Quotulatiousness

February 10, 2010

AGW: the military solution

Filed under: Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 17:25

Brian Micklethwait goes all gung ho and everything, trying to encapsulate the current situation in Climatestan:

Are you bored with Climategate? And bored with me writing about it, again and again? Yesterday, fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings told me he is. I understand the feeling, and would be interested to hear if any of our commentariat shares it, but as for me, I can’t leave this thing alone. I mean, this is now the biggest single battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, and the forces of darkness are now in definite, headlong, ignominious retreat. I for one do not feel inclined to stop shouting about that any time soon.

However, I do agree that things are now moving on, and that is what this posting is about.

[. . .]

If you don’t think you have any position to retreat to, then you stand and fight to the death. The Hockey Team, along with their most vocal fans, are now in this doomed position. But the CAGW camp as a whole is now deciding whether to back the Hockey Team or to cut them lose and concede the ground that the Hockey Team have so fraudulently occupied. This Guardian leader says to me that the high command of the Grande Armée of CAGW is now attempting a retreat in good order to a position further back, which it thinks it can hold, rather than making a futile last stand now that would only destroy them all. The CAGW camp, as they now wish to remain, losing the I but definitely keeping tight hold of the C, are now concluding that there is no future in defending the now utterly discredited Hockey Team, i.e. Mann and the East Anglians. And although the IPCC gets no mention in this Guardian leader, other CAGW-ers are already saying, with similar reluctance but similar definiteness, that the now utterly discredited IPCC will also have to be cut loose from polite society, certainly in its now utterly discredited form, as crafted during the last decade or so by the now utterly discredited Rajendra Pachauri.

[. . .]

Don’t get me wrong. Crushing Michael Mann and his Hockey Team, sending Pachauri packing, making the letters I, P, C and C spell L, I, E and S in the minds of all thinking people, getting the Met Office to stick to short-term weather forecasting, ripping the panda pants off the WWF – these are very important tasks. When pursuing your enemies after you have won a battle against them, it is important to ensure that as many as possible of the defeated ones do not keep any undeserved shreds of reputation with which to fight again. This is not an either/or thing. The climate skeptic blogosphere is big enough and clever enough to do it all, pushing the old media along with it (UK), or not and just replacing the old media for the duration of the battle (USA) — or the war, or for ever, for everything — as the case may be. But in among sneering at the disgraced Hockey Team, chuckling over the multiple lies and lavish living arrangements of the rascal Pachauri, and gags about how many inches of global warming have just descended upon this or that American city, we should also be getting stuck into the next fight.

I’ve done my best to include a sprinkling of decent links, to reports and to celebratory whoops from this last battlefield, but these are now potentially infinite. A few weeks ago I went on a foreign trip and was largely disconnected from the internet for the best part of a week. Since then, I have been trying and failing to catch up with Climategate. Last weekend, the story pretty much escaped from anyone’s single purview, so large and so complicated has it now become. Basically, a huge retreat in multiple directions is going on, and a huge pursuit, ditto, with CAGW defensive position after CAGW defensive position being overrun by advancing Skeptics. The IPCC citadel, its outer walls having crumbled when Climategate first broke, is now being comprehensively sacked.

Go read the whole thing, which is liberally studded with links to follow. Should keep you busy for a bit, anyway.

February 9, 2010

This week’s silly health panic: third-hand smoke.

Filed under: Environment, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:48

Don’t worry, anti-smoking campaigners! Even though the evil smoking empire is in retreat, and smokers get worse press than child molesters and people who talk at the theatre, there’s a new moral front opening up: third-hand smoke! The war isn’t over yet:

Lingering residue from tobacco smoke which clings to upholstery, clothing and the skin releases cancer-causing agents, work in PNAS journal shows.

Berkeley scientists in the US ran lab tests and found “substantial levels” of toxins on smoke-exposed material.

They say while banishing smokers to outdoors cuts second-hand smoke, residues will follow them back inside and this “third-hand smoke” may harm.

Efforts are currently underway to determine if there’s a strong media response to this “new threat”. If so, funding will be sought to research the possibility of “fourth-hand smoke” and possibly even “fifth-hand smoke”.

QotD: “Environmentalism [is] like an intrusive state religion”

Filed under: Economics, Education, Environment, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:46

I’d heard some of this from my daughter before and had gotten used to the idea that she needed a little deprogramming from time to time. But as I listened to the rote repetition of a political agenda from children not old enough to read, I decided it was time for a word with the teacher. She wanted to know which specific points in the catechism I found objectionable. I declined to answer. As environmentalism becomes increasingly like an intrusive state religion, we dissenters become increasingly prickly about suggestions that we suffer from some kind of aberration.

The naive environmentalism of my daughter’s preschool is a force-fed potpourri of myth, superstition, and ritual that has much in common with the least reputable varieties of religious Fundamentalism. The antidote to bad religion is good science. The antidote to astrology is the scientific method, the antidote to naive creationism is evolutionary biology, and the antidote to naive environmentalism is economics.

Economics is the science of competing preferences. Environmentalism goes beyond science when it elevates matters of preference to matters of morality. A proposal to pave a wilderness and put up a parking lot is an occasion for conflict between those who prefer wilderness and those who prefer convenient parking. In the ensuing struggle, each side attempts to impose its preferences by manipulating the political and economic systems. Because one side must win and one side must lose, the battle is hard-fought and sometimes bitter. All of this is to be expected.

But in the 25 years since the first Earth Day, a new and ugly element has emerged in the form of one side’s conviction that its preferences are Right and the other side’s are Wrong. The science of economics shuns such moral posturing; the religion of environmentalism embraces it.

Steven E. Landsburg, “Why I Am Not An Environmentalist: The Science of Economics Versus the Religion of Ecology”, excerpt from The Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life.

February 3, 2010

Turning a retreat into a rout

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:00

ESR calls for even more naming and shaming of the climate fraudsters:

I too long to see the frauds and the fellow-travellers in the hell they’ve earned for themselves. But revenge, while it’s a tasty dish that long-time public “deniers” like Delingpole and myself are now thoroughly enjoying, isn’t the best reason to hound them and their enabling organizations out of public life. The best reason not to relent, to name and shame the fraudsters and shatter their reputations and humilate them — ideally, to the point where there’s a rash of prominent suicides as a result — is this:

If we don’t destroy them, they’ll surely ramp up yet another colossal, politicized eco-fraud to plague us all.

He’s quite right, many of the people deeply involved in the swindle would have been just as happy in another pseudo-scientific attempt to wrest control of the economy in order to “protect us” from ourselves.

Any conspiracies in sight? Yes, actually . . .

Conspiracy #1: Most of the environmental movement is composed of innocent Gaianists, but not all of it. There’s a hard core that’s sort of a zombie remnant of Soviet psyops. Their goals are political: trash capitalism, resurrect socialism from the dustbin of history. They’re actually more like what I have elsewhere called a prospiracy, having lost their proper conspiratorial armature when KGB Department V folded up in 1992. There aren’t a lot of them, but they’re very, very good at co-opting others and they drive the Gaianists like sheep. I don’t think there’s significant overlap with the scientists here; the zombies are concentrated in universities, all right, but mostly in the humanities and grievance-studies departments.

Conspiracy #2: The hockey team itself. Read the emails. Small, tight-knit, cooperating through covert channels, very focused on destroying its enemies, using false fronts like realclimate.org. There’s your classic conspiracy profile.

My model of what’s been going on is basically this: The hockey team starts an error cascade that sweeps up a lot of scientists. The AGW meme awakens chiliastic emotional responses in a lot of Gaianists. The zombies and the green-shirts grab onto that quasi-religious wave as a political strategem (the difference is that the zombies actively want to trash capitalism, while the green-shirts just want to hobble and milk it). Pro-AGW scientists get more funding from the green-shirts within governments, which reinforces the error cascade — it’s easier not to question when your grant money would be at risk for doing so. After a few times around this cycle, the hockey team notices it’s riding a tiger and starts on the criminal-conspiracy stuff so it will never have to risk getting off.

There’s lots here . . . go read the whole thing.

February 2, 2010

The Lancet formally retracts controversial paper on Autism

Filed under: Britain, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

In a long-overdue move, British medical journal The Lancet has retracted a paper by Andrew Wakefield on links between the MMR vaccine and Autism:

The Lancet medical journal formally retracted a paper on Tuesday that caused a 12-year international battle over links between the three-in-one childhood MMR vaccine and autism.

The paper, published in 1998 and written by British doctor Andrew Wakefield, suggested the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) shot might be linked to autism and bowel disease.

His assertion, since widely discredited, caused one of the biggest medical rows in a generation and led to a steep drop in the number of vaccinations in the United States, Britain and other parts of Europe, prompting a rise in cases of measles.

The knock-on effect of parents avoiding getting their children vaccinated creates opportunities for much more serious outbreaks of these diseases. Dr. Wakefield’s “research” has been harmful to the population at large for helping to create and exacerbate parents’ fears for their children, and in encouraging them to take the greater risk of not getting the MMR (and, in many cases, other vaccinations) for their kids.

January 27, 2010

HRH Prince Charles and his political tin ear

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:28

It’s been a long-standing — and safe — practice for members of the royal family to avoid controversy (at least, controversy in topics not actually involving members of the royal family). Prince Charles apparently didn’t get the memo recently:

The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia is under government investigation for fraud, data manipulation and withholding or destroying scientific data in defiance of freedom of information requests. Many of the disgraced scientists working at the CRU were closely involved in putting together the now ferociously suspect Fourth Assessment Report for the notoriously unreliable Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) headed by the lethally compromised Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

Is this really the best time, you might wonder, for the future King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to praise the CRU for the “quality” of its work and to dismiss the Climategate scandal as a “little blip”? (Hat tip: Roddy Campbell)

Well the Prince of Wales clearly thinks so or he wouldn’t have paid a visit to Norwich yesterday to deliver a jolly little fillip to the beleaguered scientists. In his sublime wisdom, Prince Charles clearly believes they have done no wrong at all.

January 24, 2010

The only surprise about this is that they’re admitting it

Filed under: Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:41

Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn’t been verified:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

It was unverified, but so important that they couldn’t hold back? It would be funny, if trillions of dollars were not being forcibly redirected in useless, futile “green” directions, and the lives of billions of people may be negatively impacted by government and UN mandates on unproven technologies to curb global warming.

January 22, 2010

British law enforcement moves on bomb detector scam

Filed under: Britain, Law, Middle East — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:03

Well, it’s nice to see that sometimes the British government can move quickly on something. As reported on the BBC program Newsnight, a bogus bomb detector has been selling briskly in Iraq (link here). The lead scammer has been arrested today:

The managing director of a British company that has been selling bomb-detecting equipment to security forces in Iraq was arrested on suspicion of fraud today.

At the same time, the British government announced that it was imposing a ban on the export of the ADE-651 detectors because it was concerned they could put the lives of British forces or other friendly forces at risk.

The government promised to help investigate the multimillion-pound deal between the company, ATSC, and the security forces in Iraq.

Iraq has invested more than £50m in buying the devices and training people to use them. Police and military personnel have used them to search vehicles and pedestrians for explosives. But concerns over their effectiveness — and fears they could put lives at risk — have been raised.

Avon and Somerset police officers arrested Jim McCormick, 53, on suspicion of fraud by misrepresentation. A spokesman said: “We are conducting a criminal investigation and, as part of that, a 53-year-old man has been arrested.

There should be a special hell for this scam artist

Filed under: Britain, Middle East, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

A report from the BBC on a “bomb detection device” widely sold in the Middle East, which does nothing at all:

A BBC Newsnight investigation has found that a so-called “bomb detector”, thousands of which have been sold to Iraq, cannot possibly work.

Leading explosives expert Sidney Alford told Newsnight the sale of the ADE-651 was “absolutely immoral”.

“This type of equipment does not work,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind betting that lives have been lost as a consequence.”

Questions have been raised over the ADE-651, following three recent co-ordinated waves of bombings in Baghdad.

It sounds like the ADE-651 is a combination of tech-look crap and new age marketing crap:

Iraq has bought thousands of the detectors for a total of $85m (£52m).

The device is sold by Jim McCormick, based at offices in rural Somerset, UK.

The ADE-651 detector has never been shown to work in a scientific test.

There are no batteries and it consists of a swivelling aerial mounted to a hinge on a hand-grip. Critics have likened it to a glorified dowsing rod.

And if that’s not enough whiff of flim-flam for you, how about this claim?

The training manual for the device says it can even, with the right card, detect elephants, humans and 100 dollar bills.

Update: The Guardian reports that the managing director of the firm has been arrested today.

January 13, 2010

A point-by-point fisking

Filed under: Environment, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:58

The twinned arts of strawman construction and deconstruction, as illustrated by Fred Pearce (construction) and Viscount Moncton (deconstruction):

The Daily Telegraph, on 8 December 2009, produced what it called the “Climate Skeptic’s Q&A”, a piece written by Fred Pearce, a long-standing environmental extremist campaigner on the climate question. There was no attempt in the piece to produce balanced or scientifically-accurate answers. A reader has sent the “Q&A” to us and has asked us to put matters to rights. Mr. Pearce’s “straw-man” questions are in bold face; his answers are in italics, and my comments are in Roman face.

How can scientists claim to predict climate change over 50 or more years when they can’t even get next week’s weather forecast right?

They can’t tell us in detail. But forecasting climate change is more like forecasting the seasons than the weather. We know winters are cold and summers are warm. Always. And it’s like that with greenhouse gases. Physicists have known for 200 years that gases like carbon dioxide trap heat. These gases are accumulating in the atmosphere, thanks to our pollution. They will heat up the atmosphere just as certainly as the summer sun heats us.

This is a classic “straw-man” set up and then knocked down by Pearce. It is not and has never been the contention of skeptical scientists that there is no such thing as the greenhouse effect. The question that is hotly debated among climate scientists is not whether the doubling of CO2 concentration that is expected this century can in theory cause warming: the question is how much warming we can cause, and the increasingly frequent answer in the peer-reviewed journals is “very little indeed”.

Pearce also tries to suggest that forecasting climate change is “like forecasting the seasons” — i.e., easy. Unfortunately, Edward Lorenz proved that claim to be false very nearly half a century ago, in the landmark paper in a climatological journal that founded chaos theory. Lorenz demonstrated that unless we knew the values of the millions of parameters that define the climate to a precision that is not and can never be in practice attainable the long-range prediction of climatic behavior would be impossible “by any method”. Yet the UN’s case for climate alarm is based almost exclusively on the output of models that have been demonstrated, time and again, to fail. Not one of the models on which the UN relies, for instance, had predicted that there would be 15 years without any statistically-significant “global warming” — the years 1995-2009 inclusive.

“times online commenters absolute RETARDS”

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:24

The headline is the ever-nuanced Giles Coren expressing his opinion about the folks who left comments on his Times Online column on climate change:

Right, there is something that is going to have to stop right this second, and that is people making jokes about “If the globe is warming up then where did all this snow come from, eh? Eh? Tell me that?” Because it is driving me crazy.

And when I say “people”, I mean mostly columnists, cartoonists and comedians. I know there is nothing else to write about at the moment (God help me, I’m writing about people writing about the snow) and I grant that it was a nice little coincidence that the Copenhagen summit happened just as it started snowing, but please, people, stop making jokes about the weather in relation to climate change. Stop pretending to be surprised that you had to put a scarf and hat on this morning when the world is supposed to be warming up. The two things are not related. Nobody who understands the science is claiming that global warming (if it happens) is going to make Britain hotter in the long run.

January 11, 2010

Dystopia, here we come!

Filed under: Environment, Government, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:06

The State of the World 2010 report published by the Worldwatch Institute will find a large audience among the postlapsarian Left:

Ditch the dog; throw away (sorry, recycle) those takeaway menus; bin bottled water; get rid of that gas-guzzling car and forget flying to far-flung places. These are just some of the sacrifices we in the West will need to make if we are to survive climate change.

The stark warning comes from the renowned Worldwatch Institute, a Washington-based organisation regarded as the world’s pre-eminent environmental think tank.

[. . .]

“Habits that are firmly set – from where people live to what they eat — will all need to be altered and in many cases simplified or minimised… From Earth’s perspective, the American or even the European way of life is simply not viable.”

Of course, to enforce this new “way of life”, we’ll also have to give up our quaint, out-dated notions of liberty, civil rights, democracy, representative government and other relics of the Enlightenment. To save humanity, we’ll have to give up individuality: there’s no other way to eliminate the “wasteful” American or European lifestyle without massive employment of force. You can almost hear the hearts-a-flutter among the ranks of those who want to run your life for you (assuming you’re considered valuable enough to keep alive, of course . . . to save the human race, individual lives can’t be spared, comrade).

First to go would be the tourism industry: can’t have all those passenger jets flying to and fro, spewing all that evil carbon dioxide into the air. But don’t plan on driving anywhere . . . personal vehicles will be next. Mass transit will be the only allowable transportation. What’s that, comrade? Don’t live near a transit line? Get used to walking.

Oh, and better bone up on subsistence farming . . . that’s also in the blueprint. You’ll be expected to grow your own food as part of living the new “sustainable” lifestyle, along with only using “completely recyclable” goods.

Our would-be rulers appear not to have observed what happened the last time someone implemented this sort of radical policy. Or perhaps they have . . .

December 22, 2009

QotD: Say goodbye to “global warming” and “climate change”

Filed under: Environment, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:06

This new terminology is more clever, for it neatly avoids the shortcomings of its clumsy forebears. It requires neither warming, nor change. Just television.

When blizzards descend on scientists and world leaders from Copenhagen to East Anglia to Washington, the warmists can now claim ownership.

When hurricane forecasts fall short of the mark, the propagandists can cite their very failure to support their scheme.

Warm winters, cold winters, more hurricanes, fewer hurricanes, growing ice caps, melting ice caps — directions won’t matter. Every “new” temperature record, every seasonal flood, every California hot spell, every dusting of snow in the south of France — in other words, local weather, reported globally, will return full force as evidence of anthropogenic climate crime, as it did in a simpler time when the ice conditions of a canal in Ottawa led to nationwide panic.

So, get ready to welcome the new talking point on the block: “climate instability“.

Kate McMillan, “Y2Kyoto: Climate Instability Just Around The Corner”, Small Dead Animals 2009-12-20

Wikipedia shows its biggest innate weakness

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:40

James Delingpole shows the built-in bias of the Wikipedia editing team presents a very restrictive view of AGW and the CRU hacking/leak:

If you want to know the truth about Climategate, definitely don’t use Wikipedia. “Climatic Research Unit e-mail controversy”, is its preferred, mealy-mouthed euphemism to describe the greatest scientific scandal of the modern age. Not that you’d ever guess it was a scandal from the accompanying article. It reads more like a damage-limitation press release put out by concerned friends and sympathisers of the lying, cheating, data-rigging scientists.

Which funnily enough, is pretty much what it is. Even Wikipedia’s own moderators acknowledge that the entry has been hijacked, as this commentary by an “uninvolved editor” makes clear.

Unfortunately, this naked bias and corruption has infected the supposedly neutral Wikipedia’s entire coverage of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory. And much of this, as Lawrence Solomon reports in the National Post, is the work of one man, a Cambridge-based scientist and Green Party activist named William Connolley.

Wikipedia is a useful resource, but (as with the mainstream media) you have to take into account the built-in bias both on how issues are covered, but even the issues that are allowed to be presented.

Tim Worstall cheers the collapse of the Copenhagen circus

Filed under: Environment, Government, Politics, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:25

As Tim Worstall points out, the collapse of the Copenhagen talks is good news all around, regardless of your position on AGW:

Copenhagen is dead. Hurrah! And I say that as someone convinced that climate change is happening, we’re causing it, and we need to do something about it. However, what we don’t need to do is the ghastly mess that was being cooked up in Denmark.

They’ve essentially agreed to, um, well, try — and they’ll think a little bit more about what they’re going to try sometime later. And that’s the best result we could have hoped for. We already know what needs to be done, as the economists have worked it out. It is true that economists are not exactly the flavour of the month right now, but they are still the experts here.

We are trying to change people’s behaviour, and long experience tells us that the way to do that is to change the incentives people face. We might make it illegal to burn coal, for example — as we largely have done in British cities — and the motivation people would have for doing so would be an incentive not to.

Yet observation of humans over the past couple of centuries has shown that the carrot tends to provide a better incentive than the stick. Being shot for failing the Five Year Plan should concentrate minds more than the alternatives of bankruptcy or hot and cold running lingerie models which our own system provides for failure or success, but which has been better at producing economic growth? Quite.

What many had hoped would result from the Copenhagen meetings was an embryo form of world government . . . and the idea that it was being snuck into the discussions under cover of environmental concerns was a feature, from the point of view of those who favour supra-national controls. No democratic leader arrived in town with a mandate to give up national sovereignty, but many attending hoped that they could “do a fast one” regardless.

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