Nuclear power is more unpopular than we’re led to believe
contribution by Leo
New polling sheds some light both on where the public stand in terms of different power options, and on the impact of arguments that make nuclear seem more attractive.
The polls are useful for understanding public attitudes towards nuclear power in two ways: they indicate how people regard nuclear at the moment, and they also help show the impact of arguments for nuclear power.
At a basic level, nuclear power is currently pretty much the least popular form of power generation in the UK.
continue reading… »
Is the Telegraph censoring criticism of climate-change deniers?
About ten days ago, Telegraph employee and blogger Tom Chivers wrote a blog post titled ‘Viscount Monckton is an embarrassment to global warming sceptics everywhere‘.
In the blog post he wrote:
Entertaining news of the week: high-profile global warming sceptic Viscount (Christopher) Monckton has been caught out in an embarrassing example of (if we’re charitable) utter scientific illiteracy, in one of the most magisterial scientific take-downs on record.
He goes on to explain that Monckton giving a lecture at a university in Minnesota where he made a series of “startling claims”.
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Yes, BP does need its ass kicked
My job sometimes sees me address seminars designed to teach businessmen how to handle the media when things go tits up in a big way, and the week before last I was once again on the platform at such an event.
The other scheduled panellist – booked months in advance, I understand – was to have been a representative of BP. Unfortunately, he had to blow out the engagement, on account of another rather more serious blow out elsewhere in the world.
In the session that immediately followed, the audience was treated to a presentation from a veteran PR man on just how badly the oil major has dealt with the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which has now spilled seven times more oil than the Exxon Valdez.
The speaker could have boiled down the message to attendees to the proposition that they should look at how BP chief executive Tony Hayward did things, and then do the opposite.
Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
Put aside the environmental impact of the BP oil spill for a minute – massive as it is – because right-wingers don’t really care for little things like that.
Instead they’re whinging that Obama is slamming their favourite oil company far too much. It hurts their pride you know. Oh and it hurts our pensions! Damn that Obama, does he not care for our goddamn pensions?. Who cares for those people whose livelihoods have been lost thanks to the obscene amounts of oil that is about to hit their shores?
Certainly not these idiots.
Defend the urban fox!
There’s a mini-tabloid storm brewing against urban foxes because, apparently, a fox wandered into someone’s home bit a couple of kids for kicks and then wandered off again.
The papers do not record whether the fox’s friends filmed the incident on their mobile phones, or whether the fox had arrived in London from Poland in a secret compartment in a lorry.
Whatever the ins and outs of the case, and let’s assume it’s all true, this would make it an extremely rare occurrence.
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Why is climate change going down the political agenda?
contribution by Climate Sock
After a pause in hostilities for the election, it looks like the favourite climate story of the year has resurfaced. A new poll is out and being covered with the headline that fewer people now believe in climate change or think that it’s an urgent issue demanding attention.
There’s some truth in the basic argument that people are now less convinced and worried about climate change than they have been in the past.
But when the Guardian runs a story like this, it gets widely noticed and repeated, and there are several reasons why we shouldn’t get too carried away by the news.
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How can we keep climate change an important issue?
contribution by Climate Sock
However we measure it, climate change has become a less prominent issue in the UK lately. With a new government that looks unexpectedly stable, climate campaigners can no longer count on another election coming along soon to shake things up.
Instead, they need to find ways of working with the current media and political set-up.
There are significant risks in not addressing the way climate change is currently talked about and acted on.
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The Miliband commitment to climate change is mostly just rhetoric
The Miliband brothers both claim to be ‘green-leaning’ candidates, and this is part of what helps them to appear modern and progressive.
But the reality, given their actions when leading various government departments, is that their rhetoric masks a lot of inaction.
- That effort is being successfully conducted if emissions are going down. But most people don’t realise that our Co2 emissions are still going up.
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The Greens still have much to worry about
contribution by Climate Sock
Away from Brighton, the Greens’ scores weren’t spectacular; the significance of yesterday may be less the results themselves, and more the opportunity they’ve given the party to build on its current position.
Nationally, the Greens won 286k votes: up about 30k on 2005. But in 2005 they contested 200 seats; this time they were in 334 constituencies, and there was an overall small national swing away from the Greens. Overall, UKIP got 3 times as many votes, and the BNP got twice as many.
Away from Brighton Pavilion, their results in the constituencies they targeted were mixed. In Norwich South they gained 7.5pts, and in Cambridge Tony Juniper gained 4.7pts, but in both they remained in fourth place. In both Lewisham Deptford and Oxford East, they lost ground, falling by 3.3pts and 2.1pts respectively.
So even where the party is making gains it’s still a very long way from being able to win more constituencies. Only in Norwich South are they in touching distance of the winning party – and Labour and the Lib Dems will be fighting tooth and nail over it.
There’s an argument that this election came at a difficult time for an environmentalist party: the focus on the economy squeezed out most coverage of green issues. But other factors may have helped, since the Tories and Labour were so unpopular, and the Lib Dems look to have been less popular than the polls had suggested.
All this suggests that the extra money, airtime and credibility that Caroline Lucas MP will bring is unlikely to be enough alone to help the party make further gains in Westminster. The only answer for the Greens looks to be electoral reform.
But it can’t be any kind of electoral reform – in fact I suspect that the Alternative Vote system (which is the limited reform that both Labour and the Tories may push for) may even be unhelpful for the Greens.
To do well in AV, you need not only to be disliked by relatively few, but you also need a decent number to choose you as their first choice. In Brighton Pavilion this shouldn’t be a problem, but I suspect the party would continue to struggle to find enough people putting them as first choice in other constituencies.
The only system that would allow them to take advantage of their broad but thinly-spread support (about 1% of the electorate under the current system – though it should increase under a changed system) would be a more proportionally representative system.
A system like the ones in Wales and Scotland, which elects both constituency and regional Members, may be the most realistic and helpful answer for the party.
Why Britain needs a different future
contribution by Simon Mair
Last week BBC Newsnight’s Economic Editor Paul Mason ran a piece called “What’s Wrong with Britain?“.
He surmises that :
Something about the economic model we adopted over the last 20 years has just not worked. Financial speculation has been rewarded, industry has declined, wages at the bottom end have not kept pace with growth and the basic test of an economy – does it make poor people richer – has been flunked.
This, I think, is something the majority of the left can agree on. Despite the protestations of the New Labour apologists, the government’s own studies show inequalities are worse now than under Thatcher.
So how does Mr Mason suggest we should rectify the situation? By being front runners in the “third industrial revolution”.
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Dr Feelgood
Dear Readers,
I thought I had a terrible disease. I went to see 99 doctors, and they all told me roughly the same thing. That if I act fast and change my lifestyle in key ways I can avert the worst. But if I carry on as I am, I am going to get very, very sick. It’s not clear but I might even die. Or so they say.
Of course there are discrepancies between the exact diagnoses and projections each doctor gives me – but I guess that’s only to be expected, as medical science is a tricky thing.
Or is it? continue reading… »
Why aren’t our banks backing green projects?
Guest post by Adam Ramsay
There is much to write about yesterday’s budget, but I thought I would highlight just one paradox – one I genuinely don’t understand.
Alistair Darling announced a £1bn fund for low carbon projects. This green investment bank is designed to provide the stimulous which will encourage other lenders to also back renewable energy projects and the like. The Treasury reckon this will lead to a total of £2bn extra for low carbon infrastructure. In itself this is to be welcomed, but is nothing like the level of investment we need in climate protecting technologies if I am to have a comfortable retirement come 2050.
So far so normal.
Alistair Darling also announced that the bailed-out banks would be given new requirements to lend to small businesses. They did a similar thing back in November with their ‘asset protection scheme – again, no massive surprise.
OK, so, here’s the paradox. continue reading… »
More media misinformation on climate change
1. On 14th Feb the Mail on Sunday published a story titled Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995
Typically of the Daily Mail and its coverage on the issue: it was a distortion. Real Climate points out:
What Jones actually said is that, while the globe has nominally warmed since 1995, it is difficult to establish the statistical significance of that warming given the short nature of the time interval (1995-present) involved. The warming trend consequently doesn’t quite achieve statistical significance. But it is extremely difficult to establish a statistically significant trend over a time interval as short as 15 years–a point we have made countless times at RealClimate.
In fact it hugely distorts what Phil Jones said. More on the Daily Mail’s farcical reporting on climate change exposed here.
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Sunday Times promotes climate change denier
A couple of weeks ago, Ben Goldacre bashed out a quick piece for the Guardian’s news desk on the subject of the General Medical Council’s damning verdict on the conduct of Andrew Wakefield, in which he said:
As the years passed by, media coverage deteriorated further. Claims by researchers who never published scientific papers to back up their claims were reported in the newspapers as important new scientific breakthroughs, while at the very same time, evidence showing no link between MMR and autism, fully published in peer reviewed academic journals, was simply ignored. This was cynical, and unforgivable.
That last paragraph is particularly important because it shows one of the more common ways in which mainstream media outlets consistently distorts the truth by selectively highlighting particular claims and/or research on the basis of whether it conforms to an established narrative. Take, for example, yesterday’s Sunday Times, which devoted several hundred words to the uncritical promotion of the latest effluvial outpourings of TV weatherman and all-round climate crock, Anthony Watts.
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Quote-mining is never a good idea
One of the more common, and thoroughly, dislikeable practices associated with climate change ‘skepticism’, creationism/intelligent design and with the peddling of pseudoscience, is that of quote-mining.
Quote-mining is the practice of scouring scientific papers and reports for quotes that can be readily presented out of context in support of the quote-miners preferred position or argument irrespective of whether those quotes provide a fair reflection of the actual contents of the paper. It’s actually a practice that recognised as a logic fallacy, not to mention a form of false attribution and it’s neither a clever nor a particularly honest practice for anyone to engage in.
Sadly, there’s currently a perfect illustration of the fallacious use of quote mining to be found at Devil’s Kitchen; one that relates – unsurprisingly – to one of the key chapters in the IPCC’s AR4 report on Climate Change. continue reading… »
Behind the BBC poll on climate change
contribution by Climate Sock
Another week, another shonky poll? On Friday the BBC reported their new survey, which they claimed showed a clear drop in the number of people who believe in climate change or that it’s man-made.
After the BBC’s inaccurate coverage of a climate poll last year, I was ready for this to be another bit of mis-reporting ripe for a take-down.
Yet in both the poll and the way the BBC described the numbers, there’s little to fault: their data do indeed suggest that belief in man-made climate change has fallen since November.
But I’m not convinced that the UEA emails or the glacier controversy were behind these changes, or that the changes in levels of belief are inherently interesting or important.
continue reading… »
Revealed: MEP praises French attack on Greenpeace that killed activist – updated
Godfrey Bloom is a UK Independence Party MEP from Yorkshire & North Lincolnshire. He is a fervent climate change denier and has made speeches at the EU Parliament stating global warming isn’t happening and dismissing the idea of Co2 as a pollutant. Bloom also records videos for his own YouTube account.
Recently he made a video (below) standing in front of a Greenpeace boat. He starts off by calling it a “fascist boat”, funded by “ridiculous middle-class, middle-aged people spouting junk science”.
He goes on to say:
This is a huge stunt for middle class people to have a little bit of a float around the world. The whole thing is a sham, the whole thing is ridiculous.
He then concludes the short video with:
And I don’t often say anything good about the French but one thing I can say – well done the French for sinking one of these things. Vive Le France!
There’s only one incident he could be referring to: the French intelligence services sinking of the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior in 1985 which killed a photographer and injured others.
Bloom is praising an incident that killed an innocent person and led to the resignation of the French Defence Minister.
Not long after he made the video, it vanished from Youtube. But a Libcon reader who had seen it in horror passed it to us. Here, we publish it for the first time.
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How the media is tricked into ‘balance’ on climate change
contribution by Peter McColl
Sunny pointed out on CiF yesterday that the BBC gave yet more air time to climate change denial on Newsnight the night before. What the mainstream media describe as ‘balance’ has been a matter of concern for some time to me.
The strategy deployed by climate change denialists focuses on two elements. Firstly, problematising the science of climate change, and then appealing to ‘balance’ in the media to ensure coverage of their position.
This is made all the more extraordinary by the lack of coverage for the other conspiracy theories Sunny mentions.
A couple of weeks ago Rod Liddle, the chungwit slated as next editor of ‘The Independent’ was on the radio. He was asked about a range of his more sensationalist opinions. This included his opinions on climate change.
Liddle claims not to be a climate change denier. He is, instead, a climate change ‘moderate’. This, he claims, means he refutes the extremist claims of both climate change deniers, and the extremist climate change believers.
Now this rankles with me.
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Why we’re taking the Treasury to court
contribution by Adam Ramsay
Today we will serve the Treasury with legal proceedings. We are trying to stop them allowing RBS to pump public money into fossil fuel projects driving us towards climate catastrophe.
As I discussed a week ago, the Royal Bank of Scotland have long been Europe’s dirtiest bank. Since the bail-out just over a year ago, they have poured billions of pounds of public money into fossil fuel extraction projects driving wars, human rights abuses and climate change around the world.
Their climate impact is so high that, according to this recent report (pdf) the government could potentially do more about global emissions through active ownership of RBS than through all UK domestic activity.
They have also funded, with our money, projects which risk: inflaming wars in central Africa, destroying pristine arctic wilderness and systematically abuse workers.
We thought there must be laws to prevent such abuses of public money. It turns out that there are.
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ClimateHate – the new battleground
I thank LeftOutside for introducing me to this topic. I think the following is clearly true:
1. For a great proportion of our scientific beliefs, we have to rely on a long-established consensus. For example, I ‘believe’ that a hydrogen atom has a proton and an electron because I have been told by a huge consensus, it sort of makes sense, and I trust the consensus. For views on evolution, the Holocaust, whether transfats cause cancer, or carbon dioxide causes global warming, no single person can themselves compile enough evidence. You need to rely on scientists who themselves rely on more scientists.
2. Conspiracy theorists seldom or never have enough data for their views, but rely on a profound belief in the bad faith of their opponents. This is a sort of heroic arrogance – ‘I alone in my living room have worked out how misled thousands of others are’. 99% of the time, they are wrong; 1%, we are talking Galileo
3. However, people often form opinions, or choose which ‘consensus’ to trust, on the basis of feelings. This particularly works in a negative way; if you really hate X and X believes somethingis true and important, then thinking and proclaiming it as untrue gives enormous pleasure. This happens whether X is some braying redfaced foxhunter or sanctimonious good for nothing leftie student.
continue reading… »
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» Cambridge student demo: policeman punched student in the face
» An ode to David Cameron
» Why the student protests are unlikely to backfire despite the coverage
» She is free now, but the justice system still fails raped women
» Why Nick Clegg offers a recycled vision of society
» We need to reclaim the true ideals behind civil disobedience
» Why Ireland should default on its debts and start afresh
» How Labour could regain the initiative again on immigration
» Irish bankers: a modest proposal
» Is Nick Clegg ditching his own principles on inequality?
» Guess what? Ireland drank neo-liberal magic potion and it failed
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