Greenbait

Ian Plimer has a new book on the way, one that seems to take a fairly strong poke at the environmentalist fraternity. Here's the flyer.

The processes required to make a humble stainless steel teaspoon are remarkably complicated and every stage involves risk, coal, energy, capital, international trade and finance. Stainless steel cutlery has taken thousands of years of experimentation and knowledge to evolve and the end result is that we can eat without killing ourselves with bacteria. We are in the best times to have ever lived on planet Earth and the future will only be better. All this we take for granted.

Greens may have started as genuine environmentalists. Much of the green movement has now morphed into an unelected extremist political pressure group accountable to no one. Greens create problems, many of which are concocted, and provide no solutions because of a lack of basic knowledge. This book examines green policies in the light of established knowledge and shows that they are unrealistic. 

Policies by greens adopted by supine governments have resulted in rising costs, increased taxes, political instability, energy poverty, decreased longevity and environmental degradation and they don’t achieve their ideological aims. Wind, solar and biomass energy emit more carbon dioxide than they save and reduction of carbon dioxide emissions does nothing to change climate and only empties the pocket. No stainless steel teaspoon could be made using green “alternative energy”.
 
This book argues that unless the greens live sustainably in caves in the forest and use no trappings of the modern world, then they should be regarded as hypocrites and treated with the disdain they deserve.

The prescience of James Delingpole

A director of a company involved in the Keystone XL pipeline project in North America has had a late night visit from a group of concerned environmentalists.

James Delingpole's thesis doesn't seem far off the mark, does it?

Taking Morgan

Somewhat off topic for this blog, but David Rose emails to say his first novel has just been published. Taking Morgan is a thriller set in Gaza and Washington DC and is available on one of those unbelievably cheap ebook deals at Amazon at the moment, but only for a few days.

Get it here.

The Frackers

Gregory Zuckerman, a business journalist at the Wall Street Journal has told the story of the shale gas revolution in his new book The Frackers. It's an easy read, with a light, journalistic style similar to books like Robert X Cringely's Accidental Empires or Stephen Levy's Hackers. You get a series of pen portraits of the motley selection of men who battled against adversity and ridicule and made the shale gas revolution a reality. We hear about their lives and loves and the fortunes they made, or in some cases, they didn't make.

The book cleverly shows how the different ingredients needed in order to make shale gas flow in economic quantities were gradually brought together. So we start by learning that hydraulic fracturing was tried as an alternative to gel-based fracking (not as a brave new commercial venture but in a desperate attempt to save money) and was found to be much more effective. Others were trying horizontal drilling on shale and exploiting the new-found ability to precisely steer the drill bit. Other factors needed to be added before the recipe was just right.

In the end though it's a bit too light for me. As a business journalist with a mission to entertain the lay reader, Zuckerman seems to shy away from the technical details. I wanted more science, more technical details, something more to get my teeth into. But if you are not technically inclined, or you just want something to read by the pool, you will enjoy it.

Buy here.

Merchants of advocacy

Reiner Grundmann has written a fairly damning review of Oreskes and Conway's Merchants of Doubt. I guess it's fair to say that he is not desperately impressed.

It is disappointing to see professional historians reduce the complexity to a black and white affair where it goes without saying what the preferred colour is. The social science literature relevant to the understanding of policymaking in the face of uncertainty is largely absent. The authors mention just one study, about rational decision theory, which is probably cited because it supports the authors’ claim that scientific uncertainty helps to prevent or delay political action. They missed the opportunity to confront their historical material with approaches that have examined the same case studies but did not come to the same conclusions. Reading Merchants of Doubt gives the impression that no such work exists. This raises the question of what epistemological status it can claim. Its authors have been critical of the scientific credentials of the contrarians, quoting the lack of peer review or selective use of information. This book has all the hallmarks of science (there are many footnotes) and perhaps it was even peer-reviewed. But it is what the title and subtitle suggest: less a scholarly work than a passionate attack on a group of scientists turned lobbyists and thus itself a partial account. I wonder if it does not do a disservice to the cause it is advocating.

 I haven't troubled to read Merchants of Doubt before. I can't really see that changing in the near future.

The Neglected Sun

This review of Vahrenholt and Luning's The Neglected Sun is a guest post by Thomas Cussans.

In June 1997, addressing the United Nations, Bill Clinton made a dramatic assertion. ‘The science is clear and compelling,’ he said. ‘We humans are changing the global climate.’

In fact, Clinton was behind the curve. Well before his claim, the belief in a ‘settled science’ that human CO2 emissions would produce an unprecedented and catastrophic rise in the Earth’s temperatures had become an unchallenged truth. Governments across the world, most obviously in the West, embraced it with a kind of masochistic delight. Green activists were similarly frantic in their assertions of impending disaster. Scenting cheap profits courtesy of immense government grants to produce ‘renewable’ energy, a series of multi-nationals made clear their determination to climb on board the global warming express. No less important, the West’s media took as read that this ‘consensus’ represented an obvious truth.

Click to read more ...

The failure of the climate models

Bob Tisdale's new book on the failure of climate models is just out and comes recommended by no less an authority than Roger Pielke Sr.

There's an introductory post on Bob's blog here, with details of where to buy.

Book reviews

Does anyone fancy writing a book review for me? I have a few titles queued up, which I am going to struggle to get to in the near future. There's nothing technical.

Drop me a line if you'd like a shot.

Update on Sep 18, 2013 by Bishop Hill

OK, got four people up for the two jobs, so that's fine. Feel free to offer your services for future titles if you want though.

Cli-fi

A propos of my earlier posting about "Cli-fi", take a look at what Brian Micklethwait found in his local bookshop.

Into the dustbin

Donna Laframboise's new book about the IPCC is now available. Here's the blurb:

Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is a non-stop train wreck. The IPCC is supposed to be an objective scientific body, but Pachauri writes forewords for Greenpeace publications and has accepted a 'green crusader’ award. He is an aggressive policy advocate even though his organization is supposed to be policy neutral. In 1996, an Indian High Court concluded that he’d "suppressed material facts" and "sworn to false affidavits." He has long claimed to hold two PhDs, but in fact only earned one.

This book is a collection of essays about Pachauri originally published as blog posts between February 2010 and August 2013. Essay number one, The IPCC and the Peace Prize, appears here for the first time. It documents how Pachauri improperly advised IPCC personnel that they were Nobel laureates after that organization was awarded half of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize (Al Gore received the other half).

Scientists aren’t supposed to embellish. They’re supposed to be clear-eyed about what is true and what is false. The idea that hundreds of scientists have been padding their resumés, that they’ve been walking around in broad daylight improperly claiming to be Nobel laureates, isn’t something any normal person would expect.

Click to read more ...

Taxing Air

When you think about it, it's rather surprising that nobody has ever put together a good layman's explanation of the weaknesses in global warming science. It's only with Bob Carter and John Spooner's Taxing Air that this gap in the market has been filled.

And they have filled it with considerable style in my humble opinion. This is a hugely readable book, with short accessible summaries of each subject addressed, crisp direct prose and enlivened throughout with Spooner's cartoons. The publishers have splashed out on a colour interior, so the friendly effect is maintained throughout.

With its focus very much on the global warming newbie, the book is unlikely to bring anything new to many BH readers, but those who come here without scientific backgrounds will probably find it useful. And it should form the backbone of everybody's Christmas present lists.

Excellent stuff and congratulations are due to the authors.

Buy direct here or from Amazon here.

Book review: The Attacking Ocean

Brian Fagan is an American anthropologist who has written a series of books examining climate's effect on mankind in the past, including one on the Medieval Warm Period and one on the Little Ice Age. His new volume, The Attacking Ocean, looks at sea-level changes.

Like his earlier works, the new volume treads a careful line between the two sides of the climate wars. Global warming is mentioned from time to time, and is the focus of a short epilogue, but there is caution too, and criticism of media hysteria.

Most of the book is focused squarely on the past - the disappearance of Doggerland beneath the waves of the North Sea, life in the Nile Delta, tsunamis and floods and tides, the perennial attempts of man to prepare for them, and man's impotence before the forces of nature.

One theme reoccurs throughout - that we have always lived with the ocean and changes in its level. But Fagan also asks the question of whether the situation is different now, with countless millions living just above sea level. These are fair questions, and ones that might arise even if nobody had ever heard of global warming.

It's an interesting collection of tales, although one I didn't quite find myself engaging with for some reason. You might want to take a look.

Book review: The Age of Global Warming

This is a guest post by Messenger.

I take my hat off to Rupert Darwall for tackling this knotty and diverse subject, so full of devious twists and turns and sometimes almost unbelievable actions and decisions. It is a fascinating, if complicated story, creating an important record of the machinations producing the madness of crowds that has overtaken so many governments and people around the world.

Darwall pins down the seminal moments, the recurrent scares, and the prime movers, beginning with Malthus and Malthusians and identifying the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) as an important watershed. He notes the innate pessimism of the much of the environmental movement, typified by the Club of Rome in 1972 when it asked if the human species could survive without falling into a state of “worthless existence” and its development into the depressing topos that man must be at fault in one way or another for all environmental damage, and that therefore we must do- and apparently be persuaded or forced to do- without. It is this demand for self-sacrifice, originally aimed at Western nations, that has now become an attempt by our “global governors” to hold back development world-wide.

Click to read more ...

Quote of the day

[In 2008] Scientists from the Met Office's Hadley Centre responded to Lord Lawson's contention that there has been no global warming since 2000, saying this was due to the La Niña cooling event of early 2007.

From the Wikipedia page on Nigel Lawson's An Appeal to Reason.

An encounter with a nobellist

In the comments, The Leopard in the Basement posts an excerpt from Nicholas Nassim Taleb's Antifragile in which the author encounters a Nobel prizewinner:

As I was writing this book, I overheard on a British Air flight a gentleman explain to the flight attendant less than two seconds into the conversation (meant to be about whether he liked cream and sugar in his coffee) that he won the Nobel Prize in Medicine “and Physiology” in addition to being the president of a famous monarchal academy. The flight attendant did not know what the Nobel was, but was polite, so he kept repeating “the Nobel Prize” hoping that she would wake up from her ignorance. I turned around and recognized him, and the character suddenly deflated. As the saying goes, it is hardest to be a great man to one’s chambermaid. And marketing beyond conveying information is insecurity.

We accept that people who boast are boastful and turn people off.