Global warming in a frontier society

Via The Volokh Conspiracy, an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal Article (subscribers only).

The story according to which politically connected industries block economic developments that would be beneficial overall but redound to the detriment of the big players is one expounded mostly by cranks in the U.S., but is commonly accepted in Europe. This results from the fact that in Europe, this kind of thing happens. Market signals on employment, wages and production are all attenuated by government's heavy hand to a much greater extent than they are in the U.S. Stagnation in Europe has many faces, but one of the most important is the stasis of the corporate constellation: Most European economies are dominated by the same large companies that ruled the roost decades ago, while in the U.S., many of our largest and most successful companies didn't exist a generation ago.

This comparison is not new. But its relevance to the global warming debate is not well-understood. As a former Carter administration official at the conference put it, "America is, psychologically, an open-frontier society. Europe's frontier closed a millennium ago." In other words, the characteristic American response to, say, climate change, is to believe that technologies— and even companies—that do not now exist will crop up to solve the problem, assuming there is a problem. The characteristic European response, as exemplified by the German conspiracy theorist in Venice, is to focus on how to get the businesses to behave "better."

The open frontier view was captured by a Silicon Valley representative in the room. He stood up to announce that "clean tech" would be to this decade what high-tech was to the 1990s. The companies that would revolutionize our energy usage, he claimed, were now being funded by venture capitalists, and the Ciscos, Microsofts and Googles of the next decade would be the companies that solved the energy puzzle. We hadn't heard of any of them now, he insisted, but they would be huge. Is he right? Maybe. Who cares? It's his money, and the money of his colleagues in the Valley. The point is, if there's a conspiracy to keep revolutionary clean technology down, he didn't get the memo. The notion that this is simply a trans-Atlantic divide can easily be overstated. There are statist Americans and entrepreneurial Europeans. But the divide between the open-frontier camp and the closed-frontier camp is very real, and of the utmost importance to the global warming debate.

I can't help feeling that Mr Brown will shortly be appointing a "Clean-tech Czar", to be accompanied by a "Clean-tech levy" on bottles of wine, or something equally unconnected with the problem. It's coming, I tell you.

Cherry picking

Right now there's quite a few readers being referred here from Devil's Kitchen (thanks for the link!) and also a comment I left at Iain Dale's place. Everyone's very welcome.

I hope you find the articles linked interesting. You might also want to refer to the article I wrote about cherry-picking of data. If anything this is even more scandalous than the others.

As ever, the full story is at Climate Audit. I'm just pointing you to the guy who's actually doing the work and breaking the stories.

We didn't mean it!!

Roger Pielke Senior has an amusing post aboutthe rising sense of panic among environmentalists over the conclusions the IPCC is reaching about how to deal with the alleged impending climate catastrophe. He quotes a news release from an organisation called commondreams.org...

Environmental groups are [...] deeply concerned that the IPCC’s Summary for Policy Makers on climate mitigation, released earlier today, includes a recommendation for large- scale expansion of biofuels from monocultures, including from GM crops, even though monoculture expansion is a driving force behind the destruction of rainforests and other carbon sinks and reservoirs, thus accelerating climate change. The IPCC also recommend the expansion of large-scale agroforestry monoculture plantations. These plantations, which will include GM trees, are similarly linked to ecosystem destruction. Monoculture expansion is a major threat to the livelihoods and food sovereignty of communities many of which are already bearing the brunt of climate change disasters caused largely by the fossil fuel emissions of industrialised countries.

(My emphasis) 

GM as well as nuclear? What can I say, other than bwaaahaahaahaahaaha...!

Climate creationists

OK, so you know the score. Carbon dioxide is on the loose and we're all going to hell in a handcart. In fact WE'RE ALL DOOMED! Scientists have been overwhelmed by a consensus (does that hurt?) and are yelling for politicians to do something about it. Meanwhile a small group of fruitcakes are trying to undermine efforts to save the planet.

A small group of fruitcakes. 

These are called the sceptics, and they are HERETICS. They're going to hell in a handcart too, but nobody will talk to them when they get there, on account of them having been global warming deniers. They are BAD PEOPLE, but fortunately it's easy to spot them because they all have fistfulls of petrodollars stuffed in their pockets and they all work for oil companies, except the ones who don't and you can still spot them because of the petrodollars. So let's remember this people...

 

So the fruitcakes (may they rot in hell) are evil and they're like creationists. They spout their wicked lies, without a shred of scientific evidence to back them up, and disseminate them through the popular press - which everyone knows is owned by RUPERT MURDOCH. He is, of course, a puppet whose strings are pulled by BIG OIL. Yes, the popular press - like Proceedings of the Royal Society A - a grubby tabloid if ever there was one- or Geophysical Research Letters, all big-breasted ladies and even larger lies.

And now these creationist loons have got themselves a website. It's called Climate Audit and it's a magnet for every half-cut reactionary fruitloop fruitcake on the planet. Here they chant their neanderthal mantras and spew their evil bile. Just listen to this:

While I was reading about rotated varimax PCA in connection with Rob Wilson’s article, I came across R.W. Houghton and Y.M. Tourre, 1992, Characteristics of Low-Frequency Sea Surface Temperature Fluctuations in the Tropical Atlantic, Journal of Climate Volume 5, Issue 7 (July 1992) pp. 765–772 url. They observed that a PC analysis applied to Atlantic SSTs yielded a dipole in the 2nd EOF. Although this article is not discussed in Vimont and Kossin’s discussion of the Atlantic Multidecadal Mode, both articles seem to be probing similar data - with the Atlantic Multidecadal Mode looking very comparable to the dipole of Houghton and Toure.

How can anyone think that these people are scientists? Any right-thinking person can see at a glance that what is being talked about is THE OVERTHROW OF GLOBAL CIVILISATION! I mean, look at it! BURN THEM AND BURN THEM NOW!

But wait, a real scientist has actually entered the heretics' lair! Rob Wilson of the University of Edinburgh has gone to confront these loons on their own ground. Ha! Our very own Richard Dawkins taking apart the illiterate creationists with his razor sharp mind. Just enjoy this ripping apart of their stupid faith...

 For DWJ2006, I compiled essentially a mean series of these data. The resultant time-series is essentially the same although with a slightly weaker r2 with GOA temperatures. In this study, I undertook nested PCA. Meaning, that PC regression was undertaken over multiple time-steps (i.e. as the shorter series left the data-set) to allow the quantification of the reduction in calibrated signal going back in time. This is not possible if all the data are averaged together, although, I will admit that one could do nested averaging at every time-step. I used PCA as it quantified nicely the regional differences in growth. I would mention a couple of papers where I have utilised a nested averaging approach, but you guys are busy enough trashing this paper and I do not want to give you more work.

You see what happens when these creationists are confronted with a real scientist? Someone who understands logic and the scientific method? And having reduced them to a quivering wreck with his laser-beam logic he delivers the coup de grace with this devastating parting shot...

Thank you for taking the trouble to read the paper. Please feel free to submit any ‘issues’ that you may have to Climate Dynamics, and I will gladly address them through the peer review process.

 And so end all creationists...

Sceptics win a round of the climate debate

There was a debate held in the US last night (I think) on the subject of climate change. There were some big hitters on both sides, including Richard Lindzen and Philip Stott for the heretics and Gavin Sshmidt and Richard Somerville for the orthodox. There's a transcript up here, which I haven't had a chance to look at yet.

What I did find interesting was the results of the polls held before and after the debate which showed a marked shift towards the sceptic position.

Global warming is not a crisis Date 3/14/2007 Votes Online Poll Before Debate After Debate For 54.76 % 29.88 % 46.22 % Against 41.94 % 57.32 % 42.22 % Undecided 3.30 % 12.80 % 11.56 %

This suggests strongly that when people are exposed to the sceptic position, they form a completely different view of the truth of the global warming hypothesis.