Are you bored with Climategate? And bored with me writing about it, again and again? Yesterday, fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings told me he is. I understand the feeling, and would be interested to hear if any of our commentariat shares it, but as for me, I can’t leave this thing alone. I mean, this is now the biggest single battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, and the forces of darkness are now in definite, headlong, ignominious retreat. I for one do not feel inclined to stop shouting about that any time soon.
However, I do agree that things are now moving on, and that is what this posting is about.
I will start by saying that AGW, as an acronym, is incomplete. We should really have been talking, throughout the Climategate campaign, not about “AGW” only, but about ICAGW. As in: Immediate and Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. And a good way to describe the current state of the debate is that we are now witnessing the removal of the I from that acronym. Do you remember when earlier environmentalists also put time limits on their catastrophes? Perhaps you are so young – lucky young you – that you don’t. But I am old and I remember. In those long gone days, the big catastrophe was going to be resource depletion and overpopulation. The entire population of India was supposed to starve to death by 1980, or whenever it was. And I can recall thinking even then that this would sound a bit daft come 1981, in the event that India failed to oblige and still contained lots of people.
That failed scenario of resource depletion and overpopulation was then replaced in anti-capitalist agitpropped minds by the gradually constructed intellectual edifice that is Global Warming. But this time around, at first, once burned and now wisely shy, the agitpropmasters were careful to say that although they knew that climate catastrophe would happen, and by and by to say that we humans were causing it, and that we humans could prevent it, nevertheless it was impossible to say exactly when catastrophe would strike if their prophecy went unheeded. They were careful, that is to say, to avoid adding that I to CAGW. Sooner or later – it might happen next year, but maybe not for a couple of decades – those deadly feedback loops would go positively loopy, unless something drastic was done. Like handing the world economy over to a collectivist global government. But as to when the catastrophe would manifest itself if we failed to prevent it by mending our ways, who could say?
The more sophisticated of the CAGW-ers even said, and say now, that catastrophe might never happen. But, they then added, and add still: don’t let’s take the chance. Better safety, by taking all kinds of precautions, rather than sorry because not. And of course if unnecessary precautions are taken, and disaster then does not strike because it never was going to anyway, then we would never know of the pointlessness of the precautions. What are you doing? Scaring away elephants. But, there are no elephants. Yes, it’s working!
I for one have always accepted – indeed, as one agitpropper to another, admired – this argument. If you are in a burning building from which you must either jump dangerously or die horribly, then fretting about the potential cost of jumping, about broken limbs and so forth, is entirely beside the point. Yes, the fact that lots of people are now feeling the pinch and are now particularly reluctant to pay to prevent CAGW is true, and makes the argument now at lot easier to have, but the crucial question is: is it happening. If it is, and if we have it in our power to prevent it, then the cost simply must be endured.
But then came the Hockey Team, the IPCC, etc. They did put a date to doom. They put the I into ICAGW. They crafted a graph that disappeared off the top right hand corner the page at an actual, stated time. At the bottom right corner of their concoction there were actual numbers, referring to actual years. One of the many Hockey Team problems – apart from the small matter of it being a pack of lies – is that by now, doom was supposed to have happened, or at least to be happening. That it is unclear whether the world is now getting warmer or colder or what is itself a catastrophe for the Hockey Team, because their graph said that by now, there would be no doubt. Indeed, by predicting a catastrophe that had to happen within their own professional lifetimes, these scientists were setting themselves up for personal disaster, and potentially dragging the entire Global Warming industry with them into this disaster.
In this Guardian editorial last Saturday, we can see one of the shapes of climate battle to come.
If you don’t think you have any position to retreat to, then you stand and fight to the death. The Hockey Team, along with their most vocal fans, are now in this doomed position. But the CAGW camp as a whole is now deciding whether to back the Hockey Team or to cut them loose and concede the ground that the Hockey Team have so fraudulently occupied. This Guardian leader says to me that the high command of the Grande Armée of CAGW is now attempting a retreat in good order to a position further back, which it thinks it can hold, rather than making a futile last stand now that would only destroy them all. The CAGW camp, as they now wish to remain, losing the I but definitely keeping tight hold of the C, are now concluding that there is no future in defending the now utterly discredited Hockey Team, i.e. Mann and the East Anglians. And although the IPCC gets no mention in this Guardian leader, other CAGW-ers are already saying, with similar reluctance but similar definiteness, that the now utterly discredited IPCC will also have to be cut loose from polite society, certainly in its now utterly discredited form, as crafted during the last decade or so by the now utterly discredited Rajendra Pachauri.
In among lots of tribal nastiness about how nasty the enemy tribe is, this Guardian leader identifies the position that many CAGW-ers now intend to defend:
… the settled core of our knowledge on climate – the fact of increasing atmospheric carbon, the rising temperature trend, and the heat-trapping mechanism linking the two – …
Ah yes. “Settled.” And “peer reviewed” as well, I dare say. We shall see. Actually, the debate concerns not only that, but whether, if CO2 does indeed cause warming, that warming is caused to any great extent by humans, and above all whether, anthropogenic or not, this warming will at some future date turn catastrophic. To put it acronymically, the CAGW camp will still be fighting over all of those remaining initials. It’s not just a matter of whether CO2 is causing the W. This is the terrain of the next big battle.
Don’t get me wrong. Crushing Michael Mann and his Hockey Team, sending Pachauri packing, making the letters I, P, C and C spell L, I, E and S in the minds of all thinking people, getting the Met Office to stick to short-term weather forecasting, ripping the panda pants off the WWF – these are very important tasks. When pursuing your enemies after you have won a battle against them, it is important to ensure that as many as possible of the defeated ones do not keep any undeserved shreds of reputation with which to fight again. This is not an either/or thing. The climate skeptic blogosphere is big enough and clever enough to do it all, pushing the old media along with it (UK), or not and just replacing the old media for the duration of the battle (USA) – or the war, or for ever, for everything – as the case may be. But in among sneering at the disgraced Hockey Team, chuckling over the multiple lies and lavish living arrangements of the rascal Pachauri, and gags about how many inches of global warming have just descended upon this or that American city, we should also be getting stuck into the next fight.
I’ve done my best to include a sprinkling of decent links, to reports and to celebratory whoops from this last battlefield, but these are now potentially infinite. A few weeks ago I went on a foreign trip and was largely disconnected from the internet for the best part of a week. Since then, I have been trying and failing to catch up with Climategate. Last weekend, the story pretty much escaped from anyone’s single purview, so large and so complicated has it now become. Basically, a huge retreat in multiple directions is going on, and a huge pursuit, ditto, with CAGW defensive position after CAGW defensive position being overrun by advancing Skeptics. The IPCC citadel, its outer walls having crumbled when Climategate first broke, is now being comprehensively sacked.
Anti-CAGW-ers like me have recently been giving more attention to the Hockey Stick than to that “settled core” that the Guardian refers to, but that battle has long been joined at the merely intellectual level, just as the Hockey Stick itself was actually cut to pieces several years ago, to the satisfaction of those doing the actual cutting. What I am getting at is that this CO2 argument is going to be the next big arena of widespread media and blog conflict. More arguments, of the sort that the likes of Steve McIntyre have been engaged in for years, will now go very public. If the intellectual standards of the protagonists on each side of this battle turn out to be similar to the corresponding standards of each side in the Hockey Stick debate, as I suspect that they will, then the CAGW camp will face further multiple humiliations.
Meanwhile, now that the Hockey Team is being abandoned to its wretched fate by its own former cheerleaders, this means that we can at least hope for some quite spectacular defections from among their ranks, along the lines of: “You’re right, it was a fraud. Let me tell you all about it from the inside. Let me tell you what that felt like telling lies to other scientists, and what I thought of them and think of them for believing the lies. Amazon, £8.95.” Hollywood may not want to tell this story until the crime has been tricked out as a tragedy, so there is tragic money to chase here.
Looking further ahead, what of the CAGW camp as a whole? Might they also find themselves abandoned? What if the Global Governors decide to dispense with Greenness altogether, all Greenness? These people dumped Marxism, at any rate in public. Might they soon dump “the environment” in similar style. Again, we shall see. If the CAGW-ers start seriously losing the whole CO2 war, as they well may, what with the basic principle having now been thoroughly established that scientists can also be liars, cheats and bullies, that could well happen. This is the line that Richard North has long been taking. It was always, says he, about power and about money, and once the power and money have been accumulated, the Green Movement will have served its purpose and be left to rot.
Trouble is, much of the money involved is based on demonising CO2. And if they (a somewhat different “they” now) do retreat entirely from Greenness, what argument will these villains then retreat to? What other excuses for their villainy will they be able to seize upon and proclaim? Where will they find new “experts” to serve their purposes? One of the reasons why the CO2 battle looks to me like it could get nasty is that it is now hard to see where the Global Governors could then retreat, if they lose that one. No doubt they’ll think of something. And we will all be watching out for the relevant memes.
Or maybe, they will just stop bothering with mere arguments, based on alleged facts, about alleged catastrophes that only they can save us all from. Maybe they will just say, oh to hell with arguing, let’s just tell them: we are in charge now and there is damn all you peasants can do about it. As with the EU, they will simply announce that their dominion is inevitable, and that only fools will persist in challenging it.
But this would also, I think, be a somewhat high risk tactic. These people really don’t want to be declaring themselves in unchallengeable command of the world unless and until they really are.
Brian,
between you and me, i love Climategate.
its the gift that keeps on giving.
ive gone thru 3 tons of popcorn, sat watching at ringside.
im lovin it, when the darkside get their cummupence.
Keep on going. The coverage has to be relentless to keep the forces of totalitarianism on the ropes.
Good stuff. Very timely. The contradiction of every single verifiable forecast and trend made by the CO2 alarmists by observations, and the exposure of their peer-review and policy-linked processes has been a major blow to these crooks and clowns. Their sloppy arguments re CO2 would be a good next target, but will require more technical expertise to explain why a simple theory that works for a jar of gas, can be all but irrelevant when you stick that gas on a spinning, lumpy, irregular sphere along with a lot of water and water vapour and send it in variable orbit, wobbling around a variable heat source.
Keep hitting that nail on the head. Eventually we will win.
Hi,
Good points ref withdrawl of the line. I had not thought of it in that context, but I think you are right. And yes the I and prob the C was killed in serious circles a few years back, and it has taken this long for the I to reach the MSM.
The real science now is in the papers coming forward (bizarrley through funding of AGW…which does suggest some scientists want to get it right) such as the water vapour strato accounting for 30% of the ‘warming’ which came from pretty much AGW City, and of course Linzden & Choi’s question on positive/negative feedbacks. Another year or so of this stuff and the C will be debunked by ‘peer reveiwed’ science too. Which leaves just AGW. The progressing understanding of ENSO will then kill off the A leaving just GW…which is where Lomborg was half a dozen years ago. And the GW will die when the temp stats can’t be hyped up any more as all the slight of hand thermometer movements will have been completed, so there is nowhere else to go.
All good fun.
Do not stop now! This is when it gets fun: porn-novels, backstabbing, hacking, lies, conspiracies, billions of dollars… Just imagine all the books, films, articles, etc that can come out of this. If you want to make your name in the blogosphere now, this is the main seam to dig.
As people who have read military history know, it is when the rout begins that most of the casualties occur, not in the fighting. When they start running is when you hit them as hard as you can and show no mercy.
Learn the lesson from the ideological left – NEVER – give up. Mnay of us thought that Reagan and Thatcher had defeated marxism, but like a cancerous hydra the left are stronger than ever a mere twenty years later.
The left didn’t win a single argument, and their only converts amongst the masses are those bought and paid for amongst the public sector and their clients, yet here we are today lead by Obama, Brown, and the EU. They have reached their position of dominance simply by persevering. They never give up, and neither should we.
Cameron, Osborn, Clegg, New Tory, New Labour, and nearly all of their hangers-on are still fully committed to AGW. They don’t even acknowledge that climategate has occurred. So please don’t be fooled into thinking AGW is defeated, don’t yield to those who say they are bored with the whole topic, and don’t move on to new pastures.
You can be sure that the left will never give up.
Thanks very much for all the encouragement, most gratifying. If anyone is bored, they are keeping it to themselves, probably because if they are bored, they can just not read such stuff. Which is no problem for anyone.
I take the point about not stopping now. Speaking for myself, I am not really a fighter in this, more a camp follower/fan, cheering my preferred army on. I see my contribution now as trying to make such cheering interesting, and also truly encouraging to the real soldiers, in the event that they happen to hear me.
Re in particular David Cameron, I read something some weeks ago, I think, in which he seemed to be saying that he has already retreated from Climategate, to the general proposition that humans are emitting too much CO2, and that this must still be curbed, whatever lies the Hockey Team may or may not have been telling. He has already retreated, in other words, to the “settled core”.
I did not say in the posting, but could have, that one partial retreat that is likely soon to become prominent (once again in “tragic” mode) is that the Hockey Team are liars, yes, but noble liars. The Hockey Stick is nonsense as in premature, but its purpose was to scare people into doing the necessary, in a way that the mere truth could not have done.
The EU is cleverer than that: if you challenge it, you are evil, xenophobic, and dangerous; foolishness is a minor attribute. Expect the global governance types to add racism to the mix.
Keep up the good work.
The main details of the unfolding drama are well covered by blogs like WattsUpWithThat and Climate Depot, and I love it. But there are plenty more general issues to come which would make good threads here.
For example, there are plenty of Green issues which are worthwhile (many are rubbish of course) which have been overshadowed as AGW has achieved dominance. AGW needs to be decoupled from the public perception of major environmental problems and as John East points out this will be difficult.
Examples? How about reduction of the water table in some developed/developing countries which will put pressure on food/water supply and the consequential effect on populations?
And your “failed scenario of overpopulation” fails to take into account that quite a few third world countries are effectively Malthusian economies. In the sense of his basic premise, which he thoroughly researched (read the Essay on the Principle of Population) that population will rise to meet the food supply available. The arithmetic/geometric suggestion, which is often criticised, was merely an attempt to quantify the problem and by focusing on this the critics attempt to deny (provocative choice of words I know) the basic premise. Have we seen that somewhere else? He knew the suggestion had limited scope: ancient Rome imported much of its food from Egypt, for example. Malthus/neoMalthusians would make a good – separate! – environment thread.
Back to Climategate: keep the big issues rolling Brian.
I’m getting OT. For the anatomy of scare stories, I commend bloggers to read Mass Listeria by Theodore Dalrymple, a former prison doctor, blogger and columnist.
Just one little thing, neither ICAGW nor CAGW is an acronym (if it comes to that, nor is AGW). An acronym used to be a serious of initials forming a word, in modern usage it is a series of initials pronounced as a word (such as SCUBA or NATO). A series of initials which is neither a word nor pronounced as a word is not an acronym but an initialism.
Don’t stop!
What we need to be on top of is any form of tactical retreat, ready for another assault. We cannot let down our guard.
We must also be aware if we notice a shift to other areas such as financial markets (Tobin taxes), population, migration, food, water.
Of course, the same people who support AGW will surely turn to other gods, er, I mean concepts such as demanding we keep vast numbers of hapless humans on subsistence farming and that urbanisation is “western” and “wrong for THESE people”. How quaint. How typically ladder-kickingly cruel. How socialist.
My ancestors escaped the grinding existence that was subsistence farming/agricultural labouring. They urbanised. Why? Because it was BETTER. Who am I to deny that to my fellow humans?
I have for a number of years thought we need another Hong Kong somewhere (my mind was thinking of the African coast opposite the Canaries – close to markets of Europe and America, but not so good if bits of the island chain slide into the sea washing the entire city away…ummm). To that effect it was good to see Paul Romer talk about Charter Cities recently. I was tickled when he suggested the same size and location I had come to – 1000sqkm of coastal land. We will need over 100 of these puppies to meet demand.
Concrete futures, anyone?
The huge mistake many made after the end of the Cold War was to assume liberal values has won forever… time to stand down.
Wrong wrong wrong.
The mistake was to not drive a stake through the vampire’s heart and NOT be magnanimous in victory, but rather vindictive and utterly and completely unforgiving. When our enemies take a hit, as they did with Climategate, we need to make sure the people responsible spend the rest of their lives defined by their revealed wickedness and that it is engraved on their tombstones.
Keep writing about Climategate, Brian. Still be writing about it 10 years from now. Name the name and assign the blame, over and over and over again. Keep doing it until our enemies are all dead and buried and then write ‘CLIMATEGATE’ in piss on their grave when it snows.
This time we must never forgive and make damn sure no one can ever forget.
I suspect that Michael J feels bored partly because for him it is very familiar. Perhaps he first read about these demolitions of the hockey stick when they were scientific accounts full of algebra rather than James Delingpole blog posts with a happy smattering of swear words. To you it’s still new.
Just my off the top of my head theory, Michael, if you’re listening – feel free to tell me I’m barking up the wrong bristlecone pine!
I’m not bored. More to the point you’re not bored. Keep it coming!
On another issue, exactly what the mental state of the Hockey team was continues to fascinate me. They can’t have been simply lying. If they were just lying then they wouldn’t have set themselves up for failure by giving a definite date. But they did lie…
I agree with Natalie. I see signs that people who have been close to the debate for a long time are thinking of it as a fait accompli. But when I mention it to collegues at work they quite often have heard nothing about it. If your objective is to discredit anyone in the mind of the average person, never mind something so ambitious as to discredit the IPCC, there’s still a long, long way to go.
It seems unanimous: none of us is bored with this topic, so keep it up! Perry is correct: we need to keep at this relentlessly, until we’ve driven a stake through all their hearts. Take no prisoners, give no quarter. Completely disprove not just the “I” and “C” but also the “A” and perhaps the “W” as well. And then thoroughly discredit the idea that these were “noble liars”; unambiguously show that they were mendacious, unprincipled thieves seeking only personal gain (monetary or otherwise).
I was also going to suggest that the site of the East Anglia Institute be sown with salt, but perhaps a better monument to its colossal folly would be to construct there some sort of huge industrial plant, belching forth prodigous quantities of CO2. And be sure to name it after Philip Jones, without whose efforts it never would have come into existence.
I am not bored at all with this issue, it still remains quite fascinating.
My position is that the climate is far too complicated for anyone to predict and so the position of the doomsayers cannot be anything but absurd. I do understand that there is a theoretical link between carbon-dioxide and higher temperatures but to take this in isolation, apply it to something as complex and chaotic as the Earth’s climate and imagine that you can predict the outcome is surely absurd. Yet there are some who are 100% sure that the sky is falling, so sure that they compare those that disagree with holocaust deniers and people connected with the tobacco industry who deny that cigs cause lung cancer.
This last accusation is particularly galling as I keep being accused of being some kind of petrol head who wants to carry on driving his seven litre V8 4X4 and so is in denial. In fact I drive a small diesel car that gets close to 70 miles per gallon on long runs and grow my own vegetables.
FatBigot, I love a bit of pedantry. Well done!
I think you’re missing the motivation of the bulk of the CAGW movement – people who don’t so much have a political agenda themselves (though they are planted in the centre-left mainstream), but who still interpret climate scepticism as a cousin of creationism. When they say that we’re a well-funded denial machine that is against science, it is not just rhetoric, but is what they actually believe. (The political distinction between the Cato Institute and the Discovery Institute is not something they are equipped to notice).
They will not give up. The problem with conspiracy theories is not that they are never true, it is that they are very difficult to falsify – better contrary evidence can also be construed as evidence of the greater power of the conspiracy.
As I said on my blog, the current mood of the public probably owes more to the cold weather than the scandals, and a hot summer will set the whole bandwagon running smoothly again.
I have seen it suggested, by somebody discussing the UK Guardian’s recent volte-face, that the PR disaster management people recommend that if you’ve got a scandal on your hands, the best thing is to get it all out there in a blur of speed and get it over. Brief events pass through the news cycle and into fish wrap before it has time to make much impact on public opinion. And it makes it hard to bring up again, because everybody is ‘bored’ of old news.
Opinion has tremendous inertia, but a steady push applied for long enough can move mountains. It is what electrical engineers call a low-pass filter. And it has barely started moving – the governments are still trying to pass carbon legislation, the Met office and NASA are still trying to palm us off with more alarmism, the celebrity luvvies are still lost and bewildered and trying to get their bearings. And we’re still piled high with taxes and regulations and bins and bans and bloody windmills all over our green and pleasant land!
Tell me you’re bored of writing about taxes. Bored of writing about stupid, repressive regulations. Bored of writing about government bans. Bored of venal politicians and tranzi totalitarians and back-to-the-stone-age anti-Capitalist Malthusians brainwashing our kids. No, of course not!
And Climategate! Ahhh! Climategate is like the finest single malt whisky – 30-years matured, complex and multi-layered, distilled to a fiery concentration, and every drop of the cask to be savoured in small, delicious, damn-the-prohibitionist sips.
How can anyone possibly get ‘bored’ of it?
The climate blogs will indeed fight the battle on the science. But climate blogs are generally read by people who already know.
Another task is to get the message out there, to people who are not crazed climate-junkies but who are normal. People interested in politics and life and society generally. Samizdata should certainly not become climate-only, and I value those other topics like breaths of fresh air between immersions in the intoxicating fumes of pure Climategate. One should perhaps ration oneself to a little dram on special occasions. (Willpower! Breathe! You can do it, Pa!)
But give it up?! Go completely teetotal?!!! Never!
In short: I an not tired of it — keep it coming.
More verbosely, they’re down but they’re not out. Keep the discussion going until the killing blow has been dealt to the fake science, disinformationists, and alarmists.
The only thing I’m tired of is the [long, long string of expletives deleted] -gate suffix for every last scandal. Every last thing seems to be filtered through the prism of events that happened between the assassination of John Kennedy and the resignation of Richard Nixon.
I can’t wait for the Baby Boomers to be pensioned off once and for all.
Ted, so this is Gategate?
Something has just occurred to me after seeing something on TV.
All of the worthy deconstructions and scientific analyses carried out on climate change data and IPCC propaganda by us sceptics was appropriate and necessary, but it should come as no surprise that most of this went over the heads of the average citizen.
We will not convince the masses until we get them laughing at the pompous warmists. To this end it was fantastic to see on Fox News tonight that their New York office had stood up a copy of Al Gore’s book “An Inconvenient Truth” in the snow outside the studio. They cut to a video of this scene at various times throughout the evening, using it as a makeshift snow depth gauge.
Hilarious, and making a clear statement easily understood by all.
Yes I do agree that this flood of gates is wearisome.
And what happens when the CAGW tribe get caught telling lies about water?
How about ‘Floodgate’?
….and where any marxist tranzi scumbags are concerned, i opt for ‘Traitorsgate’
The green beast is the closest we have ever come to a totalitarian monster in my life time. To take our feet off its throat now would be criminal.
Kill the f***er !!
I was 90% unconvinced before the release of the emails.
Now the show is over for me. Occaisonally there is some further twist which is amusing, but aside from that, I am done with it.
More interesting is how long the establishment will run with AGW.
Don’t ever get bored. Pursue them relentlessly. Drive them from the Universities. Drive them from the laboratories. Drive them from the Government. Pursue them to their most secret lair. Pull down the edifice of their totalitarian dreams, and salt the earth under the ruins.
Otherwise . . . they’ll be back . . .
Scientifically, the argument on alleged anthropogenic global warming was lost decades ago — or years ago, depending on how a person wants to define the moment of death.
But politically, the battle is far from won. The leftists have not even begun to fight.
It is way too premature to claim that it is all over bar the shouting. Obama has just told NASA to give up lunar exploration to concentrate on global warming. The Brazilians are about to waste billions of desperately-needed dollars to get rid of the high CO2 content in those big offshore oil fields they discovered recently. Every day, another pristine view somewhere in the world gets permanently spoiled by the erection of yet more bird-whackers.
Follow the money, the wise heads say. The alleged anthropgenic global warming scam is still pumping money every day from the pockets of ordinary people into the pockets of the powerful & well-connected. And governments are not likely to let go easily of a source of tax revenue and regulatory interference.
Yes, the tide of battle has turned. And that is indeed exhilerating. But the battle is not yet won — and will not be won until the money stops flowing. This is not the time to lay down those metaphorical swords of truth.
http://climateprogress.org/2010/02/10/revkin-dotearth-science-wattsupwiththat-climate-sensitivity-jerome-ravetz/
Revkin replies in the comments.
Lunatic raving and argument from intimidation is the sole constituent of one narrative. If you study psychology, it’s rich material.
I commend Revkin for re-examining, or more probably actually examining the issue. He has a brain and is using it to enquire – specifically about evidence of CO2 and more specifically the A part. He may become a full apostate.
As I said to you last night, Brian, the sign of total victory is when the next Bond villain is cast as a UEA lecturer.
As I said to you last night, Brian, the sign of total victory is when the next Bond villain is cast as a UEA lecturer.
Well, the last Bond villain was a maniac posing as a do-gooder environmentalist, which I thought was a good start. He was even called Green.
In fact, thinking about it, he was posing as a pointless tree-hugger, but actually exploiting the kind of real-life environmental issue mentioned in the posts above that tree-huggers seem to ignore – water table scarcity in developing countries.
My comment about being bored with Climategate wasn’t so much an observation that I no longer want to read about it, and it certainly wasn’t an observation that I want Brian to stop writing about it, as much as an observation that I am not really in the mood to write about it myself any more. It’s still very interesting to watch the fallout slowly cascade across the media and government. Beyond the obvious – the Global Warming “scientific consensus” was never real and had to be destroyed – a thing I find so interesting about it is the complete inversion of the “We in the mainstream media do all the reporting and you on the internet only comment on our reporting” line that we got for so long. In the lengthy discussion of Climategate that Brian and I had after I said that I was bored with it, Brian said to me that he sees Climategate as the most important story in the world today. He’s likely right, and yet none of the actual reporting has been done by anyone in the old media, and everything has been done by people on the internet. If the newspapers had done a minimum of reasonable reporting in the first place rather than just swallowing press releases credulously, none of this would be necessary.
Two things:
(1) A useful summary with links to recent research undermining CO2 alarmism: http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/crumbling-pillars-climate-change
(2) The UEA should use the CRU building for a new institute to study Lysenkoism in Science. The Lysenko Research Institute would not cost much to start, just trim the top off the ‘C’ .
Brian, thanks for making my morning. But, am I alone in feeling that all this triumphalism is misplaced. AGW, like socialism, is a paper tiger or just one head of the hydra. Another head, which we are far from defeating, is “Big Government”. Following your analogy a battle has been won, but the war is another thing. My personal view is that this war exists within all people and the two combatants are: romanticism and reason. I do not want to eliminate the romantic but reason needs to heeded. We have been fortunate that, in the battles against socialism and AGW, reason has correctly been opposed to the romantic. What happens if the romantic view switches to a possible correct agenda, such as a coming ice age? If at this point “Big Government” is undefeated, we would then be in serious doodoo. When every school child knows of Julian Simon, then I might become triumphalist.
David Roberts
Also not bored. And it seems to me that the hockey team are needed to prop up the A as well. The whole point of the hockey team was to “get rid of the medieval warm period”. Without the hockey team everything looks like natural variation; only the W is left (and I have my doubts about that, too).
I don’t think the battle or the war have been won. The man on the Clapham omnibus still believes in AGW, aand the news media still spout it, businesses still use ‘low carbon’ as a selling tool and so on…
The battle among the intelligentsia is one thing, but while we still live in democracies it is the unthinking majority who still need to be convinced. I hear people mention it as a given all the time by people i don’t know, although most people I do are starting to see the light.
Of course, bien sur, I meant ‘Lysenkoism Research Unit’
I really do think we shall need something like it, but any University that appoints Muir Russell to lead an ‘independent’ inquiry, does not have the required distance from the scientific establishment at the heart of the CO2 extremism, notably the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh.
Bishop Hill reports the makeup of the Muir Russell Panel on his blog. Commenter Mac digs up interview with panel member Dr Philip Cambell talking to Chinese State Radio showing a less than impartial view of the Crugate scandal.
Channel4 website reports that Dr Philip Cambell resigns from panel.
Schadenfreude reigns supreme in blogworld.
Good article & great comments…and yes, NEVER give up pursuing the perpetrators & their myrmidons of this scam of the century….bring them to book for bleeding our economies of billions. I posed this question over at Richard North’s EUReferendum.
“What if they (the Warmistas) simply ignore us, declare victory & walk away….what then?”
You cannot have any possible doubt that this is the game-plan…and that it is dangerously possible in our brave new world where neither the EU, nor our corrupt provincial gumment…nor, FFS, your own Local Council pay the slightest attention to the taxpaying electorate or any opinion which doesn’t reflect their own.
Richard North at
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/#115444005168305521 has played, and is playing, a leading part in the exposure of the fraud which involves so many big names & organizations with unpleasant agendas.
North has no intention of letting go…and I hope the sentiment is firmly fixed here too.
Laird,
I’m with you. A nice 2 Gigawatt “Phil Jones Coal Fired Power Station” on the former site of EAU.
As for the rest as they flee in disarray, play “Deguello”.
Then again, there is no snow in Vancouver for the winter olympics
(the warmest January in history for that city) and south of the
Equator, Rio de Janeiro is having it’s hottest January in living
memory as Carnaval begin. Nothing to see here. It’s just too
bad that public statements of GW deniers aren’t held to the
exact same standards as the private e-mail of IPCC scientists.
No one can predict the future, but it’s worth keeping an eye on
the thermometer, just for fun.
–bks
@bks
Thats just ‘weather’ isnt it?
Everyone can see there’s no snow.
No-one is denying that.
But why should we have to make a leap of faith between those real events, and any connection with anthropogenic CO2?
MMCO2 Warmists make extraordinary claims which will result in fantastical impositions on everybody (except those elites making dosh out of the scam).
Therefore, they are required to present extraordinary evidence.
Private emails which indicate fraudulent activity should trigger alarm bells as to the validity of ANY evidence presented by these IPCC ‘scientists’.
bks,
A good way to show that “weather is not climate” is to plot out all the data, not just the global averages. See the bottom graph here.
This graph shows the monthly grid cell temperature anomalies (differences from the local average for time of year) after all their fudging and “adjustments”, but before calculating the global average. You can see the rise in context, and that unusually warm and unusually cool weather are both expected to continue, whichever way it goes. The spread would be even larger if it hadn’t been averaged monthly, and if you plotted actual temperatures instead of anomalies the rise would be totally invisible.
The smarter sceptics bring up the “weather as climate” thing as an ironic joke – having just watched the other side go mad every time there’s a warm summer, or the springs come a bit earlier, or a bit of ice melts in the Arctic. We know it’s rubbish, but we do it to make a point.
But for many, they’ve been taught by the media’s breathless panic that there are signs of global warming in individual local weather events, and so naturally by the same logic cold weather must be a sign that it’s stopped. The scaremongers created this false belief for their own purposes. Now they’re having to live with it.
We nominate “ocean acidification” as the next crisis du jour. As bathymetric (deep-open) magmatic episodes increase, warming waters rising to continental shelves evaporate more swiftly. Evaporation is an “air-conditioning effect” inducing high precipitation– flooding rains in summer, blizzard snows in winter. At some point, accumulating layers of snowfall become too deep to melt.
Like Wegener’s “continental drift” hypothesis, disputed from 1912 to c. 1964, our own fringe hypothesis is that Earth pulses in geophysical rhythm, contracting and expanding on minuscule but crucial scales over centuries if not millennia. On a 4,000-mile radius, lengthy cracks open regularly by (say) one part in 25,000 (850 feet). Allied with suitable plate tectonic dispositions, that will definitely suffice.
Actually, by AD 2110, we anticipate a mass-migration off-planet to giant self-contained refugia in face of uninhabitable conditions. Given well-known self-destructive tendencies, no Mus-lumps need apply.