Tuesday
Jul302013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Polite discourse shocker
Jul 30, 2013 Climate: Sceptics The Guardian has thrown all my preconceptions into disarray by printing an article about sceptics that is not only thoughtful, but is polite too!
Sceptics such as Andrew Montford and Anthony Watts agree with the mainstream view that the greenhouse effect brings about atmospheric warming as a result of carbon emissions, but dispute levels of climate sensitivity. However, others offer far more fundamental challenges to climate science, such as fringe sceptic group Principia Scientific whoreject this orthodox view of atmospheric physics.
Reader Comments (128)
This is what Adam Corner, Research Associate (i.e. shoe-shiner) in the Cardiff department of social psychology says about himself:
"I am a Research Associate in the Understanding Risk research group at Cardiff University. My research looks at how people evaluate arguments and evidence, the communication of climate change, and the public understanding of emerging areas of science such as nanotechnologies and geoengineering.
I am very interested in the application of psychological and social scientific research to practical questions such as the effective communication of climate change, and the psychological barriers to engaging in pro-environmental behaviours."
Another Lewandowsky?
Is it me, or has the "Political Science" wing of the Guardian gone to war with the "Environmental Science" caucus? Please note, in both parties I use the word "science" in its broadest possible sense.
actually Geoff that is incorrect..
So for the record I did NOT out Adam at Bishop Hill. Foxgoose did.
Foxgoose outed Adam at Copenhagen carrying a Take Action Now banner, the picture was from a write up by Dr Adam Corner - Green Party parliamentary candidate in a Green Party magazine
people were welcoming to Adam if I remember until Foxgoose posted that picture, AND it was found that Adam spoke at an event (Peter LIlley on the panel) and Lawson & Peiser in the audience, where Adam started speaking with "I'm a researcher, NOT a campaigner...."
and of course there was Adam's 'deniers' tweet whilst at Copenhagen, and the fact that he is policy advisor (COIN) to the man that gave us Deniers - Halls of Shame (George Marshall)
and he is a director of PIRC - the organiastion that gave Franny Armstrong the idea for 10:10, she was also a director of the PIRC, PIRC co-director, Christian Hunt (ex green peace and editor of the Carbon Brief) all of that is publically available information, about Adam (with his speaking roles and media activity) is a public figure.
welcoming voices turned against him after that.
so I did NOT out Adam. (and I could have done front page of WUWT)
Sorry Barry for crediting you instead of Foxgoose. It was a lovely photo, and I was hoping you’d put up the link here.
Capell
Corner gave Lewandowsky his big break by publicising his first daft paper at the Guardian. He then allowed comments at his government funded talkingclimate blog, which put Barry, Foxgoose and me on the trail that led to Lew and Cook being revealed as liars. He’s been off the environment pages and busy at Business Green lately. Expect him to turn up as a Green Management Consultant when the government funding for BRASS COIN PIRC and other troughs dries up.
No thank to Andy (Jul 31, 2013 at 9:02 AM) for bringing comments here down to the same level as those at the Graun.
Bishop and Antony you are being spung.They ve created a happy middle ground story that favours them."despite Climate senitivty CO2 is still a Green House Gas".
In a TV studio pump some CO2 from a fire extinguser into a test tube in a vice. Heat it up with a blow torch then point an Infra Red Camera at it .Then watch it glow after about 10 takes.
What happens in the real world of the 3rd planet is particular solar system.Trapped inside a test tube with glass walls is one thing, but what actual temparature pressure concentration does CO2 actually retain heat.When the number crunching take over.
But treat Climate Change as a media story its only delieverved a few floods on a few flood plains and not the spectacular end of the world light show we were all promised.
GeoffChambers
Well he and his ilk are giving the study of psychology a bad name (thus joining climate science in the scramble to the science dustbin). Mind, I once attended a three day IET seminar on ergonomics and boy was the use of statistics laughable.
@jamspid:
Let's destroy the positive feedback claim first so as to allow the believers to come down to Earth gently.
To expose them to reality, aka scientific cold turkey, would be cruel, but satisfying when it comes......
Maybe the first shoots of reason have returned to this once highly moral newspaper?
Jul 30, 2013 at 11:14 PM | Unregistered CommenterStacey
---------------------------------------------------------------------
I hope so, but, as johanna suggests, it might just be click fodder. One swallow doesn't make a summer. They still have the greenpeace camel in the tent and the climate refugee from the blog that cannot be named.
no spin.. Warren is playing it straight.. look at the grief he is being given by the regulars in the Guardain comments section
This is an encouraging piece, although it is also of small significance. When Damian Carrington, John Vidal and Leo Hickman start treating those who reject CAGW with respect, we will know there is really a shift taking place.
Bish readers might be interested to know that a couple of months ago, Myles Allen and I worked on an article together for the Grauniad's main print comment page. It would also have run on the web. It accepted that while Myles and I have our differences, we also share some common ground, especially over policy. We criticised wasteful subsidies for wind power and futile, unilateral emissions targets.
At lunchtime on the eve of publication, I had a couple of conversations with the subeditor. All very civil. It seemed we were all set for the main guest slot next day. Then at about 4.30 in the afternoon Myles received a phone call from the comment editor. She said the paper would only run the article if my name were removed. Myles argued strongly against this, saying the fact it was a joint production between a sceptic journalist and a 'mainstream' scientist was the whole point, and would attract more attention. I pitched in, and had a rather tense email exchange with Alan Rusbridger.
Anyhow, the paper was unmoved. The piece was not published. Apparently the comment editor had been 'distracted' when she agreed to publish it as a joint effort, and was uninterested in the views of a sceptic hack from a rival publication. She would have been prepared to publish it under Myles's name alone.
I used to work for the Guardian in the 1980s and have always considered Rusbridger to be a friend. Whatever this incident may say about the paper's commitment to open debate, it was also quite hurtful at a personal level. I didn't make it public at the time, but in light of this current Bish post, the Grauniad article and the comments on it, it seems worth mentioning. No biggie, but maybe worth knowing about.
I signed off my correspondence with Alan by saying there were no hard feelings on my part. That remains my position. More in sorrow than in anger, and all that.
Barry
Warren is playing it as straight as someone can while doubling as a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham on the Making Science Public programme. “He researches climate science scepticism and evidence and expertise in policy.” He’s no doubt realise that Lewandowsky is Cooked as an expert on scepticism, but still manages to link to a defamatory paper which has been removed from the journal’s website - a paper which was peer-reviewed four times by different combinations of the authors’ mates and citees, most prominent among them being the world expert on female bottoms and anti-semitism in Malaysia. (There is no anti-semitism in Malaysia).
No doubt Warren is hoping to replace these charlatans as the resident expert on our psychology. Quoting a Montford tweet and admitting that we may not all be mad or corrupt while linking to Oreskes and Lewandowsky does not count as the beginning of a fruitful dialogue, in my book.
David - Why not ask Myles Allen if he would be prepared to publish the joint article at WUWT.. (or here)
It would spread considerable goodwill. whilst sceptics might disagree with Myles, he does generally play things straight. It would be bold for Myles to do that, But, I think he would be applauded by everybody.. (except the extremists)
The Guardain is the problem, preventing civilised debate.
Perhaps there should be a Roll of Honour based on the date when one was first banned from commenting on the Guardian for fear that one would pollute the minds of the faithful?
In my case it was 3 years ago.
The obverse would be a roll of dishonour based on the survival of commentators.........:o)
David Rose
Thanks for that little insight ito the working of the Guardian. Rusbridger’s gushing praise for Stephen Emmott’s Royal Court show revealed the level of his knowledge of, and interest in, science. The Comment Editor is presumably equally ignorant. We’re in the interesting position that the ten or eleven full timers (Rusbridger isn’t sure how many Greens he has on the books) at Guardian Environment may be less extreme than their bosses, or the theatre reviewer or the weirdoes at Business Green.
So when Vidal copies and pastes verbatim comments by Bolivian peasants from an old Oxfam handout, or writes eyewitness accounts of the weather in Tanzania from the window of his flight to Pretoria; when Monbiot praises Gleick for lying and takes the word of Pachauri’s accountant for gospel; when Hickman breaks the news that Ben Pile has been paid to write a report on wind farms; perhaps they don’t really mean it. Perhaps they’re just doing it to humour Rusbridger.
By Jove I think they've got it!
Maybe they're worried that come the glorious revolution, when the crowds with the pitchforks are on the streets looking for those who screwed the economy in the name of Gaia, they'll need some friends with influence who can put in a good word for them.
I had to double check to make sure it's not April 1. How very refreshing.
Many climate sceptics worry climate science cannot be dubbed scientific as it is not falsifiable...the complexity of interactions and feedback loops, as well as the levels of uncertainty in climate models, are too high to be a useful basis for public policy.
That may be what others think, but it's not the non-falsifiability that troubles me. My issue around the falsifiability of the psyence is that all the predictions are made so far into the future that none can be falsified observationally within a useful timeframe. The cynic in me thinks this is not a mistake.
- "Skeptic-wash AMBUSH" I rationalise based on the Guardian's devious past record.
A few times recently I spoke to some naive young people "you know the Guardian presents a completely distorted picture, publishing straight off activist NGO press releases and heavily censoring the comments"
- they didn't want to believe me. But now the greens can point to this ONE article and say "see the Guardian covers all sides" (there is a word for that type of action ?)
- The "Guardian is bankrupt" argument doesn't wash ..media is niche GLOBAL these days and Guardian's chosen market is middle-class Green/Left (especially US) so it tells them what they want to hear.
Jul 31, 2013 at 10:17 AM | Registered Commenter geoffchambers
Geoff, just a reality check ... in your description Lew's funny fan and foister of feeble fantasies masquerading as "scholarship", you wrote:
I hope I'm correct in assuming that your (parenthetical) was a summation of the fan's views, not yours! Because, just for the record, while there are no Jews in Malaysia, anti-semitism is very much alive and well. See, for example:
Robert Fulford: Anti-Semitism without Jews in Malaysia
As for Corner's "abuse" whine ... well, he's certainly not the first prima donna with such a thin skin who has used such cooked-up nonsense as an escape clause, is he?! And I doubt that he'll be the last.
These guys should spend some time at Judith Curry's blog if they want to see what "abuse" really looks like. She gets it from both "sides". But I've never heard her utter even a peep about it, let alone a full-blown whine such as those we've seen from the likes of Corner (and Betts!)
But all in all (notwithstanding David Rose's disclosure of the Graun's appalling behaviour), the view from here, so to speak, is that it's been a pretty good couple of weeks. For the Society of Environmental Journalists, not so much! <shameless plug alert>
Society of Environmental Journalists … lockstep in an appalling beat of bias?
Now it's Tamsin's turn.
Climate scientists must not advocate particular policies
What is interesting is that while there is a softening of position by individuals, we are still being besieged by increasingly hysterical nonsense. Today, in scanning through the news feeds, I was told that my city had the warmest July on record (it is winter here); that deaths from heatwaves in Australia were going to rise significantly by 2050; and that several US cities faced inundation thanks to sea level rises. All model driven supposition, of course.
So, has there been a calving off a polar glacier? Have some activists and their associates begun to drift into the ocean of uncertainty? And has this made those who remained onshore more desperate?
Interesting times.
@AlecM
"and this Bowers person appears to be at the head of it"
Bowers is hilarious: when Climategate 2 occurred, I broke the news to the Graun regulars in a comments thread, and Bowers immediately rushed over to Tall Bloke's Talkshop and spend the rest of the day threatening him with the law (Tall Bloke responded with the derision he deserved).
Once the Guardian starts publishing rational articles on global warming, the end must be nigh. In passing, I'd forgotten the level of hate in some of the warmista comments there.
Pointman
I am sure you do not wish to get into arguments about the GHE violating the laws of thermodynamics but this is true The light bulb experiment of Spencer and Watts did not show what they claimed.
@Pointman
V. difficult for the Guardian to climb down without admitting the sceptics were right all along, after demonising all sceptics as rabid right-of-Ghengis-Khan frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Science creationists in the pay of Big Oil.
Hilary
Thanks for the correction. Your article from 2006 details Malaysia’s less than friendly relations with Israel, which may be the reason that Dr Swami the female bottom expert did a survey of anti-semitism among ethnic Malays which found that expressions of antisemitism were probably a coded form aof anti-Chinese sentiment. The on-topic part of this is that Lewandowsky used this study as evidence that we climate sceptics are right wing conspiracist ideationists. A study of homophobia among men who have sex with men in South Africa was also used for the same purpose. Pearce is quoting approvingly this stuff. He shouldn’t.
Two may be a blip, but three looks more like a trend. There's another really rather good article by Tamsin Edwards -- also under the "Political Science" banner -- taking climate scientists to task for their blatant advocacy.
I think ideological battle lines have been drawn at the Grauniad. I'd dearly like to know who commissioned these pieces.
Tom DeSabla: Nice to see you over here. One of the things I've valued about your contributions is that you always make clear where you're coming from in terms of political philosophy, leaving room for those from other places. Liberal in the old fashioned sense. I felt certain the Zamboni was about to be deployed on CA yesterday as I wrote my second reply to you. It was - a few seconds before I posted! I was glad Steve allowed that short response to stand.
David Rose and Geoff Chambers: Interesting idea that Carrington and co may be under pressure from above as well as below to keep the extreme stuff going. "You can’t do this job properly without 24/7 hate" as I was amazed to get agreement with on Tamino's in April, after Andy Revkin had been judged to have been too nice about Steve McIntyre. Thanks for the detailed account David and for the nevertheless gracious spirit in which it was given. Who knows, you may yet be given an opportunity to make Rusbridger think again. There's a change in the tides of opinion but the personal touch is also crucial.
Braqueish: I was also moved by your earlier contribution about how real damage to the poor is neglected by their self-appointed champions. And from you I learn that Tamsin is in The Guardian as well. I thought the earlier quote was just from her blog or something. Yep, the messy business of change, at so many levels, is afoot. There's no trap, just a need for more boldness and courtesy than many of us are used to, all at the same time.
I wouldn't read much into the Guardian publishing a few skeptic-friendly pieces. They know the value of controversy and court it. For the same reason they regularly ask one of Dawkins fleas to attack him and publish other click bait.
On the vitriolic abuse; I don't complain about it because it probably works against the warmistas, I quite enjoy it, and it's good to have a record of which side is foaming at the mouth for anyone who might one day look back at the climate wars. The best response is to stay polite and, if you like, gently wind up their fury.
I just had three of my six pithy, apposite posts on CIF deleted. So, no real change to the moderation.
The warmists are on the run .
They are offering an alliance with the luke-warmists who visit WUWT and Bishop Hill blogs. This is an alliance against their really dangerous enemy, the non-warmists at Principia Scientific International.
Roger Clague:
Hahaha. Some people have gone to extraordinary lengths to promulgate this but it just isn't going to fly my friend. A very expensive straw man that is proving useless in shifting the debate even a millimetre.
That was me 'holding the wild frontier pseudo-scientists of climate change to account' just a little. Thanks Adam.
Look at the scores of commenters approval in both camps. The AGW brigade are having a pasting and the lukewarmer standpoint stacking up the votes. What a turnaround ,does the Guardian have a guest editor over summer ???
AlecM JBowers is a Glasgow Rangers supporter. If he has a chemistry Phd, so has Diddy McCoist the manager. You are dealing with liars ad low life and I don't do polite discourse with liars. I actually enjoy rough stuff. It gives me an advantage. #sarcasm
I want to repeat my non polite opinion. Anyone who discusses climate sensitivity is playing for the other side. That is the exact reason why the other side is praising them.
Particularly the GWPF, which I have always regarded as a 5th column organisation.
I predicted a few months ago that AGW was dying. The reason is that its sponsors, the oil industry has shifted from carbon trading (which has basically failed) to new sources of fossil fuels, of which I am sure, fracking is only one. No doubt there will be many more in the future.
I've lost the link but just before the Copenhagen 2009 summit, the Graun published an article predicting that the pause was over and that global warming was going to worse in the next 5 years than anything we had seen (or could imagine). This produced a long list of comments from the true believers about deniers.
Interestingly, the same suspects are still commenting the same message at the Graun. Will they never learn?
RC Saumarez
Their environmental section for the year leading up to the Copenhagen 2009 summit was sponsored by Shell OIl. That will tell you who is behind this.
Delingpole.
Climategate: George Monbiot, the Guardian and Big Oil
But who is it that sponsors the Guardian?s Environment pages and eco conferences? Why, only that famous non-fossil-fuel company Shell. (Though I notice their logo no longer appears on top of the Guardian?s eco pages: has the Guardian decided the relationship was just too embarrassing to be, er, sustainable?)
And which company has one of the largest carbon trading desks in London, cashing in on industry currently worth around $120 billion ? an industry which could not possibly exist without pan-global governmental CO2 emissions laws ? BP (which stands for British Petroleum)
And how much has Indian steel king Lakshmi Mittal made from carbon credits thanks to Europe?s Emissions Trading Scheme? £1 billion.
And which companies were the CRU scientists revealed cosying up to as early as 2000 in the Climategate emails? There?s a clue in this line here: ?Had a very good meeting with Shell yesterday.?
And how much was Phil Jones, director of the discredited CRU, found to have collected in grants since 1990? £13.7 million ($22.7 million)
And why does this Executive Vice-Chairman of Rothschild?s bank sound so enthusiastic in this (frankly terrifying) letter about the prospects of the ?new world order? (his phrase not mine) which result from globally regulated carbon trading?
Or why not try this blog, in which a German Green party MP is revealed being given hefty donations by a solar power company?
Or how about this tiny $70 million donation to the climate change industry from the Rockefeller Foundation?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100019523/climategate-george-monbiot-is-in-the-pay-of-big-oil/
Lest we forget.
Cultural Marxism, the ideology of the hard left - those precepts dictate all, if not most of the Grauniad's bylines and editorial.
The guardian, is the print version of bbc news and the relationship is symbiotic, the left dominate the media of Britain and the focus is on the EU and under the UN Agenda 21 design.
Then, take care to remember who reads the guff that this baleful organ prints, they live in a foetid and incubative atmosphere lending to leftist groupthink predomination. In the halls of academia - the liberal left wing aka the intelligentsia, the luvvies and political elite of Britain inclusive of LibLabCon. Oh yes, you can easily buy the rag all over the EU - not that anybody purchases it. The Guardian pretends, claims the gravitas of an international newspaper but in fact - it is an internationalist [Socialist] organ, about as widely read as its sister [in spirit] paper 'the Socialist worker'.
CAGW myths, for the graun fit the agenda very nicely.
A 'back page' passing nod, to two noted anti CAGW realists - no matter how sincere the writer may be is actually just pure window dressing on the graun's behalf. Indisputably all done - to display to their own readership [but to no one else] a wonderful open mindedness and equitable stance and if you believe that is some sort of 'smoke signal', then you are very much mistaken, don't be gulled by the sirens of the left, the outpouring of the rabid Trotskyites.
The hard left, for them there can be no 'middle' ground - for the Graun, either you're with 'em or, agin 'em.
The Conversation on 25 Jul 13 was Catherine Happer on "Andrew Neil’s phoney war against the ‘climate mafia’". How did that end up in one of my browser tabs? Anyway, I mention it because at the bottom Barry Woods and Paul Matthews are just exemplary, both in content and tone. I was proud to read those comments guys, in a smaller corner of cyberspace than CiF. I was closing down my climate tabs to shift to web development. The appreciation doesn't lessen but the volume of posts might. :)
I think you're in danger of over-egging the pudding there @Athelstan. The Guardianistas are liberal-left mostly public sector professionals. Their journos are often the scions of the upper middle-class who weren't bright enough to make it in the City, but who managed to stumble through a Humanities or Womens' Studies degree. Their world-view is informed by 1980's victimology, the "given" that big business (or business at all) must be wicked, a muddled anxiety about what "we" are doing to the planet, and a general Millenarian feeling that something very bad is about to happen and that something must be done about it.
That's not "hard-left" or anything, really, other than reactionary. You can always tell the hard activists because of their brusque, dismissive, and didactic utterances; plus the degree of self-righteous, narcissistic smugness which makes you want to keep wiping your computer screen. Dana Nuccatelli is, for me, the prime example. The rest just need a bit of a rectitude recharge as a break from their comfortable lifestyles.
The Guardian is a now a centre / right, American style liberal newspaper.. It supported Mandelson, Blair, Clegg and Cable, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars etc .
It opposes welfare reform because all decent people do. The dole scrounger haters are generally low intelligence tabloid readers.
Monbiot is on the far extreme right and I suspect he isn't the only environmentalist there who is. Vidal is posher than Monckton.
Well I think Drcrinum made the best interpretation so far but I want to add to it.
I interpreted the last paragraph (of the guardian article) as suggesting that the science was getting in the way of implementing good policy that is important and in the public interest.
It also seemed that he was trying to drive a wedge into the skeptics group by praising luke warmers over other skeptics. I think this is for sure a change in policy from the Graun but I am not sure it is for the best reasons.
I don't think a wedge is needed. We are very divided on some of this and we need to face it. I think Warren Pearce's final link to this month's Hartwell Paper was inspired, a reminder that we're all Policy Sceptics (including James Lovelock and many Guardian readers) and only a very small percentage of us are complete Greenhouse Sceptics. (How the latter category fits with James Painter's taxonomy I leave to the interested BH reader but I think it's a worthwhile exercise.)
Richard Drake
I am not a Greenhouse Skeptic, I happen to believe that there is no GHE at current levels of CO2, not the same thing. However let me ask you a question, does the GHE continue at any and all atmospheric ppm levels and if not when will it stop? I think the odds of you giving me a sensible, concise answer are pretty slim of course.
Very interesting observations from Rose.
The new Hartwell paper is too. I note Roger Pielke Jr is not listed in the author list. Maybe he's just not on this particular document. Nevertheless, one can see via the table of contents how their premise is shaky. Pity you can't read the whole thing without becoming a member of one of these academia.edu, researchgate.net and similar so-called coercive 'social media' sites
I don't know the answer and that applies to many of the details of the science, as I made pretty clear on Climate Audit nine days ago. Maybe David Coe is going to sort it all out faster than I opined there! And I wasn't seeking to categorise you. Feel free to do that as you see fit. I was objecting to your accusation that Warren Pearce was trying to drive a wedge between sceptics. We are divided. And there's no shame in that, because the science is horrendously complicated. The crucial point is that we are all Policy Sceptics at the very least. Robin Guenier has made some vital points about this. And I think Warren's contribution was little short of magnificent, given the context.
Alec M poitive feedback that old alarmist chestnut.
I was in Frinton on Sea in Essex this morning and a saw the Wind Turbine array out in the Estury.Anyway I followed the sat nav back to Colcester to the A12 and the M25.Outside Clacton was a row of 5 onshore 3 bladed turbines Cant miss themthey re huge They remind me of Jeff Wayne war of worlds album cover with the Martians inside the menacing giant tripod things.So 4 of the turbines were moving but the one in the miiddle one of its blades was bent and bowed out of shape. Obviously been lock down out of use.
Im wondering those turbines must be getting so much buffeted by turbulance and wind shears only a matter of time before their bolts shear off its rotor and a blades flies off and lands in a populated area.
Shub: I noted the same. Be interesting to get Roger's take when he returns to his blog.
The thing is, AGW is not just a gentlemanly academic discussion, would that it were. People are angry and express that anger when they post because AGW has been used to tax people and to industrialise the countryside.
The Tax is a regressive tax taking money from households and passing the most part to the rich landowners whilst as ever our shameful politicians gorge at the trough.
Today Centrica announced their figures to the city and were careful to point out that every household paid an average green engendered levy of £184 last year.
That makes me very angry.