Dr Seuss' Copenhagen

Snow or no snow...

With every smart-alec comic and commentator making play that much of the UK and US eastern seaboard have been covered in snow since Copenhagen, there's a bit of a panic on in Vancouver before the Winter Olympics - you guessed it - no snow. Any jokes about that? Mention on the front page of the Express? Not even a little one? No?

I want to make all these characters write out 1000 times "I must not confuse weather with climate". That'd learn 'em.

UPDATE: Satellite readings show that last month was the warmest January on record (ie since records began in 1979).

So what about the Himalayan glaciers?

You've probably seen in the press that an error has been found buried in an IPCC text. It said the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 and it turns out that the statement has no scientific backing. The denial industry has gone into paroxysms of rage/joy, but the claim wasn't even featured in the document summary. The fact is that no-one knows for sure what is the state of these glaciers because they simply haven't been studied enough despite the fact that 2bn people rely on them for drinking water. Have a look at this short video and you'll see that we'd need to take a closer look because the limited information we have doesn't look good.

Oh for a 4X4!

Happy New Year Everyone! Hope you all had a fantastic break.

Mine was great, but fell down on the green front. Santa went a bit overboard for the older boy. And me. Less so for the old girl - my tightness saves on a lot of resources. Actually she got a merino wool walking top - very sustainable indeed.

Foodwise, we couldn't get our usual organic turkey and the free range we did get came in at a whopping 2kg more than we expected, so the meat once a day pledge went out the window in favour of not wasting something that died for us.

Then there was our New Year break, in Belford, Northumberland. Our house was lovely, but solid stone walls and poor insulation (our roof snow went first everyday), and some idiot left a window open while the it was empty for 5 days in sub-zero temperatures... it took about 24hours of full on heating to get the place to a temperature which meant we could change the little one without putting the prospect of grandkids at serious risk.

It snowed and it snowed and it snowed. In the old, sprogless days, this would have been a great opportunity for tramps across the snowy landscapes, but with little ones it usually meant hours of Thomas the Tank Engine. It also meant we had to dig the car out and skite across ice to the A1 to get home. For only the second time in my life, I wished I had a 4X4 - the local farmers were having no problems. Still, we ate well, the NY fireworks were just outside our window, I got to catch up on some reading and the scenery was fantastic.

By the way, lots of people will be thinking, how come all this snow with global warming? North-easterly winds is the answer - we're just getting someone else's weather for a while. Siberia's to be precise.

It is holding up the start of my permaculture experiment - part of my 10:10 commitment - the agricultural mulch rolls have been bought, but the spade is staying put for the time being.

I hope 2010 brings you harmony, health and happiness!

The Age of Stupid

I finally watched Franny Armstrong's Age of Stupid last night on BBC4. The film is effectively a series of modern day mini-documentaries of people with different attitudes to climate change around the world, but framed as archive pieces being assembled by Pete Postelthwaite in an armoured repository in post-apocalyptic 2055. There are also some animated sequences, but these were undoubted the weakest part of the film as they tended to slip into a standard activist polemic-by-numbers, whereas the real life elements really got across the complexities, self delusions and frustrations in the response to climate change.

There was the small scale wind farm developer, losing a planning application in the face of NIMBYs. The head NIMBY, a middle aged woman who had apparently managed to stop a farm "on her Scottish estate" said to the camera "of course I'm worried about climate change, of course we must expand renewable energy", leaving the "but not in my back yard" unspoken.

There was the Indian entrepreneur who was on a mission to bring air travel to the poor through a low cost airline, the Iraqi kids scratching a living in Jordan whose father had been killed by the Americans, the American who saved hundreds in the aftermath of Katrina but who used to work in the oil industry, the elderly French alpine guide who was campaigning against a second Mont Blanc tunnel.

But the story that really struck home for me was the Nigerian woman trying to get into medical school while living in the shadow of a Shell Oil refinery. A standard line from the sceptic/denial camp is that acting to stop climate change will divert funds away from poverty reduction and lock the poor into a doom loop. What utter nonsense. Shell flares enough gas in Nigeria to be equivalent to about 10% of the UK's carbon emissions. They could sell it cheaply to Nigerians for cooking, vehicles etc, but no they just burn it off. Nigeria, with all its natural wealth, is stuck in a rut of corruption, poverty and pollution. So the $6m question is, what has the high carbon economy ever done for the poor?

As I said before, the animations didn't add much and the Postlethwaite bits could be a bit mawkish, but the heart of this film is a powerful story of how we can be so stupid - and I use that word in as nice a way as I can as few people featured were being particularly greedy. It is both a warning and an insight into the trajectory we are locked into by the dint of what is between our ears.

You can't kill a zombie

Ben Goldacre writes the regular Bad Science column in the Guardian. Normally he sticks to medical issues, particularly the MMR scare, but he turned his scathing eye to climate change denial this week and gave us a new phrase - "zombie arguments". These are the arguments that keep coming back no matter how many times you blow it to smithereens - global cooling in the 70s, mediaeval warm period, no warming since 1998 and all the usual suspects. You can try using the well rehearsed responses listed at Grist, New Scientist or try the heavy artillery of scientific argument at Real Climate, but you won't kill zombies with mere facts - they keep coming back.

BTW, I had lunch on Saturday with a leading climatologist. He's very relieved that none of his e-mails to Phil Jones at CRU have been through the denialists' distortion mill and says that Phil Jones is a true gent and completely above reproach. The New Scientist debunking of the e-mail allegations is worth a read - there really is nothing in it.

When Physics & Politics Collide

If he wins the next UK General Election, Conservative leader David Cameron is going to have a problem. His first act to decontaminate the Tory brand was to fly to a melting glacier and hug a husky. Vote blue, go green was the slogan. But a recent survey found that the top ten Tory or Tory-leaning bloggers are all proudly in the climate change denial camp. If Dave is going to match his talk with action if and when he wins, will he be able to bring his party with him?

Going further to the right, the small party UKIP are renowned deniers and at the extreme end of the scale, the racist BNP are also deniers. In the US and Australia the situation is similar - as you move from centre to the right, climate change denial goes from rare to the gospel. And what do these people tell you? That climate change is a socialist hoax to enslave the individual in a communist new world order. Those of us who "spread alarm" about climate change are 'watermelons' - green on the outside and red in the middle. This is clearly preposterous - are (almost) all the climatologists and world leaders involved in some humungous socialist conspiracy? In any case communism has been just as polluting as capitalism.

Going leftwards, there is a tendency for Marxists to deny - the Great Global Warming Scandal declared that Margaret Thatcher had created the whole thing to smash the mining unions (crikey...). But you have to go much further from the centre before you hit such crazy conspiracy theories.

I find all of this bizarre. Climate change is about physics, not politics. You have to look at the evidence and decide whether or not you accept it. Your political orientation shouldn't come into it. Politics is about people, not physics.

So why does it happen? Previous environmental crises have been regional in source or impact - acid rain from the UK would damage European forests - or involved certain chemicals (eg DDT, CFCs) which could easily be substituted or phased out. What climate change does for the first time is fundamentally challenge the status quo. Our economy is built on cheap fossil energy and that is rebounding on us in a big way. The solutions are political and difficult and will be very hard for a free marketeer with their abundance mentality to accept.

It is much easier to deny the science than accept the reality. But in my book the laws of physics will always defeat political argument every time.

Lord Lawson "fiddles climate data"

Nigel Lawson is another non-climatologist who believes he is qualified to review the evidence on climate change. He has recently been in the press harrumphing over the CRU e-mail hack revelations.

Shame he has been found out fiddling the 21st century climate data on the logo of his new objective climate change think tank to show a cooling trend.

This is the latest in a long line of faked data from the sceptic/denier camp - eg Pat Michaels misrepresenting James Hansen's predictions to Congress and Christopher Monckton's fictional IPCC prediction. [update - we should add Booker, Plimmer, and Durkin to this list]

Should we have an independent review? Or just laugh?

Monckton/Gore Rap It Out

Climatologists are human shock!

You've probably heard the furore over the leaked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. If you are a climate denier/sceptic then this is the proof you've been waiting for that the whole thing is a socialist scam to enslave the world. Even George Monbiot says that heads should roll. Rejoice!

Except...

When you look at it, it's all a big fuss over nothing. Let's look at the "smoking guns":

1. One researcher says he's used a "trick" to deal with the "decline". This has already been misinterpreted by The Telegraph that the "decline" refers to recent years' temperature data when it doesn't. It refers to a way round a problem marrying historic tree ring data and actual temperature data. The whole "trick" was so devious the researcher published what he did and how he did it at the time in the prestigious scientific journal Nature and it was accepted as scientifically sound by their (very strict) peer review panel.

2. The censorship of research. This refers to the controversy in 2004 over the editorial policy in the journal Climate Research and again the row was very public at the time. Several editors resigned in protest at the acceptance of a number of (sceptical) papers which they felt did not meet proper academic standards. Academic politics can get quite bitter.

3. Freedom of Information requests. Again this has all been in the open, although I believe that in general data should be shared, even with people who will misinterpret it, deliberately or otherwise.

4. One researcher is frustrated he can't explain why 2008 was relatively cool. If you've worked in academic circles, there are always problems like this to solve.

What else do the e-mails tell us? That climatologists can be truculent, defensive and sometimes rude about others in private. Well, just like the rest of us then...

The whole fuss has got the denial brigade back in the media just before Copenhagen. You'd think someone had planned the whole thing.

Also, Nigel Lawson has launched a new "cross-party policy forum" on global warming which is going to carry out an objective review of the evidence. Except the board of trustees and scientific advisors are packed with the usual suspects from the denial circuit (Lindzen, Stott, Plimer - the best that money can buy). The banner of the website shows temperature data from 2001-08, nailing their colours firmly to the mast. Looks like the Heartland Institute on Thames, then.

Ho hum.

FoE Climate Change viral

Blind faith or sound science?

The case of Tim Nicholson, who successfully sued his employer Grainger plc for unfair dismissal on the grounds that he believed too deeply in environmentalism akin to a religious belief, has generated more in column inches than it arguably deserves. But, never one to eschew a bandwagon, here's my take on faith vs science on climate change.

To start with, most if not all of the commentary is oversimplistic in order to make a good headline. To get a sensible understanding of this situation, we've got to split the 'green position' into three.

First of all, take the science of, say, climate change. I once heard a Met Office climatologist tell an audience "I often get asked at parties whether I believe in climate change. I respond that you might as well ask me whether I believe in mountains. It [climate change] is simply a physical fact." Estimating the likely impacts of man-made climate change is where the real scientific debate takes place and that is a matter of observation, modelling, debate, peer-review and all the other objective processes of scientific endeavour. Faith does not, and should not, get a look in.

Secondly, there is the deeper value-driven belief system when it comes to the environment. Everyone (OK, almost everyone) is an environmentalist. Who isn't amazed by the splendours of nature - the Grand Canyon, wildebeest migrating across the Serengeti or an eagle in flight? This taps into a deeper part of our soul - our attachment to our natural habitat. This is subjective and will manifest itself in different ways for different people. This is the closest environmentalism comes to faith.

Thirdly, there is political outlook. There is no doubt that the physical phenomenon of climate change is convenient for those with an anti-capitalist, anarchist mindset - just look at any major protest. Despite claims to the contrary, you rarely see many men in Pringle sweaters or women with blue rinses at a Climate Camp. That's not to knock those protesters, but they would have to admit themselves they tend to come from a particular mindset. People's politics change, so this can't be faith either.

Many of the commentators on the Nicholson case, deliberately or otherwise, have mixed up these issues. We get told that if we don't get in step with "the climate change orthodoxy" we get howled down (who by? go to any online debate on climate change and see who is doing the howling). Let's get it straight. Man-made climate change is a scientific fact. The enthusiasm or tone of argument of those who promote action on climate change does not undermine that fact or make it an article of faith.

I would like now to throw the "faith" issue back at the climate change denial brigade. I went to a very academic and quite religious school in Northern Ireland. On the subject of evolution we got a very schizophrenic education. We'd go to Biology and get the science in an objective and rigourous manner, then to Religious Education, where a man in a dog collar would try and disprove that science using what I now recognise as some very dodgy scientific arguments and some stuff he simply made up. Reading the ramblings of a climate change denier like Christopher Booker of the Telegraph (who also happens to be a creationist) reminds me of my old RE teacher. They start with an assumption they are right (faith), ignore the core evidence (blind faith) and pick out (or make up) a few 'facts' which they say bring down more than a century of climate science (self delusion). Straw men are set up to be knocked down, experts are derided and laymen are quoted as soothsayers. Despite this, they get the book deals and the newspaper columns - just like many other huxtsers in other lines of human endeavour.

So, whether greens are coming from a scientific or a political angle, it cannot be argued that climate change is "eco-fundamentalism". The only fundamentalism in the green debate is from the denial brigade. Fact.

Superfreak! Superfreak!

The chapters of new book Superfreakonomics on climate change (saying we should simply blow aerosols in the atmosphere rather than try to cut carbon) has caused a swift backlash from climatologists - check out this and this.

One thing that bugs me about "the climate change debate" is that everyone thinks they know better than the experts - I don't go to the dentist if I need brain surgery...

Sticky

I'm on a train back up to Newcastle after a couple of day's work in London. Hardly slept last night as it was so sticky.

Sticky? In October?

I was sleeping under a single sheet with the window open. And yes, the heating was off.

Funny how a bit of snow back in February brought the denial brigade out to play. What do they say now?


(actually neither event proves anything - could just be freak weather - you have to look at the trends, but still...)

Franny Armstrong on 10:10

Personal journeys

I was running a sustainability workshop for the executive board of a major client yesterday. Despite there only being 7 (sometimes 8) people in the room, the reactions were honest and varied. Initially one attendee said "this is nothing to do with me" and another "we're all going to hell on a handcart and there's nothing we can do about it" - the two extremes of denial. By the end of the session, both these people (and their colleagues) were fired up to act, but there wasn't a neat progression - the buy-in ebbed and flowed like waves on a rising tide. While one person made a step forward, another would be retracting slightly, but overall the motion was in the right direction.

It struck me on the train on the way home that we're all on a personal journey when it comes to sustainability, climate change and all the rest. There is a tendency for those who 'get it' to berate those who don't. This will achieve nothing, or worse, push people into a more defensive position. We need to help people find the way forward, make them feel comfortable with what they are doing and confident to make the next steps.

So as well as working on our own footprint, it is essential to bring someone with us.

Seen Any Brown Astroturf?

Astroturfing is the cynical creation of artificial grassroots movements to achieve political and/or corporate aims. It is a bigger phenomenon in the US than the UK, but I'm sure we still get plenty of climate change denial astroturfing under the radar.

Take George Monbiot's blog in the Guardian. He goes out of his way to provoke the denialosphere and every online post immediately fills up with denial comments. The commenters obviously aren't your average everyday Grauniad readers and you see that many of them are spotting right-wing dweebs just waiting for Monbiot to makes his move before they shout 'Aha!' and start typing furiously. But spotted in amongst these are a strange brand of faux-naive comments like "I came at this with an open mind, but when I looked at the science I couldn't believe how skronky it was."

Let's be clear - almost no-one who looks at the science with an open mind finds fault with it - because most of it is fact and the rest reasonable interpretation of the evidence collected and analysed and checked over many decades by thousands of people. So what made this anonymous poster think he could see gaps where the great minds of science can't? That word 'skronky' looks like a US spinmeister's creation to me and is at odds with the personal authority he claims.

It appears that the same old tactic of 'don't debate the substance, just spread uncertainty' is alive and well. This was the tactic used by the GW Bush administration and the Global Climate Coalition for many years to avoid the brutal facts their scientific advisors were telling them. Beware of astroturf...

The last wilderness

(originally posted on the Terra Infirma Blog)

On Tuesday night I was invited to a fundraiser to send a young man, Joe Spedding, on an expedition to the Antarctic as part of the 2041 campaign to maintain the continent as the Earth's only untouched wilderness and draw attention to climate change. 2041 is the year when the international agreement to preserve the Antarctic is up for renewal.

The talk was by Robert Swan, the founder of 2041 and the first man to walk to both poles. The tales of derring do, determination and hardship were at times overwhelming, and Swan got rather brutal first hand experience of two global environmental issues. On his South Pole trek in 84/85, the walkers' faces blistered and peeled far more than had been expected. It was only while they were there that the hole in the ozone layer was discovered. On the walk to the North Pole five years later, they found sea where they expected ice - evidence of climate change - which as a scientific phenomena was only just emerging at that time from academic studies into the public arena. Amongst his myriad other claims to fame, Swan now owns the only private building on Antarctica - an educational building powered entirely by renewables. His life is now dedicated to the global environment.

Joe Spedding saw Swan talk about these experiences when he (Joe!) was just 11 years old. 11 years later and he is fulfilling his dream to travel to Antarctica - the aim of the trip is to train him and others as environmental ambassadors and leaders. As one of my formative environmental experiences was an expedition to the Ecuadorian rainforest in 1993, I'm a sucker for this sort of thing and was happy to make a contribution. Pity I can't go too!

Trick question

I'm off on holiday for a couple of weeks (in Yorkshire - no flying etc), so I thought I'd leave you with a puzzler.

Q. Which country is the biggest contributor to climate change?

A. The UK.

Do you know why? Post your explanations in the comments.

Natural History Museum

I'm in London en route to a business trip/holiday in Bruges - travelling by Eurostar through the Tunnel which is exciting my 2 and a bit year old son as he's read about it in an edition of "The Little Red Train". Anyway today we took him to the Natural History Museum to see the dinosaurs and Daddy got 15 minutes in the "our environment today and tomorrow" exhibit.

I was quite disappointed in the cautious, almost apologetic tone of the displays. They had the usual stuff about "where does a trainer come from" and a very small exhibit on renewables, but nothing on the grand scale of the "history of the earth" stuff upstairs - nothing to really make you stop and think. In an era where the scientific consensus on climate change must be stronger than many 'accepted' scientific fields - Darwin's brooding presence may overlook the main hall, but there are plenty out there who can't and won't accept the theory of evolution - can they not be bolder? Or was it the fact the exhibit was sponsored by a major mining company?

Frustratingly the only bit that held my attention was a touch screen explanation of the General Circulation Models used by the IPCC to model the world's climate and the bloody thing wouldn't respond to my repeated jabbing. Oh well.

The fact that did make me stop and think was in a completely different section - the creepy crawlies. Did you know that a field of cows produces hundreds of tonnes of dung every year? And that dung beetles and other tiny workers recycle the whole lot? If they can do this in this small area, why can't we?!