Climate Change – Those hacked emails
To reiterate John’s point about the relative plausibility of conspiracy theories based on the hacked CRU mails, Dave Cole has forwarded this video, which really does make the point very well…
AGW: battle of the conspiracy theories
Let’s forget the actual data for a second. Let’s assume that we know absolutely nothing about the likelihood of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory being true, but that either the climate scientists or the [denialists/sceptics - insert loaded term of your choice here] are right.
Let’s also assume that one side consists of crooks, cheats and liars, and the other side of bold seekers for truth – but we don’t know which one.
What happens if you try and deduce which side is lying from how the world has acted, based on every actor’s incentives?
Who’s in it to win it?
If AGW is false and people are lying to try and show that it’s true, who benefits? To start with, some geeks who get money to build computer models, some hippies who get to feel less silly about 50 years of veganism and hair-shirt-wearing, and some companies selling turbines and carbon filters.
The nuclear industry is the obvious big potential money-draw, and has form on extorting enormous quantities of state cash – but almost the entire environmentalist establishment hates them and rails against their product, and nuclear currently isn’t counted as ‘renewable’ by any major standards. Still, they’re the ones to watch if there were a conspiracy.
On the other hand, if AGW is true and people are lying to try and show that it’s false, who benefits?
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Re-tuning the environmental movement
Dubbed ‘climategate’, the leaking of emails from University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, seems to have given the self-proclaimed ‘global warming sceptics’ a boost in their worldview.
Inevitably, a lot of the comments and emails have been taken out of the context and twisted to suit the ’sceptics’. The emails haven’t even been verified for authenticity – they could have been made up. The Times even claimed a lot of data was dumped, when it wasn’t. Misinformation has always been a classic tactic of the deniers.
This isn’t about whether most of global warming is driven by human activity – my position is very clear – but about how to win the public relations battle.
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Climate change splits Australian Liberal Party
The right-wing Australian Liberal Party, kicked out of power in 2007, has just elected their fourth leader in two years.
Last week, six frontbenchers quit their posts in protest against the Liberal Leader’s support for the Labor government’s proposals for emissions trading to help tackle climate change. They then voted out their leader and, by 42 votes to 41, replaced him with a climate change sceptic who is one of their most right-wing MPs.
A Liberal activist warned conservatives in Britain: “Climate change fundamentalism has wrecked our conservative coalition. Be careful it doesn’t wreck yours.”
It’s always entertaining to watch formerly dominant right-wing political parties get taken over by their wingnuts, whether in Australia or in the USA. There is speculation that the Labor government may call an election to take advantage of these divisions and secure a mandate for their environmental policies.
And I guess it will embolden our very own climate change sceptics in the Tory grassroots to redouble their efforts to kill the idea of ‘Vote Blue, go Green’.
Britain’s first green city
Arguably, Stoke is already England’s greenest city on the grounds that there isn’t much industry left, or that much employment of any other kind. Still, nowt wrong with making a virtue out of necessity:
This evening, in St Margaret Ward Roman Catholic high school, Stoke-on-Trent is set to become the first city to sign up to the 10:10 pledge to cut its carbon emissions by 10% during 2010…
… Out in the cavernous main hall, waiting for the bingo to start, members Dave Athersmith and Julie Hulme agree: “We car-share to come here. We’ve all got to do our bit, haven’t we?” John Clowes, a retired ceramic tilemaker of 76 (”There’s tiles of mine in the Houses of Parliament”) has just had his loft insulated, and turns everything off at the mains at night. “It’s the young people you need to worry about,” he says. “Those electronic games. What happened to a kickaround in the street?” (In two days in Stoke, by the way, I met only three people prepared to dismiss climate change as a notion cooked up by a control-crazed government (or as one local put it, “absolute bollocks”). Most confessed to at least some concern.)
It’s conventional wisdom that the stout yeomen of the working classes will have no truck with all this environmental nonsense: conventional wisdom, that is, amongst rightwing or otherwise anti-crusty middle class types. continue reading… »
Climate change and Cumbria’s floods
Imagine, if you please, a kettle. The empirically-minded may wish to actually fetch one and 3/4 fill it with water. Examine the water in this imaginary (or actual, for the science geeks) kettle. It’s pretty much stationary. Now turn the kettle on and watch very carefully. You will quite quickly notice that the system becomes less predictable, less stable, more active and wilder, as the heat in the system increases.
If you increase the temperature far enough, your system will change radically and comprehensively (all the water will change state and leave the system through the cracks) leaving you with a barren, parched shell of what was once a nice cup of tea in potentia.
This is the image you should have in your mind when you hear an Environment Agency spokesmen using words like “unprecedented”.
The Second, Law, of Thermo, Dynamics.
The flooding in Cumbria is not quite Hurricane Katrina, but then we’re not in a hurricane belt. For Britain, even a Britain recently flooded a number of times in different areas, this has been a pretty wet week. Most specifically over a foot of actual rain fell on the Lake District and south-western Scotland [1] over the last 24 hours alone.
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SuperFreakonomics – How to lose friends and irritate people
If there really is no such thing as bad publicity then Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner will surely be laughing all the way to the bank as sales of their new book ‘SuperFreakonomics’, the follow-up to their 2005 bestseller ‘Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything‘, head through the ceiling.
In a little under a fortnight since the book’s release, Levitt and Dubner have already walked straight into one major shitstorm by, seemingly tweaking the noses of a prominent environmental blogger and a well-known environmental advocacy group with their chapter on climate change.
And if Anna North’s article at Jezebel.com is anything to go by, their chapter on the economics of prostitution looks set to have a few feminists chewing the furniture as well, in very short order.
Controversy sells, even if its misplaced, which seems to at least partially the case here as neither chapter looks to be anything like as contentious as some of the book’s more vocal critics are trying to make out.
So what exactly, have Levitt and Dubner done to piss these people off.
Climate Change
Taking the climate change chapter first [pdf no longer available], and with the caveat that I’ve not yet had time to exhaustively examine all the claimed examples of misrepresentation and/or technical errors cited by its critics, what Levitt and Dubner have done is poke a stick at what is by far the largest and most intractable problem facing climate scientists working on global warming; their inability to make anything that remotely approaches a reliable prediction of its likely impact on the global climate. continue reading… »
Boris Johnson will kill children
Boris Johnson is threatening to kill some children and worsen the educational outcomes of many more.
The reason for this is straightforward. He intends to remove the western extension zone of the congestion charge, and delay phase three of the low emission zone, which would charge polluting vans more for entering London.
The effects of these will be to increase congestion and emissions of carbon and nitrogen oxide. Such emissions, however, are quite strongly associated with pre-natal health, as a new paper by Janet Currie and Reed Walker demonstrate.
They studied the impact of the introduction of E-Z Pass in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. This system allows cars to travel onto toll roads without stopping to pay manually. They therefore greatly reduce congestion and emissions around the toll plazas.
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Is the BBC buying into global-warming denialism?
BBC Online published an article on Friday titled, What happened to global warming?, which has already been picked up by esteemed scientists such as the Drudge Report, the Telegraph’s Damian Thompson and Benedict Brogan. The Spectator won’t be far behind I bet.
The BBC’s Paul Hudson does that classic media trick of pretending there are two equally valid sides to a debate and confusing readers further. In fact it’s so lame that even a lay person such as myself can easily take it apart.
The central thesis to the article is that global temperatures have fallen recently, atmospherically and in the oceans (which absorb most of the heat), therefore the denialists must have a point!
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Greens are moving forward on science
As regular readers of Liberal Conspiracy will be aware there has been an ongoing discussion over the Green Party’s attitude to science. While the Greens may have been ahead of the curve on climate change, writers like Martin Robbins have highlighted the fact that “in spite of their sparkling climate and environmental credentials” in many areas “their policies are far out of step with the scientific community”.
He’s right. Whether it’s the pledge, stem cells or alternative therapies there’s plenty of gut churningly embarrassing policy to choose from. What’s been interesting, as a Green Party member, is that the majority of those I’ve spoken to have been equally shocked at these revelations.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find that the key task ahead is not to persuade party members of the need for evidence based policy, most of them are there already, but to actually crack on with the work of a serious review of our science, technology and health policies.
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On clean cars, Spain leads the way
The Guardian reported this week that disused phone boxes are being earmarked as “recharging points” for electric cars in some of Spain’s biggest cities.
I decided to find out more about it and, by the look of it, it really appears the Spaniards are going to lead the way.
In a stark contrast with the tiptoing around paraded by other governments worldwide, next month Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero will unveil the Pacto por la Energía, so far the biggest electric vehicle production stimulus programme.
According to the Spanish Government, if all of the country’s cars were electric, oil bills would see savings of up to €11m a year and the country’s oil dependency down twenty per cent.
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Different arms of the environmental conspiracy
On Sunday Peter Beaumont wrote this article in the Observer asking: “What is the Climate Camp in London for?”
He goes on to quote approvingly from Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals (one of my favourite books ever) and then says:
I mention Alinsky because he seems to crystallise many of the failings, not just of the Climate Camp, but of significant sectors of the wider anti-war and anti-globalisation movement which have struggled either to articulate precisely what is their message or who have chosen, literally at times, to pitch their tent at the margins of the political debate.
…
Climate Camp, with its often hazy message and complex inner negotiations, with its indulgent obsession with its own workings, its insularity and the suggestion of elitism of its direct-action hard core, is in danger of becoming about Climate Camp, the institution, rather than about the wider fight to halt global warming. With all its energy and motivation, that would be a shame.
As applicable to Climate Camp itself, those are not criticism that should be dismissed so easily. But I see all this slightly differently. The problem is to assume that Climate Camp is the entirety of the environmentalism movement. It isn’t. It represents an arm of that movement: the more anarchic, activists interested in direct action and publicity stunts.
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The real point of Climate Camp
The Climate Camp is back, and thoroughly established on Blackheath, scene of a number of very drunken evenings of burly cheer back when I was a Kent schoolboy rugby player.
They’re slowly getting their message across in spite of all the distractions. They’re a broad, consensus-based coalition which carries no universal ideological burden. The only point of cohesion is that they are all dedicated to true debate, to collective action and to direct, rather than “representative”, political systems for self-determination.
They are able to be all of these things because they live in a society where the cost of entry into the communications market is so low that normal people can play too. And they’re winning the spin war, so far. Being factual, organised and in the right really helps with that. Mr. Cameron, take note.
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Climate Camp: Watching the Watchers
Shambling through the kitchen with my face in a massive plate of pasta last night, I heard the door crash open: my friend who shall henceforth be known as Activist Polly*, veteran of the summer of hate, had come back from Climate Camp.
‘Oh my GOD, Laurie, it was awful,’ she moaned. ‘Climate Camp was full of hippies!’
The fact that Polly might have expected something different is key to the essential weirdness of Climate Camp. The idea is – well, It’s a protest, you see, a four-day sit-in protest about…something. The environment. Capitalism, also. And associated…badnesses. And we swoop, you see, we all gather in various parts of the city and swoop, not walk, swoop, on text-command from our remote superiors towards a target which we don’t know what it is yet but we’ll definitely be told about on the day. Possibly we’ll go to the Bank of England, and everyone will see, because it’ll be in London. I’m certainly planning to take lots and lots of photographs. How about you?
Being a young cool lefty kind of person, I’m aware of many people who are at Climate Camp – and every single one of them has gone with the express or primary intention of taking photographs.
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The Treehouse Gallery
There’s a great little project happening in Regents Park at the moment. The Treehouse Gallery is an ever growing collective of artists, designers, musicians and educators, who have constructed their own public space in which to hold exhibitions and events.
I’ve been following the development of the events schedule for a few weeks now, which is steadily filling up with workshops and other events, but I don’t see much in the way of debates programmed. Surely some LibCon readers and writers could get together to argue about something? Localism is a live debate at the moment, and would seem a perfect topic to discuss in a community-made space. CSJ? Fabians? Demos? SMF?
The Tory approach to International Development is a farce
by Left Outside
9.2 million children die before the age of five each year. Two million die on the day they are born – and 500,000 women die at childbirth. A third of children in Africa suffer brain damage as a result of malnutrition. 72 million children are missing out on an education. Every day 30,000 children die from easily-preventable diseases. That’s 21 children every minute. 33 million people are infected with HIV/AIDS. There are 11 million AIDS orphans in Africa. Every hour, 300 people become infected with HIV and 225 people die from AIDS…and 25 of these are children.
These bald facts are an insult to our humanity. Every life is precious. Everyone has unique talents and abilities. Every time the candle of life is snuffed out by disease, we all suffer. Every time ignorance triumphs over enlightenment, we are all injured. Every time a child is born into a cycle of poverty, we are all made poorer.
So opens the Conservative Party new Green Paper on International Development, One World Conservatism.
These two paragraphs read like an accusation. They are contrasted with the Millennium Development Goals set out by the UN. With the 2015 deadline looming they seem wildly ambitious contrasted with such continued suffering.
The Conservatives pledge a new approach to International Development should they win the next election. As this looks almost inevitable, it is important to examine what they propose as it will affect millions of lives. In this blog post I highlight some of the main points of the report and explain why it’s fundamentally a ‘failure’.
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We’re missing Green opportunities
It’s clear that Vestas, the company faced with a long-running sit in, acted with contempt towards its workers: the practically non-existent dialogue, the transparent attempt to starve them out, the delivery of termination letters with the workers’ one hot meal, the shoddy paperwork filed to have them evicted, and the laughable charge from their legal team that there was a fear the protests could get ‘heated’ or violent.
Equally, whilst Ed Miliband has handled the matter better than one might’ve expected, the charge that his government has lacked leadership on this can’t be ignored.
Whether the option is nationalisation or, more preferably, a kind of decentralised, locally-run operation, there is a case for the government to facilitate some kind of deal to save the factory.
But I’d now like to leave the particulars of Vestas’ closure to one side and try to consider the case from a national perspective.
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Greens: 21st century Stalinists?
Scratch Jean Lambert, get Lavrentiy Beria; Green politicians are totalitarians in the making, just itching to refound a carbon-neutral Gulag Archipelago.
This, anyway, is the position of Times hack Antonia Senior, who has obviously given the matter a great deal of thought. Her stark warning must be heeded at once by anyone naïve enough to cast the odd tactical vote for the Green Party, in the misguided belief that they are a harmless enough functional equivalent for the old-style moderate social democracy unavailable elsewhere on the ballot paper.
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Why I’ll be voting Green on June 4
It is widely held that Euro-elections are little more than an expensive white elephant, a charade conducted in order to put various failed and eccentric politicians on the gravy train to the continent. This year, however, they have taken on a new importance as there is a very real possibility that the fascist British National Party could gain representation for the first time at a European level. Voters are turning away from the established parties in droves, and I believe it is likely that the rise in support for the minor parties will prove to be understated on the day.
Tories have an easy if rather peculiar alternative in the UK Independence Party (UKIP), and that group’s support is rocketing predictably. For disaffected Labour voters however, the choice is not so easy. Those on the left who half-heartedly call upon people to vote for “the political expression of the working class” are wasting their time, and in any case are selling people a turkey. The idea of asking the working people of the UK to vote for a party that has overseen their houses being reposessed, their jobs being lost, their children being sent to war and their public services being privatised, has me reaching for the sick bucket. I cannot conceive of the thought process that allows people to continue reciting the same tired old doctrines about “historic ties to the labour movement” which lead them to call for a Labour vote. In any case, the electorate are not going to listen on June 4.
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Euro-elections and the left
Yes, it will be a chore. But whatever you do on June 4th, make sure you vote in the European elections. If nothing else, the higher the turnout, the lower the chances of the British National Party securing a clutch of seats in Strasbourg.
Sadly, the momentum behind the British far right now looks unstoppable, and that tragedy is compounded by the reality that many of its supporters are working class people that would formerly have numbered among the Labour heartland vote.
continue reading… »
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» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civil cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
» Is this the end for the socialist left?
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