Latest recruit to Confederacy of Climate Dunces

One by one, they’re coming out of the woodwork. Occasional climate sceptic William Reville was the latest to re-surface, this time in his weekly Irish Times column. I read it with dismay; I genuinely have no problem with him having a personal pop at me (all’s fair in the public domain) but his cynical piece, masquerading as an honest scientific review of the so-called ClimateGate deserved to be properly dissected and shown for what it is.

I am indebted to writer Marco Chiappi for the article below, which both deconstructs and eviscerates Reville’s contribution:

=============================================

Professor Reville (Associate Professor of biochemistry and public awareness of science officer, UCC) in his article published 10/12/2009 characterises the debate surrounding anthropogenic global warming as a debate between a ‘majority’ and a ‘minority’ position and regrets the incivility with which both sides engage.

That the ‘majority’ position relies on peer reviewed research published to enable expert scrutiny and is representative of a massive scientific effort that has synthesised multiple detailed data sets and is based on sound physical principles that have evolved over the past century should not influence us unduly.

For we have a countervailing ‘minority’ view incapable of passing the first hurdle of peer review, incapable of putting forward a credible alternative hypothesis and is ridiculously shrill in proclaiming that each inconsistency or unknown in the majority position is proof positive of the fallacy represented by AGW.

Actually the ‘minority’ position can be best represented by the old law school maxim ‘When you have the facts, pound the facts, when you have the law pound the law and when you have neither pound the table’. And pounding has been happening aplenty. The din around the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia is deafening.

Out of 168 megabytes of stolen information Reville highlights three instances that “…will undoubtedly weaken the AGW case…” So perhaps it would be timely to take pause and examine these instances in a little more detail and resist judgement until we are sure about what we are talking about, a task that should be within the competence of your average biochemist.

One of the emails that concerns Reville is the following: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”. So wrote Kevin E. Trenberth to Michael Mann on October 12th 2009. Trenberth was discussing with Michael Mann the shortcomings in our understanding of the earth’s energy budget.

Basically, though we can see from all the observational data that the globe is warming our understanding of the way in which that energy is distributed between ocean and atmosphere is incomplete. The email gives notice of an article, “An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy” that Trenberth published in the journal Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability that goes into this problem explicitly and in detail. But Reville chooses to assert that this email is one of many (the many that he never quotes) that “express doubts about AGW.”

Reville introduces another email: “One senior scientist writes ‘…I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temperatures to each series for the last twenty years (i.e. from 1981 onward) and from1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline’ ”. It’s interesting here to note that Reville never names the authors of these emails, which prompts the question, has he ever read the emails or is he simply regurgitating guff that he has downloaded from the Internet.

The unnamed scientist mentioned above is Phil Jones Head of the CRU and the email is dated 16 November 1999. Mike’s Nature “trick” is a reference to Michael Mann’s multiproxy temperature reconstruction, published the year before in the academic journal Nature. This was the first attempt to reconstruct a global temperature history going back many millennia. Proxies such as tree-rings, corals and sea sediments were examined, for their growth patterns show sensitivity to temperature change.

Jones is talking about adding the instrumental temperature record (i.e. the record derived from weather stations, satellites, ocean buoys etc) to some of the proxy series. The reference to Keith is Keith Briffa who is an expert on tree-ring proxies (dendrochronologist). ‘Hide the decline’ in this context refers to the problem that after 1960 some of the tree-ring proxies diverge from the known temperature record. To simplify the temperature signal from these tree-rings declines in relation to the actual instrumental record

The problem with Reville’s bleating on this subject is that he has access to all the academic journals in which the tricks and hidden declines to which Jones refers have been openly canvassed. Briffa has been publishing on these problems since at least 1998. And as any academic knows, as Reville certainly should that when you adjust data you indicate where this has happened. Does Reville point to any evidence where this hasn’t happened? Of course not, for conspiracy stories are better served by quoting the shorthand between academics rather than reading the articles in which the shorthand is given a full and rigorous academic expression.

The Freedom of Information business to which Reville alludes is an issue. However denying an FOI application is not in itself illegitimate, particularly if the request is an attempt to get access to proprietary information or is vexatious. Philip Jones has had to step down and the matter is being investigated; any comment on this is pointless while the independent investigation continues.

There is much else in Reville’s article that needs redress. The nonsense he repeats about climatologists being in consensus in the 1970s about an imminent ice age is particularly egregious for someone involved in promoting scientific awareness. The United State’s National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council report of 1975 was explicit, ‘The climates of the earth have always been changing, and they will doubtless continue to do so in the future. How large these future changes will be, and where and how rapidly they will occur, we do not know.’ In other words the science of climatology was so undeveloped that nobody could make a judgment either way. Not much of a consensus.

When Reville concludes his article with ‘Climate science badly needs to get its act together’ one can only think of the following words in no particular order, pot, kettle, black.

Marco Chiappi is a freelance writer.

ThinkOrSwim is a blog by journalist John Gibbons focusing on the inter-related crises involving climate change, sustainability, resource depletion, energy and biodiversity loss
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33 Responses to Latest recruit to Confederacy of Climate Dunces

  1. Richard Tol says:

    It is quite a stretch to call Revelle a skeptic.

  2. Lenny B says:

    Couldn’t agree more with Marco. Reville pops up every now and again, and what’s so creepy about his articles is that they appear on a page called ‘Science Today’, which would lead the unwary to believe this is genuine scientific analysis, not the ultra-Catholic flavoured anti-environmental agitprop that Reville has been pedalling for years.

    His piece last Thursday plumbed new depths, and if R. Tol can’t see that, well he must have his blinkers on tightly as well.

  3. Richard Tol says:

    @Lenny B
    So what did Reville write that marks him as a “skeptic”, a “Catholic”, “anti-environment” or an “agitprop”?

    All I read is that he is not happy with the alleged behaviour of some CRU staff.

  4. G Murray says:

    Marco – could you povide a link to one of the articles you refer to above where Briffa has discussed the problem of post 1960’s divergence of his tree ring data set from the instrument temperature record.

  5. Marco says:

    To G Murray

    The link below will take you to the Nature pay site. However you should be able to find a few good quality free sites by putting ‘tree ring sensitivity’ into google I hope this helps.

    http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v391/n6668/abs/391678a0.html

    Reduced sensitivity of recent tree-growth to temperature at high northern l
    latitudes

    Nature 1998

  6. cormac says:

    To be honest, I don’t think Willie is a skeptic, he always finishes on the side of peer-reviewed climate science. He also comes across as non-passionate either way, which is no harm in scientific debate as you know.
    However, I do feel that someone with a column like his could inform hinself better – for example trotting out that 1970s ice-age myth is poor.

    Did you know 30 seminal papers on climate were published in the 1970s, only 3 of which suggested global cooling (see OUP A Very Short Into)…some consensus!

  7. EWI says:

    It is quite a stretch to call Revelle a skeptic.

    You mean, unlike people who are on the so-called Academic Advisory Council of a certain organisation with an interesting logo?

    http://www.thegwpf.org/academic-advisory-council.html

  8. Richard Tol says:

    @EWI
    You can call me whatever you like (within legal bounds). However, you’d be more convincing if you’d provide arguments. You may want to read this paper and reconsider:
    http://www.springerlink.com/content/x324801281540j8u/?p=56a1b800a02947a5a9a623bd0696ede2&pi=0

  9. John Gibbons says:

    This week’s New Scientist has a valuable article turning the focus onto the credentials or otherwise of the climate denial lobby which has itself been in a frenzy over the stolen East Anglia University emails which, they falsely claim, undermine the link between carbon emissions and rising global temperatures.

    In their rogues’ gallery of what they call Deniergate, Item No. 5 below is of specific interest. Why? Because this sham called the Global Warming Policy Foundation has someone on its grand-sounding Academic Advisory Council who is described as “a Research Professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, Ireland, where he is responsible for the research areas energy and environment”.

    The ESRI is an extremely reputable body, funded by the Irish taxpayer. Its reputation in my opinion is being tarnished by association with this makey-uppey Global Warming Policy Foundation, stuffed with climate deniers that make a mockery of its claim to: “to help restore balance and trust in the climate debate that is frequently distorted by prejudice and exaggeration”.

    What complete horseshit! Looking for “Balance and trust” from quacks like Ian Plimer, that is almost funny. What R. Tol wants to do with his own reputation and credibility is I suppose his own business. I’m personally far more concerned about the good name of the ESRI being roped into this nonsense.

    FROM: NEW SCIENTIST, 14/12/09

    The Global Warming Policy Foundation is an independent think tank chaired by the former British finance minister Nigel Lawson that claims to “bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist and all too often depressingly intolerant”. So it is a little disappointing that a graph in the banner on the organisation’s homepage is so misleading.

    That graph is a jazzed-up graph of average global temperatures since 2001 and shows, essentially, no trend. The implication is that global temperatures are not increasing.

    Of course, no conclusions can be drawn from such a short time span, because temperatures vary so much from year to year anyway. You have to look at several decades in order to pick out real trends. The UK Met Office this week published data showing that the first decade of the 2000s has been the warmest on record.

    Outcome: On 3 December the British newspaper The Independent reported that “an error by a graphic designer” in the graph had been corrected. The larger issue of the misleadingly short time span has not been addressed.

  10. Paddy Morris says:

    In fairness, everything I have read by Mr Tol has been quite clear that manmade global warming is real and a problem – I would rather someone whose studies have led him to that conclusion, and has published papers to that effect, be on the GWPF advisory council than simply the usual suspects of ‘deniers’.
    I am sure Richard can fight his corner when it comes to people like Pilmer – he has the published, peer reviewed science to do so. Last time I checked, Plimer has a book, riddled with factual inaccuracies, and done a series of interviewers with soft questions from those interviewing to promote it. He has dodged any difficult questions.
    Should be no contest really.

    The graph on their front page is very misleading though – Richard, maybe some ‘academic advice’ could be provided to them on changing it? This decade is apparently the warmest on record, and this year is on track to be the 5th warmest ever. The graph, if they insist on having one, should reflect the underlying warming trend over the last few decades.

    Also, I do worry that Richard’s faith in the markets ability to mitigate the effects of climate change may be misguided/wrong…
    an example is: http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/4245
    “Climate change may cut food production in Africa by one-third. If African farmers would use the latest farming methods, food production would increase ten-fold”
    Given that the latest farming methods can be energy (i.e. oil) intensive, and that even the IEA has acknowledged the era of cheap and easy oil is over, would it be wise to rely on modern methods that are completely dependent on a dwindling supply of oil to deal with a reduction in food production that will be caused by climate change? Particuarly when those ‘latest farming methods’ are buring more oil, releasing more carbon dioxide and worsening the problem of global warming in the long term.

  11. Richard Tol says:

    @John
    Can you point me to anything that the GWPF did wrong? As far as I can see, the only fact on the ground is the creation of an aggregator for news on climate change and climate policy.

    The Academic Advisory Council of the GWPF consists of people who vigorously disagree with one another, with the director, and with the chairman.

    I note that you, Lenny B, and EWI still have to answer the question why William Reville is a “skeptic” or a “dunce”.

    Lenny B added more words, like “anti-environment”, “ultra-Catholic” and “agitprop” that have yet to be substantiated.

  12. Coilin MacLochlainn says:

    Isn’t the raison d’etre of the GWPF to sow confusion and dissent and so delay action on climate change? One would have to question why R Tol is part of it, if he is genuinely impartial and constructive. And now he is implicitly defending W Reville.

    Blogs typically receive a great amount of negative and abusive comments. This applies even to blogs that are doing good works. Most now filter out the rubbish. As the climate change problem is so grave, climate bloggers including John Gibbons would be well advised to filter more rigorously.

  13. Richard Tol says:

    @Coilin
    “Isn’t the raison d’etre of the GWPF to sow confusion and dissent and so delay action on climate change?” Do you have any evidence for this?

    I’m not defending Reville. I just wonder why he is called a dunce, a skeptic, a catholic, a agitprop and an anti-environmentalist. So far, no one has supported their claims.

    There’s innuendo, but no substance.

  14. John Gibbons says:

    @Richard
    Reville’s record speaks for itself. Here’s a Letter to the Editor, dated June 2008, from one John Mulcahy, who wrote:

    “Denial, generally the preserve of the determindely ignorant, ill befits Dr Reville, who frankly should know better than to rely on the propaganda that more commonly characterises the less evolved of the industrialist species.

    “His credibility is in tatters and one can only wonder at his motives. Is this a common view among the UCC scientific fraternity? If so, we should advise our brightest young minds to seek enlightenment elsewhere”.

    The above letter followed a particularly toxic anti-environmental rant by the good doctor from UCC, published on June 26, 2008. Let me share a few highlights:

    “First, the green movement believes in God, or more precisely in a Goddess called Gaia. Gaia is the name given by scientist James Lovelock to the Earth and its coating of living organisms”.

    “And just as religious people have rules and practices for good living, so do the greens. The golden rule is to live “sustainably”, that is in a manner that doesn’t interfere with the perceived mechanisms through which Gaia maintains herself. This can determine how we behave in almost every aspect of our lives. Thus, we should eat organic food, avoid genetically modified food, use public transport, ride bicycles, drive the smallest cars, severely ration air-travel, insulate our houses, instal solar panels, compost, recycle, conserve water, etc, etc. The minutiae of proper green behaviour closely resembles the Christian notion of offering up all your daily actions to God”.

    “…We rarely hear anymore of the dangers of ballooning world population now that birth rates are plummeting – instead we are smoothly invited to worry about the ill-effects associated with an ageing global population”.

    “Also, politically and economically, many leading greens seem to be Marxists, a philosophy that comprehensively failed in practice.”

    “The green religion basically views technological and industrial development as a burden on Gaia and may never be fully satisfied with less than a return to a simple life where most physical contacts and travel are local.”

    So if you’re wondering why Reville’s an anti-environmentalist and sceptic, see above for his blinding hatred of those Marxist Greens. Guess that’s how one sets aside one’s scientific training to engage in such embarrassingly self-revelatory diatribes. As a devout Catholic, Reville seems to need to ascribe to others quasi-religious motives which in truth underpin his own world view.

    Regarding his being a dunce, anyone who works for a university and who can haul out an old canard about a 1970s “scientific consensus” about global cooling has well earned his pointy hat.

    Hope that covers Reville. As regards what your GWPF “did wrong”, your fellow Academic council are a veritable rogues’ gallery of climate sceptics – GWPF director Benny Peiser is an arch sceptic (see Sourcewatch.org), and Nigel Lawson, Maggie Thatcher’s footsoldier, is a right wing idealogue par excellence (don’t worry, that’s not innuendo, there’s a ton of substance direct from Lawson’s own mouth to support this analysis). Also, the GWPF’s own logo has had to be, er, fixed, when it turned out the temperature data was wrong. Whoops, must have been the same graphic designer who got the job working for Martin Durkin on the Climate Swindle mockumentary.

    The ultra-selective use of 2001-08 temperature data in the masthead is too tacky for words, a cheap gimmick designed to mislead the ignorant and unwary. Perhaps as a member of their Academic Advisory Council, you have in fact written to protest at this blatant and crude statistical sleight of hand? And if not, why not?

    But Richard, a smart guy like you knows all this. The question remains: what are YOU doing with this bunch of jokers? Are you one of them, or are you really just there to “set them straight”? If the latter, we all look forward to hearing how exactly you propose doing this.

    There’s a bad smell emanating from the GWPF, and I think it’ll get a lot worse soon. I’m surprised you’d be so cavalier in the company to whom you are prepared to lend your (and the ESRI’s) good name.

    I’m not trying to be pious here. Anyone can make a mistake (and I made a big fat one too recently, as you yourself were among those to helpfully point it out to me!). I think I learned something from that. I sincerely hope you’ll recognise this GWPF lark as an error of judgement and consider withdrawing from it.

  15. John Gibbons says:

    @Coilin
    you’re absolutely right. About a week ago, I started aggressively filtering the nuttier of my sceptic mailbox. Depriving them of the oxygen of seeing their tirades up on the web seems to do the trick. After one or two inevitable flare-ups and howls of indignation (ain’t the spam folder great?) they tend to buzz off to go annoy someone else. Constructive comments, serious critiques still welcome, but I’ve taken a sabbatical on full scale howl-at-the-moon types, thanks!

  16. Richard Tol says:

    @John
    Thanks for informing the discussion.

    Reville’s apparent anti-environment stance is derived from an earlier writing, not the current one. In the passages that you cite, Reville does not argue against the environment, but rather characterizes the environmental movement. There is an obvious difference between being anti-environment and being anti-environmentalist. Reville appears to be the latter not the former.

    For a professor of biochemistry, Reville is remarkably astute. Scholars of human culture have established a continuity between Germanic paganism, Northwest European christianity, and deep ecology. Ragnarok became Armaggedon which turned into Climate Change. Another common theme is penance and the aversion to indulgences. Reville does not pass judgement in the above citations — he merely describes, and his description is well-supported by qualified people.

    Reville then claims that environmentalists tend to be to the political left, which is found time and again in surveys and which is clear, too, from the political manifestos of the green parties in Europe.

    I do not understand the conjunction of the terms “scientific” and “consensus”. Many geoscientists would argue that the next ice age is overdue. In the 1970s, global warming was a small and obscure theory. The available observations suggested that the planet was cooling, and people had yet to realise that this was because of sulphur, so the idea of an impending ice age was certainly a respectable one.

    As to the GWPF, I understand that the logo was changed when an error was discovered. The logo says “global mean temperature in the 21st century”, and that is what it shows.

    I do not understand why I have to repeat myself: The GWPF aims “to bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant.” Its academic advisory council consists of people who vigorously disagree with one another. I would not resign because I disagree with some other council member, as that would be an act of intolerance. I’m also a member of the climate change committee of the Royal Irish Academy, and I have no intention to resign even though I strongly disagree with some other committee members. Councils and committees should be diverse, and I am happy to engage in a conversation about climate change and climate policy with anyone.

    You may want to read up on your recent UK history. Lawson was not quite Thatcher’s foot-soldier. You may also want to inform yourself about the UK history of coal.

  17. EWI says:

    @ Richard Tol

    You can call me whatever you like (within legal bounds).

    That sounds like an implied threat, which I hope it’s not meant to be. And on that note, I would like to observe that I have not referred to Reville as a “skeptic” or a “dunce” at any time. by the way, your interest in spending time over here to defend someone who has (correctly) been called as playing somewhat loose with the facts on the material stolen from CRU is no doubt a result of your compassion for your fellow man, which is to be highly commended.

    As to your link to your statistical analysis paper, I note that both of you appear to be economists, not scientists, so I wonder what the point is meant to be.

    On the GWPF membership, I will reproduce here for the benefit of others something I posted a while back in an Irish Economy thread:

    I picked the two best-known denialists on the board, whom those so inlined can read more on at the excellent SourcWatch: Plimer and Lindzen.

    Let’s work through the rest out there at Lawson’s collection of pet denialists:

    Benny Peiser Director)
    Philip Stott
    Gwyn Prins (one of the “Inhofe 400″)
    Paul Reiter
    Peacock also denies AGW. Dyson denies that AGW is occurring. Whitehouse says that AGW has “stopped” (a new variation). The list goes on, and I think that I’ve proved our point here.

    Richard, you’re welcome to elaborate on your claim (made previously in other places, also unsubstantiated there) that the so-called academic council “vigorously disagree” with each other – on what do the rest of the council – all climate change deniers – and you, the sole person who claims to accept the science, disagree?

    What do you think of the claims that many of them have made that those who accept global warming as scientific fact are essentially, frauds? Why, exactly, do you think that given such demonstrated hostility, you (uniquely) have been given a seat at that particular table?

    Can you point me to anything that the GWPF did wrong? As far as I can see, the only fact on the ground is the creation of an aggregator for news on climate change and climate policy.

    And yet, this “aggregator” somehow manages to collect only denialist-friendly articles. Let’s try an experiment:

    http://www.thegwpf.org/

    As to the GWPF, I understand that the logo was changed when an error was discovered. The logo says “global mean temperature in the 21st century”, and that is what it shows.

    The “error” was “discovered”, you say? Curious. And even curiouser that the no-doubt-honourabe souls that populate the GWPF chose a misleading selection of data which happens to be a well-known denialist trick, as noted by others above.

    I do not understand the conjunction of the terms “scientific” and “consensus”. Many geoscientists would argue that the next ice age is overdue. In the 1970s, global warming was a small and obscure theory. The available observations suggested that the planet was cooling, and people had yet to realise that this was because of sulphur, so the idea of an impending ice age was certainly a respectable one.

    Unfortunately, another classic claim from denialist mythology, Richard. But I can certainly understand how a non-scientist may have been taken in by a wrong impression.

    http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm

    Thanks for the tip on the RIA.

  18. Richard Tol says:

    @EWI
    You offer more innuendo.

    Counting the number of papers on cooling v warming does not mean much. Warming was still a novelty back in the 1970s, and novelties attract papers. If you’d talk to people who were around then, you’d find the assumption of cooling was so widespread that nobody bothered to write about it.

  19. Marco says:

    Richard

    An appeal to uncorroborated conversations that may or may not have happened is not a convincing rebuttal.

    As far as novelties are concerned, we are dealing with a period in which climate science was in its infancy and many of the problems would by definition have been novel. You cannot apply the novelty argument to one side of the ledger and ignore it on the other.

    But even if we allow vague recollections and novelties to stand, the argument for a ‘cooling’ consensus is undermined by the existence of academically authoritative assertions to the contrary made by persons and institutions concerned with providing a contemporary account of the state of the science (see Peterson et al amongst others).

    To insist that the 70’s consensus was for a rapidly approaching ice age is simply not supported by anything you have written here.

    Who is a ‘dunce’ or a ‘skeptic’ is not something I really have time for, largely because I have never been immune to being a dunce and I would hope that we are all skeptical.

  20. EWI says:

    @Richard

    You offer more innuendo.

    Says you. I notice that you’ve declined to answer my questions on what you have yourself said.

    Counting the number of papers on cooling v warming does not mean much. Warming was still a novelty back in the 1970s, and novelties attract papers.

    That’s an interesting way of spinning it.

    If you’d talk to people who were around then, you’d find the assumption of cooling was so widespread that nobody bothered to write about it.

    OK, now I know that this is just a prank.

  21. Richard Tol says:

    @Marco
    My point about global cooling is indeed weakly supported. You’ll have to take my word for it.

  22. Coilin MacLochlainn says:

    @EWI,

    I am enjoying your witty repartee, and you seem to be well informed; would you be able to tell us who you are and where you work, or do you have to remain anonymous?

  23. John Gibbons says:

    @Richard
    ever heard of quitting while you’re behind? This is getting embarrassing.

  24. Richard Tol says:

    @EWI
    Sorry for not answering your questions. I searched on “?” but your questions above are leading, rhetorical, or not addressed to me.

    Can you kindly rephrase the questions you want answered?

  25. Richard Tol says:

    On global cooling, Plato has uncovered the following video:

    http://plato-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/back-to-future.html

    If you fast forward to min 40, you’ll find something unusual: Steve Schneider agrees with Pat Michaels. Both argue that the common view in the 1970s was that the planet was cooling.

  26. EWI says:

    I am enjoying your witty repartee, and you seem to be well informed; would you be able to tell us who you are and where you work, or do you have to remain anonymous?

    Hi Coilin,

    Thank you very much for your kind compliment, but I’m just a humble public servant with no connection to anything in the area.

    What I’ve picked up comes from reading US blogs, in no particular order:

    http://johnquiggin.com/
    http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/
    http://www.realclimate.org/
    http://mediamatters.org/

    There’s significant crossover of tactics and rhetorical trickery with the creationist movement (big in fundamentalist Christianity here and in the US, but none of the big money behind it as with global warming denialism). These websites may be rewarding reading for some on this blog:

    http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/
    http://pandasthumb.org/

    I also read the blog of an American economist called Duncan Black, who had predicted the property meltdown (“big shitpile”, as he termed it) for a couple of years and is an invaluable independent voice on such things as the US banks bailout:

    http://www.eschatonblog.com/

    (It seems that not all economists are indifferent to the effects of the policies they promote, thankfully)

  27. EWI says:

    On global cooling, Plato has uncovered the following video:

    Richard, I have no interest in spending my time sitting through any denialist videos that you may care to excavate to show us (I haven’t watch “Swindle” either, for the same reason). Either come back with something reputable to bolster this claim out of the denialist playbook (unlikely) or get off the pot.

    I will reiterate my questions to you from above, in response to your own claims as to the nature of the GWPF’s supposed scientific advisory committee. If you still decline to answer, then I’ll have to conclude that you cannot or will not defend the GWPF in public when pressed (and might want to consider resigning from it, in that case).

    Richard, you’re welcome to elaborate on your claim (made previously in other places, also unsubstantiated there) that the so-called academic council “vigorously disagree” with each other – on what do the rest of the council – all climate change deniers – and you, the sole person who claims to accept the science, disagree?

    What do you think of the claims that many of them have made that those who accept global warming as scientific fact are essentially, frauds? Why, exactly, do you think that given such demonstrated hostility, you (uniquely) have been given a seat at that particular table?

  28. Coilin MacLochlainn says:

    For anyone in any doubt about what climate scientists believe we are facing in the next 50 years, I recommend they read this article (http://www.nature.com/climate/2009/0912/full/climate.2009.126.html) in the science journal Nature published online on 3 December 2009.

    See also the Nature Reports Climate Change site for video reports from the Copenhagen conference last week, presented by Olive Heffernan from Ireland.

  29. Richard Tol says:

    @EWI
    The video indeed is not the best. You can safely ignore everything but min 41-43 where first Steve Schneider and then Pat Michaels confirm William Reville’s and my claim about the commonly held view, in the 1970s, that the planet is cooling. Although the video was made by people whom you disagree with, Steve Schneider comes out well because he changed his mind when the evidence changed, while Pat Michaels paints himself as a contrarian-then and a contrarion-now.

    Your first question is vague (about 15 people at once) and leading (you have made up your mind about the other 14). Your second question is leading.

    Your third question is again leading. You should ask Nigel Lawson why he invited me at that table.

    Why do I think I was invited? I am often introduced as one of the world’s leading climate economists (based, I guess, on objective criteria such as the number of publications and citations) so my input is often sought by people like John Gormley and Dominic Lawson. I advised the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, and the Obama administration, the Mayor government, and the Blair government and I intend to advise the Cameron government. For your information, I told them all the same thing.

  30. Paddy Morris says:

    @ Richard

    I think I’ll repeat my point from above, it seems to have got lost in the debate:

    Richard’s faith in the markets ability to mitigate the effects of climate change may be misguided/wrong…
    an example is: http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/4245
    “Climate change may cut food production in Africa by one-third. If African farmers would use the latest farming methods, food production would increase ten-fold”

    Given that the latest farming methods can be energy (i.e. oil) intensive, and that even the IEA has acknowledged the era of cheap and easy oil is over, would it be wise to rely on modern methods that are completely dependent on a dwindling supply of oil to deal with a reduction in food production that will be caused by climate change? Particuarly when those ‘latest farming methods’ are buring more oil, releasing more carbon dioxide and worsening the problem of global warming in the long term.

    Also, what exactly was the advice you presented to the goverments mentioned above? A link will do if you have it summarised.
    Thanks.

  31. Richard Tol says:

    @Paddy
    We’re drifting from the original topic.

    The citation is not about “markets”. It’s about the, in my view, incorrect claim that climate change is the biggest problem of humankind. The citation is meant to show that inefficient farming is more detrimental to food production today than climate change could be in the future. It is also meant to show that, if you worry about food production, then you may want to focus on inefficiencies in farming rather than on greenhouse gas emission reduction.

    That said, the green revolution was no panacea; and there are resource issues.

    I’ve advised anyone who cared to listen that there should be carbon tax, and a carbon tax only; that the carbon tax should be somewhere in between $10 and $50 per tonne of carbon today; that the carbon tax should rise predictably over time; and if they do not think that that is enough, then they should consider prizes for technological progress, be it in the form of awards, guaranteed procurement, or temporary monopolies. This I’ve said for a long time. Recently, I’ve added that climate policy should be removed from politics and be handed to a institution at arm’s lenght of the government, much like a central bank sets monetary policy.

  32. Ian says:

    “Scholars of human culture have established a continuity between Germanic paganism, Northwest European christianity, and deep ecology. Ragnarok became Armaggedon which turned into Climate Change.”

    – Richard Tol

    It is correct that deep ecology is influenced by Germanic/Scandinavian paganism, as Anna Bramwell explored in her 1989 book about environmentalism. However, deep ecology is quite a marginal part of the modern climate justice movement so I would consider it irrelevant. Ireland has very few deep ecologists and I doubt any of them are commenting here.

    However I find it astounding that you assert that climate change (I assume you mean the AGW theory) originates in eschatology. You surely know that it originates in science. Perhaps the filtering of it through modern culture owes something to apocalyptic religious heritage but not the theory itself.

  33. Richard Tol says:

    @Ian
    Two discussions are getting mixed up.

    John G responded to a recent piece of Reville on climate change by calling Reville a “skeptic” and a “dunce”. As part of the evidence, John G referred to an earlier piece by Reville on the environmental movement.

    Climate change, both anthropogenic and natural, is indeed science. The notion of catastrophic climate change has little scientific support, and is more easily explained by an age-old belief in an apocalypse, often attenuated by a belief in the wrath of a superior being over our sins.

    I was using the term “deep ecology” rather broadly, by the way.

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