The New Left Project: Deniers vs Zombies

Through a series of accidents, I ended up at ‘The New Left Project‘, Britain’s latest addition to ‘high quality comment and analysis’ for ‘lively, inclusive culture of left-wing discussion’.

That means sitting in street-side cafes, like Mark Steyn’s Eloi from After America, sipping coffee and chatting lightly about Hugo Chavez, Simon Singh, Egyptian lady cartoonists, Earth Day celebrations and climate change. I think that’s how they thought it will be.

One such staged chit-chat was on climate and zombies. “Global warming roams the streets in incipient zombie form while world thinks it has time for 2°C gong to set it loose” – was the story. Only this thread invaded by a horde of ‘deniers’, offering the usual stupid suggestions about not building solar panels and windmills, and using fossil fuels. Contact was initiated gently by a few ‘veteran deniers’, skilled at these maneuvers. But this was quickly followed by Ben Pile, brownedoff, and yours truly.

Soon the climate zombies retreated to Moderation Cove, with their dear leader holding the fort.

This is how one finds Dear Leader doing it – with this little gem about climate change and its effect on the poor:

And where it is well understood that it is the world’s poorest who stand to suffer the most if serious action [on climate change] is not taken now.

One feels compelled to deliver a message of sorts at this juncture.

Dear Leader of the climate zombies, the poor stand to suffer the most because they live in the lap of nature, in direct contact with the ‘environment’. There is nothing in between.

Want to protect the poor from climate change? Take them out of their environments. Put food, cloth and distance between the two. Well, they’ll do it themselves, just stay out of the way.

Postscript: Dear Leader is one David Wearing, a PhD candidate in foreign relations, with graduate degrees in European philosophy, literature, and international public policy. His name appears on roughly 50 articles on the New Left Project ,  3 articles in Huffington Post UK, 14 in the Guardian, 3 in the New Statesman, 1 in Liberal Conspiracy, 1 in openDemocracy, and 1 in Le Monde Diplomatique. Not a single one of these relates to climate change. Yet he is able to glibly use shopworn material interjecting himself into areas he has little hold of. The New Left Project syndicates articles from a fairly wide range of authors. It carries audio recordings. Yet, it is run by ‘volunteers’ who struggle to keep things going in their ‘spare-time’. Yet, there is no detail on who funds it.

Heartland: What is Judith Curry talking about?

Free speech is not a crime. Only when Greenpeace speaks

I don’t know. I am having a hard time understanding what she is saying.

Tim Worstall, why did you impose the carbon tax? “I assumed that …”

A lot of people like climate change, mainly because it presents them with a platform for doing things they like to do. Of course, they will tell you they have come to do it because it needs to be done. So you see often – experts seriously discussing ins-and-outs of a ‘policy’ even as you blink about the need for the whole thing. Tim Worstall, provides us with an example. Tim likes the idea of a carbon tax thinks a ‘carbon’ tax  just needs to be done. Apparently he’s been yammering away about it for years.

The WWF, REDD and Tanzania

At the peak of the claim and counter-claim thrown around over Amazongate Simon Lewis a forest researcher at the University of Leeds emerged briefly at its centre. Lewis’ defense of the actions of the IPCC helped the organization avoid confronting its use of advocacy and environmental pressure group material from the WWF. A little-examined fact at the time was that Lewis’ parent department was involved along with contributions from the University of East Anglia (UEA), the Royal Society, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation and other non-governmental organizations in a UN REDD+ pilot project in Tanzania. Called ‘Valuing the Arc’, it was designed to work out putting a ‘price on carbon’ to provide ”input to the policy process, … including PES mechanisms”. ‘PES’, is payment for ecosystem services, i.e., REDD. The most prominent NGO at the the centre of the project? WWF-Tanzania.

Chris Mooney offers climate wisdom, world’s top climate scientists immediately correct record

More in the vein of the Realclimate zinger a couple of days back.

Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum thinks that climate science is being used to promote agendas of global political control. The wise Chris Mooney disagreed with him:

Appropriately, the scientists who study the climate are trained—and often, temperamentally disposed—to see the world in gray, rather than black and white.

This was yesterday. Almost the same time, a bunch of ‘top’ climate scientists were saying this (via Tom Nelson):

We can say categorically that this [Keystone] pipeline is not in the nation’s, or the planet’s best interest.

 

PS: How can something be ‘the best’ for a planet?

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why are natural disasters linked to climate change? Answers from a public relations convention

It is now more often said than any time in the past that natural disasters occur due to global warming. Often inviting ridicule upon the consensus upholders, this is more definitively predictable than the disasters themselves.

Greenpeace in the IPCC: Why the surprise?

Why is it so difficult, for some, to understand the meaning of an advocacy organization or a pressure group? Their very purpose is to push a certain perspective, a certain agenda on to public or polity consciousness, or directly work for pre-determined objectives.

Nisbet and tantric climate cuddling

There is a common phenomenon encountered in the climate debate. Those skeptical of the case made by the consensus, via various methods, arrive at certain conclusions fairly quickly. The same conclusions are eventually and much later reached by climate change professors and academicians, using the same methods.

‘I’m good at playing both sides so I must be telling the truth’

Editorial in Nature: The Committee to Resuscitate the Hockey Stick (CREEH) moves heaven and earth

Nature editorial: Glee in the climate-change blogosphere

Andrew Revkin and the human beings on the planet

Recently I wrote about a little-known writer Bryan Appleyard and about how blissfully cocksure certain British authors tended to be, when it came to global warming. More recently, medical scientist Paul Nurse tried pulling a sweeping gesture against the whole internet (!), and had to be brought gently back to earth by the interviewer Richard Heffner (reminding him that, that would be like ‘spitting against the wind’).

IPCC: Peer-review? what peer-review?

Something has happened at the super-transparent world-bettering organization called the IPCC that Hilary Ostrov who has been yanking and tugging and pulling at this, says in wry Canadian understatement:

A disappointing but not unexpected result,…

Climate change and the traditional skeptics: An opinion study

Introduction
One group of organized, regimented individuals has enjoyed popularity in the past three years or so, inciting resurgence in an otherwise insular public body called the skeptics. Traditionally, skeptics have been involved in the study and ‘debunking’ of various non-institutionalized forms of healing, prediction, spirituality, religious practice, theism and ’paranormal’ activity. Within their circles opinion seems to be divided whether to confine activities within this sphere, or to extend its range to other contentious areas of public debate and policy. Reasonably comprehensive sources of information on the methods and history of the skeptics are available^{[1, 2]}.

Skeptics cruise on the Alaskan high seas learning about climate change

Sometimes you wonder where to bury your face. As you might know, the University of East Anglia recently refused to release climate data in its custody, when requested under FOI (in itself an embarrassment, but we’ll save that for later). When the world is coming to an end, the first thing to do is to use your secret climate data to write as many papers in high-impact journals as possible, I guess.

Frank Swain on skepticism

As is somewhat obvious, skepticism, in certain circles, is not so much about skepticism at all but rather the belligerent and noisome reaffirmation of orthodoxies. Whether it be in modern medicine, organized religion or in climate science, this brand of skepticism and its practitioners know the answers. There is none of the questioning attitude, the natural curiosity, the poking and the prodding that one would reflexively associate with a skeptic. Instead, what one sees is something curious – a deference to authority and the ‘cult of the expert’ when it comes to certain topics.

Climate science and the litany of unaccountability

Examine this record:

Three cheers for Anna Haynes

No one likes their own weapon turned against them.

Maltese politician Caroline Galea on Climategate: same story, year after year

About three days ago, the ever-observant Tom Nelson linked to an article on his blog. The piece took the boilerplate, run-of-the-mill, orthodox line on Climategate, the ‘denial machine’, failure of ‘public communication’ etc. In other words: nothing remarkable. What caught the eye however (apart from carbon dioxide  CO²), was this little gem:

Mad cow disease causes global warming

“To hold global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels deforestation must be cut to half by 2020…” —  so we are told by the the U.S.-based Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests (reported here).

If we believe some credible sources of information (and apply the half-and-half logic), a ’4 degree rise’ in globally averaged gridded temperatures will create hell on earth, which can only mean that a ’2 degree rise’ will create half that hell.

IYF: The fate of the world’s forests predicted for 2011

Omniclimate is predicting 2011 climate events. Looks like Judith Curry has to weather more criticism. He says:

IPCC: “Slim it down, and get rid of that crazy man at the top”

Unsinkable

The Interacademy Council has finally released public comments submitted to its review of the IPCC.

Thanks are due to Hilary Ostrov, Donna Laframboise and the folks at the IAC who worked at redacting names and addresses, slow though their efforts may have been.

The IPCC and grey literature

‘Vast majority’, according to Urban Dictionary is, “ possibly the most over-used, tired and tautological phrases ever to have survived in the English language”.

But that is how many references in the IPCC report, an ‘open letter from scientists’ told us, were from ‘peer-reviewed scientific journals’.

Louise Gray and the Death of the Kyoto Protocol

Sometimes, in the climate change debate, you come across something that makes you want to kill yourself. Just to spare yourself the sheer horror.

Louise Gray, in the London newspaper website, The Telegraph

The Japanese have refused to sign up to a second commitment period of the treaty, even though it was named after a city in their own country.