Bishop Hill The foolishness of the overqualified
Dec 17, 2013 Climate: Sceptics Climate: WG3 Jonathan Rowson has a golden collection of academic qualifications, having got himself a first class honours in PPE, spent a year at Harvard and got a PhD from Bristol. Oh yes, and he's a chess grandmaster.
I'm not sure he isn't a bit slow on the uptake though.
The Climate Change Collaboration, an alliance of Sainsbury family charities have just paid Rowson to produce a sceptic-bashing report under the banner of the Royal Society of Arts. Seeing another formerly distinguished academy dancing to the green tune is fascinating, particularly when the financial reward for doing so is so obvious, but when you see the tone of the report it is more interesting still. This is in essence an extended exercise in name-calling, with "denier" and its variants appearing hundreds of times. What we have then is green charities paying an education charity to spew venom at people who disagree with them.
You get the impression that the money has been pocketed and the report prepared with a minimum of effort:
‘Denialism’ is more assertive, involving campaigns of misinformation seeking to misdirect people’s attention from the truth with means and methods documented in Oreskes and Conway’s classic work Merchants of Doubt and in modern Britain, propounded by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Given that Lawson and Peiser have said repeatedly that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the denier tag simply will not wash. Did Rowson even bother to look at their pronouncements before writing this sentence? It doesn't look as if he felt his paymasters would be bothered at the lack of some support for such a critical remark or even if it were true. This tells us a great deal the intellectual and ethical standards at the RSA and at the Sainsbury charities.
Rowson, like so many of people who venture into the climate debate from the social science side are unashamedly ignorant about what the climate debate is about. It doesn't matter how many articles you write about climate sensitivity, with all that implies; to the Rowson's of this world you are a denier. This failure to engage with the actual arguments made suggests a highly developed sense of intellectual cowardice or the kind of casual dishonesty that we see so often from greens.
I fancy it's the former. The whole thing is intellectually vapid and so far removed from the reality of the climate debate as to suggest the author simply had nothing better to do with his time.
Reader Comments (111)
"Has the UK tax system become so degraded that any lobby group can call themselves that and get tax privileges? When did that happen?"
IIRC, the Charities Act passed by the Labour govt in 2006(?), unopposed by clueless Cameron, gave 'charities' greater freedom to campaign for things.
@Martin A: Your post was very good. I too have an engineering background but with a lot of applied science, including the optical physics of highly dispersed two phase systems. Hence I have been able to delve deeply into Climate Alchemy.
It is flawed at its most basic level. Thus Sagan misunderstood the Venusian atmosphere because his aerosol optical physics is wrong. His black body surface IR assumption is also wrong, as any engineer will confirm. To hind-cast such flawed physics is egregious folly only made possible by the desperate attempts of lefty politicians to destroy Capitalism.
I'd like to suggest that using the term "denier" should result in a ban from this forum. It's deliberately obnoxious behaviour. If you don't like it here then leave. If you want to discuss then discuss. If you want to deliberately annoy, then be banned.
Just been following up some of Barry's links above on George Marshall and indeed it is the chap in the "How to talk..." video.
I had thought he would be either a private individual with an axe to grind or a 3rd rate poly lecturer doing "Environmental Studies" or similar. But no, he's quite a bigwig in the Climate scene by the looks of it. On the CaCC board with Monbiot and Lucas and what looks like a lifetime of sticking his nose into other peoples business. More here:
Annoying twit
Oh and he only "rarely" flies. So that's all right then. New York, California and Venezuala mentioned (how rare); they just can't help bragging about their jaunts can they? He even interviewed victims of Hurricane (thought it wasn't?) Sandy, I bet they were pleased to see him.
So that's yet another prominent but deeply unimpressive person on the alarmist side. If any readers do come across anyone convincing and/or admirable who believes in all this stuff do please let us know.
(Oh and I hope he's pursued this career on his own dime...although I rather suspect I'll have contributed to it somewhere along the line)
As a chemistry graduate, the spectroscopic properties of molecules that absorb and emit in the IR are well known to me, yet I have grave doubts about GHG theory. Even some sceptics regard those who question GHG theory as "deniers".
The problem, I believe is not so much about the IR activity of CO2, but all the other assumptions that contribute to GHG theory in its totality. There are lots of assumptions. The magnitude of GHG warming is calibrated according to the actual surface temperature of about 14 degrees and the temperature it should be if there was no GHG effect.
The science is broadly based on established laws, which is why the establishment swallows the whole story. But, my belief is that the established laws may not apply to our complex climate. For a start, the earth is not a black body. It has albedo due to clouds, ice and other factors. The sea, covering two thirds of the planet, is transparent to short wave radiation. It is not a black body radiator by any stretch of the imagination. There are lots of assumptions and I believe that climate scientists with a warming agenda have found it very convenient to quote the established ideas while ignoring the awkward questions.
I really do believe that GHG theory is badly flawed. Given the current lack of correlation with GHG concentration, this is the elephant in the room. Those who refute this are the deniers.
I paid six deniers for a pair of 10 denier tights in Denier, France.
I really do believe that GHG theory is badly flawed. Given the current lack of correlation with GHG concentration, this is the elephant in the room. Those who refute this are the deniers.
Dec 18, 2013 at 8:40 PM | Unregistered CommenterSchrodinger's Cat
I think that, possibly, you meant to say "Those who dispute this are the deniers" since to refute something means to demonstrate conclusively that it is false ?
My big problem with the GHG hypothesis is that its computations seems to be based on the assumption that radiative transfer is the dominant mechanism, whereas convection and latent heat of condensation are probably far more significant, except at the very final point, where energy finally departs as photons destined to got to the far corners of the universe.
Time for a test case under the Public Order Act 1994?
,blockquote>A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he—
(a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or
(b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,
thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.
this guy is taking the p*ss/having a larf - see below from page 62 -
Defining ‘climate change’
It is hard to know how people understand the term ‘climate change’ and how stable and informed that understanding is. There has been some work exploring ‘mental models’ of climate change and how it relates to weather,136 how the term differs from global warming,137 and how knowledgeable people are about the science of climate change138 and a recent review of qualitative studies suggested there is ‘great variation and sometimes direct contradiction between these pieces of research. This not only points to a need for further refinement in our knowledge of public understanding and engagement, but also simply to accept that no one theory will explain the variation in human experience of climate change and action in response to it. 139
While we regularly ask the public for their views on climate change; how important it is to them, what they think we should do about it and so forth, we should keep in mind that aggregate views in response to ‘climate change’ will hide some very specific and erroneous interpretations.
Consider the following fairly extreme but nonetheless instructive example
from a DEFRA focus group discussion in April 2008, when members of
the group were asked for their initial thoughts on climate change:
‘I think taking the oil out of the ground, that was a buffer to keeping the
centre of the earth stable, but it’s pushing that out. If you take all that out,
there’s nothing else going back in, so I think it could very well be the oil
surrounding the crust of the earth is the buffer to keeping everything cool.
What we need to do is put all the oil back in and we’ll get over climate
change. Whether anybody else has got any ideas on that, I don’t know.’
Participant in DEFRA group discussion, April 2008140"
instructive example !!! god (the elite) help us all (the foolish public).
ps. Bish, delete if already covered.
> I'd like to suggest that using the term "denier" should result in a ban from this forum. It's deliberately obnoxious behaviour. If you don't like it here then leave. If you want to discuss then discuss. If you want to deliberately annoy, then be banned.
What about "denial" James? Take for instance the title:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2013/12/10/daveys-heroic-denial.html
Was Davey denying CO2 as a GHG, BTW?
"One corollary of facing up to stealth denial is that we should turn more of our attention instead to those who, like the author of this report, fully accept the moral imperative to act, but continue to live as though it were not there."
....such as Al Gore, James Cameron, Pachari (and the entire IPCC crowd who schedule meetings in exotic places), James Hansen who jets around the world spreading alarmism, George Clooney, et al.