Barrel Strength

Dear Dalwhinnie:

I am just back from China and I am receiving e-mails from you about “scandal” and  “the hoax of the century” and it has to do with climate change.

There are some who have a notion that arguments about climate change are at best exagerated and perhaps are part of some dreadful conspiracy that (left-leaning?) states are involved in to .. and then I lose the plot. 

I have read and viewed what was sent on. Today is was about the Queen’s speech on climate change and (the British government-inspired position) that we should take these things seriously and that climate change is having untoward effects, which sensible conservative thinkers (like yourself) think is a hoax.

There MUST be a sub-text here.

What is it about suggestions that climate change may be in part a consequence of what we humans have been doing with gay abandon for the last two centuries and frenetically so for the last nine decades, as we have managed to use up almost all of the readily available fossil fuel energy and create a global economic system, which is not merely enormous but unsustainable — and which may have set in motion irreversible change to our ecosystem?

I am not an earth scientist, merely a sociologist, who has had a ringside seat to witness social and economic change over a little more than three decades in one corner of the world’s most populous place. I have also peeked into some other corners as well. I have colleagues who ARE earth scientists, who have shared with me their observations of what is happening in places like the high Arctic, Antartica, Greenland, Norway, the Tibetan Massif, to name a few. I respect them, their work, and when they voice concern and alarm, I do not see them, or hear them, “crying wolf”.

To be sure, climate data are available for a long period, by looking at glaciers, or trees, and, yes, we must pay attention to variations over the millenia. At the same time, there is something, or some  things, that have happened within our lifetimes, that cannot simply be brushed  aside and assigned to a “conspiracy” or a “hoax”, however these things might be significant for a particular political philosophy.

In my own observation, I have seen changes that have affected a population larger than that of North America, in the space of about three decades, that have been astonishing, breathtaking, mind-boggling and irreversible. I have seen an agriculturally-focussed nation rush headlong into an industrial system, fully meeting the needs of our own material standard of life, and in its wake ushering in a set of commercial values that would be well understood in either late Victorian Britain. or the US and Canada in the 1950s. Its characteristic is to think only of the present, the future is of no concern, the problems that future generations must resolve. In good 1950s fashion, China has become a car culture – and now India is to follow. China and India between them constitute almost a half of the world’s population.  Currently, Canada and the US consume almost a third of the word’s resources,  although there is a small shift as China (and possibly  soon India) has become the workshop of the world. If China and India’s appetite for resources grow, we might wonder what the (global) consequences might be.

So what does this have to do with climate change, or the price of beer, shirts, automobiles, gasoline and gold? Well, I think everything. I am just back from south China. 40 years ago, at this time of year we would be unpacking our winter woolies and our padded jackets. The days were crystal clear, cool and perfectly grand, in great contrast to the weather for much of the year. which is miserably  damp in March and April, then miserably damp and HOT. The problem now is that the cool and crystal clear weather doesn’t come any more, and hasn’t since industrialization got underway beginning in the early 1980s. 

Industrialization has changed, dare I say compromised, the environment, likely changed some weather patterns and certainly changed the way the weather and its affects are perceived.  There are pollutants that were not in the atmosphere 30 years ago when animal power ploughed the fields, and people walked or rode their bicycles, when the land was cropland, where much of it is now a built environment of factories and dwellings. Two weeks ago I led a delegation of BC mayors in a visit to Guangdong, where I have worked for forty years. We travelled from Hong Kong to Guangzhou by road, travelling the 200 kilometres which is now home to 30 million people. passing through Shenzhen, a city of eight million, which had a population of 100,000 largely peasant farmers until 27 years ago, through Donguan, which has grown from a million to a city of perhaps eight million, in the last twenty years, and into Guangzhou, which with a population of 10 million, has
 doubled in size during the same period.   

It can of course be argued that the Severn Valley in Shropshire was a hell on earth in the eighteenth century at the centre of the early industrial revolution, and is now once again a bucolic place with only the Ironbridge as a ghost of its past. Things can be reversed if the industry moves on, as it did for Coalbrookdale, and may have done for Pittsburgh.. The issue may be one of scale. What has happened in Southeast and Eastern China is of continental proportions and has occurred within a single generation, not the three or four that it took in Britain.  It has also occurred alongside the internal combustion engine, which was not apparent in Britain until its industrial (and political) supremacy began to decline. India may now be waiting in the wings for its own entrance.

There are other “things” going on. Outside the area of intense industrial and commercial activity, in the grasslands of western China, there are some dramatic ecological changes which appear unprecedented and which seem to be climate induced. There is now simply not enough fodder for the herds. It is in areas that are ethnically distinct (Tibetan, Uighur, Mongolian) which has created an added element in already conteted areas. The Chinese governments response have not helped matters but it is safe to say that the “troubles” that occurred in Tibetan regions in the spring of 2008 were in part related to problem caused by climate shifts. My earth scientists friends report similar ecological effects in places like the Yukon, Greenland, Norway and the Antarctic.

I am struck by the curious source of your information — Russia. It is of course an economy critically involved in exploiting a fossil fuel economy. India now seems to be arguing for a climate change hoax. As it is on the verge of becoming an automobile production economy, it is of course in its interests to debunk climate change?     

My view is that the evidence for climate change is strong. The “long duree” might suggest otherwise, My three decade observation as a frog from the bottom of my well  suggests that things for my gramdaughter and her cohort might be pretty grim.

It still doesn’t aswer my other query. What is your sub-text?

You seem sometimes to be in need of an essay. Well. I have been much troubled over the past two days and needed to write mine. What indeed is up, doc?

Pinot Noir

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

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Dear Brother Pinot Noir

Just to allay your fears for my sanity, climate change is real, constant, and never ending.

We dont cause it. I know this statement will shock; it shocked me. It is not true of course. Not completely true. Human overgrazing and defrestation can change climates. The whole Mediteranean basin as been irretrievably damaged by
goats and deforestation. Maybe the same is true in Western china; it would not surprize me.

But that is not the warmist argument.

Every glacier in existence could melt, and Antarctica start to resemble Baffin Island, and it would not affect the warmist argument, or prove it, or disprove it.

Their argument is precise.

1. Global warming is occurring.
2.Global warming is bad.
3.Global warming is caused by the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere.
4. Human activity is the cause of the recent (this past century)  rise of CO2 in the atmosphere.
5. Drastic action needs to be taken now to prevent a runaway heat effect that would turn earth into a Venusian hell hole.
6. Those who oppose this view are ignorant or in  bad faith and should be excluded from public discourse.

And because all this is true, industrial economies should pay .7% of their GNP in perpetuity (I thnk) through the United Nations to third world economies to

a) abate the efffects of global warming

b) atone for past damage caused by global warming

c) help them develop energy technologies that are less productive of CO2.

This latter is not the result of the climate scientists but the result of United Nations bureaucrats, banks, opportunists, and scallawags who want to cash in on cap and trade. Cap and trade is the taxation of CO2 emissions, where the
revenues from those trades  will not accrue to governments – no no no – they will accrue to traders. It will be a tax that never reaches government coffers because the revenue will be privately appropriated! This ought to shock any
self-respectiing leftie. But that is nto my argument today. That is yet another aspect of this enormous scam.

Back to the Copenhagen Treaty.

In short, permanent servitude to a world government is being proposed via the Copenhagen Treaty. (If you dont like the word servitude you can supply your own). Trillions of dollars are at stake because many people, yourself included, have been persuaded by a relentless propaganda attack for the last twelve years, at least, that arguments 1 through 6 above are true.

They are not.

None of this would matter except that millions of people have become persuaded that they need to do something, anything, to prevent planetary catastrophe. There is a large panic on at the moment and the panic mongers expect to empower and enrich themsleves hugely. See “cap and trade” above.

The Hadley CRU hack has shown that the chief scientitsts on atmospheric global warming have done many evil things against rational science:

a) suppress evidence that global warming has stopped in 1999 and that earth temperature has been largely flat or declining since then. (We are talking half a degree here, but they were talking of rises in the same range being
harbingers of catastrophe).

If this is so, then, since global warming has stopped but CO2 levels have continued to rise, (a fact)  then CO2 concentrations are not the driver alone of climate change. Ths torpedoes their claims and proves their argument false.

b) selectively pick only that data from temperature measuring stations around the world that accord with their views. (Viz stories from Australia and New Zealand)

c) use code so bad that other scientists cannot reproduce their results.

d) refuse to share either their source data or their source code that would allow other scientists to verify their data.

e) delete their source data when it became the subject of a Freedom of Information Act request.

f) Manoevre to displace editors of science magazines who had not wholly bought into their theories.

g) Prevent any outsiders to the temple of AGW (anthropocentric global warming) fromreviewing the articles produced by the club.

h) Ruthlessly exclude doubters and deniers from publihing in their journals.

But the real issue is that this research unit was one of three global temperaure measuring stations that documented “Global” warming. They were relied upon by the IPCC to produce the data that underlay the panic mongering reports of the IPCC (International Committee on Climate Change)which have dominated the debate, and which have been used to say that “deniers” were just cranks who could not write articles worthy of science journals.

So essentially the whole AGW argument has fallen apart in the most comprehensive way. It remains to explain why this has happened, which was the subject of my note.

Russia is not the source of our information.

It is the source of commentary on the mainstream media’s failure to pay attention to this issue. This is a side issue, however delicious to contemplate.

Basically, the subtext here is that Leftism is eternal. When Marx failed, a new ideology had to be found. The desire to control human outcomes in the name of something or other by an all-knowing elite of cognoscenti never stops. So the
Left regrouped around global warming. AGW has provided the next ideology of control to be exercised through non-democratic means. Their pet theory just exploded.

No wonder the MSM are reluctant to cover it. They have not yet received orders from whoever controls them as to what to think, so they carry forward as if their right arm had not been blown off. More seriously, it took a while
beforethe Watergate scandal got traction because it took people a while to ralize that it went all the way to the top.

You may consider Leftism to be some eternal struggle against ignorance and the helping of the poor, or some such thing. I regret to say I cannot share this view. Again, see essays at barrelstrength.com

And a fine good morning to you, brother!

Dalwhinnie