Here is the Hockey Stick Illusion, as seen in Foyles. They have one of Lomborg’s books too, and the Christopher Booker one, as well as an interesting looking skeptical book called Climate Confusion by Roy W. Spencer.
Archive for the ‘Enviro-Mentalism’ Category
Hockey Stick Illusion in Foyles
Sunday, May 2nd, 2010No Conspiracy Needed
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010Eric Raymond kicks ass by writing basically what I’ve been thinking for a long time without ever quite straightening it out enough to write about it myself.
In his post he explains what he means by error cascade, zombie, Gaianist and green-shirt, but if you’re short on time you can guess and you’ll be about right. Here’s the good bit:
My model of what’s been going on is basically this: The hockey team starts an error cascade that sweeps up a lot of scientists. The AGW meme awakens chiliastic emotional responses in a lot of Gaianists. The zombies and the green-shirts grab onto that quasi-religious wave as a political strategem (the difference is that the zombies actively want to trash capitalism, while the green-shirts just want to hobble and milk it). Pro-AGW scientists get more funding from the green-shirts within governments, which reinforces the error cascade — it’s easier not to question when your grant money would be at risk for doing so. After a few times around this cycle, the hockey team notices it’s riding a tiger and starts on the criminal-conspiracy stuff so it will never have to risk getting off.
Overall, is this conspiracy? No. Mostly it’s just people responding to short-term incentives, unaware that they’re caught up in an error cascade and/or being politically fucked around.
He also explains why it will all just happen again unless people are properly punished.
School Indoctrination
Monday, February 8th, 2010On a Samizdata post about the Tories’ failure to capitalise on the recent loss of faith in climate science, Nick Davis comments:
At school, my 9 year old and his classmates are learning all about ranforests.
Part of his homework for the weekend is research: “Find as many reasons for the destruction of the rainforests as you can. Record them in an informative way“.
What an interesting question? What an open-minded teacher!
I have given him a handful of pointers: to raise a country out of poverty by export led growth; to clear land for industrialisation or habitation; to provide building materials; to clear land for farming.
His reply is that I have misunderstood the teacher’s instruction. He is supposed to be finding out why it has happened/is happening, not why it may be a Good Thing (TM).
He’s either too clever for me, or too indoctrinated! My explanation about eco-imperialism (why should we deny them the ability to enjoy western comforts?) was met with “if they all start to use computers and the internet, that’ll use lots of energy which will destroy the planet“.
Following our discussion he has therefore written this: “There is no reason for destroying the rainforests”.
I think I need to dig up Alvin Rabushka’s book (which I have lent out or lost or both) or Peter Bauer for some inspiration. Anyone any other ideas?
UPDATE: Just remembered that Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist has a discussion on this issue. And my well-thumbed copy is in easy reach…
William H Stoddard makes this valid snipe about “[I]f they all start to use computers and the internet, that’ll use lots of energy which will destroy the planet.”:
That kid’s mastered the green agenda, all right: We have to keep Them poor. It’s for their own good, of course.
Manuel II Paleologos chips in with:
Nick – I was revising GCSE RE with my eldest last week and came across a statement categorically stating that “poverty” has got worse in the world since the Brandt report in 1980.
What can they mean? Bring back Carter and Callaghan!
It’s hard to know where to start deconstructing this argument, but I struggled to think of any measure at all where this was true.
My eldest is a bit autistic so I tried not to confuse him too much, but Parents’ Evening is going to be fun.
Ages ago, the englishman was complaining about his son’s homework being set by Christian Aid, and being all about how climate change is making life hard for poor people.
All of this is of much interest to me, as I’m expecting to be sending a child of my own to school in, ooh, about five years or so. Nick Davis’s comment in particular is interesting because his son argues back. Now, Nick Davis’s son presumably lives with Nick Davis who is the sort of person who leaves comments on Samizdata. I’m kind of hoping that it should be possible to teach children about critical thinking; and that teachers are not necessarily the ultimate authority on things; and that in any case authority is not to be trusted all the time; and even that at school there are sometimes forces at work that mean you may be taught some distortion of the truth. They may not understand everything at once, but I would hope that someone with an interest in the world and armed with some concept of critical thinking should be able to escape even a state education unscathed.
But there is Nick Davis’s son. And there are people who tell me that children are very much influenced by their (not necessarily so critically thinking) peers.
“If they all start to use computers and the internet, that’ll use lots of energy which will destroy the planet.”
I would like to think that no child of mine could say such a thing. Of course, it could be that the boy was just winding his dad up. No doubt my children are going to rebel by becoming vegetarians and I will have to watch them starve (or cook their own food); and they will certainly learn very quickly how to wind me up I am sure.
But it makes me wonder.
Signal and Noise
Monday, February 1st, 2010Pa Annoyed has what I think is a very important explanation of the problems with doing statistics on the kinds of signals found in climate science. It’s important because it makes available to the layman a level of understanding about the nature of the science. And understanding helps us come up with good arguments.
The article starts off about an email from dendrochronologist Ed Cook’s in which he complains that he has to review a paper that contains too much maths. Pa Annoyed points out that it’s exactly the kind of maths he should be intimately familiar with.
Pa Annoyed then proceeds to explain the kind of maths we are talking about. It is about how to tell the difference between signal and noise. The problem is there are different kinds of forms that the signal and the noise can take, and climatologists seem very keen to assume that the signal is a straight line and the wobbles up and down are noise. The straight line goes steadily up and is global warming; the noise wobbles up and down and is weather.
Pa Annoyed explains that there is no physical reason for that to be the signal to be a straight line, and every reason for it to be what the graphs actually look like: a random walk. In other words, there can be other hypotheses that fit the data.
Read the whole thing. Really. Read it now. You’ll learn something.
Himalayan Glaciers
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010I don’t see how one mistake in a 3,000-page report can damage the credibility of the overall report
So says Dr van Ypersele. I can see how. If you say all the Himalayan Glaciers will disappear by 2035 in the IPCC’s 4th annual report and the IPCC has no idea where the figure came from, it makes people wonder just how much other made up stuff is in there. The date is wildly inaccurate:
“You just can’t accomplish it,” Jeffrey Kargel from the University of Arizona told BBC News at the time.
“If you think about the thicknesses of the ice – 200-300m thicknesses, in some cases up to 400m thick – and if you’re losing ice at the rate of a metre a year, or let’s say double it to two metres a year, you’re not going to get rid of 200m of ice in a quarter of a century.”
The row continues in India, with Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh calling this week for the IPCC to explain “how it reached the 2035 figure, which created such a scare”.
Met Office Woes
Sunday, January 17th, 2010Via Watts Up With That? comes an article in the Times about the Met office possibly losing its BBC contract to do weather forecasts.
John Hirst, the chief executive of the Met Office, insisted last week that recent forecasts had been “very good” and blamed the public for not heeding snow warnings.
But it is the long term forecasts that are the problem. Can there be a connection between the Met Office’s (climate change blinded?) long term forecasts of a mild winter, and grit shortages?
Or perhaps it isn’t just long term forecasts.
Barry Grommet, a Met Office forecaster, said: “We put our hands up and concede that we did not expect the snow to spread so far east, and with the intensity that it did.”
Weather is Not Climate, But…
Thursday, January 14th, 2010Lots of blog posts seem to start this way, lately. The really great thing about the cold weather, though, is that it forces those who say the planet is warming to explain themselves. This inevitably illustrates that measuring the climate is complicated, which means that just maybe it is possible that it can be done wrong. The CO2-causes-warming-and-look-how-warm-it-is narrative is no more.
Just imagine how different things would be if the weather was warm. It would be obvious that global warming is happening, so there would be no need for the man in the street to question it.
Mugabe at Copenhagen
Friday, December 25th, 2009You can judge a man by the company he keeps. Mugabe spoke at Copenhagen.
Climate change, the latest and by far the most encompassing and insistent crisis spawned by this hegemonic development paradigm, yet again reveals the interconnectedness issues of global imbalances by way of uneven development, by way of unfair trade, by way of unclean politics, by way of hegemonic values and by way of arbitrary power and governance systems.
Yep, nobody could accuse Mugabe of wielding arbitrary power. Let’s listen to his ideas about governance systems.
Why is the guilty north not showing the same fundamentalist spirit it exhibits in our developing countries on human rights matters on this more menacing question of climate change? Where is its commitment to retributive justice which we see it applying on other issues? Where is sanctions for climate change offenders?
Never mind Mugabe is up to in Zimbabwe, the weather is getting warmer.
By the way, all the rubbish about lungs of the planet and “we who tend the forest so badly needed to heal the ecosystem” that Mugabe witters on about is dealt with by Pa Annoyed. The rainforest is only the lungs of the rainforest.
Climate Betting
Monday, December 14th, 2009Walking home I was thinking: would it be possible to set up some kind of climate spread-betting market that would encourage people to put their money where their mouths are? You could make a bet and then go around planting trees to make sure it stayed cold. Or develop an accurate climate model and use it to make a fortune. Or a low lying country’s government could make an insurance bet against rising sea levels. It could be a way of getting us climate skeptics to pay for cleaning up the planet.
Hislop on Climate
Friday, December 11th, 2009You’d think Ian Hislop would be all over climategate. Government pays scientists and they say things that are very convenient to government. But on Have I Got News For You this evening he sneered at the blogosphere for being bonkers and mentioning Hitler all the time, and went on about how there are actually real scientists who know all about climate change and it’s only Sarah Palin and the Daily Mail who say otherwise.
James May didn’t agree, and got accused of getting his opinions from Jeremy Clarkson and hissed at by the audience for saying he didn’t care about the planet. Reginald D Hunter seemed somewhat skeptical too, but he was being funny (he *is* funny) so it’s hard to say what he really thinks.
Still, it’s another sign in the mainstream media that there is a debate going on.
Update: Via Brian Micklethwait: James Delingpole on Private Eye’s uselessness on this issue.
