You might recall 1998 was once the hottest year on record.
This is literally what it was like in 1998. I was there. Now EVERYTHING is on fire, all the time.
It held this distinction for several years. Climate change deniers would point to it (starting in 1999) and say that, yeah, maybe there had been some warming but it had clearly stopped and now the world was cooling because, otherwise, why weren't the years after 1998 hotter?
Yeah, I used it in yesterday's post as well. Fucking sue me.
With the (unsurprising) news just in that 2023 is the hottest year on record, it is worth taking a moment to reflect that every single one of the years in the Top 10 hottest years is one of the last ten years.
I imagine it has been like this for a while, but I haven't been paying too much attention. But every year from 2014 onwards is in the current Top Ten:
Ponder that for a moment. The last ten years, every last one of them, have been hotter than every other year on the instrumental record.
2014 is, handily, and Number 10 and 2023, helpfully, at number 1 (with a very hot bullet); in between those two chronologically neat bookends, they are a bit jumbled up. But the point is, every single one of the last ten years is there.
Even the relatively chilly 2014 was hotter than every other year in that record.
The planet was 1.48C hotter in 2023 compared with the period before the mass burning of fossil fuels ignited the climate crisis. The figure is very close to the 1.5C temperature target set by countries in Paris in 2015, although the global temperature would need to be consistently above 1.5C for the target to be considered broken.
Scientists at the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS) said it was likely the 1.5C mark will be passed for the first time in the next 12 months.
So, very roughly, 0.1C pre decade for the last 150 years.
The Guardian also reproduces this nice graph:
Obviously, those still banging the denialist drum will claim 'natural variation' - but note the period from the 80s to the 90s. Then there were several exceptional years (so many you might wonder if the term 'exceptional' is the right one). Fast forward to 2000-2010 period - every year of that decade was as hot or hotter than the 'exceptional' years of the 80s.
If the trend holds, it takes a decade for the exception to become the norm. So when the Guardian points out "the global temperature would need to be consistently above 1.5C for the target to be considered broken" that will be 'achieved' by 2034.
We've got a rapidly diminishing opportunity to limit the disaster engulfing us. But it is diminishing very, very rapidly.
Just before Christmas, 2023, a swanky bach in Cook's Beach went up in smoke. It was immediately claimed that some sort of electric vehicle was responsible, with the claim being advanced via social media and repeated in traditional media - albeit in the latter case with caveats that it was hearsay from 'neighbours' and 'eyewitnesses' and had not been established.
Soon after, the local fire service made a public announcement, stating the fire was not started by an EV / PHEV and originated elsewhere in the house, adding the vehicle was not in the garage at the time the fire started and that it was not charging.
In a sane world that might have been the end of it - an official announcement had been made. We don't live in a sane world, however, so instead it was decreed this was simply a part of the cover up, a deliberate lie put out by FENZ to advance the EV agenda.
Because, yes, there are - supposedly - shadowy organization and powers whose purpose is to make people drive electric cars for ... reasons that remain unclear.
A few days after the fire some footage surfaced, filmed by a witness. It was immediately seized upon by the anti-EV voices because it seemed on the surface to contradict the official narrative.
Here's a You Tube wannbe influencer's called Simon's take on it, titled New Zealand (Cooks Beach) Fire: Media claims "EV not to blame":
His main points are that multiple eyewitness described it as being caused by an EV. The media initially reported this but later - mysteriously - changed their story to report the EV was not to blame. FENZ said the fire started elsewhere in the house, yet the garage is ablaze and the rest of the house is intact. And(of course) there is some nefarious attempt to "pull the wool" over our eyes by someone.
(SPOILER: in this case, it is the media.)
So, here is what he has to say. Describing the blaze itself, he says, "The initial media reports indicated that some kind of EV was responsible for the fire" - this is NOT TRUE as we will see. The media reports he cites don't apportion blame - they simply repeat information they have been given. They simply quote unidentified sources saying this is what they (the sources) thought happened; Simon neglects to acknowledge the caveats these media sources often included. He's presenting a false account of the media reports.
He hits us with the extracts from the media reports that he thinks back up the claim that "initial media reports indicated that some kind of EV was responsible for the fire"
A witness told 1News that the initial fire started in the garage where a hybrid car was parked.
Note there are discrepancies - in one case, it is an 'electric car' and in the second it is 'hybrid'; in the first story it is described as charging, and in the latter it is parked. The second report says the fire started in the garage, but the first one only says it started 'while an electric car was parking in the garage,' without explicitly saying where it started.
Eyewitness accounts (and note Newshub does not use the term 'eyewitness') are notoriously unreliable, and here we have complete chos after just two sentences.
Of course, our genial host has already prompted us to think it was the EV charging that ignites the garage, and the media reported this so we overlook these discrepancies.
His third source is the NZ Herald, which simply repeats (with due acknowledgement) what 1 News reported; he also provides some TV news footage, neither of which add anything to the mix, though the TV footage voice over describes the "inferno the locals say was caused by an electric car catching fire while charging in the garage."
So, finally we have a claim that the EV caused the fire - but here the "neighbours" and the "witness" have been downgraded to "locals" - by this stage, we could be getting the thoughts of anyone who was in Cook's Beach at the time and who was willing to talk to a journalist, regardless of whether they saw anything at all. And if I know one thing about people who don't like EVs, it is that they are happy to talk about them and how wicked they are, usually from a stance detached from any sort of direct experience or knowledge.
This is all worth mentioning as it gives the lie to the suggestion the media are not covering negative stories about electric vehicles, a common claim and one which Simon circles back to at the end of his diatribe. Here we have three different mainstream outlets all reporting information that it would have been easy for them - perhaps even journalistically responsible - for them not to report at this stage.
Our host then continues: "All these media outlets are basically saying the same thing - eyewitnesses who were on the scene when the fire started said it was caused by an EV with the fire spreading to the garage."
This statement is untrue. And I am not talking about the quibbles about whether they were describing it as a hybrid or an EV. He has upgraded the "neighbours" and "locals" to "eyewitnesses" who were "on the scene when the fire started"; but only 1 News 1 News used the term 'witness' (and the NZ Herald echoed it in its doppelganger reporting.
So it is untrue to claim - as he does - that "all these media outlets are basically saying the same thing" - only one of them (and its echo) is claiming to be speaking to anyone who could be said to have seen anything.
The other "neighbours" and "locals" don't say how the fire started; only the unidentified TV news coverage directly says their source claims the fire "was caused by an EV". 1 News referred to a "witness" who told them the fire started "in the garage" rather than stating the car started it; News Hub don't even suggest a location for it.
And remember, that TV news coverage only identified its source as "locals" - not dignifying them with the title of "witness" and who may not have seen anything at all. Yet here they are presented as "eyewitnesses who were on the scene when the fire started." Wild, wild surmising and invention from Simon.
That isn't what our host wants to talk about, really. After all, if that was how the story was covered, he would probably be quite happy. But, as he describes it, "But then, two days later, on the 18th of December, the New Zealand Herald put out another article ..." referring to this passage:
Social media posts and a media outlet then reported a witness as saying the fire had been started by an EV (electric vehicle) in the home’s garage.
But Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Fenz) investigator Ed Hopping said that was not the case.
“The investigation is still ongoing... but I’m comfortable to put it out there in the world that the fire wasn’t a result of the battery in the car failing,” Hopping said.
He said the fire started within the home, while the car was parked outside the garage and was not plugged in for charging at the time.
“It’s just important to put out there that hybrid cars... aren’t that vulnerable to fires,” Hopping said.
“And then in this instance, the car wasn’t plugged in and wasn’t inside the garage or the structure.”
Based on Fenz experience so far, he said it isn’t common for fires to be started by electric vehicles in New Zealand.
Simon offers his take on this: "So I'm glad we're getting all the key points of 'the message' out in this article ... I emailed the Fire and Emergency New Zealand media with the following questions: multiple eyewitness reports claim that the fire started in an hybrid vehicle that was parked outside the garage ..."
Again, "multiple eye witnesses" were not mentioned. A single "witness" was referred to and how much the rest may have known or seen is unclear. He is simply wrong here. WRONG.
(AN ASIDE: whatever these people may or may not have seen, they all said the car was INSIDE the garage. "In the garage" is repeated in all the reports - even though they can't decide if it was a hybrid, an EV, or whether it was charging or just parked. Yet hear is Simon blithely proclaims it was outside, immediately nixing the credibility of those "eye witnesses" (or whatever) he is relying on. You can't have it both ways, trusting them when they say the fire was started by a charging car (though only one of them, the "local" says that) and then happily ignoring them when they say the car was in the garage.)
Now we get to the nub of Simon's complaining - that Hopping said battery failure was not involved and the fire started else where in the house. He wants to know how this could have been confirmed "so quickly" (his words).
The obvious implication being this is a BIG LIE and a COVER UP. The possibility FENZ might have spoken to the people who owned the house and car and got information from them seems to have eluded our host. Though I am willing to be all the money in the world if Hopping had said "The investigation isn't complete but it was totally caused by the EV combusting" our host would not be complaining about the speed of that conclusion being made public.
“I can’t comment on the cause, because the investigation is not yet completed, but I can say where it did not start and that was in the garage,” Hopping said.
“The car did not have anything to do with it, and it was parked outside of the garage at the time.”
“It looks like the fire started at the rear of the property. It did not start where the car was.”
Significantly, he tells us to "take mental note of that very carefully because its going to be relevant in a minute."
He then engages in some boilerplate conspiracy waffle: "It's all very tidy isn't it? Nothing to see here folks, please disperse." If you say so, Simon. Though if I was running a cover up, I'd probably have made sure I had an alternate explanation out in the media, rather than just saying what it wasn't. Just get someone to say they left the iron on in the laundry adjacent to the garage, problem solved.
And, finally, we get the reward for all our patience. Simon has a video to show us, "sent to me by one of my viewers" which supposedly exposes the coverup. It is only a few seconds long and shows the garage of the house, the door open and flames pouring out of, with a Mitsubishi Outlander in the process of cooking up nicely.
Simon claims it is "very early on in the fire" and "you can see the only part of the house where smoke is coming from is the section where the car and the garage are. The rest of the house is not involved at all at this point ... as we get closer we can see that the garage itself is on fire. The car which is, I understand, a Mitsubishi Plug In Hybrid, is also on fire and the edges of the garage are on fire and the car. But there's no sign of the rest of the house being involved at this stage. And I don't see any evidence of the fire having started at the rear of the property which is completely out of sight compared to this view ... the main part of the house is not involved yet ... its not even involved. Its only that car and the garage that are on fire right now. So for them to say that it started at the rear just doesn't make sense with the evidence ..."
He also shows us some drone footage of the property blazing away, shortly after the clip.
He is overlooking a couple of pertinent things here, however.
First, of course, the first clip shows the front of the house. We can see the garage is in flames. But we can't see the back of the house. Tellingly, perhaps, the drone footage does show the rear of the house, and there are gouts of flame erupting from the read of the property:
As you can see, the rear of the house is pretty clearly 'involved' as Simon likes to say.
But ... but ... but ... that drone footage is clearly taken from later on, as there are now firefighters fight fire, down on the left (Simon has helpfully drawn a circle round them). Obviously, by this time the fire has spread through out the house, starting in the garage and only later 'involving' the rear of the house.
Possibly. But fires are tricky things - I know because I watched Backdraft obsessively in the 90s and still think it is a top, top film. It isn't uncommon for fires in oxygen poor environments to die down to virtually nothing (this, of course, is how you put them out, if you can only starve the fire of sufficient oxygen) but flare up again when they find sweet, sweet air to breathe. So if the fire had started at the rear of the house, if there wasn't plentiful oxygen, it could well have died down to the point where it wasn't obvious to someone in the street. There aren't ready pathways for smoke to pour out (otherwise, oxygen would be pouring in and the fire would be having a fine old time); the exception to this is the garage, where the door has been fatefully left open, giving the fire oxygen to breath.
(n.b. I am not saying this is what happens; and I repeat my credentials are virtually nil - but I reckon they are as robust as Simon's. And unlike him, when I am engaging in fantastic speculation I am making it pretty obvious this is what I am doing. And I amn't wasting the emergency services time with mendacious communications.)
Simon rounds it all off with a typically mealy-mouthed quasi-caveat, saying he would, of course, be delighted to learn it wasn't actually an EV that caused the fire but he just can't, for the life of him, see how this can fit with the facts he's presented. Someone, he implies, is telling us lies, and "What I really, really hate is having the wool pulled over my eyes by media outlets determined to push a particular message rather than be truthful with the facts."
Wait, what ... media outlets? Dude, they were simply reporting what they were being told. First, by the "neighbours" and "witnesses" and "locals" in Cook's Beach; and then by Fire Emergency New Zealand.
In spite of having emailed FENZ and quoted from their response and regurgitated the information stated in public by a spokesperson for FENZ, Simon is trying to blame the media for what he claims is a misrepresentation? This is outlandishly silly. How can the media dictate what Hopping and FENZ say?
Just go back to the title of Simon's clip for a moment: New Zealand (Cooks Beach) Fire: Media claims "EV not to blame". No, Simon, the media didn't. FENZ said the fire started else where and the car did not cause it. The media simply REPORTED what FENZ said. But claiming FENZ is spread false information is a riskier proposition than making vague, absurd claims about unidentified "media".
I know blaming 'mainstream media' is bread and butter for conspiracy trolls like Simon; but it helps if you can actually point to something bad the media have actually done. Here they have literally just done their job, telling readers and viewers what happened and what people are saying about it, in a fairly even handed way - and I know this because there is plenty of complaining on EV social media sites about how the media mentioned the claims about an EV / hybrid being involved.
Going to try to get into the blogging thing again (ha!) what with anew PM, an election coming up and all that.
So today I thought I'd start small and simple, by merely tackling the world's (second) richest man.
I am not suggesting Elon Musk literally light this fire. But he is doing it, figuratively by allowing knobends to howl bollocks on Twitter
I'm no fan of Elon Musk. You don't want to know why, but I'll tell you anyways, because that's what blogging is.
To me, his helming of tesla has not been 're-writing the narrative' or 're-framing the debate' about electric vehicles. Instead, the companies pursuit of flash, style and higher end consumers has essentially re-affirmed the prejudices surrounding EVs.
Tesla had an opportunity to completely change our relationship with vehicles. Having licked the technology far more effectively than any of their competitors, they could have produced the electric vehicle we actually need - a cheap, no frills but functioning car that the typical consumer could a) afford and b) want to drive.
Instead, they kept on (and keep on) releasing increasingly absurdly over-specced, overpriced vehicles that are brilliant to drive but not actually sifting the dial much in terms of mass take up of EVs. We don't need cars that people with a spare $100K can afford, because even the second- or third-hand value of that vehicle will make it unobtainable to the average driver.
(Incidentally, I do not hold with the stereotype of Tesla owners as smug narcissists who wants to demonstrate wealth through toys. But I suspect that's how Elon Musk views them, because that's the sort of person he is, and he can't imagine anyone one else being different.)
Oh, and the whole 'pedo guy' thing. What can you say about someone who manages to taint the story of the Tham Luang rescue of 2018?
Search for the word “climate” on Twitter and the first automatic recommendation isn’t “climate crisis” or “climate jobs” or even “climate change” but instead “climate scam”.
Clicking on the recommendation yields dozens of posts denying the reality of climate change and making misleading claims about efforts to mitigate it.
(Snip)
Tweets containing “climate scam” or other terms linked to climate change denial rose 300 per cent in 2022, according to a report released last week by the nonprofit Advance Democracy.
So, yeah, Musk managed the unthinkable and made Twitter worse. Respect is due.
Of course, Musk would say this is neither his fault, nor his problem. He is, after all, a 'free speech absolutist' - expect when people tweet the location of his private jet. Because, apparently, tweeting the whereabouts of his private jet is dangerous.
Solar power in the UK produced more electricity than coal across the whole of May, the first ever month to pass the milestone, according to research by analysts at Carbon Brief. Solar panels generated 50% more electricity than the fossil fuel across the month, as days lengthened and coal use fell. Solar generated an estimated 1,336 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity in May, compared to 893GWh output from coal.
Last year would not have definitely been the warmest on record without an incredibly strong El Niño warming the Pacific Ocean, according to analyses done by two climate scientists.
Government scientists declared 2015 to be the warmest on record in early January, reaching 0.87 degrees Celsius above the 20th Century average. But scientists admit some of that warmth would not have been possible without El Niño — a naturally-occurring warming event.
From here, Mr Bastach argues that, perhaps - because of margins of error and so forth - 2015 wasn't really the warmest year on record, really, not properly, because even though discounting el Nino, it might not have been the hottest year, because he doesn't want it to be.
This leads him to say all sorts of silly things, like "NASA and NOAA were heavily criticized for claiming 2014 as the warmest on record when they were so unsure."
A proper commentator would have taken the opportunity to explain why, in fact, the criticism was not justified, and how margins of error work, and why it doesn't really matter when almost all of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred in the 21st century, because it is the trend that matters.
Of course, he doesn't do that because his goal is to make people think, "Hmmmmm ... maybe it wasn't so hot last year after all."
Probably, we'll see people suggesting that climate peaked in 2014 and 2015 was really cooler, inspite of being hotter, and marks the start of a new cooling trend. Only, because scientists were only 38% sure 2014 was the warmest year at the time, it probably wasn't, and so on, so forth. All the way back to 1998.
Which was also a massive el Nino year, of course, but I think that fact might be conveniently overlooked.
If George Orwell lived today, he'd be penning a novel called 199, in which Hot = Cold.
The Tree Frog, declared extinct for a hundred years, is back. And it wants revenge. Perhaps.
Quite what the fuss is, I do not know. I imagine it wouldn't be that difficult to put a frog in a tree, if you had the urge to.
A group of scientists, led by renowned Indian biologist Sathyabhama Das Biju, has rediscovered the frogs and also identified them as part of a new genus – one step higher than a species on the taxonomic ranking.
Not only have they found the frogs in abundance in northeast Indian jungles, they believe they could also be living across a wide swathe of Asia from China to Thailand.
“This is an exciting find, but it doesn’t mean the frogs are safe,” Biju said, adding that he hopes the discovery leads to more awareness of the dangers of unfettered development to the animals.
The frogs were found at high altitudes in four northeast Indian states, underlining the rain-soaked region’s role as a biodiversity hotspot.
Still, I welcome back the mighty Tree Frog, and hope this bodes well for the rediscovery of other supposedly extinct species such as Mastodons, dinosaurs, and David Bowie.
According to a new book by Naomi Klein, described in the Guardian, it turns out that Richard Branson's much publicised attempts to green his humungeous planet wrecking fleet of aircraft was just hot air.
(See what I did there?)
I, of course, predicted just such a possibility back in 2008 when Branson announced his conversion to unrelenting self publicity saving the planet.
The British entrepreneur famously promised to divert a share of the profits from his Virgin airlines empire to find a cleaner fuel, after a 2006 private meeting with Al Gore.
Branson went on to found a $25m Earth prize for a technology that could safely suck 1bn tons of carbon a year from the atmosphere. In 2009, he set up the Carbon War Room, an NGO which works on business solutions for climate change.
But by Klein’s estimate, Branson’s “firm commitment” of $3bn failed to materialise.
“So the sceptics might be right: Branson’s various climate adventures may indeed prove to have all been a spectacle, a Virgin production, with everyone’s favourite bearded billionaire playing the part of planetary saviour to build his brand, land on late night TV, fend off regulators, and feel good about doing bad,” Klein writes in This Changes Everything, Capitalism vs The Climate.
An underweight hedgehog found wandering around a garden during the daytime is a sign that the animals are being lured out of hibernation too early, says a wildlife charity.
Care for the Wild, in Brighton Road, Horsham, have taken in the little hog after he was found in a Crawley garden, then taken to Harvest Vets in Maidenbower.
Care for the Wild’s wildlife carer Tarnya Knight said: “This little fella is just 300 grams so he definitely wouldn’t have made it through the winter, and if a cold snap comes that would have finished him off. But we’ll feed him up and he should be okay to be released in the spring.
“The mild weather we’ve had is leading to hedgehogs coming out of hibernation too early. Most of them will be the right weight, but there isn’t much natural food for them around at the moment. So if you get hedgehogs in your garden please leave out some food and water to see if they’re around. And of course, if you see one during the daytime, please either contact us or take it to the vet.”
Increasing warming, decreasing hedgehogs. Will Britain be Britain without the humble hedgepig snuffling about? One is vaguely - very vaguely - reminded of George Orwell's Some Thoughts On The Common Toad:
At any rate, spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can't stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.
Having failed to control the simple delights of watching little figments of nature going about their business, and not being able to tax it efficiently, the dictator and bureaucrats, it seems, have decided to drive everything endearing and untamed to extinction.
Or maybe not. But there is a smidgeon of a serious point here - climate change is not The Day After Tommorrow dramatic nonsense. Climate change is British hedgehogs dying out because the conditions that let them thrive no longer apply. And if the loveable hedgehog is being challenged by climate change, what else will struggle to adapt?
Doubtless this is one of the benefits Owen Paterson discerns in a warming world. He has pointed out that human beings are great adaptors - failing to add that adaption is usually accompanied by significant unpleasantness (the Saxons adapted to climate change 1500 years ago by sailing to Britain and killing lots of people). Hedgehogs, probably, are less capable of adapting to a changing world.
Figures released under freedom of information rules show annual spending falling from £29.1m in 2012-13 to £17.2m in 2013-14. The drop in funding follows a previous slashing of staff working on the issue from 38 to six in May 2013.
The adaptation funding at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is spent on finding ways to cope with the increased floods, droughts and heatwaves expected in the UK due to global warming. It had risen by almost 20% under Paterson's predecessor, Caroline Spelman, but fell 41% after Paterson replaced her in September 2012. Some was also spent on cutting greenhouse gas emissions but the Department of Energy and Climate Change takes the lead on that issue.
The only good news here is that one does not have to blame Environment Secretary Owen Paterson for this, as cuts inevitably lead back to Gideon 'Call me George' Osborne in Number 11. So we get to Boo! and Hiss! two for the price of one.
Meanwhile, Cameron - who campaigned hard on his green credentials - has just gleefully announced that the few bits of Britain not underwater will be concreted over by cut price, unregulated developers, following his 'Bonfire of the Green regulations':
Addressing the Federation of Small Businesses conference, Cameron will argue that the new rules will make it "vastly cheaper" for businesses to comply with their environmental obligations.
The government also plans to scrap many building standards relating to things such as the size of windows and demands for renewable energy sources, saving builders about £500 for each new home.
The Conservatives, of course, complained about too much regulation in the financial markets, right up to the moment that they collapsed in 2008. Good to see they, in Cameron's own words, "have learned absolutely nothing" from that notable experiment in deregulation, and how it does not always work as intended.
Small minded, stupid men. In charge of one of the wealthiest countries on the planet. With nuclear missiles.
"A rare Sumatran tiger gave birth to two cubs on Monday in efforts to
keep the breed from becoming extinct, according to the Smithsonian's
National Zoo."
"The tiger named Damai gave birth to the first cub
around 6:15 p.m. and the second around 8:23 p.m. Both cubs are healthy,
but zoo keepers are monitoring the newborns. Damai is nursing and
grooming both cubs, according to the news release."
"Sumatran tigers are critically endangered, with fewer than 500 Sumatran tigers in the wild."
Sad to say, but I think celebration is naive. We should stop wasting resources trying to preserve a species that is
doomed in every meaningful sense. We can not preserve them in their natural encvironment; preserving them in zoos would be an
abomination.
Is it worthwhile concentrating resources in an effort to
preserve these critically endangered species, or if we focus on stopping
other species reaching crisis point?
As for the preserving them
in zoos, you aren't preserving them. You can preserve tiger
genetic code by maintaining a few sorry specimens in zoos, but the that
things make a tiger a tiger are gone the moment you put it in a cage. I
really can't comprehend how anyone can argue putting a tiger in a zoo
is humane.
Let them - and all the other glorious species we have destroyed through our greed and stupidity - fade away. We've tormented them enough.
The Chancellor will announce £11.5bn of cuts for the 2015-16 financial year in three weeks – but so far only £2.5bn have been agreed, as senior members of the Government battle to protect their own departments from further suffering.
-snip-
Seven smaller departments have settled with the Treasury. The unresolved budgets include defence, education, business, transport, local government and the environment.
Someone cited two alleged climate experts, messrs Cliff Harris and Randy Mann in an I had argument recently.
The graph below was referred to. It was meant to prove something or other - though they were coy about telling me exactly what it was I was supposed to be seeing.
It's something about temperature, right? I know that, because it says Temperature in big red letters in the top left corner.
And volcanoes, yes, I can see that. There are lots of volcanic eruptions given. Volcanoes pop off every now and again, and the global temperature changes.
Presumably, from this, I am supposed to see how It Is Not All Not Our Fault, as if it hadn't been pointed out a million times at least, that past temperature misbehaviour doesn't really tell us much about current temperature misbehaviour, because Things Were Different Then. You know, just like Things Are Different on Mars.
In fact, now that my mind has almost caught up with my consumption of Milcrest Estate 2010 Pinot Noir (Bloody Hell it is good - and my wife was using it for cooking!) I recall I even made something of a Lurgee's Paradigm of this sort of nonsense.
Ah! The folly of youth! When I actually had time to blog and subscribed to the foolish belief that - if I just repeated the bleedin' obvious one more time - I might succeed in changing someone's mind.
But, anyway, back to the graph and what it is supposed to be telling us. Something, I think, about temperature variation and a correlation with volcanoes?
Only, there isn't much of a correlation, really.
There are some points where there are cold spells with no or few notable eruptions; and 'sudden' cooling taking 400-500 years, and instances where multiple eruptions don't seem to have had any discernible impact on rising temperatures - 35 recorded immediately prior to BC/AD switch over, for example, just as a warming spell kicked off.
The impact of volcanoes on global temperatures is a Known Thing We Know About, not some Ghastly Secret Concealed In The Climategate Emails. And even though the short term cooling impact of Old Vulcan's particulate emissions - and the insignificance of volcanic CO2 compared to humanity's - is generally Not Secret, why is it no medium scale act of Vulcanism can occur without a chain email sweeping the world claiming all humanity's efforts to stem climate change have just been undone?
What might be a bit more interesting is what causes the warm / cold spells recorded (the chart seems to be missing a Y axis scale, or is it just the booze blurring my vision?) and whether it might have any influence on the current trend.
On that, of course, the graph has nothing to say.
Being a thoroughly nasty piece of work and not at all ashamed of playing them man rather than the ball, I cyber-stalked the creators of the graph, Mr Cliff Harris - a climatologist, apparently - and Mr Randy Mann, who is described as a meteorologist.
(I concentrated on Mr Harris rather than Mr Mann, mostly because I'm not so foolish as to run 'Randy Mann' through a search engine. Oh, no. That can only lead to perdition.)
What I discovered was that Messrs Harris and Mann run a website (which puts them on a par with yours truly) and occasionally get mentioned in their local newspaper, a degree of fame to which I can only aspire.
Other than that, it all becomes very vague.
We are assured they have been providing media and public bodies with weather forecasts for decades, and that may well be true, but it is remarkably short on detailing any actual credentials the two may hold.
In a profile (again in what appears to be his local newspaper) of Mr Harris, we are told:
Harris estimates he has earned more than 300 college credits from seven different colleges and university.
That's nice, Cliff, but do you actually have a degree of any sort in anything? Because at the moment you are looking even less credentialed than the 31000. And that ain't good!
Frighteningly, on their website, Harris doesn't even seem to know what the initials IPCC stand for, naming it the International Panel on Climate Control. Maybe it was meant to be a joke, but you know, the thing about jokes is they are meant to be funny ... I get the feeling Harris and Mann really believe this stuff; and true believers don't often joke about their faith.
They also claim (I am not making this up) their weather forecasts are based on secret information that was divulged to them by an organisation called the Weather Science Foundation, which once employed "over 60 people to gather world wide data." Sixty people, gathering world wide data? They must have been pretty busy.
Only, those 60 people were rudely dumped on the dole queue and (oddly) don't seem to have thought their stupendously important information might have been of use to the people studying the impact of human activity on climate. Instead - I kid you not - they decided to gift the information to Mr Harris but made him promise not to use the information for 30 years.
It gets worse, though.
Further probing lead me to a name I know well ... Marc Morano. A-ha, I thought, here be bullshit, for the name of Morano is always found where crap about climate change has been posted. And verily, it was so.
Seeking out the source article, I discovered Mr Harris holding forth in - inevitably - the columns of his local newspaper, to this effect:
Although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that sea levels will rise 100 cm by the year 2100, actual measurements do not bear out that conclusion.
This is simply and obviously incorrect. The IPCC made no such prediction. It is simply not true.
The actual projections in AR4 can be viewed right here - about half a metre, +/- 10cm. He was writing in 2012, before you ask, and the projections in the TAR - while a bit wider - were not so spectacularly extreme as to justify the claim that the IPCC predicted sea levels will rise by a metre.
Bluntly, it is a lie. Not an exaggeration or a bit of hyperbolic rounding, but a lie. He must have known it was so, but he went ahead and published it anyway.
(But at least he got the name of the IPCC right, this time.)
Perhaps I am too good for this world but I still find it slightly shocking to actually discover someone calling themselves a climatologist simply telling lies.
Not the sort of vaguely-almost-might-be-kinda-sorta-true-if-you-look-at it-this-way-I'm-buying-the-drinks-ain't-I-so-don't-tell-me-it's-bullshit stuff that is denier stock in trade, but an outright Thing That Is Not True And Which Must Have Been Known To Be Untrue.
If if it was the IPCC putting out some similarly shonky claims, you know how it would be treated, right? Think Himalayan glaciers!
So I feel Messrs Harris and Mann can be ignored, henceforth.
Back in my naive, youthful days, I wrote some comments about David Bellamy - British naturalist turned Climate Change Denier turned incompetent typist - that implied that I thought he was a decent chap. Inspite of his occasional forays into talking patent bullshit about climate change, I took pains to emphasis that I did not think Bellamy was a knob and a liar and a turd with a beard. Instead, I emphasised he was
a splendid chap, a wonderful TV personality and, for years a great campaigner for the protection of the natural world ... I wouldn't count Bellamy as an evil lying bastard, he got it wrong and did the sensible, honourable thing, which is to admit as much and shut up.
One unintended consquence of the Daily Mail's latest incontinence-presented-as-journalism is to make me look a fool for being so generous. For who should we see, quoted in the Mail, but one David Bellamy, now holding forth about how he was a wronged man, a very wronged man, a man who was put to silence by the dread forces of Political Correctness and the IPCC.
So, David, I'd just like to say I wish I had not said you were a decent man, capable of sense and honour. You've made me look a bit foolish, and continued to add to the fug of confusion, deceit and disinformation that emanates from Climate Change Deniers. Previously you were the sort of person one could laugh with and learn from; now you're a thoroughly nasty little man who sets no store by his word of honour.
Sorry, but it has to be said. To Hell with Pandas. They might be cute, they might be fluffy and they might be just like gigantic teddy bears, but they don't want to survive and we shouldn't waste limited resources trying to preserve an evolutionary dead end with a death wish.
This is a species where the females are only fertile for three days a year. Three days! There are hardly any Pandas in the wild and the tiny colonies in zoos are living in conditions so alien to the species that they don't know how to fuck until shown footage of Pandas shagging.
Look, it's very nice that Ke Lin finally got his end away, but the fact that we have to show our captive curiosities footage of Panda sex so they can learn the basics is proof not of our ingenuity an an earnest of our eventual success, but an indication of how hopeless our task is. We can't hope to preserve anything that can meaningfully be described as a Panda.
Even if Youngyong succeeds in becoming a sort of ursine Kate Middleton and her bump is featured on the front page of every wildlife celebrity tittle-tattle magazine from here to the end of the world, whatever she produces won't be a panda, because a panda is as social as well as biological construct - and the pathetic, alienated remnants we are preserving are as far removed from genuine wild Pandas as I am from an Earthworm.
It would be more decent to let them die out, rather than preserving them as self-propelled, perambulating teddy bears to be gawped at in zoos and 'wildlife' sanctuaries.
I genuinely think there is no point in investing millions in trying to preserve something that seems intent on dying off and which has no chance of coping with out millions being continuously poured into preserving it's useless furry hide.
There isn't nearly enough money to go around and far more good could be achieved by directing money squandered on pandas toward helping preserve species that behave like they actually want to be here. Their only future is as a pitiful curiosity item in zoos.
Given how limited resources are, there are more useful areas the money could be spent.
I'm not celebrating their extinction, just pointing out that it is going to happen fairly soon, and we would be better off not trying to avert it.
So, the Daily Mail has gotten itself all excited because it has, in its hot little rightwing compulsively dishonest and hypocritical hands a pretty little graph which it claims PROVES Climate change = Bullshit and the entire science community are dirty liars who lie and have been trying to savaGELY TRICK us into selling all our cars and replacing them with bicycles made out of mung beans, or something like that.
The source of this information is a secretive clique of fearless sceptics who boldly challenge the myths and lies spread about Global Warming. They call themselves the IPCC.
Right, so I'm smelling a rat.
Here is the Mail story. And here is the pretty little graph that they claim proves that we've actually been living inside a gigantic ice-cube all this time, and would have frozen to death a long time ago if it hadn't been for all that hot air emitted by the IPCC.
(Have you - like me - just realised that IPCC includes the letters P and C - as in Political Correctness? Think on, brothers!)
Sorry, I promised you that graph:
So, um, right.
First of all, the wording of the graph is disingenuous. It claims the '95% certain estimates of the Earth heating up' were wrong. Well, not really. Phrased like that, you might be forgiven for thinking the graph was revealing that the Earth has not been heating at all. Which is, of course, complete bullshit. But the Mail gleefully grabs great handfuls of the bullshit and smears it all over its body, claiming in the first line of the accompanying story (as in fiction): "No, the world ISN'T getting warmer (as you may have noticed). Now we reveal the official data that's making scientists suddenly change their minds about climate doom."
Right, yes, well.
The Earth certainly has been heating up, this is not in serious dispute, and the graph reproduced here has nothing to do with that. The claim that the graph discredits the "95% certain claims of the Earth heating up" is bollocks. The IPCC never made that claim. The previous report stated there was of 90% certainty of human activity causing observed change; but the graph illustrates statistical certainty about the amount of warming predicted by models. Nothing to do with causation, and even less to do with whether or not there has been heating. There has been. That's why the little black line is wiggling upwards.
What the graph does show is the spread of model estimates of how much temperature increase we can anticipate over time, as CO2 concentrations continue to rise. Estimates are based on how sensitive climate is to CO2 forcing - how big an increase we can expect if we double the amount of CO2 out there. This is not a known factor, so scientists estimate within the reasonable band - usually between 2c and 4c. The difference between the predictions and actuality suggests that maybe the correct estimate is at the lower end of the range, which is a conclusion reached by many climate scientists some time ago.
Claims in the article that the graph shows "a world stubbornly refusing to warm" is horseshit. Any fool can see the line wiggling upwards. The only question is the rate of wiggle.
And of course, for all the fulminations of the Mail, the actual data is following the lower border of the 95% certainty bracket rather nicely. Correspondence between models and reality is usually taken as bearing out the climate models, not discrediting them.
Only in the loopy universe of the Daily Mail is being right somehow being wrong.
A new scientific model has revised previous figures for the next five years downwards by around a fifth.
The forecast compares how much higher average world temperatures are likely to be than the “long-term average” from 1971-2000.
It had been thought that this would be 0.54C during the period 2012 -2016 but new data puts the figure for the 2013-2017 period at 0.43C.
This figure is little higher than the 0.40C recorded in 1998, the warmest year in the Met Office Hadley Centre’s 160-year record – suggesting global warming will have stalled in the intervening two-decade period.
The fact that the average temperature for several years is only marginally warmer than 1998 does not suggest global warming has 'stalled'.
First, because 1998 was an outlier, a freak year driven up to record (according to some data sets) highs by a combination of factors. Matching that freak is evidence that overall temperatures have increased.
Second, because some of these years will be cooler than the 0.43 baseline - and some hotter. Perhaps significantly, if the factors that conspired to heat up 1998 are in play.
The New Zealand Climate Education Trust - a branch of the NZ Climate Science Coalition - challenged NIWA figures, in the High Court at Auckland earlier this year, which showed a rise in temperatures in New Zealand of 1degC over the past 100 years.
The group said the temperature increase of 1degC was significantly higher than global warming figures around the world and almost 50 per cent above the global average.
In the High Court judgement, released today, Justice Geoffrey Venning ruled that the New Zealand Climate Science Education Trust had not been successful in any of the challenges they brought against NIWA.
Justice Venning also decided that NIWA's cost should be paid by the trust and he said that if an agreement on the costs could not be reached he would make another ruling at a later stage.
Obviously, the courts are all controlled by the liberal-elite-PC-space lizard-Jews.
That was sarcasm, for the terminallt stupid.
So, James Lovelock has admitted that he was wildly exaggerating the the effects of climate change. Tell us something we didn't know. This announcement has been presented as an admission that all claims about global warming are equally alarmist and exaggerated. Why doesn't this surprise?
Most scientists regarded Lovelock's position as extreme, anti-scientific and fanciful. Comments like, "Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable" are obviously silly, and alarmist, and plenty of people said so at the time. Lovelock didn't reflect mainstream opinion then or now, but his retraction indicates he is moving in the right direction - from the freakish extremes towards the reasonable middleground. When he says "We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now", he isn't describing the scientific opinion of 20 years ago, but his own perception of what would happen happening. Look at Hansen's modelling from the mid 80s - it didn't suggest we would be anywhere close to a "frying world" by now.
Of course, for those of the distant anti-AGW extreme, both Lovelock's own extremism and mainstream AGW opinion seem so far removed as to be indistinguishable.
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