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Climate Change
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Monday, 31 May 2010 06:22 |
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 I was sent this article by my climate sceptic friend. It's a good example of how Booker weaves a self-confident self-confirming web (in a manner similar to Richard Dawkins) around relatively mundane arguments.
The jist of Booker's argument is "I don't like the theory that mammoth extinction caused climate change, and I don't like Chris Huhne's energy policy".
How does Booker do it? How does he wave his magic wand over his adoring Telegraph-reading anti-windfarm carbon-burning Brussels-detesting fanbase? What incantations does the wizard of planet-heating have in his spell book?
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Climate Change
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Tuesday, 23 March 2010 22:32 |
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Dear XXXX,
Thanks for your most recent correspondence.
The most recent thing I had to investigate was the work of Baliunas and Soon which is much chronicled and lauded by Christopher Booker. On the surface, this seemed to present interesting evidence that recent rising was caused by sun spots, and had little to do with atmospheric change. However, it is difficult to believe how much can be based on this paper.
In the paper Baliunas and Soon brought together the work of many other scientists to make their point. However, many of these other scientists have since complained about the work of Baliunas and Soon - note the review here and also the paper they published here.
Aside from the putative links between Baliunas and Soon and the oil industry; what also seems to be a problem is that they fail to distinguish between local temperature variation and global variation.
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Climate Change
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Monday, 15 February 2010 11:12 |
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Today got off to a good start with the Mormons, as I enjoyed reading the beginning of Stephen Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families". Things have gone downhill quicker than a Canadian mogul-basher with the news that the legislators of Utah have proclaimed that climate science is questionable. A good history (and qualified defence) of the Hockey Stick comes from Fred Pearce here (rapidly becoming my new favourite Guardian columnist) and here. Pearce concludes by saying: "The label was always a caricature and it became a stick to beat us with," Mann [author of the original hockey stick paper] said later. Was it flawed research? Yes. Was it hyped by the IPCC? Yes. Has it been disproved? Despite all the efforts, no. So far, it has survived the ultimate scientific test of repeated replication.
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Climate Change
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Tuesday, 09 February 2010 22:08 |
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I wrote this recently to the guy who spoke at Glasgow Presbytery: Dear XXXX, I think that you are right to suggest that the IPCC were, in their earlier days a little zealous to push the Hockey stick as showing that there was no such as a medieval warming period. There’s a good article about it here. However, it is also true that the science has since hardened and though the science was flaky back in 1998, it is a lot more trustworthy now.
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Climate Change
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Monday, 18 January 2010 13:00 |
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This is Franny Armstrong being interviewed in the the Winter 2010 edition of Third Way The Cynics say that the greens are just 'miserabilists' who want to impose their misery on everybody else; but you come across as very cheerful and very positive - I am very cheerful, yeah. Very chipper. And yet you've got the gloomiest message in history. Lots of my friends work on climate change full-time and we've noticed that we are all happier than people who don't. And our amateur-psychology explanation is that, even though we are dealing wievery day with the horrors of climate change, we also know how big the threat is and where the hopel lies, you know - whereas everybody who's ignoring it and pretending that life can go on as normal has tthishuge monster over their shoulder, and that's a very unhealthy position to be in psychologically - like being in the war but not taking part.
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