Lord Hansen of Grandchildren

I learned from the Guardian newspaper website in the UK that James Hansen is angry at Lord Lawson and the Global Warming Policy Foundation. As per the Guardian, this is because the foundation “…routinely casts doubt on the work of climate scientists”.  This is quite puzzling. Shouldn’t James Hansen be thankful to Lord Lawson for this?

One has to travel not far in Britain before stumbling into a tangle of quasi-governmental institutions— the Press Complaints Commission, the Information Rights Tribunal and the like. The consensus is finally manning up after years of whining about Freedom of Information requests. They realise they can submit requests too(!). Only Hansen and his friends failed to notice, that Lawson and friends are private individuals whereas they have whole nations and governments behind them in tow. Nevertheless, they approach the Information Rights Tribunal.

Why? one may ask. Sheer jealousy, what else! Lawson and Benny Peiser have apparently been so successful in getting media exposure, that it has turned the GrandChildren of the World into an endangered species. In Hansen’s cosmology however, he is supplicating the Tribunal for Lawson’s sake. He seeks to prevent Lawson and colleagues from being judged as having “committed crimes against humanity” by said GrandChildren and the  “…eventual conviction of these people in the court of public opinion”.

What about people who stand convicted in the court of public opinion, today?

The Guardian article carries further details about how Hansen imagines of establishing some nefarious link with fossil fuel companies and the GWPF. One can almost see Hansen,  dreaming every night, of obtaining private emails, letters and documents, which show a vast network of motivated individuals, working as one to achieve a common but distributed goal, funded immensely and interminably, …

Skepticalscience.com quote surgery on Pat Michaels

I read with amusement Skepticalscience’s latest in their lineup of posts on climate scientists whose views diverge from the consensus. First it was the ‘Michaels Mischiefs’ series. Now he’s been turned into a ‘serial deleter’. Michaels’ probably getting off easy – John Christy is stuck with ‘Christy’s Crocks’. I guess if you run a website, you can call people whatever names you want.

The present story though goes to Pat Michaels’ ‘More Ice than ever‘, an article that appeared in American Spectator way back in February 2008. Michaels was then responding to a alarmist Washington Post news item on Antarctic ice loss reported by Rignot and co-authors. The article draws attention to increasing Antarctic sea ice, and how little information there was on whether the Antarctic land ice was really going down, or its significance.

Now direct your attention to this article at Skepticalscience.com. This is them trying to ‘debunk’  a supposed Antarctic myth.

(c) SkepticalScience

It begins with a quote attributed to Pat Michaels, linked to the American Spectator article:

“The amount of ice surrounding Antarctica is now at the highest level since satellites began to monitor it almost 30 years ago. It’s simply too cold for rain in Antarctica and it’ll stay that way for a very long time. The bottom line is there is more ice than ever surrounding Antarctica.”

You can examine the Spectatorarticle—the above passage does not appear at all. It has been created by pulling together sentences from two different places. Skepticalscience.com then provides the rebuttal, beginning as follows (emphasis in original):

“Skeptic arguments that Antarctica is gaining ice frequently hinge on an error of omission, namely ignoring the difference between land ice and sea ice.”

In his article, Michaels wrote:

 [...]

So it’s not warming up, and the snowfall data are equivocal, yet the continent is experiencing a net loss of ice. How can this be, and is it even important? The current hypothesis is that warmer waters beneath the surface are somehow loosening the ice. That’s plausible, but again, there’s precious little proof of it.

And further, the bottom line is that there is more ice than ever surrounding Antarctica.

Whereas John Cook says Michaels wrote:

 ”The amount of ice surrounding Antarctica is now at the highest level since satellites began to monitor it almost 30 years ago. It’s simply too cold for rain in Antarctica and it’ll stay that way for a very long time. The bottom line is there is more ice than ever surrounding Antarctica.”

Cook makes Michaels look like an ignorant stereotypical ‘denier’ who says that ice cannot melt because it is too cold to rain and craftily ignores the distinction between land ice and sea ice. Only he did nothing of the sort. Indeed in the conclusion he says:

 One of the tired tropes that reverberate throughout global warming reporting is that inconvenient facts get left out. In this case, it’s blatant. Midway through the Post’s page-long article comes a statement that “these new findings come as the Arctic is losing ice at a dramatic rate.” Wouldn’t that have been an appropriate place to note that, despite a small recent loss of ice from the Antarctic landmass, the ice field surrounding Antarctica is now larger than ever measured?

Which is what Cook puts down as well. Only Michaels said it before Cook/Skepticalscience did.

In other words, Skepticalscience.com creates an impression that ‘skeptic arguments’ are grossly wrong and simplistic, uses a manipulated quote from Michaels’ article to exemplify such a position, and then proceeds to provide a rebuttal which consists exactly of the same facts laid by him in the first place.

John Cook, who seems to have a need to create ‘skeptical myths’ out of whole cloth (in order to debunk them), has consistently had a problem representing what people say (see here, here and here). An earlier version of his Antarctic ice post carried a slightly different passage. Even then, Cook lopped off a crucial sentence about IPCC predictions on Antarctic sea ice from Michaels’ original.

From the Waybackmachine: Skepticalscience quotes Pat Michaels in 2008 - A sentence is missing

Skepticalscience.com are free to nurture their delusions about skeptics, but it should not be at the cost of false representation.

Update: A Skepticalscience.com author dana ‘corrected’ the quoted passage by inserting ellipsis marks between the sentences. Quickly following the move, the whole Pat Michaels quote has now been taken down silently and replaced by an article summary from journalist Greg Roberts’ piece in The Australian. Unfortunately the Australian’s article too makes the clear distinction between land ice and sea ice. At this point, it is unclear which skeptic actually said anything resembling what John Cook and his cohort claim they do.

Further update: The Skepticalscience article now carries this at the end:

On 20 Jan 2012, we revised this article upon learning it referenced an incorrect quote. We apologize to Dr. Michaels and to our readers for the error.

Readers point out this is an useful graphic to show what was done:

You know who owns the story of Climategate II?

It is not some investigative journalist, or journalists who have free time on their hands and demand money to follow their hobbies.

It is Tom Nelson.

Don’t play jujitsu with people’s lives, please

Donna Laframboise alerts readers to Canadian Environment Minister Joe Oliver’s insightful remarks. Oliver notes how environmental and other pressure groups “ hijack [our] regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda”. Oliver, of course, is laying his finger at the crux of the matter. Western regulatory systems, with their high compliance rates, lack of safety valves, and paucity of democratically elected oversight are perfect vehicles for subversion and capture of power.

Which brings us to the question: Radicals hijacking a regulatory system is obviously bad. Is it Ok then for regulatory systems to be hijacked to achieve a moderate political agenda?

That is exactly what the Hartwell group and Roger Pielke Jr advocate. They both want to play ‘policy jujitsu’ – i.e., do something no one likes, but in a way no one can see it being done, and use their own energies for doing it.

We’ll be there before too long

I dig my hole you build a wall
I dig my hole you build a wall
One day that wall is gonna fall

Gon’ build that city on a hill
Gon’ build that city on a hill
Some day those tears are gonna spill

So build that wall and build it strong cause
We’ll be there before too long

Gon’ build that wall up to the sky
Gon’ build that wall up to the sky
Some day your bird is gonna fly

Gon’ build that wall until it’s done
Gon’ build that wall until it’s done
But now you’ve got nowhere to run

So build that wall and build it strong cause
We’ll be there before too long

A totally new concept from Mike Hulme

Mike Hulme the British Professor, has written a new paper that appeared in the 2011 issue of Osiris magazine. Hulme discusses what he has ferreted out, as a new revelation in climate science and climate studies practice. He then claims this method he sees scientists resorting to – which he calls ‘climate reductionism – has ‘deficiencies’.

In seeking to predict a climate-shaped future, the complexity of interactions between climates, environments and societies is reduced and a new variant of climate determinism emerges. I call this ‘climate reductionism’, a form of analysis and prediction in which climate is first extracted from the matrix of interdependencies which shape human life within the physical world. Once isolated, climate is then elevated to the role of dominant predictor variable. I argue in this paper that climate reductionism is a methodology that has become dominant in analyses of present and future environmental change – and that as a methodology it has deficiencies.

So Hulme has found in their analyses, climate scientists  first extract climate “from the matrix of interdependencies”  and  then elevate “climate to the role of dominant predictor variable”.

Helpfully enough, Hulme provides examples of the final outcome of this method. These are claims in the media he finds, e.g., ‘every year climate change leaves over 300,000 people dead and ‘We predict, on the basis of mid-range climate-warming scenarios for 2050, that 15–37% of species … will be ‘committed to extinction’, and so forth.

How does the method itself look? Hulme again provides an example of an economics paper as a perfect illustration of “[seeking] out simple chains of climatic cause-and-effect” between climate change and economic growth:

The authors recognise that whether or not climate change has a direct effect on economic development is contentious, but they claim nevertheless that their global analysis using data from over 180 nations reveals a “substantial contemporary causal effect of temperature on aggregate [economic] output … on average, a 1⁰C increase in average temperature predicts a fall in per-capita income by about 8 per cent”

By doing this Hulme says, the “complex relationships that exist between climate and economic performance are first reduced to a dependent relationship between temperature and GDP per capita” and then, using projections of future climate warming, future economic performance is predicted for the twenty-first century”.

But this is not a new observation at all. Climate sceptics are well familiar with the numerous instances of fear-mongering which Hulme acknowledges exist, have traced backward to the original source of such alarmism, and found the same methodology being adopted over and over again. ‘Take something good and connect it to climate, run a climate model and make it worse’ – this is virtually the touchstone of the alarmist call. The method has myriad variants and has been successfully used in environmental regulation and public health policy formulation. It is the root source of several claims to emerge from the IPCC. Fortunately enough the IPCC sourced such claims from environmental pressure group literature, so that aspect could be pointed out to the world to draw attention to the inherent implausibility and fear-mongering present in such claims. But what otherwise?

In instances where critics can bring enormously inconvenient ‘gotchas’ to bear, the consensus establishment reluctantly concedes some inches of territory; otherwise the use of this methodolgy is defended to death (because it yields such precious results).

Consider the case of Amazongate, where a computer-modelling effort on forest fires by Nepstad and colleagues transmogrified into a statement on dramatic Amazonian vulnerability.  The technique adopted in the originating papers by Daniel Nepstad is straightforward. A threshold of soil moisture is said to cause ‘fire risk’ and climate change produces/contributes to a reduction in precipitation over the Amazon. Vast tracts of the forest then burn away in the models. In Nepstad et al 2004, 40% of the forest is at risk of catching fire. In Nepstad et al 2008, the computer model loses 55% of the entire Amazon in the next 20 years. Or take the more recent Le Page et al 2010 whose models  reduction in rainfall whose models leave only 24% of the Amazon protected from fire due to reduction in rainfall. As we know, such extrapolation methodology has been comprehensively defended by scientists studying the Amazon.

How can this method be explicitly characterized for Amazonian literature?

From my comment on this thread:

The approach is similar: a certain diffusely present environmental metric is selected (in this case precipitation), and by a series of assumptions, linked to the risk for a local factor developing (in this case, fire). Models are then used, to obtain projections of the environmental metric (precipitation) into the future. Proportionally, the local event is projected to increase (usually), hand in hand, with the global environmental metric. Impressive area estimate figures are arrived at, for the purported ‘risk’, involving the entire Amazon.

From my comment

The way quantitative claims in the Amazon and the way their link to global warming is derived, pretty much follows the same pattern, as has occurred in this thread.

Initially, an area estimate is derived – either from modeling or from expert opinion. – indicating some damage to affect the entire Amazon. Properly considered, this estimate is meaningful, *only given the complete suite of assumptions*, which go into deriving the estimate.

Then, climate change is shown to be capable of potentially causing, usually by computer modeling, the worst/highest/most severe of causal factor/s. Thirdly, the above two things are clubbed together to derive high area estimates of forest ‘vulnerability’.

The above method – derivation of results by daisy-chaining and stacking of assumptions – implies naturally, that conclusions so arrived are heavily tied down by qualifiers, and therefore weak.

However, successive transmissions of such results happen in press releases, interviews or blog posts. At each step, the crucial context, the qualifying assumptions and conditions which constrain and make such conclusions meaningful are stripped away successively. This effectively de-contextualizes the scientific claim. The causal link between ‘climate change’ and the proposed ‘vulnerability’ becomes super-strong, at this stage.

What is left is a percent figure, the words ‘climate change’ and Amazon.

I would say these formulations above are very similar to what Hulme claims to have divined. The bulk of Working Group II high-impact high-profile modelling publications would squarely fall into this category and Hulme identifies this himself. The insight provided by Hulme in his paper is not new, and climate skeptics recognize it in its various forms.

Why does it happen though? Hulme blames the “hegemony exerted by the predictive natural sciences” which allows such ‘climate reductionism’ to emerge. I quote:

I suggest that the hegemony exerted by the predictive natural sciences over human attempts to understand the unfolding future, opens up the spaces for climate reductionism to emerge. It is a hegemony manifest in the pivotal role held by climate (and related) modelling in shaping climate change discourses.

This is backward in several important respects. There are strong systemic forces that strengthen predictive activity of this kind, once it takes its hold. Specifically in the case of climate change, a persistent and expansile international technocrat-activist class fuels the political and funding process. Predictive activity (i.e., modelling) capable of producing useful results (as opposed to no-catastrophe and world-will-end-tomorrow type results) are selected for survival in this milieu. Modeling that predicts undefined disaster safely well into the near future, whose putative outcomes are potentially modifiable by legislative regulation of substances is encouraged. In other words, the ‘hegemony exerted by predictive natural sciences’ coincides perfectly with spikes of political activity that finds such predictive science an attractive handmaiden. Once these driving forces are in place, the mere presence of an enormous number of variable in large, complex systems as the climate, makes the emergence of such climate reductionism almost inevitable.

Climate scientists  first extract climate “from the matrix of interdependencies”  and  then elevate “climate to the role of dominant predictor variable”, not just because they are scientists who “hegemony” made them do it, but because people and entities with power would benefit from them doing so.

Keith Kloor is a climate skeptic

Once in a while someone commits a Freudian slip and you get an enormous window into what they are thinking. Keith Kloor committed one recently and immediately put a whole lot of people, including Kloor himself, in trouble.

Kloor’s writing generally consists of vast swathes of copy-pasted quoted material. Falling prey to his usual style, Kloor quoted a commenter as ‘concisely expressing’ his thinking on climate change. Want to know what that looked like?

I categorise myself as somebody who recognizes that additional CO2 in the atmosphere as a result of man’s activities (fossil fuel burning and land use change) will have an effect on the balance of radiation coming into and leaving our atmosphere.

I do not have a confirmed view as to exactly what the impact of the CO2 will have (feedbacks etc being uncertain) but I know that it must have an effect – that’s physics.

Seriously? Virtually everyone in the climate debate can believe in this, including the so-called deniers.

Let us see how many problems this creates:

[1] Kloor routinely bashes skeptics, treats them like children, thinks Anthony Watts is one extreme of a spectrum the other end of which is Joe Romm, thinks those who object to use of ‘denier’ are shedding crocodile tears, routinely equates climate skeptics to ‘anti-vaxxers’, anti-evolutionists, calls them ‘politically motivated’, ‘mobsters’, ‘tribals’, ‘partisans’, ‘cranks’, ‘capos’, ‘thugs’

But his thinking on CO2 and the climate system completely matches theirs.

[2] Many skeptics find that, while they agree with some propositions of the climate consensus, it doesn’t add up to the whole that is portrayed. Skeptics provide reasons for why they reject aspects of the current consensus or the whole. Kloor rarely if ever evaluates any scientific claims put forth by the consensus, does not understand the salience of scientific disputes, and strictly speaking possesses no formal background to evaluate scientific claims.

But yet, he does not accept the conclusions of consensus climate science.

[3] After having implicitly rejected the broad conclusions of the consensus science, Kloor remains supportive of consensus science and its efforts.

[4] Not only is Kloor not really convinced by the science of impacts of increased CO2, he hides this fact well. So well that it took an alert Tim Lambert to pounce on the comment where Kloor let it slip. When confronted by the apparent mismatch, he clammed up.

So in summary, Kloor bashes skeptics but thinks just like them, has no mechanism of evaluating science but rejects it, reject the science of impacts yet pretends to support it, and is not really convinced by the science but yet hides it thoroughly.

Kloor is hardly alone in this. When Glaciergate, Amazongate, and Africagate were doing rounds, I noted several consensus knights and their lackeys hastily jettisoning the science of impacts – i.e., Working Group II– as though it were a stepchild of some sort. ‘Working Group I is where the real science is, Working Group II is not really good anyway and we knew it’.

What is more, on observing Kloor’s antics several members of the Climate Inquisitional Authority who keep their cattle-brands  (which spell d-e-n-i-e-r) well dipped into hot coals at all times, ever ready to poke into the eyes of any passerby– fell curiously silent. They were seen turning their heads rapidly, shifting their feet, hemming and hawing and generally sighing. It seems they reserve their special climate spa treatments only for newly-found deniers who are their friends.

Simple explanation? Kloor, just like everyone else has questions in his mind, questions which are eminently reasonable given the poor quality of IPCC science. There is no catastrophe and like most people Kloor doesn’t believe that climate change is an existential threat. No one is sold by the alarmism peddled in the name of the IPCC. Those who openly declare this are labeled ‘skeptics’ and compared to Holocaust deniers. Kloor just doesn’t have the courage to do so, that’s all.

As Monckton (on being compared to whom Kloor cringed in despair) points out, professing an outward belief in the climate consensus can be ” socially convenient, politically expedient, and, above all, financially profitable”. Under such attractive circumstances why would anyone not want to be seen as believer?

Roger Pielke Jr: When the debate gets over

Roger Pielke Jr: from the website of THE BEAST

Lot of people think the climate game is fun: caring for the planet, reading climate science papers, arguing about statistics, ‘sensitivitiy’, radiative physics and the like. Well, … let’s just leave that be for now. Behind the scenes, the climate game is played by ratfucking and retractions. People are not angling for ‘genuine debate’ or trying to ‘solve problems’, they are trying to shut the other guy down and have things their way.

In January last year (i.e., 2010), when the climate faithful were smarting from the twin hits of Climategate and Copenhagen, two people got together and wrote a humorous piece for the website Alternet. Now humour takes on many forms. The Alternet authors in their version of  leftie gallows humour  fancifully imagined letting Richard Lindzen roast in a sauna with a running automobile, leaving Steve McIntyre stranded on a Maldivian beach with cement shoes on, and letting Monckton’s castle be overrun by ‘climate refugees’. No doubt they were giving full expression to their frustration at not being allowed to rearrange the world’s economies in order to save it.

Interestingly enough policy scholar Roger Pielke Jr made the list of the ’15 most heinous climate villians’ (that was what the article was about), at position 14. Pretty soon though, Pielke Jr was taken off the list.  The only reason Alternet’s editors offered was that someone from an ‘affiliated organization’ had complained to them.

Fast-forward to May 2010. Author Ian Murphy after researching the Pielke Jr-described ‘post-normal science’ was literally overcome by pangs of conscience that Pielke Jr had walked free earlier and spilled the beans.  As he explains, it was Michael Shellenberger – boss at the Breakthrough Institute where Pielke Jr was fellow who got in touch by email with Alternet. Shellenberger explained how ‘Pielke had received death threats previously and Alternet shouldn’t encourage more of that’. In the original the heinous climate villian Pielke Jr was to be ‘ripped to shreds’ by invasive species hyenas as his comeuppance. This presumably in Shellenberger’s eyes counted as  ‘encouraging’ readers to literally making it happen. Pielke Jr took Murphy’s moral proclamations somewhat literally  - he called it: ‘A Call for violence against me‘.

Things become a bit simple from that point. One of the chief financial backers of Alternet, we learn , is the Nathan Cummings Foundation.  Shellenberger’s Breakthrough Institute is almost exclusively funded by the Nathan Cummings Foundation. “Virtually all of our funding comes from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, trustees of the dreaded Sara Lee pound cake fortune, and the Lotus Foundation, funded by members of the Pritzker family” , and not just some ‘dirty libertarian oil company’  as the Alternet article slanted it, boasted Ted Nordhaus Breakthrough Institute’s co-founder. One see in its full glory how the retraction game played out in January at the Breakthrough blog: as Eli Rabett informs Ted Nordhaus that he’d become Pielke Jr’s cats paws, Nordhaus informs him that Alternet had retracted the segment. Nordhaus of course forgot to mention at that point that the Nathan Cummings Foundation of the ‘dreaded Sara Lee pound cake fortune’ funded Alternet. Shellenberger forgot to mention that the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Ford Foundation were clients of his private company American Environics.

Those who would wish to verify the facts about the Breakthrough Institute’s funding via Sourcewatch.org would come in for a jolt. The page is taken down as well, and there is a short message which reads: “This article is under review”. The omnipresent Anna Haynes had carried out the last rites edits. This is the same Haynes whose Sourcewatch article on Keith Kloor was taken down as well.

When Anthony Watts deleted my article on Roger Pielke Jr’s ‘The Climate Debate is Over’ at WUWT, he wrote:

 I have removed this guest post [by Shub Niggurath] because it has been brought to my attention that it is unfair and has caused inflamed reactions [especially in comments] that were unintended.

Sounds just like something that’s happened earlier before, doesn’t it?

A request to Roger Pielke Jr to correct the record

As a few of you might know, this blog carried an article that was critical of Roger Pielke Jr, a science and technology policy scholar who runs a popular eponymously titled blog, for his claim that ‘the climate debate is over’. Pielke Jr made the claim in this form:

The debate over climate science is over and has been won by those who assert a human influence on the climate system. This then is what victory looks like. (For supporting evidence on the science and opinion, see chapters 1 and 2 of TCF).

With the first sentence, it is clear that a number of different things are entangled in a yarnball of a statement and is quite open to interpretation. But that is Pielke Jr’s style. As he notes, evidence to support the claim (that the debate is over) apparently presented in two chapters of his book, The Climate Fix.

The next day, commenter PaulM wryly reminded Pielke Jr about his statement. Pielke Jr responded:

Actually I am providing a forum for a genuine debate over whether that debate is over … so far, my original assertions seem to stand ;-)

But if you (or anyone) wants to tell me what is wrong with the arguments laid out in Ch 1 and 2 of TCF (where this argument has its full presentation), I’m all ears. Thanks!

There it was – stuff about how he had explained the debate was over in his book chapters. So, I took the second statement above as an assignment. I had read the book a while ago and still remembered bits of it. So I read the first two chapters again, and wrote up a piece. ‘Is the climate debate over?’

All kinds of funny things happened at once. Pielke Jr’s blog is on a Blogger platform, and he implements a moderation-sequenced comment stream. Seeking a wider debate on what appeared to be an overgeneralized statement thrown up to draw attention to a more specific and innocuous point (so I thought), I submitted the piece as a guest post to Anthony Watts. The article went up at WUWT.

Pielke Jr responded on his blog. I was ‘reviewing’ his book, he said. He then launched into what he called a sporting interpretation of my ‘review’, presented excerpts, and went on to say I did not ‘know what [I] was writing about’ ( about parts  that didn’t make sense as a review). He finally thanked me for writing the piece. Several of Roger’s readers essentially took him at his word. What kind of a review is this, they wondered. Meanwhile, Anthony Watts deleted my article from his blog. I won’t go into the circumstances surrounding that here.

For Pielke Jr, the mere fact that Fred Singer and James Hansen agree on the effect of atmospheric CO2 may be enough to shut shop on science and enter the policy kitchen. A World Bank poll may be enough to settle the question of public support for climate action. Others may not agree and even if one did, there is a whole chain of assumptions to be allowed for. It is clear that my article is not a review of his book. Given the link to his original post, the larger context is clear as well. Pielke Jr’s response therefore amounts to deliberate misrepresentation. This is reinforced by his making as though the GWPF’s carrying the article was an act of  Internet preservation of material the original publisher decided not to carry. After declaring that he is ‘all ears’ for any discussion of arguments in his book, Pielke Jr used his own labelling  to avoid discussion. That is fine – he is free to engage or not, but his reluctance to engage ought not to be disguised by misrepresentation.

I request Pielke Jr to set the record straight in this regard.

Michael E Mann: Quite the professorial tweet

Twitter messages by Prof. Michael E Mann

Twitter statistics for Prof. Michael E Mann

I wonder how Michael Mann claims he feels harassed by the instrument of the law, and yet is pleased at the prospect of others in the same plight.

Christopher Hitchens passes away

I heard the news that Christopher Hitchens has died.

I was reminded of the so-many intellectual midgets who crawl parasitically in the climate debate. They survive because their very lebensraum is defined by the considered opinions of others, in the middle of which they position their own.

Hitchens had said in this regard:

The truth cannot lie, but if it could, it would lie somewhere in between

Settling down in the middle is easy because you don’t have to have an idea or thought. You only need to know how to mark out territory. This brings endless advantages, chiefly, the ability to constantly indulge in territorial wrangling and pass that off as new thinking.

In this regard, Hitchens:

If you care about agreement and civility, then, you had better be equipped with points of argument and combativity, because if you are not then the “center” will be occupied and defined without your having helped to decide it, or determine what and where it is

I hope his words are not lost on those who sacrifice principle at the altar of expedience.

Pielke Jr: The climate debate is ‘over’

One characteristic of academics is that they never waste a good argument. They would give it as project to a graduate student, carve out a review article with favored colleagues as co-authors, or write a whole book on it. This brings multiple benefits: you can forever hang around making half-baked public statements to draw attention, and simply wave away questions with “The answers are in my book”. Your h-index keeps going up while your opponents waste their time figuring out your cryptic statements.

Roger Pielke Jr has been doing that for a while. There is a new post in his blog in the same vein: about those skeptics. Pielke reacts favourably to a football sports columnist Simon Kuper writing about ‘climate change’, quoting Pielke. Not the first time that’s happened either: here’s Kuper quoting Pielke Jr and saying ‘ignore the skeptics’. The reverse’s happened too: Pielke quoting occasional climate writer Kuper writing about football. You might think, ‘what’s the deal with football here?’ It’ll become obvious shortly.

I ploughed through the sportswriter’s piece: sceptics are ‘irrelevant’, there are not that ‘many of them’, and they are not blocking ‘action’ on climate change. What is blocking it? “Lack of government will”

Apparently Pielke Jr who agrees that the debate is over and the sceptics are irrelevant makes his full argument for the case. Only, as noted before, it is made in his book.

Again, I ploughed through the book. While the first two chapters are rambling one can hack away at the fluffy text and extract points for review, some which Pielke himself fortitiously identifies and some he doesn’t. These are: a) Climate change from CO2 can be ‘undesirable’ b) I cannot tell you exactly why that is, but just…just believe me c) Everyone in the world is worried about climate change and wants to do something about it d) There is an iron law

The central playground for scepticism in climate change has been in (a) and (b). Is CO2 really bad? is warming bad? how much so? is it really heating up so fast and so much like never ever before? Really? Apparently Pielke never experienced any of these questions

Perhaps it is one of the unavoidable side effects of being the son of a world-famous atmospheric scientist, but I have never questioned the climatic importance of human emissions of carbon dioxide; its importance has always been something that was accepted by my father and presented in his work.

So the young Pielke learnt everything about CO2 from his dad, you might think. However Pielke the Junior informs the reader that when his dad was writing basic encyclopedia articles on climate he was not interested in the science and was instead running behind girls and playing soccer

For instance, in the mid-1980s, when my own interests lay far from science and policy, focused instead on soccer and girls my father wrote an annual article on the atmospheric sciences for the Encyclopedia Brittanica

Thus when Pielke writes:

“So the “controversy” over whether carbon di-oxide emissions affect climate is not a subject that holds much interest for me, …”

the situation is rather easy to understand. Here’s one more person wishing to impose that the ‘real debate’ lies away from an area he is not good at, or is interested in.

 ’The debate is over’?

One of Pielke’s favorite claims is that the public of the nations of the world support climate action. As before, the effect is one of stepping into a hall of mirrors of non-sequiturs. Pielke’s contention is based on opinion polls conducted by the World Bank. The “debate is over” conclusions by Pielke spring from the same source.

From the Worldbank commissioned report in 2009: "Public attitudes toward climate change: findings from a multi-country poll"

Did ‘the debate’ ever take place around the world?

Consider the recent University of Oxford study of newspaper articles, examining reporting of climate scepticism in six countries: Brazil, China, India, France, the US and UK in 2007 and 2009. The report concludes that close to 80% of all ‘climate sceptic content’ appeared in the UK and US print media, and that Brazil, China, India and France had considerably reduced coverage of ‘climate-sceptical’ content. Climate scepticism is particularly ‘an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon’, we learn.

No doubt, the Reuters Institute study wants the focus to be on the inordinate amounts of scepticism flowing through UK and US media arteries, but data that is of interest to us is available  – climate scepticism finds little to no expression in countries like India and China.

Media expression of climate scepticism is studied in the peer-reviewed literature. Consider the example of India, for which good data happens to be available. In a 2009 study published in the journal Climatic Change, Simon Billett of the Oxford University Centre for the Environment found many interesting things. Firstly, Billett asserts rightly that the print media is the predominant source of information about climate issues in India:

The media are instrumental in shaping public understanding of environmental issues in India (Chapman et al. 1997). Recent public polling suggests that the print media remain the major source of information for the literate public on climate change issues; the 2007 Global Nielsen Survey suggested that 74% of the surveyed population used newspapers as the primary source of information on climate change.

Well, what information does the Indian print media carry on climate change (for a 2002-2007 period)?

On whether global warming is real:

In comparison to the scepticism in the North American and European press, the coding results suggest that the Indian press entirely endorses climate change as a scientific reality. Based on the codes in Table 1, 100% of the 247 articles discussing the existence of global warming argued that rapid, unusual climate change does exist today.

On what was causing it:

 In addition, 98% of these articles directly attributed climate change to anthropogenic causes.

Anything about ‘climate scepticism’?

 Just five articles remained unconvinced that the phenomenon  was the result of human activity, four of which suggested the causes were unknown rather than simply ‘natural’.

…many were also highly critical of so-called ‘climate sceptics’, often highlighting the US media in particular as responsible for giving voice to known contrarians.

So most of those who get their climate fix get it from newspapers and all studied newspapers toe the consensus line completely. Moreover Pielke himself points out in his book: close to 35% percent of the Indian population hasn’t even heard of ‘climate change’.

‘The debate is over’ indeed! Looks more like it never got underway.

The same phenomenon is repeated in almost every UNFCCC non-annex I developing country. Either privately owned media (as in the case of India) or state-controlled media outlets fully suport and promulgate the consensus line. Data to support this are available in Billett 2010 as well (see graph). The reasons for this are not hard to discern.

From Billett 2009. Positive values on vertical axis indicate 'positive news coverage' of AGW and negative values indicate 'negative news coverage'

Imagine a situation where a country’s media uniformly promotes a certain line, and the media forms the major source of information in that area. What opinions would a majority of its citizens  hold, other than what is sold to them? However it is such unanimity that Pielke Jr presents as evidence for his claim that  ‘the debate is over’. Calling it disingenuous would be going easy. Pielke Jr is not alone in this either. As he reports in his book Bill McKibben, a Pielke favourite, managed to convince ‘mostly poor’ 92 island nations about the risk of global warming. One wonders whether these poor nations had the scientific expertise to evaluate McKibben’s claims before lending him their support.

The absurd consequences of such stage-managed opinions and the resulting neuroticism is clearly evident in a paper by Max Boykoff, one of Pielke’s colleagues at his Colorado institute. Singing praises of the study above, Boykoff writes of an Indian farmer so worried about climate change that he looks for text messages on his phone:

“I can’t afford to suffer due to such frantic climate changes. I can’t predict yields any more as my forefathers could. I have to depend on the SMS (short message service)”

It is in tow of such abysmal understanding of climate change (no fault of theirs though) that Pielke claims that the debate is over.

The non-sequiturs only multiply from there in Pielke’s chapters. Public support for action on climate change is ‘strong’ as shown by polls such as those conducted by the World Bank, but apparently it is not ‘intense’. Climate change and global warming consistently at the very bottom in surveys of global concerns. What this properly tells us is that people worry about global warming but in the larger scheme of things they really don’t. In the real world this would simply mean that climate action carries little political weight, but in the hair-splitting logic of climate policymakers, ‘strong support’ has a different meaning.

Another of Pielke’s favorites is his iron law. Simply put, the ‘law’ is another reminder of the painful reality that nothing can be done in the name of climate (which Pielke gleefully points out at every turn), and its intimate link to climate scepticsm (which Pielke doesn’t want anyone to know about). To the  climate sceptic, the link between carbon di-oxide and catastrophe is tenuous or non-existent. He/she therefore may argue from principle that drastic action ought not to be taken. To the climate-neutral layperson, the link between CO2 and catastrophe is immaterial: he/she is simply willing to go along with the climate game, to a certain limit. What this means in practical terms is that the same public which Pielke Jr is counting on his side, are actually more akin to skeptics. One takes the climate issue seriously and the other doesn’t even do that. You will get nothing from them both. In other words, the so-called ‘iron law’ is an enormous non-sequitur, and just a small outcome of a more general ‘iron law of scams’.

The Iron Law of Scams dictates how much money people are willing to throw away to a cause they only marginally care for, and feel in their heart of hearts is probably a scam but will not say it out loud from politeness. If such donation-seekers showed up at my doorstep, I might feel like parting with 50 bucks a year just to keep them happy and away. This says nothing about what I feel about my economy (i.e., my income) or my concerns for the climate.  You could take the ‘iron law of scams’ and replace ‘scam’ with any cause celebré of the moment, it would work just the same.  Pielke’s iron law of climate policy is however an attempt to link economic priorities and climate ‘action’.

Climate sceptics are those who looked at the case for climate change causing ‘undesirable’ things and therefore require remedial action, and came away unconvinced. Pielke and Kuper believe that something should be done about the climate even if there is not much concern or support, and even if it costs us handsomely. I hope they don’t think something needs to be done, even if  there isn’t any need to do it. Pielke’s mistake lies in his misdiagnosis of the foundation for any possible climate action.

In the end, the numerous step-wise safety valves that have been built into the Durban climate agreement by these very countries, Brazil, China and India make one thing clear. They are a greater testimony to ‘government will’ and undercurrents of public expectation, than any monolithic wall of climate-supportive ‘political will’  that is hypothesized to exist.

References:

[1] Billett S Dividing climate change: global warming in the Indian mass media DOI: 10.1007/s10584-009-9605-3
[2] Boykoff M. Indian media representations of climate change in a threatened journalistic ecosystem Climatic Change (2010) 99:17–25

Africagate: A miracle just happened

The sequence of events is sometimes forgotten; it is wilfully obscured at other times. You might stumble across IPCC damage-control maneuvers saying  “the IPCC Himalayan glacier error was the only mistake, it was just a typo, buried somewhere deep in a 3000 page report”.

When such excuses made its appearance, Richard North showed in characteristic fashion that exaggerations such as Africagate were present in the summary for policymakers (SPM) and the synthesis reports (SYR). Ben Pile broke the story first. But North showed that IPCC chairman RK Pachauri was tugging at heartstrings about ‘Africa’ and its plight, repeatedly, in drumming up climate policy action.

IPCC Summary for Policymakers African crop yields assessment

Section on Africa -IPCC Synthesis report

The various ‘Gate-exposed IPCC errors were not just stray occurrences. Ill-founded exaggerations were found to make their way to the highest pedestals – the IPCC SPM and synthesis reports.

As we have seen before, there is an interesting backstory that developed after North broke the story in full detail. German journalist Irene Meichsner picked up on ‘Africagate’, publishing a full-length story in the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau. At the time RealClimateer Stefan Rahmstorf was getting increasingly ticked off at the drubbing the consensus was enduring from the IPCC exposés. His point of IPCC defense? ‘The IPCC based its claim on sound science, and described it specifically: only some African countries were to be affected. Its critics make it as though it claimed otherwise.’

Rahmstorf wrote to the editorial board of the newspaper with his grievances, advocating the same kind of thing he does on his Realclimate website (deleting stuff):

I would therefore ask you to publish a correction to the [Meichsner article] or withdraw it completely.

The Frankfurter Rundschau, as though seeking comfort in conformity with the Sunday Times’ action on Amazongate, withdrew the article completely. It published an explanation that must be read to understand the utter simple-mindedness of some who are writing on climate issues in Germany. Rahmstorf no doubt, was overjoyed. He steadily catalogued headlines by news outlets who bought his version of the story on his blog. They ‘quoted me’ – he wrote in one of his updates. How could a single blogger have so much influence over the climate debate? – he had ranted about North on his blog earlier. But now Rahmstorf had gotten back – newspaper editors listened to him. Even the New York Times ran a story. They had listened to Simon Lewis, another scientist, over the Amazongate affair. The climate ‘street fight’ was in full swing and the scientists it seemed were winning.

That Moroccan author Agoumi Ali had penned a review and not conducted an actual study, that her article was based on computer model projections for just three African countries, that two of these models actually projected crop yield increases, that the work was funded through the UNFCCC which is the parent organization of the very IPCC assessing her evidence, that it was not published in the peer-reviewed literature (which was a big thing those days remember), that the crop yield decreases were for droughts, and that vast uncertainties remained on scientists’ ability to predict droughts in Africa -  did not bother Rahmstorf much.

Now here is where the miracle occurs. Rahmstorf in his zeal to protect the IPCC wrote two inflammatory blog posts. The journalist Irene Meichsner did not take it lying down. She sued (yes, you heard that right). That is the first miracle.  A Cologne court heard arguments and ruled in her favour and reprimanded the newspaper for withdrawing the article. That is the second miracle. Rahmstorf has been ordered to pay Meichsner 511.58 euros ‘plus interest and two-thirds of the cost of the legal dispute’.

In the aftermath a quite-extraordinary article has appeared in the WPK Quarterly website. Titled: Ideology and Climate Change: How to silence journalists, it takes a long hard look at the whole Rahmstorf-Meichsner story. The author’s conclusions are worth taking in:

This particular case deserves special attention first of all because a freelance journalist has successfully defended herself against the malice a renowned scientist poured on her. It may motivate other journalists not to put up with absolutely everything in disputes over the quality of their work but to defend themselves, even if this involves an enormous effort.

…

The notion that one can deal with media coverage of science in the role of the scientific expert merely by invoking a true-false category would be widely agreed upon. However, this particular case illustrates that scientists have to negotiate difficult terrain, which may hold risks for their own credibility.

The article ventures into territory your correspondent is quite familiar with the Amazongate story. Why did the Frankfurter Rundschau abruptly withdraw the story, just as the Sunday Times did with Jonathan Leake’s Amazon article? (emphasis mine)

Nonetheless, it is astonishing that the FR should so demonstratively and publicly distance itself from its own article. In this case, a brief correction would certainly have sufficed. As it is, one cannot fail to get the impression that a daily newspaper is employing a grand gesture to disassociate itself from its own critical article at the behest of a renowned scientist without having verified the objections raised by the scientist first. The readers get the impression that the editors consider the article to be false because the facts are not correct. Thus in addition to the mistake in the heading, the editors make a second, and from my point of view, much more serious error: it is not the facts themselves that are the problem, but how they are interpreted. It is strange that the FR seems to have made no effort to defend the core information in its own article against a poorly substantiated criticism.

Der Speigel was equally mystified as well. They got no answer from the newspaper:

Why the “FR” acted thus, remains open. Upon request by SPIEGEL ONLINE, the main editorial office did not respond.

Rahmstorf has long known to be involved in similar actions. He seems to specialize in writing to department heads complaining of their subordinates’ skeptical actions. This 2007 article (titled: The ruthless methods of climatologist Rahmstorf) contains a fairly long list of his moves.

With the Climategate emails I and II, one can see how a small coterie of activist-scientists concerned themselves with climate issues  in the media, using every available opportunity and venue to directly influence it. Journalists, not trained in the science appear to get a sense of empowerment being on talking terms with these scientists, emailing them for feedback, direction and a sense of approval. Interacting closely with such members, the scientists seem to develop a sense of entitlement, that they and only they can dictate the contours and course of the climate debate in its broadest terms. It seems they forget, that journalists are independent actors too, who may actually dig into their claims and peer behind the curtain. When it does happen all hell breaks loose.

‘RealClimate author found guilty in court’. I like the sound of that.

Climategate II and ‘Decarbonization’

This is the vision the Climategaters have for society:

Standing outside with a solar cooker, fully decarbonizing

This is the vision they have for themselves:

Drinks with umbrellas (and enough bokeh for James and Jules)

Climategate II: Contradictions and hypocrisy

As it became obvious that Climategate II was the release of more emails from the same 2009 leak many prominent news outlets have tried adopting an ‘ostrich position’. But just as with Climategate 1.0 the contours of the climate debate change right in front of our eyes. The change  is leaving some of the expert pissants stranded in their own wake.

The slow drip-drip release of emails has had quite an unfortunate effect on the knights of the consensus— every leak gives them just enough rope to hang from, at the time of the next leak.

When the dust settled from Climategate part I, there was still a hastily hacked-out path back to the old (pre-2005) comforting fetal position. Many  activists, journalists and scientists resorted to taking this path. Clues to this type of thinking are evident in RealClimate’s latest post where it still imagines of going back to the good old days:

We anticipate normal service will be resumed shortly

But, ‘normal service’ never resumed at Realclimate even the last time around.  A few thoughtful ones of course, broke ranks. One fine day Judith Curry suddenly found herself cut off and facing the rabid wrath of the consensus. Top Amazon researcher and modeller Richard Betts though firmly in the consensus speaks his own mind. So does Jonathan Jones. So do Hans von Storch and Eduardo Zorita. von Storch in particular must be blinking at the trick pulled on on him when he was briefly editor-in-chief  at the journal Climate Research.

In any event one of the key messages that news and opinion outlets tried promulgating was this: ‘Yes, there have been some leaks. But the leaks do nothing to damage the consensus in climate science.  Scientists are unanimous in their belief of anthropogenic global warming’. But Climategate II emails paint a completely different picture unrolling behind the scenes.

So the message changes as well. Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia in a rapid response item to Climategate II says (emphasis mine):

Reading down these selective quotes, what comes across to me is that climate scientists are a diverse, complex and argumentative bunch, much like any other group of people. They argue about the data and trash the models. They bitch about their colleagues. Some see global warming as a “cause” and all are passionate about the importance of their work, but they worry and complain that the science is becoming distorted by the politics. Some feel that their religious belief requires them to promote the stewardship of the Earth; others feel that their critics are driven by religious zealotry.

So what to make of all that? That they are diverse, sometimes contradictory, and have multiple motives. Well, so what? Welcome to the human race!

New York blogger Keith Kloor goes one step further:

But before we move on, there is one notable observation shared by all sides, which deserves greater attention. And that is the healthy display of outright skepticism in many of the highlighted [Climategate II email] exchanges.

Seriously gentlemen, when you talk about a diverse, contradictory bunch who argue about data and trash the models and display outright skepticism, are you sure you are not referring to climate deniers who akin to Holocaust deniers ought to be tried for crimes against humanity?

I particularly loved Watson’s ‘Welcome to the human race’ comment. Climate scientists belong to the rarefied elite who alone are capable of reading the tea leaves of IPCC models, and yet belong to the entire human race when they make mistakes.

Watson however left out one inconvenient bit from his description though – that some climate scientists were just as political and motivated as the rest of the human race is. But such an admission would be the deathknell to science’s credibility, as Christopher Caldwell at the Financial Times points out (via Junkscience.com):

But that is everything. Voters in a democracy do not argue about science. They argue about the authority of scientists. And scientists’ claim to authority comes from the perception that, in fact, they do not let their vanities and rivalries influence their work. Where others pursue their grubby little self-interest, scientists pursue only the truth. The emails of 2009, however, showed that some prominent members of the climate-change establishment were not operating in a spirit of openness. Defending a scientist’s furtiveness on the grounds that “his science is good” is like defending a politician’s blunder on the grounds that he “did nothing illegal”. The emails were damaging because they undermined the scientists’ claim to be speaking as scientists rather than as interested parties.

If scientists are shown to be colluding to arrive at a given result, then the halo around science dissipates. Any voter who does not want to be duped must suspend his scepticism. He must listen to scientists with no more deference than he does any other interest group.

…

To those outside the climate establishment part of the problem have long seemed obvious.

This brings us to the central problem – current deficiencies and uncertainties in climate science are not allowed to become part of everyday discussion. This is obviously because they are seen as damaging to the strength of the dominant paradigm. ‘Dominant paradigm’ is of course something we are all familiar with – “the earth is warming, humans are the cause and while there are some minor questions, most of the science is settled”.

…

“Let us make our case strong first”, the climate establishment thinks, “and then we can discuss our questions and doubts”. This is both wrong and foolish. You make your case strong by openly discussing doubts. But then of course, in order to do that, a measure of confidence in your own science and data is needed first.

In the statements by journalists and scientists above one can see the slow, painful by inexorable move to the same position. Keep your problems, your data and your methods out in the open. Your case may take a while to take root (and there is a chance it might not have any takers at all), but the support you get will be much stronger and long-lasting. Climategate II should be an eye-opener for establishment scientists still chasing illusions of UN-conference-mediated global policy change, wrought by their own science.

Climategate II: More skeletons in the closet of anthropogenic global warming

From Part I

What did Climategate do? Well, apart from instigating lots of ‘inquiries’ and ‘exonerations’ and generating employment to damage control public relations firms like Outside Organization, it opened a lot of eyes.

Climategate altered the landscape of the climate change debate.

News comes from Tallbloke’s blog that there has been another email release. Again, the same caveats apply: we don’t know if these emails are authentic, and, we don’t know how they were released.

A few things however seem to be clear. Climate scientists entertain the same kinds of questions that the skeptics ask around on blogs. They have a conscience, they are human, and they are emotional. As observers and members of the lay public skeptics may freely criticize anyone, but as working professionals, scientists cannot be as free and open with their fellow colleagues. Would you run around your office or workplace loudly gossiping about your co-worker?

But these scientists do criticize, and they do recognize the points that the skeptics have to make. A few of them unfortunately appear to be victims and continue to want to be victims of an earlier archaic worldview, that ‘data belongs to the scientists’. One is reminded of the case of Geoffrey Chamberlain, who unwittingly lent his name to a dubious case report, simply because ‘that is how things were always done’ and had to resign. But that bane of the modern world called ‘global policy’, and countless lives literally depend on open access to data and methods now. The old style of squirreling away data and publicly-funded professors hiding behind ‘intellectual property rights’, is going out of fashion.

And then, there clearly are the bad apples. A bunch of a new breed of scientist-activists, with whom it is difficult to discern what hat they are wearing, even in private. One feels sad for their colleagues who have to read their messages and keep a straight face.

Surely, more madness will soon follow. Confirmation of authenticity should be the first step. God bless the Internet.

How to hold ‘incredibly nuanced’ views in archaeology and firmly shallow ones in climatology

There are some very sophisticated pissants in the climate game.

Michael Tobis, a funded climate activist, dismissed a couple of archeologists for their ideas. Tobis did not like their approach and compared it to the climate skeptics’. At once an urbane commenter, who happened to be watching the conversation, became very agitated and incredulous.

You can criticize someone, disagree with them or even call them names. But to compare them to climate skeptics…,how could you crudely disparage someone like that?

That is good to know

Richard writes:

My thanks for everyone’s good wishes.These are much appreciated, and readers need have no fears. I am told that the operation does not confer a sunny disposition.

On the other hand out in the climate wastelands, people are wishing that the skeptics were simply gone. Once more.

Well, that is how children think – they wish their troubles (i.e., the skeptics) just disappeared. Grownups go to the hospital for a xenotransplant, … and carry their laptop with them.

‘Richard Muller was a climate skeptic for many years’

People are excited that Richard Muller, lead scientist on the BEST group, was a ‘skeptic’.

Why do they think he was a skeptic? Because at one time, Muller criticized the makers of the hockey stick and supported McIntyre.

Just pointing out that there is something wrong with the hockey stick does not make you a skeptic. You can be a supporter of the consensus (i.e., ‘warmist’) and still point out dishonesty. It is allowed.

Supermandia: Holy Rapid Response

In November 2010, scientist John Abraham told a news reporter from Minnesota:

“All the technology is already here, it’s a matter of political will,”

You don’t have to think too hard to know who says these kinds of things. It is most certainly not scientists.

In October 2011, a climate science teacher in Abraham’s group has appeared thus:

Teenager

In April 2009, Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise started her blog like this:

What had brought her to that stage? Apparently, it was her electricity bill.

Skepticalscience – Rewriting History

“…resist the temptation to reply to [trolls].
Instead, do what the troll hates most — simply remove the comment.”
— John Cook

The recent censorship episode at the skepticalscience.com brings an often overlooked aspect to the forefront. The target of deletion Prof Roger Pielke Sr, runs a blog. The actions of Skepticalscience were revealed because he posted them there.

What if a scientist or a lay person, interacted with websites like Skepticalscience and did not have a blog?

Roger Pielke Sr at the SS.com: A dark day in the climate science debate

Your comment is deleted

The propaganda website ‘SkepticalScience.com’, or SS.com in short, strives to serve as a ‘one-stop shop for all consensus communication needs’ kind of an outlet. Emerging ideas based on published papers or opinions, that run counter to a perceived consensus are monitored for, and various authors who work for the website churn out superficially plausible, scientific-sounding ‘rebuttals’ to these positions.

Why does the IPCC look arrogant and non-responsive?

The climate change world is a fast-moving place. One look at Tom Nelson can tell you that. There are a lot of people who know quite a bit about the IPCC – and this does not include traditionally recognized sources – social sciences authors and environmental journalists. People stay on top of things.

GreenPCC

In 1994, Greenpeace produced a report called Climate Time Bomb: Signs of Climate Change from the Greenpeace Database. They are so proud of it, they have a short copy archived on their website [1]. Odd as it may seem, in those days, Greenpeace was not considered a source of scientific wisdom. Indeed at the time, Peter John Newell observed, the report was dismissed as “unscientific” in the media “via reference to the opinion of climate scientists” [2].

Greenpeace in the IPCC: the Edenhofer Excuse

IPCC WG-III Co-Chair Ottmar Edenhofer of the PIK, Germany

It has been a recurring pattern that the most dramatic of conclusions reached by the IPCC, are shown to arise from exaggerated claims in literature put out by environmental pressure groups. The latest addition to the list is the Greenpeace-generated factoid that ‘80% of the world’s energy demand in 2050 could be met by renewable sources’ which found its way onto the IPCC pedestal. For new readers, Climateaudit.org is an accessible source for much of the background and primary information (search for posts tagged ‘Greenpeace’ appearing in June 2011)

Many interested parties responded to the initial criticism which arose mainly in the climateaudit.org and environmentalist Mark Lynas blogs. The responses that issued from the IPCC official organ – via statements from Ottmar Edenhofer – followed particularly predictable lines. In a recent opinion piece in Nature Climate Change reiterates and expands the same points offered previously. Unoriginally one might add, writer Kyle Niemeyer in ArsTechnica paraphrases and reproduces exclusively ‘the Edenhofer Excuse’.

What is the Edenhofer Excuse?

Ottmar Edenhofer’s arguments defending the IPCC, though multifarious are plainly contradictory to each other and are easily seen to violate commonly-understood academic standards. It goes like this:

1. ‘the problem of conflict, if any, is very limited’, ‘Teske was just one author (and not the lead author)’, ‘it is a multi-authored report which went through ‘many’ rounds of review’, ‘the SRREN is a massive effort with hundreds of pages’
2. the Greenpeace’s scenario was ‘just one of one-hundred and sixty four scenarios’ evaluated
3. Sven Teske was just one of the authors of the Greenpeace scenario
4. The Greenpeace scenario was actually performed by the German Aerospace Agency DLR. Greenpeace only just commissioned it.

More public relations, marketing and climate change

Recently, I stumbled upon some blogs which struck me as somewhat short, of the customary good sense of humor on encounters on the skeptical side (laughing long and excitedly, at poor jokes and suchlike).  These shall remain unnamed because people don’t generally take well to being called out for that. Consensus blogs of course are excused, because they don’t have a sense of humor – all serious and purposeful, and all that.

The IPCC’s assessment of the Greenpeace renewable energy scenario

Introduction

The following is discussion of what can be considered as serious systemic errors in the IPCC’s ‘SRREN’ – a report that examined ‘renewable’ energy usage scenarios into the future. It is divided into two serial parts (I & II) – one leading into another.

Greenpeace demands open data availability

Bad Influence: The Greenpeace report

In any game of make-believe, there is one basic rule. You just play along and dont ask logical questions. For instance, when Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council stated that ’80% of the world’s energy can be supplied by renewable sources’, you just suspend your disbelief and nod along. That’s how it works.

PR, climate science and climate activism

The Coyote blog picks on ‘The Pattern’ here. He calls it “the Global Warming Hype Process’: