Copenhagen

Activism and protest at COP15

I am a writer looking for activists and protestors to hang with at the conference. I am covering the street scene and treatment of demonstrators at the hands of the Politi.

Please get in touch.

Thanks

Artist's impression of the conference in Copenhagen:

Are you saying that all the concern about climate change is just a big fuss about nothing?

The concern about anthropogenic global warming is probably a fuss over nothing, yes.

I wouldn't be surprised if the public as a whole is beginning to move to a sceptical position, given the uncertainty of the science (based on modelling rather than empirical practice), the behaviour of the scientists (their supporting data seems somewhat short of being in the public domain) and the string of scare stories that precedes this one (the boy who cried wolf).

I spent a little while as a post-grad Geographer and we had visiting lecturers presenting personally produced data that both corroborated and denied (heh) the warming story. In fact, an ice-core specialist prognosticated an imminent cooling and urged us to pollute MORE.

I'm quite happy to spare resources, live sustainably and cleanly etc but am not keen to buy into the latest end time cult.

mixed_biscuits said:

The concern about anthropogenic global warming is probably a fuss over nothing, yes.

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With respect, that's easy for you to say: you're not facing imminent starvation (or slaughter/displacement by the tribe next door) because it didn't rain properly this year again, or about to be made homeless by rising sea levels.

mixed_biscuits said:

I wouldn't be surprised if the public as a whole is beginning to move to a sceptical position, given the uncertainty of the science (based on modelling rather than empirical practice), the behaviour of the scientists (their supporting data seems somewhat short of being in the public domain) and the string of scare stories that precedes this one (the boy who cried wolf).

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Bollocks to what the public think, that doesn't affect the climatic reality. The point about models vs. empirical data is a red herring: what do you think the models are based on? It's hard to make predictions about the future without having a model, unless you know a good soothsayer or own a time machine. And the empirical data shows a warming trend over the last 50-100 years, which has drastically accelerated over the last decade or so.

The known facts are as follows:

• The global climate is changing - this is now beyond doubt;
• For most of the world this change means warming, which is already having severe effects on rainfall in arid regions, snow/ice cover at high altitudes, ice cover at sea and sea levels;
• These changes are already having drastic effects on human populations;
• This change is happening rapidly, more rapidly in fact than it was predicted even by the best models from 10-15 years ago, which no-one at the time thought were unduly optimistic;
• This change seems much too rapid to be explained by non-anthropogenic sources, eg. natural variations in the Eath's orbit.

mixed_biscuits said:

I spent a little while as a post-grad Geographer and we had visiting lecturers presenting personally produced data that both corroborated and denied (heh) the warming story. In fact, an ice-core specialist prognosticated an imminent cooling and urged us to pollute MORE.

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There may have been (some) room for genuine doubt even just a few years ago, but the picture I've painted above is becoming more and more cemented as new data come in and models are refined.

mixed_biscuits said:

I'm quite happy to spare resources, live sustainably and cleanly etc but am not keen to buy into the latest end time cult.

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Not even one with a basis in sound science? Taking an edgy dissenting view is not going to be much use when the whole world's gone to buggery-fuck.

I'm not talking about empirical data, I want experiments that can be repeated (ie. chuck a lot of CO2 into a jar 30,000 feet high, heat the jar by a huge, permanently exploding ball of gas, see whether a block of ice in the corner of the jar melts or something). At the least I would like to have easy access to the basic data that the scientists are using. Unhappily for me, it seems the dog ate it.

Models are gash: they are based on numerous assumptions which have not been or cannot be verified, inevitably miss random or complex effects and have their own cultural histories (having been calibrated according to other models). They're part of one great circular argument.

And as far as emotive sob stories go, how about the economic and thus social consequences of imposing draconian limits on developing countries' emissions?

mixed_biscuits said:

I'm not talking about empirical data, I want experiments that can be repeated (ie. chuck a lot of CO2 into a jar 30,000 feet high, heat the jar by a huge, permanently exploding ball of gas, see whether a block of ice in the corner of the jar melts or something).

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That experiment would tell you about the behaviour of some gas and ice in a jar. Would it be a good physical model of the whole world? I'd bet my bollocks it would be completely useless. However, it is well established that carbon dioxide has the property of being transparent to visible light and near infra-red but opaque to thermal IR. So, pending some startling evidence to the contrary, it seems reasonable to conclude that a greater concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause it to trap more heat. It is not, as they say, rocket science.

(You obviously can't do an experiment on the entire planet to prove some ecological hypothesis, any more than you can do an experiment on the universe to prove some cosmological result. They're called environmental sciences; sciences that study very large complex systems that can be observed but not directly experimented on in a lab, as such. Of course you can do experiments on, say, a sample of CO2 and then extrapolate from that to draw conclusions on the likely effect it has on the atmosphere as a whole.)

mixed_biscuits said:

At the least I would like to have easy access to the basic data that the scientists are using. Unhappily for me, it seems the dog ate it.

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The fact that some scientists were strapped for storage space hardly invalidates the whole hypothesis. And there are scientists all over the world doing this research; it's not like the conclusions rest on results from one team at one university.

mixed_biscuits said:

Models are gash: they are based on numerous assumptions which have not been or cannot be verified, inevitably miss random or complex effects and have their own cultural histories (having been calibrated according to other models). They're part of one great circular argument.

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Of course they can be verified! Take data, build model, make prediction, compare prediction to new data 5/10/15 years down the line. As I said earlier, models used in the 90s gave predictions that underestimated the rate of warming.

mixed_biscuits said:

And as far as emotive sob stories go, how about the economic and thus social consequences of imposing draconian limits on developing countries' emissions?

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Well for one thing, simply denying that it's happening at all because one group of scientists threw away some data is not really a rational response. For another, there are all sorts of things that could be (and, in some very limited and tentative ways, are being) done: development aid concentrating on sustainable practices, for example. But it's missing the point to focus entirely on developing countries anyway, because although that's where the big growth in GHG emissions is happening it's still the developed world that's been responsible for most of the effects so far and it's those developed countries that have the resources (financial, intellectual, structural) to develop cleaner energy resources and attempt to guide the development of the rest of the world in a direction that can best mitigate climatic effects without condemning its citizens to eternal poverty.

I say 'mitigate' because this is one train that's not going to stop any time soon, so it's a case of trying to slow it down a bit rather than stop it completely, let alone reverse it.

Stagger said:

I am a writer looking for activists and protestors to hang with at the conference. I am covering the street scene and treatment of demonstrators at the hands of the Politi.

Please get in touch.

Thanks

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Next week the world's leaders will meet in Copenhagen to bang out a deal to counter the dangerous effects of climate change.

It's a critical moment for all of us - Nick Griffin is attending the climate summit. He's said that he's going to expose the "somewhat dodgy" evidence surrounding climate change.

The BNP claim that climate change is a "global Marxist mantra" designed to "impose a one world government."

The BNP's website currently describes the Copenhagen Summit as an "anti-white guilt hatefest which will see billions more taxpayers' cash poured into the Third World."

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politicians are compromised and generally have no idea what they're talking about, especially when it comes to science. i can't wait for aliens to enslave the human population and destroy everything, we really are hopeless.

Mr. Tea said:

You obviously can't do an experiment on the entire planet to prove some ecological hypothesis, any more than you can do an experiment on the universe to prove some cosmological result.

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If scientists are so great, why can't they build a fake earth, seed it with a basic form of climate change and get the Large Hardon Inseminator to pump it into space?

Mr. Tea said:

Of course they can be verified! Take data, build model, make prediction, compare prediction to new data 5/10/15 years down the line. As I said earlier, models used in the 90s gave predictions that underestimated the rate of warming.

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This just proves how vague they are. I dare say that none of them foresaw the slight, but important, temperature decline of 2007, either, which presages the coming ice age.

Mr. Tea said:

Well for one thing, simply denying that it's happening at all because one group of scientists threw away some data is not really a rational response.

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Well, this data is the empirical evidence in its purest form - not having access is to it makes formulating a rational response difficult, as one is not in possession of the facts. The data should be regathered.

So in the absence of the most important information, the layman is resigned to weighing up claims on the basis of the authority behind them and having faith in their pronouncements. The problem is that the authorities have only weight of numbers behind them and, as we all know for the big questions, it is the minority who are right (Copernicus, Galileo), not the majority. In fact we should be downright suspicious of the majority, as they're the guys who are normally carrying pitchforks.

Ideally, I would be shooting my own scale model of the earth into space with personally configured experimentation devices relaying unsullied data back to my politically neutral, non-governmentally funded pda, but I have neither the scientific training nor the overdraft facility to enable such an ambitious project (yet).

Another laymanly response is to go meta and assess the latest scare story using the outcomes of the ones that precede it: bird flu, millennium bug, global cooling, acid rain, SARS, swine flu, BSE LOL: damp squibs, the lot of them. This would literally be the first ever scare story to be justified. Scare stories that happen are not things that we have time to get scared about: Spanish flu, Hitler, the Great Fire of London, Arrested Development getting cancelled, Susan Boyle.

Wait a minute, I forgot: BSE IS A TIMEBOMB, WE IZ ALL STILL GOING 2 DIE LMAO

Scientists and politicians have to exaggerate the dangers and tell us their worse case scenario to cover their asses. This should be patently clear after the fuss over swine flu, with some experts predicting a number of deaths 10 000 times greater than the number killed so far.

If I divide the worst case scenario for global warming (7 degrees C over the next 100 years) by 10 000, we get an adjusted increase of 0.0007 C, barely enough to heat a weevil's mittens.

mixed_biscuits said:

I wouldn't be surprised if the public as a whole is beginning to move to a sceptical position, given the uncertainty of the science

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the public understands climate change even less than politicians, if that is possible. i'll trust a scientist a thousand times over the schizophrenic opinion of the public (mine included).

mixed_biscuits said:

If scientists are so great, why can't they build a fake earth, seed it with a basic form of climate change and get the Large Hardon Inseminator to pump it into space?

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Hey, we're working on it! Gissa break.

All I'll say for the rest of it is that it is pretty understandable thatr the original data was discarded. Bear in mind that these days, a couple of GB sits quite happily on a nice durable DVD-ROM, but back in the '80s when the data was taken this would have been stored on megametres of magnetic tape (and some of it was on paper, fopr heaven's sake), which is liable to decay and corrupt over time. Back then they probably had no idea how important the data was: in the '80s the green lobby was all about pandas, Sellafield and the ozone layer, there wasn't this ubiquitous emphasis on climate change/warming that there is now. And having worked on one of the LHC experiments, I know how much of a logistical issue it can be to work with and store vast amounts of data; if you don't have the space, you sometimes have to make the executive decision to delete, or in this case just throw away, old data to make room for new data, if the old data isn't important anymore. According to the Times article, the data they discarded came from miscalibrated instruments, so they recalibrated their data and discarded the old, inaccurate data. Probably without realising how much political weight their conclusions would carry 20+ years down the line.

mixed_biscuits said:

bird flu, millennium bug, global cooling, acid rain, SARS, swine flu, BSE LOL: damp squibs, the lot of them. This would literally be the first ever scare story to be justified. Scare stories that happen are not things that we have time to get scared about: Spanish flu, Hitler, the Great Fire of London, Arrested Development getting cancelled, Susan Boyle.

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Most of those scare stories were whipped up by the media, not scientists. Wide sections of the media remain climate-sceptical today (look at the infamous documentary aired by C4 a few years ago). Acid rain is still a massive problem in Scandinavia and for all we know a BSE pandemic may have been averted precisely because action was taken in time to stop cattle being fed the remains of other cattle and because herds with known infections were culled.

mixed_biscuits said:

So in the absence of the most important information, the layman is resigned to weighing up claims on the basis of the authority behind them and having faith in their pronouncements. The problem is that the authorities have only weight of numbers behind them and, as we all know for the big questions, it is the minority who are right (Copernicus, Galileo), not the majority. In fact we should be downright suspicious of the majority, as they're the guys who are normally carrying pitchforks.

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Are you saying that minorities are always right?

Next week the world's leaders will meet in Copenhagen to bang out a deal to counter the dangerous effects of climate change.

It's a critical moment for all of us - Nick Griffin is attending the climate summit. He's said that he's going to expose the "somewhat dodgy" evidence surrounding climate change.

The BNP claim that climate change is a "global Marxist mantra" designed to "impose a one world government."

The BNP's website currently describes the Copenhagen Summit as an "anti-white guilt hatefest which will see billions more taxpayers' cash poured into the Third World."

Click to expand...

The minorities argument was one of the less serious in my post.

Paolo, tell me what in climate change policy is there not to like for leftists?

As far as guilt tripping goes, the rhetoric is perfect: through our very existence we are polluters, as every one of us pumps out a constant stream of carbon dioxide. Ironically enough, it's firmly Catholic: Man is Fallen.

No wonder people end up saying 'I can't wait for aliens to enslave the human population and destroy everything, we really are hopeless;' without being aware of it, they have internalised this sense of guilt. Funny that it expresses itself as misanthropy, isn't it? I wonder why that might be?

mixed_biscuits said:

As far as guilt tripping goes, the rhetoric is perfect

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it's one thing to spin the facts but please don't cod psychologise about everyone else off the basis of a few infantile earth firsters, hair-shirt leftists, Johann Hari or whoever.

BTW Frank Furedi is notorious wrt climate change. he and that whole U of Kent, Canterbury/Institute of Ideas/Claire Fox {sic}/Mick Hume in The Times/Brendan O'Neill/spiked! online network have been vigorously attacking climate change scientists and activists for many, many years (when they're not busy talking utter shit about Bosnia and Rwanda), whatever he has to say on this particular subject is less than worthless.