Bishop Hill Deben makes waves
Sep 24, 2013 Climate: Sceptics The Times has a raft of articles about global warming this morning (all links are paywalled). There's a Ben Webster article on the Met Office model, a leader:
So far there are only theories as to why the Earth has warmed so much slower in the past 15 years than some models predicted. The models may have been wrong. The scenarios inferred from them may have been alarmist. This much is clear: the IPCC must tackle head-on what it calls the “hiatus” in global warming, and follow the evidence rather than buckle to political pressure from either side of the debate.
And finally there's a short piece about Lord Deben's rather slimy reaction to my being allowed to speak on Radio 5 yesterday (unfortunate spelling mistakes per original):
Lord Debden, the former Conservative Environment Secretary who is chairman of the government-appointed Committee on Climate Change, yesterday used Twitter to criticise the BBC for interviewing a prominent climate sceptic.
Following Radio 5 Live’s interview with Andrew Montford, Lord Debden (known as John Gummer before being made a peer) wrote: “Does BBC give platform to those who don’t believe smoking causes cancer?”
Lord Debden was himself then criticised on Twitter for making a false comparison by implying that the science linking manmade emissions to rising temperatures was as strong as the evidence linking smoking to cancer.
Reader Comments (59)
Bish, on the bright side -- as a long time reader, I'm delighted to see the influence that you now have. That a Lord would publicly argue with you is quite the measure of your efforts. He would ignore you but for the fact that you are changing minds. Well done.
Except that there is a very strong reason for cigarette smoke being a cause of lung cancer. Namely it contains several known mutagens. Mike J is correct though, strictly speaking it is a risk factor.
I am suffering from some sort of bias. I have spent my life dealing with patients with this disease.
re Risk factors & causation; see this for Hill's causation criteria: http://www.drabruzzi.com/hills_criteria_of_causation.htm
Your most recent interview was excellent. Although it was early in the morning, many people turn on the radio first thing, to get their news as they toilet, dress, prepare for the day, drive to work, etc. The lady who was asking the questions seemed to want to lead you with her wording and tone. You had none of it, giving thoughtful and concise answers. She had the grace to allow you to answer in complete sentences, for which I give her credit.
I contrast this interview with your recent polar bear interview, where that a**hat from Greenpeace (or whatever activist green group he represented) kept shouting over you, refusing, in true fascist propaganda manner, to let your points be heard. You were very gracious under those circumstances. A careful listener can hear your words, which, while softly spoken, carried within them a mighty big stick. People who want to know the whole truth about climate change can learn a lot from both circumstances, I think.
I salute you.
I realise you probably don't want an endless debate on smoking and lung cancer but I like to make a brief observation. There have been many studies showing a correlation between smoking and lung cancer. However despite what you may have heard, no plausible mechanism has ever been found. Yes, there are some carcinogens in tobacco smoke but they are at too low a concentration to be culpable. Experiments have been performed with rats where highly concentrated tobacco smoke concentrate was painted on their skin but that is not representative of realistic exposure as experienced by smokers.
I recommend looking up the McTear vs Imperial Tobacco court case (2005) where the country's top anti-smoking experts could not demonstrate a proof of general causality even on the 'balance of probabilities' as opposed to the more 'rigorous proof that would be required in science'. The full judgement runs to around 600 pages but is well worth a read if anyone is interested.
This is, so far, the only case that has ever come before UK courts.
I'm afraid this is the original 'the science is settled – the debate is over' template that has subsequently been used by the warmists.
Booker & North's "Scared to Death" has a good chapter on the passive smoking research. Certainly a surprise to me (and explained why Fred Singer takes the position he does, in spite of the negative political connotations of going against the "consensus").
If tobacco consumption had increased steadily but cancer and other lung diseases had remained static for 15 years,the link between smoking and cancer would have been questioned. That never happened and the link was never seriously in doubt. But, in the case of CO2 and global warming ....
Further to the question of why climateers show anomalies rather than real temperatures: A few years ago Lucia (at The Blackboard) plotted out the AR4 models' temperatures and the real global average temperature.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/temperatures_absolute.jpg
!! :-)
A lot of smokers die prematurely of smoking-caused diseases other than lung cancer ie they die of emphysema, circulatory problems and so on before they succeed in getting cancer.
My boss died of liver cancer which seems to have been a secondary from his lung cancer. Would he have been counted as a lung cancer death? Probably not.