting to the warmists in any political sense. They’ll suffer nervous breakdowns before they concede the argument, and the power that goes with it.
When your whole political career, or your income, depends on defending the thesis that the world is flat, you can’t get out of it by conceding that maybe it’s just a little bit bent. All you can do is declare that the argument is boring and refuse to engage. You’ll miss out on discovering America, but so what? Everyone that matters agrees with you and the subsidies will keep flowing - until the world discovers that Barry Woods (above, Oct 3, 2012 at 4:15 PM) is right, and the correct word for sceptic is “Chinese”.
Got to applaud Barry Woods.....
Oct 3, 2012 at 4:15 PM | Barry Woods
indeed, the correct word for skeptic is "Chinese"
compare UK and China (and India, etc.) on CO2 emissions trajectories and ask what possible point there is in blighting the beauties of the UK coastlines, highlands, and villages with windmill towers....
Over at Twitter, James is trying to spin the high number of sceptic comments (93%) as kind of badge of honour @James_BG
Murray appears to be on the extreme limit of the warmist distribution, those for whom only Apocalypse will be sufficient adequately to feed their hatred of mankind. Perhaps we should offer him and the others of his persuasion an unusual but perfectly logical opportunity, exile to St. Kilda, abandoned in the late 1930s, there to live useful, self-sufficient lives.
The lesser-educated green (LEG) usually fails to understand skepticism because actually he fails to understand his own position. The LEG believes in social justice. Fair, equal, are concepts to him inherently good. Global justice - the rich becoming a bit poorer so the poor can become a bit richer, seems to him how we ought to be progressing, part of a bunch of propositions so self-evident they need no argument. So he struggles to cope with poorer members of richer societies saying 'eff off' to his self-evidently correct ideas. So his answer is not to re-visit his views, and ask himself whether 'is what I think ought to be done actually that which ought to be done' but to think, 'how can I tell these people to eff off myself and force through my self-evidently correct ideas?' And the answer of course, is invent/distort some science, which will serve well enough for fooling the baboons in Rotherham, who will have no answer to its imperatives. Which works fine until some non-baboons come along and start saying the science is balls. At which point the whole Progressive panoply of denigration has to be wheeled out against such people. Not (climate) scientists; Stupid; Big Oil; wrong journal - whatever works. In short, the author of this piece is less attacking deniers, but advocating 'global justice' or some other nebulous idea which appeals greatly to himself.
Don't you just love the expression on James Murray's face at the top of his blog?
'He's angry 'cause he cares!'
Re: Ben Pile
At 300w per day per employee, why not get them "pedalling for the environment"
The pedal-a-watt produces 200w per hr (http://www.gizmag.com/the-pedal-a-watt-stationary-bike-power-generator-create-energy-and-get-fit/13433/)
We could even subsidise the great and the good to put exercise farms on their land to boost the rural economy.. /sarc off
It is only a small point but it goes, I think, to questions of integrity, and that is the way Lord Lawson's views are misrepresented. Lawson's argument has always been, I believe, that the economic costs of fighting climate change rather than adapting, especially but not only when the scientific basis is disputed, are simply unjustifiable.
Not everybody can get paid to insult people, however much he claims to dislike doing so. [And it appears to me that he is paid.] I think he should be pleased. Not every editor has the luxury of issuing such a tirade yet receive in reply articulate rejections of his ignorant rants.
If he ever needs to apply for another job in journalism it may do him no harm to claim that his words are able to attract the attentions of sensible, educated people. Advertisers like the so called ABC1's.
What do the Chinese really think, about the West's CAGW concerns?
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“..China’s most senior climate change official surprised a summit in India when he questioned whether global warming is caused by carbon gas emissions and said Beijing is keeping an “open mind”
Xie Zhenhua was speaking at a summit between the developing world’s most powerful countries, India, Brazil, South Africa and China, which is now the largest emitter of carbon dioxide, the gas believed to be responsible for climate change.
But Mr Xie, China’s vice-chairman of national development and reforms commission, later said although mainstream scientific opinion blames emissions from industrial development for climate change, China is not convinced.
“There are disputes in the scientific community. We have to have an open attitude to the scientific research. There’s an alternative view that climate change is caused by cyclical trends in nature itself. We have to keep an open attitude,” he said…” (Telegraph)
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Links are in the following (Guardian reported Xie aswell, foreign correspondents not UK team)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/18/what-else-did-the-97-of-scientists-say/