Newtonian facts

A gentleman named Steven Newton of the US "National Center for Science Education" has been taking a pop at Bjorn Lomborg today, bringing up all those canards such as the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty with which greens like to assail him. (As an aside, greens' enthusiasm for this particular kangaroo court is yet another reason for doubting their attachment to a free and - in the UK sense - liberal society).

Still, Bjorn is quite capable of defending himself and he has pointed out one fairly glaring issue with Mr Newton's critique. This concerned what Mr Newton alleges was the fact-checking to which he and his students subjected Lomborg's magnum opus, The Skeptical Environmentalist.

In about half the cases, Lomborg’s citations either could not be found (for instance, they linked to non-existent websites) or did not say what he said they did.

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Ye olde techniques - Josh 273

 

I thought the National Review article, posted here of course, was worth a cartoon. H/t Rick Cina in the comments for the peer-reviewed critiques of Mann's hockey sticks.

Cartoons by Josh

Deliberate distortions

The New Yorker is taking sceptics to task for citing old newspaper articles (H/T Leo Hickman). The case seems to be that this is being done in a cursory fashion.

There’s nothing wrong with examining old newspaper articles for clues about climate conditions in the past. Legitimate climate researchers look at historical documents of all kinds. However, a good-faith effort to arrive at the truth would not rely on cherry-picking catchy headlines. It would require considering the context and looking at all the evidence. At the very least, it wouldn’t allow for deliberate distortions.

This made me laugh because I had raised an eyebrow at an earlier sentence in which the author said this:

A central tenet for [sceptics] is that today’s sea-ice retreat, warming surface temperatures, and similar observations are short-lived anomalies of a kind that often happened in the past—and that overzealous scientists and gullible media are quick to drum up crises where none exist.

Is claiming that sea ice is in retreat when sea ice levels are well above their long-term average the kind of "deliberate distortion" that he is referring to? Or perhaps "today's" means something different at the New Yorker.

Wet, wet, wet

The Guardian is reporting claims that extreme rainfall events are becoming more likely in the UK:

Climate change caused by humans has made the likelihood of extreme rainfall similar to that seen in England this winter significantly higher, according to analysis seen by the Guardian.

Rainfall events that would previously have occurred only once in a century are now likely to be witnessed once every eighty years in the south of England, the Oxford University work shows.

This is a very frustrating article as there is no link to a paper. It's therefore hard to tell exactly what has been done to arrive at this conclusion. In fact it's not entirely clear whether there is a paper backing up these claims - it may be that there is only a press release.

But we should only note that the apparent contradiction with reports a few years ago that the drought risk in the south of England was similar to that in the Sahara.

More gloom for renewables rentiers

DECC is apparently about to announce a review of its strategy on solar power:

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is set to announce a review into the level of support offered to large-scale solar through the Renewable Obligation scheme, with a number of industry figures bracing themselves for the news.

While a reduction is not the only outcome of a review, it would tally with the recent Solar Strategy document which appeared to realign its preference for PV developments from ground-mounted to smaller, mid-sized rooftop arrays.

Given that the government has been making noises about keeping everything steady on the renewables front, this could represent something of an about turn. If so, one wonders if it represents jockeying for position ahead of the various elections over the next year or derriere covering ahead of the crises in the electricity grid that are expected in coming winters.

The climate inquisitor

The National Review has done a long and in-depth article on Michael Mann and freedom of speech entitled The Climate Inquisitor.

Secure as he appears to be in his convictions, Mann has nonetheless taken it upon himself to try to suppress debate and to silence some of the “irrational” and “virulent” critics, who he claims have nothing of substance to say. To this end, Mann has filed a lawsuit against National Review. Our offense? Daring to publish commentary critical of his hockey-stick graph and disapproving of his hectoring mien.

The Hockey Stick Illusion gets a mention too.

Another scientivist

Anthony points out the eructions of an Exeter University geographer named Stephan Harrison, who says that debating sceptics is like wrestling with pigs. 

Ho hum - another day, another academic making a fool of themselves.

Nevertheless, Dr Harrison has an interesting CV. Apparently his research work on glaciers is centred on Patagonia although he previously worked on the Tian Shan mountains in Central Asia. Probably fair to say that he has a very large carbon footprint indeed. It's therefore no surprise to see that he is also an very keen environmental activist. He is:

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Reminder: Donna in Edinburgh

Just a reminder to readers in central Scotland that Donna Laframboise is speaking at the City Chambers in Edinburgh tonight. It's free!

Details here.

Back

A busy weekend, with Donna Laframboise and her husband staying and some other engagements too, hence the lack of posts on Sunday. Back in the saddle now, although I'm still pretty busy with the day job.

The ecologist view versus the economist view

Matt Ridley has an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal about the different ways economists and ecologists look at the world.

How many times have you heard that we humans are "using up" the world's resources, "running out" of oil, "reaching the limits" of the atmosphere's capacity to cope with pollution or "approaching the carrying capacity" of the land's ability to support a greater population? The assumption behind all such statements is that there is a fixed amount of stuff—metals, oil, clean air, land—and that we risk exhausting it through our consumption.

"We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably produce, and unless we change course, that number will grow fast—by 2030, even two planets will not be enough," says Jim Leape, director general of the World Wide Fund for Nature International (formerly the World Wildlife Fund).

The green authoritarian meme

At a dinner last night I found myself sitting next to a gentleman who was previously prominent in local politics and we had a very interesting chat. He was disparaging about environmentalists, saying that they were the same people that the Labour party had struggled to remove thirty years ago - the Trotskyists, the Militant Tendency and the like.

This makes a great deal of sense when you look at the modus operandi of many greens - the smears, the whispering campaigns, the ad-hominems and, as an excellent op-ed in Spiked describes, the rampant authoritarianism, opposition to free speech and crushing of dissent.

The outrage prompted by someone daring to suggest that debate over climate change might be a good thing, the shock that a politician might think that, yes, free and open political debate of an issue that could shape how society produces and consumes is important, the venom and ad hominems that have come the way of someone defending a principle - free speech - that anyone who cares about democracy ought to defend… it all goes to make Brandis’s point about ‘a new authoritarianism’ emerging, an attempt ‘to control the commanding heights of opinion’, ‘where rather than winning the argument [the new authoritarians] exclude their antagonists from the argument’.’ As Andrew Bolt put it in the Herald Sun, it amounts to something approaching a ‘dictatorship of the mind’.

Lew's downfall

Donna Laframboise is in town, so blogging will be slow for a couple of days.

In the meantime Geoff Chambers points me to the (almost inevitable) "Downfall" video to accompany Stephan Lewandowsky's recent demise. Enjoy.

Security blanket

Updated on Apr 24, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Ed Davey has announced a further expansion of the government's renewable energy scheme, with eight new projects unveiled, blanketing the UK's waters with wind turbines. These projects are apparently so enormous that they will, on their own, produce a noticeable rise in household electricity bills of some 2%. The rise in industrial electricity prices that will result and which must also be absorbed by consumers - something like the same amount again - goes unstated.

Interestingly, the argument that renewables are cheap have gone out of the window. Instead, with Ukraine in the news on a daily basis, Davey is emphasising energy security:

Mr Davey defended the cost, arguing that these kind of low-carbon projects were essential to boost energy security and battle climate change.

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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.

From another age

Sheila Jasanoff is reckoned one of the great thinkers about science and technology and her writings therefore tend to command instant interest. Her latest piece is on societal responses to climate change and can be seen here.

It's hugely disappointing, and not simply because of a rather superficial understanding of the state of climate science:

The causal connection between human activity and the warming of the earth's mean surface temperatures has strengthened from quite tentative to "extremely likely" over a quarter century.

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