John Cook's Climate Change Mythbusters 4

This is part of a series reposting material from John Cook's Skeptical Science website. Although he is a physicist rather than a specialist in climate science, he is a convinced "global warmist" and tries to rebut frequently-raised objections to the theory. However, it is always possible to question the data (e.g. this valuable note about measuring temperature) and the line of argument. Please help advance the debate - with facts and logic.
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Is there a scientific consensus on global warming?

What The Science Says:
97% of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming.

Climate Myth: There is no consensus
The Petition Project features over 31,000 scientists signing the petition stating "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide will, in the forseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere ...". (Petition Project)

Science achieves a consensus when scientists stop arguing. When a question is first asked – like ‘what would happen if we put a load more CO2 in the atmosphere?’ – there may be many hypotheses about cause and effect. Over a period of time, each idea is tested and retested – the processes of the scientific method – because all scientists know that reputation and kudos go to those who find the right answer (and everyone else becomes an irrelevant footnote in the history of science). Nearly all hypotheses will fall by the wayside during this testing period, because only one is going to answer the question properly, without leaving all kinds of odd dangling bits that don’t quite add up. Bad theories are usually rather untidy.

 

But the testing period must come to an end. Gradually, the focus of investigation narrows down to those avenues that continue to make sense, that still add up, and quite often a good theory will reveal additional answers, or make powerful predictions, that add substance to the theory.

 

So a consensus in science is different from a political one. There is no vote. Scientists just give up arguing because the sheer weight of consistent evidence is too compelling, the tide too strong to swim against any longer. Scientists change their minds on the basis of the evidence, and a consensus emerges over time. Not only do scientists stop arguing, they also start relying on each other's work. All science depends on that which precedes it, and when one scientist builds on the work of another, he acknowledges the work of others through citations. The work that forms the foundation of climate change science is cited with great frequency by many other scientists, demonstrating that the theory is widely accepted - and relied upon.

 

In the scientific field of climate studies – which is informed by many different disciplines – the consensus is demonstrated by the number of scientists who have stopped arguing about what is causing climate change – and that’s nearly all of them. A survey of 928 peer-reviewed abstracts on the subject 'global climate change' published between 1993 and 2003 shows that not a single paper rejected the consensus position that global warming is man caused (Oreskes 2004).

 

A follow-up study by the Skeptical Science team of over 12,000 peer-reviewed abstracts on the subjects of 'global warming' and 'global climate change' published between 1991 and 2011 found that of the papers taking a position on the cause of global warming, over 97% agreed that humans are causing it (Cook 2013). The scientific authors of the papers were also contacted and asked to rate their own papers, and again over 97% whose papers took a position on the cause said humans are causing global warming.

 

 

Lead author John Cook created a short video abstract summarizing the study:

Several studies have confirmed that “...the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes”. (Doran 2009). In other words, more than 97% of scientists working in the disciplines contributing to studies of our climate, accept that climate change is almost certainly being caused by human activities.

 

We should also consider official scientific bodies and what they think about climate change. There are no national or major scientific institutions anywhere in the world that dispute the theory of anthropogenic climate change. Not one.

 

In the field of climate science, the consensus is unequivocal: human activities are causing climate change.

Basic rebuttal written by GPWayne

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

EU membership - has Parliament buried the "smoking gun" letter from 1960?

Albert Burgess's second piece here on Broad Oak included a photocopy of a crucial letter from the Lord Chancellor to Edward Heath in 1960. Heath had been made Lord Privy Seal by the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and was tasked with negotiating the UK's entry into what was then known as the Common Market. When he himself became Prime Minister, Heath finally took us in. The importance of the letter is that it shows that Heath had been told of the constitutional implications almost a dozen years before.

As the copy I received was a little faint, I looked for another and found an edited-down transcript at www.freebritain.org.uk/articles (see first link above), listed as "Heath's Lie That There Would Be No Loss of Sovereignty".  It ended with a URL link to the House of Commons library website.

Trouble is, it's gone.

So I've emailed Parliament's webmaster as follows:
________________________
 

Date: 22 September 2013 19:52

Subject: Documents relating to the preparations for our entry into the Common Market etc

To: webmaster@parliament.uk

Dear Sir

I have come across a photostat of a letter written in December 1960 by Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, to Edward Heath, discussing the constitutional implications of EC membership.

 The document was titled

 "RESEARCH PAPER 10/79
Appendix 2 Letter to Edward Heath from Lord Kilmuir, December 1960"

and the URL was quoted as

http://www.parliament.uk/briefingpapers/commons/lib/research/rp2010/RP10-079.pdf

but the document cannot be found there now.

 

1. Can you tell me where it is now to be found?

2. Please direct me to other letters, briefings, minutes etc that bear on the same issues as in Lord Kilmuir's letter.

3. If there is any material of this kind that has not yet been made publicly available, can you please tell me when it will be released?

4. If a Freedom of Information request is needed, to whom should it be addressed?

Yours sincerely
___________________

Correction: the document reference I gave you was assigned by the organisation at whose website I found the letter. However, the letter itself is from Lord Kilmuir to Edward Heath when the latter was Lord Privy Seal, in December 1960, and the early part of it includes these words:

"I have no doubt that if we do sign the Treaty, we shall suffer some loss of sovereignty [...] Adherence to the Treaty of Rome would, in my opinion, affect our sovereignty in three ways:-

 

“Parliament would be required to surrender some of its functions to the organs of the Community; The Crown would be called on to transfer part of its treaty-making power to those organs; Our courts of law would sacrifice some degree of independence by becoming subordinate in certain respects to the European Court of Justice...”

I hope this will help to locate the document.

__________________________

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

John Cook's Climate Change Mythbusters 3

This is part of a series reposting material from John Cook's Skeptical Science website. Although he is a physicist rather than a specialist in climate science, he is a convinced "global warmist" and tries to rebut frequently-raised objections to the theory. However, it is always possible to question the data (e.g. this valuable note about measuring temperature) and the line of argument. Please help advance the debate - with facts and logic.
_______________________________________________________

Positives and negatives of global warming

What The Science Says:
Negative impacts of global warming on agriculture, health & environment far outweigh any positives.

Climate Myth: It's not bad
"Two thousand years of published human histories say that warm periods were good for people. It was the harsh, unstable Dark Ages and Little Ice Age that brought bigger storms, untimely frost, widespread famine and plagues of disease." (Dennis Avery)

Here’s a list of cause and effect relationships, showing that most climate change impacts will confer few or no benefits, but may do great harm at considerable cost.

Agriculture

While CO2 is essential for plant growth, all agriculture depends also on steady water supplies, and climate change is likely to disrupt those supplies through floods and droughts. It has been suggested that higher latitudes – Siberia, for example – may become productive due to global warming, but the soil in Arctic and bordering territories is very poor, and the amount of sunlight reaching the ground in summer will not change because it is governed by the tilt of the earth. Agriculture can also be disrupted by wildfires and changes in seasonal periodicity, which is already taking place, and changes to grasslands and water supplies could impact grazing and welfare of domestic livestock. Increased warming may also have a greater effect on countries whose climate is already near or at a temperature limit over which yields reduce or crops fail – in the tropics or sub-Sahara, for example.

Health

Warmer winters would mean fewer deaths, particularly among vulnerable groups like the aged. However, the same groups are also vulnerable to additional heat, and deaths attributable to heatwaves are expected to be approximately five times as great as winter deaths prevented. It is widely believed that warmer climes will encourage migration of disease-bearing insects like mosquitoes and malaria is already appearing in places it hasn’t been seen before.

Polar Melting

While the opening of a year-round ice free Arctic passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans would confer some commercial benefits, these are considerably outweighed by the negatives. Detrimental effects include loss of polar bear habitat and increased mobile ice hazards to shipping. The loss of ice albedo (the reflection of heat), causing the ocean to absorb more heat, is also a positive feedback; the warming waters increase glacier and Greenland ice cap melt, as well as raising the temperature of Arctic tundra, which then releases methane, a very potent greenhouse gas (methane is also released from the sea-bed, where it is trapped in ice-crystals called clathrates). Melting of the Antarctic ice shelves is predicted to add further to sea-level rise with no benefits accruing.

Ocean Acidification

A cause for considerable concern, there appear to be no benefits to the change in pH of the oceans. This process is caused by additional CO2 being absorbed in the water, and may have severe destabilising effects on the entire oceanic food-chain.

Melting Glaciers

The effects of glaciers melting are largely detrimental, the principle impact being that many millions of people (one-sixth of the world’s population) depend on fresh water supplied each year by natural spring melt and regrowth cycles and those water supplies – drinking water, agriculture – may fail.

Sea Level Rise

Many parts of the world are low-lying and will be severely affected by modest sea rises. Rice paddies are being inundated with salt water, which destroys the crops. Seawater is contaminating rivers as it mixes with fresh water further upstream, and aquifers are becoming polluted. Given that the IPCC did not include melt-water from the Greenland and Antarctic ice-caps due to uncertainties at that time, estimates of sea-level rise are feared to considerably underestimate the scale of the problem. There are no proposed benefits to sea-level rise.

Environmental

Positive effects of climate change may include greener rainforests and enhanced plant growth in the Amazon, increased vegitation in northern latitudes and possible increases in plankton biomass in some parts of the ocean. Negative responses may include further growth of oxygen poor ocean zones, contamination or exhaustion of fresh water, increased incidence of natural fires, extensive vegetation die-off due to droughts, increased risk of coral extinction, decline in global photoplankton, changes in migration patterns of birds and animals, changes in seasonal periodicity, disruption to food chains and species loss.

Economic

The economic impacts of climate change may be catastrophic, while there have been very few benefits projected at all. The Stern report made clear the overall pattern of economic distress, and while the specific numbers may be contested, the costs of climate change were far in excess of the costs of preventing it. Certain scenarios projected in the IPCC AR4 report would witness massive migration as low-lying countries were flooded. Disruptions to global trade, transport, energy supplies and labour markets, banking and finance, investment and insurance, would all wreak havoc on the stability of both developed and developing nations. Markets would endure increased volatility and institutional investors such as pension funds and insurance companies would experience considerable difficulty.

Developing countries, some of which are already embroiled in military conflict, may be drawn into larger and more protracted disputes over water, energy supplies or food, all of which may disrupt economic growth at a time when developing countries are beset by more egregious manifestations of climate change. It is widely accepted that the detrimental effects of climate change will be visited largely on the countries least equipped to adapt, socially or economically.

Basic rebuttal written by GPWayne

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Weekend Reading (Heavy Division)

This, by Jonathan Franzen in Saturday week's Grauniad review, is the best essay I have read for several months.  Based on his translation and exegesis of the writings of an Austrian I'd never heard of - Karl 'The Great Hater' Kraus (1874-1936), a kind of proto-blogger - the piece is hard to summarise.  (The Graun's sub-editor has failed hopelessly in this task, so don't be offput by the rubric.)

So I've assembled a little set of extracts.  If you like them you'll read it ... 

"... rather live among the Germans. For although they've strapped art into the Procrustean Folding Bed of their commerce, they've also made life sober, and this is a blessing: fantasy thrives, and every man can put his own light in the barren windowframes. Just spare me the pretty ribbons! "

"Believe me, you color-happy people, in cultures where every blockhead has individuality, individuality becomes a thing for blockheads." You're not allowed to say things like this in America nowadays, no matter how much the billion (or is it 2 billion now?) "individualised" Facebook pages may make you want to say them. 

Vienna in 1910 was, thus, a special case. And yet you could argue that America in 2013 is a similarly special case: another weakened empire telling itself stories of its exceptionalism while it drifts towards apocalypse of some sort, fiscal or epidemiological, climatic-environmental or thermonuclear. 

For Kraus, the infernal thing about newspapers was their fraudulent coupling of Enlightenment ideals with a relentless pursuit of profit and power. With technoconsumerism, a humanist rhetoric of "empowerment" and "creativity" and "freedom" and "connection" and "democracy" abets the frank monopolism of the techno-titans; the new infernal machine seems increasingly to obey nothing but its own developmental logic, and it's far more enslavingly addictive, and far more pandering to people's worst impulses, than newspapers ever were. 

"An invention for shattering the Koh-i-noor to make its light accessible to everyone who doesn't have it. For fifty years now it's been running, the machine into which the Mind is put in the front to emerge at the rear as print, diluting, distributing, destroying. The giver loses, the recipients are impoverished, and the middlemen make a living"

Amazon is well on its way to making writers into the kind of prospectless workers whom its contractors employ in its warehouses 

... the next thing you know, you're translating The Last Days of Mankind as The Last Days of Privileging the Things I Personally Find Beautiful. And maybe this is not such a bad thing. Maybe apocalypse is, paradoxically, always individual, always personal. I have a brief tenure on Earth, bracketed by infinities of nothingness, and during the first part of this tenure I form an attachment to a particular set of human values that are shaped inevitably by my social circumstances. 

Kraus's signal complaint – that the nexus of technology and media has made people relentlessly focused on the present and forgetful of the past ... something that has become a fixture of modernity. The experience of each succeeding generation is so different from that of the previous one that there will always be people to whom it seems that any connection of the key values of the past have been lost. As long as modernity lasts, all days will feel to someone like the last days of humanity. 

You get the picture ...


This post first appeared on the Capitalists@Work blog
 

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

John Cook's Climate Change Mythbusters 2

This is part of a series reposting material from John Cook's Skeptical Science website. Although he is a physicist rather than a specialist in climate science, he is a convinced "global warmist" and tries to rebut frequently-raised objections to the theory. However, it is always possible to question the data (e.g. this valuable note about measuring temperature) and the line of argument. Please help advance the debate - with facts and logic.
_______________________________________________________

Solar activity & climate: is the sun causing global warming?

What The Science Says:
In the last 35 years of global warming, sun and climate have been going in opposite directions

Climate Myth: It's the sun
   "Over the past few hundred years, there has been a steady increase in the numbers of sunspots, at the time when the Earth has been getting warmer. The data suggests solar activity is influencing the global climate causing the world to get warmer." (BBC)

Over the last 35 years the sun has shown a slight cooling trend. However global temperatures have been increasing. Since the sun and climate are going in opposite directions scientists conclude the sun cannot be the cause of recent global warming.

The only way to blame the sun for the current rise in temperatures is by cherry picking the data. This is done by showing only past periods when sun and climate move together and ignoring the last few decades when the two are moving in opposite direction.

 

Figure 1: Global temperature (red, NASA GISS) and Total solar irradiance (blue, 1880 to 1978 from Solanki, 1979 to 2009 from PMOD).

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Defending savers: a letter to Mr Peter Hitchens

Mr Peter Hitchens
c/o Mail on Sunday
Associated Newspapers Limited
Northcliffe House
2 Derry Street
London W8 5TT


Monday, 16 September 2013


Dear Mr Hitchens


Inflation protection and government’s abandonment of its moral obligation to savers

I emailed you on 1st September in response to your Mail on Sunday article that day (the “Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Carney?” section on monetary inflation and savers). If you have seen it and are simply not responding, then that’s fine, because you must be very busy.

But in case the email has not been forwarded to you (and I also tried to follow up with a comment on your blog that may have been blocked), please find enclosed a copy of what I said.

In brief, it seems clear that when NS&I Index-Linked Savings Certificates were first introduced in 1975, both sides of the House in both Houses of Parliament accepted that protecting savers and pensioners from inflation was a social obligation.

Doesn’t this strengthen the case for restoration, and will you – with your high profile - help?


Yours sincerely

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Teacher is a fool

Not personally, but collectively.

Put yourself in the animal slippers of the girl below this Sunday morning:

From the Daily Mail (print edition), !9 September 2013

Now put yourself in the shoes of her partner.

Teachers' working hours have, very carefully, never been decided. Unlike social workers':

You'd think the divorce rate among teachers would be high, but although it's more than some it's less than others - about 1 in 8 marriages in the US. One reason is that in the UK, they tend to hook up during teacher training and after that have virtually no social life except on holiday, when they are either working to catch up on all the stuff they told their managers they'd already done, or crawling into GP surgeries to cash in all the health "brown points" they've accumulated during term time, or letting their hair down on some 18-30 jaunt like pit ponies brought up from the mine for their annual gallop round a green field. The divorced ones fantasise openly about meeting a rich man.

Teachers, said a landlord of mine when he went on the pull, are gullible. But think of the career path: before compulsory 16 - 18 education/training, they were the ones who had gone through their school careers working for pats on the head and gold stars; for symbolic and often deferred approval. The system has selected for obedience, diligence and emotional vulnerability; and now that women are the majority of workers not only in the primary but also in the secondary phase, anyone who joins the "profession" enters into a competition with manipulable workaholics. Merely hint that her display is not quite as vivid as her colleague's, or that her lessons could be just a tad more interesting, and she'll burn the midnight oil down to the desktop. With their abject fear of failure, they're fantastically easy to bully.

And the definition of success is not to be one. So if blessed with some nous and a benevolent line manager, the path is out and up: pastoral care, curriculum management, senior management, headship, adviser, Ofsted inspector.

Or, of course, to start a family and then come back part-time, or not at all. Or even to take one horrified look at what they've done and switch, fast: a fellow trainee went and joined the BBC straight after the post-grad teacher training course, a colleague did a couple of years and then left to be a rep for a chemical company, others became computer engineers, estate agents or bulk-sold for a plastic bag manufacturer, and so on.

Teachers are almost completely incapable of hard negotiation. Ignore the odd noisy activist you'll see on news clips of NUT conferences: the union path is another one out of the classroom. They're so bad at it that they wait for decades for someone else to do something for them. In 1974, the Houghton committee turned its attention to teachers' remuneration (as an afterthought: the original focus was nurses) and considered the demands and skills of the job in relation to similarly responsible work in the private sector. This was to sort out the perennial cyclical recruitment crisis, once and for all.

The result was a big bump in pay, and staff car parks filled up with new models to replace the bangers. But teachers, having been warned at the time not to let this slip, lost out almost immediately to the roaring inflation of the mid-70s, and very soon slid down the comparative pay ladder to their natural, humble and inoffensive niche.

The years rolled by and in came a Labour administration keen to show that it was succeeding in education; so pay got more generous and the exam grades got inflated. Now we have austerity, and exams are being changed, teachers' pay has been frozen for a couple of years, the retirement age has been put back by 5 years, and their conditions of service have just been officially weakened (all a bad manager needs is more power). Ofsted are going into schools in areas of social deprivation with an agenda to find them failing and so trigger "special measures" intervention and ultimately conversion to "academy" status. Schools are privatising, others are starting up as "free schools" using education budget money and venues in all sorts of weird places.

There have always been more votes among parents than teachers, so that determines political angle and media coverage. First hint of industrial action and Superwimp dashes into a phone booth and becomes Uncaring Teacher in the blink of an eye.

Similarly, the attitude to teachers' social contribution is bipolar: by turns they are either unable to teach a cat to drink cream, or commanded to teach manners, ICT, social skills for business, political correctness, ecological salvation and the virtues of the allegedly democratic system that governs us.

Not that the whole institution is necessarily about teaching. Its other role is to keep children off the streets, and Ed Miliband's lovely new idea is to turn schools into 8am - 6pm nurseries for 4 - 11 year olds. And the implications for the educational workforce? Socialism can only go so far, don't you know.

Nor has the examination system ever received a consistent, definitive brief. Half the time it's about meeting some minimum standard for all, the rest of the time it's an egghead-sorting machine to decide who has a small, medium, large or chickenbanger brain. In any case, the winners tend to be the organic free-range children from percheries in rural areas, market towns and treelined suburbs, who constitute the real middle class and supply most of the green benches in Westminster.

Fools. Clever, well-qualified, hard-working fools. Only teachers and horses.

Meanwhile...

Why teach dozens of young children when you could teach millions?
Pic source: Daily Mail

 

Being played till all hours by 10-year-olds I know this week.
Curriculum links: PSHE, SMSC, ICT
(Pic source)

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.