Bishop Hill Oxford professors and the poor
May 22, 2013 Climate: Allen Climate: Sceptics Climate: sensitivity Matt Ridley Yesterday Myles Allen posted a highly personal attack on Matt Ridley. The Guardian has apparently failed to respond to Matt's requests to allow him to respond (I am reminded of their publication of Bob Ward's hit piece on me back in 2009, when it took days to get them to reply to me and weeks before the response was published). This being the case Matt has asked me to post the following:
Dear Professor Allen,
In your polemical Guardian article on Tuesday you produce no counter-arguments to my Times article. For example, you ask: "Is Ridley right that there is no actual evidence of harm as long as droughts, floods and storms are within historic variability?" You then do not answer that question. Well, am I right or not?
You then say:
Where Ridley may well be right is that if you are confident that citizens of 2065 will be rich enough and smart enough to cope with whatever we bequeath to them; or if you really don't care about unborn generations anyway (what have unborn generations ever done for me?); or if, like Bjorn Lomborg, you discount future damages to give very little weight to anything that happens after 2065; or if you firmly believe that the "second coming" will occur before 2065 anyway – then there probably isn't much point in trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. These are perfectly coherent ethical positions: they don't happen to be positions that I subscribe to, but if that is what Ridley thinks, so be it.
This is manifestly dishonest. To find out what I think, try reading my article rather than making up fantastic and absurd stories and then saying "if that is what Ridley thinks…". Where did I mention anything remotely like a "second coming"? Where did I imply that I "don't care about unborn generations", when I made the exact opposite point? Why did you choose to distort my argument that the citizens of 2060 will be able to cope with mild climate change into a quite different point -- "cope with whatever we bequeath them"? And why did you choose to ignore the point I clearly made that climate policy is doing more economic and ecological harm to the poor today than climate change itself, and will do so for several more decades?
Not only do I care very much about my children and potential grandchildren, which is why I do not want to burden them with biomass power stations and wind turbines that drive up energy costs, spoil landscapes and exacerbate rainforest destruction. But I also care about poor people alive today, whom you do not mention. Climate change policies are killing nearly 200,000 people a year by subsidizing bio-energy and driving up food prices.[1] Fuel poverty is being driven up by subsidies for wind energy — this may not trouble Oxford professors, but it is a real issue for many people. Hard-pressed south-east Northumberland, where I live, has just lost 500 jobs at an aluminium plant because (in the words of Civitas) “the smelter’s long-term viability is critically undermined by the government’s energy policies”.
Although you describe the climate debate as acrimonious, you will find no ad hominem attacks on you or distortions of your position in my Times article. For anybody, let alone a scientist purporting to speak with scientific authority, to write an article as vicious and misleading as this is frankly despicable. It exemplifies the sort of innuendo journalism that the Leveson report rightly criticised. Until this week I had considerable respect for you, having followed some of your work and disagreed only with the political interpretations you put on it. Now you have lost my respect.
Yours sincerely,
Matt Ridley
Reader Comments (81)
Be a bit easy on poor Miles - it must be a scary time for him when his Damascus moment may be so close.
Emotional arguments (filtered information) are easier than intellectual augments (all information), it's easier to appeal to the animal half of the brain than the cognitive.
Well done Matt as always a very thought full piece, it makes me think.
Careful Matt, or you may be the subject of Stephen Lewandowsky's next paper :)
Read the comments after Myles' article! Do they ever get beyond personal attacks on Ridley or constructing absurd ideas of what sceptics believe?
So, in that vein, may I just point out that Myles' article is little better than third form drivel; this is a national newspaper, so in that context is that the best an Oxford professor can do these days?
I do not see why we should be easy on Myles Allen. He is grown up who knows what he has done and said. He has done well out out the alarmism both on a personal and professional level. He has done his fair share of scare mongering - remember the 11C temperature increase by his ClimatePrediction.Net - remember the floods alarm - remember his comments on the climate enquiries, etc.
Myles Allen is steeped in the CAGW alarmism and was enthusiatic contributer to it. He clearly is sitting on the fence so he can jump onto the side that will survive. I personally find his behaviour duplicitous and dishonest.
Once again, a superb riposte from the crystal-clear thinking of Dr Ridley. He clearly shows that the threshold of Professor Allen's dishonesty has been traversed; we just don't know when or where.
Was the Myles Allen piece really a 'highly personal attack'?
It's just wrong on almost every point, almost comically in some places, and poorly thought through, from someone who ought to know better.
This Myles Allen article in the Guardian (where else) was very much along the same lines as quite a few others recently from the alarmists. Their science has been exposed as "not robust" as Marcott et al may say and some like Allen have nothing to offer but ad hominem.
What this tells us about about the plummeting standards at Oxford University will only be confirmed if this once fine institution allows this behavior to continue.
'Hard-pressed south-east Northumberland, where I live, has just lost 500 jobs at an aluminium plant because (in the words of Civitas) “the smelter’s long-term viability is critically undermined by the government’s energy policies”.'
Such problems exist worldwide, and by example, in New Zealand, the famous Greenie paradise.
The aluminium smelter at Tiwai Point near Invercargill, New Zealand reputedly produces the purest aluminium in the World. It is owned by Rio Tinto and is supplied with electricity by Meridian Energy, a wholly owned NZ Government generating company. Power generation is by hydro (which incidentally is 60% of all electricity generation in NZ) and wind sources, the latter a more recent addition.
NZ Government and its RET policies have led to the unsustainable cost of electrical power, ironic when one considers that 60% is from renewables, and built by the taxes of previous generations of New Zealanders. The consequence of the over-inflated cost of electricity, together with a decline in the aluminium commodity price, has left the aluminium smelter struggling. And its days are indeed numbered, but NOT terminally until the Government sells off 49% off the Meridian Energy power company in a public float, due very soon!
The public float will of course be conducted after Rio Tinto have 'agreed' an interim power price with Meridian Energy (the NZ Government ) and therefore ensured short term commercial stability, until the public share float takes place. Earlier this year, the smelter announced that the cost of electricity provided to them by Meridian (the NZ Government) was unsustainable and would result in their imminent closure together with the immediate loss of 700 jobs, and a wider job loss estimated at 3000, a catastrophic blow to the local economy.
In this terrible, terrible mess, the long suffering tax payers of New Zealand were screwed when their pension funds and taxes were used to fund the building of the hydro scheme. They are being actively screwed by the over inflated prices of RET twisted power prices. They will be screwed again when they are 'sold' what they built in the first place, and they will be endlessly screwed, over and over in the future by ever rising power prices, the loss of jobs, decline of communities and the whole scintillating enchilada of Green impoverishment.
But of course we are saving the planet.
It is very sad to read this item on Allen & the previous ones on Donoughue & Hansen & note the depths to which public scientific "debate" on AGW have been reduced to. Another example of poor argument (but written in a far more gentlemanly manner) is Iain Martin in the FT today, who asks if so many scientists can be wrong.
It was this unwillingness by the "Warmists" to engage in proper scientific debate which initially led me to look into the matter & draw my own conclusions.
The more ad hominum attacks I see, the more convinced I become of the correctness of my understanding & of the absolute weakness of the AGW case. They clearly have no scientific arguments left to present.
I wonder where we would be in this debate if we didn't have the Internet to communicate by.
Picture a boot, stamping on your face........forever.
Well as predicted in the previous Sensitivity thread our opponents next move was called correctly.
"Aha, so you agree with the new sensitivity range, therefore you agree with all the rest of climate science so lets move on and debate what we should do about this impending disaster".
Instead of interpreting the sceptic case as, "look, even if we accept CO2 as a control knob you were still way out".
But the bit after that beggars belief, is it one of those robot generated texts. How else could you fit "think of the children", "the second coming", "casino bouncer" into an article on Ridley's original.
And yet again we see floor to ceiling "ranges of uncertainty" allow Allen to move seamlessly from his preposterous 11C previous prediction to the new much lower range without so much as a by your leave.
And this guy is an Oxford professor? Who performs the quality control on that? Serious question.
As the alarmist case is dismantled it is the failure to call these clowns to account for their previous scaremongering that is going to boil my urine.
Allen said: "... if you really don't care about unborn generations anyway (what have unborn generations ever done for me?) ... if that is what Ridley thinks, so be it."
Sounds personal to me.
What a sorry spectacle Myles Allen has made of himself with this presumably hastily written piece in The Guardian! It displays some of the moral and intellectual poverty so readily found in climate alarmism.
A discerning visitor newly landed from Mars could scarcely fail to note the differences in calibre and tone between it and the earlier piece by Matt Ridley to which it refers.
Perhaps even earthlings who read the Guardian will draw similar conclusions, especially those for whom it may be a revelation that respectable people have a respectable case to make against the panic that we have had to endure for decades from politicians whose ears, and brains, seem to have been commandeered by voices shouting scary claims about the climate system with an incredible degree of assurance. If so, some good may come from this spat.
The whole thing is not a personal attack, but it has personal attacks in it.
This is what happens if you try to go lukewarm. You are not going to one-up these folks in the game of 'caring for the grandchildren', They invented the whole thing. They have been playing it for three decades. You can't walk up to them and say 'well, the sensitivity is not zero but a little less so you can ease up on the grandchildren'.
Myles says we have a more interesting 'debate' about 'regional impacts'. Well, he can have his 'revenge' on those who disagree with him by calculating horrible impacts in the regions they live in. 'Ahhh. That'll show them'.
If the Guardian refuses responses, take them to the PCC. They have to provide space. Myles Allen comes here and comments, doesn't he?
The capacity of the warmista for self parody never ceases to amaze.
Myles Allen is a professor?
At Oxford?
Mind you - what is geosystem science for goodness sakes?
My, my, standards have dropped, my real concern is for the poor students who have to listen to his drivelling rot.
I read Allen's piece, it was churlish and childish stuff and then later on that night I saw Owen Jones wittering on some newspaper review item - and mulling over Myles Allen Guardian piece, I thought can people really set store in what either of these two children utter?
50 years ago, such as Myles Allen would have been 'skewered' in an Oxford lecture hall.
Why should anyone go easy on Matt Ridley? Given how asleep he was as Chairman of Northern Rock, I'm surprised anyone gives him the time of day.
Is this not the same Miles Allen who has just contributed to a paper showing a not-at-all-scary-but-probably-beneficial computation on sensitivity? Shurely shome mishtake?
'Where Ridley may well be right is that if you are confident that citizens of 2065 will be rich enough and smart enough to cope with whatever we bequeath to them...'
Professor Allen commits the fallacy, common in the IPCC exercise, of assuming that future generations will be affluent enough to be able to adapt. The emissions scenarios assume just that: economic growth will drive emissions growth, which will drive climate change. But then they assume that humanity will be just as vulnerable as it is now - ignoring such realities as malaria being virtually unknown when per capita GDP exceeds about $US3,500.
If he is concerned about trade-offs between generations, he might like to ponder the point that Stern discounted the future so little that half the costs that rendered immediate action positive in cost-benefit terms occurred after the year 2,800. Should we really sacrifice heavily for the benefit of such generations?
Oh! all those crocodile tears for the unborn. These clowns will be bequeathing the unborn outrageous amounts of public debt because of our current profligacy -- no problem.
Allen's article has an air of panic about it. The wild extrapolations of Matt Ridley's comments and the false attributions of motives read like hysterical ravings. With this he completely destroys whatever credibility he may have enjoyed previously, appearing small-minded and spiteful.
It may be he was driven to it by threats to his funding and/or position or, perhaps, he was trying to appeal to the "swivel-eyed loonies" in his own camp to show that he is still onside.
Whatever the reason, he has demeaned himself and, by association, his university patrons.
That is a text book example of an ad hominen argument, billy. Well done!
"if you really don't care about unborn generations anyway": so it's verboten to say that about Keynes but OK to say it about Ridley? Jeeze.
If there is one thing we need to bequeath future generations then it is a detailed history of our mistakes. What they do about that is entirely up to them. If Allen wishes them to have to search out those facts by candlelight then it is he that is condemning them and not those that wish to preserve the gains made by civilisation.
How grateful the warmista elite must be for AutoTrader, keeping their house journal afloat - for the time being, anyway.
Alongside the frantic arm waving in Allen's article is a huge shift in position on climate sensitivity. The IPCC range has long been "2 to 4.5 degrees C" with the commonly expected value being circa 3 degrees C. Myles Allen has neatly shuffled down the scale by characterising the Met Office models, at 2.5 C as "at the top of the current range", citing "the average of current climate models" (upcoming from the next IPCC report) at 1.8 C, and hence finding - don't laugh now - "only" a 30% reduction in expected warming from the Otto report.
This is wildly disingenuous, as all the predictions of climate disaster have been based on the original IPCC range and often on the far flung fringes fringes of that range. Nobody, as far as I know, has produced anything seriously apocalyptic based on a 1.3C climate sensitivity, mainly I'd guess because it would strain credulity just too far. The only item at risk from this degree of warming is the warming bandwagon itself.
The only way that the citizens of 2065 would be too poor to adapt to climate change is via a self-fulfilling prophecy of the Green/Left.
If they can pull off their stunt of destroying the industrial economy with the 'war on carbon', then indeed future generations will be poorer and less able to fend off whatever cooling or warming might take place.
Personally, I don't think they can succeed -- the human survival instinct will stop these fanatics before things go critical. But plenty of pain will be felt before sense sets back in.
This looks like a Josh Hickman-like cartoon moment for Myles. "Ah, the unborn children"
In the meanwhile, this, for what babies are doing out there in the real world, now.
In a way I feel sorry for Professor Allen. The scientist in him has realised that climate sensitivity to CO2 is low, whilst his emotional side still sides with CAGW.
He is walking a mental tightrope- hence his ill-conceived and intemperate outburst.
Bob Ward has written to the Times and in doing so plumbed new depths of cherry-picking dishonesty and hypocrisy. this is what he says I said:
"Lord Ridley’s rather complacent assertion that “climate change will be slow and harmless” is based on turning a blind eye to uncertainties in the science "
This is what I actually said:
"The strong possibility that climate change will be slow and harmless must be taken seriously before we damage more lives, landscapes and livelihoods in its name."
Far from being blind to the uncertainties, I was stressing them. Far from asserting anything, I was suggesting a possibility be taken seriously.
The only people asserting certainty in this area are those who keep telling us that there is no doubt about dangerous warming.
And when will any of these folk even address the issue of the damage done by climate change policies?
John Davis (11:28 AM) -
You are confusing the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS: IPCC AR4 range 2-4.5 K; Otto et al best estimate 2.0 K) with the transient climate response (TCR: range of AR5 models 1.1-2.5 K*; Otto et al. best estimate 1.3 K).
I agree with Prof Allen that the midrange of Otto et al. results are about 30% below the midrange of IPCC estimates (for both TCR and ECS). However, most of the scary scenarios arise from using the upper end of the uncertainty range, with a cost function which increases sharply with higher temperature changes. If the TCR can be confined to a more narrow range, it will provide ammunition to retreat from some of the let's-do-anything counterproductive policies.
*Yes, the highest TCR value (2.5 K) among the 19 models belongs to the Met Office's HadGEM2.
A couple of previous BH postings on Myles Allen:
Myles Allen's ad hominem
Myles Allen on Climategate "That's sad for democracy but it may ultimately be the best for the planet" [last 10 seconds of video]
I'm heartily sick of people pretending to take the moral high ground despite them continuing to use just as many fossil fuels as the rest of us. Allen may well subscribe to the view that he is morally superior but he is not. The poor are having to choose now between heating and eating precisely because of the overhyped catastrophism from his ilk. Is he even an activist out of misplaced angst for unborn generations or more likely just personal aggrandizement?
Alas I can't remember exactly what Myles said at the Lindzen/Oxford Union evening, but I can paraphrase it as: 'We have to stop using fossil fuels, as I and 4,000 other agreed at our meeting in Hobart, Tasmania.'
Well, something like that. The video will be shown on Al Jazeera in June, possibly.
Great links to the old "Arnold Rimmer" threads MartinA, they're hilarious.
He does like his loaded dice doesn't he? Try not to laugh
( I know you've seen it before but it's a good one.)
The only loaded dice in this debate are the GCMs which are consistently too warm.
@rhoda
''We have to stop using fossil fuels, as I and 4,000 other agreed at our meeting in Hobart, Tasmania.'
Are you that you didn't mishear? Perhaps it was
'..as I and all the other climatologists in Club Class agreed on our flight from London to Hobart'?
I suspect that mainstream climate scientists like Allen are suffering from Asch's Conformity.
They all know that what they are saying isn't true, but under the pressure of the group they cannot bring themselves to admit it.
Asch's Conformity
Matt Ridley "when will any of these folk even address the issue of the damage done by climate change policies?"
Never. Because they are shameless idiots.
"What a sorry spectacle Myles Allen has made of himself with this presumably hastily written piece in The Guardian!"
Hastily? Over-tired and emotional comes to mind...
It's depressingly routine for these little Robespierres to substitute moral certainty for scientific certainty.
Buck, Thanks for that link to Asch's Conformity. Inspires confidence in the Jury system, doesn't it?
Tallbloke:
Like Paul Matthews, I have thought that some of the language here has been a bit over the top, including the Bish's intro and the end of Matt Ridley's letter. But I'm also feeling pretty forgiving of strong language, because of the context Rog gives from Matt: "when will any of these folk even address the issue of the damage done by climate change policies?"
I well remember all the incredibly over-the-top criticism of The Great Global Warming Swindle in March 2007. Yet not a single critic even mentioned what was clearly Martin Durkin's passionate motivation for the whole piece: the damage being done by climate policies today, with 100% certainty, to the poor living without electricity and barely able to afford food. Not one person even mentioned this, as if it was the most trivial of all issues, beneath their great status, wealth and comfort to even think about.
I will correct myself and say that John Houghton did mention this at the end of his critique of Swindle - he even ventured that in this Durkin might have a point. Almost as if it was the very first time Sir John had given it thought. Easily the best of the critics, though, in my book, for that very reason.
So for me invective, in this area, is sorely needed. Anything to wake people up to their drastic responsibilities. Thanks Matt, Tallbloke and others.
Myles Allen got very upset with the BBC and Roger Harrabin,even mentioning the 'trick' and 'hide the decine' a while back.. (note adam corner in attendance)
Myles Allen:
"There was nothing - nothing obliged the BBC to flash up those words as this subliminal advertising. I think that was tantamount to libel. Because they knew that the words were going to be misinterpreted. So what you did - whenever you ran a story on Climategate, you flashed up the email with "hide the decline" in it, and you highlighted "trick" and "hide the decline". Okay? And you knew - BBC editors knew, David Shukman knew, that the word "trick" and the word [sic] "hide the decline" was going to be misinterpreted by anybody who happened to be not tripping over the dog and seeing the television at that time.
https://sites.google.com/site/mytranscriptbox/home/20100614_ri
Richard and any other readers who feel that some the language here is a bit OTT may prefer this balanced and diplomatic article on the dispute.
The Oxford Environmental Change Institute (ECI), is part of the School of Geography and the Environment. Myles Allen is leader of the ECI Climate Research Programme and is also in charge of the climateprediction.net project, which came up with the 11 degree figure quoted by others.
His less well known claim to fame is that of advisor to an "educational" computer game called "Fate of the World", in which users have to save the world from climate change. It offers an interesting solution – decide the problem is overpopulation and design a virus to kill millions.
The game's producers said, "Dr Myles Allen, who provided the climate model, pushed us to make sure we included methane as well as CO2, but he did so for game play reasons as well as scientific ones. He pointed out that if we included methane we could include a lot of exciting/scary geo-engineering technologies. That opened up a new set of features for players: who wouldn’t want to be able to risk plunging the Earth into an Ice Age, or cause floods of biblical proportions?"
Oxford ECI was opened in 1991, with geographer Martin Parry as the first Director and is part of the Tyndall network of associated institutes.
Parry's current status can be seen here: http://www.mlparry.com. He is currently a visiting professor at the Imperial Grantham Institute, where Sir Brian Hoskins is director. He was Co-Chair of WGII (Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability) for AR4, for which he had a DEFRA contract as "Martin Parry Associates", worth £330,187. He has a long IPCC career from the first assessment onwards.
A former head of ECI is Diane Liverman, another Geography Professor, who in 2009 set up a new climate institute at Arizona University with Jonathan Overpeck, although she is still a visiting Oxford professor, http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/people/livermandiana.php.
She is a member of "America's Climate Choices" panel, convened to advise the US Government on responses to climate change and became chair of a sub-panel called ˜Informing Effective Decisions and Actions Related to Climate Change".
Also on this panel were John Holdren, the late Stephen Schneider, Susan Solomon and Jane Lubchenco, recent head of NOAA, together with Fred Krupp of Environmental Defense, and Carter Roberts, WWF-US. Liverman studied at NCAR under Schneider.
Both Krupp and Roberts are on the joint Management Committee of the UK Grantham Climate Institutes set up at LSE, (Lord Stern) and Imperial College, (Sir Brian Hoskins).
Another famous name on the Grantham committee is former RS president, Lord Robert May, a Professor at both Oxford and Imperial and a member of the UK Climate Change Committee.
The Oxford ECI (http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk), currently has a top link to a new paper: “What sceptics believe”: "The effects of information and deliberation on climate change scepticism"
http://pus.sagepub.com/content/22/4/396
From the abstract:
"Scepticism about climate change now appears a pervasive social phenomenon. Research to date has examined the different forms that scepticism can take, from outright denial to general uncertainty. Less is known about what climate sceptics value and believe beyond their climate change doubt, as well as how “entrenched” such beliefs are."
Then we have the Grand Old Man of Global Warming, Sir Crsipin Tickell. He is currently on the advisory board of the Oxford ECI and was Warden of Green College, Oxford between 1990 and 1997, where he appointed George Monbiot and Norman Myers as Visiting Fellows. He is a Director of the Global Institute for Sustainability at Arizona University, where the aforementioned Diane Liverman co-directs the Institute of the Environment. John Gummer was previously on the ECI advisory board.
Tickell is also currently a Director of the Policy Foresight Programme at the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization at Oxford University. Its Advisory Council has Lord Stern, former RS president Lord Martin Rees, Pascal Lamy, (EU, now UN) and Joe Stiglitz, (Chief Economist of Socialist International and advisor to Obama). Arianna Huffington is a commissioner, as is Lord Chris Patten.
The Oxford Martin School was founded in 2005 by James Martin, a former member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the U.S. Department of Defense.
It was announced by William Hague on April 9th 2013, that the UK Government’s Global Centre for Cyber Security Capacity Building is to be based at the Oxford Martin School.
It's all happening at Oxford.....
I learned long ago to be wary of anyone using the phrase "think of the children". And that one should be even more wary when the "children" are part of those magical "future generations".
I learned long ago to be wary of anyone using the phrase "think of the children". And that one should be even more wary when the "children" are part of those magical "future generations".
More or less how I feel about the faith-based end of the warmist community, I'm afraid.
May 22, 2013 at 5:18 PM | timg56
Of course the "caring about future generations" has absolutely nothing to do with future generations; just the kicking into the long grass again. "Caring" is used to make people accept uncritically what is being said; as opposed to thinking. Any fool can care. What matters is finding out.