More Greenpeace death threats

Updated on Jan 23, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Who can forget the infamous threat from Greenpeace's Gene Hasmi?

We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.

And we be many, but you be few.

But was this a one-off? The evidence is suggesting otherwise. In the comments thread to a particularly sick Guardian post, which was adorned with a photo of a severed head, and which I will not therefore dignify with a link, comes this from commenter Bluecloud:

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Walport bashes the Guardian

A few weeks ago Adam Vaughan wrote an article in Guardian that suggested that a report by Mark Walport had compared the risks of fracking to thalidomide and asbestos. Vaughan's contribution to the debate has now received an extremely cutting response from Sir Mark (see update at link above):

The Guardian article that linked fracking with thalidomide and asbestos is a florid example of what my report argued most strongly against. It confuses arguments about science with value propositions. It selected one sentence from one evidence paper, quoted it in part, and in doing so misrepresented both the report and indeed the evidence paper itself.

Marvellous stuff. I just don't quite understand why Sir Mark has chosen this moment to speak out about Guardian Eco playing fast and loose with the facts. They do much worse than this on an almost daily basis.

Why now?

Deja vu

It was interested to read this article by Ed Hooper, the author of a book entitled The River. Published in 1999, this weighty tome presented an alternative hypothesis for the development of AIDS, suggesting that use of simian organs during the early trials of the polio vaccine provided a pathway for the SIV virus to make the leap to humans, where it became HIV.

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Diary dates, navel gazing edition

The Guardian has organised one of those Guardianesque events at which they get a lot of greens together to discuss how green things should be:

Are the media contributing to the problem of climate change through apocalyptic stories, or by giving equal airtime to sceptics despite the scientific consensus? Could better reporting help us feel less hopeless and helpless?

• Anne Karpf is Reader at London Metropolitan University and a freelance journalist

• John Vidal is environment editor of The Guardian

• James Painter, of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford, is author of 'Climate Change and the Media'

• Sally Weintrobe is a psychoanalyst and editor of 'Engaging with Climate Change'.

 It's on the 18th November in London. Details here.

Ouch

Chris Rapley has turned his hand to stagecraft, penning a new play about - you guessed it - climate change, which is being staged at London's Royal Court Theatre. Not bad for a first-time author! Here's the first review, from What's on Stage:

Had it been more interestingly presented, it could have amounted to the starkest message on a stick ever mounted at the Royal Court. Instead, it's probably the worst play ever seen on that hallowed stage, convincing you that the world can't end quickly enough if this is all we can expect from the so-called home of new writing.

Ouch.

There’s something fishy about our journalists

This is a guest post by Danny Weston.

Just a few days ago our old friend, the Telegraph’s Geoffrey Lean, was rightly excoriated on this blog for yet another appallingly biased - not to mention incompetent – screed further justifying his apparent fear of imminent human caused thermageddon. Now it’s not news to any regular readers here that many of our glorious hacks appear to throw out all pretense of professionalism and impartiality when it comes to the issue of the seemingly ever omnipotent CO₂ molecule belched from the belly of human industry. Motivated reasoning seems to be the root cause. Or is it? I’d like to propose an altogether more frightening theory – that in many cases it is in fact sheer incompetence that is the driving force and the reliance on climate catastrophist talking points is more an effect than a cause. It gives them a nice, tidy, heuristic for them to hang everything on, minimising their need to do their own research, editing or indeed, even thinking.

To explain why I’d like to talk through a number of personal anecdotes that all tie in together in various ways with both Lean’s article and his behaviour.

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Silly social science

From the long and turgid annals of the Society of Silly Social Science Studies comes a paper by two academics at the University of Maine. Bridie McGreavy and Laura Lindenfeld have been examining three examples of the cinematographer's art as applied to the global warming debate, namely The Day After Tomorrow, Sizzle and An Inconvenient Truth.

All three films had their critics. All three have their factual errors and distortions. All three have their hidden agendas. None of the films is peer-reviewed science...obviously. Nevertheless, such storytelling does have an impact on popular culture and public perception regarding a given issue. McGreavy and Lindenfeld suggest that dominant representations of race and gender in these films fail to align with the key sustainable development goals of equity, freedom and shared responsibility. Instead, their position as "entertainment" influences our sense of the world, guides our relationships and may well affect, in a detrimental manner, our collective abilities to create a sustainable future.

You thought that the problem with An Inconvenient Truth was that it was a lot of scientific baloney. But actually the film's big failing is that it reinforces "racial, gender and sexual stereotypes". Who would have thought it?

A falling out

It's fun to watch the tiff that has developed between uber-upholder of the climate consensus Chris Mooney and the New York Times' Andy Revkin. Mooney has written a piece highlighting the growing use in the New York Times climate coverage of what is described (by the headline writer at least) as "weasel words". This is what you and I, gentle reader, would call "statements of uncertainty". Mooney's article was prompted by a study by one of Max Boykoff's students, which find that the New York Times, alone among US newspapers, is now using such terminology much more often and much more so than Spanish newspapers.

In response, Revkin has described Mooney's take as "spin" and wonders why he would prefer the nuances of American journalism to the certainties that apparently dominate Spanish coverage. Mooney of course is a political campaigner and wants public support for his policy preferences, so public understanding of uncertainties is not really going to help his cause. So as long as people like Revkin occasionally lard their articles with expressions of doubt, the Mooneys of this world are going to try to get them to stop.

The descent of broadcasting

Pour yourself a coffee, open a packet of biscuits, and sit yourself down in a comfy chair to read Ben Pile's long and utterly fascinating survey of the descent of science broadcasting and in particular the BBC's Horizon strand. With side swipes at, among others, Paul Nurse, Simon Singh, Iain Stewart and David Attenborough it is unmissable. Take this bit:

Nurse’s contempt for ‘politics and ideology’ and ‘polemicists and commentators’ is simple contempt for the viewer. Nurse asks for his trust, but does not reciprocate — the viewer is too easily misled, not being sufficiently equipped, too vulnerable to ‘others who don’t understand the science’. Science is just too complicated for the public. The values of the contemporary Royal Society are now identical to the values of the producers of Horizon: the public is a dangerous, contemptible moron.

Read the whole thing.

Diary date: rock talk edition

The Geological Society has decided to join the throng of institutions keen to discover that magic ingredient that will get the public to hang on their every word. Yes, it's scientific communication time once again:

Geological issues are increasingly intruding on the everyday lives of people across the UK. Whether it be onshore exploration and extraction of oil and gas, subsurface injection of waters for geothermal power or deep storage of carbon and radioactive waste, many communities across the country are being confronted with controversial geo-engineering interventions under their backyard. Alongside the complex scientific and technical challenges, an additional problem is that, to most people, the geological subsurface is an unknown realm. That combination presents particular difficulties for professional geoscientists communicating what they do and what they know to the lay public. Developing public participation strategies that effectively engage with citizens, communities, and stakeholder groups, requires geoscientists to better appreciate what the public knows and what they have concerns about.

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No objection

Further to the last post, I emailed Dart Energy's PR people to ask for some details about the hearing. In particular, according to Rob Edwards at the Herald:

Dart’s predicted radioactive discharges were highlighted in a submission to the public inquiry by Dr Ian Fairlie, a radiation expert hired by local objectors. He didn’t present his evidence because Dart objected to inaccuracies in his submission.

What precisely were the objections, I wondered. Well, the response was a bit of an eye opener. It seems that there were no objections lodged at all. The true story was given in the closing submission of Dart's QC to the inquiry:

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Deniers no more

In the pub on Friday night a pal mentioned that he'd seen my name mentioned in the Independent a few days ago. I think this may have been this article by Tom Bawden responding to the SciTech committee's report on climate change communication, which cites me as saying something eminently sensible about sea-level rise.

What struck me about the article was that Mr Bawden eschewed the use of the d-word, something he has not felt constrained about in the past.

Perhaps we are having an effect.

Targetted rebuttal

Here's another interesting snippet from Julia Slingo's appearance on The Life Scientific. This is where Slingo is asked about the kerfuffle over her apparent linking of this winter's storms and floods to climate change. Readers will no doubt recall that this blew up when David Rose published an article in the Mail on Sunday which noted the contradiction between Slingo's remarks, as reported by Roger Harrabin, and conventional understanding of what was behind the storms, namely a shift in the jetstream, with no known link to AGW.

According to Slingo, her remarks had been "taken out of context" and all she had been trying to say was that warmer air will hold more water thus leading to more rainfall. So if she is to be believed, when asked if there was a link to between this winter's series of  storms and AGW, her remark that "all the evidence points to a link" was meant to mean that the storms had been made marginally worse by AGW.

I'm not convinced that this is the message that most people would have taken away with them.

And just as surprising is that when Rose reported Slingo's remarks as reported by Harrabin, the Met Office decided to issue a criticism of Rose.

Slingo 3

Ward versus Tol

I am somewhat in awe of Channel Four news. I mean, Bob Ward writes a post criticising Richard Tol on an obscure page on the LSE website and Jon Snow, Cathy Newman et al leap into action to interrogate Tol on air. Not only that, but Ward is invited on to put his own case to Tol and Newman repeatedly accuses Tol of "having an agenda" because he is an unpaid adviser to GWPF while Ward, the paid mouthpiece for a wealthy environmentalist, is given a free ride. All that from a blog post!

I must say, the interview was distinctly uninformative, with Newman and Ward apparently trying to suggest that because Tol's paper is the only one showing benefits from warming (there are only two that have examined the case of warming of 1°C), his allegation of scaremongering by the IPCC is wrong. If ever there was a non-sequitur this is it. As Tol points out, the other studies for warming of a few degrees show net harm that is indistinguishable from zero. Calls for panic are indeed over the top.

Preparing the ground

Ahead of tomorrow's publication of the Science and Technology Committee's report into the communication of climate science, certain sections of the chatterati are, shall we say, preparing the ground.

The Guardian notes SciTech chairman Andrew Miller bemoaning the appearance of dissenting voices in certain media outlets:

Andrew Miller MP, the committee's chair said: “All of the serious news outlets we spoke to were unanimous in accepting the scientific evidence that human activity is causing climate change. This came as a surprise to us because some papers regularly give a platform to lobby groups or indeed conspiracy theorists – many not even qualified scientists – who pooh-pooh the evidence and attack UK climate scientists."

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