I was invited to be on the Murnaghan programme on Sky News this morning – which I always find a great deal more intelligent than the Andrew Marr alternative on the BBC. I declined because I did not want to get up and get a 7.30am train from Ramsgate on a Sunday morning. I had a meeting until 11.30pm last night planning a conference on human rights in Balochistan [I still tend to say Baluchistan], and I have a newly crowned tooth that seems not to want to settle down. But I am still worried by my own lack of energy, which is uncharacteristic. Is this old age?
I also have some serious work to do on my Burnes book, and next week I shall be staying in London to be in the British Library reading room for every second of its opening hours. So there may be a bit of a posting hiatus. I have in mind a short post on an important subject on which I suspect that 99% of my readership – including the regular dissident commenters – will strongly disagree with me.
This is a peculiarly introspective post, perhaps because my tooth is hurting, but I seem to have this curmudgeonly spirit which wishes to react to the huge popularity of this blog by posting something genuinely held but unpopular; a genuine view but one I don’t normally trumpet. The base thought seems to be “You wouldn’t like me if you really knew me”.
Similarly when I wrote Murder in Samarkand I was being hailed as a hero by quite a lot of people for my refusal to go along with the whole neo-con disaster of illegal wars, extraordinary rendition and severe attacks on civil liberties, sacrificing my fast track diplomatic career as a result. My reaction to putative hero worship was to publish in Murder in Samarkand not just the political facts, but an exposure of my own worst and most unpleasant behaviour in my private life.
I am in a very poor position to judge, but I believe the result rather by accident turned out artistically compelling, if you don’t want to read the book you can get a good idea of that by clicking on David Tennant in the top right of this blog and listening to him playing me in David Hare’s radio adaptation.
Anyway, that’s enough musing. You won’t like my next post, whenever it comes. Promise.
I am not a liar or a denier.
If you want to get funding for research into the “disastrous” effects of increased atmospheric CO2, that is easy.
If you want to get funding for research into the “beneficial” effects of increased atmospheric CO2, like this:-
http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/00-077.htm
You can forget it.
Government controls academia through grants and funding. They get what they pay for. Successful scientists come up with the “right” results.
Peer review? You obviously haven’t read the UEA emails.
Some scientists are as morally bankrupt as some bankers.
Thanks Clark – and agreed with your point about the nature of science earlier.
BTW, have you noticed how often GLC deniers want to reference 1998? 1998. 1998. “In the last fourteen years ” … “in the last 15 years, average temperatures are down!
Yes, that’s because 1998 was a spike in an upward trend. Just that sort of spikes in trends that “sceptics” fulminate about, because they like to talk about long terms (millions of years) of climate change. Yet 1998 is an incredibly popular year by which to measure just very recent trends (preferably starting in 1998). Why doesn’t that give them pause for thought? 1998 crops up so much is because climate change deniers simply don’t understand its significance, and how bad science is being used to dupe them – to make them the useful idiots I lamented earlier.
Zoologist: Sorry mate, you just simply do not understand science. But I’ll agree some scientists are absolutely corrupt and morally bankrupt, no argument there! Every last miserable, worthless SOB scientist/engineer working on weapons development can be put squarely in that category. But it doesn’t mean that they are factually wrong, does it?
We should remember that just because emissions are heating the world up doesn’t mean that Greenwash isn’t happening. But just ask yourselves; if global heating really were happening, do you think that would stop governments and vested interests from trying to make money on it? Of course it wouldn’t. Corruption will ride on any back it can jump on.
Note carefully. Our governments didn’t take global heating seriously until the Stern Review told them that environmental changes would cost them a lot of money.
Dead people and trashed environments? Governments didn’t care.
Expensive? Oh, we’d best start legislating!
Glenn, I think “climate change deniers” is a good term for members of those right wing (not just the far right) groups that lobby against the control of emissions. But it does sound a bit pejorative when applied to people like Chris and ScouseBilly. With all the propaganda in the corporate media, we can hardly blame people for not accepting things when the corporate media happen to be telling the truth.
Chris Jones and ScouseBilly, what would like to be called? I’ll use it, if you can agree on something and it seems reasonable.
Also sprach Glenn:
“It astonishes me that “sceptics” are willing to accept so many products of the scientific method (medical science, aerospace engineering, technology generally, the “Internets” etc. etc.), but are stubbornly opposed to all of it when it comes to climate change.”
It astonished me to see the environmental ‘science’ departments springing up in all the universities during the early 1990s, at a time when the science faculties where closing down real science departments, such as physics.
When Britain had an industry, the science faculties evolved to match the requirements of that engineering economy. But as our economy became bureaucratic, and State centric, it was inevitable that the sciences would change to reflect this.
I see environmental ‘science’ as the spawn of a centralized bureaucracy, and it should never be considered equal to a real ‘evolved’ science, born of economic necessity. The remit of a scientist is to make discovery and explanation of their subject; the remit of the environmental agencies, is to scare the taxes out of the voters.
a storm is coming and it is gonna be messy and brutal.
false flag maybe.
priming of the sheep happening with french cartoons and wacky fake mohammed films.
now iran a threat on us soil.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/sep/19/officials-iranian-quds-force-threat-us-homeland/
SB: My apologies, I only just saw you post of “20 Sep, 2012 – 12:21 am” and replied to others since. Please may I reply to your enumerated points in order:
1. Indeed – consensus has no weight in science. But it does show the weight of scientific opinion, on matters not conclusively proved. The only way to prove this one to you, it would appear, is to show you the charred, lifeless remains of the Earth at some point in the future.
2. By “qualified scientist”, I mean someone capable of publishing a peer reviewed paper directly relevant to the subject. Their qualification could be in theology, as long as their science was absolutely sound.
3. It’s clear who’s left-right position the GCC deniers tend towards. Your mate depicted by your avatar leans pretty much in the direction I indicated, as it happens.
4. No, I am not politicising the science. I am pointing out the politicisation of the “debate” on the subject.
5. The precautionary principle holds that anything potentially dangerous should be considered dangerous, until we are assured otherwise. (That’s not definitive btw, I just said that off the top of my head because it seems obvious.) Given that GCC might just be a tad dangerous, and most sane and rational scientists in that field seem to conclude it to be a real problem, then the precautionary principle does apply.
JiimyGiro: I don’t disagree at all mate.
Glenn – with all due respect, you’ve got this the wrong way round. What you should be asking people is to please provide some real evidence of why the man made global warming and IPCC community (or naturally occurring fluctuating temperature deniers) should be trusted and where is their real empirical evidence to back up their claims of the direct link between man made C02 and mass global warming.
No one is denying climate change – climate change is what has been happening every single day of the week for a very long time indeed, and long may it continue. What is being sold to us is quite different. Once again i go back to the hockey stick graph – one of the most influential graphs in the last 12 years,which was totally changed from its predeccesspr in 1996 and which has gone on to shape environmental and governmental policy internationally and neatly guided us all in to the sustainable development fold, even though it has been utterly discredited…And you ask for real evidence why they should not be trusted?? Come now Mr Bond
For the record i think i’ve put in some juicy links disputing the IPCC process and graphs but i’ll include some more that i think are worthwile to look at.Like ive mentioned i am not a scientist so rely on the best evidence to hand,such as this one by the Science and Public policy Institutue which clearly states that “there is surprisingly little explicit support (in the IPCC’s report) for the key notion, that humans are very likely (90% to 95%) responsible for climate change”
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/peerreview.html
Anthony Watts writes in his site http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/24/the-scandal-deepens-ipcc-ar4-riddled-with-non-peer-reviewed-wwf-papers/ that “IPCC’s rules are such that they are supposed to rely on peer reviewed science only. It appears they’ve violated that rule dozens of times”
Here is also a link to the inafmous petition signed by 31,487 scientists, 9,092 of them with PhD’s.These scientists have prodcued real peer reviewedresearch on their specialised subjects. http://www.petitionproject.org/index.php This site also explains how scewed the IPCC’s peer reviewed system is;
“The United Nations IPCC also publishes a research review in the form of a voluminous, occasionally-updated report on the subject of climate change, which the United Nations asserts is “authored” by approximately 600 scientists. These “authors” are not, however – as is ordinarily the custom in science – permitted power of approval the published review of which they are putative authors. They are permitted to comment on the draft text, but the final text neither conforms to nor includes many of their comments. The final text conforms instead to the United Nations objective of building support for world taxation and rationing of industrially-useful energy”
It appears that the IPCC is political rather than scientific
http://www.medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=657:climate-crisis-the-collapse-in-corporate-media-coverage&catid=24:alerts-2011&Itemid=68
“While making public statements that ‘appear to show their concern for climate change’, these corporations are fighting fiercely to prevent action. This helps explain, Greenpeace notes, ‘why decisive action on the climate is being increasingly ousted from the political agenda’. They add:
In the US alone, approximately $3.5 bn is invested annually in lobbying activities at the federal level. In recent years, Royal Dutch Shell, the US Chamber of Commerce, Edison Electric Institute, PG&E, Southern Company, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and ConocoPhillips all made the top 20 list of lobbyists. The climate campaign organisation 350.org estimates that 94 per cent of US Chamber of Commerce contributions went to climate denier candidates.”
And more from the article above:
If CO2 were a problem why did we not see runaway warming in the past when CO2 levels were orders of magnitude higher than today?
Or put another way, what would today’s climate models say should have happened, and did it?
Very basic non-politicised question regarding cause and effect.
Clark – i’d rather not be called a ‘denier’ anything if you don’t mind. I’m afraid it is a word that has been very cynically used and exploited because of its obvious connotations. Are you going to call members who believe wholeheartedly in man made mass global warming ‘naturally occuring temperature fluctuation deniers’ just to keep the balance?
Just quickly… Billy, (20 Sep, 2012 – 2:26 am) – I don’t think we did! Do you have proper evidence that (a) CO2 levels were orders of magnitude higher than today? on a relevant timescale, and (b) have you looked it up yourself, out of interest?
It’s also worth noting that these models are also difficult to describe in just a few sentences, because they too are also on the shift. Models are like working theories, always on the shift, trying to make the best interpretation of all the given facts to date. In addition, models have to examine how well their own predictions performed, when faced with new data – this gets extrapolated backwards to see how these models cope with accurate, historical data.
That’s why it’s maddening to find some useful idiot shrieking about someone randomly putting numbers into a climate model. OMG! LOOK! Someone’s MAKING UP DATA! Hah – proof it’s all hoax, right? Whereas in fact, we might have someone testing a model… but that doesn’t matter, let’s screech and yack about Scientists Making It Up!
Aghh… this is depressing. I’m off to play a game… anyone here for HL2?
*
Chris: Thanks for your reply – wouldn’t do justice to bang off a response, will respond properly later.
~~~~~~~~
Glenn, there was a guest article reviewing the paleoclimatic record with best estimates of T, CO2 and sea level on WUWT back in 2009. I don’t believe anyone (including climate scientists) seriously disputes the relative levels:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/16/searching-the-paleoclimate-record-for-estimated-correlations-temperature-co2-and-sea-level/
Glenn – Very kind of you to offer an explanation on what empirical evidence is. I would hope that most people,scientists especially would use empirical evidence as the basis of all their work. However, belief and many other things can play a big part in a lot of the how,when and why empirical evidence is established and how it can be misused. Belief cannot be completely divorced from the evidence process.
Personal and mass belief inevitably derives and deviates from empirically established evidence – todays empirical evidence becomes tomorrows flawed belief system and vice versa. There is also the philosophy that empirical evidence is relative and the reality in which it is based cannot be unquestionably proven, but maybe best not go there tonight
A rather interesting article from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change:
“Rothman (2002) derived a 500-million-year history of the air’s CO2 content based on considerations related to the chemical weathering of rocks, volcanic and metamorphic degassing, and the burial of organic carbon, along with considerations related to the isotopic content of organic carbon and strontium in marine sedimentary rocks. The results of this analysis suggest that over the majority of the half-billion-year record, earth’s atmospheric CO2 concentration fluctuated between values that were two to four times greater than those of today at a dominant period on the order of 100 million years. Over the last 175 million years, however, the data depict a long-term decline in the air’s CO2 content.
Rothman reports that the CO2 history “exhibits no systematic correspondence with the geologic record of climatic variations at tectonic time scales.” A visual examination of Rothman’s plot of CO2 and concomitant major cold and warm periods indicates the three most striking peaks in the air’s CO2 concentration occur either totally or partially within periods of time when earth’s climate was relatively cool.
A more detailed look at the most recent 50 million years of earth’s thermal and CO2 history was prepared by Pagani et al. (2005). They found about 43 million years ago, the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration was approximately 1400 ppm and the oxygen isotope ratio (a proxy for temperature) was about 1.0 per mil. Then, over the next ten million years, the air’s CO2 concentration experienced three huge oscillations on the order of 1000 ppm from peak to valley. In the first two oscillations, temperature did not appear to respond at all to the change in CO2, exhibiting an uninterrupted slow decline. Following the third rise in CO2, however, temperatures seemed to respond, but in the direction opposite to what the greenhouse theory of global warming predicts, as the rise in CO2 was followed by the sharpest drop in temperature of the entire record…”
http://www.climatewiki.org/wiki/Paleoclimatic_data
Have a good read, Glenn and other’s “denying” the null hypothesis 😉
No, Chris – it really doesn’t. Belief does not enter any part of the scientific world. “Belief based science” is like “fact based fiction”, or “flat-Earth based circumnavigation”. They just do no co-exist. Technology can be driven by motivation, certainly, and scientific research nudged in certain directions. But that is absolutely not to say that scientific fact in itself, can be politically (or belief based, ideologically) driven.
I must correct you – no empirical evidence draws upon any form whatsoever of a belief system. Empirical evidence simply is, it’s not relative, and not a matter of debate!
Hope we’ll continue this later – have to review your links first. But I do note from the URLs alone, they do not appear to be primary sources of science. That means I’ve got to look at your reference, then look into the site and its interests….
SB: Taken to the blunderbuss approach, rather than take each one of your own (enumerated) points on their own merits, eh? Much harder to discuss actual points, than just blast off propaganda, I suppose.
Something else to consider: The IPCC had hundreds of “warmists” on their original list of supporting scientists. Many of them are not qualified in climate matters at all. Many are plain medical doctors or have qualifications in disciplines far outside climate study. These people are concerned about warming because they accepted on face value everything the IPCC told them. They have become unwittingly, or conveniently, complicit with warmist theory yet have less understanding of it than some of the posters here.
In contrast, there are other scientists who are qualified to comment who questioned the IPCCs conclusions and who were then censored from expressing their views yet were still included, against their wishes, in the list of pro-climate change advocates, even after they expressly requested removal of their names.
In that case I cannot have any confidence in ANYTHING that the IPCC publishes, nor the palpably corrupt East Anglia University Climate Research Unit, an organisation festooned with lies, manipulation and false data.
This is a classic example where side-taking is not based on any plausible source and this is palpably demonstrated by the arguments in this thread, nearly all of which have joined one tribe or another, usually through political positions which match their stance. The left are almost always alarmists and the right are nearly always regarded as “heretics”.
When words like “believers” and “deniers” are thrown around with abandon, you can be sure that properly sceptical views have been discarded and that the whole subject has become charged with a compliant desire to be on-message with one polarised view or the opposite.
Moreover, the obsession with CO2 is sidelining a far more important subject which I don’t think anyone is eager to argue about: real pollution from far more potent sources which are now largely ignored. Meanwhile CO2 has become a means by which the IPCC and its associated advocates are attempting to enslave poor countries while the rich in more prosperous nations deal for profit in carbon offsets like they are raffle tickets (see Gore et al).
Amen to that LeonardYoung. I find it quite odd to hear the whole left right paradigm still being mentioned – it obviously doesn’t stand for anything anymore,if it ever did, and doesn’t serve any purpose except divide,rule and polarise.
Agree with your point on pollution too. The American military are one of the biggest C02 polluters in the world, as are the aeroplanes spraying various chemical aerosols in our skies daily. Weapons grade Uranium will poison the countries in which they have been used for thousands of years as will all the other chemicals and bio weapons that NATO has developed. All with the full knowledge and acceptance of the UN of course..
Breaking News
Oh really? Which ‘Jim’ fixed that? In May the DCMS committee concluded that Rupert Murdoch was not a fit and proper person to hold a licence…… Mensch was one of the four on the committee who dissented from that view.
Sky ‘fit and proper’ to hold TV licence, says Ofcom
Media regulator Ofcom has decided Sky is a “fit and proper” company to hold a broadcasting licence.
Ofcom was investigating the satellite broadcaster in the wake of the phone hacking scandal that engulfed Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp media empire.
News Corp owns 39% of BSkyB, and James Murdoch, Rupert’s son, was chairman until he stepped down in April.
/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19658811
The OFCOM ‘decision’ is here. (http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/tv-ops/fit-proper/bskyb-final.pdf)
Gould is worried by the decline in support for Israel.
Israel must fight for the British centre
By Matthew Gould, September 14, 2012
http://www.thejc.com/node/80654
Mensch sends a message to all her followers on Twitter
Louise Mensch@LouiseMensch
Have been remiss in wishing all my Jewish friends and followers Shana Tova, been enjoying High Holy Days too much #lchaim
Has she left these shores yet?
Has Craig’s announcement something to do with the LibDem conference this weekend?
Wasn’t Cleggover’s apology on breaking his promise on tuition fees excruciatingly embarrassing to watch. No apology though for his grab at power and his party’s complicity in enacting the coalition’s legislation. He is a dead duck.
Maybe we have had levels of co2 higher in the past. But has the earths ability to make environmental corrections been destroyed.
WTF what we cant achieve is unlike our monitary policy is quantive easing of our weather.
They can print all the worthless paper money and digital format they want. but can they produce oxgygen and weather controls.
I think not. The despots all believe in a Keynsian monetary policy. They no doubt, will all follow the same hymm sheet with climate change.
The`yre fucking greedy driven by money and power.
It should not be just about climate change.
What irks me.
Its probably written in a book. The code word for it. “Noah”.
WHAT WE DO NOT ASSUME IS THAT WE ARE DOING IN SUB-CONSCIOUSLY!
I guess you were sensible in not going to the interview – why have them cancel it on the grounds that the government leaned on them? Be proactive and cancel it first so that you are in control, and save the rip-off train fare as well 🙂
When my teeth grumble, I put them on ‘sugar quarantine’ for a day or two – no sugar in tea, no sweet stuff, period. You might gently try (using the finger tip as a toothbrush) applying Sen*odyhe (or similar product). Not to mention phoning the dentist if the pain doesn’t clear up!
I wouldn’t worry about the loss of energy, if you’re prone to get depressed now and then. It will no doubt come back (I might get an expert medical opinion from Sohail & Co, though).
Has anyone factored the Dunning Kruger effect into the climate change debate yet?
And the topic was? Anyway this is off it. George W. Bush’s delusions of Jesus wanting him for a sunbeam.
http://tomhayden.com/home/bush-the-christian-crusader.html
Ok another stab at Craig’s article matter:
Building Straight Roads In A Spheroid World
Tough Guys, Tough Work, Tough World. It’s Easy To Malign The CIA
What archaic nonsense. No wonder there is no respect for institutions.
There are currently 649 MPs due to Louise Mensch (Corby) +++taking the Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead++++.
http://www.parliament.uk/mps-lords-and-offices/mps/