Do you feel lucky?

Once again, Ian Wishart is working himself up into a fine frenzy over at his blog, responding to a perceptive post by Bomber Bradbury at Tumeke! In the comments there he claimed to have “pointed out numerous mistakes in Gareth’s snide and out of context ‘review'”, and — funnily enough — I didn’t feel inclined to let that pass. So I suggested a little wager, and drew this furious response. So, knowing it will make precious little difference in the strange version of reality that Wishart occupies, here’s my (final) response…

Wishart begins by claiming that the “child-eating greens” quote was taken out of context, and — by the by — calls me a liar.

Gareth, your Asian brothels quote was taken utterly out of context, and the spin you put on it was crap. You know it, I know it. As I showed, both in the book and my response to you, I was quoting Green activists. You lied in your review, and I clearly established that.

What I put in my original review was this:

Consider the mental space occupied by someone who is willing to write, publish and promote this (p247):

What they [“wild greens”] really mean is that they want ordinary families and kids to become extinct, leaving space for the Green elite to run the planet and enjoy exclusive bird-watching excursions while feasting on the bones of six year olds who’d earlier been sold to Asian brothels.

This sentence is not in quotes, so it was certainly written by Wishart. He also published the book, and is very keen to promote it, so it’s hard to see how I misrepresented him in any way.

The sentence comes from Chapter 18, titled Priests Of The New Green Religion, and could be described as a creative synthesis of a series of quotes from people Wishart defines as “Green activists”. Ted Turner is first, then Lyall Watson, quoted as saying “[Cannibalism is a] radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation” in the Financial Times in 1995. Wishart then adds his own gloss:

[Watson thus evokes] cannibalism as a lifestyle choice for committed Greens, who of course prefer not to dine on battery hens. The idea of eating their fellow human, primitive as it sounds, is not a huge ideological leap for some of the numbnuts on the loopy left who have the ear of those in power. They don’t see any value in humanity, and see global warming as a chance to spread their beliefs.

I haven’t seen Watson’s original article. It doesn’t appear to be on the web, but I’d love to see the full text, because the exact quote and attribution Wishart provides is liberally scattered around far-right, anti-green web sites without any context (although I have also seen the words ascribed to Prince Philip). Was Watson misquoted, or taken out of context? I don’t know, but it did start me off an a train of thought. Wishart continues the chapter with quotes from Carl Amery, Merton Lambert, David Brower and Maurice Strong. I plugged those names (and Watson) into a famous search engine, and it produced this result. What a coincidence! All the same names and quotes appear together in a list that appears to have been doing the rounds of the far right, Lyndon Larouche followers, and strange religious sects. Scholarship? As someone once said, there’s no wisdom button on the Google.

Let’s return to the original quote I used, and look at the paragraphs that follow it:

Now, again, you may dismiss all this as fantasy, and to an extent it is — right up to the moment that people with this kind of world view start getting funding cheques from a newly enriched United Nations thanks to compulsory emissions trading fees or transaction taxes imposed. Because when these people get access to real money and political power, that’s when life will become seriously interesting on Planet Earth, and not in a nice way. Laugh and scoff about the “New World Order” all you like, but if Copenhagen goes through at the end of this year you’ll effectively be funding their daft schemes, and you won’t be laughing for very long.

A veritable army of straw men in service of Wishart’s vision. In other words, I didn’t choose my quote “out of context” to make Wishart look bad, for the context it’s in speaks for itself. Wishart wants us all to believe, on the basis of some scary-sounding quotes he’s dredged up from dodgy web sites that a New World Order driven by billionaire socialists and rabid Greens is going to make our lives very unpleasant. No interpretation required. No spin. It’s there in black and white. If Wishart doesn’t want to be judged by what he writes, then he should give up writing rubbish…

He then returns to the next section I quoted in my review:

So much for the popular theory that CO₂ levels increase first, then warming. All of this is vital in identifying the culprit behind the current warm period. If these two studies are to be believed, then it’s conceivable that the Earth is currently heating as direct result of the sun’s warmth during the Medieval Warm Period in AD1000. Jump ahead 800 years, and the planet starts to warm up around 1850, a warming trend that continues into the present.

Wishart tries to make a fuss about the difference between my description of the drivers of the end of an ice age (classic Milankovitch, based on increased NH insolation) and that of the link I provided, which suggests a SH initiation. The simple fact is that there is no one “right” answer — there are lots of complex factors at work. The IPCC AR4 summarises thus:

Current data are not accurate enough to identify whether warming started earlier in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) or Northern Hemisphere (NH)… (WG1, Chap 6, p447)

But one things is clear, warming 800 years ago is not driving the increase in atmospheric CO₂ now. There’s 40% more now than there was in the 1850s, and we know where it’s come from. I discussed the point in this post, where I was pleased to demonstrate Wishart’s “central thesis” was bunk (read the comments too, there are good links and discussion for those interested in the real science).

Nevertheless, Wishart’s on a roll, so he continues his aggressive attack:

Regardless, follow the logic for a moment, Gareth, if you can. On your simplistic understanding of greenhouse theory every warm period should turn into runaway global warming. Another newsflash, it hasn’t.

Spot the straw man? Yup, that’s right — “runaway”. Not all positive feedback loops have to “run away”. And the climate system being complex, lots of factors are in play. So if warming triggers CO₂ release, and that then amplifies warming so that more CO₂ is released, that’s one factor. But as the world warms, you get other feedbacks kicking in: a dry world becomes a wetter world. More forests grow, sucking CO₂ out of the air. The orbital forcings change, so that less solar heat reaches the important parts of the world, be they north or south of the equator, and so warming slows. Eventually, the negative feedbacks overwhelm the positive, and the world cools into a new ice age. You can see evidence for this in the shape of the temperature curve over the last few ice ages. The warming is always fast, but the descent into full ice age conditions is relatively gradual.

The lesson, of course, is that the evidence suggests that the climate system is a sensitive beast that we shouldn’t, as Wally Broecker has put it, be prodding with sticks. However Wishart is still keen to beat around the bush:

Why did the Earth not collapse in a heatwave of unstoppable global warming at that stage [warming out of an ice age], then? (particularly when you claim the heat of the MWP should have resulted in one).

See above, obviously, but I want to make a couple of points about the Medieval Warm Period. Throughout Air Con, Wishart argues that the world was warmer during the MWP than now. He even helpfully prints graphs purporting to show that — even though they all stop short of the last half of the 20th century (Air Con colour section). Nobody else agrees with him (barring a few crank sites). Here’s a somewhat more helpful illustration (IPCC WG1, Chap 6, fig 6.10):

This graph includes many of the series reproduced in Air Con, but helpfully provides a comparison with recent temperatures (the black line at left that reaches up to +0.5ºC). This is for the northern hemisphere only, please note, and there is certainly a “warmish period” around 1000AD. Unfortunately for Wishart, modern temperatures are well above that…

I dealt with the “runaway” straw man above, but there is something interesting to note about the MWP and CO₂. Bill Ruddiman in Plows, Plagues and Petroleum looks at “wiggles” in the CO₂ record over the last 2,000 years and links them with the emergence of pandemics causing population crashes that allow forest regrowth. This is a controversial theory, to be sure, but it prompted me to take another look at the data for CO₂ for the last 1,000 years from the Law Dome in Antarctica (below). We can see that there’s a CO₂ hump around the putative MWP and a pronounced dip around the Little Ice Age. Perhaps the link between warming and CO₂ is a little closer than many suspect…

Wishart then witters on about “devastatingly embarrassing gaffes” (that aren’t), before addressing my challenge to him at Tumeke!.

As for your “wager”, purportedly based on page 208 of Air Con, again you misrepresent and misquote me.

You say: “You think the planet is going to cool (Air Con p208). I am willing to bet $100 (for the charity of your choice) that there will be a new record global average annual temperature within the next five years (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, or 2014”

However, that page wasn’t about general cooling. What I actually wrote on page 208 is:

“Not withstanding a hot regional blip in Australia, the odds are not good that 2009 will be a record breaking warm year. On current trends it may be cooler again than 2008.”

For the record, the relevant paragraph on p208 concludes thus:

“The full extent of the sun’s drop in activity isn’t expected to hit until late 2009 and into 2010, because of the thermal lag in the oceans. In other words, the cooling is likely to increase.”

Where’s the misrepresentation and misquotation? Wishart clearly doesn’t expect anyone to refer to his book, because he is apparently quite content to misrepresent its contents himself. On the basis of that sentence, I made my offer of a small wager. His response is risible:

We know CO2 emissions continue to rise, we know methane emissions continue to rise. Are you willing to wager $2,000 against my $20 that 2009 will be “the hottest year on record”? By rights, if you are so confident that what I wrote in Air Con on p208 was wrong, you should be leaping at the chance.

I would be absolutely nuts to take any bet on this year alone. The chances of 2009 being a record breaker are slim indeed, as I discussed earlier this year (long before Air Con came out) when looking at a couple of iPredict contracts. I framed my offered bet carefully. Wishart is on record that “the cooling is likely to increase”. I believe there will be a new record by 2014 — that is, sometime in the next five years (barring major volcanic activity). I repeat my offer: $100 to a good cause of his choice if there’s no new record by the end of 2014. If there is a new record, he can pay $100 to the good cause of my choice. I think I might choose Greenpeace…

Note for the weary. That’s the last in this sequence of posts. No doubt Wishart will rustle up some claim about “winning” in our little blog conversation, perhaps even continue directing his readers over to Hot Topic when he sees “nonsense” from MIT or other august bodies. Meanwhile, the offer of the wager stands, and will remain open. Henceforeward, my only comment to Wishart will be:

You got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do you, punk?