Assistant Blog

Back in July David Bellamy wrote an article titled ‘Global Warming: What a load of poppycock!’, which – despite its faintly endearing title – was itself a load of absolute rubbish (he quoted a petition signed by 18,000 ‘scientists’, whose signatures included, on closer inspection, ‘Ginger Spice’ and ‘Michael J. Fox’). Now he’s at it again. He’s claimed that many of the world’s glaciers

“are not shrinking but in fact are growing … 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980″.

In the Guardian today George Monbiot deconstructs the ‘scientific’ data which led Bellamy to this claim, and reveals – predictably enough – that it’s a combination of thoroughly bad science, out of date research, invisible sources and, unbelievably, Bellamy’s own carelessness.

“While Bellamy’s source claimed that 55% of 625 glaciers are advancing, Bellamy claimed that 555 of them – or 89% – are advancing. This figure appears to exist nowhere else. But on the standard English keyboard, 5 and % occupy the same key. If you try to hit %, but fail to press shift, you get 555, instead of 55%. This is the only explanation I can produce for his figure. When I challenged him, he admitted that there had been “a glitch of the electronics”.”

He didn’t request a correction, however. Not good enough! Bellamy joins the ranks of ‘scientists’ who have to be thoroughly unscientific in order to justify their opinions about climate change. It is hard to convey, Monbiot writes

“just how selective you have to be to dismiss the evidence for climate change. You must climb over a mountain of evidence to pick up a crumb: a crumb which then disintegrates in the palm of your hand. You must ignore an entire canon of science, the statements of the world’s most eminent scientific institutions, and thousands of papers published in the foremost scientific journals”.

Read his article in full in the Guardian here, or on his website – with references – here.

An interesting (if not actually entertaining) article by Mark Lynas over on his blog today (and in the new edition of New Statesman, too). Lynas calls for the government to turn its attention to environmental matters now, and if they’ve any sense they’ll follow his advice.

Lynas writes:

“‘The environment’ is still seen as a soft-focus poor relation to the real hard-politics issues such as health, the economy, asylum-seekers, and so on. Throughout the election, it was the issue that dared not speak its name. The problem was not that it was too controversial: on the contrary, it wasn’t controversial enough. Green issues are still so unimportant electorally that, last November, Labour admitted quite freely that it would not meet its own climate-change targets. Unlike Iraq, the environment is not even worth lying about.

Our political system is gripped from top to bottom by a peculiar kind of cognitive dissonance, where politicians openly acknowledge that environmental issues are the most important ever to face humankind, and yet even as they utter these words, business as usual hums on in the background.”

Reading the article in full has spoiled my day somewhat. I’ve been looking at summer holidays and marvelling over the cheap flights. Cheap, yes. Impossibly damaging, er, also yes. One of those situations where I won’t even pretend my moral side will win out, but that’s a shame.

A nice note on Kyoto by John B over on his Shot by Both Sides blog today, arguing that – as much as we would like to blame Bush for America’s refusal to ratify the protocol – US resistence runs a lot deeper than the top man.

“As Bush apologists frequently point out, he didn’t kill US support for Kyoto. Rather, the Senate voted 95-0 in 1998 to say it would not ratify any such treaty. Americans don’t like being told by experts that they probably ought to stop being greedy fucks or lots of people will die.”

Worth reading, too, for John’s always appealing prose – any article which throws in a reference to Bush being “stupid, crooked and venal”, much less a “smirking prick” is alright by me.

Over at Mark Lynas’s blog, he’s jubilant,

“It’s been declared ‘dead’ by everyone from anti-capitalist protesters to George Bush. But Kyoto will go down in history as the treaty that refused to die – and as Kyoto lives, so too do our hopes of still greater efforts in future to avert the threat of catastrophic climate change.”

And he finishes, “One last thought: the US saw fit to stand outside this historic global effort. History will judge its leaders accordingly.”

On the day that Boeing launch their new 777 airbus, meanwhile, Mark had some cautionary words to say about it on yesterday’s Today programme. Looking back on his appearence, he remarks,

“I was trying to get across a … general message in a very short time. Most people haven’t the faintest idea that flying is the most climate-destructive thing they ever do, so I wanted to mention this whilst simultaneously sounding reasonable about the opportunities that it offers for travel and so on. My point about short-haul flights being worse is because *proportionally* per mile travelled they use more fuel because more time is spent taking off than cruising. Also there are more easy alternatives for short-haul travel by rail and so on rather than flight. I think the most important thing here is not to try and find the most fuel-efficient journey, but – given many tonnes of CO2 will end up in the atmosphere either way – to reassess the need to fly at all.”

Many Arctic animals, including polar bears and some seal species, could be extinct within 20 years because of global warming, a conservation group said yesterday.

a concerned polar bear, this morning.

Sorry, that was just a gratuitous excuse to show a picture of a polar bear, an animal which is really cool.

That said, I read last Friday, with a degree of surprise, a news item in the Guardian which reported on “the UK’s first dedicated meeting of climate change sceptics”, which was held in London last week. At it, the paper said:

“…the consistent message is that global warming will not have a catastrophic effect, and if it does there is little the world can or should do about it.

The meeting, held yesterday at the Royal Institution in London, was billed by organisers as “a valuable opportunity for debate on a topic frequently obscured by angst and alarmism”. Climate change, they said, was a topic “that has been subject to widespread misrepresentation and politicisation”.

Speakers included David Bellamy, the former television botanist and a special professor at the University of Nottingham; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University.”

Thinking it odd that the Guardian seemed to pass up the opportunity to challenge these conceptions, my immediate response, not knowing much about the subject, was to wonder if perhaps these people weren’t right after all. But Mark Lynas, writing on his blog on the same day, seems to be under no illusions. And he writes,

“This unwelcome appearance of the American far-right in London is unlikely to convince many people that all the scientists are wrong, but it may at least confuse non-experts – which is precisely what the climate change deniers intend.”

And which is precisely what happened.

Reading the Guardian article back, one quote leaps out, from David King, the chief scientific adviser to the government.

“It’s very important to know where these sceptics are coming from and to identify lobbyists as distinct from scientists.”

Making that distinction is not always easy, however.

I haven’t time to go into this in anything like the detail I would like to, but Sam draws my attention to the ‘Manifesto for a Sustainable Society’, which, given that I voted Green in the European elections, I really ought to have read already. It makes for interesting reading, although it does not contain too many surprises; idealistic statements on the environment which it is difficult to disagree with , fine words on transport, asylum and taxation, rubbish on Europe and the single currency, wonderful on the hereditory principle and the royal family – generally quite impressive, Europe aside. I need to read it in more detail, though.

For a quicker synopsis, the dreadful Kilroy-Silk, and more yesterday concerning his role in the party’s sudden success. As Michael Moore has long pointed out, if Oprah Winfrey stood for President of the United States she’d win with ease. Which makes me wonder quite how successful the Greens can be if the best they can do is Peter Tatchell?