Author: Gareth

The Age Of Stupid – coming soon (or here now)

The NZ green carpet premiere of The Age Of Stupid — Franny Armstrong’s powerful drama documentary about global warming — is being held in Auckland on August 19th, in a solar-powered cinema tent. The blurb:

‘The Age Of Stupid’ is the new documentary from the Director of ‘McLibel’ and the Producer of the Oscar-winning ‘One Day In September’. This enormously ambitious drama-documentary-animation hybrid stars Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite as an old man living in the devastated world of 2055, watching “archive” footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change while we had the chance?

Bloody good question. Here’s a good recommendation: “The most powerful piece of cultural discourse on climate change ever produced.” — Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

Limited ticket sales at $30 from Oxfam and Greenpeace. Phone 0800 400 666. Public screenings begin at Hoyts Sylvia Park that same evening — tickets available direct from the cinema. An additional first night screening is being hosted by Grey Lynn 2030, the local transition town group, at Bridgeway Rialto, 122 Queen St, Northcote. 8.15pm Weds 19th Advance ticket sales only, $20 from Jayson at The Wine Vault, 453 Richmond Rd, Grey Lynn.

There will be showings at cinemas in other parts of New Zealand, see here for more details. If anyone else wants to arrange screenings, contact me to be put in touch with the organisers.

Big guns brought to bear

homer.jpgThe now infamous McLean, de Freitas and Carter paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research (see Mother Nature’s Sons) has attracted a damning response from some of the biggest names in climate science, including a strong Kiwi contribution*. A comment has been submitted to JGR by Grant Foster, James Annan, Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Brett Mullan, Jim Renwick, Jim Salinger, Gavin Schmidt, and Kevin Trenberth. McLean et al’s “analysis is incorrect”, “seriously overestimates” the link between ENSO and global temperatures, and their paper provides no support for any claim about recent global temperature trends. Here’s the abstract:

McLean et al. [2009] (henceforth MFC09) claim that the El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), as represented by the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), accounts for as much as 72% of the global tropospheric temperature anomaly (GTTA) and an even higher 81% of this anomaly in the tropics. They conclude that the SOI is a “dominant and consistent influence on mean global temperatures,” “and perhaps recent trends in global temperatures”. However, their analysis is incorrect in a number of ways, and greatly overstates the influence of ENSO on the climate system. This comment first briefly reviews what is understood about the influence of ENSO on global temperatures, then goes on to show that the analysis of MFC09 severely overestimates the correlation between temperature anomalies and the SOI by inflating the power in the 2–6 year time window while filtering out variability on longer and shorter time scales. It is only because of this faulty analysis that they are able to claim such extremely high correlations. The suggestion in their conclusions that ENSO may be a major contributor to recent trends in global temperature is not supported by their analysis or any physical theory presented in that paper, especially as the analysis method itself eliminates the influence of trends on the purported correlations.

Looks to me like there’s no academic wiggle room for McLean, de Freitas and Carter. They got it very wrong. The big question now is how they managed to sneak the paper through peer-review. Meanwhile, claims that McLean et al shows “that most of the late 20th century global warming and cooling can be attributed to natural climate processes” will remain up at crank web sites, and Carter and de Freitas will consider their real work — to provide more propaganda for the denial machine — well done.

[* Brett Mullan and Jim Renwick are at NIWA, Jim Salinger’s now in the same department at Auckland University as CdF (which must make for interesting conversation over morning coffee), and Kevin Trenberth is a New Zealander.]

The price of a policy

rodenymorph.gifIn the run up to last year’s election I devoted a lot of coverage to the ACT party’s descent into climate denial, and in particular to the outrageous statements of its leader Rodney Hide. It wasn’t clear to me at the time why Hide was ditching the party’s carefully constructed “Smart Green” positioning on environmental policy and spouting standard climate crank nonsense, but intriguing hints are now emerging thanks to excellent detective work at Canadian blog Deep Climate. Hide’s repositioning coincided with a major donation to ACT by Alan Gibbs, a wealthy NZ businessman best known here for his Aquada (a sportscar that thinks it’s a boat) and for his generous patronage of modern art. Gibbs, however, also plays a prominent role in climate crank organisations. He is on the “policy advisory board” of the International Climate Science Coalition (with such luminaries as Monckton, Bryan Leyland and Owen McShane), while his daughter Emma is listed as a director of the ICSC. In its election spending return to the Electoral Commission, ACT reveals that on April 9th 2008 Gibbs paid $100,000 into the party’s coffers. Within weeks, the party’s new climate denial line was being pushed to the press.

Continue reading “The price of a policy”

Some cuts are bigger than others

targetNick Smith and the government’s insistence that a sensible emissions target for 2020 is too expensive to even contemplate is coming under more pressure with the release today of a report [PDF] prepared by the Green Party, which they claim shows that big cuts are affordable. Announcing the release of the report, Greens climate spokesperson Jeanette Fitzsimons said [Scoop]:

“The Government says it can’t be done, but careful research shows it can be done. Environment Minister Nick Smith says it’s too hard and too expensive to set a responsible target, but the facts and the science say something different,” Ms Fitzsimons stated. “In the absence of leadership from the Government on this issue, weâ’e done the work. There’s a way to be optimistic and constructive in the face of a major international challenge but it seems the Government is taking a different path.”

A key part of the Green strategy involves a major commitment to tree planting and pest control in native forests, both of which Smith seems keen to ignore or misrepresent — as his response, headlined Bold 2020 target comes with high price demonstrates. Smith is content to trot out his current mantra, “We need an ambitious but achievable goal for 2020 that balances the environmental risks of climate change with the economic impacts on New Zealand of reducing emissions”. The minister is of course completely correct, but since he lacks ambition, gets the “environmental risks” completely wrong and continually overstates the cost of action, I expect the government’s goal to be too soft — and therefore immensely damaging to New Zealand’s long term interests.

Update 5/8: Jeanette Fitzsimons at Frogblog on Nick Smith’s response to questions in the House today:

Not a single question of mine answered, not a single point in our report addressed, but finally, the last refuge of someone with no arguments, a personal attack […] NZ deserves a “can do” minister, not a “can’t do, won’t try” government.

[The Smiths]

Wouldn’t it be ice

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Pictures from my new favourite blog, Meltfactor.org, where Jason Box of the Byrd Polar Research Centre at Ohio State is posting from the Greenpeace expedition to the Petermann glacier in NW Greenland. The pictures are stunning (above shows fracturing on the end of the ice tongue) — and the insight to what’s going up there as the Arctic melts is fascinating. And, just to make every photographer jealous, they get to fly over pods of narwhals (including two young ‘uns, I reckon)…

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