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There is a nice exposé in the Telegraph indicating that tax money and the tax funded BBC are funding key people and institutions in the warmist/environmental movement. The article provides a useful who’s-who of establishment figures with their snouts in the public trough… …but what a pity they did not just read the indispensable Biased-BBC blog because the Telegraph could have written this exposé more than a year ago. April 24th, 2011 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
 During a discussion with other board members of the National Space Society, someone noted this lecture by Albert Bartlett, a retired Physics prof. at the University of Colorado-Boulder on the subject of “Arithmetic, Population, and Energy,” After watching it, I felt a discussion was in order on how someone can say things that are absolutely correct and yet not map them correctly to the boundary conditions in the reality we actually inhabit. I had been putting this off due to an overly busy schedule but I finally had a little time free this morning and watched all eight sections. 1-6 are math; the remaining two are primarily politics. What I find wrong is what is missing. We all know how exponentials work and we all know that they do indeed stop in real life. In electronics a rising exponential means clipping, feedback, etc as the circuit response transitions from linear to nonlinear. It is also present in economics and in demographics both of which have the S curve as a fundamental form. The S is a combination of a rising exponential and a falling exponential glued together at an inflection point. This is the ‘growth’ curve that matches the Bell Curve he shows for oil production. The two are closely related mathematically.The inflection point on the S-curve is the peak on the Bell. A very big missing fact in his discussion is that population growth peaks in the mid to late part of this century by all the demographic studies I have seen. I was part of a University wide collection of summer seminar givers on this subject at CMU back in the early 1980’s (I presented in one course on the implications of the space option naturally). The UN projections that were part of our study guide showed a family of curves of which we seem to have followed the lower growth curve in the ensuing decades. Even then it was known that the biggest factor reining in population growth is women’s education and per capita wealth. One could even say the faster economies of the third world grow, the sooner they are likely to get through the demographic transition (ie the S curve in populations) and the lower their final population will be. Europe went through the transition a century ago; the US in perhaps the 40’s (I would have to research that timings, I do not remember them precisely). China has gone through it also now and the population is still going up only because there is a coasting phase due to previous growth. In the terms I used earlier, they have passed the inflection point of the S curve or the peak of the Bell Curve. Europe faces a collapsing population, a falling exponential, something that was not really predicted 30 years ago. Russia has a demographic disaster on its hands. Very few places still show population growth and those are primarily in the Middle East. It is no surprise this an area dominated by a culture where women are allowed the least control of their lives and bodies and are least likely to be educated. The good professor also ignores economics although they show indirectly in his curve. Economics, not a bunch of self-congratulatory tree huggers, is the driving force behind a growing efficiency in products or the useful part of that efficiency at least. The market gives a price signal on a resource; capitalists then innovate to find ways to do the same with less or with different so they can make more money. This was the most important message from Julian Simon’s writings. I found it interesting how he went out of his way to denigrate Julian Simon rather than engage the very real ideas Simon espoused. Most notable was the uncomfortable fact of the bet Simon won against Paul Erlich on the declining real price of resources. Perhaps the difference is that Simon’s world is one in which nonlinear dynamics rule. Simple linear models of classical physics are simply not a good model for economics or civilizations over the long term. So, absolutely, long term exponential growth would be a bad thing if it ever really happened. But it will not. Population on the planet will stabilize; per capita use of resources will rise for a while after that until everyone in the world comes up to the wealth level of us hated capitalist Americans who have the temerity and the creativity to make our lives better than those with crap governments and worse cultures. They will emulate us, not vice versa. Market signals and competition will drive down the per capita use of resources and the energy per unit of production; if we get lots of solar power satellites the actual energy per capita may go way, way up… but not necessarily as an exponential, or at least not one that runs for a long period of time. I foresee stable planetary populations living at levels of wealth beyond the wildest dreams of our most creative billionaires. Since I just saw “Atlas Shrugged” yesterday afternoon, I very much hope we do not make our billionaires go on strike. They are the ones who make real things happen. Without the generations of their kind we would all still be spending our days watching the backside of a mule. April 17th, 2011 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yesterday I received a spam-email, with a link to this, which begins thus:
And the Gadarene Swine are moving towards the cliff edge with abysmally insufficient urgency. Later:
Once again, we observe that Law about how, when you name a government department after some problem, this guarantees that the problem will only get worse. All of which just goes to show the power of momentum. The mere arguments in favour of such policies have taken a hammering during the last year or two, and I daresay that the event that this piece of spam was alerting me to won’t have quite the buzz that its organisers had been wanting when they first set it up. Doubts – in the form of puzzled and angry questions about what to do about the rising tide of climate denialism, but doubts nevertheless – may be heard during it. And that matters, because unless there is global unanimity on this issue, curbing some of the CO2 emissions of little old Britain will be so extremely pointless as actually to seem somewhat pointless to some of those who favour such a policy. But, too many bets have been placed, too much Green Money is now swilling around, for this foolishness to end at all soon.
In other words, this Good Cause is now deep into the racket phase. Which means that the end is in sight, but not before a lot more money has been given to some very undeserving people. April 13th, 2011 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
From – where else – The Guardian: Bolivia enshrines natural world’s rights with equal status for Mother Earth
The first comment to the Guardian piece said, “So much for evolution.”
Votes for bacteria now!
With the newly-enfranchised bacteria supporting him, I’m not surprised.
Nice to see Bolivia following April 11th, 2011 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
Computer modellers have long been accused of inventing extreme weather events at some deliberately vague point in the future. But here is an Australian story about how another kind of modelling invented extreme weather conditions at an exact moment in the recent past, that other forms of actual measurement didn’t register.
But:
This is no mere academic spat. SEQW’s allegedly flawed decision making contributed hugely to the serious flooding that recently hit Queensland.
The modelling-trumps-measurement vibe to all this is the reason that climate skeptics like Anthony Watts are already onto this. Delingpole hasn’t yet had a gloat about it all, but doubtless he will, because this just begs to be amplified into a big story, of the sort that the world’s Old School Media will either run with, or make further climate-prats of themselves by ignoring. March 29th, 2011 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
March 27th, 2011 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is 8:30 pm in London and ‘Earth Day’ has begun. Every single light in our house and garden have now been turned on. March 26th, 2011 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have worked in government for 28 years as an economist, and for the last 20 years I have worked on environmental programs. In that time I have not seen a shred of evidence to justify global warming, let alone man made global warming and I have not seen a shred of evidence that there is going to be a green economic boom. The only evidence I have seen is that there is a green economic bust, that money invested in green technologies is usually wasted and simply consumes investment that could be better used elsewhere. I think that anybody in government or industry who can not understand this is either dishonest, stupid, or both. That applies to Cameron – I think he is both. – A comment on a Christopher Booker article. Bishop Hill already has this as his quote of the day, but I think it really deserves to get around. It is often assumed by opponents of big government that all those on the government payroll are automatic believers in big government, because it suits them to be. But it just doesn’t follow. They may start out believing in big government, but what they then learn when part of big government may cause them to have second thoughts. LATER: Yes, I have demoted this posting, as it were, basically by pretending that this went up an hour sooner than it really did. This is because I have been updating the posting that is now next, and because I consider that posting, although no more important than this one, to be be more urgent. March 13th, 2011 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Caroline Lucas MP, Britain’s only, (or “first” as the Guardian puts it) Green Party MP, writes “Scrapping the fuel duty rise will hurt Britain economically”. In the article she says,
A commenter called Fomalhaut88 pointed out one strange aspect of her article at 12.53AM. He or she wrote,
Some words from Ms Lucas that occur a line or two down are even more bizarre:
Spot the error in this sentence. I have put the relevant bit in bold to make it easier for you. I don’t really think you need that help in spotting such an absurdity, of course. But by Gaia, some people do. March 12th, 2011 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Did Steve Holliday, Chief Executive of the National Grid, let the cat out of the bag or deliberately set it amongst the pigeons when he said, on Radio 4 last week, that our National Grid is going to have start being “smarter” about who gets electricity and who doesn’t? Delingpole reckons he’s an imbecile, and maybe he is. I didn’t hear the actual Radio 4 interview, so do not now know if he was blurting out an embarrassed admission or proud proclamation of inanity, or on the other hand offering a more careful and considered warning, thus to alert politicians to the consequences of their excessive policy greenness of recent years. Whatever the old school newspapers (that story, by the way, says that Delingpole is right) make of this story, it is already going walkabout in the new media. Slowly, the counter-attack against global greenery is taking shape. First it was Climategate, which is now, finally, finding its way inside the heads of the kind of people who rule the world. The scientific excuses for greenery are collapsing, not just in the heads of skeptics, but in the heads of the kind of idiot politicians who originally accepted these excuses without bothering to scrutinise them. Now the consequences of greenery are becoming clearer. Blackouts. Nothing says “failed politicians” like power cuts. For Britain, a big moment will arrive when it is finally, truly accepted, by enough British people to make this acceptance stick, that these blackouts are being imposed upon us by, and by means of, the European Union, and that our Prime Minister is not our Prime Minister, any more than the District Commissioner of your province in India was your District Commissioner. Today, the news is, yet again, that David Cameron is going native. I’ll believe this when it starts having consequences, in the form of Britain doing things that the EU forbids, and when they threaten to chuck us out, and when Cameron says: go on then, I dare you. I wouldn’t put this past him. He seems to be the kind of leader who follows his followers. But, more generally, I am not angry about this tendency for the world more and more to be ruled as a single entity by the kind of people who now rule it. Telephones and atom bombs have seen to that. The former technology has long meant that they can talk to each other rationally, and the latter one has for more than half a century meant that they must. These people are now, more and more, all on the same side. I just wish they were ruling the world rather better than they actually actually are now ruling it. In the matter of greenery, the world’s rulers have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate a huge folly, and personally I am very grateful to the probably imbecilic Steve Holliday for having made this fact that little bit clearer. March 8th, 2011 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you are interested in seeing the polemics around climate giving way to improved climate science – and lets face it, a lot of the comrades around here find the polemics more fun – do not miss the storm being kicked up by Judith Curry on her blog Climate Etc. Curry is ‘Professor and Chair’ of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a bête noire (or at least a ‘crazy aunt’, as she puts it) of climate alarmists, as she is one of those competent insiders who keeps putting spokes in their wheels. She has three threads running on the topic of ‘Hiding The Decline’, referring to Phil Jones’s notorious Climategate email. The basic message to her fellow climate researchers is: stop trying to defend the indefensible. Some money quotes:
Referring to supposed parallels between the hockey-stick controversy and a controversy over the relationship between hurricane intensity and global temperature:
It takes courage to take on her own profession’s establishment like this. February 27th, 2011 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Remarkable developments are in train at London’s Royal Court Theatre, in the form of a play that is about climate science, but is not Watermelon propaganda. In a guest posting at Bishop Hill, Mr and Mrs Josh (Mr Josh also does the cartoons at Bishop Hill) provide a fascinating and enticing review of The Heretic, a new play by Richard Bean:
Maybe I am reading far too much into this, but this sounds like it could be something of a cultural turning point in Britain. For decades now, there has been a self-reinforcing feedback loop shutting out anything but left wing friendly dramas from the live theatre in Britain, or so it has seemed and felt to one of those who has felt shut out. No anti-lefty dramas – e.g. praising Thatcher or heroic entrepreneurs or working class vigilantes, or denouncing bossy social workers or manipulative communists or ridiculous civil servants or psychotic and tyrannical Islamists, or pointing at the state itself as the prime mover in the banking crisis – have made sense to the theatres, because the audience for such things hasn’t been there, and because writers have been disinclined even to bother writing such things. What’s the point? And because there is no non-lefty drama, the audience for such things never comes. It stays at home surfing the net or watching its preferred telly shows and movies. If it is like me, it blogs. Crucial to the willingness of another audience to show up to see this play is that it can be urged to do so on the internet, despite the major official organs of British theatre publicity, notable the BBC and the Guardian, apparently trying, just as they have tried with Climategate itself, to be very sniffy and dismissive. If a new audience does show up in strength at the Royal Court to see The Heretic, then that could result in Britain’s theatres saying: hey, I wonder if there are other non-lefty-friendly “issues” out there that we haven’t done before, because the BBC and the Guardian haven’t allowed us to? Never forget that theatre folk love a big row, provided only that the row isn’t too big, as it would be if they took at serious whack at Islam. They love to push the boundaries, not too far, but just that little bit beyond what is entirely safe. They love to make mischief, to get everyone shouting at each other. They love to take the piss out of whoever happens at any particular moment to be the pompous and hypocritical elite, because, potentially, maybe, that will sell tickets, contrive bums on seats. Okay, most British thesps are lefties themselves, but many of those lefties are theatricals first, lefties second, and in quite a few other cases, on the quiet, so I surmise, not actually proper lefties at all, really, even though they dress like lefties and talk like lefties. A earlier key moment in British theatrical history happened in the late nineteen fifties. British live theatre was then the Conservative Party at play, watching third-rate Noel Coward imitations consisting of brittle, well-dressed upper middle class chat in implausibly opulent living rooms with big floor-to-ceiling French windows at the back, centre stage. That is a caricature but not that much of one. But suddenly, or so it felt, all that was smashed to pieces by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and all that followed from it. Look Back in Anger was also, by the way, first presented at the Royal Court. Perhaps my view of all that is a bit myopic, because the nearest theatre to my home when I was a kid was the Windsor Rep, which, I seem to recall, showed third-rate Noel Coward imitations just about all the time. But I suspect I have it about right, even if those closer to theatrical happenings then had felt in their water that the Angry Young Man upheaval had been coming for some time and thus remember it as a somewhat more gradual thing. I’m not saying that The Heretic is in the same class, as a play or as a culturally explosive event, as Look Back in Anger. I haven’t seen The Heretic yet. But this new play may perhaps, with hindsight, come be seen as one of the bigger paving stones that paved the way for something that is more like Look Back in Anger. Goodness knows, Britain certainly contains plenty of anger just now. Conveniently for me, the Royal Court Theatre is in Sloane Square, which is only a longish walk or a short bus or tube ride from where I live. I’m giving a talk on Monday. As soon as that’s out of the way, I will pop around to the Royal Court and fix to see The Heretic for myself. February 12th, 2011 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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