Not today - by Richard... Wednesday, July 07, 2010

Not today - by Richard... Wednesday, July 07, 2010

As a self-proclaimed climate activist and campaigner for sustainability and all things green, it is rather bizarre that Joe Romm should wax indignant aboutTata Steel. 

There was a time when industrial corporates such as Tata, serial polluters and despoilers of the land, automatically attracted the ire of the Greens. But, compared with Booker and "the anti-science blogger" North, such corporates are maligned saints, alongside Rajendra Pachauri, who has been so foully "smeared" by us.

And so fixated is Romm by the "Amazongate" story, and equally convinced that it is "shameful and bogus", that he cannot imagine why any newspaper, even a fairly disreputable anti-science one, would rely on my work, "which has now contributed to embarrassing retractions and apologies."

Romm, as one might expect, is not alone amongst the ranks of warmists who seem to revel in their own ignorance and prejudices. They just can't cope with the truth. For instance, this one not untypically declares:

Clearly it doesn't matter that the poorly-dubbed "Amazongate" claims – that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had misrepresented research on warming impacts on the Amazon rainforest – turned out to be completely baseless, that the IPCC was entirely correct, and that the story was subsequently withdrawn with an apology by the UK Sunday Times; in the world of the climate denier, it lives on as if it were all true.

The charge that the "Amazongate" claims are "completely baseless" can, of course, only survive in the context of wilful ignorance. Such are the wonder of Google and other search machines that it is simplicity itself to check the state of play before making such claims.

But, as with George Monbiot who could not bring himself properly to examine the evidence, leading him to make the unfounded charge that "Amazongate" relied on a mistaken view of the Rowell and Moore text, these people so often shut themselves off the debate in order to sustain their viewpoints.

Alarmingly, we see it right across the board, even in such august publications as theEconomist, which ponderously examines the recent Dutch evaluation of the IPCC's report, without once mentioning "Amazongate". With blinkers firmly in place, thus are the warmists able to focus on their destination without being distracted by conflicting evidence.

Each place we look, we see the same identikit arguments, the same narrative. They even use the same links to the same limited warmist sources, coming to the same conclusions, all relying on a narrowness of vision and a rigorous exclusion of unwanted evidence. 

One has to go to the saner realms of Watts up with that and his more detailed post to realise how off the wall these people are. It is there, rather than in the warmist tracts, that we find the Max Planck Institute suggesting that tropical vegetation is far less reliant on rainfall than has been supposed, its press release telling us:

From a global point of view, however, water is the factor which has the strongest effect: over 40 percent of Earth's vegetated surface plants photosynthesize more when the supply of water increases, and less during droughts. In temperate grasslands and shrublands, the amount of carbon dioxide which plants fix as sugar depends to 69 percent on their water supply, in the tropical rain forest this figure is only 29 percent. 

The researchers call the amount of carbon dioxide which ecosystems annually take up primary production. "We were surprised to find that the primary production in the tropics is not so strongly dependent on the amount of rain," says Markus Reichstein. "Here, too, we need to therefore critically scrutinize the forecasts of some climate models which predict the Amazon will die as the world gets drier."

We did not need that to tell us that the warmists have been grossly exaggerating the effects of climate on the Amazon, with the biggest threats to the forest being human intervention, through logging, clearance for farming and the rest. But this is another piece of the mosaic which supports that contention. 

That the warmists have been playing fast and loose with the science, however, comes as no surprise and another piece of that mosaic is supplied by the American Thinker. It describes a scenario which indicates that Andy Rowell, the lead author of the WWF report on which the IPCC relied for its Amazon claim, has "form" when it comes to rather vague referencing of his work.

Further, it would appear that Rowell is less than impressed with the need for peer review, regarding it as an undesirable restraint to promulgating activist views. That perhaps explains why he is happy to go to print himself without bothering with such restraints.

Unsurprisingly, the WWF, which hired the man to write its report, was less than happy with his description as a green campaigner with "little scientific expertise", but now seems perfectly content with the description, "experienced environmental journalist", as if that was sufficient to qualify him to offer evidence to the IPCC. But then, this is an organisation which is turning lying into an art form.

Today, however, we will be at the mercy of many experienced environmental journalists, who will be offering their views on the Muir Russell whitewash inquiry. Ironically, Climate Depot has picked up on Booker's cry: when will the truth be told. Courtesy of these "experienced environmental journalists", we will get a partial answer: not today.

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Death threats galore - by Richard... Tuesday, July 06, 2010

The Guardian is selling us a sob story about how our brave climate scientists have suffered a surge of death threats and other unpleasantness, following the release of the "Climategate" e-mails.

Why this should be news is questionable – except that we are to hear the results of the Muir Russell whitewashinquiry tomorrow, so the paper is quite obviously warming up for the event.

Describing itself as leading the way in environmental reporting, the paper argues that "Global warming remains a great threat to humanity". This is why, it tells us, "we have placed the issue at the top of our editorial agenda."

And that made its site, environmentguardian.co.uk the most popular environment site in the world in September 2009. Currently it is the largest green website in the UK, while the number of unique users between July to March 2010 more than doubled to 19.1 million, compared with the 9.2 million the same period the year before.

With that sort of market penetration, you wonder why the warmists are getting so paranoid about losing the argument, except that a large proportion of people coming onto the site are probably sceptics who are only there to mock. With Gerald Warner and Delingpole both at it, even 19 million users leaves them struggling.

Perhaps sceptics also ought to be getting death threats ... except that they are.

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In sorry hands - by Richard...

Lord Marland, the parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department of Energy and Climate Change,is telling us:

We think that climate change is one of the biggest issues to confront the nation. We are putting green awareness on the front of our agenda. We are going to be the greenest Government who have existed and we intend to deliver policies to show so.

This was yesterday during starred questions in the Lords, when the Lord Lawson brought up the so-called Wigley Report, officially known as the Report by the Green Investment Bank Commission on "Unlocking investment to deliver Britain’s low carbon future".

On the basis of this, Lawson claimed that, "meeting the requirements of the absurd Climate Change Act will cost the United Kingdom £50 billion a year, every year, for the next 40 years." He then went on to ask: "How-above all in this age of austerity-can this possibly be justified?"

Actually, the noble Lord got it wrong, although the reality is bad enough. What the report says is:

£800 billion to £1 trillion of investment is required by 2030 to replace, upgrade and decarbonise Britain’s infrastructure. This £40 to £50 billion annual requirement substantially exceeds the historical average and is on a scale not seen since reconstruction after the Second World War.

This is a combination of fantasy and stupidity on a heroic scale. Lawson is not wrong about the age of austerity, and what this excuse for a government is proposing is a scale of expenditure roughly ten times that which is needed to renew the entire electricity infrastructure, purely in pursuit of its obsession on climate change.

And if, by the reckoning of Wigley, we are embarking on a level of investment not seen since reconstruction after the Second World War, we are talking about the rebuilding programme following the Battle of Britain and the Blitz which was about to play itself out almost exactly 70 years ago. That is the measure of the stupidity we are dealing with and the enormity of the waste.

We are in sorry hands – the hands of morons.

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Intellectual honesty - by Richard...

A fine piece of rhetoric finds its way into the first comment on Watts up with that, the piece about the current ice extent:

The main stream media has no intellectual honesty. All they have is talking points that the commentators regurgitate from the teleprompter written by their corporate overlords. It's good to see the MSM dying a free market death. Long live the alternative media.

Ruminating (or fulminating if you like) about the shoddy reporting on the Dutch reportabout the IPCC, one can only agree, especially the last sentence. If it was not for the blogs, particularly, our world would be a very different – think would it would be like if we had to rely on intellectual dwarfs like Richard Black (or "Godzilla" as Biased BBC calls him) for our news and comment, without the opportunity to fight back.

These are now interesting times, as The Times hides behind its paywall in the hope that it can turn a small proportion of its readers into profitable "customers", while the rest of the newspaper industry watches with bated breath, in the hope that Murdoch can pull it off.

The retreat of the newspapers and the general inadequacy of the broadcast media should create a singular opportunity for us, as readers increasingly look elsewhere. So it is interesting to see the Ruminations of Raedwald on the state of the blogosphere, contrasted with his latest post on how The Daily Mail got a story right.

This sort of underlines the fact, as I keep saying, that the blogs and the newspapers are complementary. We need both, developing a symbiotic relationship where we all play to our strengths. I spose a fair division of labour would be that they could do the crap while we do the "honesty" bit and moan about it. As for the slime in the BBC, they just keep ripping us off.

Unless you know different, that is.

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The big, fundamental questions - by Richard...

I cannot recall any period in my life when I have been less interested in the activities of them in Westminster. Yet, it seems, the evil Clegg is pratting around with his obsession over fixed term parliaments, dissolution rules and sundry other displacement activities.

He is, for instance, also messing about with the voting system and planning a referendum on what is called the AV system. My indifference to this is matched only by the indifference of the rest of the population.

Nevertheless, the irony of being offered a referendum for something we don't want, and being refused one for something we do – a referendum on the EU – has not escaped us. Clegg thinks this will give the electoral system "a new legitimacy". In fact, the insult simply reinforces the detachment of the political classes from the rest of us. 

Therefore, unable to take this preposterous child seriously, one begins to dwell on the "big, fundamental questions" - but not those on which the deputy prime thingy constantly pronounces. These become more and more urgent every time we see him stand up in the Commons: is his body too big for his head – or is his head too small for his body? 

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