Tag: coal

In the land of make believe

NZETS.jpg Today’s lesson is taken from Jane Clifton’s Politics column in this week’s Listener (full text on the web next week). Her take on the current fuss over the Emissions Trading Scheme perfectly illustrates how the debate around this issue is being misunderstood and misrepresented, occasionally wilfully, sometimes from ignorance. This is not Clifton’s fault. She is reflecting only a certain kind of reality – the perception of the issue that is driving press coverage and political actions. Here’s a key passage:

“… most people have gotten the drift by now: to reduce carbon emissions means to reduce activities we currently benefit from and enjoy. And we will have to pay handsomely for our lack of pleasure.”

She then considers why the government is struggling with the scheme:

“It’s the ultimate non sequitur. A government that addressed this crisis seriously would become massively unpopular and lose office. A government that didn’t would be hideously irresponsible and deserve to lose office. Hard to avoid a certain fatalism.”

If the first part of the argument were true, then her “non sequitur” would follow. Happily, her assumption is completely wrong, so it doesn’t have to. But you’d be hard-pressed to glean that from the current discussion in NZ (or indeed from Clifton’s column).

Continue reading “In the land of make believe”

What’s going on?

heart.jpg The Heartland Institute’s inclusion of five New Zealand scientists in a list of “500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares” (title has since changed to “500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares” – PDF here) is even more bogus than I originally thought.

The list is the product of the fertile imaginations of Dennis Avery and Fred Singer, and is “derived primarily from the citations” in their recent book Unstoppable Global Warming—Every 1,500 Years. They say in the introduction:

The following list includes more than 500 qualified researchers, their home institutions, and the peer-reviewed studies they have published in professional journals providing historic and/or physical proxy evidence that:

1) Most of the recent global warming has been caused by a long, moderate, natural cycle rather than by the burning of fossil fuels… [There are six more items, but you can read them for yourself]

So how did Jim get in there? He sent me a copy of the offending paper – Southwest Pacific temperatures: trends in maximum and minimum temperatures, Atmospheric Research 37 (1995) (copy here). It’s interesting enough, but not exactly earth-shattering. As the title suggests, it uses a then new data set for SW Pacific temperatures and looks for changes in maximum and minimum daily temperatures in the region. The paper states “Increases in concentrations of greenhouse gases and changes in cloudiness could be plausible mechanisms for the overall increase in both daily maximum and minimum temperatures.”

Avery and Singer list the paper in their first section, “studies finding evidence of the climate cycle”. Now I’ve read the paper in some detail, and I can’t find any reference to a 1,500 year cycle, or indeed a cycle of any kind. Perhaps Avery & Singer included it because Jim rides a bicycle?

In other words, the use of Salinger’s paper to support Avery & Singer’s hypothesis is entirely bogus. It’s scientific fraud, unethical, and just another example of how Heartland are prepared to encourage people to distort the truth in support of their political objectives. I hope Heartland’s apologists in New Zealand, the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition will share my outrage, and demand that Bast and co remove Salinger from the list immediately.

But I’m not holding my breath.

You know my name (look up the number)

homer.jpg Sometimes it can be difficult to know if someone is a genuine climate crank, sceptic, one of the GODs*, or just a fly-by-night, johnny-come-lately keen to ride on the soon-to-arrive ice age bandwagon. Well, here’s the good news. The International Climate Science Coalition has recently published several lists of people who are happy to endorse the Manhattan Declaration. That’s right, a list of all (or at least most) of the people who agree with this statement:

That there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.

No more worries, no need to agonise. If they’re on the list, they’re guaranteed to be grade A climate cranks. Please dissect at will. What a remarkable public gesture, no doubt funded by the Heartland Institute in the interest of a better tomorrow. Or possibly not.

* Grumpy old deniers (©R McKie 2008)

The sincerest form of flat earthery

discworld.jpg I can’t resist a small (flat, disc-shaped) chortle. While the great communicator (Prof Bob) was readying himself to address an august audience at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron in Auckland last Saturday, a bunch of members of the NZ branch of the Flat Earth Society (dressed in clothing from their favourite historical period – the Medieval Warm Period) were handing out leaflets suggesting that the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition might like to join with them to resist the dark forces of rationalism. From the leaflet:

The Flat Earth Society and the Climate Science Coalition (with Bob Carter) have so much in common. While the NZ CSC is relatively new, we at the FES have had centuries of experience in battling against against a mass of overwhelming scientific evidence, and believe may be able to learn from and indeed support each other.

The NZCSC seems to have come to a critical point that appears to be tipping against you – a point where fewer people believe in your position. Believe us, we’ve been there, we know what it’s like.

Don Brash was there.

“I occupy the balanced middle of this debate”

homer.jpg Sunday morning laughs. Bob Carter, a particularly voluble member of the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition, is in New Zealand doing a “lecture tour”. He’s addressing a number of Rotary groups around the North Island. But the slick PR machine* inside the C”S”C obtained a top TV gig for Prof Bob, and he was interviewed on Shine TV recently. I won’t embed the YouTube video here (I think a young Mick Jagger is better for the blog’s image), but I would like to draw your attention to the breathtaking chutzpah of the man as he defines the “climate debate”. At about 0:35s he says (roughly transcribed):

On the one hand you have what are called the deniers, the people that deny climate change happens at all. It’s a very small group, and I don’t know any who are really significant scientists. On the other hand you have the alarmists, who say that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, it’s our CO2 emissions that are the problem, and we need to do something about it. Now, both of these groups have shrill voices, and it’s fair to say that the press has dominantly picked up the alarmist shrill view. The great majority of scientists sit in the middle. I’m in New Zealand, as you know, giving a lecture tour, and I occupy the balanced middle of this debate.

Astonishing. He’s not so much attempting to shift the Overton window, as move it to the house next door. And he says it with such assurance. No doubt there will be an upswing in scepticism in Rotarian circles in the rural North Island. I’ll have to organise a tour of Probus groups to counter the great man’s efforts.

* That’s only half a joke. They’re very good at getting themselves noticed.