James Delingpole is a bestselling British author and blogger who helped expose the Climategate scandal back in 2009. Reason.tv caught up with Delingpole in Los Angeles recently to learn more about his entertaining and provocative new book Watermelons: The Green Movement’s True Colors. At its very roots, argues Delingpole, climate change is an ideological battle, not a scientific one. In other words, it’s green on the outside and red on the inside. At the end of the day, according to Delingpole, the “watermelons” of the modern environmental movement do not want to save the world. They want to rule it.
September 27, 2011
ReasonTV: ManBearPig, Climategate, and Watermelons
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September 23, 2011
The cliché-meister strikes again
Andrew Ferguson reviews the book That Used To Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum. He didn’t find it a pleasant read:
Mr. Friedman can turn a phrase into cliché faster than any Madison Avenue jingle writer. He announces that “America declared war on math and physics.” Three paragraphs later, we learn that we’re “waging war on math and physics.” Three sentences later: “We went to war against math and physics.” And onto the next page: “We need a systemic response to both our math and physics challenges, not a war on both.” Three sentences later: We must “reverse the damage we have done by making war on both math and physics,” because, we learn two sentences later, soon the war on terror “won’t seem nearly as important as the wars we waged against physics and math.” He must think we’re idiots.
The slovenliness of our language, George Orwell wrote, makes it easier to have foolish thoughts, and while Mr. Friedman’s language has been tidied up a bit, the thinking remains what it has always been. The authors call themselves “frustrated optimists.” Their frustration is owing to the depredations of the last decade, which they call (Mr. Mandelbaum nods) the Terrible Twos. But self-contradiction is also part of the Friedman brand. In many other passages, the authors specifically trace the American slide to the end of the Cold War — though still elsewhere they remark that the 1990s were “positive for America.” It doesn’t help their argument, such as it is, that the evidence of decline they cite — crumbling infrastructure, a failing public-education system — predates both 2001 and 1989 by a long stretch. Our potholes and schools have been favorites of declinists for generations.
If the authors’ frustration is unoriginal and ill-defined, their optimism is terrifying. America will rebound — we will become the us that we used to be again, you might say and Mr. Friedman does — when we regain our ability to do “big things” through “collective action.” Collective action is a phrase that means “the federal government.” Among the big things that we will do are rework American industry, through regulation and taxation, to drastically cut carbon emissions. Another one of our big things is a big increase in the gasoline tax. We will also impose on us a new big carbon tax. We will use revenues to create a “clean energy” industry with millions of “green jobs” like the ones that were eliminated earlier this month at Solyndra. Readers will wonder, like the early environmentalist Tonto, “What do you mean ‘we,’ kemo sabe?”
H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.
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September 22, 2011
“A piece of half-baked speculation had simply been used without checking because, well, it seemed true enough”
Tim Black on the recent Times Atlas gaffe over the Greenland ice sheet:
For those all too inclined to believe the worst in the warmest of all possible worlds, there was no need to question the Times Atlas’s revelation. It merely told them what they already knew — that our nasty industrialised ways are destroying Earth.
But among those who actually know a little about ice sheets, the atlas’s findings were a little too much of a revelation. First up were researchers from the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, who promptly wrote to the atlas’s editors: ‘There is to our knowledge no support for this [15 per cent] claim in the published scientific literature.’ Other scientists in the field were quick to back up the Cambridge researchers. ‘The claims here’, said Graham Cogley from Trent University, ‘are simply not backed up by science; this pig can’t fly’. Others agreed. Jeffrey Kargel of the University of Arizona, principal scientist on a project involving the mapping of ice and glaciers from space, was unequivocal: ‘These new maps are ridiculously off base, way exaggerated relative to the reality of rapid change in Greenland. I don’t know how exactly the Times Atlas produced their results, but they are not scientific results.’
So how exactly did the Times Atlas cartographers produce their results? More kindly commentators have suggested that the atlas bods foolishly relied on the National Snow and Ice Data Center-maintained online resource, the Atlas of the Cryosphere. This apparently shows the thickness of the central part of the ice sheet over Greenland, but it does not show the thickness of the ice sheet’s periphery. The cartographers presumably interpreted this to mean that the peripheral ice did not exist — that it had melted. Other critics have been less generous, with one suggesting they might have been just a little too reliant on that bastion of truth, Wikipedia.
While it’s fun to pile on when a respected publication gets caught out trying for sensation instead of presenting facts, Black also sounds a note of caution:
Yet such over-eager triumphalism on the part of climate-change sceptics is misplaced. This is not because advocates of climate change are not frequently making mistakes. And it is not because the climate-change narrative, demanding so many facts to fit its story of manmade doom, is not fundamentally flawed. No, the problem with celebrating every scientific, factual refutation of the climate-change thesis as the beginning of the end for what remains the dominant narrative of our times, despite growing public indifference, is that climate change is not primarily a scientific issue. It was not born in science labs or in meteorology centres. And likewise, it will not be defeated by scientists or meteorologists, either.
That is because climate change is principally a political issue, not a scientific one. Climate-change alarmism is about channelling a vision of the future in which man, producing too much and consuming far more, is conceived as a problem. And the only way to challenge this widespread political and moral outlook is by coming up with something a little less human-hating — a political vision in which humanity’s needs and desires, our productive capacities and our consuming wants, are championed rather than denigrated. To rely on the mistakes of climate-change advocates to undermine their own cause is no substitute for the long-awaited, never-seen political debate about climate change.
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September 20, 2011
New Times Atlas vastly overstates Greenland ice sheet shrinkage
You know it’s a major gaffe when even the BBC’s Environment correspondent is saying things like this:
The part of News Corporation that makes Times Atlases is currently taking the same kind of kicking from scientists that some of its newspapers took from the general public over phone-hacking.
What it’s being kicked for is for claiming, in the edition that came out last week, that the Greenland ice sheet has shrunk by 15% over 12 years, necessitating the re-drawing of its boundaries.
[. . .]
The problem is, it’s not true; and glaciologists have been queuing up to say why not.
“In the aftermath of ‘Himalayagate’, we glaciologists are hypersensitive to egregious errors in supposedly authoritative sources,” said Graham Cogley from Trent University in Canada.
“Climate change is real, and Greenland ice cover is shrinking. But the claims here are simply not backed up by science; this pig can’t fly.”
As Professor Cogley was the scientist who raised the alarm over “Himalayagate” — the erroneous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contention that Himalayan glaciers could largely melt away by 2035 — he is well placed to make the comparison.
Update: Breaking! James Delingpole discovers the advance plans for the next Times Atlas:
Following its controversial decision to produce a map suggesting that Greenland has lost 15 per cent of its ice cover in the last twelve years — a loss rate disputed by most credible scientists: and even, amazingly, the Guardian agrees on this — the Times Comprehensive Atlas Of The World has decided to take its new role as cheerleader for Climate Change alarmism a step further. In its upcoming 14th edition, unconfirmed rumours suggest, it will completely omit Tuvalu, the Maldives and major parts of Bangladesh in order to convey the “emotional truth” about “man made climate change.”
“All right, it may not be strictly geographically accurate to say the Maldives and Tuvalu will definitely have disappeared in about ten years time when our next edition appears,” said Times Atlas spokesman David Rose. “But did you see that picture of the Maldives cabinet holding a meeting underwater? If the Maldives government says the Maldives are drowning, they must be drowning. And frankly I think it’s despicable, all those deniers who are saying it was just a publicity stunt, cooked up by green activist Mark Lynas, to blackmail the international community into giving the Maldives more aid money while simultaneously trying to lure green Trustafarians to come and spend £1500 a night in houses on stilts with gold-plated organic recyclable eco-toilets made of rare earth minerals from China. Why would a government lie about something as serious as climate change?”
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September 18, 2011
September 14, 2011
Broken CFL? “The four-page document that followed read more like reactor-core meltdown protocols than simple reassurance”
As the compact fluorescent lightbulb (CFL) becomes the only readily available replacement for boring old incandescent bulbs, more people are discovering that cleanup after breaking a CFL is not child’s play:
Not long ago, Dan Perkins was in his New Haven home when his wife told him that she’d broken a lightbulb. She’d been cleaning in the attic bedroom of their seven-year-old son when she knocked over a lamp. The bulb, one of those twisty compact fluorescents, shattered onto the carpet next to their son’s bed.
Perkins, who draws the political comic This Modern World under the name Tom Tomorrow, was vaguely aware that a broken compact fluorescent bulb might be more problematic than a broken conventional incandescent.
“I knew that they had some mercury in them,” Perkins says. “That had been kind of a propaganda point for the right wing in the debate over bulb efficiency, so that was on my radar.”
To learn what kind of risk the broken bulb posed and what he ought to do about it, Perkins turned to Google, which sent him to a fact sheet put out by the Connecticut Department of Public Health entitled “Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs: What to Do If a Bulb Breaks.”
“Stay calm,” the fact sheet instructed. But the four-page document that followed read more like reactor-core meltdown protocols than simple reassurance. It cautioned that small children, pregnant women, and pets should be sequestered from the breakage site and called for an immediate shutdown of any ventilation systems.
Here’s a post on the incandescent bulb ban and CFL breakage from earlier this year. Tom Kelley posted an informative comment to that post, addressing several issues including the energy efficiency of CFLs:
I don’t use enough of the CFLs to notice a difference in the electric bill, but in a straight-across, lumen for lumen, hour for hour comparison, these bulbs should lower one’s kW/hr electricity consumption (so says the Mythbusters tv show).
BUT, and this is a real big BUT, that does not translate into a reduction in the raw energy needed to create the electricity, due to a small detail known as “power factor.” While resistive loads like an incandescent bulb (typically) have a power factor of 1.0, the CFL bulbs have a 0.5 to 0.6 power factor rating, meaning that the CFL consumes as much as twice the raw “energy” (VA (Volt Amps) at the generator), as the electric meter measures in W (Watts).
So, one can go ahead and buy CFLs if one thinks the bulbs may lower one’s electric bill, but one should not be under any illusion that the CFLs are saving any consumption of coal, oil, gas, etc.
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A response to the chefs’ open letter
A group of well-known chefs recently issued an open letter about the relationship of cooking to the wider world. Rob Lyons would prefer them to stick to what they do so well and avoid being pawns for dietary puritans and scolds who want us to live poorer lives:
Dear chefs,
I would like to be a great admirer of your collective works. However, I’ve never had enough money to eat in your elite restaurants, so I’ll just have to trust that you really are the best in the business. I read with interest your recent Open Letter to the Chefs of Tomorrow. It clearly expresses your views on the way you think cooking should be done and how the restaurant business can interact with the rest of the world. But what you are suggesting is just nonsense. You should stop talking to your well-off customers and the food industry’s dreadful hangers on, and get a sense of perspective.
[. . .]
Please, stop now. St Jamie of Oliver is doing quite enough on behalf of chefs to scare us about what we eat without you lot joining in. Authoritarian busybodies have spent the past two or three decades lecturing us about our eating habits. They now want to exploit your reputations as chefs to justify their prescriptions. You may be flattered by the attention, but those miserable puritans have nothing in common with you.
Good food — especially restaurant food — is about pleasure and excess. It’s about oodles of butter, oil, salt and vino. It’s about staggering away from the table stuffed but happy. The petty puritans of the health lobby want low-fat, low-salt and no booze, in mean and miserable portions. If you go along with that health agenda, it will only prove you’re not the sharpest knives in the cutlery drawer.
[. . .]
Face it, guys. What you do isn’t about food at all. You’re an expensive and exclusive branch of the entertainment industry; you have more in common with high opera than family dinners. And in that respect, I wouldn’t want you to change a thing (except, perhaps, those prices). But please don’t use your success and reputation to parrot the sickly prejudices of the foodie crowd.
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September 13, 2011
September 10, 2011
Debunking the notion of “unspoiled nature”
ESR has a glowing review of 1493 by Charles C. Mann (a book I’ve been meaning to pick up myself), which includes a wonderful bit of debunking:
According to the romantic view of “unspoiled nature”, there is a natural equilibrium state of any given ecology (or the biosphere as a whole) which changes only on timescales of a kiloyear or longer. This pristine state is what the ecology tends to return to after major shocks such as volcanic eruptions. Humans are not part of this pristine state. Fortunately, pre-industrial humans have neither the power nor the desire to greatly alter it, and walk lightly on the land. Nevertheless, human presence degrades the pristine state into something that is inevitably less complex, valuable, and natural.
This romantic view has dominated Western popular culture since the early 1800s and underpins a great deal of the silliness and anti-human hostility evident in the modern environmental movement. It motivates, as one very current example, hostility to “unnatural” GM crops and intensive agriculture in general.
Without ever announcing the intention to do so, Mann takes a poleaxe to the romantic view of “unspoiled nature” and dispatches it without mercy. First, he shows how pervasive ecoforming is as a cultural practice. Then, he shows how ecoforming or its sudden cessation can lead to rapid, profound transformation of ecosystems on a continental scale. Then he proposes a not-too-implausible coupling between large-scale ecoforming by neolithic-level savages and the entire planetary climate!
In reality, there is no almost “pristine” nature anywhere on Earth humans can survive with pre-industrial technology. When we look at almost any “wilderness”, part of what we are seeing is the results of millenia of ecoforming by the humans that came before us. And, while attempts at ecoforming sometimes have destructive consequences (salinized soils in the Middle East; rabbits in Australia), as often or more often they lead to a net increase in ecological complexity and resource richness. Mann is not afraid to show us that the world is a better place because, for example, capsaicin peppers native to the New World are now naturalized all over Eurasia and have become important to dozens of Old World cuisines.
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September 7, 2011
How much more will “green” renewable power cost?
In short, lots more than ordinary power generation:
The Telegraph has obtained a policy document, dated July, that seems to suggest that the government is considering a walk away from the most expensive renewables — and now we can see the full copy online. Two No 10 advisers challenge the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s utopian cost predictions, and say energy bills will be much bigger than we’ve been told.
What isn’t in contention is that energy itself will be much more expensive. DECC’s argument is that we’ll all start insulating our homes more — so our utility bills won’t reflect the higher per-unit energy costs. No 10’s energy expert thinks this is nonsense.
The Cameron advisors also suggest that government policy should be “open” to ditching some of the most expensive renewables — such as offshore wind power.
What’s the real cost of wind and solar?
The former power director of the National Grid, Colin Gibson, now estimates that the lifetime per unit cost of onshore wind is £178 per megawatt hour (MWh), and offshore wind at £254/MWh. Nuclear is £60/MWh. The figures DECC provides don’t account for the huge additional transmission costs of wind.
Note how much more expensive reality is than the clean, green vision. Government figures reckoned onshore wind cost £55/MWh and offshore wind £84/Mwh [. . .] compared to gas at £44/Mwh. Politicians seeking to dump the renewables policy could argue that green-minded civil servants sold them a pup. They’d be right.
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A bit more on the Lacey Act
The Economist has a brief mention of the Gibson raid:
Agents barged in and shut down production. They were hunting for ebony and rosewood which the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) alleges was imported from India in violation of the Lacey Act, a 1900 law originally designed to protect fauna from poachers. This law has metastasised: it now requires Americans, in essence, to abide by every plant and wildlife regulation set by any country on Earth. Not having heard of an obscure foreign rule is no defence. Violators face fines or even jail. FWS claims the ebony sent from India was mislabelled, and that Indian law forbids the export of unfinished ebony and rosewood.
[. . .]
Guitarists now worry that every time they cross a state border with their instrument, they will have to carry sheaves of documents proving that every part of it was legally sourced. Edward Grace, the deputy chief of the FWS’s office of law enforcement, says this fear is misplaced: “As a matter of longstanding practice,” he says, “investigators focus not on unknowing end consumers but on knowing actors transacting in larger volumes of product.” But Americans have been jailed for such things as importing lobsters in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes, in violation of a Honduran rule that Honduras no longer enforces. Small wonder pluckers are nervous.
Original report on the Gibson guitar raid here. Rules like the Lacey Act are tailor-made for petty bureaucrats to exercise immense amounts of judicially unsupervised power. It’s hard to believe that this kind of rule is being enforced evenhandedly, and rather easier to believe that it is being used selectively as a way of paying off scores, providing a “service” to certain firms at the expense of others, and creating lots of opportunities for bribes, “protection money”, and the like.
September 4, 2011
James Delingpole forced to offer an apology
Yes, it’s true. Delingpole made an error in a recent column and has to make a full apology for the error:
It has been brought to my attention that this blog owes Sir Reginald Sheffield, Bt. an apology. In a recent column entitled Green Jobs? Wot Green Jobs? (Pt 242), I carelessly suggested that Sir Reg — beloved dad of the famous environmentalist “Sam Cam”; distinguished father-in-law of the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, no less — is making nearly £1000 a week from the wind turbines on his estates.
The correct figure is, of course, nearly £1000 a day.
In other words, Sir Reginald is making the equivalent of roughly 1000 looted widescreen plasma TV screens every year from the eight 400 foot wind turbines now enhancing the view for miles around on his 3,000 acre Normanby Hall estate, near Scunthorpe.
There will be those who suggest that my mistake is a resigning matter. I do share their concern. However it is my view that if a journalist is going to resign on a point of principle these days, it has to be over something immeasurably trivial, rather than over something merely quite trivial. What I do nevertheless agree is that I owe Sir Reginald Sheffield, Bt, an apology.
A big apology.
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UK “will lose 2 to 3 per cent GDP a year for around 20 years” on renewable energy subsidies
A report in The Register says that the subsidies for green renewable energy will be a big net drain on the national economy:
The UK’s headlong rush into renewable energy — one ignored by the rest of the world — will hit British jobs and then general incomes, an economic study finds.
The report, The Myth of Green Jobs by economist Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University, examines the long-term impacts of subsidising expensive “green” renewable energy projects. It says that if the UK continues to do so, it will lose 2 to 3 per cent GDP a year for around 20 years. If reducing CO2 emissions is your goal, says Hughes, your economy really can’t afford renewable energy.
[. . .]
“All forms of green energy tend to be substantially more expensive than conventional energy, so there is a trade-off between higher costs and lower emissions,” writes Hughes. “This trade-off is not specific to green energy, since there are many ways of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Hence, the starting point of any assessment of such programmes should be the total cost per tonne of carbon dioxide saved — or its equivalent — which will be incurred by relying upon different measures or policies to reduce emissions.”
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September 2, 2011
Christopher Howse welcomes the new dark (ages)
A welcoming column on the new “lights” of modern Europe:
Normally, to read a book, one turns on the light. I had thought of that, but the numerous light switches in the room only brought a dim glow from various lengths of compact fluorescent lamps, some shaped like paperclips, others coiled like something from the pavements of dog-loving Dijon. You could tell that they were switched on, but it was as if someone had given the lights several coats of opalescent lacquer. It almost seemed as if the lamps attracted light gravitationally from nearby parts of the room, which were consequently left in shadow.
[. . .]
Except for not emitting light, there is little wrong with the new energy-saving bulbs, apart from their causing night-time falls, triggering epilepsy and storing up deadly poisons. But we must expect to make little sacrifices to save energy.
All over Europe, people are tumbling down the stairs in the small hours, snapping their femurs like breadsticks when they venture out of their bedrooms, perhaps to go to the loo – it isn’t unknown. That is because the energy-saving bulbs in the landing light take time to warm up. Those who survive the nocturnal pitfall soon notice that the new kind of bulbs flicker. For some, this triggers migraine; for others, epileptic fits. For me, it merely induces nausea and a sensation that the room is moving backwards and forwards. So I should count my blessings.
As for the mercury that the energy-saving bulbs contain, I have always found it a most beautiful metal, aptly named quicksilver, shining like the moon. Certainly, the effects of mercury poisoning are no fun: shedding of skin, loss of teeth and hair, salivation, sweating and forgetfulness. Yet anxiety about such matters is soon dispelled by the FAQs on the Energy Saving Trust website. “Energy-saving bulbs contain only tiny traces of mercury,” it says soothingly. “Imagine a pellet smaller than the tip of a Biro.” Yes, I’ve imagined that. It sounds ideal for the tip of a blowpipe-arrow or a Bulgarian secret service umbrella.
So remember to be very careful when you dispose of these wonderful new high-tech devices.
. . . each fluorescent light bulb contains about 5 milligrams of mercury. Though the amount is tiny, 5 milligrams of mercury is enough to contaminate 6,000 gallons of drinking water, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Low level mercury exposure (under 5 milligrams) can cause tremors, mood shifts, sleeplessness, muscle fatigue, and headaches. High level or extended length exposure can lead to learning disabilities, altered personality, deafness, loss of memory, chromosomal damage, and nerve, brain, and kidney damage, as stated by the EPA. There is a particular risk to the nervous systems of unborn babies and young children.
H/T to Chris Greaves for the link.
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Doubts about Britain’s next proposed high speed rail line
The Economist is usually pretty gung-ho about high speed rail development in general, so this article expressing some serious doubts is noteworthy:
Earlier this year the coalition government announced details of a £32 billion ($52 billion) super-fast railway line from London to Manchester and Leeds via Birmingham (see map). Philip Hammond, the transport secretary, claims it will be a “fast track” to prosperity. If the project goes ahead—and there is still, just, time to reconsider—the final route, and Stoke’s transport fate, will not be decided until 2012 at the earliest. The first trains won’t reach Birmingham until 2026, and Leeds and Manchester until 2032-3.
There are practical reasons to favour a new north-south line. Good infrastructure lasts a long time: Britain is still enjoying the fruits of Victorian railway investment. At some point in the next 20 years the existing west-coast main line will face a capacity crunch. Upgrading lines is disruptive and expensive, so constructing a new one appears sensible. The vision of a futuristic train scything across Britain at 250mph (400kph) is appealing.
But although the plan has cross-party support, the British public is not entirely convinced. Objections have so far focused on two concerns. First, the environmental damage, particularly to the Chilterns, an area of “outstanding natural beauty” and home to many well-off voters. Second, the business case for the line: the projected doubling of long-distance rail use by 2043 seems ambitious.
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