Tag: Monbiot

Waving, not drowning (yet)

I found myself hesitating over reporting a further attempt on the part of Oxfam to draw attention to the increasing plight of populations in poorer countries faced with the early effects of climate change. In this case it is Oxfam New Zealand’s Wave of Change campaign, highlighting climate impacts in the Pacific region.

Why was I hesitating?  Fear of overdoing a theme? Recognition that there is not absolute scientific certainty that a particular event can be attributed to climate change? Caution about compassion fatigue? Foreseeing reactions from some that this is just another begging strategy devised by the pesky poor? A general feeling of hopelessness about the likelihood of rich nations taking a sustained interest in the plight of others, even when their responsibility for that plight is established? Not wanting to be seen as a bleeding heart liberal?

 

All these elements, and others, were discernible when I interrogated myself. None of them justified ignoring the Oxfam news release sitting in my inbox.  All the more when I read George Monbiot’s latest Guardian article. His argument is more generally political than climate change related, and I don’t propose discussing it here in those wider terms. But his conclusion was entirely relevant to this post:

“People with strong intrinsic values must cease to be embarrassed by them. We should argue for the policies we want not on the grounds of expediency but on the grounds that they are empathetic and kind; and against others on the grounds that they are selfish and cruel. In asserting our values we become the change we want to see.”

So let me write briefly about the Wave of Change campaign. It’s timed as the Cancun conference comes into view.  There appears to be some slight hope that Cancun will see advance on the transfer of finance and technology from developed countries to help developing countries adapt to climate change. Oxfam intends that New Zealand politicians and negotiators are well aware of the seriousness of the need of our Pacific Island neighbours in this respect. The declaration opening the short video on their website:

“People of the Pacific are among those to be hit first and worst by climate change.”

This isn’t just about the future danger of islands disappearing as a result of sea level rise, as Oxfam’s Coordinator Anne-Marie Mujica pointed out when launching the campaign:

“Right now people are struggling with salt poisoning their staple food crops and polluting their drinking water.”

A Pacific Conference of Churches spokesperson underlines this when he  speaks on the video of the increase in the severity and frequency of extreme weather patterns.

“Salt water is now seeping into the food crops and the drinking water. Tropical storms are more fierce.”

One woman puts it simply:

“Seawater is coming. Every high tide I have water in my front yard.”

The campaign seeks a fair deal. Two Pacific Islanders on the video say it:

“Our Pacific urgently requires a fair deal on climate change.”

“We need to protect our Pacific regions. We need to speak out loud and clear for a fair and ambitious deal on climate change.”

Fair deal is the right note to strike since issues of justice are clearly involved when the effects of  emissions are felt by those least responsible for them.   One woman speaker says:

“Climate change is not just about science; climate change is about human rights.”

These are island voices. People alarmed by what they see happening where they live and asking for attention and fair treatment. Auckland is the most appropriate city in the developed world for their voice to be raised loud and clear.

Awareness-raising events taking place around Auckland this week are detailed on this Facebook page.

One of the campaign activities suggested is writing to the NZ Prime Minister. He should be open to the plea. New Zealand has signed up to the Copenhagen Accord and consequently no doubt expects to make a proportionate contribution to the funding targets outlined in that Accord to assist developing countries adapt to and mitigate climate change.

Last word to Oxfam’s Mujica:

“New Zealand may be a small country, but we’re a big player in the international climate talks. Our negotiators lead, or are members of, important working groups. It’s time to show the government that its citizens want them to do more to protect our Pacific.”

Rees: scientists are citizens too

The BBC’s HARDtalk interviewer Stephen Sackur engaged this week with the eminently reasonable Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society. The interview covered a range of topics, and climate change was among them.  It could hardly not be, given the seriousness with which Rees regards it.  Sackur chose to introduce the subject by suggesting that some of the confusion over climate change among the general public may be “because some scientists can’t decide whether they’re scientists – completely impartial, independent, guided only by data – or whether they’re campaigners”. Who he had in mind he didn’t say, or more likely didn’t know. Perhaps he was suggesting Rees falls into that category.

If so, Rees didn’t rise to the bait but took the opportunity to affirm that there is wide acceptance in the scientific community that climate change is a matter for serious concern and that nothing that has happened in the last year weakens the evidence for this.

 

He acknowledged, however, that there is plenty of scope for debate as to what we should do about it because we have to decide what sacrifices we make now in order to guard against risks of uncertain magnitude in the future.

Incidentally, when Rees mentions the uncertainties of future predictions it should be noted that he means that it is uncertain whether the level of warming this century will be two degrees or as much as a catastrophic five or more degrees.

Confronted with Monbiot’s latest fear that climate enlightenment is dead Rees replied that he wouldn’t go as far as that but hoped rather that the debate could be reinvigorated. At this point he mentioned the article he and Anthony Giddens have just written and which has now been posted on Hot Topic. Sackur pounced, asking how that can be done by scientists who must follow the data rather than campaign.

Rees patiently agreed that it is important to separate out the science, which is the basis for the policy decisions, from the policy decisions themselves. As a scientist “I see it as my job to ensure that the science with all its uncertainties is made available to politicians.”

But then came the telling aspect of scientific responsibility: “But as citizens I think we want to make sure that issues which are longer term and important don’t always get trumped by the urgent and immediate.”

“Scientists need to get noisier do they?” asked Sackur.

“Not just scientists, but many people who are concerned about the long-term future of the environment and the climate need to urge our politicians to give some weight to long-term issues.”

Behind the politeness and carefulness of Rees’s statements there is clearly a refusal to accept the foolishly simplistic notion that climate scientists should be corralled in the domain of their science and should leave the policy makers of the world to work out for themselves whether they are going to respond to the science and how. The fact of the matter is that politicians need to be constantly challenged to face up to the seriousness of the issue. And scientists are citizens with the same interest as the rest of us in an appropriate level of political response to a grave threat.

The dichotomy which Sackur used to get the discussion under way is a false one. It’s also a very tired one. I was surprised that an accomplished interviewer such as Sackur wasn’t ready with an approach which showed a more alert awareness of why scientists like Rees are impelled to sound alarms. It seemed to fit with a critical Climate Progress post from Joseph Romm recently on what he discerns as a decline in the BBC’s coverage of climate change. In the post he  reports hearing from a former BBC producer colleague that internal editorial discussions now under way at the BBC on planning next year’s news agenda have explicitly parked climate change in the category “Done That Already, Nothing New to Say”!

Reinvigorating the debate, Rees’s preferred path, is not going to be made easy. But we can be thankful that he and other scientists are committed to the effort.

The politics of failure/the failure of politics

As an example of contradictory thinking it would be hard to better Energy and Resources Minister Gerry Brownlee this week. He was announcing that oil and gas exploration in New Zealand is to get a substantial boost in government resources, including funding to further the possible exploitation of deep-sea methane hydrates.

He made a plea for New Zealanders to consider the potential for an accelerated oil and gas discovery programme to be achieved in an environmentally responsible way.

“People need to shift their thinking on exactly this issue. The development of New Zealand’s natural resources and the protection of the environment are not mutually exclusive. It is only through a strong economy that New Zealand can afford the expenditure required to look after and improve our environment.”

Is it unfair to construe this as follows?

We need to mine more oil and gas, the burning of which will hasten dangerous climate change, in order to become rich enough to deal with dangerous climate change.

In fact of course, when Brownlee talks of the environment he is probably not thinking of climate change at all.  He gives very little evidence of ever thinking of climate change.

 

The contradictions of which Brownlee is an example are deeply embedded in the political scene in a great many countries. There is very little indication that governments are preparing to stop the mining of fossil fuels.  Indeed there’s every indication that they’re ready to increase it whenever it looks as if there could be an economic benefit in doing so. Even the monstrous environmental assault of the extraction of oil from the Canadian tar sands is justified by its proponents. American Senator Lindsey Graham, who once supported a US climate bill, announced recently on a visit to view operations that he was going to do all he could to make sure that the oil sands production was not impeded because of US policy. He remarked that its production “really blends in with the natural habitat”!

One risks being regarded as slightly mad in declaring that a rational New Zealand would leave any possible new oil and gas fields undisturbed, along with coal unless effective carbon capture and sequestration processes are in place. But that seems to me to be the sane view at this stage of our understanding of what greenhouse gas emissions are doing to the climate.

George Monbiot has been reflecting on gap between the grand announcements of governments about emissions reductions and the reality that they aren’t achieving them. In a bleak column this week he writes that the failure of the international political process to find a successor to Kyoto means that “there is not a single effective instrument for containing man-made global warming anywhere on earth.”

It’s not as if the warnings are getting weaker.  They are clearly mounting as the evidence continues to accumulate.  But “the stronger the warnings, the less capable of action we become.” We were mistaken to think that something might come out of the last 18 years of talk and bluster. Environmentalists tend to blame themselves, but there was no strategy sure of success. The powers ranged against us are too strong.

“Greens are a puny force by comparison to industrial lobby groups, the cowardice of governments and the natural human tendency to deny what we don’t want to see. To compensate for our weakness, we indulged a fantasy of benign paternalistic power – acting, though the political mechanisms were inscrutable, in the wider interests of humankind. We allowed ourselves to believe that, with a little prompting and protest, somewhere, in a distant institutional sphere, compromised but decent people would take care of us. They won’t. They weren’t ever going to do so.”

Monbiot concludes that we must stop dreaming about an institutional response that will never materialise and start facing a political reality we’ve sought to avoid. I guess here in New Zealand that means accepting that the juggernaut of “resource” exploitation is going to roll on and leading politicians are going to continue to talk as if they’re protecting the environment while they’re in the process of destroying it. It also means that only strong organised implacable challenge is likely to have any effect – there is a small ray of hope in the success of mobilised public opinion against mining in protected conservation areas, but whether that kind of mobilisation can be raised against fossil fuels remains to be seen.

It may be worth noting that another columnist this week found reason to sound more upbeat, though certainly not about his own country. Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times, lamented the failure of the US senate to pass the energy-climate bill but pointed to the seriousness with which Chinese Communists were by contrast tackling the climate change issue and turning it into an opportunity for the development of clean technologies.  Friedman is inclined to optimism, as was apparent in his book Hot, Flat and Crowded, but he provides some basis for it in the case of China.

He quotes Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, a nonprofit group working to accelerate the greening of China.

“China’s leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don’t waste time questioning scientific data…China is changing from the factory of the world to the clean-tech laboratory of the world. It has the unique ability to pit low-cost capital with large-scale experiments to find models that work.”

Friedman points to the way China has designated and invested in pilot cities for electric vehicles, smart grids, LED lighting, rural biomass and low-carbon communities.

It’s perhaps not much to pin hopes on, especially as coal continues to be used for much new power generation in China. But it may well yet be the case that burgeoning clean technologies will take us further than politicians can. In my inbox this morning was information from the Earth Policy Institute on the continuing rapid growth of solar photovoltaic cell production, described as the world’s fastest-growing power technology. China, Japan and Taiwan are the leading manufacturers. The writer acknowledges that it remains more expensive than fossil fuel-generated power, but points out that its costs are declining rapidly. If fossil fuels ceased to receive subsidies and were required to incorporate their currently externalised costs their relative cheapness would be exposed as only apparent.

Which is good reason to argue in New Zealand for more even-handed government investment in renewables by comparison with fossil fuel extraction. The absurdity of offering so much support for fossil fuels and so little for the green technologies on which our future, if we have one, will depend might be realised by some in our government if we keep on insisting. But it remains a hard slog.

[Cream]

Report clears IPCC head Pachauri, UK paper apologises

Back in March I posted on IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri’s stout defence of the IPCC report against the attacks to which it was being subjected by hysterical denialism.  But he has also had to defend himself against accusations in an article by Christopher Booker and Richard North in the Sunday Telegraphin December which claimed that the UN climate chief was “making a fortune from his links with ‘carbon trading’ companies” and that payments from his work for other organisations “must run into millions of dollars”.

KPMG was engaged by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the non-profit organisation Pachauri heads, to conduct an independent review of personal financial records of Dr Pachauri and other records of TERI to confirm if there is any evidence that suggests that Dr Pachauri misused his position for personal benefit as alleged.

The KPMG report has now been made public.  The Guardian reports:

 

“The KPMG audit, completed in March, showed the allegation that Pachauri had made millions of dollars could not be further from the truth. In addition to his annual salary of £45,000, the auditors found that in the period 1 April 2008 – 31 December 2009, Pachauri received 20,000 rupees (£278) from two national power commissions in India, on which he serves as director; 35,880 rupees (£498) for articles and lectures; and a maximum of 100,000 rupees (£1,389) in the form of royalties from his books and awards.

“Any money paid as a result of work that Pachauri had done for other organisations went to TERI. The accounts also show that Pachauri also donated to the institute a lifetime achievement award from the Environment Partnership Summit – a 200,000 rupee prize he would have been entitled to keep.”

The Sunday Telegraph has removed the article from its website and apologised, hardly handsomely but apparently to avoid libel proceedings:

“[The article] was not intended to suggest that Dr Pachauri was corrupt or abusing his position as head of the IPCC and we accept KPMG found Dr Pachauri had not made ‘millions of dollars’ in recent years. We apologise to Dr Pachauri for any embarrassment caused.”

George Monbiot has made trenchant comment.

“Has anyone been as badly maligned as Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ?

“…The story immediately travelled around the world. It was reproduced on hundreds of blogs. The allegations it contained were widely aired in the media and generally believed. For a while, no discussion of climate change or the IPCC appeared complete without reference to Pachauri’s ‘dodgy’ business dealings and alleged conflicts of interest.

“There was just one problem: the story was untrue.

“It’s not just that Pachauri hadn’t been profiting from the help he has given to charities, businesses and institutions, his accounts show that he is scrupulous to the point of self-denial.”

The Sunday Telegraph article also complained that we don’t know “how much we all pay him” as chairman of the IPCC. The answer, as Monbiot reports, is nothing.  This was information that the journalists could easily have obtained but driven by their intention to malign preferred not to.

This won’t be the end of the matter for denialists of course. North on his blog puts the apology down to the paper’s need to avoid libel proceedings from an “unethical law firm” and continues undaunted:

“If you wish to believe that means Pachauri didn’t make millions of dollars, that is your affair. But the crucial thing is that the paper has not apologised for accusing Pachauri of making millions of dollars. That accusation stands uncorrected. The paper simply accepts that KPMG has a claim in this respect.”

Monbiot expects that the smear campaign will continue, and become ever more lurid as new charges are invented.

“The best we can do is to set out the facts and appeal to whatever decency the people spreading these lies might have, and ask them to consider the impact of what they have done to an innocent man. Will it work? I wouldn’t bet on it. As we have seen in the United States, where some people (often the same people) continue to insist that Barack Obama is a Muslim and was born abroad, certain views are impervious to evidence.”

If we need reminding, denialism will stop at nothing in its campaign to denigrate the science of climate change. That is what the attacks on Pachauri are about. He is chairman of the IPCC. Portray him as dishonest and hope thereby to spread doubt about the IPCC reports. It is determination to suppress the science which informs the attacks on him and on the scientists who have been falsely accused of various malpractices.

Monckton is a fraud

Christopher, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, pompous peer of a parish in Kent, not content with threatening legal action against US scientist John Abraham (who had the temerity to point out the huge number of errors and misrepresentations in a talk he gave: see Support John Abraham, now 1050+ comments), has now threatened action for libel against Professor Scott Mandia. Mandia wrote a blog post in support of Abraham, inviting members of the media to consider if Monckton were a fraud — which drew a spiteful little email from Tannochbrae…

I also note that you have publicly accused me of “fraud”, and have widely circulated that accusation on the internet, and have expressed the intention to invite the mass media to repeat it. Since this is a serious charge, do you have any evidence to back it up, or should I add your name to that of Professor Abraham in the libel case that will be filed shortly?

Mandia’s open letter to the media asked them to “expose Monckton for the fraud that he is”, which is somewhat different to an accusation of fraudulent behaviour. Let’s examine the evidence, and see if Monckton can reasonably be described as “a fraud”, and whether his actions and public statements are in themselves fraudulent. First we need some definitions:

Continue reading “Monckton is a fraud”