Bishop Hill A meeting of moderates
Jun 22, 2011 Climate: Sceptics Climate: other I am still pretty overwhelmed with "stuff" at the moment. Just life things, really - IT problems (Bill Gates, you are useless), school problems (Perth & Kinross council, you are worse) and of course the day job too. This is leaving precious little time for the blog and for thinking about peace conferences.
Almost off the top of my head, therefore, is the idea that the objectives for such a peace conference should be quite limited. So when Leo Hickman suggests as a starting point...
Unimpeachable, transparent, uncorrupted science
Energy security
"Clean" energy (if CO2 is not your concern, then surely reducing localised air pollution is a valid goal?)
Halting deforestation
Halting biodiversity loss
Conserving marine habitats
Avoiding economic instability
Protecting the poor and vulnerable
Ensuring global food supplies
...it seems to me that he is hopelessly overambitious. At the very most, a conference might address the first point. That would be an important objective. The rest is a wish-list, with many tradeoffs needing to be made. These are not questions to be decided at conferences.
Reader Comments (122)
All you have to do Bishop is ask for proof for all the things he calims as a staring point. Not one or two but all of them. In my judgement these are meaningless pinko talking points of no value to serious people.
But how do I know who is serious here?
Points two through eight are political, surely. Does he expect us to disagree on protecting the poor and vulnerable? No, of course not. Then comes the sneaky follow-up, if you don't buy into my ideas you are going to hurt them. Political. Let's just stick to the science, we do not need to deal with school debating team tactics and rhetorical tricks. Let's start with what we know about historical climate. Or maybe whence comes the derivation of the figure for climate sensitivity. Those alone will serve to reach an impasse.
Someone suffering from a food shortage ("ensuring global food supplies") might be all in favor of plowing under a section of jungle so as to make more arable land. That is at directly at odds with another purportedly uncontroversial value of "halting deforestation". In practice in both South America and Africa, it has often been the preferred choice of the people most directly affected (the people that live in or near the forest) however. Do the forests belong to them wholly? Somewhat? Or to "the world" so that they need to be prevented from deforesting "their" land, because the world has a prior claim to a certain number of trees?
Any conference that prioritized one value above the other, which is necessary wherever these goals come into conflict, would be imposing new priorities on those more directly affected than the decision makers. By happy coincidence, some of the time the decisions of the conference and of the people might align, but there is no necessity that they would often or at all -- and it is in fact unlikely since those in the conference naturally know less of the relative costs and benefits that will be born by the people they are deciding for that those people do for themselves.
Specifically in the case of food vs. trees, a major global solution to date has been to offer either money or food in exchange for an agreement not to deforest. I don't think it takes much imagination to see that giving people food or money in order to prevent them from developing self-sufficiency in something as fundamental as food supply goes at odds to "protecting the poor and vulnerable."
I suppose the shorter way to say this is that this is a fool's errand.
Hideous list. I would like Leo to chat about really simple stuff like valid science. But yes, go for the first on the list and see if we all fall in a heap.
Only a person with superficial understanding of these issues could suggest that such a list could be dealt with intelligently even in a series of meetings. Do you really want to waste your time with this guy?
Seems like he is proposing a Utopia with the inevitable set of incorruptible, selfless and all-seeing Guardians. We have seen the results seen such plans have produced; dystopias where the Guardians are demons perpetuating what's essentially a wicked fraud and extremely eco-unfriendly to boot.
However, taking the view that if you try do everything, you'll end up doing nothing so concentrate on the first and most approachable and fundamental task, "Unimpeachable, transparent, uncorrupted science", young Leo's enthusiasm is not to be discouraged; rather his efforts should be directed solely to the achievable. One task at a time. Achieve the first objective and the solutions to the others become clearer.
He might have included, "Achieving world peace" on his list as well as "Banishing injustice".
I don't really see that he's making any concrete proposal at all, just throwing out some warm and fuzzys that he dares anyone to disagree with (hands up anyone that doesn't want world peace and free beer). If he believes that a debate is valuable then all he has to do is to give a platform equivalent to his to a 'sceptic' and make sure it's on equal terms with anything that Mr Hickman might expect. I'd suggest the best start would be for Messrs Black and Harribin to host a page each for Mr Hickman and a chosen sceptic, followed by a comment board unmoderated on either side other than for language and straight insult. If the BBC would allow that, then we are at least on the beginning of a path to true debate.
"If the BBC would allow that.."
About as likely as world peace, I fear!
if you're a moderate, bish, or a luke-warmer as leo ddescribed you, what's an extremist?
Where does current AGW policy take us with the list?
"Unimpeachable, transparent, uncorrupted science"
Well we all have our views here
"Energy security"
UK will be looking at power cuts, so will Germany if current trends continue
"Clean" energy (if CO2 is not your concern, then surely reducing localised air pollution is a valid goal?)
Lets increase nuclear capacity. Smaller scale plants, as in submarines etc
"Halting deforestation"
Agreed, but local people will do what they have to, to survive. Most of europe was forested, so we need to avoid hypocracy
"Halting biodiversity loss"
Agreed, but greatly exaggerated by Greenpeace et al
"Conserving marine habitats"
Agreed, but greatly exaggerated by Greenpeace et al, ocean acidification etc is a stupid scare, and just like AGW theory in the early days is getting a free pass through peer review
"Avoiding economic instability"
AGW theory is making this worse
"Protecting the poor and vulnerable"
AGW theory is making this worse
"Ensuring global food supplies"
AGW theory is making this worse
Why aren't Sunshine and Motherhood on his list? Are they not important too?
1) The first item alone could be broken down into many issues that we might or might not share opinions on. I agree that that is the most relevant issue to start with.
For the latter subjects, they can be considered thus –
2) We currently enjoy energy stability supplied to us from a range of sources including nuclear and coal. We have woven huge mineral and energy resources into the fabric of our country such that we hardly notice how much surrounds us.
3) While we still have pollution, we self determine how much we are prepared to tolerate. We export the dangers of serious pollutants to countries that are poor enough to risk their people and we import safe, sanitised products in return.
4) We live on an island that has been tamed, deforested and converted to farmland. We have seen unfettered population growth such that our land can no longer sustain us all. We supplement our agriculture by outbidding those less wealthy for food. Worse, we outbid them in order to create vanity fuels.
5) What little biodiversity the UK had after the ice age ended, we have reduced still further. Our wild animals are polite, secretive and mostly harmless, so there are few threats to our farming or our families. We eradicated many inconvenient insects using chemicals we have now banned and still enjoy the added benefits of reduced disease.
6) We have damaged our marine habitats in our pursuit of tasty protein and still use the oceans as a free resource for business and pleasure.
7) The best way for the UK to maintain economic stability is to stay as far up the pile as possible. That requires we stand on the economies below.
8) How dedicated are we to the things on Leo’s list, given that we owe our comfortable lives to having bent every rule for our betterment? Are we sure that our idea of protecting the poor and vulnerable would tally with the way they’d like to be protected?
I cant help with the Utopian wishlist, but if Bill Gates is getting your goat you can always try Linux. I have been using Linux Mint for a couple of years now, and have never been happier:
http://www.linuxmint.com/
Tiny, very happy to see you posting here :-)
Nicely sumarised and well put, as ever.
Bishop,
I fear you have misunderstood Hickman: the first item is the proposed subject of the debate, the other items are his notes for speaking against the motion. Would be interested to observe how he will spin 'Protecting the poor and vulnerable' - that's a new one for The Cause.
p.s. ubuntu linux
Hi Josh :-)
I’ve been throwing myself into warmist lion dens to see how many bites I can stand and still live. If I do it often enough they might wear their teeth down and learn to listen rather than attack... nah.
Are we sure that our idea of protecting the poor and vulnerable would tally with the way they’d like to be protected?
Jun 22, 2011 at 10:53 PM | TinyCO2
Brilliant post, but whose idea is "our" idea in the above extract?
What has "Unimpeachable, transparent, uncorrupted science" go to do with anything?
The issue is assclowns who think they can predict CO2 emissions 100 years into the future without needing or being able to predict energy price. Where's the science in that? If we can agree that's a fool's errand, we may get somewhere.I'm not holding my breath because making scary predictions that nobody here will live to see not come about are the warmists' best argument.
Thanks, Andrew, for posting this follow-up. I hope when time allows you get a chance to offer your fuller thoughts. Yes, the list is long, overambitious, idealistic etc. Of course, it is. I only threw them in as these are all topics that regularly feature in the wider climate debate either as proposed solutions, motivations or concerns - on both 'sides', to a varying degree. Strike things off the list, add some: it was only ever intended as a trigger for debate on this subject. As I said in my original article, building from the science up is clearly the first priority before even considering the possibility of common ground over possible policies.
Here is an idea , climate science should meet the standards expected of all other sciences when it comes to way its carried out . It is not good enough to excuse it becasue AGW is alleged to be the most important thing ever , in fact just the reverse is the case. If it can do that and drop its preference for political activism see in some of its leaders , a lot of progress can be made . It does not have to be perfect in approach , no science is , but it sure as hell should try to be .
Bottom line CIF environmental's management which Leo represents, have made it very clear indeed that they are fully committed to AGW as its sold by the CRU, IPCC etc They have no doubts nor room for any , they unquestionable support Mann , Jones etc . For them AGW is an article of fatih and its faith they are metaphorical are willing to go to fire for . How therefore can any movement or change ever be expected of them to obtain any pace ?
golf charley - but whose idea is "our" idea in the above extract?
If you asked me if I wanted all the things on Leo's list I'd say yes. Most people would. I want to save the tiger and the rain forests but then I don't have to live with them.
I think Billie Gates shld be disowned of his billions and the billions shld be put into the Western economy, where they belong.
Give Billie a proactive nobel if he must, a kiss from mooch obama and then a stamp in his fat billionaire arse, out of public view.
A couple of lawsuits that don't turn out the usual way shld do the trick.
for the rest you must be raving mad to use microsoft products, let alone buy them . Each and every single open source product that competes with them is better and simpler.
Leo Hickman
If you do not have full faith in the science produced by the IPCC, Bob Ward, Hockey Team et al, you would not be here.
Your employers still have full faith in the IPCC, Bob Ward, Hockey Team et al.
Where do you want to go with this?
Am I alone in saying I don't want unimpeachable science? I want impeachable, ie falsifiable, science.
"Unintended consequences" popped into my head while reading that list. The measures Leo and his "Do Gooders" would have us take in order to address the bottom 9 issues on the list would interact in unintended and harmful ways; like a geriatric on 9 different meds (no slight to geriatrics or meds intended). Besides, didn't they try all that in the old Soviet Union? /sarc
I was extremely heartened by Mr Hickman's latest article. Certainly I could nit-pick about some things in it, but - I think there are signs here for some genuine movement away from "everything the other side says is wrong".
"Unimpeachable, transparent, uncorrupted science" - that's the way forward. If we can all agree on that then I think there's real hope of lifting the climate debate out of the tedious rut that it has got into.
TinyCO2
Thanks for that!
If you believe the TV commercials for WWF, Greenpeace etc you should be able to live with a large wild cat. It is your fault if you can not, and if they die out, it is also your fault!
Meanwhile preventing power station development due to concerns about CO2, and preventing people having access to clean water is the fault of the AGW theorists, but the AGW theorists are not the people dying, so it is not important to them.
TinyCO2 rant not directed at you!
Picking 5 that are rather interlinked:
"Clean" energy
Halting deforestation
Halting biodiversity loss
Protecting the poor and vulnerable
Ensuring global food supplies
Ok, so clean energy presumably means non-nuclear renewables. Picking on biofuels, how do we scale up many of those without deforestation to provide woodchips, plant palms for bio-oil, plant biofuel crops rather than food crops or covering the land in bioreactors. Many of the biofuels still produce CO2, but this is good CO2 and gets captured and dumped, or sold on for later release.
Or is halting deforestation actually the best way for carbon mitigation? US and Australian practices don't seem to work, ie leaving the land to nature. Stuff grows, dies, burns and the more fire tolerant species survive reducing biodiversity in the process, not to mention releasing the carbon previously sequestered. Or is it better to clear old growth and plant with something new? If old C3 plants are replaced with more photosynthetically efficient C4 plants, or crops, more CO2 is sequestered and more food or even fuel produced.
Problem for a lot of the pro-AGW is the science has been hijacked for policy or vested commercial interests and many of the proposals aren't fit for purpose, or potentially counterproductive. The first bullet:
Unimpeachable, transparent, uncorrupted science
is something where we should all be in agreement on, other than whether some current climate science is achieving that goal. The rest is business and politics, in that order and often has very little to do with the science.
Forget about all except the first. The others are complex political issues which will bog us down for years.
We know how to solve the first.
Here is my proposal for any research intended to become part of any IPCC report (some are already adopted in part by the IPCC)
- The scientific paper must be available for free download (even if it was accepted by a journal which charges for subscriptions). The subject matter is too important to hide it behind such a paywall.
- No more anonymous referees - all peer review must going forward be open and transparent.
- Reproducibility - Ensure that all of the data used is provided to anyone via a simple download. This "data" should include computer code, time series data, spreadsheets. All processing done in the generation of the data should be done using free and easily found tools such as R or Openoffice for spreadsheets. This must be done simultaneously with publication and preferable before when the paper is still in pre-print or working paper form.
- Declaration of Interests - All IPCC scientists and contributors must state the source of their funding including consulting work where that work may create a conflict of interest.
- A live audit trail of all discussions regarding the contents of IPCC reports must be kept - perhaps via some mailing list to which all comments must be CC'd.
A conference which addresses all of these proposals in detail would be a good start.
The problem with science is it ultimately is based on reality, not wishful political agenda.
I really have no time for such conferences because they are based on a false assumption -- that science is negotiable. Never seen it work for very long. Sooner or later reality wins anyhow.
Oh, my CO2,
Lions and tigers and bears.
Lasso fur for all.
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Leo, it's the water vapor feedback. It's made up. Not real. Honest. Now get on with your conference, and please understand that the political movement that was CAGW was a War on the Poor.
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The trouble is that the better possible answers to pretty much all except the first point on the wish list are dependeent on whether or not you believe in CAGW.
The best answer to a particular problem for a sceptic may well involve a CO2 release unacceptable to a warmist. The best answer for a warmist is likely to seem to a sceptic to be an unnecessarily costly (and not just financially) way of avoiding CO2 release.
I see no way of avoiding long and fruitless battles on these points. After all if there were easy pain-free ways of agreeing on these points there wouldn't be so much to bother disagreeing about in the first place. It would matter as much to the general public as disagreements over the nature of black holes.
The only point that can be usefully addressed by both sides is the first.
Of course the warmists still naively imagine that secrecy is an unnecessary and unfortunate gift to sceptics instead of the only way that CAGW can be maintained.
Bishop
May I suggest you or some of your parishioners stop by Kloor’s place and engage with the spirit of reconciliation.
http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2011/06/22/a-climate-olive-branch/
You are absolutely correct. Also, attaining science that is not corrupt means rejecting peer reviewed, published articles that are corrupt, including all belonging to Mann, Jones, and all of The Team.
Dreadnought: Impeachable Science. thank you. I would prefer it as well.
I see all of those subjects irrelevant to the central question, are humans causing catastrophic warming of the planet.
They are pure emotional political.
The very first things which must be answered are;
1. Are humans warming the planet?
2. How much.
3. Will it influence the weather patterns?
4. Will such influence cause problems at locations?
5. Can these problems be managed?
Going beyond point 6 gets into the realm of fixing the cause, not the consequence, and that raises a huge number of questions on how and plausibility.
The fact that he would produce a list like that illustrates just what a Trojan horse of leftist causes "climate change" has become, and how the activist watermelons have brushed aside any pretense of scientific method in their pell-mell policy push.
He's not framing any of his issues as a scientific question, he's pushing (over and over and over) the line that the "science" (when the issue is in fact even a scientific one) is settled and that all that remains is calling in the Greenpeace lawyers to draft up the appropriate treaties and legislation.
Perhaps if Mr Hickman would unwind a point like "Halting deforestation" into "Establishing an open scientific and statistical framework for measuring the Earth's forest coverage" he'd get further, but - once again, if you're really talking about science and not policy activism - that's an effort for a different bunch of people.
Talking of Bill Gates, you must know that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded HPV vaccine trial in India has collapsed? The reason? Poor patient consent procedures, poor paperwork and then, 4 girls who recieved the vaccine died. The almighty Nature magazine informs eruditely that one of the '4 girls died of a fever'. I am sure Jenny McCarthy knows more medical stuff than that.
The Nature article is worth readying - the Indians are potrayed as ethical bankrupts who are morally incapable of holding their nerve with all that cash pouring in.
It is learned that the trial included 23,000 subjects. Can you believe that number?
When you buy a computer (PC), remember that Gates takes your money to cut down population growth in the Third World and Gordon and Betty Moore take your Intel money to 'save' the Amazon rainforest. Gates' father was an eugenicist and son does father proud.
Don't know what your IT problem is, but I highly recommend Standalone System Sweeper, about the only thing Bill Gates has done right since turning XP into a free remote hosting site for hackers (win7 isn't far behind). But you simply download this stripped down OS onto a CD or USB (whichever is easier to boot from) on a working computer, then boot from that on the corrupted computer. Then it sifts through the system(s) on the hard disk and eliminates the known malware. Obviously it does this without running the corrupted system which is critical sine malware can defeat most antivirus once the malware has a toehold.
From the Ecclesiastical Uncle, an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate with minimal qualifications and only half a mind:
As I understand it, the science required to understand climate and mankind's possible effects on it far exceeds what is known now, even after so much work. Any future scienctific work (or advance) that is conceivable will likely leave the deficit as significant as it is now.
Although science will never be key, it should, no doubt, be all the things Mr Hickman wants.Maybe it usually is, except of course when it is done in those notable 'centres of excellence' where it is employed to make a point rather than to explore. Maybe the problem more often is the 'spin' that is put on it by outsiders (though I recall one of the Bishop's recent contributors complaining about writing press releases about his own work). Spin is usually the work of polemicists like, for instance, Bob Ward, whose efforts Mr Hickman apparently finds unhelpful. Amen to that! However, setting up a forum for moderates is not going to silence them and they will continue to do their upmost to influence the course of events in their noisy way.
Mr Hickman might like to contemplate this: since the science tells us so little, policy based on the evil of CO2 and so on is actually without any basis other than the green religion bequeathed by predecessors who believed it was a meaningless fad. It is no basis for punishing the population now by stupid energy policies. Rather than propose meetings of the middle ground, should he not use his column to influence public opinion and the policy makers in as noisy a way as he can to adopt a more sensible policy that recognises the scientific vacuum ?
Many of the other items on Mr Hickman's wish list are not the immediate business of this blog. The others seem to be parts of the climate change problem and float around in much the same scientific vacuum. Should they not be managed accordingly, maybe with, however, a more wary eye to the future?
I second the advice to go with Linux, and Mint seems to be a reasonable choice. If you install it as a dual boot system, you will at least always be able to boot and use your files from the Linux side if Windows goes pear shaped.
I like PCLinuxOS Gnome edition best for newcomers to Linux. Debian is where you will end up, if you take to Linux permanently, but its a bit harder to manage so maybe better to leave to later. Any one of the three will do you better than what comes from Redmond.
The second important piece of advice is: no amateur with commercially available tools can disinfect an infected system. Do not even try. The only solution is reformat the hard drive and reinstall the OS of your choice. You may think you've done it, the AV people may tell you everything is fine. Don't believe them. Format and reinstall, or you don't know.
Good luck.
It seems to me that most of the 'Science Establishments' eg. Royal Soc. already think the science is unimpeachable and until there is a dramatic change in this attitude, there is little hope of progress. When a major learned society takes the initiative to get away from concensus science and takes serious steps to look at some of the empirical evidence, rather than believing in the output of imperfect models, then progress may be made.
Until then, a very long spoon is recommended.
"Jaw Jaw is better than War War"
There ought to be little harm engaging with environmental journalists like Leo Hickman. At least at the moment. They cannot really come away from such engagement with a worse view of "deniers" than they already have.
Nevertheless, extreme caution should be exercised. Is this a genuine reaching out? Think Sir Paul Nurse and James Delingpole.
Send him a copy of "The Hockey Stick Illusion" as a "peace" offering and offer to talk further after he has read it.
Your Grace,
This sounds like the intro a deep green manifesto, for which AGW is the beachhead. Interestingly Leo could be giving the game away a little; use the 'threat' of natural catastrophe to tear off large chunks of our nasty, resource intensive technological life.
AGW is obviously a tender spot, and quite important to the whole project. I'd be tempted to keep on the proof for AGW, unequivocal links between CO2 and the H20 feedbacks etc.
Good luck!
There is little point in the Bishop having to learn a completely new computer system, and new software, when we need him blogging. There are only so many hours in a day.
I can't recommend Linux. In my experience people who do vastly underestimate the switching costs in terms of time. And rather like Greens, think that acquiring this esoteric knowledge is "good for the user", like eating muesli. I already acquired this is an IT pro, and like messing about with software, so I have a rather different view. Zealots forget that computers are a simply a means to an end.
@Leo, nice to see you "engage" again...
This is only about the science.
Not because I am scientist (I am not) or because I believe in the need for universal scientific integrity (I do).
It is only about the science because every great political catastrophe has been built on a lie.
It does not start off as a lie, but when such a lie be believed by sufficient numbers of the population, then it takes on a life if its own. It is high jacked by those who see benefit for themselves: politicians.
The lie then becomes the "truth" and the justification for every action.
Cabinet meetings, Politburo meetings, Conclaves. Politics takes over the lie. And politics is power.
You yourself must see this lie every day? Put some green on a product and "Hey presto" - environmentally friendly. Your colleague Lucy? Call something ethical but charge three times the amount? An "ethical" 40,000 quid wedding? Why not buy a cheaper product and donate the difference to a direct action charity?
What is even more strange is these products are bought by people of higher than normal educational standards. Ignorance is not a function of when you left school.
And the Guardian goes along with this lie. It must. It has no choice. So the Guardian selects those stories that fit in with its political view of the world. Greenpeace, WWF, FoE IPCC, Bob Ward are all Political with a capital "P". Yet you present them as supporting "earth justice". And that in itself is a lie.
Many greens see themselves as the equivalent of Aldermaston Marchers, but are sure you are not just cannon fodder for a lie?
You must be well aware of the huge investments that are planned or lobbied for in the name of "Saving the Planet". Once you divert these sums into the hands of politics do you think that there will be ever be a way back. When a political movement based on a lie fails (and they always do) then society suffers. Greatly.
Are you certain that the cure is better than the illness? Because when based on a lie history points to the answer in one direction.
So this is only about the science. Find the truth, before truth is defined for you.
"This myth of Christ has served us well..."
"I can't recommend Linux....Zealots forget that computers are a simply a means to an end."
That's exactly why I DO recommend it. All the software is available in one place, pretty much everything is free, there are no hidden agendas or nasty little surprises lurking in glossy packages and if there's anything you don't like you can take it up with the programmer(s) personally. Going back to Windows after Linux is like going back to commercial TV after watching the ABC (or BBC or PBS, depending on your locale). You think 'who let all this crap in?'
But don't take my word for it, Bish; download a Live ISO, burn a CD and try it for yourself.
I can't help thinking Mr. Hickmans opinion of the sceptic position is opinion by proxy. It seems an awful lot of warmists "know" my opinions and motivations without asking a single question.
Mr. Hickman, have you read the HSI? Have you followed a single IPCC issue right through on any "moderate" blog?
Did any of that research raise a single issue for you? Did you not see any common ground, any "signal" within all that "noise"?
You want to talk about deforestation, I suspect you don't want to talk about the fraud whereby the WWF et al "protect" areas of forest that are so remote in such difficult terrain that are so inaccessible they would never be cut, allowing cutting (selling permits?) in all the other easy access areas, while raking in carbon credits.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/03/amazongate-part-ii-seeing-redd.html
No, I doubt you've read that, it's too easy to right off as "right wing" "noise" for someone so comfortable with their left wing working environment they happily condone censure-ship with their continued participation.
I can't think that there is much point in a peace forum the purpose of which is to see whether we all adhere to the full package set out in the green chapter of the Guardian compendium of acceptable views for the thinking man or woman.
For my part, it would be enough to see the science discussed openly with recognition of the uncertainties, and with data and computer programs fully disclosed, so that the normal process of scrutiny and criticism can properly apply. This ought to be possible without the sort of political unanimity on environmental issues that Leo Hickman seems to think worth attempting.