If there was any doubt about the mainstream media’s agenda, this piece from the BBC should lay them to rest. It cites ten global warming skeptic arguments, and provides counter-arguments. Note the image caption: Unravelling the skeptics, which links to an article by the BBC’s environment correspondent who claims he’s not entirely sure what the arguments against the political consensus on global warming actually are.

This is not reporting. This is nothing less than partisan advocacy.

For its rebuttals, it relies on information supplied by Gavin Schmidt, who calls a significant correction of the most relied-upon temperature data — maintained by the organisation that employs him — “another ado about nothing“, who is a co-contributor at RealClimate.org with Michael Mann (he of the broken hockey-stick), and who claims to welcome openness in the debate but refuses to admit Steve McIntyre to the same debate.

The arguments are notable only for their vagueness, and for the patchy nature (at best) of the rebuttals. Worse, it omits the biggest and best of the skeptics’ arguments: that the direct and indirect costs of government programmes to curb global warming will exceed any claimed benefits even if they were to accrue, alternatively that the cost-benefit of spending resources on climate change is considerably worse than the cost-benefit of directing those same resources towards any number of other global problems.

I’ve considered most of the specific arguments in previous posts on the subject. Check under the climate change category for a selection. One day, should I find myself casting about for some productive procrastination, I may fisk the “news” in this article in particular.

But whatever you do, whether or not the BBC is right, and whether or not you believe them, do not mistake it for “news”. It’s BBC News, which is a different animal altogether.

This bunch of eco-minded brand merchants in San Francisco (where else?) operate a website which, besides for acres of vacuous and only mildly funny verbiage, sells stickers, shirts and other gear promoting the use of bicycles by everyone except goats. They’re serious about this, and if I were a goat rights campaigner, I’d be grateful.

Here’s their company hymn:

BIKING KICKS ASS
Biking is fun. Biking is fast.
Biking is quiet. Biking is cool.
Biking is healthy. Biking is simple.
Biking costs less for us.
Biking costs less for our cities.
Biking costs less for the planet.
Go ride a bike. And spread the word.

To some pious people, the sensual perfection to the left is the epitome of evil.

To these pious people, the sensual perfection to the right is the epitome of evil.

So what do you think their slogan would be? As religious folk sing the praises of chastity and modesty, you’d expect this lot to extol the virtues of high — nay, infinite — miles per gallon, right?

Wrong.

They called it Zero Per Gallon.

If they mean zero miles per gallon, the slogan would make a fitting bumper sticker for a Hummer. And if they mean zero dollars per gallon, as their nonsensical merchandise suggests, everyone could afford to drive one. In fact, I think I’ll get me a t-shirt, just to poke fun at them.

Kudos to the arithmetically challenged goat-haters, however, for exploiting the gullibility of cyclists who read the exhortation to “Be righteous! Be contemptuous!” and think, “Yup, that’s what I want to be when I grow up.”

Be afraid, be very afraid. If you’ve been eating pork sausages, ham, polony or bacon, you’re going to die.

Okay, you’re going to die anyway, but a new study says you should rather die without eating smoked, processed, cured, salted, or preserved meat. Or any red meat whatsoever. To make it easier to remember, simply add this to the list of things you shouldn’t consume much, if any, of: alcohol, tobacco, white bread, toasted brown bread, milk, butter and margarine (or margarine and butter, depending on who you consult), salt, pepper, anything that makes food taste better or last longer, fried food, potatoes, tomatoes, cheese, canned food, carbonated soft drinks, sweetened anything, spicy food, chocolate, coffee, tea… In fact, just assume you can’t eat something, unless otherwise specified by government, or an agency of the medical or parma pharmaceutical industries.

According to details published in the LA Times, for example,

Once an individual reaches the 18-ounce [~500g] weekly limit for red meat, every additional 1.7 ounces [~50g] consumed a day increases cancer risk by 15%, the report said. Every 1.7 ounces of processed meat consumed a day increases cancer risk by 21%, it added.

So if you eat a kilo of red or processed meat a week, your cancer risk is at least 150%, possibly 210%. Be terrified.

On the ham and bacon issue, it would seems the Jews and Muslims, who listened to God, got it right. To the Christians, Peter explained that in a dream he was presented with a great feast on a picnic blanket (think Wal-Mart, Tesco, Spar), “wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air.” When he refused to eat it because it was “common or unclean”, God told him, “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.”

The grammar is tortured, but the meaning is clear. Peter might have appeared to be a sandal-shod communist on acid, but he clearly was a PR for the global corporate retail oligopoly, trying to make a good little consumer out of you.

You thought you could get away with eating carrots and nuts? Wrong. The European Union has just set the safe limit of beta-carotene and selenium intake to the equivalent of two carrots and two brazil nuts, according to an article published by a group that claims to tell you what doctors don’t, and is devoted to pushing pills.

Which makes it clear that this whole food health scare thing is a propaganda effort by Big Pharma. Its profit margins on dietary “supplements” (read: “substitutes”) are around 40%, according to the most recent market study by the US Food and Drug Administration. The study is eight years old, so who knows how big it is these days? I’ll bet the FDA is in cahoots with the Big Pharma pill pushers, which is why it stopped publishing research on the subject. Perhaps maybe the pill pushers just threatened to stop paying tax, which would put half of the civil service out of work.

The pill pusher’s poison plot is hoping to make us realise that food is bad for you, and the only way to live is to consume only vitamin pills. Of course, they need the EU and other governments to publish laws that limit the permitted quantities of active ingredients, to keep the costs down and profits up.

On the other hand, I’m a heretic and an apostate. I reckon living increases your risk of death to near 100%, so you might as well eat steak and drink beer. Besides, if I die under suspicious circumstances, it’s not like officials will investigate the pill pushers or government agents. They’ll just blame it on my lifestyle.

Lifestyle. There’s another bad thing. Causes death too, you know.

If you want to know how “scientific consensus” is cooked up, look no further than the speaker lists at climate change conferences. Actually, do look further: to who doesn’t get invited to such shindigs.

Last week, the American Statistical Association sponsored a workshop on climate change. The goal, according to David Marker, one of the organisers and facilitators, was to “delineate a statistical science perspective on understanding climate change and to develop a consensus statement on the areas of clear knowledge, as well as those areas in which great uncertainty remains”.

Of course, developing a “consensus statement” is easy if you neglect to invite people like Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who famously broke Michael Mann’s infamous hockey stick temperature chart (right). Showing Mann’s methodology to be so badly broken that it turns even random data into a hockey stick, is one of the more significant statistical contributions to climate research in the last decade. Considering that the question of how to use proxy data to reconstruct a historic temperature record, and whether this record does or doesn’t show warm and cool periods corresponding to solar activity, remains a hot topic of discussion within the ASA (PDF newsletter), this on its own would appear to qualify them for invitations to such a workshop.
McIntyre has also been swimming against the tide of obstructionism and even secrecy by government scientists to audit US temperature measurement stations. Though the focus of the research is the siting of these stations and how “bad data” gets “corrected”, a surprise discovery forced James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, to correct the benchmark temperature record which — like Mann’s Hockey Stick — the politicians on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change use to scare us into give them more powers to tax and regulate. Again, the significance of McIntyre’s work on the statistical treatment of climate change data appears to be substantial. His comments on some of the topics raised at the ASA workshop show insight and familiarity with the issues.

This isn’t the first time that McIntyre and McKitrick have been omitted from speaker lists. Shortly after McIntyre’s discovery that NASA GISS had been cooking the books, a conference on integrity in scientific research likewise overlooked the Canadian, even though he’d raised red flags over the secrecy with which NASA GISS treats its data collection sites and its statistical methods.

Understanding climate change requires the combined skills of atmospheric scientists and statisticians, said Marker. The former understand the physical relationships being investigated, while the latter know how to determine which hypotheses are strongly supported and which are still subject to uncertainty.

And here I thought the consensus of the people that get invited to consensus-development workshops is that the science is settled.

Nick van der Leek’s comment on my climate change column got me to thinking. He says that the facts in my column, on the apparent inaccuracy of, unaccountability for and secrecy about the source data used by the global warming lobby, are just “details”. He says mentioning it in the media constitutes mere pedantry. He believes that articles like mine, which don’t pretend the debate is over, “confuse people even more”.

Unless he was referring to the inadequacy of the prose itself, my readers may take offence at this insult to their intelligence. So should his own readers. After all, he once told them:

If bloggers are to add any value to the internet in the near to medium term, and make any impact on the media machine, we need more credible writers, prepared to be who they are, write what is worth caring about, and being willing to back what they say.

I’ll let you be the judge of my credibility, but I am who I am, I write about what I believe is worth caring about, and I’m willing to back what I say — not only as a blogger, but even more so as a columnist. Yet he argues that my column did not add any value, because “the most obvious just gets left behind”. I missed what is “self-evident”, namely a fairly arbitrary factoid, worth more for an opportunistic bet than for serious discussion, from which one should reach a broad conclusion that in turn permits one to lecture people on their habits. They “ought to” change them, my correspondent says.

I have no doubt that — in addition to smoking, about which he rightly lectured me already — my other habits are indeed slothful, dissolute and iniquitous. I have no doubt he knows how we all should live. I have only the deepest respect, and indeed awe, for the cosmic enlightenment of greens and cyclists. However, even if he were a bona fide saint — not that I’m saying he isn’t, you understand — telling the rest of us how to live borders on petty fascism. Even if he’s right that “human beings may be largely responsible for climate change”.

My real point, however, is simply that he’s wrong. I’ve made a list, and counted the ways. Here’s why I don’t believe in global warming.
Read the rest of this entry »

• This was first published as a column in print in Maverick magazine in South Africa on 6 September 2007. If the denial machine reads this, I am still waiting to be well-funded, so at least consider subscribing, please.
  

You can relax. The hottest year in recorded US history was not 1998, and 2001 isn’t even in the top ten anymore. Hey, facts change, you know.

The news couldn’t have come at a worse time for Newsweek. It had just published a cover emblazoned with the headline “Global Warming is a Hoax*” The footnote reads: “Or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change. Inside the denial machine. By Sharon Begley.”

Contributing editor Robert J Samuelson repudiated the story in the very next issue, however. He calls it a “moral crusade”, “righteous indignation” that “undermines good journalism”, “a vast oversimplification of a messy story” and “a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading.” Wow. With friends like these…

Then there’s Steve McIntyre, already infamous in climate change circles for revealing the fatal flaws in the Michael Mann “hockey stick” chart adopted by the UN’s International Panel for Climate Change. His original aim had been to verify the adequacy of the US network of temperature sensors, many of which were being influenced by encroaching urbanisation. Some of them sit in the middle of hot tar parking lots, or near the hot exhaust fans of air conditioning units, for example.

The NASA official in charge of the most cited database of US temperatures, James Hansen, not only refused to disclose the adjustments that were being made to correct for bad siting of sensors, but also removed public access to the locations of meteorological stations. McIntyre had to reconstruct both. He did.

In The American Spectator, Michael Fumento wrote: “In retrospect, you knew there would be trouble when you put the people responsible for the Space Shuttle program in charge of tracking US temperatures.”

Read the rest of this entry »

“Oh Christ.” That was 88-year-old Doris Lessing’s exasperated, charming response to CNN, when she disembarked from a black cab in London to be informed by the news cameraman that she had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Why she’s so surprised is beyond me. She’s a pretty good author, has been both prolific and influential, and has sure waited long enough for the ultimate accolade. And at least she’s a writer.

What mystifies me is the Nobel Peace Prize, which according to Alfred Nobel’s will is to be awarded “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

So who gets it? A failed candidate for US president and a bevy of bureaucrats. The former has recently been going around the world using dodgy numbers and emotive images to whip up mortal fear in the hearts of millions, calling for states to impose, by force, restrictive and oppressive measures on free, industrious people. For good measure, the politico-bureaucrats have been living off taxes collected by force while they base fearful prophecies of apocalypse on statistics of dubious provenance in their efforts to scare people into expanding the power of national governments and supranational institutions. For all their entertainment value, how either Al Gore or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change created fraternity between the nations, abolished or reduced standing armies, or held and promoted peace congresses, is beyond me.

Mind you, I guess Al Gore did invent the internet. Peace, bro.

It’s a funny affair, the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s been inconsistent at best. Last year, the choice was inspired, selecting Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, which has done Bangladesh in particular and the Indian subcontinent in general a great service by proving that wealth can be created among the world’s poor through peaceful trade, without pouring billions down bureaucratic black holes. Today’s award exactly contradicts the philosophical basis and spirit of last year’s prize.

That earthquake warning, incidentally, has its epicentre in Norra Begravningsplatsen, pictured above.

Describing parts of Al Gore’s global brainwashing film, An Inconvenient Truth, as “alarmist”, a judge managed to find nine insupportable statements in the Oscar-winning jeremiad. He was ruling in a case brought to prevent its screening in British secondary schools. The case alleges the film is unfit for schools for being politically partisan, for containing serious scientific inaccuracies, and for being full of “sentimental mush”. Stewart Dimmock, the school governor who brought the case, said: “It’s a political shockumentary, it’s not a scientific documentary.”

According to the BBC, among the errors the defence could not explain were:

• Mr Gore’s assertion that a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of ice in either West Antarctica or Greenland “in the near future”. The judge said this was “distinctly alarmist” and it was common ground that if Greenland’s ice melted it would release this amount of water — “but only after, and over, millennia”.
• Mr Gore’s assertion that the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa was expressly attributable to global warming — the court heard the scientific consensus was that it cannot be established the snow recession is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.
• Mr Gore’s reference to a new scientific study showing that, for the first time, polar bears had actually drowned “swimming long distances — up to 60 miles — to find the ice”. The judge said: “The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm.”

The judge did call the film “broadly accurate”, and ruled that subject to suitable warnings and guidance notes to provide balance it can be shown in schools. But then, that goes for a lot of fiction.

Sean Jacobs, a South African blogger living in the US, added an interesting comment to the post about Burma under his equally interesting pen name, Leo Africanus.

In it, he calls for a boycott of Gary Player for doing business in Burma. This call, while it has merit, leaves me uncomfortable for several reasons, however. Let’s first establish the facts of the matter.

Read the rest of this entry »

According to the Times of London, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has “shaken the White House” with a “stinging critique” that includes a claim that it went to war for oil:

However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.

… Britain and America have always insisted the war had nothing to do with oil. Bush said the aim was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam’s support for terrorism.

Read other reports about it, however, such as that in the Wall Street Journal, or the Washington Post, and it turns out that Greenspan said securing global oil supplies was “not the administration’s motive.”

“I have never heard them basically say, ‘We’ve got to protect the oil supplies of the world,’ but that would have been my motive.”

So it turns out securing oil supplies and thwarting Saddam Hussein’s moves towards the Strait of Hormuz was the reason why Greenspan himself supported the first Iraq War. It turns out that he shared the administration’s view on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes and intentions. It turns out Greenspan’s actual beef with the current administration is big government, not “war for oil”.

It turns out you can’t believe a word the Times of London writes, because the primary purpose of its “news” reporting is bashing Bush. And you know, I actually think they’ll succeed: I’m starting to suspect Bush might not win the 2008 US elections.

We might as well give up, folks. Everything, everywhere, is going to go extinct in the next 10 to 50 years. Really. Would you disbelieve National Geographic, CNN, and Scientific American?

The reason, of course, is that the half of all species that were supposed to be extinct by 2000 flatly refused to do so. Norman Myers, Edward O. Wilson, Paul Ehrlich and Thomas Lovejoy have predicted such catastrophe ever since their hippie heydays. The very same people keep getting quoted as reliable sources and keep making the same predictions. The more they turn out to be false, the more crazy they make them.

The most succinct: Earth ‘will expire by 2050′. Heaven knows why people worry about the climate in 2100. Or have babies. I always knew retirement annuities were a scam.

Just scan the list of extinction headlines on this page. Once you’ve finished laughing, ask yourself: does the media have any credibility on environmental questions at all?