Bishop Hill Kevin Anderson does science
Jan 24, 2014 Greens Kevin Anderson was on an Irish TV show called Eco Eye the other day. With a title like that one's expectations are not high in the first place and it turned out to be possibly the single most unscientific take on climate change I've ever come across.
Take Kevin Anderson on rates of climate change:
The climate is undoubtedly changing but the climate has always changed, so there's nothing particularly new about this. What is interesting to us and actually disturbing is the rate of change, so the climate is changing as it has always but it is going faster. The rates of change are different to how it has been in the past. And we are as confident as we are about any other area of science that this is due significantly to the emissions that we as human beings put into the atmosphere, principally from burning fossil fuels but also from the production of our food.
Asked for details, Anderson explained that some people in poor countries were experiencing weather that was different to anything they had seen in the past. He went on to say that if we carry on as we are we are going to get temperatures 8°C above those seen in the 2003 heat wave in France. We had someone who seemed to say that warming has accelerated over the last three decades and hurricanes were cited as evidence of climate change.
Does RTE have any editorial control over its own output?
Reader Comments (34)
When does he reach the part about warming 'accelerating' right into a brick wall, about 17 years ago?
I've just plotted a graph showing the terrifying 'rate of change' as shown by the latest data just released by HADCRUT4 and GISS.
The interesting thing in your first clip is how insurance companies are using the 'increasing bad weather' fairy tale to crank up insurance premiuims.
Are you sure it wasn't the BBC?
Those from the Tyndall Centre seemed to be more like rabbits transfixed by the lights of the oncoming cars.
They talk about high temperature rises whilst ignoring that there hasn't been any significant rise for the last 20 years. They ignore ALL the evidence that points to NO increase in extreme weather. They ignore the fact that Arctic ice during the summer hasn't disappeared and Antarctic ice is increasing. They ignored that Argo data does not show the "hidden" heat.
They are transfixed by the CAGW meme and can't see the nonsense they spout.
People like Anderson are prepared to lie without any qualms. I'm surprised he isn't leading the warmist trio at the CCC hearing on 28th January. He should be sacked from all his taxpayer funded posts for his fraudulent activities (deliberately misleading people is fraud).
Are you sure about that headline, Your Grace?
My first reaction was "since when?"
Kevin Anderson is away with the fairies.
If Kevin Anderson has been studying climate science for 20 years, then
for 85% of his career. there has been no significant increase in global
temperature. Exactly what is he studying?
Just to say I think Eco Eye is a TV programme rather than radio. There's also at least one clip on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xULJEH-GwpQ
Alex
I think I knew that, but having spent half an hour listening to an audio recording it slipped my mind. Thanks.
I don't think Kevin is lying but that's just my guess about his motives. He's reading out loud, to all who can hear him, his interpretation of the Chronicles of Doom. For him eschatology is as real as belief in the supernatural was to the medieval clergy and from this he takes comfort in that he's doing his bit to pull others from the fires of the pit.
He's not alone in this crusade as a quick glance at the Environment section of CIF or the output of the illuminati of blog-dwellers such as a weepy McKibben or the scornful Connelly demonstrates.
Left to themselves, such zealots would be mostly harmless and a source of pity but they are not alone and they constitute a clear and present danger to the economic and psychological health of society.
They, and their dystopian martyrdom, can be driven back into the obscurity that that their infantile, intellectual aberrations deserve but careful, deliberate and measured responses are essential to ensure that this happens.
It will be of little comfort that realists won the scientific battle while losing the war and this is a real possibility. Let's not face the possibility that we may, one day, look back ruefully at how Defeat was snatched from the jaws of Victory!
As always, Pointman expresses my sentiments better than I ever could.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/cool-it/
Kevin is speaking out of ignorance or deceit. Or both.
Climate does not care if the weather occurs over the third wold or the first.
Weather patterns are not changing 'faster' or more dangerously than 'before'.
Before what, by the way?
What the world is suffering from is a madness of crowds dysfunction based on climate obsession.
'Click to read more'...
Must I..?
This wasn't by any chance the bloke who did the radio beat-up at the end of "Round Ireland with a Fridge"?
Much against my better judgement I did listen to the 2 recordings. Once again, the old and incorrect stories about Hurricane Katrina and Sandy are used to prove their statements.
Is RTE a branch of the BBC propaganda machine I wonder as they repeat each other’s nonsense?
2 months or so ago, on an early morning short news program, the newsreader read out an article about the population of corncrakes in Ireland.
There is genuine concern at the massive reduction in the population of these birds but it is a 100% accepted fact that the loss has been caused by modern farming methods, particularly farm mechanisation. There is another contributing factor, Mink.
The mink were released from mink farms by activists.
I have read reasonably widely about it so I was certain of my facts.
Needless to say, RTE claimed that the reason was Climate Change.
I sent an email to the news department advising them that this item was not true and gave them the correct facts. I asked for an acknowledgement of my email.
Did I receive a reply?
What do you think?
I wish I had kept a copy of the email
RTE is a government propaganda machine.
PM Walsh
And, by God, what's more important? Climate Change or "the production of our food?"
I'm for food production.
When these twits start committing suicide to save the planet, I'll start paying attention.
Watch the full program at this link below or search in YouTube for Eco-eye 2014 episode 3. It may be the most one-sided program ever produced on the subject.
Also look out for resident irish green nutter john gibbons who unbelievably has a regular gig with The Irish Times
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWLHyxwEADo&sns=em
This is true. because of the improving global economy, there are people in poor countries who now have enough disposable income to travel to other places and experience weather that was different to anything they had ever seen.
Others have emmigrated to other countries (here) where they are experiencing weather that none of us really enjoy or remember having seen in the past.
On a slightly different note, I had put in 2 or 3 complaints about the BBC's One Show in the fairly recent past, in which Grauniad warmista Lucie Seigle had been given carte blanche to spout her leftie-greenalist views (impartiality anyone)! They poo-pooed the complaints of course with the "balance of evidence" crap, the UNIPCC says this or that, but that is how the Beeb do things, have a "Complaints Procedure" designed to ignore the complaint! However I have noticed that she hasn't been on there much lately nor spouting her views about green issues as much as she had been! I wonder, is anything happening at the BBC to cause this to happen?
Eco Eye is a programme presented by some chap called Duncan Stewart.
He’s a typical eco warrior type but with many fingers in well subsidised green pies. His programmes are an echo chamber for like-minded eco-loons. The counter arguments he cites are always weak and always presented by him. Anybody who disagrees with his viewpoint must be in the pay of big oil, etc. He wouldn’t dare interview someone who held different beliefs. The other chap interviewed on the programme, John Gibbons, is listed in Wikipedia as an activist and is even worse than Duncan Stewart. Not the sharpest chisel in the bag, it must be said. He previously claimed that average global temperatures used to be x degrees Celsius but they are now y degrees Celsius, a rise of z %... Seriously, he did.
It is a common tactic for Eco Eye and the Irish Times, for which Gibbons writes, to quote Munich RE to endorse alarmist arguments when even the IRCC reports can’t be relied on for some of the more outlandish projections. It’s a perfect example of circular logic. Insurance company increases its premiums on the basis of fabricated conclusions it sees in a research paper. When the paper is shown to be bunkum, the activists use the fact that an insurance company has increased its premiums as evidence of a problem. After all, why else would an insurance company want to increase its premiums?
Gibbons, in his Irish Times column, claimed to have walked into a bookmakers and asked the person behind the counter if he/she would take a bet on it being colder in ten or twenty years time. I don’t fully remember the details, but apparently, they wouldn’t take the bet or offered very poor odds. This was taken as evidence of things being even worse than the official line. Truly dreadful stuff. And the Irish Times is not the least bit embarrassed about printing this sort of crap.
PM Walsh
"I wish I had kept a copy of the email"
I have trouble getting rid of mine! (I can, but it has to be very deliberate.)
Does your email program not save them?
"claimed to have walked into a bookmakers and asked the person behind the counter if he/she would take a bet on it being colder in ten or twenty years time. I don’t fully remember the details, but apparently, they wouldn’t take the bet or offered very poor odds"
Not sure how that reinforces the warmist position. It sounds to me as though the bookie is more in touch with reality, as they usually are.
Whenever this sort of thing appears the question that should be asked is "really - who counted them?". Because they don't, in any meaningful way (because it's impossible). The claim is usually based on dubious estimates of "habitat loss" applied to a fictitious relationship with population size.
Jan 24, 2014 at 5:40 PM | jamesp
Hi James.
Thanks for the suggestion.
I've been having a cull on my emails in recent days/weeks and have deliberately deleted almost everything as there were too many backed up. With a 10 year old Dell with Windows XP I'm nt certain as to how much backup there is.
PM
I'll have another look tomorrow and if I find it I'll let you know.PM
PMW
Deleted files are normally first put into 'trash' or just a 'deleted' folder. You have to empty that for get rid of them properly. Sent mail is usually handled separately from incoming, and there tends to be less of it. If you tidy (or archive) your inbox, that may be enough. WRT space, it's worth having a cleanup program like CCleaner (originally CrapCleaner) which I used to recover 8GB from a computer this afternoon!
Link (use the 'download this version' button on the right)
None of this is about the science, and if the Pause lasts for another dozen years there will still be rent-seekers arguing that global warming is a threat. The academic-green-business complex is pursuing its interests at the expense of the rest of us.
In Spielberg's film Schindler's List there was a shocking scene where an architect vehemently pointed out a dangerous flaw in a building, but was shot for speaking out. In that fictitious scene, and in the great climate debate, facts are a side issue when a power grab is taking place.
In our next episode we discuss how the Lizard People have infiltrated our political leadership and its consequences for the global economy...
I think the program makers have massively edited and manipulatrd Anderson's comments.
This is an unedited version of the interviews:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xULJEH-GwpQ
I posted earlier in the week on misrepresentation of IPCC temperature projections by John Gibbons, and, more seriously, by An Taisce, the Irish National Trust, once an organisation I could respect. The post is at http://oneillp.wordpress.com/2014/01/13/gibbons/. A further aspect is the silence of persons who should know better. I will have another post at the end of next week with samples from John Gibbons and others, particularly in the Irish Times. (Away, with very poor internet connectivity until then).
even worse than Duncan Stewart says andymc
andymc, is this Duncan Stewart the architect who had a series (brief thankfully) on RTE some years ago presenting the building of eco type houses? If so, he is the biggest self-orgasmer on the planet with his crazy eco ideas. Thankfully he hasn't been on RTE lately. Or maybe I've been lucky enough to miss him
PM
even worse than Duncan Stewart says andymc
andymc, is this Duncan Stewart the architect who had a series (brief thankfully) on RTE some years ago presenting the building of eco type houses? If so, he is the biggest self-orgasmer on the planet with his crazy eco ideas. Thankfully he hasn't been on RTE lately. Or maybe I've been lucky enough to miss him
PM
Jan 24, 2014 at 5:35 PM | James P.
re emails...no such luck. I went the whole hog and after "deleting" the lot I emptied the deleted item folder.
I'll have a word with my brother about this. I normally copy him in on things like this and he may still have them.
Rgds
PM
"Whenever this sort of thing appears the question that should be asked is "really - who counted them?". Because they don't, in any meaningful way (because it's impossible)."
Actually Corncrakes are quite easy to census, since they live in open, easily accessible, terrain and the male has a very characteristic nocturnal mating call that can be heard a long way. We have pretty good population data for Sweden and Ireland is much smaller and vastly easier country to survey.
Some scientists think scary stories work best. I copied this from the comment thread at Realclimate regarding Mann's advocacy piece in NYT:
Mike,
While I agree with everything you and Gavin say, I wonder how many laymen and, more importantly, scientists are going to have their minds changed by these articles. From what I can gather, peoples minds are not changed by reason. They are changed by emotional arguments. That is where Stephen Schneider got it right when he said we have to offer up scary scenarios.
Of course the deniers argue that this means lying, but it does not. If no action is taken to curb the emissions of CO2 then the future is scary! We have to point this out to the public. That should be our message, not that the science proves that CO2 causes global warming. The latter is a straw man argument got up by our enemies to divert us and the public from confronting the real issues.
And if we are going to switch to emotional arguments then we need a bogey man. That is the tactic that the sceptic think tanks adopted when they attacked you, Mike. We have to fight fire with fire. But the candidates for demonisation need careful selection otherwise it could backfire.
In summary, we should not be advocating carbon taxes, geo-engineering, or rationing of fuel. We should be warning of the consequences of taking no action i.e. tell scary stories.
But is this argument emotional enough? Or will we scientists continue to sit in our ivory towers playing with our equations? Meanwhile, wild fires driven by global warming will convert bountiful states such as Texas, California, Chile, and Victoria in Oz into deserts e.g. http://phys.org/news/2013-06-thirds-chile-desertification.html.
Cheers, Alastair.
Comment by Alastair McDonald — 18 Jan 2014 @ 10:39 AM