When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets

I saw an interview on television last night with George Monbiot. He is a columnist in the British newspaper, The Guardian, and the author of a climate change book, Heat: How to stop the planet burning. The title pretty much tells you which side of the climate debate he is on, although he would object to that statement, since he firmly believes there is no real debate, as all the so-called deniers are just poseurs arguing bad science or non science.

I read through some of his archived columns and the Wikipedia description of him this morning and he has quite the curriculum vitae. He seems to me to be an anti-establishment activist. Monbiot is an advocate of the “consume less” society. Naturally, supporting the conventional wisdom on climate change fits that political agenda to a tee.

I was interested to see him because the news of the leaked e-mails from the British Climate Research Unit shook him up. He called for the head of that institute, Phil Jones, to step down.

But he seems to have recovered his cool, if last night’s interview was an indication. He was smooth, poised, polished and definitely in command. He was here to accomplish two things: to participate in a climate change debate and to beat up on Canada for foot -dragging on climate change and interfering with the rest of the world that is rushing to get on with the program at Copenhagen.

Of course, he was asked about the leaked e-mails and he was in full defense mode, characterizing it as maybe evidence of some bad behaviour by 3 or 4 people, but in no way derailing the accepted science of climate change. According to him there are “hundreds” of “lines” of evidence in the scientific community, from across many disciplines, which support the IPCC view of the world’s coming climate.

I found that statement interesting for a couple of reasons.

First, the usual accusation against the climate deniers is that they are not “climatologists”, even if they have other scientific credentials. This ignores the fact that there are climatologists who dispute the AGW theory, some of whom used to be “go to” people for the IPCC, who have since dissociated themselves from it. Leaving that point aside, here we have a pro-IPCC supporter flogging the fact that non climatologists support AGW as proof of the theory.

Hmmm.

A little hypocrisy at play there.

Secondly, it is more than 3 or 4 scientists at the heart of this initial scandal. As well, similar accusations have cropped up in Australia and New Zealand regarding the accuracy of the temperature records around the globe.

What Monbiot didn’t say is as important as what he did say. These so-called “3 or 4” that he went to lengths to dismiss as irrelevant are not your backroom, white-coated lab geeks, with plastic pocket protectors and Scotch Tape holding their outsized eyeglasses together. These scientists are the rock stars of the IPCC and the face of the public shilling for AGW. It would be like collusion amongst Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, Bobby Hull, or any other high scoring hockey players who might have played at the same time, to limit their goal output to influence the outcome of the games their teams play.

Monbiot failed to address the most distressing point of all (which the interviewer should have asked him). The CRU lost all the original temperature data records, so nobody can be sure what the base measurements were. It is also clear from the e-mails that the data base they do have, which was manipulated and massaged from the original data, is seriously corrupted to the point that the complier gave up in frustration trying to make sense of it.

Now you can say what you like, as Monbiot did, that biology, chemistry, physics, etc., all support the AGW theory, but in the end, it is the temperature that matters. If you can’t rely on a verifiable base of accurate temperature, how can you predict how that has changed? You have built a theory on sand, not concrete.

Monbiot dismissed the idea of a world-wide conspiracy to fabricate global warming, indicating that not only would thousands of competitive scientists have to stop being competitive to make it happen, but also politicians and media.

Yes, but only if you think of conspiracy as a planning exercise, like a bunch of crooks getting together to plan a break into a bank vault after hours.

There is another sense of conspiracy in the form of the Zeitgeist (spirit of the time). It is not planned, it is simply embraced. It is a mass movement, not unlike a religious movement. In one of his columns on his blog, Monbiot dismisses climate deniers as belonging to a religious movement.

But the same could be said for AGW supporters.

Climate “science” is based on computer algorithms, which depend for their reliability on a good base of information (which we have just discovered through these e-mails that we do not have) and the ability to compute huge swaths of measureable data accurately. The climate models all fail in one fashion or another to take account of all the chaotic nature of the relevant climate inputs. In short, their reliability as accurate predictors is suspect.

In the normal course, one would have to say this is a stupid basis on which to reorganize our global societies.

So what accounts for Copenhagen, if it is not reason?

The answer is simply that it is a mass movement, not really any different from the South Sea Bubble or the Tulip Bubble or any of the other historical parallels where multitudes of people bought into the theory of the rising tide and jumped on board before the ship sailed and stranded them on shore. People want to believe that they can change the planet to something better. It is utopia in all its glory at play.

Here is a paragraph from Eric Hoffer’s excellent little book on mass movements, The True Believer:

For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and the potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking.

George Monbiot’s personal history reveals a person who is a malcontent and wants to change the world. His pathology is shared by millions in the developed world who feel guilty about the consumerism and waste they have embraced, the unsustainable globe. The AGW theory is just the wedge they need to bring about the utopian world of which they dream.

And here is what Hoffer had to say about that:

When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them.

Nothing to see here, move along

Since we live in a busy world and there is only so much time a person can devote to the “news of the day”, it behooves us to ration our time carefully. Many people, in my opinion, glance at headlines and the first paragraph in a newspaper, form their opinions from that, and move on. Similarly, many people still get their impressions of the world from television news, a highly manipulative medium, which assaults us, simultaneously, with pictures (some of which are merely archived video), speech and headlines crawling across the bottom of the screen. I do not understand why anybody would subject themselves to this barrage – it produces shell shock in me. At the end of a broadcast I am never certain what I have learned or how I feel about it.

My preference is to search for news sources and opinion makers I generally trust on-line on the Internet. They could be found in on-line newspapers or blogs or occasionally broadcast outlets. You can take as much time as you need or is available to you. You can drill down to get the depth of material needed to understand a story and you can quickly link to other sites to give more background or different perspectives. You can bookmark them for easy access and you can save their output for future reference.

The difference between lazy reporting and thoughtful journalism shows up in today’s Toronto Sun.

Both items refer to the current scandal that has been dubbed "Climategate".

In a news story, a reporter tries to tell us that the leaked e-mails from the CRU are essentially irrelevant in the matter of climate debate. He quotes one global warming skeptic, a climatologist, with the Friends of Science organization, who thinks they are important because they show that the data on which the whole edifice of global warming is based may be false or distorted, and then immediately dismisses that person’s opinion with this sentence:

But most mainstream media and serious science groups have dismissed this interpretation of the e-mails as mischief.

Full points for identifying the MSM as a protector of the conventional wisdom, but “serious science groups”, who would they be? This reporter seems to think they include the Sierra Club and the Pembina Institute, because he cites quotations from their spokespeople. These are not scientific organizations, they are environmental advocacy groups.

What are we getting from this reporter? Is he displaying his bias by putting down the skeptics in favour of the pro global warming crowd? Or is he just ignorant?

One clue that he might not know what he is writing about is this sentence:

The e-mails, between top climate change scientists, appear to reveal top scientists were suppressing information that contradicted the widely held theory, backed up by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, that climate change is man-made.

Wrong, Mr. Reporter. It is the work of these climate scientists that back up IPCC report, not the other way around.

This is why it is dangerous to rely solely on headlines and reporters for reliable information.

Much better, in the same newspaper, to go to a regular columnist like Lorrie Goldstein who has immersed himself in the climate change file for the better part of the past year and has written numerous columns on the subject. He thinks this e-mail disclosure is far from being merely mischievous.

He has examined a set of exchanges that I have not seen covered in other media that shows the entire data base of weather information used by CRU was corrupted beyond repair. That is no small thing.

Tipping points and climate confusion

What is a “tipping point”?

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a best-selling book with that title. He says it is the point at which something takes off and becomes a runaway phenomenon whose growth is exponential. He gives examples of everything from Paul Revere’s famous ride, to the spread of STDs, to the popularity of Hush Puppies.

I suspect Harry Potter would fit that category. It started out as a book that was rejected by every publisher in the U.K. but one. Eventually, people began talking about it and news of it spread. That is how I first heard about it, a friend raved about it over lunch. By the time I got around to reading it, everybody was into it.

That brings us to the use of the expression tipping point in the climate change debate.

James Hansen, the leading Chicken Little in the global warm-mongering camp, uses the term quite often. He says it is the point at which climate changes cannot be controlled by man, that nature’s feedback mechanisms take off and become like a shark feeding frenzy.

Think about that statement for a minute. It implies that we can manage climate. Not that there is any historical precedent for such a conceit. In fact, it is probably the most monumentally foolish idea of the 21st century.

We can have an impact on the climate, for sure, but we cannot manage something we barely understand.

For about 800,000 years the CO2 level has been about 280 ppm, sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower, but that is the order of magnitude. In the past century it has climbed to around 380 ppm; hence the alarm. It is generally agreed amongst the Hansenites that most of the cause of this climb in CO2 is related to the release of carbon into the atmosphere by humans. The real debate is that not all scientists buy into the idea that CO2 is the main driver of climate change.

To add further confusion, there is now a contradiction around the concept of tipping point that needs clarification if one wants to persist in claiming CO2 as the key.

Hansen claims that the maximum CO2 level that would preserve the status quo is 350 ppm. He says that at 380+ ppm we have already past the tipping point, and points to high Arctic and glacier ice melting as proof. This means that even if we substantially reduce our carbon contribution it is too late, nature is now in a runaway mode to much higher global temperatures that will see all the ice melt and the oceans rise. He also claims that 450 ppm is probably the maximum safe level.

However, in a just released study, a team of scientists from the U.K. and the U.S. have determined that declining CO2 in the atmosphere led to ice forming over the continent of Antarctica about 34 million years ago, a continent that had previously experienced a tropical climate. On its face, that result would not seem to contradict anything James Hansen says; except when you start talking about tipping points.

The new CO2 study determined that 34 million years ago the CO2 level dipped to 760 ppm. This was considered the tipping point for ice formation.

So which is the real tipping point: 350+ ppm when ice melts or 760 ppm when ice forms?

And what about the claim that CO2 levels are unsafe after 450 ppm? All kinds of new life forms emerged on other continents in an atmosphere of 760+ ppm.

This is far from a “settled science”.

What you find out when you go behind the newspaper's back

Andrew Nikiforuk being interviewed on Norwegian television.

One of the benefits of having time on one’s hand is that one can follow-up on what seem to be inflammatory statements that appear in the media. The original source often does not back up the assertions being made.

Such a case in point was an op-ed column appearing in today’s edition of The Toronto Star. The writer is an award-winning journalist, Andrew Nikiforuk. In a piece entitled, A Public Tarring in Saudi Canada, he is moaning about an appearance on June 11 of this year that he and a family physician, Dr. John O’Connor, made before a parliamentary committee dealing with the environment and sustainable development.

The committee is looking into the matter of the troubled oil sands development in Alberta and it heard from a number of witnesses before inviting these two to make presentations concerning the native residents of Fort Chipewayan, downstream from the oil sands projects.

Both witnesses were given 10 minutes each of uninterrupted time to make their presentations before the floor was open for questions from members of the committee. Each member was given 5 minutes to ask questions, with a slightly shorter period for follow-up questions after the first go-around.

According to Nikiforuk, he and O’Connor were sandbagged by the 4 Conservative members on the committee. The Liberal, NDP and Bloc members were civil, but “unevenly” informed about the oil sands and the environment, says Nikiforuk.

Earlier this month, Dr. John O'Connor, a dedicated family physician, and I got badly tarred by another one of Ottawa's disturbing political gangs.
The ambush happened June 11 before the House standing committee on environment and sustainable development, which is studying oil sands and water. We testified not as experts but as concerned citizens. We didn't ask to appear; the committee invited us.

As such, we naively assumed that we were doing our duty as Canadians to speak to the House about the impact of world's largest energy project on water: 130 square kilometres of waste water, acid rain, fish deformities, rare cancers and city-scale withdrawals of freshwater.

But both O'Connor and I made a terrible mistake.

Note the allegations and the choice of language. O’Connor is “a dedicated family physician”. Did you ever meet a family physician that wasn’t? Does this give him some cachet that an ordinary family doctor doesn’t have? They were “ambushed” by a “political gang.” They were not there as experts but as “concerned citizens”. They were invited and did not seek the audience.

Rubbish.

They have both presented themselves as people with some knowledge and information to shed on the environmental and health concerns related to the oil sands industry, which is exactly why they got invited to make presentations. Neither could make the pretense of ordinary citizens (that would be me and I wasn’t invited), nor, given the fact that Nikiforuk has been writing about this stuff for 20 years and has authored a book on the subject can he (a) claim to be naïve, or (b) disclaim some expertise.

Here is how he self-describes his knowledge in the Star piece:

As a business and environmental reporter, I've written extensively about the oil and gas industry for two decades. My book on the tar sands, winner of the City of Calgary's W.O. Mitchell Award, argues that the project has slowly transformed the nation into a dysfunctional petro-state that governs mostly for hydrocarbons.

He and O’Connor went to Norway as part of a Greenpeace delegation whose purpose was to convince the Norwegians not to invest in the oils sands developments. How many “ordinary citizens” do that?

Here is his description of how he and O’Connor were treated by the Conservatives on the committee:

… the four Conservative MPs on the committee, Peter Braid, Mark Warawa, Blaine Calkins and Jeff Watson, spent most of their time attacking our credibility. They didn't want to talk about water.

Like members of some strange Communist gang, they assumed that Dr. O'Connor was a natural born liar. They insinuated that he had no credibility because he wasn't an industry cancer professional or a highly degreed expert. What, after all, would a family physician know about rare bile-duct cancers, even though his father died of one? They suggested that a 30 per cent higher-than-expected rate for cancers in the community must be a lifestyle issue. In other words, the people living downstream of the tar sands had simply chosen to make themselves cancerous.

Then they questioned O'Connor's patriotism. In May, both O'Connor and I accepted an invitation by Greenpeace to speak in Norway. O'Connor courageously told Norwegians, public investors in the tar sands via their state-owned company Statoilhydro, that unfettered tar-sands development was creating a real public health problem in Fort Chipewayan. The Tories ever so slyly accused O'Connor of taking part in unCanadian activities.

Then came my turn. As a veteran reporter, I didn't expect kid glove treatment but thought the Tories might want to know more about acid rain or the unsustainability of groundwater withdrawals. But they expressed no interest in the conservation of trees and water. They simply belittled me for writing an opinion piece about how oil hinders democracy. They couldn't even hear the irony in their own frat-boy mockery

.

“Frat-boy mockery”, “members of some strange Communist gang”?

Here is what frat boy Mark Warawa asked Dr. O’Connor when his turn came to ask questions. I will truncate it to cut to the chase.

Mark Warwa: Dr. O’Conner, you stated that there were 6 cases of cholangiocarcinoma (a rare and difficult to detect form of cancer), but isn’t it the case that there were only 2 actually identified in a subsequent study?

Dr. O’Connor: Well, yes, but there might have been 3, except the third potential victim can’t be found.

Mark Warwa: What was the purpose of your trip to Norway with Greenpeace?

Dr. O’Connor: I basically told my story. One of the things that's been a hallmark of this process in northern Alberta is that there's been no action or reaction from government unless media were involved. Actually, in 2006, the mother of Brian Jean, the Conservative MP, alerted CBC of her concerns for the health of the people at Fort Chip, and CBC were told to approach me.

Mark Warwa: In the documentary film Downstream, it appears that the blame for any health issues is pointed at the oil sands. And you've gone with Greenpeace to advocate for the removal of investment in the oil sands. Is all the focus on the oil sands? Are they the total cause of any illnesses in Fort Chipewayan?

Dr. O’Connor: I don't know. I'm only saying that the documentation from science and the illnesses that these toxins can cause may purely coincidentally correspond with what I documented in Fort Chipewayan. It's very difficult not to make the connection, but I'm not saying there is an absolute connection and that this must stop.

Does any of that sound impolite or irrelevant? In the course of a few incisive questions, Mr. Warwa got the good doctor to admit that his initial claim of the unusual form of cancer was grossly inflated. He got him to acknowledge that his purpose in his Norway trip was to spread the news of the inflated cancer rates and to get media attention. He admitted that he could not say that all the health problems in the Chipewayan community were a result of the oil sands.

This is a perfectly proper exercise in questioning a witness and one we would expect our parliamentarians to perform. You don’t just accept the version that walks in the door without testing it against other known information.

Let’s go on to another member of Mr. Nikiforuk’s rogue’s gallery of communist questioners.

Peter Braid (addressing Dr. O’Connor at the outset): I certainly appreciate the importance you place on advocacy. I think that's central to any physician's role.

Wow! That certainly hits below the belt. It is a wonder O’Connor ever recovered from the piece of inordinate impertinence.

Peter Braid: In an earlier question, I think Mr. Calkins referred to the unfortunate higher incidence of diabetes among the aboriginal population. I'm not a scientist or a physician, but as I understand it, one of the reasons for that unfortunate higher incidence is the role of genetics. Have you considered what role, if any, genetics may play with respect to the issues you're speaking about in Fort Chip?

Dr. O’Connor: It could play a part. That is why I left it out there as a question.

Does that sound like somebody making a case for the aboriginals being responsible for their own cancer? It is basic medical science to screen out all relevant possibilities to determine both the illnesses and their causes. These are perfectly acceptable questions.

Blaine Calkins, the other member of the gang of four, got Dr. O’Connor to admit that he did not know very much about the incidence of other health factors amongst the Chipewayans, such as smoking, that might cause more serious diseases. He also got the doctor to admit that he didn’t know very much about bacteria and viruses that effect the strange appearance of the kind of fish eaten by the natives. Again, these are perfectly relevant questions for determining health issues and environmental factors that might explain the observations.

Peter Braid (speaking to Mr. Nikiforuk at the outset): Mr. Nikiforuk, your perspective on the oil sands is critical. I'm just trying to understand what your suggestions or your recommendations are with respect to the ongoing development of the oil sands, how it might be sustainable, and quite frankly, because you seem to be advocating this, how we replace our carbon-based energy system in the world.

Ohmygosh! He is not the slightest bit interested in what Nikiforuk has to say. How did he even get on this committee?

In fact, the only member of the committee to really go after Nikiforuk was Jeff Watson who wanted the journalist to clarify a hyperbolic column he had written comparing Canadian agencies to the old Soviet politburo. That culminated in a bit of an uproar on the committee, but aside from the aggressiveness of Watson, the questions were not inappropriate as they were aimed at the credibility of the witness. If you going to engage in polemics then you have to expect some blowback. Polemicists should not expect softball questions in such a forum.

And considering his depiction of the four Conservative members of the committee as communists, it is clear communism is a strain that runs through Mr. Nikiforuk's thinking.

One of the things that came out of Nikiforuk's testimony that did not get challenged, surprisingly, is that he sucks and blows at the same time. On the one hand he describes the environmental degradation at each stage of the oil sand refining process, including the bitumen stage, as if this is something we need to stop doing, then he goes on to complain that we just sell the bitumen to the U.S. where the value-added refining takes place and that this costs us jobs and we should be doing the refining here.

You can go to this website to read the transcript in full.

All you unbelievers are going to burn in hell and probably take New York city with you!

Courtesy of Jewel Samad, AFP, Getty Images

Isn’t this a great picture of the Goreacle!

It reminds me of one of those old U.S. military recruiting posters, the ones the said “Uncle Sam want you”.

Except I don’t think the Reverend Gore is asking for people to follow him, since he generally only preaches to the choir. I think he is suggesting that bad things will (or should) happen to those who don’t follow his religion.

Like these folks, for example, and this guy.

And, he is not alone. Here is another pastor predicting the end of the world after receiving personal advice from God. He is suggesting stockpiling supplies for 30 days, an odd thing to do if the world is about to end. Perhaps the triggering event, which he predicts will occur in New York city, has to do with the deniers' meeting and Al Gore’s curse.

The new secular religion of environmentalism

From time to time I carry on an e-mail debate with one of the senior editors of one of the Toronto daily newspapers. He is one of the few that spends some time crossing swords with his readers. Many columnists don’t acknowledge you, especially if you have disagreed with their points of view. This guy is different and I enjoy our infrequent interchanges.

Recently, I sent him a commentary on how I saw the new secular religion of environmentalism. He liked it, and said it was the best description of it he’d seen, it was “brilliant”. It is not often one receives such high praise from a hard-boiled newspaper editor, so I thought I would reproduce it below:

“It is now trite to say that environmentalism has become the new secular religion. It has its God (the IPCC), its dogma (curb CO2 at all costs), its high priests (Al Gore and David Suzuki), it has a narrative (human destruction of the planet), it has breakaway sects (the people who advocate non-reproduction of humans), it has apocalyptic predictions about the end of the world (mainly Gore's Inconvenient Truth) and it has a Bible (the Kyoto Protocol), and if one only follows the path, the people on the Earth will be saved.”

That was the paragraph he really liked. I don’t believe he bought into the one that followed:

“When you say you believe in the IPCC (i.e. you believe in God) but not in the literal truth of the Bible (Kyoto), then the fundamentalists attack you for your lack of faith -- you are a mere deist. The funny thing about religions is that you think you are disputing only the actual beliefs and not the people who believe them. But people's egos are so tied to their belief systems that any attack on it cannot be seen as anything but an attack on them.”