OFF: UK's premier green awareness festival under threat from police and local council.

[Jonathan Jarrett]

 	Dear All,
 		  allow me one more on this. I realise I've started 
annoying people but it's because of that I'd like to try and make an 
attempt at being more reasonable than `bat-shit crazy'. The good opinion 
of the list matters to me and so does being able to admit I'm wrong. 
Anyone who's not interested in further climate change stuff from me by all 
means hit delete now, and perhaps anyone who wants to take it up with me 
further will do so off-list. Okay?

On Fri, 14 Aug 2009, Paul Mather wrote:
> (Or, perhaps you meant to say, "There is bugger-all evidence I'm prepared to 
> accept."  That's quite a big difference.)

 	No, I'm not that far gone, though I do appear to have been very 
angry about something or other lately, this wasn't the only rant I've 
written though the others are thankfully not public. Thankyou for 
attempting to administer the argumentative slap in the face to the 
hysteric. I have the problem that I don't want to become an atmospheric 
chemist or read at that level; I'm reliant on reports of consensus from 
informed people. I'm also prepared to be swayed by them so I'm taking you 
very seriously here and am ready to accept I've drunk too much of the 
wrong Kool-Aid or whatever. Let me try and find a more reasonable place to 
stand than I managed last time.

> Like I said, you should read a bit more.  There are numerous, easy-accessible 
> sources that debunk these arguments.  How about what the American Geophysical 
> Union think about your medievalist concerns: 
> http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/prrl/prrl0319.html.  (And, the AGU had such a lack 
> of consensus they decided to publish a formal position on the human impacts 
> on climate: 
> http://www.agu.org/outreach/science_policy/positions/climate_change2008.shtml; 
> just like many other learned societies and leading science journals.)

 	Let's have a look at the AGU stuff then. I can handle a *bit* of 
science, so as well as the position statement, which is, well, a position 
statement whose foundations are essentially the reputation of the authors, 
I also had a look at the paper they link to from it, originally published 
in _Eos_:

http://www.agu.org/eos_elec/99148e.html

Now, Paul, you have to admit that if I wanted to have that kind of 
argument I could quote-mine that paper for something in support of almost 
everything I said in the previous post: the uncertainty over whether CO2 
vs. atmospheric heat is correlation or causation because of historical 
precedents that don't, well, correlate with causation; the question of 
what order CO2 rises and heat rises have occurred in and which may 
therefore be leading which; the complications of modelling when a great 
many processes appear to affect what they want to model; and that CO2 is 
only one of a whole bunch of pollutants with which we should be concerned 
and the one that nature appears most able to soak up in ways we don't 
entirely understand. Though their conclusions are in line with the 
position statement there, the caveats and conditions are so prevalent that 
it's hard for a reader to see how they get to that position without having
read everything they cite. I could source a far more rabid uncertainty 
critique than what I wrote, just from that paper.

 	The problem is of course that that paper is now ten years old, and 
the position statement *it* links to has now gone, presumably replaced by 
the 2008 one. So perhaps I and the little reading I've done are ten years 
behind. Is the degree of certainty we've achieved over what's going on in 
that time enough to lead from that paper to the current position 
statement? I just find it very difficult to understand how all those 
caveats and conditions and complications and problems with local data can 
be got round to the point where we can actually talk about a consensus 
here that isn't partially a faith position--which is why the word sceptic 
is the one that springs to mind. But certainly as you say it's no problem 
finding backup for that position in a far more consistent form than 
for the claims of the sceptics.

 	As to that little reading, by the way, I do agree with you that 
Anthony Watts is a problem source and that he finds what he wants to find. 
Also, he writes so damn much that repeats itself that I long ago gave up 
reading it. But the paper I linked to, though I saw it on his blog, was 
by someone else, Steven Goddard, though a look at some of *his* other 
posts suggests I may have over-rated his ability to talk sense. It's only 
about computer modeling anyway, not about the actual data we currently 
have.

 	The historic perspective, however, I have from a paper I saw last 
year at the International Medieval Congress by Sebastian Payne, who is 
the Chief Scientist at English Heritage. I grant you that this doesn't 
make him a atmospheric scientist, but neither is he a denier; indeed he 
argues that we have to deal very urgently with the effects of climate 
change, he just doesn't think the current climate situation is very 
unusual in long-historical terms. If you want to evaluate his position 
a presentation from a paper of it is online here:
http://www.britarch.ac.uk/sites/www.britarch.ac.uk/files/node-files/EH_Payne.pdf
with abstract here:
http://www.britarch.ac.uk/conservation/climate/ifa2008
The abstract of the paper I saw is here:
http://imc.leeds.ac.uk/imcapp/SessionDetails.jsp?SessionId=2576&year=2008
Regrettably I can't see that he's actually gone into print with this 
anywhere, though it isn't really his job.

 	Anyway, even that much poking round the web finds a whole load of 
stuff that makes me want to swallow a lot of what I was saying. Not all of 
it, but a lot. (In particular the Climatic Research Unit at the 
University of East Anglia have a lot of useful stuff online that's easy 
for someone at my level to swallow:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/
).

> I suppose skeptic sounds nicer and more fearless and romantic than denier.  I 
> agree with you about the pollution; peak oil; over-reliance on fossil fuels 
> (especially oil) with no urgent transition plan in sight to an alternative 
> energy policy; conscience salving via offsetting; and a lack of use of 
> renewables.  But, I think you're plain batshit crazy on the earlier stuff. 
> (I calls 'em like I sees 'em.) :-)

 	I clearly went too far with that. (Sorry.) What I mainly wanted to 
argue was that "carbon" (rather than CO2, even, though that too is 
suspect) has been fetishised into the sole cause of climate change, which 
is one thing if it gets people to pay attention because it's easier to 
swallow than a message of austerity. It's another thing, however, when 
plans like `carbon tariffs' for industry and so forth get ahead of 
stopping them, for example, pouring metal salts into rivers or generating 
*other* greenhouse gases that trees *don't* breathe, and when carbon 
offsetting threatens to actually comfort people out of making necessary 
and urgent changes to their resource usage. Somewhere in there I got all 
tangled up in how much crap there is surrounding all sides' presentation 
of anything resembling science in this debate. I may well not be properly 
equipped for telling crap from verifiable fact in this field.

 	I will hold to the environmental historians knowing what they're 
doing with the historic data for the moment though. Yours,
 							   Jon

ObCD: Mother of All Bands - _Insect Brain_
-- 
       Jonathan Jarrett, Cambridge    jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk
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  "With Capitalism, man exploits man.  With Socialism, it is exactly opposite"
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