I have an article up on Spiked today about the melting Greenland ice cover story from a few weeks back.

‘Satellites see Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Melt’, announced a press release on 24 July from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institution of Technology. Satellites that constantly scan environmental conditions on the planet’s surface had revealed that from 8 July to 12 July, 97 per cent of the surface of the ice sheet contained water rather than ice, whereas typically just 45 per cent of the surface area melts at this time of year. The extent of this melt is not in itself significant – just millimetres on top of an ice sheet that is 3.5 kilometres thick at its deepest point, most of which soon refreezes.

In spite of the headline, the press release itself went on to explain how the ‘unprecedented’ extent of surface ice melt wasn’t, in fact, unprecedented. ‘Ice cores from Summit [a central Greenland station] show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time’, said Lora Koenig, a NASA researcher involved in the analysis of the satellite data.

I had long and interesting chat with sea ice researcher at the Open University, Mark Brandon before writing the article. Mark and I probably disagree about a number of things, but on the expectations of science, we did seem to find some common ground. What emerged most strongly for me was that, in the current atmosphere of the climate debate, the possibilities of doing ‘value free’ research are greatly reduced: any scientific development which paints a picture of things being better or ‘worse than we thought’ has immediate implications for the debate.

Coincidentally, just before the article was published, the Today Programme on BBC R4 had a feature on some ongoing scientific research:

Preliminary results from a European Space Agency satellite measuring the thickness of Arctic ice suggests it is melting faster than previously thought.

Seymour Laxon of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling said the thickness of the ice could now be measured to an accuracy of 10cm (3.5in).

He said there has been a “very strong decline” in the thickness of the ice, and if the current trend continues, the Arctic could be ice-free on a summer’s day by the end of the decade.

Any suggestion that Arctic ice — summer sea ice, to be precise — is ‘melting faster than previously thought’ should raise the question ‘how fast did you think it was melting?’ As I discussed in the article, according to ‘scientists’, the Arctic would be ice-free next year.

Although it is good to see scientists engaging critically with climate alarmism, such corrections seem to have limited potential. Although climate activists and politicians have emphasised the scientific consensus on climate change, their alarmism has found its expression in the public sphere after press releases announcing scientific claims. These press-released stories often turn out not be based on research but on opinion or guesswork. For instance, in 2007, when Arctic sea ice reached its lowest extent since 1979, a rash of speculation followed about when the ice might disappear altogether. In 2008, the Observer happily reported that 2013 would be the date of the ice cap’s demise, according to just one researcher’s claim.

But this turned out to be mere guesswork, as did other estimates of the future of Arctic sea ice, which put the date of disappearance much further into the future. The fact of this speculation was lost by journalists emphasising the scientific credentials of those doing the guessing; it was guesswork, but it was scientists’ guesswork.

And so it was, once again, that the narrative of doom preceded the science. ‘Preliminary results’ should not be interesting to any news desk. ‘Preliminary results’ are not results. And the interview proceeded, to abandon any attempt to reflect on the story critically, or to ask what the significance of the story really is. Ditto, the following headline from the Observer

Rate of Arctic summer sea ice loss is 50% higher than predicted
New satellite images show polar ice coverage dwindling in extent and thickness

The BBC’s Roger Harrabin tweeted,

Potentially alarming analysis of Arctic ice from UCL. Seymour Laxon interview on Today Prog. The experiment continues. http://bbc.in/SdI6D7

Only ‘potentially alarming’… But being used to alarm, nonetheless.

What seems to be beyond the capacities of BBC and Guardian/Observer journalists is to ask questions about how and when the measurements of Arctic ice took place.

As the website for the Cryosat-2 programme — the satellite that produced the ‘potentially alarming results’ — says,

CryoSat was launched in 2010 to measure sea-ice thickness in the Arctic, but data from the Earth-observing satellite have also been exploited for other studies. High-resolution mapping of the topography of the ocean floor is now being added to the ice mission’s repertoire.

So the data from which the ‘potentially alarming’ result was produced consists of a series that began in April 2010, and has thus only had the chance to record Arctic conditions over two summers and two winters.

Some results from Cryosat-2 were announced in April this year.

After nearly a year and a half of operations, CryoSat has yielded its first seasonal variation map of Arctic sea-ice thickness. Results from ESA’s ice mission were presented today at the Royal Society in London.

In June 2011, the first map of Arctic sea-ice thickness was unveiled, using CryoSat data acquired between January and February of that year.
Now, the complete 2010–11 winter season data have been processed to produce a seasonal variation map of sea-ice thickness.

This is the first map of its kind generated using data from a radar altimeter and at such a high resolution compared to previous satellite measurements.

If these really are the first data relating to the volume of ice available to science, then it really is far too early for researchers to be claiming to be able to put a date on the demise of summer Arctic sea ice. Moreover, and never mind the failure of journalists to subject scientists’ claims to scrutiny, what was Seymour Laxon of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling doing, going on a mainstream news programme — perhaps the most listened-to news programme of the entire country — to explain that science was able to put a date on the terminal point of Arctic sea ice? The only thing he should have been able to say is that ‘it’s too early to say’.

Anything else is, frankly, a lie. The variation in sea ice volume detected by Cryosat-2 may well have been no more than weather. In order to make the predictions that Laxon made, he would have to assume that any variation can only be accounted for by anthropogenic climate change, and that the trend it detected would continue.

This is as clear a case of environmental politics preceding the science as any other alarmist story. I have no idea whether or not Laxon consciously allowed himself to speak prematurely on the decline of sea ice, and I do not care. The alarmist story is allowed to proceed in spite of facts, and without scrutiny or criticism.

UPDATE

Paul Matthews let me know by twitter that I was wrong to say the measurements were based just on Cryosat2. In the interview, he explains that the data were produced by using Cryosat2 and NASA’s Icestat satellite. Either way, however, the data he refers are measurements still only taken since 2010, which I still believe is far too short a time series to say anything about trends, let alone safely projecting them.

UPDATE 2

Andrew Orlowski has an interesting article about Laxon’s claims over at the Register.

Laxon has generated a torrent of headlines in the media. It’s the silly season, of course, so this is to be expected. But what most surprises me is that I can’t track down any evidence of the ‘research’ this is supposed to be from, nor even a press release. All this headline-making seems to have happened just on the basis of one man’s opinion. This opinion, from one man, gets turned into science, produced by ‘scientists’.

According to my ‘favourite’ newspaper…

Bill Clinton: cutting use of natural resources would help US economy
Former president says US would recover faster from financial crises if more effort was made to use resources sustainably

Clinton was speaking to the Re|Source conference in Oxford, and features a line-up of individuals with international profiles. Fiona Harvey of the Guardian was there, and had this to say about Clinton’s recipe for America’s recovery:

“We can grow even faster if we use less energy,” said Clinton in a conversation with the Guardian at the Resource 2012 conference in Oxford on Friday evening. “We have studies that show this. All that we need to do is find ways to finance this.”

He said the current financial system favoured the building of major projects such as coal-fired power stations, despite their energy intensity, because the value of energy efficiency was underrated.

Big financial backers are used to weighing up the finances of major infrastructure works, because they have long developed the financial models to work out the payback on their investment over the project’s lifetime.

But financing efficiency projects is more complex, and has received much less attention from investors, because the payback is spread more diffusely – among thousands of companies and individuals.

“This is the problem with going aggressively for efficiency, as we need to,” Clinton said. “If I want to finance efficiency savings, I need to go to lots of people and add all those savings together. But if I want to build a new coal-fired power station, I go to a few [backers] and I’ve done it.”

“We can grow even faster if we use less energy”… Has Clinton discovered some new principle which contradicts all existing scientific knowledge? Have the laws of thermodynamics changed? Does this hold true for any amount of ‘less energy’ used? Could we use less and less energy indefinitely, and ‘grow’ indefinitely? Is less, really, and in fact, more?

Of course not. And dear old Bill is confused about the difference between ‘using less’ and ‘efficiency’. He believes that somehow, inefficiencies are built into some kind of ‘system’. He believes you can change the system by ‘financing efficiency projects’. And this will somehow made it possible to ‘grow faster’.

This is nonsense, of course, unless you’re facing a shortage of the resource in the first place. We’re not. There are plenty of resources. But they are expensive at the moment. So it could be argued that making processes more energy efficient might lower the total cost of energy, leaving more money for other things. But this would depend in the first place on the ‘efficiency project’ being worthwhile. You could install a $million worth of things that improve efficiency, but only realise $100,000 worth of fuel savings a year. And then you’d have to decide whether you’d get a better return on the $million spent on efficiency, or some other thing.

Clinton wants to make efficiency an end in itself. This is a reinvention of the concept of ‘efficiency’. And as discussed in a recent post here, this reinvention of ‘efficiency’ in environmental terms, cannot produce growth, except in the twisted logic of environmentalism. Making this reinvented ‘efficiency’ the end of policy and of the production of energy means precisely the opposite of ‘growth’.

Nobody ever needed to tell the designers and financiers of of power stations to be ‘efficient’. If a team of designers could not produce increasingly efficient generator designs, they would quickly find themselves working in other fields. (Perhaps they might find themselves either working on the Guardian, or advising former presidents). And if financiers did not put emphasis on efficiency in their briefs to designers, they would soon find their stock falling. Designers being able to produce something more efficiently than existing systems is what makes financiers get their chequebooks out. And it’s not as if there is no incentive, what with oil prices being what they are.

But environmentalism holds that there is only one form of ‘efficiency’. And it’s not for anyone else to determine what the measure of ‘efficiency’ is — i.e. to make calculations of something’s efficiency in the terms that are of interest to them. Environmentalists believe they have invented — rather than reinvented — ‘efficiency’, and that nobody had ever heard of it.

And it’s an interesting rhetorical trick, a bit like the invention of the concept of ‘sustainability’. To be critical of ‘sustainability’ would sound like being critical of something that common sense tells you is right. Who is for ‘unsustainability’? It’s only when we look at the endless stream of nonsense that is produced by advocates of ‘sustainability’ that we discover that the common sense understanding of ‘sustainable’ is not the principle operating within the agenda. They’re talking about ‘sustainability’ in terms strictly narrowed by environmentalism. Nobody is against efficiency.

‘Efficiency’, says Clinton… And the room gives him a standing ovation, as though, for centuries, it had been the missing part of liberte, egalite, fraternite.

What does Clinton know about ‘efficiency’? What is the reason he was invited to the Re|Source conference? For sure, he might be able to shed some light on what happened in politics during his reign. But what does he really know about how much CO2 a power station produces? As much as Al Gore? He’s a celebrity, of course, and that’s why he turned up. He was briefed on what to say by his researchers. He’s just an actor. This was just a performance.

And the performance is extended onto the pages of the Guardian, where another actor, playing the part of a journalist called Fiona Harvey, penned the article. It looks like journalism. It looks like an article in a newspaper. But a vital component is missing from the scene, making it it impossible to suspend disbelief, and to find the performance convincing. The journalist has suspended disbelief. She believes the play she is in. And she forgets to notice that Clinton is talking unmitigated bullshit.

As the article points out, David Miliband and Peter Mandelson were also in attendance.

Earlier in the conference, Miliband warned of the destructive effects of resource overuse and scarcity, and Mandelson called for an end to subsidies that encouraged the overuse of fossil fuels and an increase in support mechanisms for clean energy, such as sun and wind power.

Mandelson said: “Some kinds of subsidies are key to opening up the new world but on the other hand there are some kinds which are the biggest obstacles to making progress.

Isn’t it odd that when politicians say ‘environment’, journalists’ brains switch off. It’s as if there were no reason to be sceptical of these politicians’ words. No need to check the facts, or to scrutinise the logic… when the politicians are talking about climate change in the right way.

Barry Gardiner MP has a written an article for the Guardian, which complains that ‘This government’s energy policies are a timebomb‘.

Sometime in 2018 or shortly thereafter, the UK will experience a crisis. Electricity supply will not be enough to meet demand. When this happens, people will look back to 2012 and the disastrous policy decisions taken by the UK.

Yes, indeed, it is true. Between now and 2015, 11.8GW of conventional generating capacity will be shut down. And between 2016 and 2019, a further 6.1GW of nuclear generating capacity is scheduled for decommissioning. Just 7 years from now, nearly 18GW of capacity will be lost. We seem to be in agreement with Gardiner. So what’s the issue?

The first is the publication of the draft bill on electricity market reform. The second is the imminent decision to cut potentially as much as 25% from onshore windfarm subsidies.

This complaint seems to be that uncertainty about the details of energy market reform, and the possibility of a cut in subsidies have dented investor confidence. No investment, no wind farms. No wind farms no plug to fill the UK’s energy gap.

What has become clear is that the government cannot rely on the market to supply the £110bn of investment in generating capacity that will be required to replace the old nuclear and coal power stations, which are likely to be turned off after 2017.

If this is news to the coalition, it must be news to Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party. And it was under that party’s administration that the existing arrangements were made. They came to office fifteen years ago, and made the environment central to their policy-making. Miliband himself sought to champion the climate issue internationally, and fought for tougher emissions and renewable energy targets in the UK, in the EU, and in the world.

Gardiner’s emphasis is on the financing of low carbon energy. Now he is in opposition, he has the luxury of criticising the coalition’s policies. But the current and previous government have both operated on the basis that the right policy framework would… for sure… create the conditions for investment in renewable energy. And compare the difference in rhetoric. In 2008, politicians like Ed Miliband and Peter Mandelson were talking, not about ‘keeping the lights on’ — avoiding an energy gap — but a ‘green industrial revolution’. The UK was set to become a world leader in renewable energy and other green tech. As I wrote in 2009, the government believed that nearly half a million jobs would be created by 2017, meaning that 1.3 million people would be working in the provision of environmental goods and services. Since then, unemployment has risen by nearly half the number of jobs promised. And the promises of jobs and an ‘industrial revolution’ have turned into threats about ‘timebombs’.

Gardiner should admit that if the current government is wrong to believe that the market would supply the finance for the UK’s energy ‘transformation’, so were his own colleagues in the Labour Party.

In the words of one senior city analyst: “The government’s policy is based on a lie.” He is too generous. It is based upon three. The government wants to tell people that their electricity will become cheaper. It will not. The government wants people to believe that new nuclear can be built without government subsidy. It cannot. The government wants to persuade people that it is neutral as between technologies. It is not.

The current government’s desire desire to change the energy market and subsidies for renewable energy are not whimsies. They may be poorly conceived, but they are at least owed to political, economic and material reality: there is no real public appetite for renewable energy, and it has embarrassed the current and previous government; it is expensive and increasingly so, and the level of subsidisation is further embarrassment, and likely to cause further hardship; and renewable energy as it currently exists simply doesn’t work as it is intended. If the current government’s policies existing and planned policies are ill-conceived, messy, and likely to fail, then so were the Labour government’s.

In the words of one senior city analyst: “The government’s policy is based on a lie.” He is too generous. It is based upon three. The government wants to tell people that their electricity will become cheaper. It will not. The government wants people to believe that new nuclear can be built without government subsidy. It cannot. The government wants to persuade people that it is neutral as between technologies. It is not.

The real lie that afflicted both governments was that you can pull policy levers, and material, economic and political realities will adjust themselves accordingly. Promises of money for investment, in the form of subsidies for renewable energy did not cause wind industry to boom. The following graph shows the cumulative capacity of planned, approved, refused, and built onshore wind farms in the UK, data from the Renewable UK website.

As the graph shows, onshore wind capacity has grown linearly, at a rate of about 485MW per year. In spite of claims that it was wind farm campaigners and climate change sceptics that stalled this progress, the rate at which wind farms have been given planning consent is more than double the rate at which they have been built. Clearly, therefore, there has been very little investment in the machinery which installs wind turbines. One explanation for this is the possibility that investors were never confident in the UK renewable energy market, in spite of the UK’s policies. Another possibility is that grid integration problems have stalled progress. A third explanation is that developers were ensuring the highest profits by ‘gaming’ the Renewables Obligation system — putting too much capacity onto the grid would mean devaluing the fake commodity (Renewables Obligation Certificates) invented by the government, to encourage investment.

Whatever the cause of the wind sector’s inertia, Gardiner’s own lie is the idea that this inertia could ever be overcome. At the rate at which wind farms have been built in the UK, and assuming a load factor of 80% for conventional and nuclear generating capacity and 30% for wind, it would take an entire century to fill the UK’s energy gap with onshore wind. So in order to have the 18GW gap closed by 2018, the rate of build would have to increase by a factor of 16 — and we have not even considered the problems of backup and intermitency. Does Gardiner really believe that the difference between the coalition’s policies and his own analysis amounts to this much?

Of course, there are other ways of producing energy that both governments have considered. The point is to emphasise that wind energy cannot, as Gardiner seems to believe, make any meaningful contribution to the closure of the energy gap by 2018. The point is, his own claims do far more to injure his own argument than they do damage to the Government. For instance, he continues,

In principle, a contract like this should work to incentivise investors and dispel their concerns over any future price uncertainty. The problem is that our government has caused real disquiet among the investment community because it has prevaricated about just who will sign these contracts. The government initially claimed that National Grid would be the counterparty, but National Grid has said it will not sign the contracts. The government first claimed that in the event of a default it would be the government who was sued in the courts, but claims it is the public who have to pay the contracts through their bills, and that government would not be liable. The whole thing is a mess and the uncertainty is choking off investment appetite.

He is right to say that the proposed policy is a mess, incoherent, full of contradiction, and likely to fail. He is right that investors are being put off, and were never very confidfent in the first place. But it was ever thus with the UK’s renewable energy policies, and it is unlikely to change while policy-makers labour under the misapprehension that you can simply set targets and make promises to reward investment, and LO! Britain will have a wonderful new energy grid. While this belief persists, expensive failure will follow expensive failure. It’s not the detail of the policy which is the problem, it is policies of this kind. What Gardiner forgets is reality.

Of the three low-carbon options, onshore wind is far and away the cheapest to build. So a government that simply wanted to produce a lot more electricity without producing a lot more greenhouse gas would likely favour onshore wind technology. In fact, onshore wind is the government’s least favoured option, as the Guardian has reported.

Never before has the UK required investment in its utilities sector on the scale this government must achieve, nor in a timeframe so brief, in order to keep the lights on past 2018. The government has begun to close down its energy options and the British public are going to pay the price.

Gardiner is simply wrong. The government itself has no objection to onshore wind at all. But it senses that it is a political embarrassment: increasingly, people don’t want them. Visible wind turbines were huge monuments to the pioneering of energy policies, but quickly came to stand instead for politicians’ intransigence, expensive energy bills and high profits for energy companies.

And worse, Gardiner uses the energy gap — as much a problem of his own making as it is the government’s — as a weapon against the government. Here we see that the poison presented as the antidote. Ambitious renewable energy targets and over-emphasis on wind created the problem, and now Gardiner suggest more wind will be the solution. No, it’s worse than that. The problem goes back further. The failure to permit the development of new generating capacity created the problem. For decades, UK governments have been terrified of environmentalists, to the extent that they simply rolled over, rather than allowed or comissioned the construction of new nuclear, gas, coal or oil-fired power stations. The public interest was sacrificed to avoid embarrassing political conflict. Governments didn’t believe that they had the muscle necessary to fight street-level environmentalism. So they dithered, and involved the environmental movement in policymaking, an unholy union epitomised by David hug-a-husky Cameron announcing his party’s energy policies on the rooftop of Greenpeace’s London offices. Now that the problem has come to fruition, manifested in the form of an energy gap, Gardiner’s proposition is that the government ignore the growing scepticism of renewable energy policies, and anger about increasing prices. It is a lie, says Gardiner, that we can have cheaper energy. He is a liar.

We can have cheaper energy. And we can close the energy gap. It would be quite simple.

All it involves is the repeal or suspension of the Climate Change Act, and other energy policies, including the EU’s renewable energy targets. Gardiner has all but admitted that this is inevitable. There is no chance of sufficient wind or nuclear power stations being built by 2018 to close the gap, and the alternatives are fossil fuel-fired power stations. The cost of energy would be reduced by allowing different technique of finding, extracting and producing it to be developed and to compete. While policies privilege inefficient forms of energy, there is no incentive to produce any.

By invoking the ‘time bomb’ analogy, Gardiner has revealed the truth of the energy debate: renewable energy and emissions-reduction policies were always dangerous, and were gambling the UK’s energy generating capacity for political expediency. ‘Tackling climate change’ was never as straightforward as simply creating the right policies, and watching the green economy blossom. That was hyperbole — the conceit of self-serving politicians.

The Guardian… as ever… are reporting that

British consumers have an estimated £30bn worth of clothing that they have not worn for a year in their wardrobes, a new report from the government waste body Wrap reveals today.

As a statistic, it may or may not be interesting. I work it out to be approximately £500 per person — US$777 at today’s exchange rate. And I do not find it surprising. Some of the clothes in my wardrobe are 10 years old, and no longer fit me, because over the last decade, I have eaten too much. If we assume the growth of my waistline (and the rest) to be linear, it would mean that £50 worth of clothes a year go to the back of the wardrobe. That could be as little as one shirt. In my experience — I don’t often spend that much on one shirt — it might be one shirt and one pair of trousers. If you were budgeting, it could be three such items. And if you went to Primark, you may come away with a fair bit more for £50, but it probably wouldn’t last five years.

Our outward expansion is the cause of all this redundant clothing, as the report notes.

The average UK household owns around £4,000 worth of clothes, but around 30% of that clothing – 1.7bn items – has not been worn for at least a year, most commonly because it no longer fits.

So what’s the big deal?

The report does not advocate that people should stop buying clothes, but that the active life of clothing is extended and the amount going into in landfill is cut back. Just under one-third of clothing at the end of its life goes to landfill every year – around 350,000 tonnes, worth £140m every year, based on Salvation Army estimates of their value.

Wrap said that extending the average life of clothes by just three months of active use per item would lead to a 5-10% reduction in their carbon and water footprints.

What is interesting about this is the way in which the environment is used as the pretext for expanding the role of government bodies, making it their responsibility to monitor lifestyles.

Some might say that I’m over-stating things here, and that this is just an attempt to understand how people are living, so that public services can be better organised. But the report isn’t about planning public services, as I will explain shortly.

The organisation that produced the report, WRAP — The Waste and Resources Acton Plan — are a curious form of public body that has emerged in recent years. They aren’t statutory bodies, and as such have no real authority, but are established to deliver a public function of some kind, a bit like the QUANGOs — Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations — of previous years. Increasingly, these take the form of non-profit-making companies, financed by government. In the case of wrap, the financing is substantial. According to WRAP’s annual statement, it received £79 million in 2011. £12.4 million of that pays the salaries of its 253 staff. And it’s nice work if you can get it. Four of the senior staff at WRAP earn more that £100,000 a year. A further 25 earn more than £50,000 year. A further 104 earn between £30,000 and £50,000. And what do they do? According to their ‘about’ page

We have two priorities; minimising resource use and diverting priority materials from landfill.

Between 2011-15 we aim to:

* Encourage better design and more informed consumption which will help us all waste less
* Make it easier to recycle, repair and re-use as much of our waste as possible, wherever we are – in the home, at work, or away from home
* To enable others to recover as much value as possible from the waste that’s collected – whether as resources that can be used again and again, or as energy
* Help others to keep resources moving round the economy – the more money we save, the less the demand on ever-scarcer natural resources

Organisations like WRAP deserve our full contempt. They are established by governments at ‘arms length’, but in reality this means that they are also out of our control. Their agenda is determined by whichever minister woke up one morning with the bright idea, and then the possibility of debating the function of that organisation is kicked into the long grass. WRAP have a huge staff, and £Millions to spend on influencing the public debate and policy, but where is the possibility of countering it, or putting forward competing analyses about how to organise public services? There isn’t any. The best you can hope for is blogs like this, run without funding, in spare time, with zero budget.

This brings me to the second interesting thing. Being at ‘arms length’ from government means appearing as an actually independent organisation. And that means idiot journalists taking WRAPS’s report at face value, rather than asking questions about its mandate, its legitimacy (the mandate notwithstanding), its agenda, and the basis of its project to get us all to ‘Reduce! Re-Use! Recycle!’. Such credulity is not just naivety, it’s the signature of utter mediocrity. And it is the duty of every mediocre journalist at the epitome of mediocrity, the Guardian, to report verbatim what those in authority tell them.

Liz Godwin, chief executive officer of Wrap, said: “The way we make and use clothes consumes a huge amount of the Earth’s precious resources, and accounts for a major chunk of family spending. But by increasing the active use of clothing by an extra nine months we could reduce the water, carbon, and waste impacts by up to 20-30% each and save £5bn.”

The report cites the recently launched M&S and Oxfam “Shwopping” initiative as evidence of retail awareness and customer interest in new approaches. Retailers are being urged to set up “buy back” schemes that would enable customers to sell retailer own-brand clothes they no longer want back to the retailer to prepare for re-sale.

Lord Taylor, minister for environment, said: “Making better use of our resources is integral to economic growth, cutting carbon emissions and building a strong and sustainable green economy. This report shows that there is a huge potential for both businesses and households to save money and the environment by thinking differently about the way we produce, use and dispose of clothes. Used clothing has a massive commercial value, yet over 430,000 tonnes is thrown away in the UK every year.”

The idea that “Making better use of our resources is integral to economic growth” is green flim-flam. There has never been a need for official intervention to help individuals or companies find more efficient ways of producing or consuming. It is only necessary to spend £tens of millions a year on such ends when the idea of ‘efficiency’ has been re-conceived. Re-conceived, that is, according to the tenets of environmentalism. One of those tenets, of course, being the idea of ‘ever-scarcer natural resources’ — an idea which has no basis in material fact, and is historically illiterate. Once again, we see environmentalism, given as the operating principles of a public body, put beyond the reach of proper democratic control, such putative virtues taken for granted.

Concomitant with re-inventing ‘efficiency’ according to environmentalism’s precepts is a transformation of the relationship between the public and private spheres. So it is no surprise that we now find official bodies poking around in people’s wardrobes, and writing reports giving ‘advice’ like this…

A combination of good practice – lower wash frequency, lower wash temperature, less tumble dryer usage in summer time and larger loads – could cut the footprint by 7%.

Yes, folks, for £79 million a year, the Climate Resistance blog would also be happy to tell you to wash your clothes less, to “save the planet”. The report concludes:

This report has set out a number of opportunities for the clothing sector to reduce carbon emissions, resource use and waste – and gain business benefit from doing so. While many of the opportunities are up to businesses themselves to evaluate and take forward, one action that organisations across the sector can take is to sign up to the forthcoming Sustainable Clothing Action Plan 2020 Commitment.

Like many reports intended to influence behaviour, debate and policy, it is insipid and stuffed full of glib statements about how to produce — at best — a marginal actual benefits to the individual/company and a very contestable environmental benefit. It’s the quality we would expect from an organisation that has no real demand put on it by the public to perform, and isn’t subject to scrutiny either from above or from below. The flow of money is secure. It is the sound of a detached political class, speaking to itself, up its own arse… the bland pieties it reproduces being nothing more than echoes reverberating through public institutions… ‘save the planet’… ‘reduce our impact’… ‘scarce natural resources’… ‘2020 sustainability commitment’… uninhibited by reason.

The proper journalistic response to any official report — take note, The Guardian — is incredulity. The first job is to say ‘f*** off!’, rather than take things at face value. The job of the journalist is to ask people in authority ‘who the f*** do you think you are?’ You’re supposed to be following the money, exposing the agenda, and asking difficult questions. When you fail to do so, you turn the Fourth Estate into the first. Shame on you, the Guardian.

Leo Hickman has collected a number of seemingly sensible statements from climate scientists about the claims that the recent unusual weather in the USA can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change. Says Leo,

This week, scientists have been queuing up, it seems, to explain how the wildfires in Colorado, the heatwave across the eastern seaboard, and the “super derecho” are all indicative of “what global warming looks like”. Most pulled back, though, from directly blaming global warming for such weather events.

This more sensible approach sits in contrast to articles elsewhere on the Guardian’s website. For instance, this screechy vignette of what happens in the mind of Bill McKibben:

Global warming is underway. Are we waiting for someone to hold up a sign that says “Here’s climate change”? Because, this week, we got everything but that:

• In the Gulf, tropical storm Debby dropped what one meteorologist described as “unthinkable amounts” of rain on Florida. Debby marked the first time in history that we’d reached the fourth-named storm of the year in June; normally it takes till August to reach that mark.

• In the west, of course, firestorms raged: the biggest fire in New Mexico history, and the most destructive in Colorado’s annals. (That would be the Colorado Springs blaze: the old record had been set the week before, in Fort Collins.) One resident described escaping across suburban soccer fields in his car, with “hell in the rearview mirror”.

• The record-setting temperatures (it had never been warmer in Colorado) that fueled those blazes drifted east across the continent as the week wore on: across the Plains, there were places where the mercury reached levels it hadn’t touched even in the Dust Bowl years, America’s previous all-time highs.

• That heatwave was coming at just the wrong time, as farmers were watching their corn crops get ready to pollinate, a task that gets much harder at temperatures outside the norms with which those crops evolved. “You only get one chance to pollinate over 1 quadrillion kernels,” said Bill Lapp, president of Advanced Economic Solutions, a Omaha-based commodity consulting firm. “There’s always some level of angst at this time of year, but it’s significantly greater now and with good reason. We’ve had extended periods of drought.”

McKibbin’s recent twitter feed has been reading like a latter-day Revelations. Indeed, if isn’t enjoying the spectacle of homes and fields going up in smoke, he’s nonetheless milking it.

But such screeching isn’t going to convince anyone else, and doesn’t seem to come with the blessing of the scientists quoted by Hickman. Kerry Emmanuel, Peter Stott,Michael Mann, Clare Goodess, Doug Smith, Michael Oppenheimer, Harold Brooks, and Michael F. Wehner were each far more reluctant to make an unequivocal attribution of any event to human induced climate change than McKibben was. Mike Mann is perhaps the keenest to make the link, but typifies the response:

I like to use the analogy of loaded dice. Here in the US, we’ve seen a doubling in the frequency of record-breaking heat, relative to what we would expect from chance alone. So far this year, we’re seeing those records broken at nearly 10 times the rate we would expect without global warming. So there is no question in my mind that the “signal” of climate change has now emerged in our day-to-day weather. We are seeing the loading of the random weather dice toward more “sixes”. We are seeing and feeling climate change in the more extreme heat we are witnessing this summer, the outbreak of massive forest fires like the one engulfing Colorado over the past week, and more extreme weather events like the Derecho that knocked out power for millions in the eastern US during a record-breaking heat spell.

The scientist is saved from having to do anything as silly as linking a single event or series of events to a single cause by invoking probability — the ‘loaded dice’ analogy. Oppenheimer makes the same point:

The link between extreme events which have occurred recently and the build-up of the greenhouse gases is best represented by the “loading the dice” analogy – as the world warms, the likelihood of occurrence (frequency), intensity, and/or geographic extent of many types of extreme events is increasing. The events are individual data points in a broader pattern, akin to pixels on a computer screen. You can’t say much from any one pixel, but a picture emerges when you step back and look at the pattern. That said, for a few types of extreme events, particularly heat waves, it is sometimes possible to connect the pixel to the bigger picture more directly. The best case is the European heat wave of 2003. According to computer simulations of climate, the likelihood that such an event would occur was about doubled by the buildup of the greenhouse gases. A few other events have been examined using similar techniques, including the 2010 heat wave in Russia.
As for the willingness of scientists to make such statements: as the climate signal due to the ever-increasing greenhouse effect strengthens and emerges more and more from the noise in the system, and as statistical techniques for doing such “fingerprinting” studies as I mention above improves, scientists have become more confident in making such claims, which is to be expected.

It’s a yes-but-no-but answer to Hickman’s question — Is it now possible to blame extreme weather on global warming?

Indeed, the answer — which depends to some extent on who you ask — is more complicated than the question permits an answer to.

The real answer is no, of course. But let’s imagine that it was possible, and we could say that we could attribute events to AGW. What then?

Even if science could do this, would its answer be any more instructive? Let’s imagine that the dice analogy holds true, and that it is possible to say that the extreme weather in the USA is X times more likely… Does it make Bill McKibben’s imploring the world to act any more rational?

No, this is a greed problem. In the last five years, Exxon has made more money than any company in history. For the moment, Exxon and other’s desire to keep minting money – and our politicians’ desire for a share of that cash – has conspired to keep our government, and most others, from doing anything to head off the crisis.

In other words,should we head off this ‘crisis’ if it is possible to say that extreme weather has been increased by our CO2 emissions?

No.

The problem is created by asking climate scientists to pass judgements on human greed, and politician’s intransigence. McKibben does it it explicitly, Hickman does it by implication. The expectation is that science can be instructive — that once we can establish that there are links between our emissions and weather extremes, we know we have to ‘do something’ about it.

But this is a mistake. The real question to ask is ‘are we more vulnerable to climate extremes’, to which the answer is…

No.

The problem is epitomised by Michael F. Wehner’s answer.

This risk of extreme weather, particularly very severe heat waves, has already changed significantly due to human induced global warming. For instance, the chances of the 2003 European summer heat wave, responsible for as many as 70000 additional deaths, at least doubled and likely increased by a factor of 4 to 10. The chances of the 2010 Russian and 2011 Texas events also undoubtedly increased. While these events could have occurred without the human changes to the climate, it is important to know that the amount of climate change that we have experienced so far is very small to what is projected to occur by the middle and end of this century. By 2100, today’s most extreme weather events will seem relatively normal.

I only wish that I could be around long enough to see his prognostication fail to come to pass. Failing that, I will be content to go to my deathbed having seen the deaths attributed to the European heat wave of 2003 instead attributed to the failure to look after people. It’s quite simple: you can make sure that people have enough water to drink and that there are ample fans or air conditioning units available. Few — if any — of those 70,000 deaths can be attributed to ‘the weather’, which can in turn be attributed to CO2 emissions. The preoccupation with climate distorts our priorities, and our understanding of how we relate to the natural world.

On the view evinced by Hickman’s correspondents, we seem to be passive objects, shoved around by the dynamics of the climate. But this is a self-evidentially a misconception. There are many places in the world where the elderly and infirm survive hotter and drier places than Europe in the summer of 2003. And there are places on the planet which are hotter and drier than Colorado. What ‘climate change looks like’ cannot be understood merely in terms of the magnitude of the climatic phenomena. As I pointed out in my previous post, in order to understand environmental ‘impacts’, you need to understand what it is impacting upon. If you take the view that humans are passive/stupid, then it follows that you will overestimate the impact.

Climate ‘ideology’ is what loads the dice, and loads the question. Climate ‘extremes’ have become part of environmentalism’s mythology because it holds that we cannot survive them, and that they happen to us. In reality, however, what determines a climate extreme’s ‘impact’ is determined by our ability to cope with the climate. A simple thought experiment proves the point: what would have happened if the same wildfires and drought had happened in a much poorer part of the world? The answer is that there would have been many times the number of casualties.

It’s of no comfort to the people whose lives have been turned upside down by the weather, of course. But such things are a decreasing fact of human life, in spite of what doomsayers tell us. So, perhaps we do face an increase in the frequency and intensity of climate ‘extremes’. But their potential impact reduces by a greater factor each time we give the matter thought. In which case, reducing our vulnerability to climate by a factor of 4X at the cost of increasing the frequency and intensity of extremes by X seems to me to be a price worth paying. But don’t expect climate scientists to agree.

UNPDATE: Judith Curry has some interesting comments on ‘what global warming looks like’. Interesting that another journalist was canvassing scientists’ views but decided not to publish Curry’s sober comments… Only doom sells papers, after all.

I have a story on Spiked-Online today.

Rio+20 was presented as an opportunity to determine ‘the future we want’ as though there was a free choice to be made. The next moment, the ugly truth was revealed: choice had been excluded. Science had detected ‘planetary boundaries’ – the ‘Limits to Growth’ thesis revised for the twenty-first century – which, with the imperatives of ‘sustainable development’, had already decided what kind of future we should be allowed.

A lot is expected of ‘science’. However, the failure of Rio+20, like the failure of many global conferences to produce agreements, such as the meetings at Durban, Cancun and Copenhagen, reveals once again that the real function of ‘science’ is a fig leaf for their delegates’ bad faith. One of the first to reflect on the failure of Rio, for instance, was UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who called the agreement produced by the conference ‘insipid’. He should know – before setting off to Rio, he wrote in the Guardian that ‘developed economies must not sacrifice long-term sustainability in the name of short-term growth’, that ‘national governments [must] broaden their understanding of wealth’, and that ‘Rio must set out a plan for the future’.

The most obvious thing to say about Rio is of course that it failed. But the failure of these huge environmental conferences doesn’t seem to limit their number or ambition. It’s almost as if the failure of things like Rio are what drives the process ever further from normal democratic politics. We hear often from the green camp that climate change may be too big an issue for democracy — that by representing people’s interests and desires, it fails to respond to things which are beyond individuals’ understanding.

What I also wanted to show was how the ‘ideology’ of environmentalism — its political culture, its presuppositions and prejudices, and so on — now consists of more than just the claim that humanity’s relationship with the natural world, it now makes claims about humans. So the claim that democracy cannot cope with the problem of environmental degradation now has a (pseudo-) scientific premise that our brains are too limited. A couple of paragraphs on this point didn’t make it into the final version of the article:

And nowhere is environmentalism more protected from scrutiny than at conferences such as Rio+20. They are held well beyond the reach of democratic politics, and far from critics. Yet some are not convinced that such institution-making is put far enough outside our control. Just as the basis for political environmentalism is seemingly justified on ‘what science says’, resistance to environmentalism’s political projects is explained by its advocates in pseudoscientific terms. The failure of Rio+20 was, according to George Monbiot, the result of a politics dominated by the ‘[pursuit of] the dopamine hits triggered by the purchase of products we do not need’ — consumer society, to which we are ‘addicted’. We have ‘stone age brains equipped with space age technology’, said Paul Ehrlich — our minds and bodies are built only to respond to the limited pains and pleasures of hunter-gatherer lifestyles, not to advanced technological society.

No doubt Ehlrich, Monbiot and the mob at Rio would protest that their primary concern is for humans and their interests — that they are therefore ‘humanists’. But this ‘concern’ amounts equally to contempt. If their outlooks are ‘humanism’, then it is a form of humanism equivalent to animal husbandry, which would lock us in kennels, and entitle us to no more than subsistence. Theirs is a ‘metabolic humanism’, in which humans are seen not as subjective agents capable of rational thought, and determining our own ends — the premise of any sensible definition of humanism — but on the contrary, mere machines  hardwired to consume beyond satisfaction. Thus, rather than escaping or criticising the shortcomings of consumer society, Mobiot and Ehrlich assimilate its vile logic in its entirety, to view humans as merely consumers. The only difference between the consumer society they offer and the one they criticise is that theirs is one characterised by scarcity, rather than the promise of abundance.

Once you take the view — as Monbiot and Ehrlich have, and which is implied by the very premise of the Rio meeting — that humans aren’t capable of making decisions even about what to eat and buy, let alone about decisions about how to organise society, you allow yourself to make decisions on their behalf. World leaders ‘seem more interested in protecting the interests of plutocratic elites than our environment’, moaned Monbiot, when it was revealed that Rio was doomed to fail. Yet the protection of elites is what conferences such as Rio are all about. The real reason Huhne couldn’t build  ‘environmentalism in one country’, is because nobody in that country wanted it. The only alternative is to establish a basis for political institutions internationally, away from such troubling concepts as democracy.

There are three orders of scientific claim in currency here. First, there are the claims made about the world as it is — temperature changes, and their consequences. I.e. there are observations. Second, there are models, models and more models about the interaction of natural processes — the functioning of the entire planet. And third, there are these arguments about individuals’ capacity to understand the problem, and their predisposition to ‘ignore evidence’, and carry on consuming. While we can have (some) confidence about the first category — observations — the second and third are presupposed. As useful as observations are, they point to an imbalance or antagonism between our minds and the ‘biosphere’, only if we presuppose the second and third categories. in other words, it’s only if we hold with a ‘strong Gaia’ hypothesis and contempt for stupid humans that we get ‘unsustainability’ out of the calculation.

A couple of weeks ago, I was on the panel for a debate on the motion ‘Britain should be a fan of wind energy’ at the Cheltenham Science Festival. John Constable of the Renewable energy Foundation was also against the motion, while arch-environmentalist Jonathan Porritt and wind energy tycoon, Andrew Garrad were in favour.

The debate is now online at http://raeng.tv/default.aspx?item=72, but unfortunately there is no option to embed the video here, and the server seems to be a little rusty.

The debate itself was enjoyable, though I found it a bit frustrating that there weren’t as many opportunities for the panel to challenge each other as I had hoped for. I think it’s clear that Porritt was also quite frustrated.

I wanted to argue that it really doesn’t matter whether you are a fan of wind energy or not; the decisions about our energy policy are neither dependent on public opinion, nor controlled by it. (Yet). I think this point is perhaps lost on many people, who still regard energy as a problem of ends, rather than means. It’s a point which certainly escapes Porritt, who can only think that an argument for cheap and abundant energy is ruinous, rather than the means by which good can be done. The delight that environmentalists seem to take in saying ‘no more’ is a peculiar thing, which I struggle to understand. That seems to me to be the point of limiting the debate about energy techniques and politics: if you allow any other imperatives to the debate — such as improving our lot — environmentalism loses all its currency.

Here’s what I said:

I have to admit, I am a little confused by the motion being debated by the debate. Energy is energy — a means to ends, not an end in itself. I doubt that many of us are ever as excited to discover that our computers are powered by our favoured technique as we are when our favourite football team scores a goal.

What we’re really talking about then, is I think, policies which have led to the construction of wind farms. And we’re talking ideas which inform those policies and the consequences of committing ourselves to them. Wind turbines are just a means.

The nature of technology is that it produces unintended consequences, which we organise our lives around as much as we do around the intended consequences.

For example, some people have rightly pointed out that the convenience of the motor car has led to towns and cities developing in a way that has left communities divided and isolated by busy roads; creating large, unnatural housing estates devoid of social space, and other amenities.

So a meaningful commitment to wind energy means committing ourselves to the limitations of wind energy — its expense and its intermittency. So what are these consequences of such a commitment?

The CEO of the National Grid, Steve Holliday says, and I quote…

The grid is going to be a very different system in 2020, 2030. We keep thinking about: we want it to be there and provide power when we need it. It’s going to be a much smarter system, then. We’re going to have to change our own behaviour and consume it when it’s available, and available cheaply. ENDQUOTE

Making the grid compatible with an increasing proportion of wind, and the replacement of existing generating capacity with wind energy is going to cost hundreds of billions. At the end of it, we will not have a better grid than we have now, capable of delivering a continuous supply of energy.

Fifteen gigawatts of electricity generating capacity is scheduled for closure by the end of 2016. To replace that capacity with wind energy at the current rate of building wind farms of about 650 megatwatts per year, with a load factor of 28% would take over sixty years. Wind energy simply cannot fill that gap. An emphasis on wind energy is going to create shortages.

As Holliday admits, the ‘Smart Grid’ will decide when we can and can’t use electricity. People will find that they cannot afford electricity deals that guarantee continuity of supply – the capacity to supply it will not exist. If you’re better off, you will be able to afford the prices that suppliers will charge when electricity is in short supply and demand is great.

I believe that this Orwellian use of the word ‘smart’ betrays some deeply regressive values. If we are going to make sensible decisions about our energy future our choice of technique must be informed by the recognition of the need for ample and affordable energy.

Wind energy lobbyists have recognised that there is a problem with rising energy prices, and claimed that wind energy only costs the average household a few pounds a year. While this may be technically true, it is disingenuous. What it forgets is first that currently only a tiny fraction of our energy supply currently comes from wind.

And emphasis on renewable energy creates an opportunity cost. Rather than seeking ways to make energy abundant and cheap, global agreements and EU and UK policies have instead emphasised ‘changing our behaviour’, reducing demand, and limiting the production of energy.

Policy-makers simply have the wrong priorities. They believe it is their responsibility to force us to change our behaviour, and to manage a diminishing supply rather than to respond to democratic will, or at least to our needs. The message is clear: you are not allowed to have cheap and abundant energy.

It would be much harder to say that about wind energy, if there had been a public, democratic, transparent debate about our energy policy, and the values which inform it. It would be harder to say that policymakers were getting it wrong if the public had expressed its view that the costs of wind energy were worth bearing.

And wind power doesn’t offer us anything intrinsically good, such as more abundant or cheaper energy. In fact it only offers us less, for more cost.

There is nothing to be a fan of, except cost, inconvenience, and a form of politics which is indifferent to our needs.

So I respectfully ask that you reject the motion.

Back in 2010, I had a look at an Oxfam report which claimed that,

According to the IPCC, climate change could halve yields from rain-fed crops in parts of Africa as early as 2020, and put 50 million more people worldwide at risk of hunger.

But it was not the IPCC which had said it:

In other [African] countries, additional risks that could be exacerbated by climate change include greater erosion, deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture of up to 50% during the 2000-2020 period, and reductions in crop growth period (Agoumi, 2003). [IPCC WGII, Page 448. 9.4.4]

As I pointed out, Agoummi 2003 was not what it seemed…

There is only limited discussion of “deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture” in that paper, and its focus is not ‘some’ African countries, but just three: Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. It is not climate research. It is a discussion about the possible effects of climate change. All that it says in relation to the IPCC quote, is that,

Studies on the future of vital agriculture in the region have shown the following risks, which are linked to climate change:

• greater erosion, leading to widespread soil degradation;
• deficient yields from rain-based agriculture of up to 50 per cent during the 2000–2020 period;
• reduced crop growth period;

… and worse still,

the study was not simply produced by some academic working in some academic department. Instead, it was published by The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

[…]That the IPCC is citing non-peer-reviewed, non-scientific research from quasi governmental semi-independent sustainability advocacy organisations must say something about the dearth of scientific or empirical research. The paper in question barely provides any references for its own claims, yet by virtue of merely appearing in the IPCC’s reports, a single study, put together by a single researcher, becomes “consensus science”.

This was in the wake of ‘Glaciergate’, of course — the discovery that ‘grey literature’ had been included in IPCC reports, which are supposed to be produced by ‘science’. I later wrote a guest post for Roger Pielke Jr’s blog.

When I wrote the post, I was pretty harsh with science journalist, Fred Pearce, who had been involved in the Glaciergate story. My chief criticism of environmentalists — especially environmental journalists — is that they are unable to reflect on their mistakes. But Pearce seems more able than most. In the New Scientist today, Pearce writes,

Climate scientists are likely to face charges of putting politics before science, following two controversial decisions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, earlier this month.

The IPCC decided for the first time to impose strict geographical quotas on the scientists who author its major assessment reports. There will also be a push to increase the representation of women among its authors.

Controversially, it also voted to increase the role in those assessments of “grey literature”: publications not subject to peer review. Using such material in the last assessment is what led to the “glaciergate” scandal in 2010, when the report was found to have vastly overestimated the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are losing ice.

The issue of grey literature persists, then. But what really caught my eye was this…

Grey literature was responsible for several embarrassing errors in the 2007 report. These included the false claim that the Himalayas could be ice-free within 30 years and the assertion that African farmers could suffer yield losses of up to 50 per cent by 2020 because of climate change. The latter claim was formally corrected at this month’s Geneva meeting.

I wondered what the IPCC had done to remedy the problem I had found. This is the result:

Based on the IPCC Protocol for Addressing Possible Errors in IPCC Assessment Reports (approved at IPCC-XXXIII held in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates), substantive changes to past Synthesis Reports must be submitted to the Panel for approval, prior to posting; the Panel may delegate the approval step to the Executive Committee.

IPCC received a request for a change to two passages of the AR4 Synthesis Report dealing with projected impacts on yields of North African rainfed agriculture. The request was submitted by Drs. Pachauri, Parry, Canziani, van Ypersele, Barros, and Field.

Because the change was requested by the individuals responsible for the decision on action (the IPCC Chairman and the Co-chairs of the relevant working group), the request should move to Section 3, Step 5A of the Error Protocol.

The text in question is in the Synthesis Report (Table SPM.2. on page 11 and 3.3.2 on page 50). Both passages read: “By 2020, in some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%.” The problem with this passage is that it drops all mention of a role for climate variability, creating the impression that IPCC is projecting that climate change alone could cause agricultural yields to drop by 50% by 2020. In the background reference and in the WGII report, it is clear that this projected impact reflects the combined effects of climate change and variability.

Based on extensive discussions involving the WGII Co-chairs from the AR4, these statements provide such an incomplete message that most readers will interpret them incorrectly. This problem does not affect the text in the WGII report or the WGII SPM, where the role of climate variability is prominent.

Based on section three of the error correction protocol, the IPCC Chairman and the WGII Co-chairs from the AR4 and the AR5 propose a straightforward correction to the two statements in the Synthesis Report.

The text of the correction is as follows.

1) AR4 SYR SPM, page 11, Table SPM.2., line 3: After 50%, insert “, as a consequence of climate variability and change”

2) AR4 SYR, p 50, column 1, line 20: After 50%, insert “, as a consequence of climate variability and change” In both places, the changed statements will now read, “By 2020, in some countries, yields from rainfed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%, “, as a consequence of climate variability and change.”

The inserted wording matches, as closely as possible, the wording in the WGII SPM.

Acting on behalf of the IPCC Chairman, as well as the Co-chairs of WGII from the AR4, the Cochairs of WGII request panel approval of these two changes to the AR4 Synthesis Report.

It’s not clear to me from this whether the changes will also be made to mentions of Agoumi 2003 in the other parts of the WGII report, or are limited to the Synthesis Report and Summary for Policymakers. Either way, however, it hardly seems sufficient to merely add a caveat. The issue is that the original literature is grey, doesn’t seem to be supported by other studies, was extremely limited in its scope, was highly speculative, and was produced by a sustainability advocacy organisation. Shouldn’t it just have been removed entirely, rather than embedded in another layer of caveats?

The 50% crop failure ‘meme’, as they do, ‘went viral’ in early 2007. It was brought to the attention of the IPCC in 2010. It’s not until now — mid 2012 — that the IPCC has responded to an error that should not have been in its reports in the first place. It would be impossible to measure the impact of this one problem, which has been reproduced, with many others, in many reports that aim to urge political action on climate change. And to point out the problems with the IPCC that led to the questionable claim achieving such prominence, or to seek to challenge the claim is to identify oneself as a ‘denier‘, and to draw questions asking what qualifications we have to speak about the IPCC’s reports — seemingly the work of ‘thousands of the world’s best scientists’.

The IPCC gets the criticism it deserves. If it can’t cope with the problem of grey literature, and will be including more of it, as Pearce suggests may be the case, maybe it should just admit to being political, not a scientific organisation. After all, as Pearce explains, the new emphasis on ‘grey literature’ is intended to make it more ‘inclusive’:

Krug told New Scientist this would correct an imbalance in the assessments as it is harder for people in developing countries to get research findings into the major peer-reviewed journals. […] Richard Klein, an IPCC stalwart from the Stockholm Resilience Institute in Sweden, told New Scientist this was mostly a formalisation of current practices. “Membership has always been based on expertise, geographical balance and gender.”

So it doesn’t matter if total waffle is produced by unheard of academics, on the instruction of Western NGOs and advocacy organisations… The next IPCC report will produce politically correct science, which must surely be nearly as good as ‘truth’. So will this let Greenpeace smuggle its agenda into AR5, on the basis of ‘positive discrimination’? We’ll have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, however, I’m wondering if any critics of environmentalism from universities in developing economies will be allowed to the party. I think the thought experiment is revealing enough… It didn’t happen here. This must be what is meant by ‘grey literature’ — it is to be produced by black people, but according to a distinctly white agenda, dictated by wealthy green NGOs.

Leo Hickman has an interesting interview with James Lovelock here, and a fuller transcript of their discussion here.

Given that Lovelock predicted in 2006 that by this century’s end “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable”, this new laissez-faire attitude to our environmental fate smells and sounds like of a screeching handbrake turn.

Indeed, earlier this year he admitted to MSNBC in an interview reported around the world with somewhat mocking headlines along the lines of “Doom-monger recants”, that he had been “extrapolating too far” in reaching such a conclusion and had made a “mistake” in claiming to know with such certainty what will happen to the climate.

But Lovelock is relaxed about how this reversal might be perceived. He says being allowed to change your mind and follow the evidence is one of the liberating marvels of being an independent scientist, something he has revelled in since leaving Nasa, his last full-time employer, in the late 1960s.

This raises some points of discussion that Hickman has in the past shrunk away from, and no doubt, given his green leanings, is made uncomfortable by. Kudos to him for that. But as I pointed out in my review of Mark Lynas’ attempt to reformulate environmentalism, these uncomfortable issues might well have been confronted years ago.

Environmentalism, ignorant to criticism, has thus developed inside an insular, self-regarding bubble. Perhaps only someone from within it could prick that bubble, revealing to its members what those outside it have been telling them for decades.

Lovelock observes, for instance, that environmentalism has developed into something resembling a religion, which is mirrored by a religiosity amongst some sceptics. On the first point, Lovelock is hardly the first to point it out. And though as a description it seems to explain the excesses of environmentalism, it isn’t enough to explain how green thinking developed in this way.  And the second point seems to present environmentalists as equal and opposite forces, which is inaccurate, as we know, because ‘scepticism’ simply isn’t a political force — it has very little institutional muscle through which it can assert itself . Similarly, the substance of many arguments on Hickman’s own articles seems to have been that a handful of tiny and barely-funded organisations have been able to thwart the progress of huge NGOs and governments seeking to establish global political institutions to ‘tackle climate change’.

The interview concludes, after Lovelock’s entirely correct pointing out that ‘sustainability’ is a meaningless concept:

The last few posts have been about the application of the precautionary principle. In some green perspectives, precaution operates overtly, and arguments about risk are made explicitly. In other cases, the precautionary principle still operates, but is hidden from view, which is to say that the precautionary principle prefigures in the argument, but it is not until the argument is unpacked that its influence is revealed. In this respect, the anti-GM protesters of last week were more more honest, consistent and reflective about their own argument than their pro-GM critics in the green camp, even if their arguments are irrational. The pro-GM critics didn’t notice their own use of the precautionary principle; it is hidden by the sheer volume of literature, policies, and institutions that are involved in the debate. In other words, the fact of a scientific consensus obscures the content of that consensus and the way in which it was established.

Back in the climate debate, I think I may have stumbled across the most remarkable attempt to formulate — or reformulate — the precautionary principle I have ever seen:

It is very clear that uncertainty is no one’s friend. We have seen that greater uncertainty about the evolution of the climate should give us even greater cause for concern. We have seen that all other things being equal, greater uncertainty means that things could be worse than we thought. We have also seen that greater uncertainty means that the expected damages from climate change will necessarily be greater than anticipated, and that the allowance we must make for sea level rise will also be greater than anticipated. All of those results arise from simple mathematics, and we do not even have to resort to any economic modelling to understand how greater uncertainty translates into greater risk.

These words belong to Stephan Lewandowsky, who is Winthrop Professor and Australian Professorial Fellow at the School of Psychology, University of Western Australia. Lewandowsky has a series of posts up at the ‘Shaping Tomorrows World’ blog, which is funded by the University of Western Australia and the Institute of Sustainability and Technology Policy at Murdoch University. So, presumably, these words are no joke. But they are an incredibly tortured attempted to alternate between word play and maths abuse.

Lewandowsky, over the course of three posts – one, two, three — reinvents the precautionary principle without ever calling it the precautionary principle. This is interesting in itself… An academic in the field of climate policy has forgotten that the precautionary principle already exists, is already applied to the science, and is already manifested in policy.

Angry computer scientist, Steve Easterbrook, tweeted a link to the posts:

Steve Easterbrook ‏@SMEasterbrook
Denialists often use uncertainty over future climate change to argue for inaction. But uncertainty is nobody’s friend

As previous posts have pointed out, the issue is not whose friend the precaution principle is — indeed, the point was made that the precautionary principle might apply to the precautionary principle. Thus, precaution may leave us in a dizzy spin of infinite regress. The issue for ‘denialists’ is instead that the application of the precautionary principle passes weak theoretical risk off as certainty; it turns possibility into story lines, about which ‘something must be done’.

This is the point I made to Keith Kloor — and I was perhaps a bit unfair to him, by lumping him in with the Easterbrooks of this world. After all, it was Kloor who pointed out that Easterbrook’s advocacy of climate science was out of kilter with his distrust of GM technology:

For the climate science community, climategate was a galvanizing event, in which many of them, such as Easterbrook, have risen to publicly defend their honor and profession. Thus, you might think that he (and other environmental scientists) would naturally come to the defense of plant scientists whose work and profession has also come under assault–by anti-GMO activists.

Not when it comes to genetic engineering.

It seems that many in the environmental community have a visceral dislike of biotechnology, especially GMO’s (genetically modified organisms.) It’s an interesting little quirk, which is worth exploring in more depth.

Meanwhile, Easterbrook has just offered up a long treatise that essentially lays out his misgivings about genetically engineered crops. […]

Easterbrook’s tweets about ‘denialists’, and his offering the link to Lewandowsky reformulation of the precautionary principle do much to make my point: that climate-preoccupied environmentalists really aren’t that interested in what ‘science says’; precaution is in fact the operating principle.

I won’t attempt to discuss Lewandowsky’s workings here, because his opening statement on the third of his posts — quoted above — is sufficiently… well, mad… to make my point. I hope that others may want to take a closer look, and I suspect that each of the paragraphs on each of the three posts could be the basis of an entire blog post, so stuffed full with presuppositions, special pleading and prejudice that they are… A case study in the mechanics of climate alarmism. So let’s visit the above quote, line-by-line…

It is very clear that uncertainty is no one’s friend.

This may be true. But then, some have more to gain by championing precaution than others. Those of a green persuasion are invariably inclined to emphasise catastrophe in their arguments for political action. The predominant mode of contemporary politics is, with or without environmental issues, a politics of fear. This was the point made four years ago on this blog, in reply to Naomi Oreskes’ ‘merchents of doubt’ thesis:

Doubt is the very essence of the precautionary principle. And the precautionary principle is at the heart of international agreements and domestic policies on the environment. It was not scientific certainty that drove efforts to mitigate climate change, but the same doubt that Oreskes claims is generated by the “tobacco strategy”. In claiming that denialists were generating doubt where there was certainty, Oreskes – a professor of the history of science – re-writes scientific history. More interesting still, Oreskes seems to agree with the “deniers” that scientific certainty – rather than doubt – should drive action.

The Environmentalist narrative of catastrophe, doom, and apocalypse, once given superficial scientific plausibility (in that science cannot exclude the possibility of such things happening – which it never could), provides doubt and uncertainty about the security of the future, which in turn provides political momentum and legitimacy for environmental policies.

Oreskes had written the precautionary principle out of the history of environmentalism’s development, and written it back in as the construction of climate sceptics in response to scientific certainty. Now Lewandowsky’s reformulation writes it back in to the unfolding story. ‘Uncertainty is nobody’s friend’, he says, but he makes a lot of capital out of it. Or tries to.

We have seen that greater uncertainty about the evolution of the climate should give us even greater cause for concern.

In other words, ‘the less we know, the more we should worry’. This has a curious implication. Whereas Oreskes had claimed that science had always been certain — that an unequivocal consensus had always existed — Lewandowsky must now claim that the consensus had not advanced its understanding of the climate: that we don’t know more than we did. And indeed, this reflects an ideological presupposition of environmentalism: that progress is itself a problem. For if certainty was actually achievable — if the parameters of climate change were actually understood — then ‘tackling climate change’ would become a straightforward technical problem. Instead, policies intended to tackle it are founded on the idea that the possible impacts of climate change are uncertain, precisely in order to head off any possibility of a solution that is not mitigation. In other words, if you know what kind of problem you are facing, then you deprive those who have made the <i>undefined</i> problem central to their perspective and their arguments about the urgency of their cause.  The urgency of the problem is owed only to the fact that we don’t know what kind of problem it is.

We have seen that all other things being equal, greater uncertainty means that things could be worse than we thought.

This is a palpable nonsense. All other things being equal, things are the same, no matter no matter what we think about them, or how certain we are about what we think about them. Things in the world are not dependent on the degree of certainty we have about them. Leaving the distracting pseudo-jargon to one side, and taking the part of the sentence that could make sense reveals only at best a tautology: ‘greater uncertainty means that things could be worse than we thought’. Indeed, the condition of uncertainty means precisely that what you think about a thing could be mistaken. Moreover, even certainty is no guarantee of security; things could be ‘worse than we thought’, in spite of certainty. Certainty and actuality are not the same.

We have also seen that greater uncertainty means that the expected damages from climate change will necessarily be greater than anticipated…

This is an extraordinary claim indeed, which requires some unpacking. This part of the sentence puts the degree of uncertainty into a necessary (i.e. it cannot be otherwise) relationship with what we have anticipated, and the outcome of events. The condition of uncertainty itself multiplies the anticipated result, to yield an impact of greater magnitude. This is an absurd claim, because the condition of uncertainty has no bearing on things. If you’re unsure about what the result of a throw of a dice will be, but you anticipate that it will not be the number you want it to be (the odds are just 1 in 6 that it is, so it’s a good bet that it isn’t), your uncertainty does not reach out to the dice to prevent it turning the face with your number on it upwards.

But that is the implication of the term ‘necessarily’ in the sentence. So let’s mediate it, to see if it makes any more sense: ‘greater uncertainty means that the expected damages from climate change will necessarily may possibly be greater than anticipated’. Again, this is at best a tautological truism, identical to the previous sentence’s meaning: ‘greater uncertainty means that things could be worse than we thought’. Notice, then, that the ‘will necessarily’ in this sentence contradicts the previous sentence’s ‘could be’.

… and that the allowance we must make for sea level rise will also be greater than anticipated.

Again, this language is tortured. The object of the sentence is ‘the allowance we much make for sea level rise’. The meaning of the sentence then, is that the ‘allowance will be greater than anticipated’. This cannot be true, because the ‘allowance we make for sea level rise’ will be at least equivalent to what we anticipate sea level to be. (I say ‘at least’, because the precautionary principle allows us to expand our estimation of what sea level rise may be.) Perhaps this academic struggles with the English language. Perhaps logic and proportion escape him. Or perhaps this is some kind of clumsy attempt at a sleight of hand. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Let’s imagine that what he wants to say is that ‘sea level rise will be greater than anticipated’. But this still doesn’t work, because it is still an anticipation that is clouded by uncertainty… Uncertainty, then, necessarily implies under-estimation, on Lewandowsky’s view. He is wrong. My not knowing if I’ve got the winning lottery ticket does not make my winning the lottery any more or less likely.

All of those results arise from simple mathematics, and we do not even have to resort to any economic modelling to understand how greater uncertainty translates into greater risk.

Let’s be far too fair to Lewandowsky: he is nothing more than a bullshit artist. ‘Simple mathematics’ have nothing to do with his claim, and the mathematics he offers on his blog posts are as tortured as his language and logic. Uncertainty has no relation to actual risk. The degree of risk is the same, no matter what the degree of certainty is. To say otherwise, is to say that the world is moved by nothing other than the confidence we have in our thoughts, and that I could will a dice to produce a 6 on each throw, merely by being sufficiently confident in the outcome: a Disney version of reality. Even the best sense we can make of his claim — that uncertainty implies the underestimation of risks — is a nonsense, because we know that it is possible to over-estimate risk, even in the face of uncertainty. And we have precedents: the Y2K bug; BSE; flu pandemics of recent years; acid rain; ozone depletion; and the entire torrent of turgid crap produced by Malthusians such as Paul Ehrlich over the last half century. This is yet another of one of those Emperor’s New Clothes moments, in which an academic has attempted to identify with the environmental issue. Rather than advancing knowledge, he revealed not only his own inability to reason, but also his actual contempt for knowledge. Only sophistry underpins his conclusion.

Environmentalists have claimed to speak for science, but only have the monopoly on over-estimation of risk. Indeed, it is only by virtue of their over-estimations of risk that environmentalism has achieved any influence at all. And this is the reason why environmentalists cannot abandon the precautionary principle. To eschew this tendency to produce wild speculation, and the use of ‘science’ to construct superficially plausible story lines from that speculation, would mean to abandon the political capital and urgency that is generated by the mere possibility of risk. Take away the environmentalist’s licence to speculate, and the idea that the world needs special forms of politics and powerful political institutions to deal with the ‘climate crisis’ is suddenly redundant.

The precautionary principle — risk analysis without numbers, and without a sense of proportion — gives greater weight to speculation than to knowledge. That is the nature of the politics of fear: you can’t rule something out, so in order to survive, you have to assume that anything you can speculate about is actually the case, and act accordingly. In the wake of criticism of the precautionary principle, environmentalists and those invested in the environmental agenda attempted to distance themselves from it, to emphasise certainty instead: the unequivocal consensus that ‘climate change is happening’. But the precautionary principle did not go away. It took on a new form, and lurked in the background. Rather than saying that the risks of climate change were beyond estimation, environmentalists invented a horizon of uncertainty: the limit of 2 degrees, beyond which lay ‘dangerous climate change’. But this limit was intangible. It wasn’t detected by science; it was invented to meet the needs of policy-makers. It mediated some of the excesses of the precautionary principle by reasoning that we know more about what will happen before 2 degrees of warming than what will happen following it.

But hiding the precautionary principle from environmentalism’s critics concealed it also from the environmentalists. They too forgot the ground on which their perspectives were formed. And now we see in Lewandowsky’s silly posts that the ugly creature wants to crawl back out of the hole it has been buried in. Lewandowsky’s posts will, by themselves, likely achieve no great influence, but what this shows is the irrepressible, irrational and incoherent nature of environmentalism. Environmentalists will continue to be divided by the precautionary principle as it continues to embarrass them and their claim to be grounded in science and reason. The precautionary principle will be reformulated and hidden again, and then reinvented, ad nauseum, long after environmentalism’s demise.

UPDATE: Apologies for some typos in the above post, which must be annoying in a post about someone else’s language abuse. My only defence is that it is a long weekend here in the UK, with more parties than usual.