I had only written couple of posts for ToS, which John had invited me be a guest author for on the basis of my having blogged about climate change and the urgent need to do something about it here on zone5.

Clearly as I investigated the issue more- particularly Al Gore’s film- my own views had changed considerably. I was well aware of the backlash I was likely to get were I to begin expressing doubts about the “party line” on climate change, and was in fact rather surprised John agreed to post it- that he did I felt was very much to his credit as an open-minded person -although his contribution to the comments showed him as anything but, as I have commented here.

Fortunately I had kept a copy of all but the last couple of comments which we will have to live without. I re-post them here in full for reference and as one of many examples that may be found of warmists trying to close down debate, resorting to ad hominem, and, most remarkably, claiming that science is on their side in cases when it clearly is not!

Incidentally, a short while after John had closed the debate down, he emailed me in an apparent attempt to persuade me that we should really be on the same side as “we both dislike dogma and ideology” and in support of this sent me, not science at all but a paper by Clive Hamilton, author of Requiem for a Species which I wrote a review of here:

Hamilton seems ambivalent himself about the relationship to of environmentalism and science, on the one hand promoting science as the only way we can know about our predicament, on the other hand arguing that the scientific-industrial revolution has lead to a disconnection from Nature which “led inexorably to a stronger orientation toward a personal self”. While this may be partly true, it seems that it is only same science that can lead us back. Instead, he hints that he would see a return to some kind of spirituality as for our salvation, seeing Gaia as fulfilling this need. Confusingly he asks “If our scientific understanding and technological control over the world allowed us to discard the gods, will the reassertion of Nature’s power see us turn again to the sacred for protection? Will the late surge of militant atheism come to be seen as a Homeric burst of pride before the fall?” Surely reverting to religion or superstition is the last thing to protect us!

Like many others in the environmental movement, Hamilton- and perhaps Gibbons- feel that it is not science that counts here, but rather the need to return to some kind of Gaia-worshiping- and Gaia-fearing- religion: as carbon emitters we are all sinners and unless we undergo the penance of relinquishing much if not all of the benefits of the modern world then the Great Mother will wreak climate chaos on us in recompense.

Finally, I should say however that Gibbons does an admirable job of promoting nuclear power and as such puts himself very much at odds with the majority of Greens. This much at least we do indeed share in common.

Here are the missing comments from that SinkorSwim post:

1.  Julian says: 

2. February 15, 2011 at 12:31 (Edit) 3. “Someone in [Delingpole's] position should certainly have been used to debating such points; Nurse gave him the perfect opportunity to argue that there is no consensus, but he flumped it.” 4. All this showed was that Delingpole was not able to think on his feet. That it was presented as “haha, he has no answer!”, shows how weak the programme was in its attempt to get to the truth. Why not suspend the interview and ask the question again? i.e. Have a real debate and let the arguments be explored and developed rather than base the whole programme on catching Delingpole out.

1. melk says:
2. February 15, 2011 at 14:08 (Edit)

3. I’m astonished that Delingpole could not have responded to Nurse with at least one of the recent shatterings of scientific consensuses in the medical field, namely the discovery that peptic ulcers are largely a consequence of infection by the helicobacter pylori bacteria.
The pre-existing consensus on this topic was destroyed in dramatic fashion by Nobelist Barry Marshall at a meeting about 30 years ago. He had actually ingested a cup of these bacteria and had developed ulcers, just to prove his point. Prior to this, Marshall might have been characterized as a “denialist.” Everybody “knew” what caused peptic ulcers. Maybe even Al Gore.

   John Gibbons says: February 15, 2011 at 14:59 (Edit) @Melk you’ve just explained how scientific knowledge advances. Theories are postulated, tested, challenged and, as new information or detection methods become available via the peer review process, science (in this case, medical science) absorbs the new information (the h. pylori case is a good example) and medical practice adjusts in the light of the new information. Others in turn seek to challenge this new information, again via peer reviewed studies. If their challenges hold water, the new thesis is rejected. If not, and if sufficient other studies independently confirm the ‘breakthrough’ finding, then this new knowledge become medical/scientific theory. This in turn is not set in stone. If in five years, it turns out thanks to more advances in medical imaging, for example, that h. pylori has been falsely implicated, and some as yet unknown pathogen is the culprit, this too will be tested, challenged and tested again until the most robust theory to explain duodenal ulcers emerges. For the ‘consensus’ scientific position on climate change to be challenged, this has to happen via the peer review process. Your opinion, my opinion or James Delingpole’s opinion are of no value. If the hard scientific evidence refuting anthropogenic climate change exists, it would be published in the major specialist journals, having been first reviewed by a panel of expert scientists to ensure that the maths, referencing, citations and underlying assumptions were legitimate. Scientists don’t have to “agree” with a paper to peer review it. The peer review process is to weed out false, incomplete or simply dishonest scholarship. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the Op Ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, where anyone can say anything about any topic, with no pre-publication process to actually confirm that this stuff makes any sense. How do you think Bjorn Lomborg keeps getting published everywhere EXCEPT in the peer-reviewed journals? Fame, glory and a Nobel Prize awaits the scientists who can publish the ‘silver bullet’ paper disproving AGW in the peer-reviewed journals. Where are they? You mention Barry Marshall, an eminent medical researcher with a glittering CV and a roll-call of peer-reviewed papers to his name in his specialist subject. Where are the Barry Marshalls of climate science? Fred Singer, perhaps (don’t make me laugh). There are of course a handful of actual scientists who ‘reject’ AGW. That’s their personal opinion. Concentrate instead on work they have published in the peer-review process in a relevant field, and suddenly the list dries up almost completely. Al Gore is a favourite red herring of the denialist camp. Forget about him too. Look at the peer-reviewed evidence. Think of how strong the lobbies are who desperately want to disprove AGW (just like the Tobacco-not-linked-to-cancer lobby). They can fund as many scientific studies as they want. Why are these studies not appearing? (and puhleazzze spare me the “peer-review is broken” line trotted out by guys like Delingpole who are too inert and dogmatic to even understand the process, never mind actually read a paper or two and, shock, horror, form their own opinion). @Julian
Delingpole is a self-appointed climate science “slayer”. It’s not unresonable for him to be expected to come up with something slightly better than “I’m the interpreter of interpretations”. This is Mystic Meg territory. Delingpole may be a great guy, he may be a babe magnet, he may even be a talented writer. He is NOT however sufficiently knowledgable to comment on climate science and expect to be taken seriously. I myself am not much of an expert in quantum mechanics, for that matter, but I wouldn’t go public deriding the physics underpinning it. Why? Because I don’t understand it enough to have an opinion worth inflicting on anyone else. Sometimes we all have to be humble enough to just shut up about things we are basically clueless about and listen instead to what the actual experts have to say, rather than the hollow echo chamber of third hand opinion re-heated and served up as fact.

   Sundance says: February 15, 2011 at 15:40 (Edit) Graham, statistics and economic analysis is preferable to appeals to emotion and fear. Take for example the ethanol disaster, originally intended as a solution to reduce dependence on foreign oil (fear), governments subsidized ethanol without much thought which has now led to many negative impacts on the environment and food availability. Such is the result of unintended consequences when emotion and fear prevail in decision making. Even James Hansen in a recent interview with Andy Revkin commented on how fear tactics used by those opposed to nuclear energy development starting with the Carter Administration has exacerbated our use of fossil fuels that contributed to excessive GHG emissions in the present. One can certainly reflect on how much different the US GHG emissions profile would have been over the last 30 years had pebble bed and thorium reactors been developed and 80% of US energy was being produced by these reactors. Hansen certainly provides a fine example of the unintended consequences of using fear rather than scientific discipline in decision making. Unfortunately as was also uncovered in the Hansen interview, was that the Obama administration has completely ignored Hansen and his rational approach to lowering GHG emissions. Hansen sees Obama, just like Carter, caving politically to the anti-nuclear fear mongers. At least with Lomborg there is an attempt to incorporate the disciplines of statistics and economics to quantify all risk and potential damage in decision making as opposed to using fear tactics which often lead to very poor decisions. However as Hansen points out it won’t matter unless you have a strong leader who will consider the stats and economics rather than cave to those using fear to push a political agenda.

   MarkB says: February 15, 2011 at 18:07 (Edit) Ah yes, Al Gore and his indulgences. As Fitzgerald said, the rich are different from us. Gore’s behavior actually follows an old American tradition. During the Civil War, wealthy Americans would pay another man to take their place in the military. Al is all for a war against global warming – he just doesn’t want to be cannon fodder. “I’m right behind you, boys!”

   peter2108 says: February 15, 2011 at 18:11 (Edit) “Theories are postulated, tested, challenged”. Sure, but when I ask myself what tests CO2 driven global warming has been subject to I find no answer. There is indeed the physics of the “Greenhouse” effect which, at least for simple models, I can understand and which is uncontroversial. There is the output of the GCM computer models which predict warming consistent with the warming seen in the last century. OK. But is there is nothing startling like the heliobacter/ulcer experiment. It may be enormously consequential – but to this onlooker and occasional student the received paradigm has no triumphs to show, there is no “wow” factor. Scepticism is in therefore perfectly understandable.

   EWI says: February 15, 2011 at 20:51 (Edit) This is a poor article to see on Thinkorswim, with many flaws. Not the least of which is the lack of basic research; the supposed ‘concerned parent’ in the UK case was an associate of and backed by Mad Monckton: “This weekend, however, the campaigners behind the High Court case said they planned to send copies [of the Swindle] to 3,400 secondary schools “to counter Gore’s flagrant propaganda”. … The distribution of The Great Global Warming Swindle is being funded by Viscount Monckton, who is part of a counter-campaign to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change. Monckton was one of the backers of Stewart Dimmock, the Kent lorry driver and school governor who took the government to court for sending copies of Gore’s film to schools. The two are connected through the New party, a right-wing group whose manifesto was written by Monckton and of which Dimmock is a member. … Dimmock was awarded only two-thirds of his costs and is understood to have a bill of more than £60,000. Monckton confirmed that he was among his “backers” but refused to confirm if he had financed the case.” http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/10/monckton_was_behind_dimmocks_l.php I find it interesting that some swallow the precedent of Tory troglodytes subjecting a popular (in the broad sense) film on an issue of science to judicial levels of proof. Monckton has, of course, also falsely claimed that he sued the BBC and ‘won’ a great victory over the Meet The Skeptics documentary, a claim that is clearly untrue (see the comments by members of the production team here): http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/02/monckton_myths.php#comments Still, any piece that detours to such beloved standbys of the denialists as “Al Gore is fat!” and “GM food!” clearly wasn’t fit to be published in the first place, least of all here. Poor show, guys?

   John Gibbons says: February 15, 2011 at 22:50 (Edit) @EWI The above article is Graham’s in its entirety. It first appeared on Graham’s Zone 5 website, and he asked if it would be ok to run it here as well. As Graham has previously contributed (at my invitation) it seemed churlish to say ‘well, I liked your last couple, but this one doesn’t pass my personal sniff test’. So I let it run. I’ve enjoyed much of what Graham has written, especially his debunking of quacks, including green-flavoured anti-science irrationality. I was therefore more than a little puzzled as to why such a generally shrewd observer (and decent writer) like him should produce such a poorly argued crypto-denialist piece. As you correctly say, Graham’s attack on ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ swallows the counter-propaganda smear in one gulp. That film was a thoroughly researched, balanced and objective guide for the lay-person on climate change. Just ask the actual climate specialists over at RealClimate.org and they’ll confirm as much. Graham also recycles denialist guff about exaggerated threats of sea level rise. These are anything but. Quoting a solitary “recent study” is a pretty thin basis for his premise that concerns about accelerating ice melt are “doom-mongering pure and simple”. A little knowledge here is indeed dangerous. “Doom-mongering” is a serious charge. Graham may not be aware that according to GRACE gravity satellite readings, Greenland is currently losing 104-138gt per annum. That’s 104–138 BILLION TONS of ice lost per annum. Some doom-mongering (this figure is somewhat ahead of the 2007 IPCC estimate of 100gt/annum). Jumping on isolated headlines in search of a “gotcha” moment is Denialist 101, and certainly not what I’d have expected from Graham. However, when Graham is citing the duplicious Dane, Bjorn Lomborg as a somehow basically credible guy, an honest political scientist just trying to come up with workable solutions to climate change, he is swallowing another phoney, even bigger and fatter than the homeopaths he so enjoys deriding. Lomborg is a libertarian propagandist, the Dr Strangelove of climate science (read ‘The Lomborg Deception’ by Howard Friel of Yale for a thorough debunking). He commissions and recycles “data” from fellow right-wingers like the economists Tol and Nordhaus, ignores the entire canon of actual climate science and then concocts bizarre happy-clappy “We’ll all be millionaires in 2100, so why worry” scenarios that anyone whose nose is not completely blocked will know reeks to the heavens of bullshit. This crap is then pushed out via the op-ed pages of 101 “business-friendly” media outlets (many owned by billionaires like Murdoch – he of the borderline fascist Fox News network). The supposed ‘contest’ here between the credibility of Gore on the one hand and Lomborg/Monckton/Delingpole, etc. etc. on the other is a classic straw man argument. Jabbing a finger at Gore’s alleged failings as a human being tells us nothing about the science, and on the science, he’s pretty much on the money. How do we know? Just ask the published scientists. We can at least agree that the 400-year old UK Royal Society is a pretty serious bastion of sober science; yet this Society, studded with Nobel laureates and by definition a pretty conservative bunch, has last month published a set of proceedings entitled “Four degree and beyond: the potential for a global temperature increase of 4C and its implications”. The time scale they envisage for this ecological Armageddon? 2060 – or just under 50 years hence. Graham seems to have stumbled down one of the many intellectual rabbit-holes the (well funded and very well organised) denialist lobby have been digging. That someone as genuinely skeptical as he can be so utterly wrong on such a massively important topic as the looming collapse of the global ecosystem is far more worrying to me than the bleatings of assorted wingnuts and their Ayn Rand-fuelled Panglossian fantasies about some capitalist Big Rock Candy Mountain which will continue to spew out an infinity of resources as we sail into a glorious future of cornucopian bliss. To regular ToS readers who’ve been both shocked and disappointed at the appearance of the above article (and yes, a number have been in touch today) I apologise. ToS is here to facilitate a serious debate on the substantive issues and that’s what we’ll be getting back to asap.

   Graham says: February 16, 2011 at 00:18 (Edit) Hi John
Firstly, thanks for allowing me to post this here- sounds like you may be regretting it though!
That’s a shame. And i am very sorry for regular readers who, by the sounds of it, may be in need of counseling as a result 
I am wondering though if you have read it- most of the points you make have already been answered in the original post! “Jumping on isolated headlines in search of a “gotcha” moment is Denialist 101, and certainly not what I’d have expected from Graham.” err- but it’s ok when Nurse does it to Delingpole, yes? “As you correctly say, Graham’s attack on ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ swallows the counter-propaganda smear in one gulp. That film was a thoroughly researched, balanced and objective guide for the lay-person on climate change. Just ask the actual climate specialists over at RealClimate.org and they’ll confirm as much.” But I have already shown that this is not the case, irrespective of what Steig et al say about it. The section on sea-level rise is quite clearly exaggerated doom-mongering, deliberately omitting the essential piece of information that according to the peer-reviewed science you are so keen on John, the melting of Greenland will take thousands of years even in a worst case scenario. I have made this clear in the original post, which you seem to have ignored. (I would encourage anyone who doubts this to watch that section in the film again, closely, and consider how it is stage-managed for maximum effect.) So you are quite wrong to say Gore’s film is “a thoroughly researched, balanced and objective guide for the lay-person on climate change” – personally, I can only understand this comment on the basis that you are ideologically motivated yourself. Actually, it simply beggars belief that you can call it objective. John, you go to great lengths to show that what you are promoting here is based on science, but your defence of Gore just shows that you will defend ANYTHING that supports your ideology. “The supposed ‘contest’ here between the credibility of Gore on the one hand and Lomborg/Monckton/Delingpole, etc. etc. on the other is a classic straw man argument. Jabbing a finger at Gore’s alleged failings as a human being tells us nothing about the science, and on the science, he’s pretty much on the money. How do we know? Just ask the published scientists.” John this is simply rubbish- and you claim my post is “poorly argued”! Obviously, it is Pigluicci who sets up this ‘contest’ as you put it and it is to him you should put your point. Maybe you could show a single example of something Lomborg has stated in such an exaggerated way as Gore’s film does with sea-level rise. The published science is quite clear on this John: sea-level is not expected to rise more than a couple of feet max by the end of the century. Manhattan will not disappear beneath the waves any time soon. And maybe you could explain exactly how “jabbing a finger” at Lomborg as you are fond of doing tells us anything about the science? Seriously though, I love the bit about “Gore’s failings as a human being” !! As nearly the next president of the USA he was actually one of the most powerful man in the world, immensely wealthy (far more so Ill bet than Monkton). His film won an Oscar. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the IPCC. His film was hugely influential and sent to thousands of schools. That is why Pigluicci writes about him, because he is still one of the most important figures in the climate change debate. And you feel the need to defend him (from me!) as if he is some sort of wayward alcoholic miscreant or something. Your comment actually reinforces all the issues that I tried to raise in the article: anyone can claim to be “skeptical” and use the word to promote their ideology; if you want to be taken seriously, I fail to see why you would want to defend Gore in this way. The study on Greenland came up as I was writing the article- I am not claiming it “proves” Gore was doom-mongering, because there is no need. We know he was misrepresenting the science; there are many activists who believe this is indeed necessary to achieve their aims, science be damned. It does however show that within science there are serious debates, new information is emerging and in some areas there remains plenty of uncertainty. You seem acutely concerned at who is funding the skeptics, and how evil-funded they are, apparently blissfully unaware at the power and finances available to Gore and his propaganda. Or maybe you are fine with that for the simple reason that it accords with your own point of view? Nor have you in any way convinced me that Lomborg is a fraud as you seem so certain. You ignore my point in the post that TSE was in fact peer-reviewed. IMHO Fog has clearly not refuted Lomborg in any fundamental way, and his (and yours) constant refrain of “fraud” and apparent refusal to give him any credit AT ALL makes me smell an ideological rat: things are rarely that black or white. This was actually a good point I thought that Nurse made about most skeptics blogs: read through them and you will find absolutely nothing good at all about those who are concerned about AGW or give the theory the slightest degree of credit. This is a good BS indicator. It works both ways John.) “He commissions and recycles “data” from fellow right-wingers like the economists Tol and Nordhaus, ignores the entire canon of actual climate science and then concocts bizarre happy-clappy “We’ll all be millionaires in 2100, so why worry” scenarios that anyone whose nose is not completely blocked will know reeks to the heavens of bullshit. ” Again, maybe for clarity it would be helpful if you relate this to what I have written in the post: To say that Lomborg “ignores the entire canon of actual climate science” is really quite extraordinary. Lomborg basis all his analysis on the IPCC which is quoted and referred to at length throughout as you surely must be aware John!
And, again as I have made clear in the post, the assumption of growth and increased prosperity in 2100 is also straight from the IPCC. You are basically saying “The IPCC is bullshit”. So, from the layman’s point of view, if the IPCC’s views on economics is bullshit, why should they believe anything else they say? It also suggests that you don’t understand Lomborg at all. Is this part of some kind of misinformation campaign? Lomborg accepts the science of AGW, and he thinks we should do something about it. You disagree with such fraudulent concerns I take it? But my main point is also sadly wasted on you John: it is your ideological defence of Gore and unsubstantiated accusations against Lomborg that are doing far more harm to the cause of addressing AGW than more extreme skeptics like Monkton.

   HaroldW says: February 16, 2011 at 02:52 (Edit) A little knowledge here is indeed dangerous. “Doom-mongering” is a serious charge. Graham may not be aware that according to GRACE gravity satellite readings, Greenland is currently losing 104-138gt per annum. That’s 104–138 BILLION TONS of ice lost per annum. 100 billion tons is indeed a large figure. But let’s see what that means in terms of sea level rise. The earth’s radius is about 6400 km. Earth’s surface area, use 4 pi times the radius squared; and 70% of that area is water — it comes to about 3.6 x 10^14 sq. meters. Ocean isn’t all of that, though, and I cheated a bit and looked online to get a figure of 3.35 x 10^14 sq. meters of ocean area. Let’s get back to those 100 Gtonne, or 10^17 g, of melting ice per year. As water has a density of (approx.) 1 g/cc, that comes to 10^17 cc of water, or 10^11 cubic meters. Spread that evenly over the above ocean area, and it comes to a depth of 0.3 mm. A rate of 0.3 mm per year is about 1 inch per century. Doesn’t seem to merit capital letters to me.

   melk says: February 16, 2011 at 02:58 (Edit) @ John. No major disagreements with you but it does seem, and this was my point, that the pro-AGW school and, particularly, their non-scientist adherents, seem to feel that a current consensus should end all further speculation about the correctness of that position. That was certainly not Barry Marshall’s attitude. And I doubt that there will ever be a Eureka-type Nobel-winning discovery that destroys the AGW position. Instead, there may be a steady erosion of the basic tenets, especially if the plateau of current warm years seen since around 1998 continues to remain a plateau, without further dramatic increases in temperatures. This would be just one chink in the armor. The post-hoc exposition about the current very cold winters now also being explainable by AGW is really not terribly convincing, given that we had been given to believe just quite recently that winters would be getting much milder. Obviously a future period of much colder weather for an extended period of time would end the AGW story, without the award of any Nobel prizes. I am not predicting anything. But scientific certainty is a precarious thing. I rather think that Sir Paul would be totally astonished were he able to look at cancer science one hundred years from now. One final point. If AGW is indeed a consequence, overwhelmingly, of ever-increasing atmospheric CO2, would it not seem technologically possible to eliminate or even reverse this increase, currently only 0.25%-0.5% per year?

   Graham says: February 16, 2011 at 08:19 (Edit) @EWI
Just to be clear, so I dont mis-understand your train of thought: Monckton backed Dimmock
therefore (you conclude) the court findings were wrong and
everything Gore says is beyond reproach and “objective”; therefore:
Greenland really could melt in the foreseeable future and raise sea levels several meters, despite what the science actually says. IF this is your reasoning, then may I humbly suggest that your comment is not worthy of publication, not even here?

   Graham Strouts says: February 16, 2011 at 08:56 (Edit) Let’s just have a closer look at the sea-level rise issue.
Lambert seems to agree more with me than with John on this and accepts, following the IPCC, that Gore’s scenario is very unlikely: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/10/an_error_is_not_the_same_thing.php “The IPCC says that by “very unlikely”, they mean a 5-10% chance of it happening. Since the consequences would be very bad, I think Gore is justified in saying that it is worrying, though it would have been better if he had said that it was a possible rather probable result of continued warming.” The IPCC say:
“Therefore, no quantitative information is available from the current generation of ice sheet models as to the likelihood or timing of such an event.” I linked to a much more recent study that suggests it is even more unlikely than then thought; John dismisses this- even though it appears to be good science, not funded by Monkton- because it does not support his ideology of doom. So how worried should we be about something that is “very unlikely” ? I think it is pretty obvious that this forms one of the key scenes in the film, playing on the heart strings of the American audience especially with reference to the WTC site. In defending Gore. Clearly, the film is for public consumption and not aimed primarily at those who scrutinize the blogs and read the actual IPCC reports. There is only one impression that cinema goers (or school children) are going to leave the film with unless they are extremely well informed and skeptical: unless we change our lightbulbs and cycle to school we are all going to drown (or our children and grandchildren will). I return to my may point, because this is really what i would like you guys to respond to: you gain nothing by defending Gore in this way, and bolster the more extreme skeptics’ view that environmentalism is a religion, and suspicions that the whole climate change thing is an attempt to regulate people’e lifestyles. Yes, it is Monckton et al who capitalise on this and play on it for their own agendas, but it is the stance taken by John and others here (along with things like the 10:10 campaign) that give that point of view credibility.

   John Gibbons says: February 16, 2011 at 09:11 (Edit) @HaroldW I can neither confirm nor refute your pocket calculations on Greenland ice melt. I’ll be guided by what the experts say, and they are increasingly trending towards sea level rises of upwards of one metre this century – and much, much more in the event of climatic ‘tipping point’ threshholds being crossed (Greenland is of course just one source for rising sea levels). @ Graham Let me try to be clear: I don’t give a fiddler’s elbow about Al Gore. Period. I’m interested in what mainstream climate scientists are telling us, and how society needs to be guided by their expert advice. Your repeated misunderstanding of risk threshholds regarding the Greenland ice sheet (and Western Antarctica as well) I’ll put down to a lack of knowledge, rather than any more malign interpretation. To repeat your “doom-mongering” line Graham is shoddy. Either you simply don’t understand that the biosphere is hanging by a thread, or you do, but you enjoy argument so much that you set this “inconvenient” fact to one side and wade into a scrap, like Delingpole, for the sheer joy of being a contrarian. Your repeated defence of Lomborg I’ll again choose to chalk up to naivete rather than malice. Lomborg systematically mis-represents IPCC findings. His “analysis” makes a mockery of climate science. If you don’t know that, you are on the wrong website. Let me give you a flavour of Lomborg at work: “…We have no idea how much good we could do for the world if we made more free trade; we could do ten times more good for the world if we got a little more free trade than will happen if bad things (sic) because of global warming…”
– Bjorn Lomborg, Fox News – Business, May 28, 2010. Perhaps Graham you agree with this analysis. Perhaps you don’t, but let’s both agree that only a pure ideologue could produce such a parody of logic. You keep repeating how Lomborg “accepts the science of AGW”. You’ve been had again, I’m afraid. Lomborg mouths that line to sound reasonable, while his arguments are classic “do nothing”, “it’ll be fine” – the very lines of logic that are steering humanity (and our fellow species) towards the climatic abyss that I referred to in the Royal Society estimate of 4C heating within 50 years. Graham, what exactly do you think 4C heating in the next five decades might mean? (or maybe this is more “doom-mongering”, funny how all those experts are doom-mongerers). Just in case you’re not familiar with the basic science (and I really am now beginning to wonder), the current global average surface temp. is c.14.5C. Add 4C to that in half a century and you have increased the average surface temp by over 25%. That means, briefly: zero Arctic ice, Greenland committed to collapse (the idea of this taking thousands of years in a 1000ppm+ CO2 world is fanciful in the extreme), ditto for Western Antarctica, coastal innundation displacing hundreds of millions, disappearance of the world’s remaining glaciers – including the Himalayan system which provides much of the fresh water for south-east Asia. And let’s not forget, that 4C is an average. It’ll be lower at sea, of course, but higher, much higher on land, and especially towards the poles. That means temp. increases in the range of 8-15C over Northern Canada and Siberia. That in turn means the mass melting of the tundra, and the consequent release of tens of billions of tons of CH4, which as you no doubt know, is more than 20 times more potent a GHG than CO2. Oh, and did I mention that the entire Amazon rainforest would have long since disappeared as we neared 4C. So 4C in reality trips the switch to completing the Sixth Extinction. This’ll be on the scale of the end-Permian event 240m years ago (it was a 6C climate shock on that occasion that wiped out 95% of everything alive at that time, and took the planet over 100 million years to recover biodiversity. But hey, Graham, that’s just some boring factual “doom mongering” for you. And anyhow, Al Gore is a tosser, so climate science is probably just made-up stuff like homeopathy. And your failure to understand the MO of arch-propagandist Monckton (per your posting to EWI above) deepens the impression that you are bringing some formidable ideological baggage of your own to this discussion. I’ve set out my position as a journalist in attempting to communicate climate change, sustainability, etc. to a non-scientific audience pretty plainly and publicly over the last several years and am prepared to let readers judge which of us they feel labours under the greater ideological burden. Have to head off to work now, so sadly won’t be able to play tag on this for the forseeable future. I suspect we are not going to move towards agreement, and as there is in my view nothing whatever new or especially interesting in the crypto-denialism on offer here, the value of a lengthy debate is questionable.

   Brian O’Brien says: February 16, 2011 at 10:21 (Edit) Mr Strouts states above that Lomborg’s book, ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’ is peer-reviewed: “Nor have you in any way convinced me that Lomborg is a fraud as you seem so certain. You ignore my point in the post that TSE was in fact peer-reviewed”. Does Mr Strouts know anything at all? TSE was not peer-reviewed. It was derided by the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty for its blatant lack of truthfulness, but in the final analysis, they failed to rule firmly against it precisely because it is NOT a science book! It’s simply the very pointed opinions of a political scientist wrapped in scienc-y jargon. Mr Strouts, in not knowing even what peer-review is puts himself on the same plane as James Delingpole – bombastic argument, sweeping assertions riddled with howling factual errors (like thinking TSE to be a peer-reviewed publication, for goodness sake, how stupid can you get?). I don’t know anything about Mr Strouts, other than what I’ve learned from his article and these comments, but one thing is certain: he is either very very gullible or very very cynical.

   Simon Maller says: February 16, 2011 at 11:20 (Edit) John, you write: “We can at least agree that the 400-year old UK Royal Society is a pretty serious bastion of sober science; yet this Society, studded with Nobel laureates and by definition a pretty conservative bunch, has last month published a set of proceedings entitled “Four degree and beyond: the potential for a global temperature increase of 4C and its implications”. The time scale they envisage for this ecological Armageddon? 2060 – or just under 50 years hence.” So we look at the Royal Society publication and find the following quotes (all from the abstract found at http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1934/67.full) “The highest emissions scenario considered in the AR4 [was] scenario A1FI” “While it is still too early to say whether any particular scenario is being tracked by current emissions, A1FI is considered to be as plausible as other non-mitigation scenarios and cannot be ruled out.” “If carbon-cycle feedbacks are stronger, which appears less likely but still credible, then 4°C warming could be reached by the early 2060s” (this last quote using the A1FI scenario, but with stronger feedback). So to get to 4 degC by 1960 we have to use the highest emissions scenario, which is “plausible” and “cannot be ruled out” in combination with “less likely” stronger feedback. I don’t known about anyone else, but this would indicate that the 50 years to “Armageddon” is an academic exercise looking at low probability events rather than an attempt to provide a high probability prediction. This is NOT the conclusion the uninformed would come to from reading your post. You say that “ToS is here to facilitate a serious debate on the substantive issues”, and yet how can you call your own brazen mis-characterization “serious”. The old chicles using pots, kettles and a sooty colour (or alternatively motes, logs and eyes) spring readily to mind.

   Simon Maller says: February 16, 2011 at 11:21 (Edit) and yes, I typo’d cliché. woops.

   John Gibbons says: February 16, 2011 at 13:23 (Edit) @Simon Current emissions trajectory is worse than the IPCC’s “worst case” A1F1 scenario. It will continue to worsen, barring disasters, as China, India, etc. continue to grow at breakneck speed and US/EU dither and dally on pricing CO2. Getting to 4C may well in fact be a piece of cake. We’re going to overshoot A1F1 comfortably; this in turn increases the likelihood of strengthening carbon-cycle feedbacks (the Amazon, for instance, suffered its second “once in a century” drouught in six years in 2010, and may have been a net carbon emitter last year. How’s that for carbon-cycle feedbacks kicking us in the teeth. A carbon sink becomes a carbon source). To describe the above as ‘low probability events’ depends on your attitude to risk. Would you regard, say, a 20% chance of 4C (and global ecosystem failure) as an “acceptable” risk? How about 30, or 40%? Still acceptable? This is species-level Russian Roulette you’re engaging in here. If that’s “brazen mischaracterisation”, well so be it. Around 0.5% of homes burn down in a given year, yet almost everyone who can afford it insures against fire risk. Why bother? Because the likelihood may be small but the downside is huge (losing your house) and most rational people insure against such catastrophic downsides. Societies must similarly insure against ‘black swan’ events by taking strong steps to reduce the likelihood of their occurring. To not do so may leave more cash in your pocket today, but you’re gambling with penury in the future (and for future generations, ie. our kids) – just like the guy who treats himself to a nice a new flat screen TV with the money he meant to put aside to pay the home insurance…

   DR says: February 16, 2011 at 19:51 (Edit)

   John Gibbons says:
February 16, 2011 at 09:11 Just in case you’re not familiar with the basic science (and I really am now beginning to wonder), the current global average surface temp. is c.14.5C. Add 4C to that in half a century and you have increased the average surface temp by over 25%. What’s the percentage increase in Farenheit?! Seriously, that is not how temperature works. Zero centigrade is a completely arbitrary starting point. You have to start at zero Kelvin to use percentages.

   EWI says: February 16, 2011 at 20:29 (Edit) IF this is your reasoning, then may I humbly suggest that your comment is not worthy of publication, not even here? Look, buddy: you’re the one who is seeking to make this about the personal life of a mild-mannered centrist Democrat, not me. You’ve a choice between reputable scientists on one hand, and a freak-show of right-wing nutters on the other. Which is it to be?

   John Gibbons says: February 16, 2011 at 21:09 (Edit) @DR
Strange that on the one hand you are unable to perform the simple conversion of 14.5C to 58.1F, or to work out that a 4C increase to 18.5C is equivalent to 65.3F, but on the other hand, you are bemoaning the arbitrariness of 0C and suggesting we calculate in Kelvin. Is this another wind-up, perhaps? @Brian
Thanks for reminding me that Graham was of course talking through his hat when referring to Lomborg’s dire populist ‘Skeptical Environmentalist’ as a peer-reviewed publication. Kinda gave the game away there. The phrase “not even wrong” comes to mind. Still, isn’t Al Gore a right bastard! That’s about the only coherent thread I can draw from this entire sorry exchange. People mistakenly think that it’s only the Tea Party/Creationist/fundamentalist school of right wingers that routinely rubbish climate science. Among certain lefties, it’s an equally trendy pursuit. Martin Durkin, producer of the mockumentary ‘Great Global Warming Swindle’ is a hard leftie, who was convinced Maggie Thatcher dreamed up global warming as an excuse to shut the coal mines and break the unions (seriously). These same lefties think the real issue is ‘class war’ and that environmentalism is some wimpy middle class guilt trip that’s distracting from progress towards the glorious brotherhood of world socialism. @EWI
Pithy and to the point, once again. Repeat after me: Gore…baaaaad. Gore….baaaaad. Gore….baaaad. There, hope everyone feels better.

   Delio says: February 16, 2011 at 21:34 (Edit) Ladies, please! Enough already. John, any chance of some coverage of what our prospective new gov’t might have in mind by way of a climate bill, or how about an examination of what’s going on with world food and/or the energy crisis. I know I speak for quite a few of your regular followers in saying I’m sick and sore of this na na na na na stuff about climate skeptics. It’s a bottomless pit of pointlessness, please stop flinging yourself down it… your regular output is pretty much the best systematic environmental coverage in Ireland today. Please, please stick with it and leave the septic skeptics to fester elsewhere. D.

   DR says: February 16, 2011 at 22:38 (Edit) John, I think you are making my point for me. You said “Add 4C to [14.5C] in half a century and you have increased the average surface temp by over 25%.” Using Farenheit, the same temperature change (58.1F to 65.3F) is a 12% increase, using Kelvin it’s about 287.6K to 291.6K, or a 1.4% increase. It really does matter where the zero is, if you are talking about percentage changes. That’s why one uses simple temperature differences when talking about climate, and not percentages.

   John Gibbons says: February 17, 2011 at 09:31 (Edit) @DR
Brilliant. What scale would you generally recommend for counting angels on the head of a pin? It’s important we get agreement on all our measurement tools, however bizarre or irrelevant.

   Graham Strouts says: February 17, 2011 at 11:38 (Edit) @EWI “Look, buddy:” Hey buddy! “you’re the one who is seeking to make this about the personal life of a mild-mannered centrist Democrat, not me.” Am I ? How so?
You’ve a choice between reputable scientists on one hand, and a freak-show of right-wing nutters on the other. Which is it to be?” Err…ummm… dont I get any more choices? Maybe some middle ground, like Lomborg perhaps? How about a freak-show of left-wing nutters? Just kidding! Please dont blow me up! Hahahaha. Love the “mild-mannered centrist Democrat”- priceless! seriously though- is the reason you ignore my question because it makes you feel a little uncomfortable? Cheers buddy! @Bien O’Brien
“Mr Strouts, in not knowing even what peer-review is puts himself on the same plane as James Delingpole – bombastic argument, sweeping assertions riddled with howling factual errors (like thinking TSE to be a peer-reviewed publication, for goodness sake, how stupid can you get?).” Maybe you dont have access to Wikipedia on your computer so I will quote from the article I linked in the original post. (On the internet, if you see a word or phrase highlighted you can click on it and it takes you to a link which often is a reference to the point being made. Quite useful to know.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skeptical_Environmentalist “Dr. Chris Harrison (Publishing Director of social science publishing for Cambridge University Press), anticipating the level of controversy a book like this would likely provoke, took extra care with the book’s peer-review process. For example, instead of choosing candidates from the usual list of social science referees, Cambridge University Press chose from a list provided by their environmental science publishing program. Four were chosen: a climate scientist, an expert in biodiversity and sustainable development, a specialist on the economics of climate change (whose credentials include reviewing publications for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)) and a “pure” economist. All four members of Cambridge’s initial review panel agreed that the book should be published.” Definitely worth reading the whole article though, and the links provided there for further info..
Now, me being stupid and you being clever an’ all, you clearly have convincing and unequivocal proof that the CUP, Wikipedia and everyone else who does not think Lomborg is a fraud, are in on the conspiracy he is controlling and that it is all lies. Thing is Mr. O’Brien you need to actually provide that proof, show us what it is and how we can verify it, otherwise some people (not me obviously! I’ll just naively take your word for it!) may think you are just making it up.
(Go on, tell me Gore’s book and film WERE peer-reviewed- I dare you!) @John Gibbons: Your readers and supporters will not believe that you dont care about Gore- you’re having a joke! You do care John, that’s why you are so concerned about defending him in your earlier comments. You care very much about people seeing him and his film as being objective representation of the science. You have posted three comments here defending him, and attacking my personal credentials, but without supporting argument. I want to re-visit this incredible comment about Lomborg you made earlier: “[he] ignores the entire canon of actual climate science” Do you stand by this statement? Dont you think you might be opening yourself up to the charge of ideological bias by this sort of thing? I mean, surely you are aware that anyone can pick up Lomborg’s book, or check the internet, and verify for themselves that Lomborg deals very thoroughly with the mainstream science? How about this one:
“You keep repeating how Lomborg “accepts the science of AGW”. You’ve been had again, I’m afraid. Lomborg mouths that line to sound reasonable, while his arguments are classic “do nothing”, “it’ll be fine” ” Again, it is easy to verify that Lomborg accepts AGW science; and it is quite untrue that he says “do nothing”- his entire book is about what to do- and what not to do. It is a book about cost-benefit analysis, and he argues that the approach of simply cutting carbon omissions is flawed. You really should read the book John then you will see what I mean. Now, it is perfectly valid to question his conclusions; but to repeat the mantra of “Lomborg……….baaaaaaaaad Lomborg………….baaaaaaaaaad” as you continue to do really does sound hollow (at best, just lazy). So once you have read Lomborg, you may well revise your opinion (I’m sure you will- I have great confidence in you!) but otherwise it really does sound that you (like Pigliucci) are deliberately misrepresenting him in the hope that noone else will read him either. You say: ” Lomborg systematically mis-represents IPCC findings. His “analysis” makes a mockery of climate science. If you don’t know that, you are on the wrong website. ” But you dont give an example of this that we could discuss, instead giving a quote about economics, which I cannot assess without context and more information: “Let me give you a flavour of Lomborg at work: “…We have no idea how much good we could do for the world if we made more free trade; we could do ten times more good for the world if we got a little more free trade than will happen if bad things (sic) because of global warming…”
– Bjorn Lomborg, Fox News – Business, May 28, 2010. Perhaps Graham you agree with this analysis. Perhaps you don’t, but let’s both agree that only a pure ideologue could produce such a parody of logic.” Yes I am very stupid, but I cannot see why it is a “parody of logic”; surely this is in principle at least a testable hypothesis: to assess it we need to look at the evidence. So I’m going to ask you one more time to respond to this point: without people like you John, the Moncktons and Delingpoles of this world would have little traction. But IF I wanted to conspire that environmentalists are ideologically motivated, and that climate change alarmism is essentially a religion, or has a hidden agenda aimed at destroying the modern world (“climate change will destroy civilisation! To prevent it we must destroy civiliisation!”) all I would need do is to refer people here. So for people like me who really do care about making the smart decisions, and a rational approach to climate change, you are really rather problematic;
by which mean, with activists such as your good self, we really dont need Moncktons etc.. (BTW I dont think you understand DR’s point about temperature and percentages: your point was that if you add 4 degrees to 14.5 degrees you are increasing temperature by 25%. This is not correct, the example DR gives being that the percentage would be quite different if you used Fahrenheit (58-65 degrees is about 12% increase). If I was a conspiracy theorist I would point to this as a good example of how climate alarmists misuse statistics to give a false impression and mislead people! 
I am however a generous person and will assume that you dont have a clue what you are talking about. ) Oh yes one more thing: you forgot to reply to the point about the IPCC and their projections of future growth- which you regard as “bullshit”. Can you explain this? Are climate scientists talking bullshit? Or do the substantial majority of scientists such as Steig and Schmidt etc all agree that PO and die-off is impending and we are all doomed anyway, even without AGW?
And when you say things like “Current emissions trajectory is worse than the IPCC’s “worst case” A1F1 scenario. It will continue to worsen, barring disasters, as China, India, etc. continue to grow at breakneck speed ” are you not actually contradicting yourself? I know you are busy John and I appreciate your dropping back into the discussion, but if you avoid all the extraneous stuff about how stupid/gullible/corrupt/deluded etc I must be and just stick to the points I am putting to you, it shoudnt take you too long. “Lomborg…………baaaaaaaaaaaaad! Lomborg……………..baaaaaaaaaaaad!!”

   John Gibbons says: February 17, 2011 at 11:59 (Edit) Graham Glad you got that lot off your chest. Think we’ll have to agree to disagree. Throwing mud pies may be fun, but it don’t make no flowers grow. You’ve made your mind up; I’m equally clear about my position, and the two are not converging, so let’s leave it at that. I’ve met you 2-3 times, and enjoyed your company on each occasion. I don’t intend abandoning my good opinion of you on the basis of this exchange, and hopefully this is reciprocal. There’s a new posting on the site, and I have two other contributors queued up to have their postings published, so let’s move on. JG

   Brian O’Brien says: February 17, 2011 at 16:19 (Edit) “Anyone who ever thought that Lomborg had anything useful to contribute to the debate about the state of the planet must read ‘The Lomborg Deception’ “Its author provides a detailed page-by-page account of how Lomborg studiously overlooks all the key facts that do not fit his preconceptions, falsifies what the peer-review literature states, and fabricates material to his ends. No wonder the Danish Committee of Scientific Misconduct called him “dishonest.” This is the book to show how Lomorg did it. Yes, it’s an account of a sordid few years, but in detailing how Lomborg and his ilk produce this nonsense, there is no better guide. As a journalist who specializes in investigations — and not a scientist with an axe to grind — Howard Friel is the very best person to write this debunking” – Prof Stuart Pimm, Columbia University. Graham, your one and only source for claiming TSE to be “peer-reviewed” is a Wiki entry which has been clearly generously edited either by Lomborg or members of his fan club (sorry, Wikipedia isn’t actually peer-reviewed, at least not in the academic or scientific sense of the phrase). Lomborg’s litany of attacks on climate science and scientists (all of whom were out of step but Bjorn, of course) was most definitely NOT subject to review by a structured panel of scientific peers prior to publication. It has, since publication, been torn apart limb from limb, lie by lie, by the very scientists you infer approved its publication. The Union of Concerned Scientists wrote as follows:
“UCS invited several of the world’s leading experts on water resources, biodiversity, and climate change to carefully review the sections in Lomborg’s book that address their areas of expertise. We asked them to evaluate whether Lomborg’s skepticism is coupled with the other hallmarks of good science – namely, objectivity, understanding of the underlying concepts, appropriate statistical methods and careful peer review” The conclusions? “These separately written expert reviews unequivocally demonstrate that on closer inspection, Lomborg’s book is seriously flawed and fails to meet basic standards of credible scientific analysis….” “Time and again, these experts find that Lomborg’s assertions and analyses are marred by flawed logic, inappropriate use of statistics and hidden value judgments. He uncritically and selectively cites literature — often not peer-reviewed — that supports his assertions, while ignoring or misinterpreting scientific evidence that does not. His consistently flawed use of scientific data is, in Peter Gleick’s words “unexpected and disturbing in a statistician”.
The entire UCS article is below:
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/global_warming_contrarians/ucs-examines-the-skeptical.html So there, in a nutshell, and from the mouths of some of the world’s top (peer-reviewed) climate scientists is the great Bjorn Lomborg laid bare. Your increasing desperation to back up your “doom-mongering” thesis about the malign intent of climate scientists and environmental campaigners, activists (and writers, like John) leads you to instead cosy up with a rag-bag of cornucopianists, energy industry hacks and assorted straight-up crazies like Monckton and Delingpole. I don’t know you, but hear you’re some kind of off-the-grid environmentalist/survivalist? Well, with friends like you, the movement to build public awareness of the coming ecological collapse is well and truly fecked. Don’t know what your own pet ideology or grudge is, friend, but it’s pretty messed up. You must have a pretty thick neck to be happy to make a wally of yourself over and over again in a public forum like this, so – Respect! Where I do agree with John is in seeing that you have nothing to add to an adult discussion on climate change; you’re a Troll who’s simply not worth engaging with, even if John found a politer way of phrasing it.

   Jonathan says: February 17, 2011 at 18:08 (Edit) @John Gibbons, I’m afraid DR (and Graham in his add on comment) have you bang to rights. Your original comment about temperatures increasing by 25% was scientific nonsense. Fair enough to try to move the conversation on, but it is customary to admit that you were mistaken before doing so.

   Graham Strouts says: February 17, 2011 at 18:59 (Edit) @John Gibbons
Thanks John for agreeing to stop throwing mud at me; I appreciate it. Maybe you could have a quiet word with Brian called Brian and suggest he do the same.
However, you put me in a difficult position: you have generated through your contradictory confused comments several interesting questions which I have repeatedly asked you but you are dodging through the device of calling enough to the (your) mud-slinging.
For example, the issue of assumptions of continual growth you use as justification for rubbishing Lomborg, apparently not realising that it is the IPCC who assume this, Lomborg is merely using their own models;
but you then contradict this by referring to the inevitable growth of India and China which is the basis of your alarmism: so the question is, if growth of these projections is not possible (the peak oil thesis which I of course have also been promoting until recently but which appears to have little support in scientific circles) where does that leave future projections of greenhouse emissions and consequent temperature increases and sea-level rise?
These seem to me to be genuinely interesting issues which i have been puzzling over for a while, and I would genuinely be interested in your opinions on them; you must surely have considered them yourself. So it does seem a pity after all this that you refuse to engage with them. I dont think we would necessarily disagree. Moreover re the mudslinging, I know what “stupid” means (Brian’s formulation which you appear to endorse) and I understand “gullible” and so on, but please could you explain what “crypto-denialism” is? It appears to be a new category, leastwise I’ve not come across it before. @Brian called Brian “Graham, your one and only source for claiming TSE to be “peer-reviewed” is a Wiki entry which has been clearly generously edited either by Lomborg or members of his fan club (sorry, Wikipedia isn’t actually peer-reviewed, at least not in the academic or scientific sense of the phrase). Lomborg’s litany of attacks on climate science and scientists (all of whom were out of step but Bjorn, of course) was most definitely NOT subject to review by a structured panel of scientific peers prior to publication” No, Wikepedia is not my only source. Here is the paper mentioned in Wikipedia by Dr. Chris Harrison (Publishing Director of social science publishing for Cambridge University Press) in which he clearly confirms that TSE was indeed peer-reviewed, just as are all CUS publications: http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/publications/special/harrison_peer_review_politics_and_pluralism.pdf “As a University Press, we insist on a peer review process
for every book we publish. It has become part of the
anti-Lomborg folklore that his book bypassed the usual
Cambridge peer review process and was cynically spirited
through the system by an ignorant social science editor.5
This is a charge that has been repeated in many of the public
and private attacks on the press, and it is unfounded. Indeed,
The Skeptical Environmentalist would never have been
published by Cambridge had it not been for peer review” Now, in principle nothing can be proved “most definitely” and you cant really prove a negative, but Occam’s Razor will tell us that there is no more likelihood of CUP (or Wikipedia) being a part of a Lomborgian conspiracy than there is of the 9-11 Truthers being correct or for that matter the “denialists” regarding climate change science being a conspiracy. In fact I would say far less of a chance, because whether or not TSE was peer-reviewed or not is an important but (relatively) minor issue that doesnt prove anything one way or another: as John correctly surmises in an earlier comment, the fact that sthg has been peer reviewed does not mean you have to agree with it. It would actually strengthen your position IMO for you to concede this issue, since I there is indeed good evidence it was peer-reviewed while you have provided none that these claims are false. (I actually think you could easily concede my case for Gore’s doom-mongering as well, it wouldnt cost you much.) How about we settle it with a bet: I will bet you 1000 euros that it was peer-reviewed; we would of course have to find a referee and agree terms etc.. What do you think? That you and John seem so absolutely certain that it was not peer-reviewed I find extraordinary, and a fascinating insight into your mentalities. You are clearly both deeply committed ideologues- Respect indeed! You quote the UCS, which are of course one of the groups Lomborg criticsies in EoS.One of the reviewers, Dr. Jerry Mahlmann, writes: “I found some aspects of this chapter to be interesting, challenging, and logical. For example, the author’s characterizations of the degree of difficulty in actually doing something meaningful about climate change through mitigation and coping/adaptation are perceptive and valuable. In principle, such characterizations could provide a foundation for more meaningful policy planning on this difficult problem. Unfortunately, the author’s lack of rigor and consistency on these larger issues is likely to negate any real respect for his insights”. Now, the last sentence is critical to be sure, but a very far cry from yours and John’s repeated assertions that Lomborg is a fraud and engaged in conspiracy (even nobbling Wikipedia!). So you are quite wrong to claim there is a scientific consensus on this. There are other reasons to question the freedom from ideological bias within the UCS, especially on the question of GE crops which they are opposed to. This puts them in a minority amongst the science world on this issue, since all major science academies in the world have written reports that GE is basically safe and should be promoted. Just sayin’, that’s all. And the report you link to is a caricature of what Lomborg actually says. As for your ad hominems: Use of Troll is an interesting formulation, I’m not quite sure that works since I wrote the original post! Surely it should be I calling you a Troll! My lifestyle has of course nothing to do with these issues, but if you wish for more ammunition on this you have only to follow the link to my blog at the bottom of the post. I dont think Ive ever been called a survivalist before either! I know you think Im gullible but I have never been able to trust anyone called Brian ever since I saw that documentary on Brian of Nazareth, who was clearly a fraud and an imposter- try telling me the science doesnt agree with THAT!!. Not only that, but you have got a very big nose. Nothing personal, just telling the truth. Friend.

   Adam Smith says: February 17, 2011 at 19:40 (Edit) Note to self: Buy shares in Koch industries.

   John Gibbons says: February 17, 2011 at 21:05 (Edit) Graham I’ll try for the second time to wrap this one up. We’re not going to agree. You believe you have all the answers; good luck with that. Going 15 rounds with a clever slugger like R. Tol may be intensely frustrating and fraught, but it’s not entirely pointless, given his role in shaping policy. This, on the other hand is frustrating, fraught – and pointless. Ciao, Graham (and please don’t try to start this one up again or I’ll have to – reluctantly – exercise my prerogative as the founder and Moderator of this site).

   John Gibbons says: February 18, 2011 at 09:09 (Edit) @Johathan
Guilty as charged. I’m not a scientist, and am occasionally likely to make a technical gaffe, like the one pointed out by DR. I regret the lack of precision in my language. For clarity, let me briefly re-phrase: Current global average surface temp: c.14.5C. The 4C projected increase this century per the Royal Society’s estimates (based on but not restricted to the IPCC’s A1F1 trajectory) is, if allowed to come to pass, a cataclysm for this planet and all who live here. These are the basic facts. My stab at translating this into percentages that most people could understand was clumsy and unscientific. Sadly, this in no way alters the fact that 4C is curtains for civilisation as it’s currently organised, and will lead to human misery on an unimaginable scale. Is this not the actual point here? You and DR have set me straight on my baselines, yet neither of you has bothered to comment on the reality of 4C. How very curiously detached of you both. Don’t you think this will affect you as well (or your kids for certain, if you have them)? Quite a few posters on this thread appear to think climate change is some fantasy foisted on the world by Al Gore and friends to limit your freedom, put up your taxes, etc. As a father of young children, no one would be happier than me if this were so. However, 25 years working as a journalist and publisher has taught me a healthy respect for facts, and an equally healthy suspicion of ideology, in all its subtle forms. And yes, that includes stepping back from time to time to make sure to the best of my ability that I haven’t morphed from ‘specialist commentator’ to ‘unreasoning zealot’. Apologies to anyone who finds the passion with which I argue the case for climate science offputting. If it weren’t so damn serious I’d probably be able to have a laugh at the Plimers, Moncktons, Lomborgs, Tols and Delingpoles of this world. Hell, the way things are playing out, laughter may yet be all we have left.

   EWI says: February 18, 2011 at 12:24 (Edit) Err…ummm… dont I get any more choices? Maybe some middle ground, like Lomborg perhaps? Lomborg – repeatedly proven to be spreading disinformation time and time again, mysteriously one of the ready go-to guys (along with Tol) for red herrings by the do-nothing right-wing crowd – is your “middle ground”? I would say that you show your real bias here. I suggest that John Gibbons and the others here look up the definition of Concern Troll, because you’re clearly one. I certainly won’t be wasting any more time in taking you at face value.

by Marc Diacono

Hdbck 192pp Quadrille publishing 2011

Marc Diacono runs Otter Farm in Devon, “the UK’s only climate change farm where we’ve planting olives, peaches, pecans, persimmons, apricots, szechuan pepper, vines and much more.” He is also leads the Garden Team at Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage. He has worked closely with forest garden guruMartin Crawford whose influence in some of the choice of plants described here is evident, and the two appeared together on a recent R4 Food programme.

The notion of a climate change farm is an interesting one: facing the prospect of a warming climate Marc has started growing crops like those listed above that would have been considered marginal for Britain until recently. “The idea is beautifully sustainable” explains Marc- “if we can take advantage of climate change to grow food usually sourced from overseas we will be producing low carbon food for a domestic market – helping arrest the acceleration of climate change. As a result Otter Farm has become known as the ‘Climate Change Farm’.”

In this video clip from Jan 2009 Marc can be heard saying how mild the winters have become and how the grass doesn’t stop growing- this is quite surprising since it was in the middle of the first of the past two really cold winters we have had in Ireland at any rate, and I am wondering if he still thinks the winters are likely to be that mild, and whether he has lost some more tender stuff recently. For example, I lost many of my small Myrtus Ugni during the past two winters- and in this book, Marc does advise “if you live in a colder region, I’d be tempted to keep your plants undercover, at least through the colder months.” I live in a milder part of Ireland, and this is a plant that should be hardy to -10degrees C, so this does perhaps give an indication of the difficulties of adapting in terms of the plants we might grow to a climate that is unlikely to change in a linear fashion.

That being said, this is a sumptuously illustrated book full of good ideas and lots of sensible practical advice on both growing, preparing and cooking some really interesting food crops not found in the average allotment.

Marc’s philosophy is very simple and makes a lot of sense: why grow the same old standard staple veg like potatoes and cabbage, which can easily be bought cheaply (good old intensive industrial agriculture) when you could fill your garden with exquisitely delicious food crops like mulberries, Szechuan pepper, apricots and yacon?

he also advises to choose “easy winners” and going for perennials and plants that don’t need too much attention.

There is a great chapter on nut trees, in which he recommends perhaps surprisingly, in addition to chestnuts and walnuts- if you have space for them- also pecans which apparently he is having success with.

Under soft fruit he includes blue honeysuckle, autumn olive -Eleagnis umbellata- and fuchsia (ever tasted a fuchsia berry?).

Many of the plants he includes I am familiar with and am growing myself; one that was quite new to me is the perennial vegetable Kai lan, apparently a cross between kale, asparagus and broccoli, which sounds fantastic and definitely one I will try for next year.

All in all a lovely book, the perfect present etc., an essential addition to the forest gardening bookshelf and a great companion to Martin Crawford’s Creating a Forest Garden.

Mark Lynas- who featured on last year’s channel 4 documentary What the Greens Got Wrong- has put the cat amongst the pigeons with his recent criticism of the IPCC report on renewable energy. I know something of what this feels like.

In classic IPCC style the Summary for Policymakers was released weeks before the actual report, which means that the conclusions- that 80% of the world’s energy could be met by renewables by 2050- went round the world’s media before the study itself could be scrutinized.

Lynas explains:

Here’s what happened. The 80% by 2050 figure was based on a scenario, so Chapter 10 of the full report reveals, called ER-2010, which does indeed project renewables supplying 77% of the globe’s primary energy by 2050. The lead author of the ER-2010 scenario, however, is a Sven Teske, who should have been identified (but is not) as a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace International. Even worse, Teske is a lead author of the IPCC report also – in effect meaning that this campaigner for Greenpeace was not only embedded in the IPCC itself, but was in effect allowed to review and promote his own campaigning work under the cover of the authoritative and trustworthy IPCC. A more scandalous conflict of interest can scarcely be imagined.

To hardened skeptics this is nothing new, in fact it’s par for the course; what is notable is that Mark Lynas has decided to call the IPCC out despite being a climate change activist himself and author of the truly alarmist book Six Degrees (2008).

This story is discussed by Steve McIntyre, who first spotted it; here at Bishop Hill and by Judith Curry.

The actual report itself qualifies for the yawn factor according to Revkin who says:

Of course, my issue with the report from the get-go was the yawn factor. It was yet another study implying that renewable energy choices — in theory, and in the face of high costs* and other daunting constraints — could be the dominant source of reductions in emissions by mid-century.” Yes, and we could all stop driving tomorrow, but we won’t.

Effectively a report looking at the theoretical possibility of replacing fossil fuels with renewables is academic unless it provides a full cost-benefit analysis of how to get there. You might as well say, theoretically if we could efficiently capture all the sun’s energy that falls on the planet we would be grand.

Lynas has now dug his heels in and upped the ante writing

if the ‘deniers’ are the only ones standing up for the integrity of the scientific process, and the independence of the IPCC, then I too am a ‘denier’

Lynas has now agreed even to read The Hockey Stick Illusion- which I find mildly surprising, that he has not read it already I mean, I know that I have only just read it, but I am not an A-list environmental campaigner (actually I’m about triple-Z rated.)

To show how serious this has become Curry writes:

I predict that your actually reading the Hockey Stick Illusion and mentioning it on your blog will get you removed from RealClimate’s blogroll.

Curry’s post is especially interesting as she writes a message to Lynas warning him of the vilification she experienced when she first started questioning the IPCC, and that he can expect more of the same.

What she writes about her own experience, and what Lynas is now going to be faced with, strike a chord in a very small way with my own very recent coming out as a climate skeptic. (Skeptical that is about the “consensus”, the IPCC and the proposed policy of decarbonisation.)

It started at the end of last summer after seeing the film Not Evil Just Wrong which pointed to a legal judgement pointing out scientific errors in Al Gore’s film. It was then that I started looking at some skeptics blogs and discovered to my surprise that they were not all written by extreme right-wing nutters, but were very serious and impressive in their analysis.

At first, I was to be quite honest too scared to speak openly about this. I was well used to controversy and had been embroiled in numerous heated debates this and other blogs, on a variety of topics from dowsing and homeopathy to organic food and genetic engineering. This last topic had lost me a couple of long-standing friends unwilling themselves to challenge or acknowledge their ideological stance on the subject.

Climate change felt like it was on another level again however. The scientific consensus was seen as too complete, and while I had not had any strong position on most of the other topics previously, I had of course myself been a vociferous proponent on climate change alarmism myself, even once calling Pat Kenny a denialist and calling for him to resign. (Sorry, Pat.)

Climate change felt like the last sacred cow of the environmental movement, and I was not going to jump that shark without careful consideration. There were however a couple of things that had already perhaps paved the way for me to do so: firstly, because of my Peak Oil doomerism I was suspicious of the policy response being advocated: I had had a good look into renewable energy and already understood that there was no easy way to replace fossil fuels with renewables, and that any alternative would mean effectively collapse of industrial society; for a peak oiler, this was may inevitable in any case, but why couldn’t the climate change activists see that? It didn’t make any sense to be calling for international treaties in a world already going down the tubes and reverting to localism.

Secondly, having closely examined the claims of the alternative health industry, the organic industry and the anti-GE lobby through our Skepteco podcasts, another curious contradiction, in an otherwise predominently anti-science milieu, man-made climate change appeared to be the only major activist cause that actually claimed to be supported by the science.

It felt daring but I decided to test my newly discovered arguments on a skeptics blog. I went to the Bad Science Forum and started posting on this discussion under the Avatar Deodar. I wanted to remain anonymous, I was not yet prepared to come out publicly with my concerns, and fully expected a reasoned and science-based discussion on such a forum.

I was bitterly disappointed. The very first response I got said

Lets face it, you don’t care about the science, rather about the percieved damage to your politics.

This seemed hilarious, but also disconcerting, and unfortunately I began to dig a hole for myself by protesting that

I have been an environmental campaigner and back-to-the-lander for over 20 years; I live an extremely low-impact semi-self-sufficient off-grid lifestyle, and have no political affiliations.

The “environmental campaigner” bit was a slight exaggeration: I had certainly campaigned for traditional things like anti-nuclear when at college, and CND before that even; and the past few years campaigned for climate change and peak oil awareness and action, but was not a serious “activist” in the conventional sense of the word beyond that. However, this was immediately seized upon as being a lie and I was compared to Lomborg who apparently was lying when he claimed he had been a Greenpeace supporter. So the climate change issues rather got lost as the debate degenerated into the other regular posters trying to “out” me when I had clearly stated that I wished to remain anonymous; I was accused of lying therefore without evidence- an attack which i ironically labelled “clairvoyance” in a nod towards the supposed skeptical nature of the forum.

Moral: don’t go onto unknown forums under an Avatar on highly controversial topics unless you know what you are getting yourself into. However, I learned a much more serious lesson about how the environmental movement behaves, and I was genuinely shocked at the response and ad hominem attacks: I had expected a lot better from skeptics who up until then I had admired.

It was only when I read Nonsense on Stilts, a supposedly skeptics book, and realized Piggliucci was just not being very skeptical about the rather obvious scientific flaws in AIT that I felt emboldened enough to write about climate change here, and ready enough for the inevitable flack that I would be receiving when I posted on Think or Swim.

What now seems to be happening in response to Lynas is that the IPCC defenders are circling the wagons and the backlash is beginning. I know something of what he will be going through.

The wikipedia article does a good job of relating all the topics covered in the three episodes, you might want to read that first if you havn’t seen the programs as I’m going to jump around a bit and pick out just some of the ideas that interested me.

The main theme of the series is that from the mid-20thCentury, new ideas emerging from ecology somehow hooked up with evolutionary theory, genetics and computer science to produce the idea that humans and human society, along with the rest of nature, can be understood as machines acting in a system, which are therefore controllable and predictable. Curtis sees this as a dangerous idea, that robs us of our human agency and makes us doubt the existence of free will, especially, the will to change things.

These themes converge dramatically in the Rwanda and Congo: -the Rwandan genocide is portrayed as the result of misguided liberal guilt of the departing Belgian colonialists, who had created artificial tribal conflict in colonial days by propagating the myth of Tutsi superiority; then encouraged the new Hutu government to rise up against the Tutsi minority who had oppressed them during colonial days. This was then exacerbated by misguided involvement of western aid agencies who set up camps which became breeding grounds for more violence; -meanwhile Dian Fossey studied Gorillas in Rwanda, ultimately coming to abuse the local people in efforts to protect the gorillas from poaching; -all this against a backdrop of the rise of computer technology which was fueled by the mining of Coltan in the Congo, spawning a war that has cost 4 million lives in the last 8 years- the computers being the machines which, according to some, then became the way out of economic boom and bust, the way to a stable society which could run itself- like a machine.

The series starts with a look at the influence of Ayn Rand’s influence on the modern world; I have to admit that I had no idea that her objectivist philosophy had had such influence on Alan Greenspan, who was one of here disciples.

While governments had been unable to provide stability in the markets, the advent of computers gave rise to the idea that human society itself could be modeled as a self-regulating system: computers became seen as a medium for liberation and equality. This idea emerged from Silicon valley in the 1970s at the dawn of the computer age. Environmentalist Stewart brand was one of the pioneers, providing one of the links between systems theory and ecology.

But prominent ecologists were already taking on the idea of nature as a self-organising machine. Jay Forrester was an early pioneer of cybernetics, the view that brains, cities and whole societies operated as networks of nodal connections, and that computers would be able to uncover their operating system.

The Odum brothers, Howard and Eugene, developed electronic models of ecosystems based on field data, which they claimed showed how nature self-organised towards balance: the idea of natural balance and the web-of-life. There models became accepted as fact within ecological science.

Although permaculture is not mentioned in the series, Howard Odum was a major influence on permaculture co-founder David Holmgren who dedicated his book “Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability” (2002) to him. He also references cybernetics as another strand of systems thinking, but goes onto say

the influence of systems thinking in my development of permaculture and its design principles has not come through extensive study of the literature, but more through an osmotic absorption of ideas in the “cultural ether” which strike a chord with my own experience in permaculture design. Further, I believe many of the insights of systems thinking that are difficult to grasp as abstractions are truths that are embodied in the stories and myths of indigenous cultures.

His reference to indigenous cultures provides an interesting cross-over of the role of systems thinking in actual machines- computers- to human society and nature- that there is an “intuitive” aspect to this understanding as well as an empirical one.

I had also come across systems theory in the work of Joanna Macey and Deep Ecology, and had a vague feeling then that it was somehow at odds with the “holistic” “intuitive” side of things that Deep Ecology was supposed to be all about. Computers and machines seemed the exact opposite of emotional encounter groups that were the hallmark of Deep Ecology sessions. I see now that the cybernetics part was giving the movement scientific credibility- it was science, with models and graphs and studies to back it up, but of a “holistic” kind. There were also lots of references and general interest within Deep Ecology with New Science, Capra and the Tao of Physics, Buddhism and physics and David Bohm, and so on. (From there you are only a short step away from Deepak Chopra and The Secret.)

So these ideas were taken on by greens and the counter-culture without realizing that they came from something as dry and soulless and mechanistic as computer science- the very antithesis of what the movement imagined itself to be about. “Getting in touch with nature” was supposed to be about the emotions, and spiritual forces, not lines of computer code, a great irony in this whole story which I find quite fascinating.

The idea of human systems was also influential in the next part of Curtis’ narrative, the hippy commune, and one of the greatest migrations out of the cities in America took place during the 1970s as mainly young people flocked to the land to live in small utopian communes which were non-hierarchical -they were supposed to operate like self-regulating systems. Some communes did prosper and thrive and are still around today- like The Farm in Tennesee, although Curtis mentions only that most of them failed after a few months or at most a couple of years. Why? (I lived in two communes for short periods of time; they were both pretty dysfunctional and as was often the case had rapid turnovers of residents. A major course of conflict was the dish-washing rota.)

Perhaps the problem was with the underlying theory of stable, self-regulating eco-systems in the natural world which, as Curtis explains in the documentary, has not stood the test of time. The models that Odum had made were over-simplified; ecology has moved on from the notion of “natural balance” and most ecologists now agree that ecology is about constant dynamic change and adaptation. There may not even be such a thing as a distinct ecosytem anyway, since boundaries are always permeable. (The idea of the whole earth as a system was developed into the Gaia hypothesis by Lovelock, something Curtis only mentions in passing.)

There is no such thing as natural balance, and computer models cannot replicate natural systems very well at all. This is a theme explored by Aynsley Kellow in his book which I reviewed here.

So what does this mean for permaculture? I don’t know, but the idea of a design system based on natural systems does seem to me these days to be metaphorical at best: actually we don’t want our systems to be too much like nature for all sorts of obvious reasons. There are lots of good ideas in permaculture for design and the idea of self-regulation in a designed system makes perfect sense- collecting rainwater, managing perennial landscapes for food- this need not have anything to do with a natural system though. Still, it is interesting that the underlying theory may be based on a completely flawed view of nature.

This idea however went on to inform public policy quite profoundly long after the science had moved on. In 1972 the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, based on Forrester’s cybernetics. The report used computer models to forecast the point of overshoot when the population and consumption of people would outweigh the planet’s carrying capacity. This has become a seminal text, one of the foundations of environmentalism, and is still widely referenced today, eg in the preface of “Fleeing Vesuvius”.

Critics claim models are only as good as the data and assumptions that go into them, and that the modelers underestimated the ability of humans to innovate and adapt. Interestingly, Curtis does not mention climate change, although this would be an obvious extension to the narrative: a science relying heavily on models, but with sometimes poor data, trying to integrate human, ecological and climate systems in one huge model, a process that is itself having enormous influence on policy. It is almost as if we believe that, given enough data and computer power, we can predict the future.

Curtis takes these ideas through the east European revolutions in the early 2000s, that used the same idea of non-hierarchical organisation, but that went the same way as the communes: they failed to account for power and inequality already present and soon reverted back into corruption.

Richard Dawkins gets a mention as taking the theory further with the idea of the Selfish Gene (originally invented by William Hamilton): human behavior can be understood as being driven primarily by the impulse of the gene to survive. This doesnt make people selfish necessarily, but it does provide an explanation for things like the Rwandan genocide: from the gene’s point of view, it makes sense to kill our cousins, or at least those not too closely related but not too distantly related either.

Which raises a couple of interesting questions, because if genes mean that we really are like computers and the code is in our genetics, where then does lie free will? This is really the whole point of Curtis’ film, to question the validity of a theory that says, everything can work as an orderly whole, we are just cogs in the machine, so how can we really work to change things? Where can political action come from? Interesting questions, but I am not sure that free will’s existence or otherwise is a testable hypothesis.

Curtis is concerned that seeing ourselves as just part of a system with “natural balance” could be seen as a way of justifying discrimination and apartheid, as had been done by Field Marshall Smuts and his theory of “holism”- everything had a natural place, presided over by white men. In this sense then these ideas of basing human systems on natural systems and striving for some kind of pre-existing balance is far from liberating or progressive, but could lead to oppression and fascism.

So a lot of interesting ideas, covering science, environmentalism and policy. I’m sure I’ll return to explore more them more in the future.

Dear Rob

Thanks for your comments and continual engagement with z5 which I know you have been following since it began 5 years ago.

You point out that there has been a dramatic change of direction in my views over the past couple of years, taking the blog far away from its original purpose of promoting peak-oil doom and powerdown/transition strategies.

This is true and now seems as good a time as any to address this in the context of some of the issues that you raise.

However, you seem to forget that change of direction means that I am fully conversant with the views you defend, having been at least as eloquent and vociferous advocate of them as you good self for many years; it is therefore curious that you think you can tell me I don’t know what is really going on in the environmental movement or within Transition: I am in fact as you well know intimately familiar with these positions.

I’m not going to try to give fully referenced responses to every point you bring up- some I have already addressed in other recent blog posts and will continue to do so. Each issue deserves many posts and books and ongoing discussion so I am not in any way suggesting this is the last word on any of it.

You say:

If you believe that “climate change provides the perfect cover for dismantling modern industrial society which is considered to be inherently “unnatural” and just bad and wrong” then it follows that any policy that addresses climate change is seen as a step too far.

You seem extraordinarily unaware of what the actual issues are Rob- I am beginning to suspect you haven’t been paying nearly as much attention to z5 over the past couple of years as you claim

I would point you towards the work of Bjorn Lomborg on this one. He will introduce you to the concepts of “cost-benefit” analysis, which is the only way to address any environmental issue (compare with your own preference for spurious notions such as “the precautionary principle”- see below). In a nutshell, Lomborg argues that the costs of Kyoto- and worse, the costs of further treaties which are supposed to be an extension of Kyoto- will do more harm than good, while failing to address the climate issue in any case. You crunch the numbers and follow the arguments for yourself- he may have got some of them wrong, but if you think after all these years of promoting Transition as a response to PO and Climate Change that opposing decarbonisation means opposing any attempt to address climate change, you are not even involved with the issue.

Hundreds of activists burning precious fuel flying round the world to endless conferences with only one approach of decarbonisation is clearly going nowhere, as Lomborg explains pretty clearly I think in “Cool It!”. Trying to lay their failure all at the feet of the fossil fuel industry is naive- apart from obvious own-goals such as the 10:10 exploding school children video, the main problem is the dogmatic call for decarbinisation targets. It’s the wrong strategy, it should get itself buried.

Also, it cannot have escaped your notice that many activists are all-to-ready to label anyone who even dares question their views as a “denialist”- not because of the “settled science” but because of their religious/ideological belief that modern lifestyles are wrong. In this case, John Gibbons is fond of quoting Clive Hamilton who is clearly a religious Gaian; Simon Fairlie is another example of religious advocacy – in fact they seem to be everywhere! And yet you defensively claim they are a tiny minority of extremists, with no influence on your good self.

Meanwhile, carbon trading seems to have created a vast opportunity for corruption and selling indulgencies. Enron were big into carbon trading as a central part of their business model,(see here and here) and oil companies like BP are also on the Green bandwagon. Sucking up any subsidies going but achieving nothing.

(It would be remiss of us here to ignore other environmentalists’ boondoggles such as biofuels, possible only a a result of subsidies introduced to placate climate-change activists; why don’t environmentalists make more of a noise about that?)

Indeed from where I stand I see very little happening at a policy level. The commitment is to economic growth first and the low carbon economy third… And indeed, rather than dismantling anything, the emerging low carbon economy in terms of energy is being driven largely by the private sector because it makes economic sense, with governments trying to catch up.

Yes I agree that the private sector is probably more effective at addressing these issues than government- so why not just let them get on with it? If renewables really can take up the slack, then will not market forces- driven by the profit motive- bring them to the fore? It is obvious that Big Oil and Big Coal will be just as happy to make money from wind and solar if that is where the money is- so what do we need treaties for? What do we need activists for? But in the meantime there are good reasons to think that we will be mainly running on fossil energy for a long time yet, and to campaign for forced reductions because of some nebulous idea of climate change sometime in the future seems perverse. Lomborgs’ recommendation is to funnel more resources into new promising technologies now, so that we can wean ourselves off fossil fuels from a position of strength, without destroying the economy and plunging millions into fuel poverty unnecessarily.

Of course, this is not going to work if we have already decided that modern society is doomed and argue, as I did when I started this blog, that there is no possibility of technological breakthroughs and that any such developments would be undesirable anyway because they might increase the human footprint, support a yet bigger population, postpone the inevitable collapse until later. So opposition to shale gas would seem to come under this category- it provides a perfect example of a new technology that might help overcome oil depletion. Your own post on the Gasland film sees it only as a negative- but to check whether your views are ideological or not, ask yourself whether, IF the safety and environmental concerns were addressed and IF it could be shown to be cost-effective without subsidies relative to alternatives, would you then embrace it- bearing in mind that modern society and growth may then be able to continue apace? For the other side of this debate, have a look at Matt Ridley’s report . (Of course I am aware there are bias on both sides- does that mean the neutral position is to condemn out of hand something with such potential?)

The point is, peak-oilers have always maintained that technology cannot help us; now when a promising technology comes along they oppose it for environmental reasons- so which is it?

You say :

“This idea that environmentalists want to dismantle industrial society is outdated and ridiculous I think… some may do…. (Derrick Jensen and others) but not many. I certainly don’t.”

but a quick look at your website and book suggests otherwise:

‘As one man said during a group discussion at the end of a screening of The End of Suburbia that I organised in Clonakilty, “we’ve just seen that the end of the Oil Age will bring about the collapse of industrial society … bring it on!”.’

“We are surrounded by what poet Gary Snyder, in his classic poem For the Children called “The rising hills, the slopes, of statistics” and by individuals telling us that this means the end, that we have gone too far, that it is inevitable that life as we know it will collapse catastrophically and very soon.“

Also this idea that Energy Descent could be more like a party than a protest march, that we will be happier after oil is delusional: coming off oil before there is a suitable replacement will just mean poverty for millions.

And what about your and most of the environmental movement’s attitude towards GE and nuclear? You have told us quite explicitly that your opposition is ideological:

“I don’t have scientific papers to back that up, it is an instinctive revulsion at the very concept.”

I would call on anti-GE activists like yourself and no doubt many other Transition supporters to take responsibility for the harm you may be doing in campaigning against technologies that could really help millions of people.

This view is generally shared by Big Green- Greenpeace, FoE, Soil Association as well as many in permaculture. And many activists do indeed think we would be better off going back to pre-industrial lifestyles, not realising that organics cannot feed the world (or come close) and that no-one wants to be a peasant farmer except for a holiday. How much of this is meant, not for them but for other people- in other words, keeping the poor poor. Let’s make sure that the poor of the world do not follow “western models of development”- yes there are technologies that could help with this- mobile phones allowing developing countries to leap-frog fixed lines with cheaper cell-phones; but if they don’t get access to improved technology in farming they will stay poor. And what about access to the kind of mobility in terms of car and air travel that we have? For us it is a choice; for the poor, international treaties might deny them access to it completely.

Re one-world government: many enviros do of course want this. George Monbiot wrote a book about it some 10 years ago “The Age of Consent”- I was at the book launch in Dublin. I asked a mutual friend of ours who is a prominent climate change/PO activist recently about this, he replied of course we need a one-world government, that’s obvious isnt it? EU leaders like Sarkoczy have also expressed this publicly, so fears about this are not completely crazy Im afraid. If you still support the IPCC and Kyoto-type treaties, then you are promoting moves towards one-world governance whether you have the wit to realise it or not- how else can international agreements on controlling something as ubiquitous as people’ energy use be instigated?

Perhaps you also agree with the spurious conspiracy theorist argument that the entire ‘Green Agenda’ is actually to massively reduce the human population? (check out http://tinyurl.com/69bd6sl for one of the worst-written articles you will see…) which is equally as unrooted in reality.

Your tendency to invoke extreme conspiracy-types does not help your argument. It is an inconvenient truth that the environmental movement has its origins in the eugenics movement; the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth”, Paul Ehrlich’s doom-mongering since the early 1970s about over-population, and now the Peak Oil movements’ cries of imminent collapse form the environmentalists legacy which as far as I can see Transition is thoroughly embedded in.

I think there are good reasons to be concerned about the warped ideologies of much of the mainstream Green movement. The Green Agenda does indeed look like a conspiracy theory, but both Al Gore and former under-secretary general of the United Nations Maurice Strong are both Gaia -worshipers who invoke religious sentiments of the planet over the well-being of humans.

In addition, many in the environmental movement, including yourself and the Transition movement are clearly closely aligned with pseudo-science and dangerous mystical beliefs and groups including all manner of quack medicine and Anthroposophy, which you have shown yourself only to willing to defend or play down. The Soil Association which you are closely aligned with promotes both homeopathy for animals and biodynamics. Another of your allies is Prince Charles, surely someone on the far end of whacko-de-lah-lah who nevertheless enjoys considerable influence and power, having flown around the world in a private jet to promote carbon reductions in other people’s lifestyles. The Organics movement as a whole is guilty of taking an ideological stance against genetic engineering, as well as promoting unscientific studies concerning the supposed health benefits of organic food, and exaggerating its capacity to replace so-called “chemical farming”.

In a class I gave in Kinsale last year looking at how to feed a growing population, I was told by some of the students that they would rather let people starve than permit GE crops to be grown, if that was the choice. Would you endorse such a view Rob? If not I would welcome a strong statement to that effect. I don’t think these views are uncommon; more, that most people havn’t though through what their beliefs actually would result in. I personally know at least two people who have seriously told me that the best thing to do would be to wipe out a couple of billion people. These are not right-wing nutters- on the contrary, they are otherwise perfectly normal family people who would support many things you are doing.

Rob, follow the logic of your own beliefs: if you are against new technologies like GE and shale gas on principle (or Thorium reactors or whatever); if you are opposed to industrial agriculture even though this is what is feeding the world; if you think governments and international treaties are the way to control people’s use of fossil fuels; if you still think civilisation is about to “collapse catastrophically and soon”- what does this mean for the billions of people yet to benefit from the modern advances that you or I can take for granted? and can you really still claim that you are not ideologically in opposition to modern industrial society, imbued as it is with the spirit of Ahriman?

There is only one rational conclusion: we continue doing the best thing we know, innovation, trade and adaptation; or we ban new technologies and consign ourselves- or, more likely, others- to poverty. It is only technology, and yes the economic growth that this allows, that can help us through what will indeed be a hugely challenging energy transition.

All I am doing is following a well-worn path already marked out by many moderate and sensible prominent greens like Brand, Lynas, Moore, even Schellenberger and Nordhaus. Even Monbiot has revised his views on nuclear and recently wrote that the “mineral crunch” (including peak oil) has failed to materialize because of our ability to substitute and innovate. Though you have far more invested in the views you hold than I have, having spawned an international movement, you will to the same degree gain kudos and respect by acknowledging past mistakes and taking on a more rational and pragmatic view yourself. Compared to these brave pioneers mentioned above the Transition Movement looks increasingly Luddite and stuck in the retro-romantic past.

Finally, to address your comments about my blogs bye-line of “On the edge between nature and culture”- I actually think it is more relevant than ever. My blog still focuses on environmental issues, gardening and permaculture, and is still concerned primarily with how human culture fits in with the natural world and how we relate to it. And it is still on the edge in terms of exploring new ideas and being open to change.

with best regards

Graham www.zone5.org

The Hockey Stick Illusion- Climategate and the Corruption of Science by A.W.Montford

pbck; 482pp

Stacey International 2010

In this thorough and well documented book Andrew Montford of the Bishop Hill blog tells the extraordinary story of one of the icons of the global warming argument, the “Hockey stick” graph, originally produced by Michael Mann in an article for Nature magazine in 1998, known commonly as MBH98 after the authors’ initials- Mann, Bradley and Hughes.

Although not necessarily crucial in proving ACC one way or the other, as Montford makes clear later in his book, the graph- showing that global average temperatures have spiked upwards in the late 20th century, presumably in response to rising levels of CO2 caused by burning fossil fuels, claimed a central place in the Third Assessment Report (TAR) of the IPCC. Montford writes:

“Whenever the Hockey Stick appeared, it was bigger, bolder and more colourful than any other temperature series presented. Mann must have been thrilled with the report. The final icing on the cake was when the IPCC chairman, Sir John Houghton, announcing the publication of the report, sat in front of an enormous blow-up of the Hockey Stick itself. This was Mann’s moment of triumph: 1998 was officially the warmest year of the millenium, a stunning recognition of his work.”

A number of issues were already raising eyebrows however. Prior to the Hockey Stick ,Mann had been an unknown researcher who had only just completed his PhD.: the IPCC, it should be noted, claims to represent the very best of climate science, assembling the most experienced and qualified scientists to pronounce upon the state of human knowledge of the climate. But by the time the TAR was published in 2001, Mann was already Lead Author of the paleoclimate chapter, presenting a potential conflict of interests, as he would be reviewing his own work- work which, says Montford, became so prominent in the report, “the whole IPCC report started to look like a locker room, it was so full of hockey sticks.”

The other most curious aspect to Mann’s paper was that it appeared to be a substantial revision of what was previously believed to be the case, that the world had in fact been warmer 1000 years ago during what is known as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) as had been in fact stated in the IPCC First Assessment report in 1990.

Clearly, the rhetorical position that recent warming is “unprecedented” and therefore likely caused by rising anthropogenic CO2 emissions, would be seriously compromised if in fact the world had been warmer prior to the industrial age.

Curiouser and curiouser, studies that had begun to emphasize 20th century warming and limit any Medieval warming to a few regions of the northern hemisphere began to take more prominence, including one by Oklahoma geoscientist David Deming who had published a paper in Science in 1995 showing moderate warming in the 20th Century based on a study of boreholes in North America. Montford writes that Deming “also attracted the notice of people in the global warming industry, who thought they saw in Deming a valuable recruit to their cause” – and in a later article Deming claims that

They thought that I was on of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes… A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm period!”

(According to Montford this email is reputed to have come from Johnathan Overpeck who says he has no recollection of sending the email, in the Climategate emails discussed below; Montford concludes however that “if future developments turn out to show that Overpeck did not make the statement attributed to him, it seems clear that he had at least indicated to his Hockey team colleagues that he would be happy to ‘contain’ evidence of past warming”.)

Other studies, such as Huang’s borehole study (1997) that showed a pronounced MWP could not get published. (A recent example of similar claims of such “gate-keeping” can be found discussed here.) The Second IPCC report began to play down the extent of the MWP;

Montford writes

It was simple for critics to point out that any conclusions drawn from this data would have to be highly speculative at best. Climate science wanted big funding and big political action and that was going to require definitive evidence. In order to strengthen the argument for the current warming being unprecedented, there was going to have to be a major study, presenting unimpeachable evidence that the Medieval Warm Period was a chimera. Enter the hockey Stick.

From this start, Montford goes onto describe the actual Hockey Stick paper and its critics and defenders in great detail over the rest of the book. Much of the story – and it does read like a detective story , keeping the reader turning the pages through sometimes challenging technical aspects of statistical analysis- focuses on Steve McIntyre of ClimateAudit, the retired mining engineer and statistician who took it upon himself to attempt a comprehensive audit of Mann’s paper.

In this account, we find McIntyre encounters a web of obstructions: in order to validate whether Manns conclusions are correct or not, he needs the original data and the computer code that was used to analyze the large body of data. At one point Phil Jones responds to a request by saying “We have 25 or so years in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try to find something wrong with it?”

It seems that actually determining the average global temperature in the past, prior to instrumental records, is no easy thing and relies on multiple “proxies” such as boreholes and tree ring data- “dendrochronology” and there is much discussion of the use or over-dependence in Mann’s study on tree ring data from just a few ancient trees, the Bristlecone pines and Foxtails (a closely related species) from the SW USA. McIntyre found that this incomplete and dubious series is one of the few proxies that shows a hockey-stick, but the type of statistical analysis used by Mann gives it an unjustifiable influence on the results.

The Bristlecone pines did not replicate modern temperature records, which brings into question if they should be used at all for reconstructing the temperature of the past; but a serious issue with the way the Hockey stick was presented was that the recent uptick- the blade of the Hockey Stick (Montford notes the “delicious irony” of this being an ice-hockey stick) was in fact using a completely different data set, of the thermometer record. While this is acknowledged in the small print as it were, the effect is to make the recent warming look much more dramatic than it should be (if indeed it is there at all) and anyone who doesnt examine the graph closely- the media and the general public, also perhaps policy makers- could be excused for not noticing.

Moreover, it may be that the methods used at analyzing the data would have turned up a hockey stick just from random data. According to McIntyre, Mann’s methods seemed unusual and contorted, but if the reader has difficulty fully understanding the statistics, the sub-plot is one of obscurification and obstruction at every turn as McIntyre repeatedly requests the data and code from both Mann, from the editors of journals, and from the IPCC even after McIntyre is himself published on the issue and had become an IPCC reviewer.

Without Mann’s help, it was simply impossible to replicate his results and thereby check if they are correct, but McIntyre’s skill and doggedness- as well as support from the legions of his blog followers, many of them highly qualified scientists and statisticians themselves, – exposed enough weaknesses and flaws in the study to bring it into serious question in any case.

One amusing episode is described where McIntyre wonders why the proxies from the Bristlecones has not been updated since 1980, and when told that this is because of their remoteness and the difficulties of conducting the field work, McIntyre sets out himself to collect the tree rings, proving that it is possible to have a Starbucks latte, collect tree rings and return the same evening.

The issue reached a head politically in 2005 with the establishment of an expert review panel by the national Academy of Sciences and congressional hearings in 2006 in Washington. This itself became something of a political battle between two congressmen, Boehlert who was more sympathetic to the Hockey team and Bartlett who was supporting the auditors McIntyre and his colleague Ross McKitrick. One thing that emerged from these hearings was just how circumspect other scientists were in assessing the proxy data, even though they were otherwise sympathetic to the ACC hypothesis.

“Geochemist Daniel Schrag said that it was very difficult to make an estimate of average temperature from instrumental data, let alone proxies, and that policy makers were demanding more than the scientific community could actually provide in practice.”

It was also revealed that the panel had themselves made no real attempt at replication of the Hockey Stick themselves; one of the panelists, Gerry North, subsequently admitted that they had just sat around and “just kind of winged it to see…”.

Montford also gives a chapter on discussing the various attempts to replicate the Hockey Stick. Other researchers had presented several other papers that claimed to replicate Mann’s original findings, but on close examination McIntyre finds that they generally used much of the same flawed data- including the Bristlecone pines. At every turn McIntyre’s investigations are obstructed by delays, sometimes for years, sometimes never, in receiving the data and codes needed to replicate the studies, and he goes to great and painstaking efforts to uncover the methods used himself.

Moreover, it is apparent that paleoclimatology is a very small and incestuous community, and most if not all these other studies are from members of the Hockey team- a tight-knit group centered around Michael Mann.

Montford sums up in his chapter towards the end of the book, “The Meaning of the Hockey stick” which has a very interesting and significant discussion on peer-review, which it seems often consists of a cursory looking over of a paper, with little if any checking of either the data or statistical methods used:

With a full explanation of methodology now often not possible from the text of a paper, replication can usually only be performed if the data and code are available. This is a major change from a hundred years ago, but in the 21st century it should be a trivial problem to address. In some specialisms it is just that. We have seen however how almost every attempt to obtain data from climatologists is met by a wall of evasion and obfuscation, with journals and funding bodies either unable or unwilling to assist. This is, of course, unethical and unacceptable, particularly for publicly funded scientists. The public has paid for nearly all this data and has the right to see it distributed and reused.

Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, has been one of the foremost critics of peer-review, arguing “it is useless at exposing fraud, it is slow, expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, something of a lottery, prone to bias and easily abused.”

Montford concludes therefore that “if governments are truly to have assurance that climate science is a sound basis for decision-making, they will have to set up a formal process for replicating key papers, one in which the oversight role is performed by scientists who are genuinely independent and have no financial interest in the outcome.”

The book ends with with a chapter on Climategate, which broke as the book was going to press in November 2009 when persons unknown hacked into the servers at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Montford gives a brief tour of some of the more surprising comments made by members of the Hockey team in often confidential emails that mainly seem to indicate that there were indeed behind-the-scenes attempts to fend off the skeptics by the Hockey team, who discuss such things as how they should deal with Freedom of Information requests: there might not be any one statement that indicates some kind of coordinated conspiracy, but there is certainly a lack of openness and transparency one would expect for scientists involved in research that will play such a crucial role in energy policies in the coming decades.

Particularly eye-brow raising is comments like this from Michael Mann:

“Let’s our supporters in higher places use our scientific response to push the broader case against [McIntyre and McKitrick].”- worryingly indicative of political interference in the scientific process.

(There are many reasons to see the IPCC as primarily a political advocacy organisation, rather than a purely scientific one, not least in that it publishes its Summary for Policy Makers- the only part that most people get to read any of- months before the actual report containing the data and analysis the Summary is based on- meaning it is not possible to scrutinize and challenge the conclusions until long after the media reports have entered the public consciousness.)

How to assess the validity or otherwise of Montford’s book? Without a much deeper understanding of the scientific and statistical issues it is hard for the lay person to pass judgement; it might be worth a look at what the Hockey Team’s response to the book was.

Real Climate, commonly percieved by skeptics to be the mouthpiece of the Hockey Team, posted this review by Tamino in July 2010. One non-technical point he makes does rather seem to be bizarre, a red herring, mistaken or a smokescreen.

Tamino argues that Montford sees conspiracy everywhere he looks, and he quote-mined the suspicious phrase “…and better for our purposes…” from an email from Michael Hughes to Mann; but Montford acknowledged that there could be a straightforward explanation, but asks, why not just say “more reliable” if that is what he meant- a question Tamino quotes himself but fails to answer.

Further commentary on Tamino’s review can be read here.

All in all the RealClimate response just isnt very convincing given the seriousness of the issues and the coherence of Montford’s book, which it must be said contains none of the bluster that we get from Mann and Tamino.

Climate change – or rather the proposed policies we are told that must be implemented to counter its worst effects- is one of the defining issues of our age. Policy decisions based on science, involving drastic cuts in carbon emissions regardless of whether this is technologically justified or not, and carbon taxes which will mean higher fuel costs, will effect everyone for decades to come and we all deserve as open and honest an assessment of all the issues.

Montford’s book is essential reading for anyone who interested in a fairer and more objective analysis of this issue, and who can see through the hubris of claiming consensus in such a new scientific discipline and such a politically charged area.

Aynsley Kellow

Edgar Elgar 2007

Hdbck 218pp

This book by Aynsley Kellow, Professor and Head of the School of Government at the University of Tasmania, Australia, is a provocative and in depth look at the degree to which the scientific underpinnings of environmental policy may be at times, and perhaps even chronically, be subject to a sort of “virtual corruption” in which results are biased consciously or unconsciously to fit what the researchers may perceive to be a virtuous cause of environmental protection; and how increasingly this is facilitated by the movement of actual scientific research away from direct observation and field studies towards a ‘virtual science’ of computer modelling.

Kellow asserts that “a purely ‘scientific’ basis for public policy may be a chimera: there is rarely a linear relationship between science and public policy, with scientific understanding leading to only one policy option.”

Kellow begins with the example of the “khting vor“, a species of horned cow in Vietnam which was on the 2003 Red List of endangered species put out by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) even though there was every indication that such an animal had never existed. It appeared to be a mythical beast of which numerous museum specimens were in fact fakes. “Much could be written about the process whereby the IUCN consensus (or other international consensus documents on science) was produced, but suffice to say that nobody really had a strong reason to oppose its inclusion, and plenty had some reason to list it. For any skeptics, the invocation of the precautionary principle has been enough to repel dissent. After all, it might have existed…”

In the next chapter Kellow examines the political ecology of conservation biology with reference of one of the bastions of environmental ideology, the question of biodiversity. This is one of the key indicators of human impact on the natural world: Greenpeace for example cites species loss at being anything from 50,000 to 100,000 species each year. However, as Kellow points out, few of these are actual known species whose extinction has been documented and confirmed. The IUCN-World Conservation Union, Kellow cites, claim that only ‘more than 800′ plant and animal extinctions since 1500 have been confirmed; the rest appear to be computer generated extrapolations. To put this in context, no one knows how many species there are anyway, with about 1.7million have been described while estimates of the total range from 5 to 100 million. Kellow cites examples of species that were believed to have been extinct that have then reappeared; and while loss of biodiversity and extinctions are of course concerning, most extinctions cited in the very large figures of Greenpeace for example seem to be “virtual’ extinctions.

(It might also be pointed out that in some cases extinction might be a good thing: in a recent conversation with an out-spoken neo-Malthusian of my acquaintance on this topic I gave smallpox and the AIDS virus as examples, to which the response was ‘Why?’- he seemed comfortable with the argument that since every species has equal right to exist alongside ourselves, we have no right to fight against diseases.)

The ideology behind this comes from the notion of the primacy of biodiversity- more diversity is always good as this contributes to the resilience ofthe ‘balance of nature’ and the strengthening of the fragile ‘web of life’.

Kellow questions these assumptions as well, arguing that “over the past 30 years the idea of adaptation to disturbance” has replaced the concept of the climax community among most ecological scientists” and goes onto say:

It is a point of some interest that in the popular imagination, the stability of the climax community is probably still the dominant ‘myth of nature’, sustained by constant repetition by political ecologists, and like ‘sustained yield’, the progenitor of ‘sustainable development’ (which emerged in a social context of great uncertainty in Germany), no doubt offering the reassurance of stability in uncertain and rapidly changing times. Similarly, ‘climate change’ suggests that the climate doesn’t usually change, which geological science tells us is poppycock.

Kelllow gives other examples of this: if the ecosystem (or the climate) is always changing, what state are we supposed to try to conserve? Whatever decisions we take in ecological management, they will inevitably be governed by our own human values about nature. A classic example of this is the ‘native-exotic’ debate: for example, in the woodlands of Glengariff near here, when they were granted SAC (Special Area od Conservation) status over 10 years ago, all the conifers including some high-grade timber such as Cedar and Douglas Fir were removed (I know as I have a couple of beams from those trees in my roundhouse frame) in order to keep the woodland as ‘native’ as possible: but to a permaculturalist, this conservation ethic seems arbitrary and wasteful. Few exotics are actually invasive (rhododendron being an obvious example) while maintaining areas as museum pieces frozen at a particular moment in time involves in keeping humans from taking a sustainable yield. David Holmgren gave me a more extreme example from New Zealand where Douglas Fir was invading the denuded slopes of the Southern Alps. This was dealt with by spraying herbicides from helicopters to deter this ‘invasive’ species.

(Michael Crichton gives other examples of this from the management of National Parks in America which he considers to have been disastrous causing more harm than good, and cites Alston Chase, Playing God in Yellowstone: the destruction of America’s first National Park. )

“Environmentalists took to the idea of a self-regulating ecosystem like ducks to Walden Pond” says Kellow, “but they failed to appreciate that it was the product of mathematics, part of the very post-Enlightenment rationality they were rejecting as they began to turn ecological science into religion, where knowledge rested on the ‘almost sensuous intuiting of natural harmonies’, as Theodore Rosak put it, and the balance of nature was thus granted sacred status.”

Kellow continues with these themes in the next two chapters on climate science, which he calls “post-normal” or “virtual” because of its reliance on computer models and its politicization. Kellow presents here a detailed examination of climate science, the problems with computer models and the way this is used to promote in his view a political agenda. They represent the most damning critique of climate science- all the more so since it was written before climategate but points some of the blame at many of the same players.

One of the problems with modelling is that the models are only as good as the data that is fed into them; yet they have a tendency to become tautological as the models themselves are then used to assess the quality of the data: this is one of the ways in which there may be a strong tendency for “virtuous corruption” in the field. For example, Kellow argues that not only does the data have to be nursed in order to “correct” for the Urban Heat Island Effect, but Kellow cites another example of erroneous data being fed into the models leading to misleading conclusions about future emissions from developing nations, an error based upon hugely underestimating their relative wealth and therefore over-estimating the likely increases in emissions as they develop.

Kellow takes a look at the infamous hockey-stick graph published in 1998 by Mann et al (later to play centre-stage in climategate) and how a couple of papers over-turned the accepted history of global temperatures by essentially eliminating the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) in order to make recent warming look “unprecedented.”

“What was surprising was not the publication of a couple of papers which challenged the established scientific orthodoxy- that happens all the time- but that these papers were accepted and became the new orthodoxy so quickly and so readily, and it is clear that both the alacrity and readiness and subsequent defence of the new orthodoxy were inextricably related to the political value of the findings.”

One of the most interesting sections is examples given of papers that might have questioned the so-called “consensus” on climate science, but which were rejected by journals or found difficulty in passing peer-review, and also Kellow’s critique of Oreskes 2004 paper claiming in a survey of all 928 scientific papers produced between 1993 and 2003 using the keywords “climate change” that there was essentially no peer-reviewed literature that questioned the “consensus”. Kellow is eviscerating of this paper which he sees as “palpable nonsense, as could quickly be verified by a replication of the search- a test any referee or editor could have subjected the paper to, had they bothered, and had they been at all skeptical of the claim…. ” …a search of the ISI database using ‘climate change’ produced 12000 papers, and Oreskes was forced to admit… that she had used the three keywords ‘global climate change’, which had reduced the return by an order of magnitude. Science published a correction by Oreskes but it refused to publish a letter from Dr. Benny Peiser which showed that her numbers could not be replicated, and another by Dr. Dennis Bray reporting a survey of climate scientists showing that fewer than 1 in 10 considered that climate change was principally caused by human activity.”

The general view expressed by Oreskes is that skeptics are in the pay of Big Oil and therefore there is a professional motive to cast doubt on the consensus. This naive view extends throughout the environmental movement- detractors to any environmental concern are angrily dismissed as industry stooges. While it is easy to see how the oil and coal industry may have a vested interest in casting such doubts, the gas an nuclear industries stand to gain from Kyoto-style treaties, and carbon- trading may be seriously open to corruption from unscrupulous financial corporations, a charge levied at Enron. Just as homeopathy is marketed as an “alternative” to Evil Big Pharma but is actually sold for maximum profit just like real pharmaceuticals, so multi-national environmental NGOs also have agendas, manipulate data to attract more funding, and the same may also be true of activist scientists.

Kellow then goes on in the next chapter to examine the specific case of the attack on Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist.

Swedish Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, Bjorn Lomborg was vilified- and continues to be so- not just for taking issue with proposed responses to climate change, namely the rapid Kyoto-style reduction in emissions, but in his challenge of the deeper tenets of environmentalism, namely that doomsday claims made by environmentalists are often not supported by the evidence and things may not be quite as bad as some would have us believe.

Kellow argues that the rise of virtual science based only on models and not checked in the real world reflect “the prominence among science of those who have been supporting a pessimistic view of environmental degradation since the re-emergence of Malthusianism from the late-1960s, exemplified particularly by Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich and his associates.” Kellow examines a group centered around Ehrlich who vigorously defended there worldview which Lomborg characterized as the “Litany” of environmental doom.

Lomborg tells of how he had begin to examine the claims made by economist Julian Simon in the 1980s, who famously made a bet with Ehrlich that prices of a selection commodities would decline rather than increase, thus giving the lie to the Club of Rome’s 1972 report Limits to Growth. Simon won the bet, and as Lomborg examined his critiques of environmentalist pessimism also began to see how Ehrlich and others were wrong.

What is significant about the response to Lomborg was its irrationality, ad hominem attacks (IPCC chairman Pachauri likened Lomborg to Hitler) and lack of scientific rigour. Importantly however, one of the negative reviewers, Michael Grubb, accepted Lomborg’s view that the Litany was overplayed and in many areas things were in fact getting better:

To any modern professional, it is no news at all that the 1972 Limits to Growth study was mostly wrong or that Paul Ehrlich and Lester Brown have perennially exaggerated the problems of food supply

(It just happens that yesterday’s Guardian carries a story on just that- Lester Brown exaggerating the problems of food supply.).

The problem was that many of the attacks from the likes of Michael Grubb, Jeffrey Harvey and Stuart Pimm, and other in the Union of Concerned Scientists, were themselves subject to Lomborg’s critique of promoting the Litany:

Not only were these critics the principle “litanists” whose reputations Lomborg had called into question, they were a small and tightly-defined group. They all seemed to be connected by an association with one person: Paul Ehrlich, who had famously lost the wager with Julian Simon, the contrarian whose statistics Lomborg had set out to disprove.

Kellow makes the important point that of course there are strong reasons to protect biodiversity and address climate impacts, but that the specific policies promoted themselves fall outside the remit of pure science- they require more than just science to justify them; there is an irony in the exaggerated attack on Lomborg since it rather proved his point that the Litany is exaggerated; and that while in medical science for example there is a strong principle of declaring conflict of interests, “rarely do we find declarations of political conflict of interest in the broad field of what we might broadly call ‘environmental science.’ “

Kellow goes on to give many other examples of the politicization of what he calls “activist scientists” in general environmentalism and climate science. “Many ‘activist’ environmental scientists … seem largely unaware that it is there cultural views (or myths) of nature that largely drive their particular ‘take’ on science; while he also makes the case that there are large amounts of funding and vested interest at stake for environmental groups, who gain from the continual belief that we are facing into environmental catastrophe.

This is an important book which documents thoroughly some of the history of the environmental movement and how climate change became its flagship, based on virtual science and a leaping from data to policy that is presented to the public and policy makers as if neutral, when in fact it is frequently imbued with ideology. There are lots of questions to be asked of both the environmental movement and the process of science itself; ultimately however, Kellow concludes that there may not be outright dishonesty involved:

Virtuous corruption need not presuppose deliberate or even conscious manipulation of data or models, but simply the privileging of certain results through the lack of sufficient skepticism of data and methods that provide answers that are politically useful.

Fleeing Vesuvius Overcoming the risks of economic and environmental collapse

edited by Richard Douthwaite and Gillian Fallon

Feasta 2010 ppbck 417 pp.

The recent economic collapse is not just a financial and banking issue, not just an economic and political issue, not a result only of bad policies and lack of regulation, but actually precipitated by the passing of peak oil, which sent oil prices spiraling above $150/barrel in 2008 and is essentially sounding the death-knoll for industrial society. Not only will we never be able to return to economic growth, but we are now facing a chaotic period of decline and collapse. The peak of energy availability has passed and we are now staring into the abyss of continual economic contraction which will result in a vastly simplified society where human muscle power will progressively replace fossil energy, and we will return to the technologies of the Middle Ages or before.

Such is the fundamental of the oddly titled new book from Feasta the Irish-based think-tank on sustainable economics: Fleeing Vesuvius is not about responding to a natural catastrophe such as Vesuvius, the volcano that destroyed Pompeii in AD79; nor is it about fleeing, for as editor Richard Douthwaite asks rhetorically, “We expect to get any clearer warnings of impending disaster than the people of Pompeii received. There are already financial fires around the economic cone. If we are to survive we need to move out quickly. Now. But which way are we to go? Is there a map? It would be a poor book about an emergency situation which did not provide one. So, for the final chapter, my co-editor and I asked the contributors to suggest actions which readers could take or support at four levels- personal, community, national and global.”

The book is layed out in seven parts: “Energy Availability”; “Innovation in business, money and finance”; “New Ways of using the land”; “Dealing with Climate Change”; “Changing the Way we live”; “Changing the Way we Think”; and “Ideas for Action”;

There are 28 contributors including economist Richard Douthwaite (author of The Growth Illusion and Short Circuit; julian Darley of the Post carbon Institute; Nate Hagens of the Oil Drum; and Reinventing Collapse author Dmitri Orlov; and with an introduction by Eamon Ryan of the Irish Green Party who had been minister for Communication, Energy and Natural Resources in the last government.

While the starting point is the same for each- the financial crisis and its connection to peak oil-, there are several wide differences of opinion expressed by the various contributors: some see a gradual decline which is worth trying to manage through Transition Towns and international treaties on climate change; while arch-doomer Dmitry Orlov for example pokes fun at such ideas, suggesting instead we should be more concerned with getting enough sleep, avoiding drawing attention to ourselves too much less we become a target for marauding gangs, and collecting things that dont lose their value that are easy to store such as bronze nails.

“Is there a reason to think” he asks when considering such community solution, ” that it is possible to achieve this radical simplification in a series of controlled steps? Isn’t that a bit like asking a demolition crew to demolish a building brick by brick instead of what it normally does? Which is, mine it, blow it up, and bulldoze and haul away the debris?”

While there are many worthwhile discussion in the book, I’m going to argue here that the general thesis expressed by all the contributors is based on an outdated and discredited concept of environmentalism rooted more in ideology than rational thought.

The tone is set by our ex-Minister Eamon Ryan in his preface when he invokes the 1972 Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth when discussing the potential for new technologies:

“Some will argue that new natural gas supplies will allow us to get off the hook. It is true that new shale gas supplies have altered the international gas markets. However, as Dennis Meadows and others showed in the 1972 book The Limits to Growth, the challenge this century will be to avoid breaching one of a number of constraints that come with living on a finite planet. “Even if gas is more easily available and even if it has relatively low carbon emissions in comparison with other fossil fuels, the reality is that simply replacing oil with natural gas will see us breach the greenhouse gas limits that the best scientific advice says we have to avoid”. (my emphasis).

To my mind this statement rather well expresses some of the core contradictions and confusion in the environmental movement. Essentially, as regards shale gas or other potential ways of new energy sources, Ryan is arguing they should not be used because we have already past the “limits” of what should be used, with reference to a 40-year old report based on computer models.

Make no mistake: I used to think the same myself. I used to argue that limits had been reached a long time ago and any attempt to extend them further would merely lead to a bigger crash and die-off later. Neo-Malthusians argue the same: dont work to feed the hungry of the world, that will simply lead to them breeding all the more and even more people starving later on. (I personally know individuals who subscribe to this policy.) This vile philosophy fails to understand the essential ways in which humanity differs from other species who are indeed subject to limits of boom-and-bust cycles: language and technology.

Whatever about the “science” of climate change, Ryan fails to explain that the dangers of future climate change need to be balanced against the current benefits of cheap energy now and the future wealth it will foster which, coupled with ongoing technological innovation, will set us in a better position to withstand such future challenges.

There are certainly some interesting chapters. Richard Douthwaite, who has written an earlier book surveying attempts at various models of alternative currencies, and who initiated a L.E.T.S. system that I was briefly involved with in Westport, Co. Mayo, advocates regional Liquidity Exchange Networks to help with the credit crunch. Local councils would open accounts in Quids- the generic name for regional currencies- which could be used for public services, possibly to pay a proportion of tax and some other uses; the supply of currency would be completely transparent and can be automatically increased or decreased according to the needs of the system. It is not clear how well they might work on a regional level however; many local areas in Ireland have so little manufacturing that there might not be enough local economic activity to warrant their introduction. Nevertheless, Feasta is dong important work in researching such initiatives and new currency models of this kind may become essential in the near future as the financial crisis deepens.

None of the authors pick up on the fact that it has been the recession that has proved to be not only the most effective instrument by far in reducing CO2 emissions, but the only effective instrument, while environmental concerns have gone out the window for the same reasons, as evidenced by the annihilation of the Irish Green Party, including the loss of Minister Ryan’s seat, in the elections that followed the publication of this book.

Why on earth would anyone be interested in policies that might increase fuel prices when they are struggling to pay their mortgage or keep their jobs, while at the same time we are being told big international globalised institutions are unlikely to last much longer anyway, so the effort required to develop international climate treaties seems futile. Who would give a damn about small amounts of global average temperature increases that may or may not happen 100 years from now when the same people are telling us the supermarkets might be going to run out of food and we should start stashing cans of beans? These interesting issues are not explored by the contributors.

We are treated however to some rather glaring examples of ideological bias: -Patrick Andrews includes in his table comparing the “old and new mindset” “Giving back to Mother Earth more than we take”- an explicitly religious viewpoint; the idea that we need a new mindset and that Andrews is the one to tell us what it might be is just taken as a given- detractors are suffering from a cognitive dissonance attributable to a human propensity to assume that because everything has been ok so far it will be ok in the future. An alternative view might be that Andrews is the one suffering from cognitive dissonance attributable to the human tendency to spend decades and even lifetimes assuming that the End is Nigh.

-Brian Davey includes in his list of “well-established trends in global food production” – which he recommends “if you really want to be frightened”- the old canard about “terminator seeds”: “Development “terminator” seeds to concentrate all seed sales in the hands of a corporate elite.” Maybe his “peer-reviewed” source for this was The Economics of Happiness. How many times do I have to debunk this? Terminator seeds were never developed or used outside the laboratory, and were originally created only as a safeguard against gene-flow. GE seeds can be saved by farmers in most cases; most farmers however continue to buy their seeds quite happily without needing to invoke 9-11 type conspiracy theories.

-Davey will also raise some eyebrows with his unequivocal statement: “If fossil fuels create climate change they should be banned from sale without a permit. Period.” Which sounds not only quite nutty but a call for the end of debate and even maybe even democracy.

-in a later chapter Davy and Rutledge lament the loss of public trust in science, mentioning Climategate but not even considering the possibility that this might actually represent a good reason for people not to trust activist scientists.

-Anne Ryan in an chapter on “Changing the Way we think” is positioned firmly in the “nature knows best” naturalistic fallacy: “Nature favours cycles because they come to an organic end after a suitable period of growth. They do not go on growing because in nature, that is a cancer.” Maybe someone should explain to Ryan that cancer is nature as well. Cycles don’t come to an end in nature because nature knows better but because other species dont have the ability to innovate their way out of these limits. Give any species- including cancer cells- the ability to overcome the limits of evolution and they will take the chance just as we have done.

This kind of naive blabber about “nature” in the context of this book would really make you wonder whether Feasta is actually a “think tank” at all or merely another branch of the seemingly all-pervasive Church of Gaia.

Maybe it starts with the editor Richard Douthwaite, an excellent writer and economist whose chapter I enjoyed and he makes a lot of very sensible points about the problems with the euro and other aspects of our current economic plight. Douthwaite’s views seem however to be underpinned by a retro-romantic wish to return to the 16th century:

“I argued that the wrong turn was taken in England in the 16th Century as the population began to recover from the balck Death. The increased numbers- a rise from 1.6million to 5.5million in less than 200 years- naturally put pressure on resources and caused communities to have problems living within the limits imposed by their local environments. In 1631, Edmund Howes described how this had forced them to start burning coal…

“That was it. The thin end of the wedge. The slippery slope…” Oh dear. Just as humanity was doing OK and keeping everything nice and simple and civilized without too much technology, someone went and started digging out the smelly black stuff and its been downhill ever since.A few quick centuries later and we have those awful supermarkets stocked with cheap food and 27 types of chocolate rice crispies, Twitter, Lady Gaga and God knows what else. It’s all been a terrible mistake!

Mr. Douthwaite may well prefer to be living in the 16th century, but probably not as one of the vast majority of the population who were landless peasants with pretty much no further prospects from birth to a most likely early death. While he acknowledges that no-one was going to protest then against the shift to coal, he ignores the fact that there is no chance we will voluntarily leave fossil energy until there is a cheaper, better alternative. Thankfully, he at least accepts that individual actions like going off grid are futile and that energy solutions are better done collectively, while Corinna Byrne apparently thinks that “the installation of small wind turbines to power ones home will also help”- no it wont Corinna, dont be daft.

Douthwaite, in common with the other main authors, assume that technology will have little to offer, and hence “collapse is inevitable” as David Korowicz argues. I had the opportunity to ask David how he could be so sure that another energy transition was impossible, siting shale gas; fuel cells and breakthrough solar technology; oil from algae; and thorium reactors as potential candidates for new energy sources. He replied that a)there is no time- peak oil and financial collapse are upon us; and b)none of these (apart from oil from algae) actually replace the convenience of oil as a liquid fuel for transport. In a discussion later he recommended Vaclav Smil’s book Energy Myths and Realities. Apparently Smil does not accept the peak oil hypothesis but empasizes that an energy transition away from fossil fuels will take decades.

Clearly we have enormous challenges, but what the peak oil doomer theorists in this book fail to address is that growth, prosperity and development do not rely only on digging holes in the ground and extracting the goodies until they are all gone and collapse ensues, but also that we are clever monkeys whos defining nature is technology and innovation. This is nothing to do with the quasi-religious New Age beliefs that Davie Philip mentions in his chapter as being off-putting to some in the Transition Towns movement, and which are also clearly expressed in some of the offerings here, of having lost our way, separated from nature, fallen from Eden and having lead to the hubris of thinking we can control nature, but simply that that is what we are as human beings.

I could take the doomer prognosis expressed in this book more seriously if there wasn’t such an apparent rubbing of hands with glee at the prospect of collapse. This is clearest in Orlov’s chapter. Orlov clearly thinks that the enormous successes of the modern world at feeding people are just a huge mistake:

“What piece of technological innovation do we imagine will enable this maize-dependent population to diversify their food sources and learn to feed themselves without the use of fossil inputs?” but ignores the possible but politically incorrect answer of genetic engineering and other new plant breeding techniques which could indeed help lower the resources needed to feed the growing population. He is right of course that there should be more to life than fast food and computer games, but forgets that for the majority of human existence there has been little more to life than a rather brutal struggle for survival.

Korowicz told me he would love to be wrong, and has no wish to lose the benefits of the modern world, but finds it hard to be optimistic. This seems reasonable enough but predicting the future is still really little more than a parlor game. Other contributors seem naive beyond belief in terms of what a low-energy world where we learn to say “enough” will actually be like- not one I think we would ever chose.

While there are valuable ideas on the economy and new ways of organizing businesses and community contained in this book, it unfortunately fails to provide a credible analyses of the predicament we are in, instead providing only a hop-scotch of doomer predictions of the future and new age pap.

I dont know if this is really true even though it might seem it after the Meet the Skeptics documentary also, but here at least from a year ago is a fascinating Radio 4 episode of Analysis asking Are Environmentalists Bad for the Planet?

Featuring Greenpeace chairman John Sauven, Jonathan Porritt, Professor of Climate Change Mike Hulme; the theologian and United Nations adviser on climate change and world religions Martin Palmer; Sociologist Lord Anthony Giddens; John Gummer MP and policy director of the New Economics Foundation Andrew Simms and others, the main theme is that, whatever about the science of climate change, climate activists are using it as a way of imposing their anti-modernist, anti-technology agenda:

PALMER: I think the core of what the environmental movement has done is it has taken sin, guilt and fear from religion and has used those very strongly. The problem is that in good religion – if I can put it that way – that is always combined with a sense of hope, a sense of liberational salvation and a sense of personal responsibility but not the kind of responsibility that makes you feel you are a victim of the weight of your sins and guilt. Bad religion ignores the hope, salvation dimension of it and seeks to create a climate of fear which then means that those in control of creating that climate of fear are in control of those people and become dictators and there is – and I hate to say this – but there is a very strong –it’s very small – but there is a very strong green fascism in much of the environmental world. I’ve heard it said at meetings I’ve been at – that climate change is so important – democracy has to be sacrificed.

This is indeed the view of for example Professor of medicine and IPCC author Dr. David Shearman who apparently argues in his recent book The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy that democracy is incapable of dealing with the global climate change crisis, and therefore needs to be replaced by an authoritarian world government with the power to force people to do what Shearman thinks they ought to do.

And here is Prof. Mike Hulme:

HULME: Some of the deep green movement would buy into this – that actually climate change is the best opportunity that we have got in order to get our political goal of a more egalitarian, localist, less consumer driven society onto the table. And we’ve seen over 40 or 50 years different tactics I suppose from some of these deep greens, eco-socialists if you like, to drive forward this idea and climate change is the latest and is an opportunity.

Increasingly it seems to me judging from the kind of reactions I’m getting, people get so vexed at any hint of skepticism, not because they feel it is contradicting established science, but because it challenges the religious conviction that the modern world of technology and growing populations is just plain wrong and doomed anyway. That’s what they really mean by “denialist”- not just someone who questions cutting CO2 even with no good alternatives to fossil fuels, but anyone who questions the climate of doom.

Well worth listening to the whole episode.