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I am going with my son to the Royal Institution on Friday to hear the debate between Roger Pielke, Jr, and Bob Ward, of LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (Bob Ward recently starred in a Samizdata post by Brian Micklethwait). The debate is titled ‘Has Global Warming increased the toll of disasters?’ Not hard to guess Bob Ward’s answer. A flavour of Pielke’s position is given by this extract from a Wall Street Journalopinion piece (not by him) from last June. According to the WSJ, a report by the Global Humanitarian Forum (prop. Kofi Annan) warns:
that climate change-induced disasters, such as droughts and floods, kill 315,000 each year and cost $125 billion, numbers it says will rise to 500,000 dead and $340 billion by 2030. Adding to the gloom, Mr. Annan predicts ‘mass starvation, mass migration, and mass sickness’ unless countries agree to ‘the most ambitious international agreement ever negotiated’ at a meeting this year in Copenhagen.
To which Pielke Jr replies:
… ‘To get around the fact that there has been no attribution of the relationship of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions and disasters,’… the Annan ‘report engages in a very strange comparison of earthquake and weather disasters in 1980 and 2005. The first question that comes to mind is, why? They are comparing phenomena with many ‘moving parts’ over a short time frame, and attributing 100% of the resulting difference to human-caused climate change. This boggles the mind.’
Doubtless he will be boggling our minds on Friday along these lines.
I did not realize untill I started writing this post that RPj and Ward had such a long history with each other. Just lately there has been massive to-ing and fro-ing between the two of them on RPj’s blog. Ward helped with the notorious report produced by the boss of the Grantham Institute, the Baron Stern of Brentford. The report just took a serious hit from Pielke, for silently correcting an important number in a table after publication:
Interestingly, it looks like Stern chose to change the report rather than issue an Errata. Either way (though an errata would have been more proper from an academic standpoint), the issue lies not with a typo, but what problems are revealed once the typo is corrected. … Correcting the typo does not make the analysis correct, just obviously wrong… None of this excuses altering a published government report quietly and without notice, after its publication and wide dissemination.
Bob Ward does not hesitate to use the ‘vested interest’ smear against opposition. There is an interesting piece on the Grantham Institute’s own vested interests at Climate Resistance.
This is going to be interesting. What a change there has been in the climate-change climate these last few months!
Tiger Airways flight 308 (Singapore – Hanoi). Jan 31, 2010.
Just out of interest, although this couple were watching a movie together on an iPhone screen in an impressive display of marital harmony, they did have his and hers iPhones regardless. Perhaps even more impressively (if you are Steve Jobs, anyway) all five people in my row on the plane were at one point using iPhones or iPod touches simultaneously. I think all of us would have our experiences enhanced using the larger tablet.
On the other hand, Apple victim as I am, I don’t think I will be getting one myself. For me, the killer issue is the lack of an SD card slot. Normally, I travel with a netbook, and I am constantly taking photographs and backing them up. I do not want additional accessories that I have to remember to bring with me and can lose along the way. I certainly do not want additional accessories that have proprietary Apple connectors and that I cannot replace in obscure shops in strange parts of the world. No SD slot but works with USB card reader = annoyance. No SD slot and card reader with proprietary connector = deal breaker.
This is a shame, because iPad as media player, web browser, and photo management tool that would import my photos to iPhoto and then sync with my Mac when I got home would be great.
Plus there is the small matter of VLC and a bit-torrent client, which for unstated reasons that are fairly obvious, are much more useful to me when on the road than when at home, but let’s not mention that. This may be less of a deal breaker, as I suspect there are teams of jailbreakers and hackers on the job already.
The Channel Four report on the issue can be seen here on their internet TV viewer (which ought to be called the FourPlayer, but is regrettably known as Channel4OD). Their report is clearly from a green perspective, but does at least cheer us all up with a snippet from the Hide the Decline video.
Choice quote from Bob Ward “if you are less than transparent then people think you might be hiding something”. To which one is tempted to respond that if you say you are hiding something, people might also conclude that you are hiding something. Like a decline for example.
Before Christmas, the Bishop (aka Andrew Montford) talked with me over the phone. Be warned that there are some seriously annoying clicks right at the start of this, but after a couple of minutes they go away and the remaining half an hour or so is okay. That caveat aside, listen to that here.
Someone called Andrew K is using the excellent Bishop Hill’s blog to help him to compile a database of environment correspondents, complete with educational qualifications or lack of them. Says Andrew K of this project:
This is as much as anything an appeal for information: to do a little crowdsourcing.
Commenter MikeE is not sure he likes the tone of this post:
… I am not sure I like the tone of this post.
Yes, interesting. One of the biggest frauds in the whole history of our species is still being attempted, but don’t let’s be too nasty to the newspaper cheerleaders still trying to promote it. Let’s not get the tone wrong. I say that Andrew K’s tone is spot on.
Bishop Hill himself defends his guest-blogger:
One of the most interesting aspects to the history of AGW is the sheer unquestioning awfulness of the media coverage. This is an attempt to explain that phenomenon, and is not unreasonable.
Well, I think it goes beyond that. This is indeed quite nasty, as MikeE says, but only in the same sort of way that a prison sentence is nasty for a criminal. It is nasty but thoroughly deserved. Nasty but still the exact right thing to do. Just as I am in favour of prison sentences for criminals, I am also thoroughly in favour of the spotlight being shone on these (mostly) ridiculously unquestioning environmental correspondents. I said when Climategate first broke that once the “science” had been given a good seeing to, then next in line would be people like the idiot journalists who had been passing this “science” on with such enthusiastic credulity, them being a big part of the story itself. Excellent. What a difference an internet makes, eh?
So, if you can help with relevant information, please go to the Bishop’s blog and provide it. Comments about the general goodness or badness of compiling lists of bad people can go wherever that makes sense to commenters. Personally, as I say, I am all for it.
The weather is cold and snowy in Britain just now – even, now, in central London – but people like Richard North are actually quite enjoying this:
It is global warming here again, and it is getting serious. It is not so much the depth, as the repeated falls. Each layer compacts and freezes which, with fresh global warming on top becomes lethally slippery.
Time was, what with the AGW crowd pretty much completely controlling the agenda, when this kind of elegant mockery would be dismissed as the ignorance of the uninitiated. But the fact is that the present wintry weather is extremely significant in this debate. True, the weather today is not the climate for the next century, but sooner or later weather does turn into climate, and the weather has, from the AGW point of view, been misbehaving for a decade. Their precious Hockey Stick said that the temperature of the globe would disappear off the top right hand corner of the page, right about now. Well it hasn’t, has it?
As John Redwood recently asked Ed Miliband in the House of Commons, concerning the present very cold weather:
… which of the climate models had predicted this?
None, it quickly became clear from Mr Miliband’s faltering reply, that Mr Miliband has been paying any attention to (although other sorts of models have predicted cold winters rather successfully).
But this is not just about looking out of the window and seeing if global warming is to be observed or not (as Richard North well understands). The other point here is the authority of the people upon whom people like Ed Miliband have been relying. Not only have none of Miliband’s “experts” (sneer quotes entirely deliberate) been able to predict the recent succession of colder winters; it goes way beyond that. The point is: these experts assured the world, or allowed their more ignorant followers to assure the world, that these cold winters would not happen, and despite all their protestations now about how weather is not climate, well, shouldn’t they have born this in mind when saying, only a few short years ago, and repeating ever since, that winter snow in places like Britain would be a thing of the past? Should they not have been more careful about seizing upon any bursts of warm weather, any bursts of weather of any kind, come to that, as evidence of the truth of global warming? Had they truly understood the point that they have been reduced to making now, they would have been a lot more modest in their recent, and in Britain economically disastrous, medium range predictions. See also, John Redwood’s follow up posting. Redwood is now talking more sense about the world’s climate than the British Met Office. → Continue reading: Cold wars
In a recent discussion on climate change I mentioned what I call the coming carbon collapse, that point at which human generated carbon emissions go to zero or even negative. If you wondered what I was talking about, here is just one of the technologies roaring down the tracks at us in 2010, brought to you courtesy of the Hero of the Capitalist Revolution who beat the socialist Human Genome Project to completion.
I just noticed an interesting set of musing about Professor Shahriar Afshar, wondering fearfully what theorist will do if the Large Hadron Collider fails to find the mysterious Higgs Boson:
The controversial physicist, whose Afshar experiment has already found a loophole in quantum theory, said that unless the scientific community starts contemplating a “plan B”, failure could lead to “chaos and infighting”.
He said failure will undermine more than a hundred years of scientific theory and undermine some of the mainstays of scientific thinking, the Standard Model, a general theory of how particles fit together to create matter. It would also lead to bitter recriminations and infighting among the different scientists and a complete loss of confidence among the general public and taxpayer, he said.
This made me wonder if not finding the Higgs Boson would necessarily be a Bad Thing if it means Big Science is less likely to get the hapless taxpayer on the hook to pay for the latest research toys. But more importantly, also makes me wonder why scrapping a failed theory (if that is how it turns out) and seeking to come up with better ones is grounds for such trepidation. What the good professor sees as “chaos and infighting” sounds like fresh opportunities for intellectual enquiry to me, but then I do not have any tax funded sacred cows in danger of getting defunded. Just sayin’.
I have waited awhile to chuck my tuppence into the ‘Climategate’ ring as I am not a true believer and have preferred to see how things played out over time. I personally favour the hypothesis that humans are causing some climatic effects but I do not believe the evidence is sufficient to prove my opinion correct. I have an open mind towards those who are weakly opposed, which is to say those who are waiting on data to prove me wrong. If one were to place my opinions on a dartboard, I would fall pretty close to the one labeled Bjorn Lomborg.
I am far more worried about the collateral damage the CRU researchers have caused. Their machinations, exposed by these ‘Pentagon Papers’ of the oughties, is damning and damaging to public trust in science. It opens the door to all sorts of pseudo-science by making their expositors appear superficially to be as trustworthy as the real thing. This is bad. This is very bad.
‘Climategate’ is not the first case of serious scientific fraud in recent years but may be the most damaging and far reaching one. Other well known cases included South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk who falsified his work on cloning and Bell Labs Physicist Jan Hendrik Schön who faked results in numerous papers. Schön used the same fake graph, with modified labels, in three totally different papers. That was just a starter. His massive misdeeds caused a gravity wave ripple through the Physics world as every paper citing his work had to be reconsidered.
Since all CRU citations must now be treated as problematic, the potential of ‘Climategate’ is not a ripple but a terrible and destructive tsunami. The researchers responsible for this have set their field back by years and should be disciplined by their peers accordingly. Cleaning primate cages is too good for them.
A second facet of ‘Climategate’ is the reported shortcomings in the model code base. Part of the document release included source code. In a discussion with Rand Simberg over breakfast in LA earlier this month I heard that some very knowledgeable open source programmers are having a go at it. If half of what he told me turns out to be true, the models used by IPCC are worse than useless.
I have several times in my career translated serious numerical modeling code from Fortran to modern languages and thus had to deal with the issues of validating the results. In the real world mistakes cost money and sometimes lives. Most recently I translated some aerodynamics code for a New Space company. I spent weeks doing nothing but validating and checking to be sure the output was reasonably trustworthy for questions within the realm of interest. When Rand told me the CRU model code did not even handle numeric overflows I was speechless.
Let me explain. Computers represent numbers in binary. Any signed representation (ie one that handles plus and minus) will use some formatting trick to differentiate the two. The problem is, if a positive number gets incremented to be one bit too big… it may suddenly become a negative number. Regardless of what does happen, any calculation using the value after an overflow might as well be a random number generator. The results are totally, utterly worthless. There is not a chance in hell that the output will be meaningful.
There are ways of dealing with this sort of thing but I will not go into that sort of techno-detail here. My goal is simply to point out that if the statements I heard are true, I must cease to believe the validity of any output from CRU and CRU related models.
There is really only one acceptable way for the field to recover credibility and reinvigorate trust. The code for models must all be made open source. It must be released into the public domain where experts in numerical programming can openly argue about the validity of the code, the mathematical techniques and the mathematical and physical simplifications and assumptions it contains.
I will no longer believe results which lack this corroboration. If an author refuses, I am going to assume they have misdeeds to hide.
Early in this article I said I lean towards pro on the hypothesis of human caused climate change. I should expound upon that a bit more. It is my belief that we are causing some change at present and if things went on as they are now there might be some serious, but not civilization threatening results.
However, things are not going to stay the same. A collapse in carbon output is going to occur and the reasons for it have nothing to do with cap and trade or Copenhagen or any other State or NGO foisted crisis plan. By the middle of this century liquid fuels such as gasoline will be generated using the Fischer-Tropsch process in some updated form. It will be carbon neutral because part of the feedstock will be free for the taking: atmospheric CO2. It will be split using either grid power, mechanical nanotechnology or genetically modified algae (some of which is purportedly working already). With the addition of energy, CO2 -> CO + O, and the Carbon Monoxide may be fed into the same FT process that was used to fuel the Nazi war machine. Towards the end of World War II this was nearly the only source of fuel available to Germany. Anyone who believes this technology is unproven on an industrial scale is simply historically ignorant.
Carbon based grid power is already declining as a relative portion of US energy (30% according to a recent SciAm article). I expect that decline to accelerate as use of ever cheapening and ever improving solar panels really starts to bite. We will also see inputs from Space Based Solar Power growing explosively by 2050. New technology nuclear and perhaps even game changing wild cards like Polywell Fusion will be taking up major roles by then as well.
If you toss in the huge impacts nanotechnology will have on all facets of technological civilization and the expected population decline in the second half of the century one begins to wonder exactly what will be the climate change problem of 2100? If human CO2 inputs collapse and population declines what climatic impact will the modeling of that scenario show?
There is yet another wildcard to consider. What if we are about to hit a Maunder type solar minimum? There is debate on this issue but it is certainly not closed. Such a decline could cover any human global warming until long after we have transitioned to more modern energy sources.
We need Climate Science to cleanse itself of political hacks. Young scientists must learn that Science cannot save Politics… but Politics can certainly ruin Science. Let scientists generate science and leave politicians to deal in the realm of opinion and ‘what people want’.
When an argument is being won and lost, the retreating team does not issue statements saying: By gad, you were right and we were wrong, sorry and all that, we’ll try not to let it happen again. No, the way you spot a victory and a defeat is when you see bits of bullshit (linked to rather admiringly, on account of the piece not being complete bullshit throughout, from here) like this from the Los Angeles Times:
The real scandal illustrated by the e-mails is not that scientists tried to undermine peer review, fudge and conceal data, and torpedo competitors, but that scientists and advocates on both sides of the climate debate continue to claim political authority derived from a false ideal of pure science. This charade is a disservice to both science and democracy. To science, because the reality cannot live up to the myth; to democracy, because the difficult political choices created by the genuine but also uncertain threat of climate change are concealed by the scientific debate.
Actually that is pretty much exactly what the real scandal was, except that they missed out the bit about sabotaging the entire world economy.
But allow me to draw your particular attention, just in case you missed it, to this bit:
… scientists and advocates on both sides …
Position one: Our guys are right and your guys are wrong. Position two: Yes, it’s true that our guys are wrong, but … but … so are your guys! “If we have the decency to admit that our bad guys are bad, now that your good guys are proving it, can’t you at least be a sport and say that your good guys are bad also?”
No.
How, exactly, do the AGW sceptics “continue to claim political authority derived from a false ideal of pure science”? How has their conduct earned them the insult of being part of a “charade”? How have the sceptics been undermining science? Or democracy? There has been a charade. But the sceptics are busily unmasking it, and replacing it with truth.
This is a classic retreat from fraudulent moral superiority to fraudulent moral equivalence.
Once again, as so often in this ruckus, I’m thinking: Cold War. “Yes indeed, Communism is not working very well and many of the communists are very bad people, but capitalism and those who support it are no better …” No, communism was indeed a catastrophe, but capitalism was and is colossally, world-transformingly better. I despised the fraudulent army of anti-anti-communists then, and I despise the fraudulent and soon-to-be-huge army of anti-AGW-sceptics now.
James Delingpole delivers the goods on the latest blow against AGW alarmism. It has come from Russia. The story is not quite so “John Le Carre” as the theory put up recently by Sean Gabb, however.
Following on from Brian’s post immediately below this one, is what can only be described as an encouraging story by Bloomberg, stating that the chances of a deal being agreed by world leaders in Copenhagen are remote. Excellent if true.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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