Climate Resistance

Polls Apart

2008-07-11T00:23:00.007+01:00

One of our major gripes with Environmentalism concerns the claims made by its adherents that it is some sort of popular, grass-roots movement. Time and again, polls suggest otherwise. And yet these polls are rarely, if ever, reported in terms of the undemocratic nature of Environmentalism as it is foisted upon reluctant electorates. Rather, they are presented as evidence that the public are unthinking, selfish morons brainwashed by scheming 'deniers'.

Of course, everybody - ourselves included - will jump on a poll that can be used to support their own position. Which is why Green activist and winner of the Royal Society's prestigious prize for popular science (fiction), Mark Lynas, picked up on last week's ICM/Guardian poll. Writing in Comment is Free, he suggests that, in contrast to previous polls, it

shows that a clear majority favours government action on the environment v the economy, while an even larger majority supports the introduction of green taxes.

And it does, if you believe that the answers to such leading questions as 'Generally speaking would you support or oppose the introduction of green taxes, designed to discourage things that are harmful to the environment?' tell you anything at all about public opinion.

But, his main point is that the poll dispels the myth that concern about climate change is a luxury of the middle-classes:

perhaps the most fascinating result of all emerges from the small print of the different social classes of the ICM survey respondents. Environmentalists are constantly accused of being middle-class lifestyle faddists, who don't understand the day-to-day financial pressures faced by "ordinary" working people. But the number of people who thought that environment should be the government's priority rather than the economy was substantially higher (56%) among the lower income, less well-educated DE demographic than among the better-off ABs (47%). Lower-income social groups also have a much lighter environmental footprint overall: only 42% of DEs took a foreign holiday over the last three years, whilst 77% of ABs did. Better-off people also own more cars, as you might expect – only 5% of DEs have three or more cars, whilst 15% of ABs do.

So perhaps anti-environmental class warriors like the editors of Spiked need to find a new cause to champion. The working-class people who they claim "can't afford to be concerned about climate change" actually care more about the future of the planet than the rich – and are doing a lot less damage to boot. So next time you hear someone defending motorway expansion or cheap flights on behalf of the British poor, ask yourself the question: whose side are they really on?

Environmentalism might not be popular, you see, but at least it's equally unpopular across society. Lynas's view of the "working-class people" has more to do with the idea of the Noble Savage than solidarity with those at the bottom of the social pile. In his world, poverty is something to aspire to rather than alleviate. It's as if they cause 'a lot less damage' as a result of a desire to live in harmony with nature rather than the fact that they are, by definition, less able to afford the luxury of foreign holidays and cars.

Not that we should be surprised. After all, this is the same Mark Lynas who believes that alleviating poverty should be put on hold until the planet has been saved:

The struggle for equity within the human species must take second place to the struggle for the survival of an intact and functioning biosphere

Moreover, Lynas's attention to the 'small print' was not as attentive as it could have been. Otherwise he could not have reached the conclusion that he did. Yes, the responses of DE and AB respondents are comparable across the survey, but the demographics of the two groups suggest that there are good reasons for that that have little to do with social class per se. For example, 50% of the DEs were retired, as opposed to 24% for ABs. Only 18% of DEs were working full time, as opposed to 56% for ABs. And 67% of DEs were not working at all (ABs = 30%). In other words, a much higher proportion of DE respondents are unlikely to be affected by environmental tax hikes.

Lynas's true sentiments about the masses are evident in his reply to commenters who dare to challenge his latest rant against climate change 'deniers':

Well I have to say that most of the comments this piece (and many of my others) has attracted simply prove my rather depressing conclusion that a lot of probably very decent people have swallowed the line pumped out by industry-funded US conservative think tanks. Almost ever denialist argument I've ever seen first made an appearance courtesy of them - there's very little in the 'denialisophere' (apologies) which is in any way original.

None of the citations of course mention the peer-reviewed literature, where there isn't any discussion of whether anthropogenic global warming is real or not, because all the systematic data shows that it is. But it's pointless to go on digging trenches - and personally I've got better things to do than engage with entirely close-minded people. This is a political debate, not a scientific one, and has been for a long time.

Those 'very decent' yet 'entirely closed-minded' members of the public get the blame whenever polls suggest that they are not giving environmental issues the attention they should be. For example, we reported on last year's Ipsos Mori's poll, which found that the majority of people are not convinced that the scientific argument for action on climate change is clear-cut. Report author Phil Downing described the results as 'disturbing' and 'frightening':

Given the actual consensus and the reality if the situation, it is a particularly disturbing statistic and does suggest one or two things. Firstly the impact of contrarian and negative messages, for example, Channel 4's great Global Warming Swindle are having an impact. Secondly, if the public is ambivalent, and you have a disconnect between what you believe on the one hand, and how you act on the other. The easiest thing is to change what you believe, rather than how you act.

We thought these sounded more like the words of an opinion former than an opinion pollster.

A couple of weeks ago, Ipsos Mori produced another report along similar lines, which was reported exclusively by the Observer newspaper:

The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans - and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem

And whose fault is that?

There is growing concern that an economic depression and rising fuel and food prices are denting public interest in environmental issues. Some environmentalists blame the public's doubts on last year's Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, and on recent books, including one by Lord Lawson, the former Chancellor, that question the consensus on climate change.

We spoke to Downing, on the phone and by email. He told us that, when he used words like 'frightening' or 'disturbing' after last year's poll, he was speaking from the perspective of the government who had commissioned it. He also said that any mention of the Swindle and Lord Lawson in the Observer article did not come from him. And anyway, he only mentioned it last year because several poll respondents cited the Swindle when talking about their doubts over the government line.

Phil Downing: [W]hen we released the report last year, we did comment that we had started to note in purely qualitative terms that people were making reference to that programme, or had picked up on some of the secondary press [...] So we were saying this might be playing a role because this was the first time we were picking it up. But we see it as more of a correlation in time rather than a causation. We have no evidence of a direct link between The Great Global Warming Swindle, or any other programme for that matter, and what is driving people's views [...] We have no quantative data on the extent to which it is driving it. No one has commissioned research to gauge the impact of The Great Global Warming Swindle or An Inconvenient Truth and how the public are making sense of these different messages.

Regardless of who made that argument in which year, however, it boils down to the point that it is democracy itself - a free press, debate, and the need to win legitimacy for political ideas by contest - that has beset the environmental movement's intentions. Never mind the vast resources available to the Greens to push their own agenda. The fact is that the Observer can count on the fingers of two fingers the number of public challenges to environmental orthodoxy, yet Environmentalism is pushed down our throats from nearly every Government department, local authority, NGO and charity, every current affairs program on every TV channel, in every school, and, according to this article in the Shields Gazette, by Downing himself:

Keynote speaker Phil Downing, head of environmental research for Ipsos Mori, will be encouraging councils to 'think global' but 'act local' and use the regional advice and support available to inspire their communities to help tackle climate change.

So the question is whether Phil Downing and Ipsos Mori are activists or researchers, opinion pollsters or opinion-formers. We doubt that were he taking such a side on a party-political issue he would be allowed by his employers to make such statements. It suggests that environmental orthodoxy has been established within a certain influential strata of society, who believe it to be 'above' politics, as though environmentalism weren't a political ideology.

Downing told us that the line between pollster and activist is one that he is careful not to cross. And that the Shields Gazette got it wrong - he was there simply to deliver an analysis of public opinion on climate change. If anyone out there happened to attend the event, we'd love to hear from you.

Climate Resistance: Do you have strict guidelines at Ipsos Mori about not crossing that line?

PD: Yes, it's something that is strictly frowned upon, if you go into something contributing to one side of a debate and not the other [...] there are stringent quality control procedures in place to ensure impartiality at Ipsos MORI - this extends both to the way the questions are asked as well as any material we release into the public domain. A specific and in-house team is required to sign off survey materials. As well as the interpretative text we have published the results in full on the website.

Readers can make up their own minds as to whether Ipsos Mori, in blaming a contrarian tv documentary for the public's divergence from the government line while failing to consider the possibility that the government's line just isn't very convincing, should perhaps have another look at their guidelines.

CR: Is it not more likely that the reticence of the public to take up the governmental line on climate change is the result of an unconvincing governmental message?

PD: Well, you're more than welcome to commission a poll from us.

CR: What would that cost?

PD: Depends. If you're looking at 1000 people, nationally representative, you're looking at something like £700-1000 per question.

You could almost understand - if not excuse - the failure to consider the strikingly obvious if, say, the government had commissioned it, because, apparently, you get what you pay for with these things. But, intriguingly, the latest poll was not actually commissioned by anybody. Downing said that Ipsos Mori conducted it off their own backs to shed light on the complexity of the public's attitudes and beliefs towards climate change. And yet, all it has achieved is to restate the fact that the public is ambivalent, and spawn newspaper articles that seek simplistic excuses for that finding.

To a large extent, there's little point complaining. Everybody knows that polls are not to be taken seriously; that they are frequently spectacularly wrong; that busy people are keen to fob pollsters off with the answer that is expected of them, etc etc. And, to repeat, we are as guilty as anybody of jumping on poll results when it suits us. When push comes to shove, there's only one type of poll that counts, and that's the type that is conducted at the polling booths. And elections demonstrate quite clearly how unpopular Environmentalism is with the masses. The Green Party has no MPs in the UK Parliament, and the Green contingent of MEPs voted into seats in the European Parliament comprise just 5% (and the European elections have a notoriously low turn-out).

But even more telling is the spectacular decline in the number of people actually bothering to vote:

Funny how turn-out plummets as awareness of the 'most pressing challenge of our time' goes through the roof.

Forget the opinion polls. Contrary to the claims of Environmentalists, few people have really bought into their world-view. If anything, most people are slightly irritated by it. Environmentalism persists only because few people object vehemently to it, and because it's as good as impossible to vote against it.

It's All About Ethanol

2008-07-09T02:30:00.004+01:00

Poor old Gordon Brown:

More than 80 Labour MPs have signed an amendment to the Climate Change Bill, which would force ministers to promise greater cuts in carbon emissions.

The Climate Change Bill commits the government to make at least a 60% cut in CO2 emissions by 2050. The MPs want that figure to rise to 80%.

The rebels say the 60% goal will not do enough to control global warming.

This is the latest installment not only in Brown's Prime Ministerial nightmare, but also in the razor wars that masquerade as environmental politics in the UK. Looking on the bright side, we're right on course to collect on our prediction that somebody, sometime soon, is going to pledge that the country will be carbon negative by 2050.

Even more predictable is the excuse that the backbenchers offer for their rebellion:

[The rebels] also claim it is based on out-of-date science.

These figures aren't based on science at all. They are plucked from the thin air of our ailing stratosphere and given authority merely by the use of the word 'science' in close proximity.

It all makes the negotiators at the G8 summit seem so last week:

World leaders say they will aim to set a global target of cutting carbon emissions by at least 50% by 2050 in an effort to tackle global warming.

Only 50%! Ach, they'll get the hang of it. Especially with the G5 developing nations snapping at their heels:

Mexico, Brazil, China, India and South Africa challenged the Group of Eight countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by more than 80% by 2050.

Not to mention that bastion of objective, detached scientific investigation, the IPCC's chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri, who complains that the developed countries should be showing leadership on such matters:

"They should get off the backs of India and China," he told reporters in the Indian capital, Delhi.

"They should say: 'We'll assist you to move to a pattern of development which is sustainable, low in terms of emissions intensity. But we as the richest nations are willing to take the lead and we affirm our commitment to do so.'"

But the G8 statements on carbon emissions have been eclipsed by discussions of the global food crisis and biofuels, and the supposed causal connection between the two. The G8 pledge to ensure that biofuel policies are compatible with food security comes in the wake of the leaked World Bank report that the push for biofuels accounts for 75% of the food crisis by competing with food crops for agricultural land. Suddenly, it seems, all the world's problems are less about oil than they are about ethanol.

But, in Food price rises: are biofuels to blame?, James Heartfield provides such anaemic thinking with a healthy dose of red-blooded realism:

For more than 20 years now, both the US and the European Union have pursued policies designed to reduce food output. They have introduced policies that reward farmers for retiring land from production (such as the EU’s set-aside and wilderness schemes). At the same time, the United Nations has used its aid programmes to penalise African farmers who try to increase yields with modern fertilisers or mechanisation [...]

The programmes of land retirement and reservation have been so successful worldwide that between 1982 and 2003, national parks grew from nine million square kilometres to 19million, 12.5 per cent of the earth’s surface – or more than the combined land of China and South-East Asia. In the US more than one billion acres of agricultural land is lying fallow. So the idea that land has been lost from ordinary crops to biofuels is not really true; rather, it has been lost from agricultural production altogether.

For the environmentalist critics, blaming biofuels is a desperate act of scapegoating. For years now, they have been propagandising against mass food production, favouring a return to less efficient farming methods, and for the return of farmland to its natural state. It was environmentalists who lobbied for the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, that biased UN programmes against modern farming techniques in Africa (in favour of ‘appropriate’, which is to say poor ‘technologies’). Just when it suited large-scale agriculture to wind down output to protect prices, the environmentalists were on hand to support land retirement schemes. Farmers, according to Britain’s Countryside Agency, would no longer farm, but become stewards of the countryside.

It's interesting, then, that the G8 summit has also committed to fulfil a pledge to raise annual foreign aid levels by $50bn by 2010, of which $25bn is intended for Africa. Not that that is a Bad Thing in and of itself, of course; it just depends how it is used. If it's spent on more of the same, and if similar strings are attached, we can expect more land to be taken out of agricultural production in the name of the saving the planet, more food shortages, more scapegoating, and more tin-pot explanations for why the world is screwed and we're all going to die. As we keep saying, Environmentalism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A major question remains regarding the green U-turn on biofuels. Why did Environmentalists ever push the bloody things in the first place? OK, so they are, theoretically, a carbon-neutral source of energy. So far, so green. But the fact remains that it was hardly rocket science to work out that they would necessarily jostle for space with agricultural land and wilderness areas.

So please indulge us while we speculate wildly, and quite possibly wrongly... Could it be that those who were pushing biofuels at the start of the century were figuring that, come 2008, primed by the Green Great-and-Good, the world would have moved on to debating how best to go about reducing the human population to more 'sustainable' levels? And let's face it, if there's one thing that Environmentalism doesn't like it's humans - especially lots of them. And you can bet that, while Environmentalism is not the conspiracy that many of its critics accuse it of being, its adherents do have some sort of long-term strategy. While Gordon Brown, his backbenchers, Tory leader David Cameron and pretty much everybody else in parliamentary politics grasp desperately and opportunistically at Green policies in the absence of any other, better ideas, we at least know where we stand with environmental idealogues such as Jonathon Porritt and Paul Ehrlich (who are both, as it happens, trustees of the Optimum Population Trust, a group for whom 'optimum' means - in case you hadn't guessed - 'much smaller').

The trouble is that they underestimated the humanity of, well, humanity. The fact is that in 2008, and despite the efforts of Porritt, Ehrlich et al, the vast majority of us remain repulsed - and may we remain so for ever more - at the thought of population control, just as we remain repulsed by the notion a moral equivalence between nature and civilisation. The result is that they have had to think again.

That said, we are keen not to fall into the trap of painting a simplistic, one-dimensional picture of Environmentalism. There has always been a significant element of the movement that is against the dealings of big-business - especially big agri-business - as a matter of principle. But at the same time, other greens have appealed to market forces in the fight against ecological meltdown. (To repeat ourselves again, Environmentalism transcends traditional Left-Right distinctions.) In which case, the whole messy business might be the product of the push-and-pull between these various Green factions. A bit like the Labour Party, perhaps.

Infinite Regress

2008-07-04T00:07:00.005+01:00

In a recent post, we looked at some of Green MEP Caroline Lucas's arguments for action on climate change. One of them has stuck with us as especially absurd, and merits further attention:

this planet has finite resources. You cannot go on growing indefinitely on a finite planet.

This appeal to 'physics' pops up frequently in environmental debates. Interestingly, it's a tactic also popular with Creationists and their ilk, who cite Newton's second law of thermodynamics to suggest that evolution contradicts fundamental physical truths. In each case, a woolly argument about how the world should be is patched up with sciency-sounding facts, figures and laws. This is not the tactic of groups confident about their political position; it is a sign of the desperation of groups that are failing to capture the imagination of the world's population.

In Lucas's world, the appeal to physics is used as an argument against economic growth and technological development. It is principally a criticism of capitalism, which requires growth and is, therefore, inherently environmentally destructive. It is worth repeating a point we made at the time. The objection to capitalism on the grounds that it contradicts physical laws is a departure from prior objections to capitalism from the Left and is not a criticism of the kind that we would expect the Left to produce. Instead of offering a description of social problems - for example poverty - arising from the social relations produced by capitalism, Lucas seeks to explain social phenomena in terms of geological and biological processes. This is similar to James Garvey's claims in The Ethics of Climate Change, which appeals to scientific authority to make a case for environmental determinism. In Lucas's argument, there is a causal chain, from capitalism, via the natural world, to social problems such as poverty, which can be described ‘scientifically’.

Lucas might argue that she could hold both positions simultaneously. But if that were the case, why would it be necessary to emphasise the environmental aspect, let alone mention it at all, given that the social, human-centric perspective is a lot more powerful? The major reason is that the two perspectives are irreconcilable. One looks at social problems as the product of social relations, the other looks at social problems as the consequence of exceeding 'natural' limits - 'unsustainability'. They are further contradictory because we can conceive of non-capitalist growth which is, in the green lexicon, ‘environmentally unfriendly’, but which produces a social good - we could build dams, relocate cities away from coasts, reclaim coasts, create ways for the developing world to have much cheaper access to energy and industrialise agricultural production, and so on. We can also conceive of capitalist growth that is environmentally destructive and yet produces a social good. After all, it’s not as if cars and labour-saving devices and all that stuff have no utility and have been foisted upon people against their will. And it’s not as if economic and technological growth has occurred against a backdrop of lower living standards and declining indicators of social progress. On the contrary, things have got better and better. Lucas - who is unable to make the argument that things are worse in order to challenge capitalism - needs to make the argument that things are about to get worse, and that development of any kind is necessarily environmentally destructive, and so creates a haunting spectre of 'unsustainability' and imminent social, ecological and economic collapse.

In this respect, Lucas does not offer us a principled objection to capitalism – she claims that it is wrong in the same way that arguments against gravity would be wrong. Whatever your thoughts about capitalism happen to be, and even if you still believe that environmentalism is a continuation of socialism, it is worth recognising environmentalism’s distance from the traditional Left. It highlights the Left’s political exhaustion, and the environmental movement’s intellectual bankruptcy.

On a similar note, it is not true that notions of sustainable development are antithetical to the economic Right or capitalism. After all Malthus, on whose ideas Lucas's are based, was a classical economist, whose ideas were debunked by Marx himself. More contemporary conservatives have also embraced the rhetoric of 'sustainability:

The Government espouses the concept of sustainable economic development. Stable prosperity can be achieved throughout the world provided the environment is nurtured and safeguarded. Protecting this balance of nature is therefore one of the great challenges of the late Twentieth Century

The second problem with Lucas's argument is that her conception of 'resources' is itself flawed. Malthusians - especially environmentalists - misconceive resources as ‘substance’. In a finite universe, never mind a finite world, all substances are of course finite. If our 'dependence' on Earth's resources are 'unsustainable' because they are finite, then so too would our much more real dependence on solar, wind and tidal power, be ultimately unsustainable. They are not merely unsustainable in the sense that one day the sun - which drives all renewable sources - will collapse, they are also unsustainable because continued and increasing dependence on this form of energy itself cannot be sustained against growing numbers of people - there is only a limited amount of recoverable energy entering the system at any time. According to environmentalists, this is why we must therefore limit the number of people and ration the amount of energy they are entitled to. We are in favour of some of the large projects which have been conceived of as part of a 'post-carbon economy' for their own sake, particularly the idea of large, solar energy collecting arrays. Covering the uninhabited land of the Sahara with solar panels, for example, might provide 50 times the power used currently across the globe. But such projects, including hydro-electric, are met by environmentalists with anxiety about the environmental destruction that large scale developments necessarily cause. And, as we have seen, Environmentalists are against environmental destruction, even where it produces a social benefit.

And anyway, development itself is not intrinsically bad for nature. First, as economies develop, they are inclined to pay increasing attention to the environmental effects of development as wealth allows. Compare the once filthy development in the West to the comparatively cleaner industries of today. Even the destructive process of open-cast mining reinstates wilderness. Indeed, yesterday's open cast mines are today's nature reserves. They are clean ecological slates on which Mother Nature can work her magic of colonisation and succession, and are often home to rare, specialist species that are not found elsewhere. Similarly, landfill sites are recovered and repopulated with trees, and what's more, nobody would want to develop on top of them, whereas nature hardly cares. Second, technological development allows for the possibility of moving away from a dependence on natural processes, resulting in a reduced industrial footprint as both science and economics permit. It would not require a leap of imagination to consider the shifting away from rural agriculture, to an indoor process, under perfect conditions. The reason for not doing that now is that 'solar power' makes using fields for crop production far cheaper. But a more abundant form of power would render such forms of production obsolete and inefficient. Of course, organic food faddists would baulk at the idea of lentils grown indoors. But such a step would create the possibility of safer, healthier, more plentiful food, protected from pests and other natural problems, and, of course, would be environmentally non-destructive. This would be a 'green revolution' second to none, as agricultural land would be freed up for other uses, including, if we so wished, nature conservation. What environmentalists should be calling for is a world-wide push for new ways of producing more and more energy, and more wealth, not arguing that it should be rationed and limited. Rationing is a guaranteed way to cause environmental problems. That they don't reinforces the idea that Environmentalism is less about saving the planet per se and more to do with a discomfort with human aspirations.

Access to substance and its existence in sufficient quantities are only part of what constitutes a resource. The remainder is intellectual. Lucas herself must recognise this to some extent, because, as she knows only too well, methods such as domestic solar panels are not currently economically viable alternatives to centralised, fossil-fuel power generation. She argues that huge investments and massive infrastructural changes are needed to develop technology, and for the economics to be adjusted to make alternatives viable. So in this respect, solar energy and other renewables are not yet the ‘resources’ that she hopes them to become. So Lucas’s argument for renewable resources to be exploited in place of fossil fuels is predicated on a transformed relationship with a substance, and the development of the technology to make that exploitation possible. She cannot deny, then, that politics - as much as physics - are what determines which substances are resources.

Back to Lucas's blind faith in the laws of physics... 500 years ago, oil was not a resource. Neither was uranium. People around at the time didn’t know how to use them. Things that weren’t resources became resources. Our ability to use new resources made old resources obsolete. Now, no home in the UK needs to burn wood for heat, for example. Or, as Bjørn Lomborg has put it, the Stone Age didn't come to an end because we ran out of stones. What Malthusians forget is that development begats development. After all, you don't make a jump from rubbing twigs together to atomic energy. Critics of this perspective on this site suggest that this represents some form of contemporary Lysenkoism - that blind faith in science's ability to rescue us from future resource depletion is a dangerous, politically-motivated folly. They argue that science will not be able to continually provide 'techno-fixes' to the problems which emerge from our ways of life. We must come up against some ceiling sooner or later, the logic goes.

But anxiety about 'growing indefinitely on a finite planet' forgets that our abilities to make use of the finite space and finite resources increases the effective space and amount of resources that are available. And there is a colossal amount of space, and an abundance of resources out there. For example, we hear a lot about the looming 'water wars' that are to be fought because of apparent shortages. A quick look at any map will reveal that the Earth isn't running out of it any time soon. The problem is simply technological. Instead of concerning themselves with how to provide for a growing population by coming up with desalination, distribution and irrigation schemes, the environmental movement instead uses the prospect of conflict to arm its arguments in favour of restricting development and of rationing what water comes our way through natural processes. What better way could there be of guaranteeing a 'natural' disaster than limiting the supply of resources - super abundant resources, never mind oil - to human populations? Environmentalists simultaneously warn of shortages, yet stand in the way of developing any alternatives that might not last 'indefinitely'. There is only one way out of the resource-depletion scenario that is presented, they say, reduce the number of people, and the amount of resources they are entitled to.

What environmentalists refuse to consider is what a resource- and energy-abundant society might be like. What if stuff in the world just got cheaper? What if access to water and energy wasn't an issue for anyone in the world? Perhaps, just perhaps, it is this very democratisation of resource use that the environmental movement is a response to. The possibilities that are opened up by technological development for our way of life and our politics are the real locus of anxieties about the future.

Environmentalists demand an impossibly high standard. Nothing the human race has ever done to improve its conditions has been 'sustainable'. As technologies have changed our lives, and created new problems, so too have new politics arisen out of these changing conditions. If this process had been stalled during any era on the basis that it was unsustainable, we would still be living in stone-age conditions, with stone-age politics - at least, that is, until we really did run out of stones.

The Ethics of 'the Ethics of Climate Change'

2008-07-01T20:33:00.003+01:00

James Garvey didn't like Ben's review of his book on Culture Wars. But instead of responding to it, he seems to have merely laid out the same argument again.

Science can give us a grip on the fact of climate change. (For a start, have a look here: http://www.ipcc.ch/). We know that temperatures are rising; the sea level is rising too; sea ice is thinning; permafrost is melting; glaciers are in world-wide retreat; ElNino events are becoming more frequent, persistent and intense; and on and on. We know that our fellow creatures are already suffering as a result of climate change. We know that human beings are suffering too and that they will continue to suffer. The Red Cross argue that as of 2001 there were as many as 25 million environmental refugees, people on the move away from dry wells and failed crops. That’s larger than the number they give for people displaced by war. One sixth of the world’s population gets its water from the melting snow and ice tricking down from frozen sources which are likely to dry up in the years to come. There is a lot of suffering underway and on the cards. It’s this suffering which makes climate change a moral problem.

Again, Garvey defers the understanding of the problem to 'science', and directs us to the IPCC. There are two main problems with this. First, the IPCC is not beyond scientific challenge as Garvey suggests it is. Second, the imperatives seemingly generated by that scientific definition of the problems - even if the science is true - do not follow necessarily from it. Yes, we may well be inducing climate change, but there may be - in fact, there is - a moral argument that places industrial and economic development over mitigation, in spite of its effect on the environment. Garvey just doesn't get it. But science cannot and must not be allowed to generate moral and political imperatives. To allow it to do so is to undermine Garvey's own discipline. In doing so, the best he can offer from moral philosophy is a reduction of complicated scientific, political, and economic arguments to facile comparisons of 'business as usual' to 'standing around, watching a child drown'. Garvey's inconsequential and trite prose isn't moral philosophy, it is just standard moral posturing.

But, if Garvey wants to wave science around as a moral weapon, let us look at his understanding of the 'science'. He says that "we know that..."

"... temperatures are rising".
But we also know that they are falling. It's very clear from the following graph that temperatures are lower in recent months (in fact, lower than at any point) than they were a decade ago, according to any of the four main observations. There doesn't seem to have been much warming over the period either. Of course, this is not to say that there is 'no such thing as man-made global warming'. The problem is with factoids like 'temperatures are rising' being used to arm moral and political arguments. Facts and data require interpretation. Factoids require bins.

"... the sea level is rising"

As indeed they have been for quite some time, at various rates. As IPCC TAR shows there has been 120 meters of sea level rise in the last 20 thousand years. Sea level rose nearly 20cm over the last century - little, if any of which could be attributed to global warming - without too much fuss. Why is it suddenly so problematic? Whether or not human CO2 has contributed to sea-level rise, and whether or not it will continue to, or make things worse, mitigation will have very little effect in the near and mid term, and the problem of 'natural' sea level rise will still exist, regardless of what we do or do not do.

"... sea ice is thinning"

Arctic ice extent - not thinning - does seem to be following a negative trend.

But the Antarctic shows the opposite trend.

So to what extent can we say "sea ice is thinning"? What was the rate 'before', and how is it different now? What 'should' it be doing? In fact, there isn't much data available. AsIPCC AR4 reports, "Thickness data, especially from submarines, are available but restricted to the central Arctic, where they indicate thinning of approximately 40% between the period 1958 to 1977 and the 1990s. This is likely an overestimate of the thinning over the entire arctic region however." There is no substance to the claim that Garvey makes. The science is most certainly not in.

"... permafrost is melting"
While this poses some practical problems for people, melting permafrost also creates positives, with new areas being opened up for human use in agriculture. Expensive action to mitigate climate change creates little or no net benefit, especially given that we are, apparently, committed to some level of climate change, leaving fewer resources available to local adaptation. As we often say, 'environmentalism is a self-fulfilling prophecy'. We mitigate at the expense of our ability to adapt, which makes it a destructive folly. Garvey can only think of one course of action to follow because he needs there to be a black-and-white matter of absolutes and imperatives. He doesn't want us to be able to do a cost/benefit analysis on human terms. Furthermore, we know that permafrost was melting anyway, before any human-induced change.

"... glaciers are in world-wide retreat"
They were anyway. As IPCC AR4 reports "Most mountain glaciers and ice caps have been shrinking, with the retreat probably having started about 1850 [NB: the end of the 'little ice age']. Although many Northern Hemisphere glaciers had a few years ofnearbalance around 1970, this was followed by increased shrinkage."

"... El Nino events are becoming more frequent, persistent and intense".
This is simply nonsense. Here is a graph, plotting ENO since 1950

There has not been any unusually intense or persistent El Nino event since 1997/8. A graph we posted back in April shows the danger of looking at ENO to substantiate claims made about anthropogenic global warming.

This goes to show that temperatures are more closely related to ENO than temperatures are related to CO2, let alone ENO is related to CO2. Hence the Hadley Centre's making of some fairly safe bets, but changing them, not as new scientific evidence emerges, but according to what they expect theENO to do in the near future, or is already doing. Claims made by sceptics that the effects of the current ENO as it enters a negative episode, since last year, yielded temperature anomalies much lower than in recent years (in fact, very much average at near zero), have been waved away by alarmists claiming that they are the result of 'natural variability'. So, isENO the product of anthropogenic CO2, or the source of natural variability? This is a question Garvey does not seem to ask nor answer, yet wants to draw moral authority from, as though it had been answered.

From the science, Garvey moves on to the human effects, as if they were inevitable.

We know that our fellow creatures are already suffering as a result of climate change. We know that human beings are suffering too and that they will continue to suffer. The Red Cross argue that as of 2001 there were as many as 25 million environmental refugees, people on the move away from dry wells and failed crops. That’s larger than the number they give for people displaced by war. One sixth of the world’s population gets its water from the melting snow and ice tricking down from frozen sources which are likely to dry up in the years to come. There is a lot of suffering underway and on the cards. It’s this suffering which makes climate change a moral problem.

The first thing to point out is that an 'environmental refugee' is not the same thing as a 'climate change refugee', let alone a human-induced-climate-change refugee. The claim that people are 'already suffering as a result of climate change' is totally unsupported. Climate is a problem for people, regardless of whether it is changing or not. The Red Cross, never mind scientists, however noble their intentions, cannot make the distinction between a human caused climate event, and a 'natural' climate change event. And what is spectacularly absent from this kind of calculation is the extent to which industrialisation - the process which has put distance between environmental effects and human suffering, and which is blamed for causing climate change - has obviously reduced the extent of human suffering. It has brought benefits to a great deal more people than 25 million, and is evidently what is missing from the lives of the vast majority of those 25 million 'climate refugees'. It is this absence of development which is the problem, not the fact of different climatic conditions. But without this form of environmental determinism, Garvey cannot make a case that climate change demands a new ethical perspective on 'equality'.

Science can give us the facts, but we need something more if we want to act on the basis of those facts. The something more has at least a little to do with what we think is right, with justice, with responsibility, with what we value, with what matters to us. You cannot find that sort of thing in an ice core. You have to think your way through it. It helps to start small, with everyday thoughts about doing the right thing.

And without that form of environmental determinism to provide him with imperatives, Garvey would find it very difficult to explain what 'justice', 'responsibility', and 'values' actually are. It is only in the face of a problem that he can generate any meaning to provide these terms with. He can't conceive, for example, of an argument for equality in human terms, he needs environmental crisis in order to legitimise an argument for negative equality. He can't conceive of an argument for justice without a crime. Not, notice, a crime against a person, but a crime against the environment, which is later visited on people by consequence. This is 'environmental justice'. He cannot conceive of any human values without connecting humans to the environment. This empty perspective is finally shown in his appeal that we 'start small, with everyday thoughts about doing the right thing' - he cannot conceive of big things like solving the material inequalities that allow people to suffer from the effects of climate. He cannot conceive of a genuine form of justice, where people are protected from the climate. He doesn't value that sort of justice. He doesn't think we have that kind of responsibility. This 'thinking small' mentality barely registers as even thinking at all. According to this 'small' doctrine, justice is done, equality is achieved, and your responsibilities are met by having a shower instead of bath, recycling your newspapers, and not using plastic bags. Who would have thought that ending world poverty was so spectacularly easy?

If walking past a drowning child is wrong, particularly when one is well-placed to help, then the West is doing something wrong by carrying on with business as usual. It amounts to walking past, to doing nothing, in the face of human suffering. It stands out even more given the West’s capacity to do the right thing. Maybe it’s a kind of moral outrage.

Garvey compares our 'inaction' on climate change to walking past the drowning child. Perhaps Garvey doesn't sense any problem with this patronisation of both his readers and those he wishes to save from climate change.

Yes, the industrialised world can help the developing world. But, only by virtue of its industrialisation - the very thing that 'the ethics of climate change' asks us to turn back the clock on. All he has to offer the poorer inhabitants of the planet - assuming firstly that the 'science' is true, and secondly that mitigation will have any noticeable effect - is marginally different weather. Slightly different weather will not end poverty. It will not create opportunities for development, it will not even make soil more fertile, nor irrigate fields. It will not change the economic or political circumstances in the Third World. All it will do is put a greater number of the world's population into a relationship with nature where human suffering is far more directly influenced by environmental changes; it is a necessary fact that increasing your dependence on nature makes you more vulnerable to it. As we have said before, environmentalism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

These are the 'ethics' of climate change. What they reveal is an intellectually bankrupt moral philosophy, which cannot conceive of the world in terms other than culpability and victimhood; it lacks a positive conception of 'good'. This in turn reflects the political exhaustion which drives political elites towards such vapid ethical constructions to attach themselves to. It is only by jumping aboard such a hollow vessel as 'the ethics of climate change' that today's politicians can claim to be offering the world anything, without actually committing themselves to anything meaningful. But in truth, this is a ship of fools.

Despite Garvey's claims that there is more to understanding climate change than the 'science', without the 'science' narrating the apocalyptic story driving environmental ethics, there is nothing for the moral philosopher to consider; it is 'unethical' not to 'do something' to 'combat climate change'. Therefore, the only role that ethical philosophy plays is in explaining - rather than informing - the decision to 'act'. Garvey asks us to take the scientific 'facts' of the matter for granted. But the truth is there are many ways other than mitigation to approach climate problems - whether or not it is changing, and whether or not we are causing change. He claims that science provides facts which cannot be questioned. But by forcing 'nature' and 'science' between people with environmental determinism, he naturalises the way real people actually relate, and demands that people accept the limits that he sets for them, and lower their expectations. It prevents a genuine understanding of real inequalities in the world in favour of a hollow, surrogate system of ethics that exploits images of inequality for its own ends and offers nothing other than an empty promise not to make it worse.

$IR NI¢HOLA$ $T£RN

2008-06-25T19:18:00.003+01:00

Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the famous Stern Report, which underpins many an argument in favour of climate change mitigation, is behind a 'carbon credit reference agency' launched today.
“If we are to attract the levels of finance necessary to make this a mainstream market and have a strong impact on emissions reduction, risks must be clearly understood, articulated and managed. A detailed ratings system is a vital tool to bring greater clarity, transparency and certainty to the market,” he said.
Of course, where there's muck, there's brass.

The agency, run by the IdeaCarbon group of which Lord Stern is vice-chairman [he is in fact vice-chairman of IDEAglobal], said it would offer investors a guide to the quality of credits and the likelihood that they would be delivered. Sellers of carbon credits would have to pay to have their products rated, while buyers would also pay to gain access to the ratings.

IDEAcarbon sell themselves accordingly:
IDEAcarbon is an independent and professional provider of ratings, research and strategic advice on carbon finance. Our services are designed to provide leading financial institutions, corporations, governments, traders and developers with unbiased intelligence and analysis of the factors that affect the pricing of carbon market assets.
Other group directors include:

Ian Johnson - Chairman
Ian joined IDEAcarbon following a distinguished career at the World Bank. For eight years he was the Bank’s Vice President for Sustainable Development overseeing its work on climate change and carbon finance. Prior to that he played a major role in negotiating the establishment of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and managed its day-to-day operations for six years. Ian is presently an advisor to Globe, G8+5 and to the UNFCCC.

and

Samuel Fankhauser – Managing Director (Strategic Advice)
Sam served on the 1995, 2001 and 2007 assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He also gained hands-on experience in the design of emission reduction projects as a climate change economist for the Global Environment Facility and the World Bank. Sam joined IDEAcarbon from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, where his most recent position was Deputy Chief Economist.

Now, just imagine the fuss that would ensue, were some figure who was depended on for his impartial advice to make public statements on climate change that weren't in accordance with the 'consensus', and it turned out that that person had a financial interest in the public's perception on matters that he advised about? Might there not be some protest? After all, it's not as if his advice is subtle:
Lord Stern, the former World Bank chief economist whose landmark report on the economics of climate change warned the world risked plunging into economic depression if action was not taken urgently on greenhouse gases, said carbon trading was a “key plank” in dealing with climate change.
It is often said that 'climate change will be worse for the poor'. Well, it turns out that it will be great for the rich. As a December '07 press release shows, there's plenty to be positive about climate change:
“By 2020 the global carbon market could be worth EUR 240-450 billion” says Lord Nicholas Stern, Vice Chairman of IDEAGlobal Group, in the inaugural issue of CARBONfirst
He's no fool, Sir Nick. This gives the lie to the claims that environmentalism is the continuation of anti-capitalism - there is clearly room for capitalists at the fair-trade, organic, global warming beano.

Just shouting about hypocrisy gets nothing done, and doesn't change anything. But how does this happen? Why isn't Stern embarrassed about this? Why don't we see an equivalent to Exxonsecrets.org, showing the monied interests buzzing around the global warming issue? Why is it that this kind of barefaced conflict of interests is largely overlooked, while people like James Hansen call for oil company executives to face trials for 'high crimes against nature and humanity', allegedly for distorting the public perception of climate change for profit?

What this shows is that 'the ethics of climate change' allow for financial and political interests to be overlooked for the 'greater good'. The fact that Stern has been instrumental in creating the idea of mitigation serving that greater good must, by the very standards demanded by the environmental movement, surely raise questions about his profiting from it. Yet don't expect outrage, because, as we have seen before, the ethics of climate change only apply one way. To challenge Sir Nicholas's apparent profiting from his report would be to undermine the very foundations of so many environmentalists' arguments. For example, one of our favourites, Sir Bob May, former president of the Royal Society, in his review of the Stern Report and George Monbiot's Heat, cites Stern as an authority on 'the facts' which we are expected to 'respect'.
Despite the growing weight of evidence of climate change, along with growing awareness of the manifold adverse consequences, there remains an active and well-funded “denial lobby”. It shares many features with the lobby that for so long denied that smoking is the major cause of lung cancer. [...] Whoever got things started, this is a ball which ExxonMobile picked up and ran with, shuttling lobbyists in and out of the White House as it did so. Following earlier talks and seeking to exemplify its centuries-old motto – Nullius in Verba (which roughly translates as “respect the facts”) – the Royal Society recently and unprecedentedly wrote to ExxonMobile, complaining about its funding for “organisations that have been misinforming the public about the science of climate change”, and more generally for promoting inaccurate and misleading views – specifically that scientists do not agree about the influence of human activity on rising temperatures.

The Royal Society: From Science to Fiction

2008-06-17T22:48:00.005+01:00

Eco-activist Mark Lynas, has won the Royal Society's prize for popular science writing, for his book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet.

Except that it isn't science, it's fiction. Science fiction; it takes a vaguely plausible scientific possibility, extrapolates it, and makes it the situation in which some form of drama plays out. For every one degree rise in temperature, Lynas considers what might happen to life on Earth.

Professor Jonathan Ashmore, Chair of the Judges said: “Lynas gives us a compelling and gripping view of how climate change could affect our world. It presents a series of scientifically plausible, worst case scenarios without tipping into hysteria. Six degrees is not just a great read, written in an original way, but also provides a good overview of the latest science on this highly topical issue. This is a book that will stimulate debate and that will, Lynas hopes, move us to action in the hope that this is a disaster movie that never happens. Everyone should read this book.”

'Without tipping into hysteria'? Here are two versions of the front cover of the book,

The image on the left, like all clichéd science fiction, helps us to suspend disbelief by showing us an iconic landmark - Big Ben - ravaged by whatever the threat is supposed to be.

This is exactly what happened in the other global warming fantasy, The Day After Tomorrow (left). On the Right, we can see the Whitehouse being smashed by aliens. This kind image is used to inform us that the threat is to the order of the world. Our values, laws, institutions, organisations, and security are all threatened by whatever it is the science-fictionalist is writing about.

Of course, we should never judge a book by its cover. It would be unfair to claim that Jonathan Ashmore is wrong to claim that Lynas's book isn't 'hysteria', just on the basis of the book cover. Though, having said that, the cover does quote the Sunday Times, who say "... I tell you now, is terrifying". We haven't the time to review the book here. So here's a couple of clips from the book, made into a film, featuring Lynas himself, to tell us what he imagines us to be facing.

Is this still 'not hysteria'? We believe that it is, because, although Lynas appears to have 'researched' the 'scientific evidence', botching factoids leached from single-studies and worse case scenarios is not 'sound science', it is terrifying, and it hasn't been subjected to any kind of scrutiny. Worse case scenarios are themselves necessarily science fiction - they have value not to science, but to prurient imaginations and politics. Detaching our treatment of them from the caveat that they are both worst-case, hypothetical treatments of very new, untested, unchecked, and unsubstantiated science is nothing but hysteria. Ashmore is highly misleading and dishonest in this regard. Merely saying that it is not hysteria doesn't make it not so. Would he welcome, we wonder, a book which gave a best-case scenario treatment of the science, where humanity not only survives a 6 degree rise in temperatures, but positively thrives. No, he would not. Would it win any awards? The green movement would throw their toys out of the pram at such a book being published, let alone it being given such an accolade. They would call for it to be banned, claiming that it was 'politically-motivated', and misleading. There would be claims that its production had been paid for by Exxonmobil, by a scientist who had prostituted his intelligence and position for profit.

But this is not the first venture into fiction for the Royal Society and its members. It's current president, Martin Rees wrote in 2004, Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future In This Century - On Earth and Beyond (sold in the UK as Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century?) This is a bleak, miserable, pointless story about how our chances of surviving the next 100 years are just 50-50.

Also not against making things up is the previous president of the Royal Society, Lord May of Oxford. Last year, we caught him making things up about Martin Durkin, director of the Great Global Warming Swindle.

May told an audience in Oxford - where he shared a platform with Mark Lynas, interestingly - that Durkin had produced a series of 3 films denying the link between HIV and AIDS, for which Channel 4 were forced to apologise. That is untrue. Earlier last year, following an article reviewing 6 (also alarmist) books on the environment including Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, Nicholas Stern's report, and George Monbiot's Heat, we discovered that, inconveniently, May had taken a few liberties with the facts himself, citing a single study, referenced in the Stern Report to make the claim that '15–40 per cent of species' were vulnerable to extinction at just 2 degrees of warming, and that oil companies were responsible for a conspiracy to spread misinformation, and prevent action on climate change. This was a double irony, because in the same article, he had translated the Royal Society's motto - Nullius in Verba - as 'respect the facts', rather than the traditional 'on the word of no one'. Indeed, had May followed the Royal Society's own advice, he wouldn't have been taking Stern's, Monbiot's, and Gore's words for it. But rather than being the incredulous scientist, and subjecting these fictions to the scrutiny we'd expect, May used the groundless alarmism found in these texts to arm 'science' - or rather, the Royal Society - with new authority.

As we said in a letter to the TLS,

Sir, – “Nullius in Verba”, the motto of the Royal Society, is usually translated as “on the word of no one”. That is a fine motto, the message being that knowledge about the material universe should be based on appeals to experimental evidence rather than authority...

It seems that, rather than basing knowledge about the material universe on experimental evidence, the Royal Society and its senior members instead seek authority in science fiction; the extrapolation of superficially plausible science, forward into the future, where a drama plays out.

Mark Lynas first drew significant attention to himself for his views on climate change in 2001, when he threw a custard-pie into the face of Bjorn Lomborg, during a book launch.

Pie-man Mark Lynas said he was unable to ignore Lomborg's comments on climate change. "I wanted to put a Baked Alaska in his smug face," said Lynas, "in solidarity with the native Indian and Eskimo people in Alaska who are reporting rising temperatures, shrinking sea ice and worsening effects on animal and bird life."

Many countries in the Third World are also experiencing the effects of climate change. In Africa, Lake Chad is now a twentieth of the size it was in the 1950s, leaving millions potentially without water. The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is planning the evacuation of its entire population as sea levels continue to rise.

"And yet despite all this evidence," comments Lynas, "Lomborg somehow contrives to argue that it is cheaper to go on burning fossil fuels than to switch to clean energy to prevent runaway global warming. This feeds right into the agenda of profiteering multinationals like Esso." He continued: "I don't see why the environment should suffer every time some bored, obscure academic fancies an ego trip. This book is full of dangerous nonsense.

Now, however, Lynas the one-time circus-activist stuntman, has his childish perspective on the world given respectability by the establishment's accolades, and has expensive films made about his dark fantasy.

There is a peculiar symbiosis, in which, Lynas and his ilk give the scientific establishment authority by constructing nightmare visions of the future, which are given credibility by figures such as Sir Martin Rees and Lord May. The service that Lynas does for the Royal Society is to connect this institution to our everyday fears and anxieties, to give it relevance at a time when, as with politicians, it struggles to define its purpose.

Mark Lynas (left), with Bob May (right) at the Oxford is My World lectures, organised by Oxford City Council, to persuade its population to cut their CO2 emissions

The Blue/Green, Upside Down, Left/Right, Inside-Out, Three-Bags-Full Agenda

2008-06-16T20:52:00.004+01:00

Leader of the UK's Conservatives, David Cameron, is at it again... Here he is, unveiling the latest installment of the 'resurrection' of the Tory Party, by announcing his continued commitment to Environmentalism, in spite of the prospect of an economic downturn, and rising fuel costs, by mixing the Green Party Manifesto, and a nod at the market, and some straightforward opportunism.

The Labour Party are on their knees. The Lib-Dems are barely registering. Cameron could say whatever he liked, or nothing at all. Yet here he is, wrapping himself in green cloth, telling the UK that there is no alternative, 'cos the 'era of cheap oil is over', so we have to go Green. Well, we do now. Thanks to Dave.

The new 'Blue Green Charter' aims to 'reconfigure our whole economy' with horse feathers, and 'overturn our hydrocarbon dependency' by powering the country with rocking-horse shit.

This biodegradable policy commits the country to taxes, and the construction 'positive social norms' (no, we're not kidding) to 'induce behavioural change'. With Labour's position becoming increasingly limp, Cameron now seems to be recycling ideas from the Green Party, wrapped up in the 'greatest challenge facing our generation' rhetoric which screams far louder about Cameron's inability to speak to the current generation than it defines any realities that it faces.

The Green NGOs seem to be loving it.

Keith Allott, WWF-UK's climate change spokesman said it would "avoid the risk of locking the UK into a high-carbon future" and could boost investment in carbon capture technology.

John Sauven, of Greenpeace, said: "The Tories' proposals should have been more ambitious given what today's technologies can deliver but, by ruling out the proposed old-style coal plant at Kingsnorth in Kent, today's announcement puts Cameron way ahead of Brown when it comes to cleaning up our energy system."

There you have it... David Cameron, doing as unelected, undemocratic, self-appointed NGO puritans tell him, whilst making a promise to commit you to reducing your energy bills or face punishment, embarrassment and high prices, rather than him taking responsibility for the construction of a functioning energy infrastructure.

Environmentalism According to Lucas

2008-06-15T00:31:00.004+01:00

Environmentalism According to Lucas

Over the last year, we have looked at some of the words and ideas coming from the environmental movement through the Green Party's MEP for SE England, Caroline Lucas. With her breathless, urgent catastrophism, Lucas epitomises Environmentalism and its hollow vision, shallow intellect, and deep misanthropy. In these respects, Lucas never disappoints us.

However, we are never very successful at getting Lucas or her press office to account for anything she has said. Luckily, she was on BBC TV's Question Time last week, and has been appearing at a number of public events of late. So here is another opportunity to subject Lucas's political ideas to some scrutiny.

The Question Time panel were asked if the Labour Party were suffering from a leadership crisis, to which Caroline Lucas replied that Labour's problem is that it lacks values, that it no longer knows what it stands for, that it has abandoned its traditional values such as equality, and that Gordon Brown is a man who doesn't know what he wants.

We agree with Lucas that the Labour Party is in crisis because it doesn't know what it stands for. As we say in our first ever post, "Environmental concerns are serving to provide direction for directionless politics". That is why Blair and Brown were keen to be seen to be acting on climate change, and that is why, in response to that action, the Tories committed themselves to a policy of an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050, against Labour's 60%. And that is why, not to be out-done, the Liberal Democrats upped their bidding to a 100% reduction by 2050. But are Lucas and the Green Party offering anything so different?

As we have also pointed out, Environmentalism thrives in this atmosphere of political vapidity, not because it represents an alternative, but because it captures the nervousness caused by a lack of political direction. Environmentalism nurtures a general sense of doom with ideas about societal and ecological collapse. Without that sense of doom, environmentalism would be nothing.

As political movements across the political spectrum have increasingly found it difficult to generate ideas through which to connect to the public, so they have had to turn to other ways to achieve their legitimacy and authority. As Lucas points out, the Labour Party is suffering from a 'crisis of direction'. But Lucas and the Greens have not found a direction by locating a new political vision to steer towards, but a nightmare to claim to be steering away from. Lucas attacks Brown for having no values, yet her arguments for social and economic change are not formed out of her principled objections to the way in which people relate to one another through social and economic structures. Instead, Lucas's philosophy depends on a conception of humanity's relationship with nature. She is, in terms of values, as poverty-stricken as any of those she attacks. Lucas doesn't have some great store of values, with which she can create a positive view of how the world could be. Here is Lucas, speaking at a recent debate held by the World Development Movement, setting out her case for carbon rationing, trading and 'equality' and selling her argument for 'equality' in such (pseudo) scientific terms.

Notice that, in that speech, Lucas is using the word 'resources', not in the sense of stuff that we have, but in terms of the biosphere's ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere.

It seems that, in order to make a case for equality, Lucas needs there to be a finite world, as if, were there no such limits (to the absorption of CO2 by natural processes), there would be no case for equality. This prevents her from conceiving of a world in which equality is achieved, not by rationing and people having less, but by people having more, and having their expectations raised. Lucas doesn't have 'values', and hides the fact behind science. 'Science' is being used in place of values. 'Science' is Environmentalism's fig leaf. It is being used to create the idea of limits, so that Environmentalism doesn't have to commit itself to providing anything more than less and less. And just as science is used instead of values, doom is a stand in for political vision. If we don't do as 'science' (environmentalism) says, then catastrophe awaits. Here, for example, Lucas tells us that unless we put up with high fuel prices and tax, we wont adjust our behaviour, and society will collapse.

It is an 'interesting' argument that says we need to artificially keep oil prices high because... err... the days of cheap oil are over because... err... of peak oil. For someone who lectures us about 'science', the logic of the causal world seems to have escaped Lucas's understanding. Scarcity would do Lucas's work for her. Obviously, what is at issue is not rescuing humanity from a looming catastrophe, but the legitimacy of a political movement bent on creating a behavioural and cultural change for its own benefit, on the premise that only it can save us from the terrible chaos that awaits us.

As much as Lucas tries to make her ideas sound positive, they are underscored and sold by a vision of catastrophe. She may talk of progressive ideas such as 'equality', 'justice', and 'liberty', but all of these ideas are mediated by, and through the environment. Our freedom is limited, not guaranteed by the environment. Equality is measured in environmental, pseudo-scientific terms of resource distribution. Social justice, according to Lucas, is equivalent to 'environmental justice'. But what a pale imitation of justice that is; it doesn't right any wrongs, or create the possibility of a better standard of living. And where Lucas promises that there will be less unemployment under a Green Government, it is because a 'zero carbon economy' is far more labour-intensive than its fully-powered counterpart. In such an economy, the job that oil did will be done by people. Fancy a job as a serf? How about a career as a treadmill operative? This will be the 'equality' and the 'social justice' that Lucas has designed for us.

The use of science to limit political possibilities, and lower our horizons by constructing plausible catastrophic scenarios is the everyday language of environmentalism. But, surprisingly, the failure of this unremittingly negative view of the world hasn't escaped Lucas' attention.

What? Caroline Lucas is against climate alarmism? The same Caroline Lucas who, in July last year, compared climate scepticism to holocaust denial? The same Caroline Lucas who said in July last year that,

... if you look at the implications of climate change, of runaway climate change, we are literally talking about millions and millions of people dying, we are literally talking about famines, and flooding, and migration and disease on an unprecedented scale. And so yes, I know these are sensitive words that I've used, but I feel so strongly that we urgently need to wake people up and stop this march towards catastrophe that I very much feel that we're on.

Is the Caroline Lucas who is now against catastrophism the same Caroline Lucas who said in November,

... when you hear scientists say that we have about eight years left in order to really tackle climate change, I don't think what the public actually want is cautiousness, what they want is real leadership, and that is what the EU is promising to give, and yet that's what we're failing to do here.

Is it the same Caroline Lucas who said in February,

Around 75 per cent of all cancers are caused by environmental factors, mainly chemicals...

Is the Caroline Lucas who doesn't believe that alarmism works, the same Caroline Lucas in this video?

Lucas appears to be very confused about what she is selling, and how she is selling it. She claims that we must change the way we live, to expect less, and to make do and mend, but that, somehow, this will make us all happier. She claims that she doesn't depend on catastrophic visions to connect with the public, yet without it, there is no imperative to give her ideas a second thought. She claims to be part of a democratic movement, yet demands that the state regulate our behaviour. She claims to speak on behalf of the poor, yet would deprive the poor of the material means to change their lives; cheap goods, fuel, and mobility. She claims to have science on her side, yet she campaigns against the benefits of science; she is against animal research, and against evidence based medicine, favouring instead 'alternative' therapies; she campaigns against the use of agricultural and industrial chemicals; and she campaigns against anything which might have the charge of 'unsustainable' thrown at it. She claims to be against the coercive influence of big business, but in its place, she would put an authoritarian government that would regulate your freedom to travel, to buy things, and coerce you into observing an 'environmentally friendly' lifestyle.

A loss of values in politics is a bad thing. But the Green Party is far far worse. Give us disorientation over deeply confused misanthropy, any day.

Huffing and Puffin' On the Isle of Maybe

2008-06-09T19:16:00.003+01:00

Rich wonders:

"Nature as harmonious and peaceful? Have these people watched Springwatch?"

Good point. They had live footage of swallows eating their own chicks the other day.

Springwatch somehow manages to marry the genres of science documentary, freakshow and aspirational lifestyle programme. And how better to combine the three than with a bit of dolphin telekinesis? Not only can dolphins navigate and hunt using sonar, but by picking up each others' sonar as it bounces back, they can, ("we think," coughs co-presenter Simon King), read each others' minds.

Wow, dolphins. See how these clever, gentle creatures play...

[Shots of dolphins riding the multi-storey bow-waves of oil tankers in the Moray Firth.
Cut to celebrity wildlife-sound-recordist, Christ Watson, against a sunset. He is listening theatrically into earphones and twiddling special dials on a machine slung over his shoulder]

Simon King: "Their whole world is made up of a picture of sound. And on that point, I'd just like to show you something. Just have a look at this:

"Of course there's a lot of boat traffic up and down the Moray Firth. You'd expect it; it's normal; has been here for many years. But just listen - and this is just normal boat traffic - just listen. Just listen to what happens.
That's what you hear above water...

[calming shooshing noise].

"And this is what you hear underwater...

[horrible grinding drone]

"Sound travels about five time faster through salt water than it does through air, and it's just astonishingly loud from such a huge distance.

"Now I know there are proposals to potentially develop oil and gas extraction near the Moray Firth. And you've got to think; there's going to be increased traffic; there's going to be building; there's going to be all sorts of seismic activity; and as a result, you know, what's that going to do to the dolphins? There's a lot of study still to go, but, I don't know, the conclusion? Still waiting [...]

Kate Humble: "Thank you Simon. Yes he's right. I mean, there's been quite a lot of talk recently, particularly when there are, kind of like, multi-strandings of dolphins or whales, that it could be down to noise pollution."

Bill Oddie: "Yeah"

KH: "And when you hear that sort of thing, it doesn't surprise you at all."

BO: "Not at all. I was up there last year, with Chris Watson, actually, and we recorded the sound of a much bigger boat than that. And, I promise you, I had the earphones on. By the time it was within half a mile, it was like Status Quo on a bad night, you know, and not quite as entertaining, I promise you. The noise was unbelievable. I really couldn't keep the earphones on."

KH: "And you can see how disorienting that would be, particularly if it's sound you rely on so much to find your way, your sense of direction."

BO: "Totally, yes."

KH: "Well, certainly, yes, research needs to be done."

BO: "Well, I think the research has been done, you see. I just personally think it's just perfectly obvious that it is a problem. And we know that and, really, some sort of legislation should be done. And that should be a boat-free area, really.

So, in summary, dolphins love playing about around huge, noisy tankers. But surely, all that noise can't be good for them? Perhaps we should do some research. Although, nah, you just can't be too careful, and anyway Bill Oddie once had his earphones turned up too high, so we'd better just ban something.

We're back to Dr Fox again. Except that this is no nutter on a comedy programme. This is the voice of the BBC.

Further down the east coast, on the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth, there is another environmental calamity in progress. The BBC is on to it:

Fewer puffins are going to breed at the UK's largest colony of the species, on the Isle of May, scientists report.

Numbers are down to about 41,000 breeding pairs this year from almost 70,000 pairs in 2003.

We have as little against puffins as we do against dolphins. The Isle of May is beautiful. We know it well. You can't move for puffin burrows. That's because the Isle of May's puffin population has been growing spectacularly over the last half century.

Puffin numbers on the Isle of May increased steadily from a handful of pairs 50 years ago to around 69,300 pairs in 2003.

Global warming good for puffins, anybody? On the contrary, the BBC somehow still manages to turn it into a global warming scare story:

Researchers believe the decline is linked to changes in the North Sea food web, perhaps related to climate change.

And yet, despite being quoted at length in the article, Professor Mike Harris from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), who conducted the research, apparently says nothing about the climate change connection. Neither does the CEH press release that announced the survey results. The BBC has to go to the RSPB press office for that:

The suspicion is that climate change is altering the distribution of plankton across the North Sea.

This disrupts the entire food web, including predators such as puffin.

"This fits in with other evidence that North Sea birds have been desperately short of food over several seasons," said the RSPB's Grahame Madge.

By the time that the story has made it down to children's news reports, the BBC has dropped any caution or context whatsoever. We're killing the puffins and that's all there is to it:

Scientists are worried that puffins are getting underweight and dying because they haven't got enough fish to eat in the North Sea.

The Firth of Forth in Scotland is home to one of the UK's largest puffin colonies.
But experts who've been counting the seabirds there say their numbers have fallen by about a third in five years.

They think climate change could be to blame for the birds not having enough to eat.

Oh for the days when all kids had to worry about was nuclear annihilation. At least that would be quick. Without a cold war to scare them silly, children now have to lie awake at night
fretting about the ecopocalypse.

Here's something else to give them nightmares: The Moray Firth bottlenosed dolphins, which are among the best studied population of dolphins anywhere, have a nasty habit of going around murdering harbour porpoises. What's more, they only do that because they mistake them for baby bottlenosed dolphins:

'Evidence for Infanticide in Bottlenose Dolphins: An Explanation for Violent Interactions with Harbour Porpoises?'

Most harbour porpoises found dead on the north-east coast of Scotland show signs of attack by sympatric bottlenose dolphins, but the reason(s) for these violent interactions remain(s) unclear. Post-mortem examinations of stranded bottlenose dolphins indicate that five out of eight young calves from this same area were also killed by bottlenose dolphins. These data, together with direct observations of an aggressive interaction between an adult bottlenose dolphin and a dead bottlenose dolphin calf, provide strong evidence for infanticide in this population. The similarity in the size range of harbour porpoises and dolphin calves that showed signs of attack by bottlenose dolphins suggests that previously reported interspecific interactions could be related to this infanticidal behaviour. These findings appear to provide the first evidence of infanticide in cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises). We suggest that infanticide must be considered as a factor shaping sociality in this and other species of cetaceans, and may have serious consequences for the viability of small populations.

That's all a bit too much, however, for even Springwatch to cover.

Environ Mental Ism

2008-06-05T20:28:00.008+01:00

We've mentioned before how those of an Environmentalist bent are liable to blame the perceived failings of anybody who disagrees with them on some sort of mental illness. There's Andreas Ernst, for example, the scientist who says that the psychology of sceptics is more like that of rats than human beings. Or there's the professor of psychiatry, Steven Moffic, who thinks that aversion therapy involving the use of “distressing images of the projected ravages of global warming” can cure sceptics of their pathological ways.

But there's a corollary to the idea that scepticism is a form of madness, which is that to stay sane, you just have to be environmentally aware. A recent example is to be found on the BBC news site, which reports on the mounting scientific consensus, or emerging truth if you prefer, that to avoid depression, stress or psychosis, your best bet is to commune with Mother Nature:

The secret ingredient? Greenery. Those of us who live in towns and cities, and even some who live in the countryside, don't get enough of it.

The result for most of us is highly stressful; we get irritable and depressed, and even physically ill (because high levels of stress mean higher risk of things like heart disease and diabetes).

While farmers, who arguably get more than their fair share of greenery, would seem to present something of a challenge to the theory (although that's presumably just due to the psychiatric equivalent of climatic 'natural variation', or the rise of out-of-town shopping malls or something), it's probably not much of a surprise to most people that doing non-stressful things like walking in the woods is good for reducing stress.

But this is science. The BBC's wholly uncritical 'news' story (which is actually just an excuse to flag up its perennial Springwatch tv series, which this year features 'nature does you good' as one of its themes) draws on 'research' by Natural England, the RSPB, journalists, celebrities and various other experts in the field to prove its point.

First up is Springwatch presenter Bill Oddie, celebrity ornithologist, one-time comic, and BBC spokesman on climate change and now on mental health. He suffers from depression himself, and has no doubt that contact with nature helps his condition:

"when you get a downer, and lots of people suffer from this, there is no question, every self-help book, every doctor, every therapist will tell you: get out there in the fresh air, get yourself moving. It's to do with fitness, it's also to do with a meditational thing."

Were we inclined towards the level of critical analysis provided by the BBC, we could suggest that, had Bill spent less time out in the woods talking to his feathered friends, he wouldn't have got depressed in the first place. But we're not. And anyway, it's hardly Bill's fault. (And he's really quite good as wildlife tv presenters go. He might bang on a bit about how great it is when you're out in the country and can't see a trace of all those ghastly humans, but at least he doesn't talk to the viewers as if they are seven-year-olds and pretend that nature is some sort of lovely, fluffy, real-life Beatrix Potter tale (as recent newspaper headlines testify.)) Our gripe is with the BBC. The article continues:

Scientific support for Bill's beliefs comes from Dr William Bird, who combines a career as a GP with a part-time role as health adviser to Natural England.

Last year he produced a report for Natural England and the RSPB arguing that contact with nature and green space has a positive effect on mental health, especially among children.

So, a medical practitioner hired by a quango and an ornithological charity to justify their existences and relevance to 'Modern Life' counts as 'scientific support'. Has the word 'quack' ever been more appropriate?
Dr Bird is urging his fellow GPs to prescribe regular walks and exercise in green spaces for patients suffering from heart disease, depression, obesity and the like.
We don't doubt it.
Referring patients to the natural environment rather than the pharmacist is a lot cheaper than conventional pills and prescriptions...
We don't doubt it. As we've said before, Environmentalism provides the perfect excuse for anyone in power to explain their failure to provide a public service.

The next expert witness is the journalist Richard Louv, who coined the term "nature deficit disorder" to describe the "deprivation, sometimes amounting to mental illness, of children who grow up without contact with the natural environment". It is, says the BBC
an echo of the medically-established condition, attention deficit disorder
Indeed. But as the BBC points out in about the only vaguely factual part of its article:
"Nature deficit disorder" is not a condition the medical profession recognises
As a certain Dr Fox might say, 'there's no real evidence for it, but it is scientific fact'. And anyway, it seems that most of the medical profession do recognise it:
Natural England polled 70 GPs and nurses and found that 61% recommended that patients use green space, and 79% recommended walking informally.
So what's the problem?

But that still left a sizeable minority who didn't.

Bastards.

One piece of evidence that BBC didn't mention is the Royal Commission on Pollution (RCEP) report, The Urban Environment, published last year, which also cited urbanisation as a risk factor in mental health.
The way in which urban living affects mental health and wellbeing is poorly understood, sparsely researched and perhaps unexpected… but there is no avoiding the conclusion that urban living can damage the mental health of some people.
Neither the paucity of research nor the failure to identify a causal relationship between urbanisation and mental health prevented the authors from concluding that:
One way of helping to mitigate these effects would be the provision of good quality green spaces
This is more than just silly; it is verging on the sinister. Aside from the fact that nature deficit disorder is about as scientific as any old snake oil, there is something deeply patronising about the idea that we can all be happier if only we walked in the woods.

Unhappiness is the stuff of life, in that it is the experience that prompts us to improve our circumstances. It is a sign of the political times that, rather than encouraging people to realise their aspirations, various agencies - both governmental and charitable - seem to be telling us that our aspirations are the problem; rather than seek to change the world, we ought to put up with our lot and hang out with the trees.

Anyone who takes at face-value the advice to go for a walk and achieve 'balance' with nature, won’t be engaged in any serious attempt to either improve their own life or challenge problems in the real world, as much as they will be wishing them to just go away.

By fitting symptoms to diagnoses for the sake of realising the remedy - the environmental agenda - the powers that be are failing to see the wood for the trees. Fortunately, people don't lack the brains to make the most of their spare time; unfortunately, they lack the means.

Off the Grid: Microgeneration - the Spark of Endarkenment

2008-06-04T15:55:00.004+01:00

John Vidal, Guardian Environment Editor, claimed yesterday that

British buildings equipped with solar panels, mini wind turbines and other renewable energy sources could generate as much electricity a year as five nuclear power stations, a government-backed industry report has shown.

It wasn't news. The other green-activist newspaper, the 'Independent' On Sunday leaked the report ahead of its publication, to create the idea that it had discovered a choice between a "Brown future" (a reference to the Prime Minister) illustrated by a dirty, industrial landscape, and a "Green future", illustrated by a picture of some low-profile solar panels under some fluffy clouds in a deep blue sky.

The government-backed report, to be published tomorrow, says that, with changed policies, the number of British homes producing their own clean energy could multiply to one million – about one in every three – within 12 years.

It seems unlikely that there are only 3 million homes in Britain. Anyway...

These would produce enough power to replace five large nuclear power stations, tellingly at about the same time as the first of the much-touted new generation of reactors is likely to come on stream.

In his most pro-nuclear announcement to date, the Prime Minister indicated that he wanted greatly to increase the number of atomic power stations to be built in Britain. And he met oil executives in Scotland to urge them to pump more of the black gold from the North Sea's fast-declining fields – even though his own energy minister, Malcolm Wicks, admitted that this would do nothing to reduce the price of fuel.

The equivalence to "five nuclear power stations" isn't mentioned in the report. We looked hard for it. What were we missing? Where had it come from? We decided to ring Element Energy, the group who were commissioned to write the report, to see where the figure in the Independent had come from. Director Shane Slater told us that such a comparison was "outside the scope of the study", and that it was an "unhelpful comparison", with which he wouldn't necessarily agree.

So where has the figure, published in both the IoS and Guardian come from?

The factoid is also mentioned in a press release from Monday, by Micropower, a group established by Liberal Democrat Lord Ezra to "represent the whole microgeneration sector".

The report concludes that as many as nine million microgeneration installations could be in place in the next twelve years with an ambitious policy support framework. If this was to happen, microgeneration could produce as much energy as five large new nuclear power stations and by 2030 we could be saving as much carbon as if we were to take all HGVs and buses off our roads.

The IoS article predates press release, but we thought they might know where the figure came from. We spoke to them, and were told that "it wasn't in the report", which we knew already, but that it had "come out of the steering committee press release", which said,

With ambitious policy measures, up to 9 million microgeneration systems could be installed by 2020, producing as much energy as 5 nuclear power stations. This would require an estimated cumulative cost of at least £21 billion

According to them, a comparison in a press release was intended to be illustrative, rather than make a case against nuclear energy. The calculation was achieved by adding together the equivalent gigawatt hours heat and electricity generated under this theoretical scenario, and dividing it by the output of a large nuclear power station. [Report]

But the result is that a headline that bears no relation to the study, and which has been picked up uncritically by many others:

'Home-made' energy will match output of five nuclear plants.

An injection of 21 billion pounds ($41.22 billion) over the period could see nine times as many installations in place by the same time and generating as much power as five nuclear power stations, the independent report said.

A report backed by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform has claimed that microgeneration could prevent the need for new nuclear power stations if enough people adopt the technology.

The study, which was compiled for the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, found that technology such as solar panels and wind turbines on buildings could produce as much energy a year as five nuclear power stations.

The report concludes that microgeneration through the likes of solar panels or mini-wind turbines for homes could produce enough energy by 2020 to generate as much output as five nuclear power stations.

Microgeneration could rival nuclear power, report shows

Would 9 million microgneration installations, which would cost upwards of £21billion for 1% of our energy needs, even be equivalent to 5 nuclear power stations?

No. for a start, 9 million microgenerators would require millions of man-hours of maintainence a year. The Independent continues,

Even more embarrassingly for the embattled Mr Brown, the report closely mirrors policies announced by the Conservative Party six months ago to start "a decentralised energy revolution" by "enabling every small business, every local school, every local hospital, and every household in the country to generate electricity".

Here is the Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, announcing that 'decentralised energy revolution'.

But when was a 'revolution' ever about a mere 1% of our energy needs being met at an astronomical cost of £21 billion? What kind of 'revolution' is it, where instead of centralised power, we rely increasingly on what comes our way 'naturally'? That's only a revolution in the sense of going full circle and ending up where you started.

Speaking of which... In the same edition of the Independent On Sunday, in a story about the discovery of a previously isolated tribe, the headline told us:

Road to oblivion: new highway poses threat to Brazil's uncontacted tribespeople

The article carried a picture of two, painted members of the tribe, attempting to fire arrows into the aircraft of the photographer. The caption warned that

...tribes face danger from 'civilisation'.

Notice the scarequotes.

The Independent - and perhaps many others - have forgotten that civilisation is all about roads and centralised power generation. They free up our time, and allow society to become more sophisticated. They create the possibility of liberation from mundane existences, scraping a living from what nature provides. Yet the fashionable desire for off-grid living supposes that it is more rewarding, or more 'ethical' - to live as primitive, isolated an existence as possible. Both the romantic fantasy that the Independent routinely concocts out of primitivism, and the nightmare it constructs out of mis-interpreted press releases are fictions. If this fiction remains unchallenged, going off-grid will represent not a neat, efficient idea, but the first steps back into basic lifestyles and lowered horizons. What the Independent seems to want is an endarkenment.

Bishop of Stafford Sillier Than Chief Scientific Advisor?

2008-06-02T18:59:00.004+01:00

Given that climate sceptics are as bad as the tobacco lobby and holocaust deniers, and that climate change is worse than international terrorism, which is worse than obesity, which is worse than climate change, and that the church is as desperate to connect with the masses as are all the other bad politicians out there, this was kind of inevitable:

Gordon Mursell, the Bishop of Stafford in England, is a man of the cloth. He is also a member of a posse of disoriented clerics, who have become so estranged from morally literate theology that they have embraced a new brand of demonology.

At a time when moralisers cannot give any real meaning to classical ideas about right and wrong, they try instead to make people feel guilty about their impact on the environment. So instead of targeting those traditional demons – Satan, say, or witchcraft – Gordon Mursell attacks climate change deniers.

In a parish newsletter, the bishop said that people who refuse to join the fight against global warming are like Josef Fritzl, the insane criminal in Austria who locked his daughter and her children in a cellar for 24 years. For Mursell, being sceptical about the conventional wisdom on climate change is akin to the monstrous crime committed by Fritzl. He says: ‘You could argue that, by our refusal to face the truth about climate change, we are as guilty as he is.'

Mursell has not called for climate change deniers to be burned at the stake – yet. But the idea that they should be punished is implicit in his message...

Read the rest here.

Who'd've Discredited It?

2008-05-30T21:27:00.005+01:00

'Case against climate change discredited by study' shrieked the Independent yesterday. That must be one hell of a study. Except that it isn't:

A difference in the way British and American ships measured the temperature of the ocean during the 1940s may explain why the world appeared to undergo a period of sudden cooling immediately after the Second World War.

Scientists believe they can now explain an anomaly in the global temperature record for the twentieth century, which has been used by climate change sceptics to undermine the link between rising temperatures and increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Not only does the study (published this week in Nature) not claim to discredit what the Independent's headline claims it discredits, but it doesn't even discredit what the scientists behind the study claim it discredits. Moreover, what the scientists claim their work does discredit was, according to prominent Environmentalists, discredited years ago. And finally, what everybody seems to be trying to discredit isn't even something that sceptics seem to be crediting in the first place.

Yes, sceptics are concerned about the post-war temperature slump, but not because of the sudden steep drop around 1945; it is the downward trend in temperatures between about 1945 and 1975 that they suggest needs explaining (which is actually longer than the upward trend between 1975 and 1998, just so you know), given that greenhouse gas emissions were rising throughout that period.

And as the graph used by the Independent to bolster its case (supplied by CRU, apparently) demonstrates, the Nature study does absolutely nothing to address that concern:

In fact, the most striking thing about the graph is that, once the sampling errors identified by the study have been taken into account, the period of warming in the latter half of the twentieth century was shorter than previously thought, and that the '45-'75 temperature slump is more pronounced.

According to Phil Jones, a co-author of the paper, the study

lends support to the idea that a period of global cooling occurred later during the mid-twentieth century as a result of sulphate aerosols being released during the 1950s with the rise of industrial output. These sulphates tended to cut sunlight, counteracting global warming caused by rising carbon dioxide.

"This finding supports the sulphates argument, because it was bit hard to explain how they could cause the period of cooling from 1945, when industrial production was still relatively low," Professor Jones said.

That might be so. But the aerosols issue is supposed to have been done and dusted long ago. One of the central criticisms aimed at the infamous Great Global Warming Swindle, for example, is precisely that it failed to entertain the idea that the post-1940 decline in global temperatures was the result of increases in sulphurous emissions that masked the forcing effect of rising atmospheric CO2. George Monbiot described the omission as 'straightforward scientific dishonesty'. After all, he said, that 'temperatures declined after the Second World War as a result of sulphate pollution from heavy industry, causing global dimming...is well-known to all climate scientists.' And as we have reported before, this was also one of the main points raised by the Royal Society's Bob Ward and 36 scientific experts in their open letter to Swindle producer Martin Durkin.

And yet, as we've reported elsewhere, other experts in the field just don't agree. UC San Diego atmospheric physicist Veerabhadran Ramanathan, for example, told us that the empirical evidence for the sulphate masking of warming is 'pretty flimsy'. We do not doubt that the Nature study is an important contribution to the field. (Although it's interesting that Steve McIntyre seems to have produced a similar analysis more than a year ago.) What we do doubt is that the headlines, soundbites, and wild interpretations from newspapers and scientists alike bear much relevance to what is a dry, technical, scientific study, which, while increasing our ability to understand and predict climate trends, says little in itself about the truth or otherwise of global warming.

That said, the BBC's Richard Black has demonstrated uncharacteristic reserve in his coverage of the paper, which includes the following quote from CRU's Mike Hulme:
Corrections for this measurement switch have not yet been applied to produce a new graph of 20th Century temperatures - that work is ongoing at the UK Met Office - but as the land temperature record shows a flattening of the upwards trend from the 1940s to the 1970s, clearly something did change around the 1940s to ameliorate the warming.

"It perhaps suggests that the role of sulphate aerosols, that cooling effect, was less powerful than we thought," said Mike Hulme from the University of East Anglia (UEA), who was not involved in the study.
George Monbiot and the Royal Society are just plain wrong - the science is plainly not 'settled'. And so is Steve Connor, the author of the Independent article. As he wrote last year in response to the Swindle:
The programme failed to point out that scientists had now explained the period of "global cooling" between 1940 and 1970. It was caused by industrial emissions of sulphate pollutants, which tend to reflect sunlight. Subsequent clean-air laws have cleared up some of this pollution, revealing the true scale of global warming - a point that the film failed to mention.
'Scientists' have 'explained' nothing of the sort. As this case shows, the science is not settled. Indeed science is never settled. It is constantly re-evaluating what it understands about absolutely everything. And that's especially crucial to bear in mind when the science in question has been bestowed with the kind of political significance that climate science has. To claim otherwise is to do a disservice to both science and politics. It reduces science to a flimsy fig leaf used simply to hide the embarrassing inadequacies of the latest political fad; and it reduces politics to an aimless exercise in number-crunching.

Ethics? What Ethics?

2008-05-29T19:38:00.003+01:00

Ben has a review of James Garvey's The Ethics of Climate Change: right and wrong in a changing world over at Culture Wars:

Few arguments in favour of action to mitigate the effects of climate change begin without claiming that ‘the science is in’. James Garvey’s The Ethics of Climate Change is no exception. There begins an account of the ‘science’ which forms the basis of an unassailable consensus that the world faces a terrifying future. The account is a breathless list of tragedies that await us: sea-level rises, species-extinctions, glacial retreat, resource wars, and climate refugees, all of which will be worse for the poor, and most of which have been caused by the industrialised world. We face ‘planetary upheaval, the deaths of countless living things, human suffering on an enormous scale and all sorts of other horrors’, Garvey tells us. Be very afraid.

This scientific account generates the imperatives that we, in this perilous world, are supposed to respond to – if we want to be ‘ethical’, that is. But, as Garvey goes on to point out, ‘scientific facts are a necessary part of reflection on climate change, but they are nothing near the whole of it’. The moral philosopher is on hand to help us navigate the awkward journey, beset by doom, catastrophe, and other unimaginable horrors, toward a future of mere survival...

Read the rest of Environmentalism's Fig Leaf here.

What a Load of Rubbish

2008-05-29T16:43:00.004+01:00

In a Guardian article today:

LGA environment board chairman Paul Bettison said:

"The days of the clingfilm coconut must come to an end. We all have a responsibility to reduce the amount of waste being thrown into landfill, which is damaging the environment and contributing to climate change.

"Families will be pleased to see that more packaging in their shopping baskets can now be recycled. However, this survey shows there is still a lot further to go.

"Reducing packaging is vital if we are to avoid paying more landfill tax and EU fines, which could lead to cuts in frontline services and increases in council tax."

Councils have to pay £32 in tax for every tonne of rubbish that is sent to landfill, a figure that is expected to rise to £48 a tonne by 2010. In addition, from 2010 councils face EU fines of £150 for every tonne that is dumped, which could cost an estimated £200m by 2013.

It is the landfill tax and EU fine which have meant local authorities across the UK have introduced 'alternate weekly collections' (AWCs) of rubbish destined for landfill, and rubbish destined for recycling, leading to the situation where rubbish may be left festering for a fortnight, creating smells, and attracting pests. This has also begun to transform the role of local government, whose responsibility was to provide public services. Now, its role is increasingly that of policeman; monitoring our habits, and punishing people if they use slightly too much stuff, with public services taking a backseat.

Paul Bettison of the Local Government Association (LGA) is wrong. Most families will not be 'pleased' that more of their rubbish can be recycled; they are more likely to be annoyed that they are forced to recycle, and to have the amount of rubbish they are allowed to throw out rationed and monitored by the local authorities.

It is particularly interesting that Bettison and the Local Government Association haven't challenged the landfill tax and EU fines. After all, this is a local government issue, yet the EU and UK government have imposed these rules, and local authorities - councils run by Tories, Labour and Liberal Democrats - have all seemingly welcomed the interference. Laws to force the public into recycling have not been demanded by the public. The LGA cannot pretend that this is public service.

Why isn't the LGA, which claims to "aim to put local councils at the heart of the drive to improve public services" challenging the fine and tax? How is rationing public services and punishing the public 'improving public services'? Why isn't it complaining about the imposition? Given that some landfill is inevitable, why isn't the LGA pointing out that if the UK and EU weren't punishing people for creating refuse, there would be more money available for public services, or perhaps, council taxes would be lower?

The answer must be that local governments suffer from the same problem that national and supra-national governments do. Environmentalism has provided a convenient argument by which administrations have been able to distance themselves from their duty to provide public services. Local authorities are happier to play policeman than they are to jeopardise their weak positions by making decisions. The business of the provision of public services has always been a problem, but it is through the notion of 'greater good' that the public have been convinced that refuse collection and disposal creates far more winners than losers. Nobody wants a landfill on their doorstep. Nobody ever wanted a landfill on their doorstep. But nobody ever wanted rubbish to pile up in their front or back gardens, for rats to infest it, and for diseases not seen for hundreds of years to make a return to the UK. Call us alarmist if you like, but what is the point of sanitation if it isn't to avoid disease? Planning new landfill - or virtually any development - risks upsetting the unholy alliance of NIMBIES and the highly vocal green lobby, to whom no political party in the UK has an answer. As we have pointed out many times: there is no political challenge to environmentalism in the UK.

Politicians have been less and less able to make convincing arguments about what that greater good is and how best to deliver public goods. Environmentalism has filled the void, to justify inaction and inertia; it serves as a system of ready made 'ethics'. The consequence is that, increasingly, we are unable to build roads - which are useful; we are being punished for using our cars - which are useful; we are forced to recycle - which is inconvenient. And in the place of public services we have an increasingly authoritarian state. It stands to reason that a government that cannot deliver public services will instead assume an authoritarian role and make its business the management - not service - of the public. The public's aspirations and ambitions become a problem for government, and controlling our demands becomes the only function left for them. The doom-laden language of Environmentalism is key to this process. It makes it seem rational to claim that, because we are on the brink of an apocalypse, we should 'make do and mend', 'reduce, reuse, and recycle'. And it legitimises the mediation of our expectations by claiming that economic development is environmentally unsustainable, thus excusing itself from any duty to the public whatsoever.

The LGA, your local government, the UK and EU governments and Environmentalism want you to believe that laws to force you to recycle is something that the public want, and that without them,irresponsible members of society will cause a climate catastrophe. They claim to be saving us from ourselves, but the reality is that, consciously or not, eco-rhetoric is a self-serving conceit and deceit.

The Well Funded World Wide Fund for Fear

2008-05-22T02:05:00.005+01:00

We reported earlier in the year how claims that a 'denial lobby' had influenced public opinion on climate change were totally at odds with reality.

The UK's Royal Society, for example wrote an open letter to Exxon in 2006, accusing it of funding these sceptics. The image of oil barons distorting the truth for pure profit was appealing to an environmental movement desperate to account for its own lack of popular appeal. Through their site 'Exxon Secrets', Greenpeace 'exposed' the millions of dollars that had allegedly been given to think tanks and other deniers to brainwash an unthinking, gullible public.

But as we pointed out, the $22 million that Exxon allegedly gave away between 1998 and 2008 is peanuts compared to Greenpeace's $2.2 billion income over a similar period.

Following our post yesterday about the WWF's use of a rather dodgy scientific measure to secure headlines and public attention, we thought we'd have a quick scan of their accounts, too.

Year	Income ($US)	URL
2003	370,245,000	http://assets.panda.org/downloads/wwffinancialrpt2004.pdf
2004	468,889,000	http://assets.panda.org/downloads/wwfintar005.pdf
2005	499,629,000	http://assets.panda.org/downloads/wwfannualreport.pdf
2006	549,827,000	http://assets.panda.org/downloads/wwf_ar06_final_28feb.pdf
2007	663,193,000	http://assets.panda.org/downloads/wwf_annual_review_07.pdf
TOTAL	2,551,783,000

The accounts prior to 2003 aren't available online. (If you have access to them, we would be grateful if you would let us have a look). But the point stands. The WWF has an enormous amount of money behind it - far more than any dirty 'denialist' organisation has been able to get its hands on.

Even more surprising is the source of their funding. One thing that might be said in Greenpeace's defence is that it apparently doesn't accept money from Governments. But a closer look at WWF's regional sites shows that a significant amount of funding does come from the state. For example, WWF USA:

And in the UK:

It is curious that the WWF, who are so sharply critical of the US, UK and EU Government, should take such a large amount of money from them.

For example, a headline from the site on the 15th May tells us that "US government: climate change threatens polar bears" And today, the site urges that "The government must act to ensure that no new coal-fired power stations are built in the UK until carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology has been proven to work on a large scale and can be installed from the outset".

This is especially curious, because the environmental movement has been telling us for somewhile that, apart from 'manipulating' public opinion with distorted science, the establishment is reluctant to act on climate change. Yet here we can see that the government is handing over cash to that same movement.

And it's not just the WWF, which is just one of nine environmental NGOs that constitute a "Green Ten" that are beneficiaries of EU funding.

We work with the EU law-making institutions - the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers - to ensure that the environment is placed at the heart of policymaking. This includes working with our member organisations in the Member States to facilitate their input into the EU decision-making process.
...

Membership contributions are an important part of the finances of Green 10 organisations. We also receive core funding from the European Commission, except for Greenpeace. Furthermore, some member organisations of the Green 10 receive funding on a case-by-case basis for specific projects from governments and foundations. Some organisations also receive specific donations from industry. Greenpeace does not request or accept financial support from governments, the EU or industry. All Green 10 organisations are externally audited every year.

The members are:

What is stranger than Green lobby groups being happy to take significant wads of dosh from the very governments that they accuse of being climate criminals is that those governments should want to fund the enemy within to the tune of tens/hundreds/thousands of millions of dollars annually.

Could you imagine the fuss, if the sceptics had had nearly 5 billion dollars, to do 'scientific research', and were contracted by the government to 'inform the public'?

Time and again, year after year, and in spite of the billions of dollars available to the environmental movement, polls show that US and UK publics are not interested in being eco-hectored. (And here's another example courtesy of Philip Stott).

Governments, on the other hand, seem to enjoy being told what to do. Or, more accurately, to enjoy paying people to tell them what to tell other people to do - it saves them the trouble of having to work out for themselves what to tell people to do. Environmentalists might like to think they are part of some sort of grass-roots, popular, and radical movement. But what kind of grass roots movement needs such huge handouts to spend on PR? Environmentalism is rife at all levels of society except one - the electorate. It is anything but a popular, mass movement. The Environmentalist's superficial radicalism, and the bogus urgency of calls to 'save the planet' have been attractive to politicians only because their endless and desperate search for popular policy ideas has consistently failed to engage the voters. But they are mistaken. Environmentalism is very much part of the establishment.

Fat People are Killing the Polar Bears (Again)

2008-05-20T00:32:00.036+01:00

Last year we mentioned Ian Roberts' theory, as reported in New Scientist, that fat people are responsible for more than their fair share of global warming, and, in order to get a snappy headline out of it, we tied it into another New Scientist article, which was critical of research by Willie Soon, who had suggested that polar bears aren't as vulnerable as is widely claimed. Both NS articles were, in our view, rather shoddy, reflecting the magazine's partiality in the climate debate. Who could not form the impression that fat people were more responsible than the rest of us for the demise of the polar bear, if they took the magazine at face value? Excuses for snappy headlines aside, our post - 'Fat People Are Killing the Polar Bears' - was intended to demonstrate the confusion between the science and morality of climate change.

True to the eco-warrior's demands that we 'Reduce! Re-use! Recycle!', Roberts' argument - which deserves to go to landfill - has been recycled, in an article entitled Fat is an environmental issue in, yes, New Scientist magazine, who, on the same day, also reports uncritically more recycled 'news' from uber-eco-warriors, the WWF, that human activities are devastating the world's wildlife. What have these fatsos got against polar bears, for goodness sake?

According to Roberts and his London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine colleague Phil Edwards, the fatties have to take the blame for not only climate change but also for panic-du jour, the global food crisis. Writing in the Lancet they argue that:

Petrol tanks and stomachs were competing well before biofuels were proposed to tackle climate change. Motorised transport is more than 95% oil-dependent and accounts for almost half of world oil use. Because oil is a key agricultural input, demand for transportation fuel affects food prices. Increased car use also contributes to rising food prices by promoting obesity which, for the reasons outlined below, increases the global demand for food.

Roberts and Edwards want the government to address the obesity 'epidemic', climate change and the food crisis in one fell swoop by making it more difficult for people to get around:

Urban transport policies that promote walking and cycling would reduce food prices by reducing the global demand for oil, and promotion of a normal distribution of BMI would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food. Decreased car use would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thus the need for bio-fuels, and increased physical activity levels, would reduce injury risk and air pollution, improving population health.

Of course, the government is already making it more difficult for people to get around. Increasingly, making it more difficult for people to get around is what governments are for, hence our point that local and national governments use 'saving the planet' to justify the reduction of public services, in favour of authoritarian, restrictive, and punishing policies, and in doing so, turn the notion of public service on its head.

But why pick on fat people? If calorie intake is the problem, what about those irritating, self-righteous athletic types? Or if resource use is what troubles them, how about, let's say, academics, whose airmile quotient between conferences and (mis)use of precious paper outstrips by orders of magnitude what your average gluttonous member of the general public gets through? Or what about overweight academics? Or, overweight, denialist academics?

But calorie intake is not the only problem, apparently. Fat people are also lazy people, inclined to use cars more than the rest of us. And using cars makes you fatter. And then there's all the extra fuel needed to transport all that extra lipid from A to B.

Recycling old research is, of course, necessary to keep the climate issue high up on the news agenda. But it has little to do with science. Nor, for that matter, news. It is political. And Roberts isn't the only one doing it. Enter the WWF...

The latest data on the global biodiversity of vertebrates shows that it has fallen by almost one-third in the last 35 years. But experts say it may still underestimate the effect humans have had on global species counts.

The Living Planet Index (LPI) follows trends in nearly 4,000 populations of 1,477 vertebrate species and is said to reflect the impact humans have on the planet...

New figures show that between 1970 and 2005, the global LPI has fallen by 27%. This suggests that the world will fail to meet the target of reducing the rate of biodiversity loss set by the 2002 Convention on Biological Diversity.

Just as Ian Roberts grabs the headlines whenever - like some sort of bulimic ex-deputy prime minister - he regurgitates his antisocial theories, WWF can rely on the world's media to tell it how the WWF like to think it is every time they publish the latest version of their Living Planet report. And they've been publishing it every couple of years or so for ten years now:

Year of Report	Living Planet Index	Years Covered	Species Sampled	URL	Hysteria
1998	30	1970-1995	70 freshwater, 87 marine, terrestrial based on declines in natural forest cover	link
1999	30	1970-1995	102 freshwater, 102 marine, terrestrial based on declines in natural forest cover	link	Planet Earth under pressure
2000	33	1970-1999	319 forest, 194 freshwater, 217 marine	link
2002	35	1970-2000	282 terrestrial, 195 freshwater, 217 marine	link	Living standard seen slumping as resources run out Earth 'will expire by 2050'
2004	40	1970-2000	555 terrestrial, 323 freshwater, 267 marine	link	World Living Beyond Its Environmental Means - WWF Consumption of Resources Is Outstripping Planet's Ability to Cope, Says WWF
2006	30	1970-2003	695 terrestrial, 344 freshwater, 274 marine	link	Global ecosystems 'face collapse' Humans using resources of two planets, WWF warns The state we're in Humans Living Far Beyond Planet's Means - WWF
2006	27	1970-2005	813 terrestrial, 344 freshwater, 320 marine	link	Wildlife populations 'plummeting' Humans blamed for sharp drop in wildlife World wildlife numbers down 25% in three decades An epidemic of extinctions: Decimation of life on earth World wildlife numbers down 25% in three decades World species dying out like flies says WWF Wildlife is down by one-third, says WWF Wildlife numbers plummet globally: WWF

Year after year, the WWF and newspaper headlines tell us that wildlife is disappearing at an
unprecedented rate. And yet the latest report, which surveys a larger number of species than previous ones and incorporates the expertise of scientists at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), finds that the decline is not as bad as previous estimates have suggested. In the ten years that have passed since the first report, the Index has remained fairly constant. In fact, the 2008 Living Planet Index is the lowest since records began, despite the extra decade available for further declines. Carry on at this rate and, at some point, extinct species will start rising from the ashes. Of course, this apparent decline in species declines might be the result of many factors - increased sample sizes, involvement of the ZSL (for the 2006 and 2008 reports only), better controls for biased samples (earlier reports did not even attempt to control for the fact that species for which long-term population data are available tend to be species for which we have good reason to believe might be declining - rare or commercially important species, for example), etc. But the fact remains that species declines have been significantly overestimated in the past - by about a third, according to this latest estimate. It's just that 'Wildlife declines not as bad as previously thought' doesn't quite pack the same punch headline-wise. And one can only imagine the eco-pocalyptic headlines had previous estimates been found to be too low.

We remain unconvinced that the sample merits extrapolation to vertebrate species as a whole. The research has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal (although, according to co-author Dr Ben Collen of the ZSL, it has been accepted for publication by Conservation Biology), so all we have to go on is the WWF report (which isn't much help) and an interview with Collen. He told us that, while all species were weighted equally in the index, they did check for bias towards declining species by looking at the rationale behind the collection of population data for each species in the first place. This way they were able to show that species declines did not become a more important factor in choosing which species to monitor over time. This, in turn, relies on the argument that conservation biology is a relatively modern sub-discipline, emerging in the 1980s. Prior to that, he said, the emphasis was on 'natural resource management'. But, by the same token, natural resource management could be expected to be more concerned with monitoring scarce natural resources than plentiful ones. With regard to commercially important species, which might also be expected to be declining by definition, Collen told us:

That would be true if our index had a lot of commercially exploited species. But it doesn't. We have 241 fish species in comparison to, say, 800 birds [a taxon that is less important commercially]. In an ideal world, we'd be able to pull out all this meta-data on all these individual species, but that's not possible.

As we keep stressing, an environmentalist conspiracy this is not. It's just convenient. It's convenient for the WWF (obviously); it's convenient for journalists and newspapers, in that they can keep on publishing big scary numbers devoid of sobering context; it's convenient for the scientists at the Zoological Society of London who, like all scientists, increasingly have to justify themselves in terms of media coverage and social impact; and it's convenient for directionless politicians. A sure sign of just how convenient big numbers are for everybody concerned is that, following the 2002 edition of the Living Planet report, Reuters reported erroneously, in a story picked up by many other outlets (including Yahoo, ENN, Planet Ark), that more than a third of all species had gone extinct since 1970:

The study found that human economic activity had reduced the number of surviving animal, bird and fish species by 35 percent over the past 30 years.

Freshwater fish had been especially badly hit, losing over half the species in existence in 1970, while key marine species - most of which provide food for the burgeoning population of humans - were down by just under 40 percent.

A simple mistake, perhaps. And yet nobody raised a sceptical eyebrow. Except us. As we said at the time:

News of environmental catastrophe tends to be accepted without question. The idea of plummeting biodiversity has become so ingrained in our mindset that the actual number of species reported to be disappearing per unit time doesn't matter - just as long as it's a very big number. Society, it seems, is content only when it can be confident that Mother Nature is drawing her final, wheezing breath.

The Living Planet Index comprises but one half of the Living Planet report. The rest consists of the Ecological Footprint - the index of how many planets-worth of resources we are using up with our decadent modern lifestyles. We might revisit this in the near future. Because you can bet your internal organs that the footprint is as silly as the LPI is hyped. Suffice it to say for now that we suspect that humankind has been using the Earth's resources at a faster rate than they can be replenished throughout the entire course of our history. Because the WWF's calculations take absolutely no account whatsoever of the possibilities for technological development. How many planets-worth were we using prior to the Green Revolution, for example? How many planets-full of North American buffalo would have been required to make the Native American lifestyle 'sustainable'? We like to think that someone somewhere has actually done the calculations. But then again, that sort of research isn't quite so convenient for anyone.

It is also worth noting that the ZSL scientists involved in the Living Planet report are commissioned by WWF. At Climate Resistance, we don't really give a monkey's (endangered, fat or otherwise) who funds what research by whom. Many do care, however, including, as we have seen, New Scientist, who chose to make Willie Soon's alleged links to the oil industry the focal point of its coverage of his polar bear research last year. Strange, then, that the mag doesn't even mention the ZSL's financial links to a dodgy pressure group in its coverage.

Environmentalism: "frustrated, angry and confused"

2008-05-15T03:47:00.004+01:00

Over at the Daily Kos, and European Tribune, blogger 'Johnnyrook' attempts to connect 'denialism' with an ideology. The piece itself is an answer to a blog post elsewhere by Joseph Romm, The denialists are winning, especially with the GOP. David Roberts tried this approach on the Nation blog back in February:

Long-time greens are painfully aware that the arguments of global warming skeptics are like zombies in a '70s B movie. They get shot, stabbed, and crushed, over and over again, but they just keep lurching to their feet and staggering forward. That's because -- news flash! -- climate skepticism is an ideological, not a scientific, position, and as such it bears only a tenuous relationship to scientific rules of evidence and inference.

We replied that environmentalism used 'science' as a fig leaf. Environmentalism is an ideological position, whereas scepticism encompasses a range of objections to it, some of which are, in fact, perfectly valid on scientific grounds.

What Johnnyrook writes in Why Climate Denialists are Blind to Facts and Reason: The Role of Ideology is, frankly, unmitigated and unimportant crap. But it does offer some insight into the 'thought processes' of grass-roots Environmentalism. Johnnyrook whines that

Anyone who has tried to discuss Climaticide with a climate change denialist knows just how frustrating it can be. No matter how well informed you are, no matter how many peer-reviewed studies you cite, or how many times you point out the overwhelming agreement based on the evidence that exists among climate scientists that global warming is real and is principally caused by human fossil fuel use, you will get no where. Your adversary will deny the facts, cherry pick the scientific evidence for bits of data that, taken out of context, support his/her denialist view, or drag out long-debunked counter-arguments in the hope that they are unfamiliar to you and that you will not be able to refute them. If you succeed in countering all of his arguments he will most likely reword them and start all over again.

Climaticide? Climaticide? Is it even possible to kill a climate? But moving on, Johnnyrook clearly believes himself to be in possession of a faultless argument. So it must be the rest of the world that's wrong. Who said environmentalism was emotional, arrogant, and infantile?

After a couple of hours of this, you end up frustrated, angry and confused. You give up and storm off vowing to study and learn even more so that next time you will be better prepared and able to convince the denialist of the error of his/her ways.

Our advice to little Johnny is that perhaps his tantrums would be easier to manage if he reflected on why his arguments aren't convincing, rather than sought to find other reasons to explain his failure. But Johnny's tantrums are characteristic of the environmental movement as a whole - a movement that is unable to take responsibility for its own failures.

No, the true climate change denialist is an ideologue. Understanding this fact is key to comprehending the denialist mentality and to knowing how to respond to denialist arguments. Ideologues are adherents of closed, ideological systems, in which all problems are ultimately attributed to a single cause: original sin (Christianity), the accumulation of private property (Communism), restrictions imposed on a superior race by inferior ones (Fascism), the destruction of "freedom" by "Big Government" (Conservative/Libertarian).

And here Johnny gives us some insight into why he fails to make convincing political arguments. First, he doesn't recognise his own perspective as ideological, and that it is, in his own terms, about a 'single cause'. Perhaps we can help him - spell it out for him, in fact - with the aid of some emphasis to illustrate our point:

ENVIRONMENTalism

Environmentalists see society as intrinsically, fundamentally, inextricably linked to 'nature' - manifested as the 'environment'. To the Environmentalist, all moral actions are transmitted through the biosphere. Your wealth, relative to another's poverty is not seen in terms of the political, sociological, or historical background to your circumstances and those of your counterparts. It is instead seen in terms of biological and geological processes. You buy a big car, and the consequence is that it rains too much/doesn't rain at all on the poor, starving child in Africa. So, instead of addressing the poverty of the poor child through developing a critique of the socio-political relations throughout the world in order that we might begin to help, the Environmentalist just wants you to withdraw from your evil lifestyle. This moral framework is unchallengeable, according to the Environmentalist, because the causal chain between your consumer choice and the plight of the child in can be explained in 'scientific' rather than social terms; the car, the combustion, the CO2, the greenhouse effect, the warming, the climate change, the drought. (Forget any sense of proportion between these steps).

This perspective takes poverty as a given. Indeed, it needs poverty. Without poverty to designate a moral absolute, Environmentalism's moral calculations would cease to have meaning. Its objectives are, therefore, not to abolish poverty, but to make it 'less bad'. And, of course, the abolishment of poverty is, according to Johnny's maxim, 'ideological'. Thus, we are prevented from approaching the problem of poverty - or even the effects of climate change - through politics. In other words, poverty is not seen as a political problem. After all, poverty is natural. Just ask Malthus.

Second, Johnny gives us a particularly ignorant description of ideologies. Christianity is all about 'original sin', apparently. But can we comfortably say that Christianity is an ideology? It may well offer us an account of creation, but not necessarily to the exclusion of other ideological ideas. Can a Christian not be committed to free trade, on the one hand, or the abolition of private property on the other? There are interesting moral arguments for both. But why should Jesus be bothered, either way? And isn't that a problem for Christians, rather than political scientists? Communism, apparently, blames all problems on the accumulation of private property. Actually, Marx's contention was that the accumulation of private property is necessary to create a working class in an industrial - rather than feudal - society. In this sense, the accumulation begins to solve many of the problems of oppression and inequality. And Johnny is very much mistaken with his conception of Fascism, which he confuses with nazism. Nazism is indeed a racialised form of Fascism. But Fascism itself isn't a necessarily a racist ideology, and there is no consensus amongst historians about how fascism can be characterised; it is an issue of much debate, somewhat clouded by the fact that, at the time of fascism and Nazism, ideas about race such as eugenics were mainstream and orthodox - dare we say, the subject of a consensus. Finally, Johnny confuses libertarianism with conservatism. Yet conservatism, as the name suggests, seeks to use the state to preserve social orders, traditions and cultures, while libertarianism is a broader term, in that a libertarian would generally object to the state's intervention in such matters. Johnny's grasp on political ideologies is weak. No wonder then, that he fails to recognise his own.

He continues, oblivious,

Once the initial conclusion is reached (often after a long, complicated chain of deductive reasoning--Marx's Capital, the writings of Ayn Rand, etc.) that factor X is the source of all of society's ills, all debate outside the ideology's framework ends.

Hmm. Hasn't Johnny opened his story by telling us that carbon is the source of society's ills?

One may deduce new positions from the ideology's fundamental principles, but the fundamental principles can not be questioned because such questioning might undermine the entire ideological system and the psychological security that it provides, leaving the true believer in that most urgently to be avoided of states: UNCERTAINTY. Ideology is thus, inevitably, by it's very nature, anti-empirical.

We repeat:

ENVIRONMENTalism

Moreover, is it not precisely uncertainty that blights the environmental movement? Isn't it the environmental movement that needs to tell us that 'the science is in'? Wasn't it Johnny who was, just a few paragraphs ago, evincing his own sheer and absolute rightness? Isn't the entire momentum of the environmental movement predicated on a 'scientific consensus'?

Johnny borrows from Naomi Oreskes' critique of the "tobacco strategy", which we discuss - at some length - here. Oreskes' thesis is that doubt has been manufactured against the scientific case that smoking causes cancer and that global warming is caused by anthropogenic CO2, out of an ideological conviction. This forgets two things:

1. That, whatever the scientific evidence that smoking causes cancer is, and whatever the evidence that humans are influencing the climate is, our response to that evidence is necessarily political. Only a lack of response - indifference - is apolitical. In the case of smoking, the possible political responses to such information are many: we could put out the information that smoking causes cancer; we could restrict the sale of tobacco; we could ban it altogether; or we could even decide that we should all smoke more and die horribly. But all options are political.

2. That any objection to a political argument in favour of a course of action, founded on a scientific case, will necessarily 'doubt' that the scientific evidence is sufficient to warrant the political action to which one objects. To point that out is to state the obvious.

Johnny's uncertainty and Oreskes' 'tobacco strategy' hypotheses are meaningless. They say no more than "objectors doubt the proposition". But Oreskes and Johnny have convinced themselves that scientific evidence exists in some separate, apolitical space, from where it can make scientifically sound political arguments; they hide their political ideology behind their scientific fig leaves.

He continues with another mischaracterisation...

The Soviets understood this way of thinking perfectly because Marxism too is an ideology, only in Marxism the great enemy is not the State but private capital.

Actually, the state is the 'enemy' in Marxism. For Marx, communist society is a stateless society, and the state is the apparatus of the bourgeoisie; it maintains the conditions in which the working classes are oppressed. Marx explicitly seeks the abolition of the state. Johnny is completely wrong.

He goes on to argue that it is pointless to argue with people who hold an 'ideological' objection to climate change alarmism, because 'facts' are not important to them. He offers a psychological account of his political opponents:

ideologues find psychological safety from an uncertain world in the certainties of their ideology. What you think of as an argument about global warming, they perceive as an attack on their entire world view. And they're right of course, even though it's not your intention.

We have seen attempts to profile the psychology of 'deniers' before. Here, for example.

What is interesting here is that Johnny, who, as we can see, fails to recognise his own ideology as an ideology, now makes an attack against all ideology - against all political perspectives. Ideology is now a symptom of a pathology, in much the same way that religion is seen as a pathology by Richard Dawkins et al; it is a comforting delusion, with a biological basis. This scientistic nihilism allows Johnny to diminish his opposition, rather than confront them. Isn't this what the Nazi's do, according to Johnny's account of ideology, to other races? Aren't other races, by virtue of this pathology, not only morally and intellectually inferior, but biologically inferior too? Johnny has just diminished his opponents to sub-humans, who do not have the right to engage in political discussion or to raise political objections. Disagree with Johnny and you are persona non grata. Johnny isn't even capable of identifying the opposition - of which he is evidently utterly ignorant - to his ideas. He doesn't need to know what ideas in an ideology might commit an 'ideologue' to an objection to Environmentalism, and it would seem that he doesn't care. All he can see is that convictions to ideas appear to stand in the way of his own beliefs.

Johnny's claim to empiricism belies his blatant anti-intellectualism. He too wants 'facts' but only in the sense that a caveman wants a club. He says that "one should generally ignore the denialists and concentrate on persuading the open minded". But anyone who is open-minded has to agree with him, or they are suddenly closed-minded. Johnny finishes:

For those of us in the reality-based community, understanding the role that conservative/libertarian ideology plays in determining Climaticide denialist behavior, whether sincere or simulated, can be very useful in making sense of the denialist position, a position which, ultimately, is rooted not in facts and critical thinking, but in political and psychological needs.

For Johnny to tell us that 'denialists' are blinded by ideology seems as reasonable as, say, somebody who wants to completely reorganise society around a principle of, ohh, let's say, 'harmony with nature', telling us that they are against reorganising society around a particular principle. Of course Johnny has an ideology - Environmentalism. And of course he is an 'ideologue'. Why then, does Johnny protest so much about ideology?

Johnny's inability to reflect on his own ideology, his poor grasp of politics and his disregard for others all go some way to explaining his frustration, anger, and confusion. This is a symptom of the environmental movement. We have written before about the many different ways that Environmentalists have tried to diminish their opponents by questioning their psychology and moral character, and by trying to locate a conspiracy - in every way, in fact, other than through careful, honest, political argument. Johnny's emotions characterise the shrill, impatient, self importance of the environmental movement, which prefers trantrums to debate, and panic and alarmism to convincing arguments. It prizes emotion over intellectual engagement. Environmentalism isn't so much a cause to fight for, than a symptom of belonging to nothing. It is, nonetheless, an ideology - one that needs to be challenged.

Something old, something blue, something borrowed, something green

2008-05-12T16:28:00.004+01:00

Bernard Ingham, former press secretary to Margaret Thatcher, asks in the Yorkshire Post (H/T Benny Peiser):

In the election for London's Mayor, the Greens got just over three per cent of the vote. Leaving aside such misguided places as Norwich, where the Green Party gained three seats, they struggled elsewhere to poll anywhere near that. [...] Yet Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Nationalists dance slavishly to the Green tune. [...] Why do we put up with this "green" extortion to so little purpose? That's the real mystery.

We have asked this question before. Environmentalism is a political ideology, yet its influence on policy decisions is not challenged politically in this country, and barely anywhere else. How come?

The closest thing to a challenge are the scientific discussions offered by 'sceptics', 'deniers', 'realists' or whatever you want to call them. Of course, these challenges are waved away by many as 'politically-motivated' - as if Environmentalism was above that sort of thing. And there's the rub. 'Politics' has become a dirty word, and Environmentalism fills the void, because, with 'scientists' backing it, it is presented as a 'value free' set of imperatives that we must all respond to. Environmentalists will tell you that it's not a question of political values, it's a matter of material fact, scientifically established by the IPCC. But the truth is that the unchallengeable measurements that the movement depends on do not exist. Instead, science only lends Environmentalism credibility through the 'precautionary principle'; it is superficially plausible that anthropogenic CO2 will cause global catastrophe (given a substantial number of mainly political assumptions), therefore it is worth treating the possibility of a nightmare as a certainty, according to this doctrine.

From here, Environmentalism easily becomes a religious world view: we start to see disobedient countries through this prism (Burma and its missing mangrove swamps being the latest example); we start to judge the actions of others through green-tinted spectacles; and we start to do the things that are demanded of us, 'for the sake of the planet' - not for a genuine conception of a 'greater good', but just the mitigation of a worse bad.

Back to Ingham's question: the Tories (as any party would) will explain their recent success at the polls as a consequence of their taking green issues more seriously. For example, last Friday, on BBC Radio 4's Any Questions, Chairman of the Conservative Party, Caroline Spellman, said of the successes her party had enjoyed the previous night,

Our council candidates campaigned very simply on following policies that would deliver a cleaner, greener, safer country, one that is more family friendly, and one that gives tax payers better value for money. That is a very simple message, it's one that the electorate like, that is why they have returned conservative governments - in local government - because they like what they see.

Spellman's words offer no political vision whatsoever; just a promise of better management of public (and, most likely, private) life than the Labour Party - which is exactly the basis on which Blair took power from Major in 1997. The vote did not reflect an ideological shift among the public, nor Blair's resonance with the electorate. But contrast Spellman's words to those of Sir Bernard's former boss. Whether you agreed with her or not, Thatcher's aim was a political transformation of the UK, if not the world. She went Green as that vision was running out of steam, in spite of its success (and she closed far more coal mines than any environmental protest could wish for).

Surely, if anyone knows how that played out, and consequently, why the world seems to have gone green, Ingham does?

Disagreeing that politics is dominated by a green consensus is the Independent's Andrew Grice, who complains that "nobody is talking about climate change" anymore.

We might just look back on May Day 2008 as the moment when the power of green politics peaked and went into reverse. I hope I'm wrong, but I doubt it. The reaction of the two main parties to the elections was instructive. Desperate to prop up his own position after Labour's rout, Mr Brown needed to toss a few bones to the voters and jittery Labour backbenchers. So it suddenly emerged that he was about to dump the so-called "bin tax" – allowing councils to charge householders who do not recycle their rubbish. Downing Street didn't confirm it, and five token pilot schemes will go ahead, but it's clear the bin tax has been binned.

A temporary halt to the progress of a law demanding that people recycle, or face punishing fines means that climate is off the agenda, apparently.

Grice goes on to complain about the possibility that a 2 pence rise in petrol/diesel tax will be scrapped - even though the current high price of fuel makes these entirely unnecessary, as the Inland Revenue already takes VAT (17.5%) of the sale price (~£1.108) on top of ~£0.50 a litre of petrol. A genuinely 'anti green' policy would surely make fuel cheaper, rather than allow it to get much more expensive. Grice continues:

Mr Brown was not alone in relegating the environment to the back burner. David Cameron, the wind in his sails after the elections, held a prime ministerial press conference in which he set out his priorities for government. Significantly, the words "environment" and "climate change" did not appear in his 1,200-word statement.

It is indeed a rare thing when David Cameron utters 1200 words, none of which are green. These seem to be the ones Grice is referring to. Here is another speech Cameron made shortly before that one:

If Cameron has indeed abandoned the environmental cause, he has done it very suddenly. But there's nothing in the later speech which contradicts it, in spite of Grice's claims.

Of course, 1200 is a small number of words. If, perhaps, green was ommitted from Cameron's speech, it was because the cause has been fully embraced by all of the parties. Why mention it? Likewise, does the fact that we can find 1200 words uttered recently by Caroline Lucas that include no reference to the environment mean that our favourite Green Party MEP has also turned her back on Mother Nature? As is the case with most shrill environmentalists, Grice confuses omission with opposition. It is what Cameron didn't say which upsets him. A bit like a failure to say Amen after a prayer, or to say grace before a meal; it offends religious sensibilities. So Grice treats it as a statement that the Tories have dropped all green policies, and are to stand against them in the future.

No such luck. And, as is clear from the past, the Conservatives have been key to establishing environmental orthodoxy in the UK.

The reason there is no challenge to Environmentalism is that there is nothing to challenge Environmentalism with. Instead, Environmentalism, and the senses of crisis and urgency it generates, are useful vehicles for policies for the sake of policies, and for the purfunctory policy initiatives that masquerade as 'progress'. Historically, for example, it has been sufficient to announce programs to build new homes on the basis that places for people to live are a good thing. New towns, however they turned out, were planned on the premise that it would make life better, and society more rewarding. Now, homes themselves are problematic. The very idea of housing developments upsets people. They use up resources and roads. They change the view. They are the manifestation of the idea that 'hell is other people'. Environmentalism is on hand to furnish ways in and out of that problem. For those wishing to resist new developments, instead of making selfish objections to the planning process, they can appeal to the 'greater good', and claim that the principle of environmental 'sustainability' has not been given due attention. Developers, in reply, can greenwash their proposal, to claim that the greater good is being served. Never mind that homes are supposed to be all about people.

Politics today, whether it be Cameron's or Grice's, needs crises - real, or imagined - in order to maintain their relevance to an increasingly disengaged public. These appeals to catastrophe are wrapped up in the language of political change. But claims to be about radical change for the sake of "SAVING THE PLANET" belie an exhausted political perspective on the world that increasingly fails to connect with the public in any other way than through high drama, and struggles to distance itself from its opposition.

The current success of the Conservative Party follows the descent of the Labour party, whose 1997 success followed the descent of the Tories, who had enjoyed, since 1978, success at the polls after Labour's problems in the 1970s. It seems that rather than winning elections, parties loose them. We punish their embarassing yet inevitable failure to connect with the public and reward their increasing mediocrity. This is the environment that Environmentalism has thrived in.

Critics of Environmentalism from the right claim that it is the reincarnation of failed socialism. Clearly, that criticism is incomplete. Critics of Tory policy, such as Grice, claim that 'vote blue, go Green' rhetoric is nothing more than spin; empty gestures to convince the public that it is responding to their fears. This too misses the point that that is also the very nature of the environmental movement, which has, like conservative ideologies of the past, used such fear to stand in the way of progress and harked back to traditional ways of life and natural social orders, lest unintended consequences of change cause upheaval.

Challenging environmental orthodoxy will take more than not mentioning it. That is not because Environmentalism is a powerful political idea, but because it exists as a consequence of the inability of political perspectives - Left and Right - to reflect on their own collapse.

When a Butterfly Flaps Its Wings, Environmentalists Just Flap

2008-05-12T13:17:00.004+01:00

We're glad to see that the BBC has removed the error we flagged up on Thursday. Where it said

The scientists predicted such species would struggle to cope with the 5.4C rise in tropical temperatures expected by 2100.

it now reads

The scientists predicted such species would struggle to cope with the 2-4 degrees Celsius rise in tropical temperatures predicted for the late 21st Century.

It's certainly not as ridiculously alarmist as it was. But we are no less confused as to where the new figure, 2-4 degrees Celsius, comes from than we were with the last one. It looks like some sort of hybrid between AR4 projections for tropical sea temperature increase and global average surface temperature rise. Which is odd, given that temperatures in the tropics are expected to increase less than those at the poles and temperate regions.

Anyway, we missed a trick with our last post on the issue. As commenters have reminded us, mosquitoes are insects too. But they're the sort of insects that spread tropical diseases and, given that we already know that climate change change will be a Bad Thing, they must, therefore, be expected to buck the trend and increase in numbers and range as a result of climate change, spreading tropical disease as they go. Alex Cull puts it rather nicely:

Cuddly species such as polar bears and koalas, pretty butterflies and other cute creatures such as pandas and dolphins will suffer massive extinctions. At the same time, we will see a rise in nasty, unpleasant species such as weasels and wolverines, anopheles mosquitos, icky bacteria and other creepy-crawlies such as slugs, snails and puppy-dog tails. No arguments please.

Climate change is bad for insects; but it's good for bad insects. Another BBC article reveals that it is good for British butterflies, too - but in a bad way...

Butterflies need a warm summer in order to help numbers recover from last year's washout, say conservationists.

Data from the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme showed that eight species were at an all-time low as a result of an unsuccessful summer in 2007.

The main reason behind the decline was an above average rainfall, which meant the insects, such as the common blue, had fewer chances to feed or breed.

In other words, Britain's butterflies would benefit from the sort of warmer, drier summer that we are told we'll be getting more of as a result of climate change. (Although given that the BBC also reported recently that the "Next decade 'may see no warming'", what are the chances of that?) And yet, UK Biodiversity Minister (yes, there really is such a thing) Joan Ruddock still manages to twist things around so that it becomes a climate change scare story:

Butterfly populations also indicate the speed and extent of climate change. We will provide every encouragement for those working to conserve them.

OK, so it's hard to blame the BBC this time. But imagine the headline had the butterflies suffered after a particularly hot, dry summer.

These various reports on single studies/comments support an argument made a while back by Joe Kapinsky:

the genre of ‘study published today’ stories holds back understanding rather than enhancing it

Science just doesn't work in the way that the media generally portrays it, as an accumulation of individual studies that are like separate pieces in a giant jigsaw of truth. Science proceeds by replication, rejection, corroboration, falsification, stumbling up blind alleys, reformulation etc etc. It's messy.

The only purpose this sort of science reporting serves is drama. It's science as soap opera - it's what we tune into when there is nothing else worth watching. It merely provides environmental politics with its latest installment of salacious talking points.

Fat People are Killing the Butterflies

2008-05-08T23:10:00.006+01:00

Steve Connor, science editor at the Independent newspaper warns us that

Tropical insects rather than polar bears could be among the first species to become extinct as a result of global warming, a study has found.

What does that even mean? Are the polar bears OK after all? Is the environmental movement looking for a new mascot for climate change? Is it out with the charismatic mega-fauna because of the environmental ethic that 'small is beautiful'? But it's nothing compared to the headline it appears under:

Insects 'will be climate change's first victims'

An image of a butterfly follows, with the caption...

Many tropical insect species, including butterflies, can only tolerate a narrow range of temperatures, and an average rise of 1C to 2C could be disastrous

Contrast with the measured language of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article on which Connor reports, and which the journal has kindly made available for free:

Our analyses imply that, in the absence of ameliorating factors such as migration and adaptation, the greatest extinction risks from global warming may be in the tropics, where biological diversity is also greatest.

This is not the first time the Independent has gone on about butterflies as the harbinger of doom. Back in March - a particularly cold March, as it happens - Environment Editor Michael McCarthy hit us with:

Last month, [climate change] produced its most remarkable image yet – a photograph, taken in Dorset, of a red admiral, an archetypal British summer butterfly, feeding on a snowdrop, an archetypal British winter flower.

But as we pointed out, the red admiral is far tougher that McCarthy gives it credit for, occasionally making an appearance in Winter, and is certainly not unusual in Spring and Autumn. Yet again, the Independent is making claims about the vulnerability of species that aren't consistent with the state of knowledge.

The BBC is no more level-headed about the research...

The scientists predicted such species would struggle to cope with the 5.4C rise in tropical temperatures expected by 2100.

5.4C expected by whom? Well, expected by the anonymous author of the BBC article, apparently. Certainly, the IPCC makes no specific prediction for temperature rise this century. And 5.4ºC is not mentioned in the PNAS study, nor in the accompanying press release. The only match we can find is in IPCC AR4 where it is the top-end prediction for SRES scenario A2 (Table SPM.3), the range of which is 2.0-5.4ºC. But why pick 5.4ºC? If you're just looking for a big number to scare people with, then why not plump for the upper value for the A1 scenario (1.4-6.4°C)? Is this like buying the second cheapest bottle of wine in a restaurant to prove you are not a skinflint? Or like Josef Fritzl wondering why everyone hates him when he could have been so much more horrible? [EDIT: The BBC has now "corrected" this error.]

Call us pedantic if you like; but imagine the outcry had the BBC reported that global temperatures are expected to rise by only 1.4ºC by the end of the century (the second lowest low point among the four AR4 SRES scenarios). But then, of course, it's not just journalists (and activists) who are happy to over-egg the ecopocalyptic pudding. When, for example, Bob May (erstwhile President of the Royal Society and former chief scientific advisor to the UK government) confidently asserted in the popular media that a global temperature of 2ºC will put 15-40% of all species at risk of extinction, it was on the basis of a single, worst-case study. He was no less unobjective when he announced that climate swindler du jour Martin Durkin was also some sort of whacko HIV/AIDS denialist. And then there are the science academies, who, while being suspicious of the industry move towards open access publishing, are happy to make papers of the the-world-is-screwed-and-we're-all-going-to-die variety available to all and sundry for free. Which is what the US's National Academy of Sciences have done with this paper. And last year the Royal Society did it, too, when they published a paper which they claimed proved once and for all that the sun has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with global warming. This wasn't just any old paper; it was, in the words of the Royal Society itself, "the truth about global warming". And for some strange reason, we are still expected to take these academies' opinions on what we should do about climate change as the last word on truth and beauty - "respect the facts" as Bob May puts it.

Newspaper editors and headline writers could - possibly - be forgiven for not understanding quite how science works. It's harder to see how science correspondents could. And it's laughable that the science academies seem not to. Funnier is that scientists and science academies are only too happy to criticise journalists, newspapers and TV producers when they report the science 'wrongly' (and you can bet your house that none of them will be criticising the Independent or the BBC on this occasion). But what do they expect? What sort of example do they think are they setting?

As we keep saying, this is no conspiracy. It's just that - as they've been trying to tell us for years - scientists are human, too. Being human and everything, scientists are as jittery about the future and unsure of their role in society as the rest of us. But just because it turns out that they are as anxious as the rest of the world, it doesn't mean that there's any reason to take the claims of environmentalists at face value, or any less reason to maintain objectivity. Just as global warming is convenient for local governments, directionless leaders and crisis politics, it is also convenient for scientists and science academies lacking raison d'être.

Science might never have been quite the objective producer of facts that we like to think it is. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't strive to be an objective seeker of facts. Because striving to be objective about the facts of the material universe is precisely what science is supposed to do. When it applies itself instead to arming political narratives with legitimacy and authority, it talks itself out of a job.

Global Warming... Jumping the Shark...

2008-05-07T11:08:00.003+01:00

Wikipedia tells us,

The term jumping the shark alludes to a specific scene in a 1977 episode of the TV series Happy Days when the popular character Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli literally jumps over a shark while water skiing. The scene was so preposterous that many believed it to be an ill-conceived attempt at reviving the declining ratings of the flagging show.

The expression is used to refer to tired TV shows which have similarly passed their peak.

Once a show has "jumped the shark" fans sense a noticeable decline in quality or feel the show has undergone too many changes to retain its original appeal.

Now, the same is true of the much over-cooked global warming. The Observer reported at the weekend:

Surge in fatal shark attacks blamed on global warming

But, of course, we need the numbers.

Two deaths in the waters off California and Mexico last week and a spate of shark-inflicted injuries to surfers off Florida's Atlantic coast have leftbeachgoers seeking an explanation for a sudden surge in the number of strikes. In the first four months of this year, there were four fatal shark attacks worldwide, compared with one in the whole of 2007, according to the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History inGainesville.

Gosh. Interesting. But correlation and causation, and all that. We ought to be careful. What is the warming climate doing to the sharks, to make them attack us?

'The one thing that's affecting shark attacks more than anything else is human activity,' said Dr George Burgess of Florida University, a shark expert who maintains the database. 'As the population continues to rise, so does the number of people in the water for recreation. And as long as we have an increase in human hours in the water, we will have an increase in shark bites.'

Hmmm. That's not global warming though, is it?

Some experts suggest that an abundance of seals has attracted high numbers of sharks, while others believe that overfishing has hit their food chain.

Hmmm. Still not getting the 'global warming' thing...

Another contributory factor to the location of shark attacks could be global warming and rising sea temperatures. 'You'll find that some species will begin to appear in places they didn't in the past with some regularity,' he said.

"Could be". Things "regularly appearing" where they hadn't been "in the past". We're not going to worry about it until we see sharks in rollerblading rinks. It turns out that the headline is misleading.

The only sense which can be distilled from this absurd article is that sharks only attack you when you're wet. Global warming has nothing to do with it.

Save Any Planet

2008-05-06T22:50:00.004+01:00

For Green buffoonery in all its ghastly, opportunistic, incompetent, self-righteous glory, there is the latest episode of the BBC's The Apprentice. That's the series where someone incredibly rich and successful like Donald Trump conducts a "job interview from hell" in which ambitious young things compete for employment at Trump Central. In the BBC version, silly posh people and salt-of-the-earth working class types battle it out for a job with Cockney barrow boy Sir Alan Sugar, whose businesses are worth, we are told, 800 million pounds.

British readers with an hour to kill within the next four days can watch the show here. For everyone else, it goes something like this...

The candidates must come up with a brand new occasion for a range of greetings cards. Will they find a gap in this saturated market? And will their ideas be commercial?

What the two teams come up with is Happy Singles' Day and, yes, Save Planet Earth Day. As bad as Happy Singles' Day may be, a packaged greetings card celebrating the use of fewer resources is, as Sir Alan points out, a complete non-starter. But that alone does not explain the excruciating hilarity of the team's attempts to sell them to retailers. What makes the pitches for Save Planet Earth Day such exquisitely uncomfortable viewing is the religious zeal with which they fight the cause. These guys think they ought to believe what they are saying. The problem is that they don't believe it. Which makes it tricky to convince others. But as any environmentalist worth their salt knows, when people don't believe you, you emotionally blackmail them or appeal to their sense of self-loathing. Team leader Kevin does both. In his pitch to market leader Clinton Cards, he resorts to:
If you don't put your weight behind it, then it's just the same as the US saying "we don't care about pollution"
Kevin missed a trick there. Why stop at the US? Surely, anyone who begs to differ with environmental orthodoxy is worse even than that - they're more like rats, slave traders, or Holocaust deniers.

Greens would interpret Kevin's embarrassing Green epiphany rather differently. They would write it off as mere Greenwash, just another cynical attempt by business to tap into the grassroots popularity of the Environmental movement. The problem for that theory is that the Environmental movement is not popular. No sooner had we mentioned last week the ABC News poll where global warming didn't figure at all in the US public's list of priorities, and last year's Ipsos Mori poll that showed that the great British public aren't quite so Green as Britain's Great and Good like to think we should be, than there was another poll, which found that 70% of us would not approve of tax hikes in the name of tackling climate change. The trouble is not that Kevin et al are cynically trying to exploit a market; it's that they're trying to sell a product that is wrapped up with a cynical ideology, and for which there is no market.

That the public are not as gullible as the Kevins of this world would have it does not bode well for green initiatives that rely on consumer power. Fairtrade, for example - still far from a market leader - won't stand a chance once we realise that it's not actually particularly ethical to give people a friendly pat on the head and toss them some loose change to make sure they carry on doing all those jobs that we wouldn't touch with a barge pole.

The beauty of it all for self-righteous greens, however, is that you don't actually have to take any responsibility when you fail - you just blame the consumers. Just as Kevin does when reflecting on what went wrong with his pitch:

If that's the attitude everyone takes, then we're not going to be able to save any planet

Sir Alan didn't get where he is today by not cynically exploiting markets. Nor by cynically exploiting non-markets. Nor by cynically blaming people who refused to buy his wares. Kevin gets fired.

Bottom Feder

2008-05-02T16:53:00.005+01:00

A link to this article came our way...

Procreation is killing the planet, and traditional religion is to blame, Global-Warming cultists insist. First the industrial revolution had to go. Then it was to the wall with oil company executives, those malignant Carbon Interests. Next, SUVs were declared enemies of the planet.

Hmmm. This is the first time we've heard the claim that environmentalists blame 'traditional religion' directly for environmental degradation. Noticeably, the claim is not actually attributed to the environmental movement in general, but to an individual, an Oliver "Buzz" Thomas, who asks in a USA TODAY article, "Might our religion be killing us?". Thomas argues predictably that religious doctrine encourages people to have more babies, thereby creating a greater environmental impact through 'overpopulation'. Yawn.

You may be wondering why we, the editors of a site that intends to challenge climate orthodoxy, are sceptical of the claims made by Don Feder in his GLOBAL WARMING -- LEFT'S LATEST EXCUSE FOR THE WAR ON THE FAMILY. The reason is that it's difficult to establish which is worse, the intellectual poverty of the environmental movement - as Thomas exhibits - or the intellectual dishonesty of Feder in this article. The fact of the former should make the latter unnecessary. What are we to make of Feder, then?

Notice that Thomas is no atheist, but is in fact a Southern Baptist minister. And notice too that there is no real substance in his article that one could fairly attribute to the 'Left'. Yet Feder appears to maintain that Thomas's remarks are evidence that the left are trying to attack the family, and religion.

As we have argued before, Environmentalism and conventional religions are strikingly compatible. But this is not just some dispute about different interpretations of biblical texts, Feder - who is allegedly a political consultant, seems to be absurdly ignorant of political theory. He tells us that

For 200 years, the left has been fixated on an imaginary overpopulation crisis. In 1798, Thomas Malthus warned that wars, famine and plagues were needed to reduce the "surplus population" else we would soon inhabit Planet SRO.

But Malthus's ideas had no currency in the Left. Quite the opposite. Lenin - about as left as lefties ever got - said of them that they were "an attempt on the part of bourgeois ideologists to exonerate capitalism and to prove the inevitability of privation and misery for the working class under any social system". Indeed, Tomas Malthus, the classical economist, was in fact a keen fan of Adam Smith - the 'father of capitalism'. To claim that Malthus is key to the development of the left is as sound as claiming that a pope was instrumental in the development of the ideas in Darwin's "origin of the species". A key assumption for Malthus was that poverty is the consequence of the poor's moral shortcomings rather than unequal structures of society. Again, where's the socialism? Nonetheless, Feder continues,

In his 1969 book, "The Population Bomb" (the prequel to "An Inconvenient Truth"), Paul Ehrlich forecast worldwide famine by 1975. Natural resources would be severely depleted and arable land exhausted in a futile effort to keep up with the population explosion.

Neither was Paul Ehrlich 'Left'. He was on the board of advisors of the Federation for American Immigration Reform until 2003 - "The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is a non-partisan, non-profit 501(c)(3) educational organization in the United States that advocates changes in U.S. immigration policy that would result in significant reductions in immigration, both legal and illegal." And the Left has never been about submitting to 'limits to growth', thereby arresting progress; it's goal has been to distribute the fruits of that progress among those who actually produce stuff, rather than those who merely own it.

It's not as if Feder doesn't know that he's talking bullshit...

If Global Warming didn't exist, the left would have to invent it. In fact, they did. As Nigel Calder, former editor of the British magazine New Scientist explains: "Twenty years ago, climate research became politicized in favor of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the study as the effect of the study of greenhouse gasses. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers."

... If he knows that climate research was politicised twenty years ago, he would know that it was politicised by the then UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher - a Conservative, and friend and ally of Ronald Reagan. Her administration - a right wing administration, arguably farther right than the party's tradition - found the ideas of Paul Ehrlich and Malthus expedient. They were communicated to the PM by the likes of neomalthusian (he admits to the term) Sir Crispin Tickell, a senior British diplomat at the time.

And on the subject of 'traditional religion', and the 'left's attack on the family', Marx - again, a fairly leftish kind of lefty - says this of Malthus:

Although Malthus was a parson of the English State Church, he had taken the monastic vow of celibacy — one of the conditions of holding a Fellowship in Protestant Cambridge University: "Socios collegiorum maritos esse non permittimus, sed statim postquam quis uxorem duxerit socius collegii desinat esse." ("Reports of Cambridge University Commission," p. 172.) This circumstance favourably distinguishes Malthus from the other Protestant parsons, who have shuffled off the command enjoining celibacy of the priesthood and have taken, "Be fruitful and multiply," as their special Biblical mission in such a degree that they generally contribute to the increase of population to a really unbecoming extent, whilst they preach at the same time to the labourers the "principle of population." It is characteristic that the economic fall of man, the Adam's apple, the urgent appetite, "the checks which tend to blunt the shafts of Cupid," as Parson Townsend waggishly puts it, that this delicate question was and is monopolised by the Reverends of Protestant Theology, or rather of the Protestant Church. With the exception of the Venetian monk, Ortes, an original and clever writer, most of the population-theory teachers are Protestant parsons. [Capital, Ch 25, note 6]

Marx's point here, like Feder's, is that Malthusianism is used to coerce the working classes, not for the benefit of the Left, as Feder claims, but for the capitalist elite. Malthusianism is just good, old-fashioned fear of the uncontrolled masses. Too many of them is a problem, you see, for capital. They start demanding things. And they start becoming a viable political force, rather than merely a useful source of labour.

The left must have its scapegoat. This is absolutely essential. For Marx it was the bourgeoisie. For the '60s New Left, it was America -- spelled with a "k." White males are the villains of multiculturalism. Now, it's babies and retrograde churches that are destroying the planet. The environment has assumed the role of the proletariat, the Third World and racial minorities in earlier models of damnation and salvation.

If it wasn't so utterly dishonest, it would be funny that Feder should talk of scapegoating in an article where he attacks the 'left', which isn't left, for characteristics of the right, in defence of the poor and the oppressed at the hands of the bourgeoisie!

The left has always worried about the reproductive patterns of certain people. As Jonah Goldberg explains in his book "Liberal Fascism," from the beginning, racial eugenics was a project of the left -- or progressives, as they called themselves then and now. H.G. Wells, a hero of pre-World War II progressivism (a socialist who wrote science fiction, much like Al Gore), said that in order for humankind to move to the sunny uplands of utopia, "swarms of black and brown, and dirty (lower class) white and yellow people" would have to be discouraged from breeding -- or physically eliminated. Moreover, Goldberg explains, "The foremost institution combating eugenics around the world was the Catholic Church."

In fact eugenics was as much an orthodoxy prior to WW2 as climate change is today. Both the left and the right bought into it. Many US states had programs of compulsory sterilisation, and there's probably no point in raising that little matter of racial segregation in the southern states up until... oh, well after eugenics was unfashionable. It is only with tunnel vision that Feder can make the point. Indeed, he cites just one prominent socialist. But it wasn't simply Wells's socialism which made him keen on eugenics, but his scientism. Indeed some religious movements have stood in the way of eugenics, but arguably, only because reproductive technologies threaten to undermine their influence, by separating our behaviour from its consequences, or otherwise undermining religious orthodoxy. What appears to be a positive stand against the evil of eugenics also stands in the way of life-saving, and life-enhancing medicine and research. Feder is not speaking about anything positive. We agree that it is a bad idea to campaign against families after the fashion of the Chinese one-child-per-family policy. But on the other hand, it is bad to coerce people into families through orthodoxies. Whether you want states or 'traditional religion' to maintain the family, the idea that the family unit is both right, and natural, and is the bedrock of society is undermined; it is still a claim that families can only exist with such forms of intervention. Why would families need a religion or a state to exist? What is more, how can Feder honestly claim that the traditional church does not worry about 'the reproductive patterns of certain people'? It's not as if the church doesn't speak about sex before marriage, gay relationships, contraception, and all that stuff.

There are plenty of things to criticise the old left for. But no need. Because it no longer exists. Feder misses the point that Environmentalism is perfectly compatible with right wing, religious as well as 'liberal' perspectives. Indeed, it's more at home with the old right in that, ultimately, it serves to maintain elites and class structures. There's no problem making rubbish up about Environmentalism if all you want to do is score points here and there against political (or even religious) rivals, as Feder seems to want to do. It's not fine if you think Environmentalism is a dangerous idea that needs challenging. And it does need challenging. There is plenty of scope for people on the right and left to have interesting conversations about what's wrong with Environmentalism. But the intellectual dishonesty of Feder's article is no way to challenge the intellectual poverty of Environmentalism. Please, let's raise the standard.

Who Are the Real Climate Criminals?

2008-04-29T15:39:00.004+01:00

If there's one thing that's supposed to annoy us British about Americans, it's their environmentally unfriendly ways. And not just George Bush and his Exxon-funded cronies. It's the whole lot of them – as highlighted by the recent ABC News poll where "global warming" scored a big, fat zero (see page 6) in the US public's list of priorities.

Contrast with London's Mayoral candidates all battling to save the planet. The "central pledge" of New Labour's Ken Livingstone to his electorate includes: "London will tackle the great environmental problems, above all climate change, to ensure that our success is sustainable." And the whole thing is only one sentence long. Boris Johnson (Conservative) pledges "a ban on bottled water, a ban on internal flights, recycling, green procurement and sustainability”. Both claim to be against Heathrow's third runway on environmental grounds. And there's still somehow room for a Green Party candidate. Politics: available in any colour, as long as it's... well... Green.

But is our superciliousness towards the green credentials of the USA really justified? Are we really that different here in the UK? Not according to an Ipsos Mori poll last year, which indicated that more than half of us are not convinced that the science of climate change is robust enough to justify a Green revolution. Despite the vast sums of cash available to the environmental PR machine to keep the looming ecopalypse at the front of our minds, nobody's really that interested, it seems.

Funnily enough, environmentalists like to blame their failure to capture the public's imagination on oil-funded “deniers” (whose budget is a fraction of Greenpeace's alone). Or they'll blame the selfishness of the public itself, who need to be hectored into making "ethical" consumer choices... and taking fewer baths.

But is there another reason for our complacency? Could it be that we have a better nose for eco-friendly bullshit than Livingstone's "London will tackle the great environmental problems, above all climate change, to ensure that our success is sustainable", or Boris's "a ban on bottled water, a ban on internal flights, recycling, green procurement and sustainability” give us credit for? Both look like nothing more than attempts to convince us that they're taking armageddon seriously, rather than serious attempts to make the world a better place.

So why, given the public's lack of interest, isn't there a candidate with the balls to stand up and challenge Environmentalism? Where is the candidate who thinks a third runway is a good thing? It's not as if Londoners don't want to use airports. Or who thinks there aren't enough roads? Or that a new de-salination plant is a better idea than saving water by hectoring Londoners with "if it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down"?

Perhaps it's because green policies can’t actually do any harm. We might be ambivalent, but we're hardly going to vote against saving the planet. Which is perhaps why everyone from the BNP through to Socialist Worker are striking a green pose. Environmentalism is attractive to unimaginative politicians precisely because it's seen as inoffensive and uncontroversial.

Except that it is offensive. And it should be controversial. Just ask Gareth Corkhill, the father of four who was fined a week's wages by Copeland Borough Council and slapped with a criminal record for overflowing his wheelie bin by 4 inches. (And environmentalism is supposed to be 'progressive'!). Once authorities get it into their heads that human concerns can take second place to a higher purpose - saving Mother Nature, Gaia, or whatever you want to call her - no reason exists for them to imagine that they owe the public anything, or are even accountable.

Environmentalism isn't the left-wing conspiracy that those whom it accuses of being a right-wing conspiracy are wont to accuse it of being. It's just very convenient, that's all. Public servants can become policemen; they can suddenly make life more difficult in the name of saving the planet. Eco-Proles can be farmed out to Eco-Homes in Eco-Towns that lack flushing toilets and where the only water you are allowed to use is that which falls on your land. And to complain is to have the blood of future generations on your hands, or to be a bin-abusing 'carbon criminal'. Environmentalism turns the purpose of government and public service on its head.

Environmentalism is all very convenient - for everybody except real, live human beings. So who's more in tune with their electorate on environmental matters? Copeland Borough Council? Boris? Ken? Or George Bush Jr?