Quotulatiousness

October 1, 2009

Back to the ’70s . . . it’s the return of the Population Bomb!

Filed under: Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:41

Ronald Bailey addresses the most recent outbreak of Globally Terminal Malthusianism from the Wall Street Journal‘s Paul B. Farrell:

Every so often, the overpopulation meme erupts into public discourse and imminent doom is declared again. A particularly overwrought example of the overpopulation meme and its alleged problems appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch in a piece by regular financial columnist Paul B. Farrell.

Farrell asserts that overpopulation is “the biggest time-bomb for Obama, America, capitalism, the world.” Bigger than global warming, poverty, or peak oil. Overpopulation will end capitalism and maybe even destroy modern civilization. As evidence, Farrell cites what he calls neo-Malthusian biologist Jared Diamond’s 12-factor equation of population doom.

It turns out that Farrell is wrong or misleading about the environmental and human effects of all 12 factors he cites. Let’s take them one by one.

But, in the same way that bad news always crowds out good news for headline space or television minutes, looming disaster stories will always attract attention . . . especially when they’re wrong.

September 30, 2009

More background on that broken hockey stick

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

I don’t want to sound like a climate crank — there are more than enough of them out there, on both sides of the issue — and I’m still very much of the opinion that the question of anthropogenic global warming/climate change still needs a lot of work to answer. If human activities are causing the planet’s atmosphere to warm up in excess of what the natural feedback systems of the planet can handle, then we do need to look at ways to reduce our contribution to that warming.

Politicians and power-seeking bureaucrats jumping up and down in front of the cameras, insisting that the crisis is upon us and we need to do something now are in no way to be trusted with additional powers: without sufficient scientific evidence, we’d just be installing petty dictators over all sorts of different areas of our lives.

The specific piece of “evidence” most useful to the “do something now” faction has been the famous Hockey Stick Graph, which has been debunked. The data was carefully selected to support pre-decided conclusions. Everyone who took high school science knows the temptation . . . you know how the experiment is supposed to turn out, and who’ll know if you just write it up as if you got textbook results? The answer is . . . that’s why you do the experiment: to determine if the result matches the expectation. Skipping the whole “do the experiment” step saves time, but it’s not science.

Bishop Hill explains how the hockey stick became the best-known case of junk science in decades:

The story of Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick reconstruction, its statistical bias and the influence of the bristlecone pines is well known. McIntyre’s research into the other reconstructions has received less publicity, however. The story of the Yamal chronology may change that.

The bristlecone pines that created the shape of the Hockey Stick graph are used in nearly every millennial temperature reconstruction around today, but there are also a handful of other tree ring series that are nearly as common and just as influential on the results. Back at the start of McIntyre’s research into the area of paleoclimate, one of the most significant of these was called Polar Urals, a chronology first published by Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. At the time, it was used in pretty much every temperature reconstruction around. In his paper, Briffa made the startling claim that the coldest year of the millennium was AD 1032, a statement that, if true, would have completely overturned the idea of the Medieval Warm Period. It is not hard to see why paleoclimatologists found the series so alluring.

Some of McIntyre’s research into Polar Urals deserves a story in its own right, but it is one that will have to wait for another day. We can pick up the narrative again in 2005, when McIntyre discovered that an update to the Polar Urals series had been collected in 1999. Through a contact he was able to obtain a copy of the revised series. Remarkably, in the update the eleventh century appeared to be much warmer than in the original – in fact it was higher even than the twentieth century. This must have been a severe blow to paleoclimatologists, a supposition that is borne out by what happened next, or rather what didn’t: the update to the Polar Urals was not published, it was not archived and it was almost never seen again.

With Polar Urals now unusable, paleclimatologists had a pressing need for a hockey stick shaped replacement and a solution appeared in the nick of time in the shape of a series from the nearby location of Yamal.

Yes, it’s long, and somewhat convoluted . . . but that is the point. Researchers were being deliberately obstructive to other researchers, concealing data necessary to reproduce the experimental results, yet publishing in numerous journals (who all should have enforced their own standards, but failed to do so) as if the data was impossible to refute.

And it was . . . because the raw data was kept out of the hands of other scientists. This is not science. It’s a deliberate fraud.

Update: JoNova adds to the story, including an image showing the relative locations of the sampled sites:

Busted_Hockey_Stick_locations

Update, the second: Tom Kelley corrects my use of the word “anthropogenic”, which I had idiotically written as “anthropomorphic”. Thanks, Tom.

September 29, 2009

A broken hockey stick graph

Filed under: Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

The red line in the following graph should be familiar to you, if you’ve been following the Global Warming/Climate Change debate:

Busted_Hockey_Stick

The trick here is the black line:

A comparison of Yamal RCS chronologies. red — as archived with 12 picked cores; black — including Schweingruber’s Khadyta River, Yamal (russ035w) archive and excluding 12 picked cores. Both smoothed with 21-year gaussian smooth. y-axis is in dimensionless chronology units centered on 1 (as are subsequent graphs (but represent age-adjusted ring width).

The “blade” of the hockey stick was a data artifact of the careful selection of only twelve samples. Including a wider sample produces a very different picture, as you can see above.

September 28, 2009

QotD: Gambling on CO2 reduction

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:45

There is a real and growing prospect of an all-out trade war being waged in the name of climate change.

The struggle to generate international agreement on a carbon deal has created a desire to punish “free riders” who do not sign on to stringent carbon emission reduction targets. But the greater goals seem to be to barricade imports from China and India, to tax companies that outsource, and to go for short-term political benefits, destroying free trade.

This is a massive mistake. Economic models show that the global benefits of even slightly freer trade are in the order of $50 trillion — 50 times more than we could achieve, in the best of circumstances, with carbon cuts. If trade becomes less free, we could easily lose $50 trillion — or much more if we really bungle things. Poor nations — the very countries that will experience the worst of climate damage — would suffer most.

In other words: In our eagerness to avoid about $1 trillion worth of climate damage, we are being asked to spend at least 50 times as much — and, if we hinder free trade, we are likely to heap at least an additional $50 trillion loss on the global economy.

Bjorn Lomborg, “Costly Carbon Cuts: Proposed Strategies Would Hurt the Most Vulnerable”, The Washington Post, 2009-09-28

September 26, 2009

Those confusing/conflicting Arctic ice stories

Filed under: Cancon, Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

How can it be that on one day, we’re told that the Arctic is thawing at an unprecedented rate, yet the next day we’re told that the ice is twice as thick as predicted? Lawrence Solomon tries to sort out the sensational from the prosaic:

If you’re confused by stats on Arctic melting, you have lots of company. Arctic stats are easy to misunderstand because the Arctic environment is unlike our own — the Arctic magnifies the changes we experience in the temperate regions. In summer, our days get longer and theirs get really, really long, just as in winter, when our days gets shorter, theirs all but disappear. By analogy, the Arctic also magnifies temperature variations, and resulting changes to its physical environment.

In the Arctic, the ice has indeed been contracting, as the global warming doomsayers have been telling us. But it has also been expanding. The riddle of how the Arctic ice can both be contracting and expanding is easily explained. After you read the next two paragraphs, you’ll be able to describe it easily to your friends to set them straight.

September 24, 2009

Another reason why there’s still debate over Climate Change/Global Warming

Filed under: Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:47

True believers treat skeptics on the Climate Change/Global Warming question as heretics because “the proof is right there” . . . except the data supporting the case is not available to study:

. . . the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.

[. . .]

If we are to believe Jones’s note to the younger Pielke, CRU adjusted the original data and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years ago. The letter to Warwick Hughes may have been an outright lie. After all, Peter Webster received some of the data this year. So the question remains: What was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or lost, and why?

All of this is much more than an academic spat. It now appears likely that the U.S. Senate will drop cap-and-trade climate legislation from its docket this fall — whereupon the Obama Environmental Protection Agency is going to step in and issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions. Unlike a law, which can’t be challenged on a scientific basis, a regulation can. If there are no data, there’s no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer to the question posed above.

September 16, 2009

An appreciation of the life and work of Norman Borlaug

Filed under: Environment, India, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:00

Gregg Easterbrook looks at the accomplishments of Norman Borlaug, who died on Saturday:

Paul Ehrlich gained celebrity for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, in which he claimed that global starvation was inevitable for the 1970s and it was “a fantasy” that India would “ever” feed itself. Instead, within three years of Borlaug’s arrival, Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production; within six years, India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals.

After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug turned to raising crop yields in other poor nations especially in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising faster than farm production and the last outpost of subsistence agriculture. At that point, Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was “inappropriate” for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists “have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things.”

Environmentalist criticism of Borlaug and his work was puzzling on two fronts. First, absent high-yield agriculture, the world would by now be deforested. The 1950 global grain output of 692 million tons and the 2006 output of 2.3 billion tons came from about the same number of acres three times as much food using little additional land.

“Without high-yield agriculture,” Borlaug said, “increases in food output would have been realized through drastic expansion of acres under cultivation, losses of pristine land a hundred times greater than all losses to urban and suburban expansion.” Environmentalist criticism was doubly puzzling because in almost every developing nation where high-yield agriculture has been introduced, population growth has slowed as education becomes more important to family success than muscle power.

September 9, 2009

They switched to calling it “Climate Change” for a reason

Filed under: Environment, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:06

After all the vitriol over anthropomorphic (man-made) “Global Warming”, it was a significant change when the organizations which had been most prominent in trying to bring it to public attention switched terminology to Climate Change instead:

Last week a UK tribunal ruled that belief in manmade global warming had the same status as a religious conviction, such as transubstantiation. True believers in the hypothesis will need mountains of faith in the years ahead.

The New Scientist has given weight to the prediction that the planet is in for a cool 20 years — defying the computer models and contemporary climate theory. It’s “bad timing”, admits the magazine’s environmental correspondent, Fred Pearce.

Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, quoted by the magazine, attributes much of the recent warming to naturally occurring ocean cycles. Scientific study of the periodic ocean climate variability is in its infancy; for example the PDO or Pacific Decadal Oscillation, was only described in the late 1990s. It’s the Leibniz team which predicted a forthcoming cooling earlier this year — causing a bullying outbreak at the BBC.

Much of the resistance to the “orthodoxy” of global warming was caused by the strong suspicion that this was merely an excuse for greater government control over business and further restrictions on individuals for a nebulous goal. It certainly didn’t help that any extreme or unusual weather was automatically “caused by global warming” according to the vast majority of media reports.

If global warming/climate change was actually being caused (or increased) by human activity, the proposals to “fix” the problem almost always seemed to impose far greater costs than the problem itself. Activists saying that the west pretty much had to give up most of their modern comforts (and their industrial base) in order to “save the planet” did their cause more harm than good.

Some data seemed to support the global warming theory, while other data seemed to contradict it. Rather than following traditional scientific methodology, too many scientists forgot their basic training and tried conducting media science (where peer review and providing raw data to support your findings are not required or expected). By saying that the problem was “too urgent” to be slowed down by following normal procedure, they undermined their own cause. By exaggerating the likely results if global warming was actually happening, they stopped being scientists at all and instead became political activists.

The confidence that higher atmospheric CO2 levels will result in significant long-term increases in temperature is founded on knock-on effects, or positive feedbacks, amplifying the CO2 effect. Large positive feedbacks imply “runaway” global warming — aka Thermageddon.

But even the basics are fiercely contested. Does a warmer climate mean more or fewer clouds, and do these trap even more heat, or act as a sunshade, cooling it back down again? Clouds are so poorly understood, you can take your pick. So if the climate isn’t getting warmer, the theory requires the view that the energy must be “hiding” somewhere, mostly likely in oceanic heat sinks.

But neither the feedbacks, nor the oceans, are currently being kind to contemporary climate theory.

September 7, 2009

QotD: Environmentalism as religion-replacement

Filed under: Environment, Quotations, Religion — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:17

It never ceases to amaze me that people who say we can “save the planet” by wearing a jumper or growing our own veg are treated with the utmost seriousness, while those who argue that tackling climate change might require some larger-scale projects — such as geo-engineering the Earth — are treated as sci-fi freaks who should stick to reading Philip K Dick novels and stop polluting public debate with their insane ideas.

When it comes to climate change, the only acceptable debate, it seems, is how we can encourage ordinary people to do less, consume less and fly less. Bigger and more far-reaching ideas about how we might offset the impact of climate change are elbowed off the agenda.

This reveals something profound about environmentalism: it is not really a campaign to find solutions to the practical problem of climate change, but rather has become a semi-religious, almost medieval demonisation of human behaviour as dirty and destructive. This is really a priestly, ideological effort to lower people’s horizons and expectations, rather than a focused attempt to create a less polluted planet.

Brendan O’Neill, “Wearing thermals won’t save the planet: Why is the 10:10 campaign, with its pledges to turn off lights and grow more veg, taken more seriously than geo-engineering?”, The Guardian, 2009-09-02

September 5, 2009

Scientific head-scratchers

Filed under: Environment, Science, Space — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:30

Courtesy of Roger Henry, a list of oddities from New Scientist:

2. Dark Flow: Something unseeable and far bigger than anything in the known universe is hauling a group of galaxies towards it at inexplicable speed.

3. Eocene Hothouse: Tens of millions of years ago, the average temperature at the poles was 15 or 20 °C. Now let’s talk about climate change.

4. Fly-by Anomalies: Space probes using Earth’s gravity to get a slingshot speed boost are moving faster than they should. Call in dark matter.

September 3, 2009

QotD: “The red-headed step-child of the environmental movement”

Filed under: Environment, Quotations, Railways, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 16:48

As a practical matter, we’d probably get more environmental benefit (and save more wear-and-tear on our roads) from improving our freight rail system, like the abysmal mess in Chicago, than from high speed passenger rail that is very unlikely to carry more than a handful of Americans on any regular basis. . . But this does not attract one eightieth of the interest that you see in HS(P)R. As I understand it, there is finally some actual progress on Chicago, but it’s still bogged down in process, and it’s not clear to me whether it’s really enough. It seems clear to me that switching freight to rail whenever possible should be a policy priority, but it’s the red-headed stepchild of the environmental movement. We need freight cars that look more like pandas.

Megan McArdle, “Rail: It’s Not Just for Passengers”, Asymmetrical Information, 2009-09-03

August 23, 2009

Toronto’s recent brush with tornado weather

Filed under: Cancon, Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 17:29

I was deep in downtown Toronto when the storm started to move in, and listening to the professional pants-wetters at 680PanicNews was initially disturbing, but eventually hilarious. Not to minimize the genuine damage caused in Vaughan and the town of Durham. This is how I summarized the weather-related experience in an email to Jon:

I barely made it home before the storm hit . . . it chased me all the way, with the ProfessionalPantsWetters at 680Panic Radio getting more and more excited as the time went on.

I got out of the truck, picked up my laptop, walked to the door, and less than a minute later the storm hit. The power went out about five minutes after that (and didn’t come back on until about 3:30 in the morning).

No obvious damage around the house, thank goodness, although the gazebo tried to go walkies around the yard. It wrapped itself around the patio set, which will take several pairs of hands to disentangle and find out if it’s still usable.

From a follow-up email, specifically about the radio coverage:

At first, they didn’t seem too bad. I turned on the radio just as traffic came to a stop on the DVP just south of the Bloor Viaduct. By the time I got as far as Lawrence, the woman reporter who got all verklempt over the TORNADO ON JARVIS!!!!! wasn’t able to draw a breath without sounding like she was panting or gasping. I was starting to laugh at them by that point.

The meteorpanickologist who started to repeat (several times) that everyone should get into the basement — or lower — or into a closet (aren’t most people’s closets on the upper floor if they’re in a house?) or cower in a bathtub (aren’t they usually upstairs too?) . . .

I also found amusement in the repeated definition of the terms “tornado watch” and “tornado warning”, where almost every time, the description of “tornado warning” was to “_watch_ out for imminent tornado formation”. They just don’t listen to themselves, do they?

I thought it quite telling that one of the better reports was from their entertainment editor, who reported from her car on the way up Victoria Park Avenue. She, at least, sounded calm and reported only what she could see for herself.

Chris Taylor brings some actual data to the discussion of tornado frequency and writes “It can be tempting for Torontonians — who generally think of themselves as an island of tranquillity free of severe weather — to overreact a little.”

July 30, 2009

Organic food shock: no better than non-organic

Filed under: Environment, Food, Science, Wine — Nicholas @ 07:59

This is another one of those “someone paid money to conduct the study?” studies. Organic food has been a boon to certain producers, but it doesn’t provide the kind of benefits most purchasers expect:

But organic is certainly more expensive. A new study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition finds:

On the basis of a systematic review of studies of satisfactory quality, there is no evidence of a difference in nutrient quality between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs. The small differences in nutrient content detected are biologically plausible and mostly relate to differences in production methods.

The study was commissioned by Britain’s Food Standards Agency.

I’ve been skeptical about the claims for “organic” products for quite some time. Similarly, I’m not convinced that there’s any great value in the “biodynamic” model for wine. My strong suspicion is that the same general quality of wine would be produced without all the new age woo-woo mystic crap, because the vineyard owner or manager is paying closer attention to the vines. That, IMO, is the key.

July 24, 2009

More on scapegoating plastic bags

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:22

Back on the old site, I posted an item that related tangentially to the issue of plastic bags in supermarkets. Russ LeBlanc sent me a note, which I published as an update to that post. He’s now expanded on that idea, with a letter to newsdurhamregion.com:

You’d think in these tough economic times our public officials would avoid “trash talk.” Enough already!

Get to the real issues. Dwelling on emotional fallacies such as the dreaded plastic bag while people are left with little economic hope is unforgivable. Sorry, Camille, banning plastic bags will do less than little to save the planet. It isn’t even a start, but it does sound warm and fuzzy.

If our politicians feel it necessary to spend our hard-earned tax dollars on recycling studies then they should do due diligence and commission a study by independent biologists to find out if the other study is even worth it. Better yet, spend the money where it counts, attracting jobs.

See-through bags and supporting a big-business cash grab for something that represents less than one per cent of a landfill (plastic bags) is irresponsible. Heaven forbid we see a politician questioning this issue.

By the way, Madam Mayor, I’m sure the big retailers would welcome the reward card incentive program (even though it’s really a form of big business getting around the right to privacy issue). Perhaps we can use the points for a garborator?

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