Barrel Strength

I like old James Lovelock, all 90 years of him. The founder of Gaia theory has been waging a lonely battle to win acceptance for what to most of us seems obvious, when you allow yourself to think about it. The Gaia theory says that the planet is a living system. Life on earth – the community of living organisms – does its best to maintain an equilibrium.

Take the atmosphere as an example. Gaia theory argues that life maintains oxygen in a dynamic process at 21% by volume of the atmosphere . Add even 1% more oxygen and fires might start too easily. Or consider methane, which is maintained at 1.5 parts per million over the last  million of years. Yet methane oxidizes so that 67% of it disappears every ten years. For methane to be kept so exactly constant, as ice core samples show, argues for processes which work towards an exquisite equilibrium. Life is doing something to maintain conditions suitable for life: that is the nub of Gaia theory.

Locvelock has many opponents.

• To the geologists the Gaia hypothesis is superfluous. The processes of geochemistry are sufficient to explain the equlibria.
• To the computer modelling crowd, the ones one foist anthropogenic global warming on us, Lovelock does not use computers and relies on actual physical measurements. This is way too empirical for their tastes.
• Gaia theory is all too purposeful for Dawkins and the othodox Darwinists, in that the randomness of the mutations is somehow threatened if the mutations work towards overall purposes, such as planetary stability.

So why do I like Lovelock? I like him for the same reason I like George Orwell. They both share a belief the prevailing error of their ages. In Orwell’s case, it was a belief that the market was finished and that a planned society was both better and historically inevitable. In Lovelock’s case it is eco-doomism of a certain plausible kind.  Their errors have had a paradoxical result. By allowing them to share the prevailing errors of their respective political epochs, each has been granted access into the intellectual  and social milieux of a variety of phonies, poseurs, and fanatics. If they had not shared those assumptions, at least in part, they would have stood aside from the main currents of their ages, such as Friedrich Hayek or Bjorn Lomborg, and have found themselves arguing from the outside inward. But by sharing just enough of the prevailing assumptions of their times, they have been allowed entry into worlds where you and I would be barred.

Thus it was Orwell the man of the left who skewered the idea of socialist revolution in Animal Farm, and who depicted the inner feeling of totalitarianism  in 1984. If he had not shared enough of the assumptions of the Left to get close to them, indeed to go fight the fascists in Spain, he would never have seen the Soviets executing the anarchist POUM militia in the Spanish civil war. He would never have shared enough of the socialist ideal to take seriously the betrayal of that ideal by Stalin and his regime. To a capitalist free trade liberal (hence conservative)  such as myself, the fact that socialists are envious little swine , and that communists are trying with all their might to become  social insects and to force you to join this experiment, so that you no longer think but just obey scent glands or something, is merely an observed fact.

So it was in that spirit that I at first perused and then devoured Lovelock’s  “The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning”. The more I read the more I wanted to have the fellow over for a drink.

• he has no use for “greens”; he thinks they vastly underestimate the problem of global warming;
• he has no use for the computer modellers; they fail to make observations of fact and can predict nothing;
• he thinks capitalism will adapt to green ideology by promoting vastly wasteful and stupid windmills and other green energy systems;
• He praises Nigel Lawson, the former British finance minister,  and his other geochemist scientific critics;
• He thinks it is folly for Britain not to rely extensively on the safe  energy of nuclear reactors;
• Most reasearch into the chemical dangers of this or that are spurious; our instruments are so sensitive that they can measure concentrations millions of times lower than that which can cause damage;
• The IPCC has failed to account even for the current climate, let alone the future one;
• the basis of his belief that global warming is happening is that sea levels are rising. All the atmospheric science is basically piffle, in his view.

“The sea level rises for two reasons only: from ice on land that melts and from the expansion of the ocean as it warms”. He has a chart at page 27 showing that the sea level has risen 8 centimeters from 1970 to 2007.

There are many rasons why a skpetic of man-caused global warming would want to read Lovelock. He is fair. He is honest. He has been proven right about many things. He thinks broadly, writes well, and though he may be wrong, he is possibly quite right. As regards the Gaia hypothesis, I suspect it will thrive long after Dawkin’s selfish gene metaphor has been consigned to the pile of reductionist twaddle. Regardless, Lovelock reveals himself the kind of person you would want over for a bottle of wine and maybe  to share a steak. The conversation would be frank, fascinating, and erudite, and he would be open to contrary thinking.

Gaia has once again shown she is able to adjust to changing conditions and look after herself without help from Algore or the UN  IPCC Chicken-Littles, with all of their Doomsday forecasts of the consequences of AGW.

Many low-lying islands in the Pacific are growing in size to counter the effects of rising sea levels, according to new research.

Scientists have feared that many of the small islands throughout the South Pacific will eventually disappear under rising sea levels caused by climate change.

But two researchers who measured 27 islands where local sea levels have risen 4.8 inches over the past 60 years, found just four had diminished in size.

The study found that the coral islands are able to respond to changes in weather patterns and climate, with coral debris eroded from encircling reefs pushed up onto the islands’ coasts by winds and waves.

more

File this under you-can’t-make-this-up.

‘Titanic’ director Cameron joins effort to plug Gulf spill

Is it possible that a ‘Star Trek’ director would have better luck?

Update:  Gulf spill headline.

Effort to contain Gulf oil stalls with stuck saw

It would be best to call the director of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’.

I ought to have seen Joanne Nova’s Climate Money before now. If you haven’t, you too can cite it in the unlikely  event of being invited to Geoffrey Simpson’s for dinner. In short, government billions for AGW; millions somewhere for skeptics.

James Delingpole, that right-wing vicious attack dog – God I love him – has come out with something similar.

Forget prorogation, which is a temporary blip in the microcosm of Canadian politics.   Remember Copenhagen. Do you? Do you know how big a victory we won?

The scale and speed of the collapse of the AGW scare ought to inspire us with trust that truth will prevail. It is doing so before our eyes.
 

The rats are leaving the ship. Andrew Weaver, one of Canada’s leading scientific bedwetters on the subject, has declared the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri,  tainted

“Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria, says the leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has allowed it to advocate for action on global warming, rather than serve simply as a neutral science advisory body.

 ”There’s been some dangerous crossing of that line,” said Weaver on Tuesday, echoing the published sentiments of other top climate scientists in the U.S. and Europe this week.

 ”Some might argue we need a change in some of the upper leadership of the IPCC, who are perceived as becoming advocates,” he told Canwest News Service. “I think that is a very legitimate question.”

To those more familiar with the story, Andrew Weaver has been foremost among those who have crossed the line into advocacy. But let that rest.

• Himalayan glacier melting has been shown to be speculation based ona telephone call to a glaciologist working for one of Pachauri’s organizations.
• Missing weather stations have been shown to have been selectively removed, not maintained or not reported (for whatever reasons) from places that are more remote, or at higher elevations, than the weather stations kept open. The result is selective favouring of those weather stations exposed to more urban heat, and a great reduction in sample size, and hence the reliability, of temperature records.
• The IPCC itself is under severe, and heeded, criticism for its methods and behaviour.

“Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have “cherry picked” the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea — which has a warming effect on winter weather.”

 Some stories play out over decades. Global warming is one of them. Considering the amount of government funding which sustains it, it has proven remarkably fragile in the face of the email leaks of climategate. Considering also the massive buy-in of the MSM and ordinary people to its simple tale of global sin  through CO2 emissions and global redemption through carbon offsets, it is amazing how quickly intelligent people do not discuss it anymore.

If you are still skeptical as to whether sanity has prevailed, then read this: and this: The bedwetters are declaring it a disatrous year for global warming “science”.

Remember: whether the earth is warming or cooling is a matter of science; what we might need to do about that is a matter of policy, if we can affect the outcome at all. There is plentiful evidence that we are not causing, and cannot cause, much of an impact through CO2 emissions. There is absolute proof that we can cause environmental catastrophes without blinking an eye: deforestation, overfishing, overgrazing, and so forth. So while truth has prevailed against lies, hubris and folly, on this major issue, the latter three have plenty more force in them yet, and always will.

Study shows: greens are pious hypocrites.

The more you assign yourself moral superiority because you shop “green”, the more inclined you are to cheat in a number of different ways.
“Co-authors Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, professors at the university’s Rotman School of Business, set up tests for a sample of university students, which asked them to purchase a basket of goods at either a hypothetical organic shop or a typical grocery store. Those who bought more green items were found in separate tests to be significantly less likely than their conventional counterparts to share money with an anonymous recipient and more likely to cheat on and lie about the results of a simple quiz.”

We have all noticed this about lefties and fundamentalists: their self-attribution of a vast reservoir of moral superiority, so that they can be ruder, nastier, more arrogant, less tolerant, than their sinning conservative or less fundamentalist neighbours.

“Grant us, mother Gaia, the grace to be more ecologically conscious and concerned, and to pardon us our sins against our fellow humans, for thy Name’s sake”.

The tendency to assign oneself moral superiority is universal. The greens are only the latest manifestation.

While fusspot Grit MP Dr.™ Carolyn Bennett yearns to get the government into the regulation of sex toys, entrepreneurs figure out how to go sustainable sexily in the free market.

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, makes an interesting case for the precautionary principle today. That is, if we believed there were a 1% chance that Al Qaeda had nukes, we would act as if they had nukes. Same with global warming. If there were a 1% chance we were causing it, we should act as if it were true. “A low probability, high-impact event.”

Friedman’s argument is as follows:

“We know that our planet is enveloped in a blanket of greenhouse gases that keep the Earth at a comfortable temperature. As we pump more carbon-dioxide and other greenhouse gases into that blanket from cars, buildings, agriculture, forests and industry, more heat gets trapped.

“What we don’t know, because the climate system is so complex, is what other factors might over time compensate for that man-driven warming, or how rapidly temperatures might rise, melt more ice and raise sea levels. It’s all a game of odds. We’ve never been here before. We just know two things: one, the CO2 we put into the atmosphere stays there for many years, so it is “irreversible” in real-time (barring some feat of geo-engineering); and two, that CO2 buildup has the potential to unleash “catastrophic” warming. Read the rest…

Declan McCullagh at CBSNews.com may be the only mainstream journalist covering the only real climate story – fortunately, he is excellent.

Nothing like a little betrayal for that second morning hangover.

In his letter from Copenhagen, Michael M’Gonigle, formerly a lawyer for Greenpeace, argues that the Copenhagen Treaty should fail, essentially because it cannot go far enough:

“The only outcome that matters in the end is on how we can redirect this new energy to where it actually needs to be — from the partial restraints of Copenhagen to full blown eco-conversion. Copenhagen is a story of many contradictions, but the need to “lose” at Copenhagen in order to expand the momentum for this conversion is the biggest of the bunch.”

M’Gonigle argues that the proposed treaty will set minimums (reductions of CO2 emissions)  that will inevitably become maximums, so that the lowest common denominator of all countries becomes the maximum that any one of them is bound by treaty to achieve.

“One last lesson: even minimal targets are meant to be missed. We have seen this with the Kyoto Protocol.”

M’Gonigle continues:

“If you were to pass around a single piece of information at Copenhagen, it should be the two pages of graphs at the beginning of an interesting book written by Gus Speth, this generation’s leading environmental bureaucrat in Washington D.C. The book is The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Speth sets out 16 hockey stick graphs that portray increases in water use, in the damning of rivers, in CO2 concentrations, ozone depletion (hopefully now slowing down), rates of increase in average surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, the rising frequency of great floods, depletion of ocean ecosystems, loss of rainforests, biodiversity decline, increases in fertilizer and paper consumption, and the explosion in the number of motor vehicles.

“And three others: growth in the size of the global economy (GDP), foreign direct investment, and population.

“Together, these graphs — all hockey sticks — provide a single message. We are killing the earth in every way imaginable, getting rich in the process, and providing a model for a growing world population to join in on.”

You can agree or disagree with the observation that “we are killing the earth in every way imaginable”. The points I am making about this letter from Copenhagen are that:

1) no sooner is the CO2 scandal exposed than the topic changes; and

2) not all of these problems are imaginary. Some, in fact, are based on real events, such as ocean fish depletion, deforestation, and riverine pollution. Do you remember cod?

But to the extent that public attention shifts to possibly real problems and away from certainly unreal ones, we might  all, just possibly, benefit.

Last night’s Munk debates saw George Monbiot and the leader of Canada’s Green Party, Elizabeth May, debate Bjorn Lomborg and Nigel Lawson on “Resolved: Climate change is mankind’s defining crisis and demands a commensurate response”. After the event, the crowd gave the vote to the May-Monbiot side by 56%-44%. The debate had caused a five point move towards  Lawson-Lomborg.

The debate never got to the main issue: that man-caused global warming is a complete fraud.

This is what I would have said.

Man-caused global warming is the issue. Does it exist and can we stop it?

Natural variations in climate are not the issue. Antarctica could melt tomorrow and it would be a disaster, but it would not be our fault, or caused by us, if it were the result of natural forces.  Polar bears could drown, hurricanes intensify, and spring might come to central Canada in March instead of April, and it would not prove a  thing.

We have been relentlessly assaulted by stories of melting ice-shelves and stranded polar bears, and we have been told we are responsible. But this would be true only if increases of atmospheric carbon dioxide increased global temperature. Apparently it does not, and the whole cap and trade scam goes out the window in consequence.

 The global warming argument is simple, and rational. It may not be defended by reasonable people acting in a proper scientific way but it is at least a rational argument.

1. Increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere cause global warming. No other cause is relevant: not the position and tilt of the earth, the shape of our orbit, the output of the sun, not clouds, not cosmic rays, not continental drift, not volcanoes, not anything that acts on the earth naturally. We, and we alone, are the cause of global warming.
2. The proportion of the atmosphere made up of carbon dioxide continues to increase . All observers agree to this.
3. We are causing that increase of carbon dioxide, so global warming is our responsibility.
4. Drastic action is needed to reduce our carbon footprints to save the earth from runaway global warming caused by man’s pollutive activities.
5. Those who disagree are in bad faith and should be silenced.

But wait! Global CO2 is increasing, but global temperature has not increased for ten years.

“The fact is we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it’s a travesty that we can’t” – Kevin Trenberth.

This is the central fact that the warmist ideologues at the East Anglia Climate Research Centre and elsewhere sought to explain, deny or avoid. Why did their models fail to explain why, when atmospheric CO2 was increasing, global temperature did not? They, at least, understood the key logical link in their own argument. This failure of the fundamental causal link in their theory is what they attempted to cover up, by a variety of thuggish and deceitful measures.

This is not a story about science, or about nasty scientists. It is about the colossal failure of a prediction based on a flawed premise. CO2 does not drive global temperature.

The fact that CO2 does not appear to control global temperature is the logical fault at the core of the warmist argument. Say it again: CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere, but global temperature is not.

Obviously, the theory is wrong. Atmospheric carbon dioxide does not drive global temperature. Since we are not causing the problem, the warmist case fails.

All the rest is just shouting at the bar. 

_____________________________________________

Lomborg maintained a brilliant debating style. His take is that, of many pressing world problems, global warming is nearly last on the list, and fixing it will take trillions and prevent the solution of other, readily soluble problems. Elizabeth May was so enraged at Lomborg – and so filled with rage generally – that she had to be silenced by the cutting off of her microphone for several minutes. (I have started to notice a bunch of unhappy women of a certain age turn into scolds: May is in a large company of people, disproportionately female, who feel they have the sovereign right to tell people how to live, feel, think and believe).

In case anyone thinks we skeptics tend to exaggerate the extent to which the AGW crowd has gone completely over the top into a frenzy of self righteousness and exaggeration, please go to  http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/, which is produced by Bill St. Arnaud, chief technologist for Canada’s backbone university computing network.

Amidst many interesting and possibly quite useful notions for making energy consumption more efficient – no objections here – we find the two excerpts below and the absence of any mention, however disdaining, of climategate.

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/2009/11/world-on-course-for-catastrophic-6-rise.html“>World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists

World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists – Climate Change, Environment -

The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. …

Note the date, relative to the East Anglia CRU hack. Also of interest, in the article cited in part above, the authors of the alrmist report were a group of scientists called the Global Carbon Project study:

“The Global Carbon Project study, led by Professor Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, which found that there has been a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available.”

uh-huh. Why are we not surprised? and further….

Fossil Fuel Is the New Slavery: Morally and Economically Corrupt

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-chase/fossil-fuel-is-the-new-sl_b_310007.html
Fossil Fuel Is the New Slavery: Morally and Economically Corrupt

A century and a half ago, fossil fuels replaced slaves as the underpriced energy source driving American economic growth. And like slavery, our deep economic dependence makes change difficult, despite the incontrovertible reality that our fossil-fueled system is profoundly wrong. America could not thrive while captured by the slave economy, nor can she thrive while in thrall to a carbon-based economy.

It required almost a hundred years and a devastating civil war to rid the US of slavery. Business interests fought to retain the morally and economically corrupt status quo. Favorable economics prompted blindness and slow response to the moral imperative for ending slavery. Favorable economics today cloud the minds of many legislators and business interests to cling to our system of underpriced fossil fuels. Despite the best efforts of Congressmen Waxman and Markey, the climate bill out of Congress proposed 2020 goals of only 17 percent reductions in CO2 over 2005 levels and passed by the narrowest of margins. Science tells us our 2020 goals need to 25 to 40% reductions over 1990 levels. Senators Boxer and Kerry have proposed 20%, a step in the right direction.

Ownership of another human being and reaping the benefit of their labor is repugnant. While burning fossil fuels is not as intimately observable or viscerally felt, a direct link from our actions to real individual suffering can be traced. [snip]

And there will be more casualties. The best estimates of the slave trade’s death toll are 15 to 20 million people over its 400-year history. Failure to move to a new low-carbon energy source will result in a similar magnitude of unforgivable suffering and death. The World Health Organization says that climate change was responsible for 300,000 deaths this last year, predicting as many as 9 million excess deaths over the next 20 years alone. Almost all of these initial victims will be among Africa and Asia’s poorest who have no voice and no vote with regard to what happens in the US Congress. [snip]

Delaying real change is intolerable. Unlike slavery, the global warming legacy will be forever irreparable and unrecoverable. New predictions indicate a good chance of a nine degree global temperature increase this century. What we eat, where we live, how we live, and indeed who lives will be changed. Forever. Again, we face an undeniable moral imperative.”

_________________________________

So it is nine degrees in this article up from six in the previous one. 

And if I burn the logs I cut in my woodstove, is this the moral equivalent of  slavery. or merely feudalism?

George Monbiot, England’s chief propagandist for anthropogenic global warming (AGW), has recently found reason to call for the resignation of Phil Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit for criminal suppression of evidence.

In a column produced in November 2 this year, he tried to explain why global warming denial was spreading so fast.

“Almost all my fiercest arguments over climate change, both in print and in person, have been with people in their 60s or 70s. Why might this be?” he asked.

He answered his rhetorical industry thus:

“A recent paper by the biologist Janis L Dickinson, published in the journal Ecology and Society, proposes that constant news and discussion about global warming makes it difficult for people to repress thoughts of death, and that they might respond to the terrifying prospect of climate breakdown in ways that strengthen their character armour but diminish our chances of survival(14). …. Dickinson proposes that growing evidence of climate change might boost this tendency, as well as raising antagonism towards scientists and environmentalists. Our message, after all, presents a lethal threat to the central immortality project of Western society: perpetual economic growth, supported by an ideology of entitlement and exceptionalism.

“If Dickinson is correct, is it fanciful to suppose that those who are closer to the end of their lives might react more strongly against reminders of death? I haven’t been able to find any experiments testing this proposition, but it is surely worth investigating. And could it be that the rapid growth of climate change denial over the past two years is actually a response to the hardening of scientific evidence? If so, how the hell do we confront it?”

Here are simpler reasons for opposing AGW, even before the recent news of fraud and bad evidence.

1. We can smell a commie rat.

The notion thatthe advanced industrial powers should send money to the Third World in perpetuity, and lower our standards of living, while obeying the dictates of interfering moral busybodies, strikes us as just another commie plot. We have lived through the twentieth century and we went to university with communists. We recognize them for what they are.

2. We can read a book or two on geology and glaciology

Geology trumps climatology. Rock beats air. For the last 400,00 years, we have been in an ice age, of which this latest interglacial has been one of six interruptions. The likelihood that processes which have continued for hundreds of thousands and even millions  of years to trump human activity strike us as a reasonable bet. In the last billion years, there has been ice at the polar caps for only 20% of that time. Think about global warming in that context.

3. We can recognize fanatics and enthusiasts when we see them

The most disturbing aspect of most of the global warming proponents is their enthusiasm: a word which connotes being taken up with godliness and God – the Greek word theos is the core of the word. They, and not we skeptcs, seem to be impervious to argument, quick to find moral fault in those who are insufficiently persuaded, and invested with vast moral superiority. If I found a skeptical global warmist I could talk to him reasonably. But I search for them and find them not. Maybe some of Monbiot’s psychologizing might better be directed to the understanding of warmist enthusiasm.

With the revelations of scientific fraud in the AGW debate, I await the emergence of our next Senator McCarthy. Who was a party to this conspiracy? Who is covering up for them? How many warmists have been inflitrated into government? What is their relationship to Maurice Strong? Who authored the Copenhagen Treaty and why are they still in government?

Why is the Gaiain religion Leftist?

Let’s start with Leftism. I posit that there is such a thing as Leftism, which is a permanent feature of the human species. It basically says a large No to reality. Reality is wrong and needs to be fixed. Here is a set of its characteristics:

• The world is wrong at some fudamental level.
• The world is rationally knowable.
• Our party has that knowledge.
• That knowledge is perfect.
• Armed with perfect knowledge, we can remake the world.
• Since our knowledge is true and perfect, those who oppose us must in principle be ignorant, or in bad faith.
• The only thng standing in the way of remaking the world into the place it ought to be is the ignorance and bad faith of those who do not know.
• We are entitled to seize power and remake the world in the name of this knowledge.

Compare this to the Gaian religion/ideology:

• man is poisoning the planet with carbn dioxide, and if nothing is done, we will destroy ourselves with the by-products of fossil fuel consumption.
• Our science is unassailable.
• We can re-engineer the world production systems through treaties requiring new production methods to reduce carbon footprints, as well as wealth transfers  engendered by those transfers.
• Those who oppose us are ignorant or deniers.
• The only thi
• We are entitled to seize power and remake the world in the name of this knowledge: viz. the Copenhagen Treaty.

Quod erat demonstrandum.