Bishop Hill Deben's doubtful stories
Sep 19, 2013 Climate: WG2 Deben A bit of a car crash for Lord Deben this morning, claiming that Bangladesh is sinking beneath the waves and that refugees are already fleeing the delta.
Deniers/dismissers upset. Say no homelessness attributable to climate change. Yet 1000s in Bangladesh forced from homes by rising sea levels.
Unfortunately, his rather better informed followers on Twitter were quick to point out to him that Bangladesh is actually expanding:
New research shows Bangladesh may not be as vulnerable to rising sea levels caused by climate change as previously feared, scientists in Dhaka say.
They say satellite images show the country's landmass is actually growing because of sediment dumped by rivers.
I wonder what other fairy stories the Climate Change Committee tells the government.
Reader Comments (65)
Lord Deben is chairman of the Committee on Climate Change how can he be wrong? He is an expert and is advising the government! So Bangladesh must be sinking! The satellites must be wrong! There can't be any other explanation and the modelling proves it.
It is worse than we thought.
Or perhaps Alarmism = enormous amounts of money
There are loads of rib ticklers, how about the one about the climate change Act, you know, how it will cost the taxpayer/consumer £18 billion/annum and all we get is sweet FA, blackouts and birdmincers.
It's the way he tells 'em.
I just very pleased Deben is on the alarmist side. Who would want this sorry excuse for a politician, and a human being, representing their side of the debate. I know we have come to expect nothing from our politicians in the way of factual argument but Debben is definitely one of the dimmest bulbs in the box along with Ed Davey.
Why this person has been allowed to remain on the Committee on Climate Change is beyond me, it's certainly not for his expertise in matters scientific. On the other hand I'll bet he is extremely well informed on subsidies and the means of obtaining thereof.
SInce it is sediments, we should apply the Tiljander correction, Voila Bangladesh is sinking.
"Dim light bulbs", that proves their energy saving credentials, then.
A little like David Attenborough, who regularly speaks of 'Pacific islands that have disappeared ...', of which there are precisely none.
And so the Great Collapse of this pseudoscience continues its Inexorable Path.
Eventually, all the opportunist creeps like Deben will be on their own, everyone else having edged away.
As a teacher of geography of three decades, Bangladesh was always the preferred option where climate change was concerned. Yet it was obvious to me ( and most of the students) that the problems of this country thrown together by a war driven flood were actually economic and political. You could find pictures of refugees almost indistinguishable from another stretching back decades, an unchanging rather than a changing scenario.The plus points were never stressed however that Bangladesh's vast population live there because they are able to feed themselves not the contrary. The number killed/drowned by flooding was also falling as against rising, mainly owing to better communications and relief efforts.It was abject poverty and corruption that were the real enemies of Bangladesh if only one had eyes to see. I despair at the calibre of our politicians and educational establishment.
I have just heard that Professor Tim Flannery has been sacked.
"In an odd way this is cheering news !"
Old Forge (Sep 19, 2013 at 10:34 AM):
To be pedantic, some Pacific islands have disappeared, though by plate tectonics, not climate change. The Galapagos Islands are supposedly being transported eastwards and downwards under the Americas plate(s). There are already some of them underwater (though all of which from long before the arrival of humans).
As an aside, given the extent and severity of the present flooding in the USA, what international relief efforts are being launched to offer aid to the suffering people?
Hmmm.....
Sorry folks. You are all wrong. The little white duke has spoken
George Monbiot
When we turn our kettle on in Birmingham, we are helping to flood Bangladesh
Most of Bangladesh is part of the planet's largest alluvial fan. Sediment from the Ganges, Brahmaputra et al rivers is deposited on entry into the Bay of Bengal. Sediment will sink as it starts to compact and dewater which gives an impression of sea level rise despite the sea level rise in that region being close to zero. The alluvium is very fertile which encourages the locals to invade the newly deposited areas to grow crops. This means that any habitation there will be at the mercy of storms as storm surges overflow the land. All this is natural and has been going on for about 80M years since the Indian subcontinent speared into Asia pushing up the Himalayas.
NOT anything to do with climate change.
"Deniers/dismissers upset. Say no homelessness attributable to climate change. Yet 1000s in Bangladesh forced from homes by rising sea levels."
Deban's Tweet was an indirect -- he refuses to respond directly -- to my reply to his earlier tweet:
The claim that any instance of homelessness is the consequence of climate change is at least as daft as the claim that Bangladesh is sinking.
There is the obvious answer first: there is no evidence of an increased risk from weather events that would make people homeless according to the IPCC SREX report.
Second, even if there were evidence that such phenomena were increasing, what makes people (or their homes) vulnerable to weather events is much more their wealth than the magnitude of the phenomena, which is why equivalent phenomena in different economies produce such huge differences in outcome.
Third, the record also shows us that fewer people are vulnerable to nature's whims -- of whatever form -- precisely because they are more wealthy.
It is notable then, that in spite of Deban's claim to be concerned for the interests of the world's poorest people, he doesn't make an argument for wealth. It's clear then, that Deban is only interested in these people insofar as they are of instrumental use to his political ambitions. Shame on Lord Deban.
just a quick note about ''sinking'' Pacific islands.
Coral islands, the majority of those in the Pacific have been targeted by alarmists, Deben included, as being at risk from rising sea levels. Nothing could be further from the truth. Coral loves rising sea levels as coral growth can easily exceed sea level rises. Falling sea levels are the death knell for corals, there is ample fossil evidence for this. Many Pacific coral islands have actually increased in area.
Yes the Galapagos Islands will eventually end up beneath the Andes but we have a few million years to go yet and by then Human kind will be extinct.
Such idiotic outpourings by this silly peer, plus the corrections, need to be publicised. The general public need reminding just how incompetent are many of the so called great and good. Especially when climate change is concerned.
The Galapagos Islands deliberately sunk themselves to avoid the humiliation of human caused global warming.
This is on the Net, might be published by now. Read the abstract and you might choose to read further.
http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msdfels/wpapers/Tide%20gauge%20location.pdf
Pegs average past sea level change, from long duration tide gauges, to below 1mm/year, or 4 inches per century if linear.
Notes that some locations are decreasing.
Put simply, villagers in parts of Bangladesh have been forced to relocate as water washes the land beneath their villages away. The flows of water responsible are not due to rising sea levels but descending river waters. The shape of the land changes but the quantity does not appear to have fallen.
Bangladesh.
1. In late 19C , due to increased population, people moved to unstable areas closer to coast subject to flooding: there were warnings but these were ignored.
2. Mangrove trees have been removed for prawn farms. Mangroves protect sediment from erosion.
3. Pumping out freshwater from ground causes compaction and settlement: this problem also occurs in some Pacific Islands .
4. Cutting down trees in Himalayas has increased erosion rates on slopes and caused increased deposition in the delta.
In areas of high rainfall and steep soil covered slopes , slight changes in vegetation cover makes large differences in erosion rates.
The problem is that old fashioned physical geography combined with geology and based upon years of fieldwork has become rare. Geography appears to be largely human/social geography with very little field work and very little maths.
The ability of water to carry sediment is proportional to the cube of the velocity , sediment load is proportional to v3 .
When it comes to understanding sediment and their transport, one rapidly enters the field of applied maths and hydraulic engineering.
Is this the same area where the Sundarbans were sinking just a few years ago?
Deben's desperation is typical of the green troughers and their growing unease that the lie they have profited from is falling apart.
The sound of the didgeridoo now strikes fear into them.
eSmiff (Sep 19, 2013 at 11:52 AM): to apply the logic being used by Breben (wasn't he the chap in "Naked Gun"?), Moonbat et al, the problems in Bangladesh could be solved by removing all the kettles from Birmingham.
Who would've thought solving climate change could've been so easy?!
Strange that gravity has a reduced effect on seawater in Bangladesh.
Has he been talking to Mark Lynas? IIRC, ML was employed by the Maldives Govt (Maldovians?) to highlight their watery state and claim compensation from the guilty parties (us) but we haven't heard so much about it lately, possibly due to the conspicuous absence of any supporting evidence. Not that that would discourage Gum-Gum.
esmiff 11.52: the Galapagos islands that have sunk are the result of the thermal contraction of the lava, not sea level rise.
Hawaii shows the same phenomenon.
So which scientist are we to believe? It gets confusing!
It's kind of fun reviewing the old, pre-climategate news articles. In another article linked from your Beeb Bangladesh story above, Here's Richard Betts and co. predicting (via their models, of course) 4 degrees C warming as soon as 2060.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8279654.stm
Ah the good old days. :)
A little more respect for the sources from which Lord Deben quotes might be appropriate
on the blog. They include:
Newspaper articles
Urban Myths
Idle chit chat
Hearsay
wishful thinking
These unimpeachable sourses should be treated with the utmost (dis) respect.
jamesp: Paul Homewood reports this morning that the Maldives are "To Build Five More Underwater Airports".
So which scientist are we to believe? It gets confusing!
Sep 19, 2013 at 1:18 PM | Unregistered CommenterJohn
John,
You don't have to believe any of them. Science works by being critical of everything claimed and accepting nobody's word (that phrase sounds familiar). It is easy to do and here is an example. Someone says that Arctic ice is disappearing and will all be gone in 2013. A quick check reveals that is highly unlikely, not impossible but highly unlikely.
If you continue in this manner you might notice something about the long list of catastrophic claims being made that are linked to climate change.
I agree Steve but personally I don't have time to check on information supplied to me by scientific sources. What do I do then? What about doctors as well?
Sep 19, 2013 at 3:39 PM | Unregistered CommenterJohn
You are, of course, correct. Nobody can check everything but sometimes just scratching the surface can be illuminating.
That is true but in my world, I often find that the more I know about a subject the more I realise I don't know.
I was talking to a colleague yesterday who had just returned from a holiday in the Maldives. She said how I really should visit there soon, as it is so beautifull, but sadly would be all gone under the sea within ten years.
When I burst out laughing she was shocked and then puzzled, first at my callousness, then as she thought I was a "denier".
I had to point out that as far back as Darwin's writings it was well known that such islands can grow much faster than sea level rises, and that warnings of the demise of the Maldives were now getting pretty old.
John (Sep 19, 2013 at 3:39 PM):
Personally, I think that this is where intuition comes into play. Galileo did not accept Copernicus’s theories because of undeniable proof; I suspect that his intuition grasped onto it as making more sense than what was more commonly accepted at the time. When challenged by the Church to prove it (surely a reasonable scientific request? – but, hey…), he was unable to. I feel that most on this, and similar sites have had the intuitive feeling that the sceptical argument is more likely to be correct than the AGWist argument, and, while we are unable to actually prove it, we do try to keep an open mind as we continue to search for evidence.
One good test of the validity of the pro- argument is to ask challenging questions on one of the many (and many rarely visited by those outside the clique) AGWist sites. The level of responses might make you reconsider ever visiting them again, as well as to cause you to question their scientific principles.
Slightly off-topic, but there is a good argument that the Earth really IS the centre of the universe.
Thanks Radical Rodent, so intuition is at the heart of it. Personally I don't think this blog or any blogs are trusted sources of knowledge, they are opinion, which is fine but not a place to find answers.
A new climate sensitivity paper for the cogniscenti.
http://m.rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/2001/20120294.full
Entropic man...you are a lone voice on this blog (well almost). Do you know why it is? Have all other AGW believers given up? I am intrigued by the debate but not decided either way but find the bashing you seem to get, pretty odd at times.
John
It can be hard to maintain a civilised conversation here. There are sceptics here with valid scientific views and the willingness to debate them. Unfortunately there is also a group who argue by ridicule and insult.
[Snip. House rules- DNFTT and mind your manners, please. BH]
Bangladesh is the best example that development saves lives! I have been a regular visitor for the past 6-7 years and I remember visiting not long after cyclone Sidr that caused massive damage to the delta region and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. I was amazed at how this was seen as "just another cyclone" in the late 2000s in comparison to the cyclones in early 90s which were responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. In fact, Bangladesh was site of the world's worst cyclone disaster with the 1970 Bhola cyclone estimated to have caused over 500,000 deaths. This cyclone was smaller then Sidr - the difference was the level of development of the country (then called East Pakistan).
By 2007, there are not only early warnings, but permanent shelters all over the delta region and the majority of deaths come from people who tried to save their boats. More importantly, agriculture and economic activity were back to normal only a few months afterwards as the country had the resilience to recover.
Development saves lives. Anything which slows down development in Bangladesh will result in people dying who should not. People like Lord Deben need to learn this fact.
EM, that paper you referenced starts with Humanity is now the dominant force driving changes in the Earth's atmospheric composition and climate and uses IPCC 2007 as proof.
I have this naive view of science, in that I don't consider a reference to a political document, shown to be largely hearsay and full of references to gray literature, can be regarded as proof of anything.
Given a start like that, why would anyone accept the rest of the paper?
I see what you mean EM. I think steveta's comment demonstrates it well.
entropic man --
The paper seems to be little different from Hansen&Sato's earlier (2012) "Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change". Is there something novel in this paper which I've missed on my (admittedly brief) review?
[Added in response to steveta (5:06 PM): Hansen & Sato begins [emphasis mine]: "Climate change is likely to be the predominant scientific, economic, political and moral issue of the 21st century. The fate of humanity and nature may depend upon early recognition and understanding of human-made effects on Earth's climate (Hansen, 2009)." One has to accept that Hansen likes to write hyperbolically, and read beyond the rhetoric.]
Hansen and Sato's 2012 paper is I believe where they claimed that the temperature plateau is because the cooling from bare aerosols and aerosols increasing cloud albedo (smaller droplets) exactly matches present GHG-AGW.
They failed to look out of the window: the clods with highest albedo have largest droplets, a bit of physics Sagan ignored.
should climate scientists be allowed to wear the full face veil?
John (Sep 19, 2013 at 4:22 PM):
Yes, intuition is the start of your learning; from what you intuitively accept as fact, you can then, if you wish, gain more information until the fact is proven (or, of course, you find your intuition is wrong – it happens).
You intuitively accept that the Earth is a sphere floating in space: have you ever demanded proof that this is so; have you even sought the slightest evidence? I doubt it; most of us intuitively accept it as fact.
You accept that blue whales are the largest animal on Earth: have you seen one? If you have, have you seen one up close enough to measure it?
There are many things in life that we all accept as “true”, without demanding that the proof be shown before we will believe it – the proof may be there, but how many times do you bother looking it up?
Yes, there are those on here who can be a bit short with Entropic Man and others, but not half as bad as the responses you can get on AGWist sites should you question. Mind you, EM can be a little obtuse at times, as his can be shown with him having “conversations” with ZDB, who, should you ever catch the comments, is most definitely a troll, displaying nothing but nastiness, and never a constructive comment (unlike EM, who can make us think).
One sure way to stop that inconvenient truth about increasing land mass is to build hydroelectric barrages across the mouths of those rivers and disrupt the deposition of sediment - voila - "rising" sea-levels. Deben - evil AGW genius - 3 steps ahead of the sceptics, able to leap into multiple directorships in a single bound.
Type the words Bangladesh and Natural Gas and you get
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrobangla
So are the Environmentalists going to stop all the developing nations of the Indian Sub Continent from exploiting their own natural reserves of Gas ,Oil and Coal
So they cant industrialize lifting themselves out of poverty.
'That is true but in my world, I often find that the more I know about a subject the more I realise I don't know.' Sep 19, 2013 at 3:59 PM | John
That wouldn't be politics, by any chance, John?