Climate change – Page 3

Why am I not suprised?

Published on September 15, 2008

It’s long been demonstrated, by such purveyors of wingnuttia like Alicublog and Decent Leftspotters like Aaronovitch Watch, that wingnuts tend to run in circles. Get slightly dotty about the Muslims and before you know it you don’t believe in evolution anymore, think giving women the right to vote was a bad idea and abortion a crime against humanity. It’s not enough to just believe in one patently false evil belief, no, once you go wingnut, you go wingnut all the way.

So it came as no suprise when, according to DutchNews, one of the Islamophobes of Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration party is revealed to be clueless about climate change as well, denying the melting of the Arctic:

‘Our schoolchildren should be learning to spell and do sums not that pathetic polar bears are drifting around on ice floes because we go on holiday by plane,’ the paper quotes him as saying.

And yet this party won nine seats at the last elections and is consistently predicted to do even better next time. Makes you proud to be Dutch.

Rivers in Time – Peter D. Ward

Published on March 25, 2008

Cover of Rivers in Time

Rivers in Time
Peter D. Ward
315 pages including index
published in 2000

Rivers of Time is a new edition of The End of Evolution, a book originally published in 1994, roughly around the same time as E. O. Wilson’s Diversity of Life, with which it overlaps to some point. Like that book, Rivers of Time mixes exploration of the Earth’s evolutionary past with concern for the
present, focussing on the historical three mega extinctions as well as the one currently under way. Unlike E. O. Wilson’s book however, this is not a call to arms. Ward is much more resigned to the great extinction than Wilson is.

Partially this may be because in Ward’s view, this great extinction has already happened, with the disappearance of the megafauna of Europe, North America, Australia and many parts of Asia and Africa during the last 15,000-20,000 years, coinciding with the rise of modern humanity. The extinctions still taking place now are just the aftermath of this. I’m not sure how much I agree with this, but at the very least it puts the current destruction of ecosystems in place like Brazil or Borneo into a new perspective, when you realise the same thing had already happened in Europe thousands of years ago.

It’s David Brin’s Earth; we’re just living in it

Published on February 26, 2008

Yesterday Norway officially opened what’s been called a “Noah’s ark for plant life”:

Dug deep into the permafrost of a remote Arctic mountain, the “doomsday” vault is designed by Norway to protect the world’s seeds from global catastrophe.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a backup to the world’s 1,400 other seed banks, was to be officially inaugurated in a ceremony Tuesday on the northern rim of civilization attended by about 150 guests from 33 countries.

The frozen vault has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the globe, shielding them from climate change, war, natural disasters and other threats.

For those of us that have read David Brin’s 1990 novel Earth, this sounds eerily similar to the “Arks” he used as part of the background, wildlife refuges for animal and plant species that were dying out in the wild. Brin set his novel in 2038, but reality seems impatient. Brin must’ve been particularly well inspired when he wrote Earth, as these arks are far from the first “prediction” from it that have come true, as the Wikipedia article linked to above shows. What’s more, Brin put them together into a coherent vision of the near-future that to some extent seems to be coming true. Not in all particulars of course; science fiction cannot predict the future after all.

Brin wrote his novel at a time when, like now, environmental awareness was high. Acid rain had been known since the early eighties at least, while the disappearance of the ozone layer was common knowledge at the end of the decade and was finally acted upon then, decades after it first had been discovered, while global warming and the disappearance of biodiversity were just entering public awareness. That was a time when a fair few science fiction novels, unlike now, tackled climate change.

Coincindentally there’s a recent thread on torque Control on why it is that so few sf authors currently seem unwilling or unable to tackle climate change other than as background fodder. Perhaps because most of us, other than hardcore denialists, seem convinced it is happening and it can’t be stopped only migitated. Climate change as part of the consensus future, too big to ignore but also too immediate to make writing about it fun perhaps, unlike fifteen-twenty years ago.

Strawman environmentalists

Published on February 4, 2008

Unlike Charlie Stross I was less than impressed with this article on The Top Ten Things Environmentalists Need to Learn. Perhaps that is because it reminded me too much of the sort of thing Jerry Pournelle used to write in his science columns for semi-obscure science fiction magazines back in the late seventies. It pays some lip service to the idea that “maintaining the environment is a critical issue” but then argues in bad faith, more interested in attacking environmentalists than in contributing to solutions. Take for example, the first thing “environmentalists need to learn”:

10. Go after pollution sources with the highest benefit/cost ratio, not those which are most noticeable – If you are attempting to make a difference in the world, you should start with the largest problems with the simplest solutions and the least cost in remedying.

For example, underground coal fires produce as much CO2 as all the light cars and trucks in North America and most of those in Europe. The cost of developing a method of fighting such fires and implementing it is likely very low compared to the benefit especially in the context of the amount of effort which has gone into reducing the pollution from cars and trucks.

Now that coal fire example makes me suspicious, as it’s just the kind of pat factiod that appeals to the inner contrarian in all of us. What’s stated here is that coal fires are as big a problem as CO2 emitted by cars, what’s implied is that those silly enivronmentalists are not doing anything about the former but are only concerned with the latter, hence they are hypocrites and can be ignored. Unspoken is the assumption that as long as these coal fires are going on, limiting CO2 emission from traffic is pointless.

But is it actually true that underground coal fires contribute as much CO2 as “all the light cars and trucks in North America and most of those in Europe”? No figures or references are given, which doesn’t strengthen the author’s case. The Encyclopedia of Earth article on
carbon dioxide says 24% of manmade CO2 emissions is attributable to transport worldwide, while its coal fires article says that “according to most recent estimations coal fires in China contribute about 0.1% to 0.2% of the annual human induced CO2 emissions globally”. There seems to be some sort of mismatch then, though of course the figure of 0.2% is only for China (the world’s largest coal user) while the 24% of transport worldwide needs to be broken down to “all the light cars and trucks in North America and most of those in Europe” to be able to truly compared the two figures. Nevertheless, a case can be made for the author having overstated the contribution of coal fires to manmade CO2 emissions…

But even if the figure was comparable, does this mean tackling underground coal fires is more cost effective than limiting the emissions put out by cars? Not necessarily. Underground coal fires are partially a natural phenomenon, with some having been burning for thousands of years,
while the most famous manmade fire, in Centralia, Pennsylvania, has been burning for some 45 years. By any measures they’re hard and costly to put out, requiring huge investments; according to an article in The Smithsonian putting out the fire in Centralia would’ve cost as much as 660 million dollars.

Producing more fuel-efficient cars suddenly looks a lot more affordable compared to those numbers, especially since a lot can be done without requiring new, exotic technology. Just switching from using inefficient types of car (the infamous Chelsea tractor, or SUV) to existing, more energy efficient cars would help. More and better public transport as an alternative to car use is another obvious measure to limit CO2 emissions. And of course, it’s perfectly possible to both invest in fighting underground coal fires, as is actually already happening (see the Smithonian article) and more fuel efficient cars.

So yeah, if the first bullet point in this essay is already this dishonest, I’m skeptical about the rest of the article, especially in the context of the rest of the blog, which seems largely dedicated to showing how silly and stupid environmentalists are.

Balanced News

Published on October 23, 2007

There’s a good report up on Medialens of how something that looks at first sight to be a balanced newsreport, on further investigation,isn’t. No prizes if you guessed this might have something to do with climate change, and in particular, that High Court judge and his supposed finding of “nine errors” in Al gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The BBC did their usual piece on this, by interviewing the involved parties, but they let themselves been snookered as they never looked into how the complainant, Stuart Dimmock, a lorry driver and school governor could afford to bring his complaint all the way to the High Court. If they had, they would’ve found that he was sponsored by the climate change skeptic New Party, itself sponsored by Scottish millionaire Robert Durward. By not reporting this in their interviews with Dimmock, the BBC therefore provided a clearly false picture of this court case while still adhering to the doctrine of “balance”.

This is only one example of a widespread practise, not just at the BBC but in all news media, where instead of journalists trying to determine the truth behind the surface story, only the claims and counterclaims of the involved parties are reported. This is not necessarily a bad thing; in politics especially it is often hard to objectively determine the truth of a story, or the story is about the conflicting interpretations of government and opposition for a given incident. It’s then that a summation of claim and counterclaim is justified, but not when relevant facts are left out of the story.

But even when this sort of reporting is justified, a story can be balanced and still be unfair. An example of this was on display in a news item I heard last night on the Radio 4 six oçlock news bulletin. The story was about the Scottish government’s opposition against a replacement for the UK’s current Trident based nuclear deterrent. since the Trident submarines are based in Faslane in Scotland, making the country therefore a nuclear target, it’s clearly a legitimate concern of the Scottish governement, even though technically it falls outside their jurisdiction.

On the BBC news however this was framed with a soundbyte from Wendy Alexander, the leader of the Labour opposition in the Scottish Parliament, who said she didn’t want English politicians speaking for Scotland on matters like healthcare and therefore Scottish politicians should not speak out about English or British matters either. This was immediately followed by a question from the BBC reporter to the Scottish National Pary’s spokesperson on whether the SNP did not go too far in its opposition to Trident replacement. With that, even though both sides, Labour and SNP, got their say, the bias of the story was clearly in favour of Labour; but you wouldn’t know that it was biased unless you paid close attention.

It’s a borderline dishonest way of reporting on stories, and it’s far more common than you think. Much of the reputation of a Jeremy Paxman or a John Humpries for being “tough”, it seems to me, is due to mock aggresive oneway questioning like this, where only the weaker party is attacked like this. The BBC may pride itself on being independent, but in important matters it will almost always take the side of the vested interests, the establishment.