So Long and Thanks for the Fish...10 Years of Personal Activism & End of this Blog

Hi all. If you were checking this blog you might notice that its been a bit quiet of late here. Well, shit happens in life and I've been busy on other stuff. But other things have been going on and I've decided that its time to end this blog. Its been fun and a blast but this blog has run its course. I want to move on to other things and do other stuff, including to focus more energy on climate change issues and media work and to have a big think about how I put my time into this sort of stuff...

First of I have come to hate the work 'activism' as it implies that those of us to put time into trying to push society into a direction we see as positive are somehow different from normal people; we are not. I have the same money, family worries as anyone else - it's just that as well as the normal things of life - spending time with friends, family on hobbies, household chores and work - I also put some time into things I believe in.

That aside, about 10 years ago I started on a political path that has had a number of twists and turns and while on this path ended up involved in lots of campaigns for things I cared about; human rights, environmental justice, equality - protesting at events like Mayday, G8, Fairford airbase and against things like corporate power and war. Ten years on seems like a good time to take stock of things...

(and when I say we I broadly mean my interpretation of the anti-capitalist movement)

What we got right:

Equality - It has now been proved that there is a causal link between almost every single social problem and the gap between the right and the poor. In the UK that gap has grown in the last 40 years and so, it seems, have our social problems. Each group of politicains that take power propose superficial 'solutions' to the problem but because none of them can ever take on the rich - because they are part of the same elite - nothing will chance.

The casino economy - The anti-capitalist movement argued that the gobal enconoomy was built on nothing real....and we were right. After billions of $/£ on bailing out the banks - that we will have to work for decades to pay back - the bankers are once again on multi-million bonuses. Where is a popular rage?

Iraq and Afghanistan - After 911 much of the anti-war movement turned into a peace one. First Afganistan and then Iraq - we argued that the war-approach, especially one driven by oil-hungry Neo-cons was doomed to fail. After the Taliban melted away in 2001/2 the Sun triumphantly attacked the anti-war voices as wrong. After the fall of Saddam the crowed again. Yet 9 years later, hundreds of thousands of dead and trillions of dollars later both wars grind on.

(Some of) Human nature - People can co-operate, and often humanity is at it's best when we do. Anarchism is first and foremost a philosophy of cooperation and many of the problems that beset us can't be solved with competition or war. We have to find collective ways to work it out else doom future generations to the hell-on-earth depicted in 'The Road'.

The Environment (especially climate change) - We have been arguing that life and ecology are one and the same. That either ignoring, socialising the cost of damage or trying to greenwash it all way is not a viable or adult way to deal with the real limits imposed by nature. Climate change is that issue made flesh - globaly we are trying to dig ourselves out of the hole by privatising the air (carbon trading) and refusing to consider any solution that does not involve continued economic growth. Nature does not do bail-outs. The elite have been using climate change as a political football to beat the miners with in the 80s and now to flirt with crazy-as-shit conspiracy theories now. Climate change is, despite the rush of denial and media fatigue, going away. The climate didn't get the memo that all the CO2 we've been dumping into it is not supposed to have any impact.

What we got wrong:

Mass action? - We've had a series of huge political shocks; the financial collapse, expenses scandal and now the phone hacking. These should reach into the political and financial heart of the establishment and yet no that much has changed. Yes, mass action helped to push for action on all 3, but nothing very radical. So why has the radical left/anarchists failed to make head-way? So if you're from the right you'll be saying that because the ideas they left has are rubbish. Yet the right has failed too. The BNP collapsed right as they hoped to make the mass-popularity break though. The Tories failed to win outright in the elections and had to bully the LibDems to push though their right-wing agenda. While most people seem to agree with the broad thrust of the left's ideas here; make the bankers pay, nobody has managed to turn that into any radical form of mass action.

Islamic Terror - not totally, because I remember distributing sticks from the Afed after 911 reading, Nether Bush nor Bin-Laden, but not enough focus of the hateful idiotic and nasty creed of fundamentalist Islam allowed the right to claim to be for liberty in trying to fight for control of oil and on the streets of the UK via groups like the EDL, when the ideas of the far-right have much more in common with fundamentalist Islam than the left. Not good and we should have been clearer about our opposition to it.

(Some of) Human nature - and this was always a tricky one for me as I believed once you removed oppressive hierarchies (such as the state) from human relations, we could move to mutual aid. I have had this belief knocked from two angles; First evolutionary psychology's view of in and out-group behaviour, as in how we behave towards people who we consider part of our 'in-group' and 'out-group'. There are huge differences (both positive and negative) but ultimately it makes our knowledge human interaction much more complex that 19th century theories of it supposed; humans are both co-operative and combative, irrational and logical. To quote Stephen Pinker; "As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike? This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist)."

Predictability over the Unknown - While I still think that the current system will have to change, I don't think it will be because our societies will happily change. While lots of ideas (e.g. mutual aid, Parecon) they suffer from the issue that they are unpredictable. In theory they are fine but they have to wade though the mass of human nature, cultural and enviromental variables before they will work. They might end up with a fair, sustainable world. You might get something falling apart like Somalia. Us humans like predictability, we're creatures of habit and so we'll tend pick the unfair unequal predictable over the unknown that might be better, but might not. If we want radical ideas of how to organise to work, we have to show then in action - and it does happen - but we're not there yet in practical examples, and more thought is needed about how to make them work long term. For all the faults of capitalism (and there are loooots) it has proven to be a durable system that does (for all its ills) generate lots of innovation in technology (in combination with the socialised system of Universities). Would the same rate of technology development exist without the motive of profit? Don't know, and that's the problem....

Structureless - So many radical groups are run on an ad-hoc basis with volunteers and the like. It tends to be the same few people over and over who do most of the work. Plenty of people will tell you how you should be doing it, but only a handful will get down to it with you and help make it happen. This leads to vaguely structured groups often dominated by either the loudest or the ones with the most time to turn up to meetings. It leads those with kids or other responsibilities at a disadvantage. Not that is this a new issue, the Athenian version of democracy where all free men got a vote and could take part - as well as excluding slaves and women - also meant that the rich, who didn't have to work as much, had more time to take part and so shape politics to suit them.

All Radical Political Movements Often Get Nasty - John Gray's work, a British philosopher, who identified a number of 'isms' as being secular branches of a religion, with a creed and a utopia at the end of a struggle. He mainly takes aim at neo-conservatism and communism in his excellent book 'Black Mass' but the belief in a heaven-like state if certain (sinful) conditions are removed. Now his book is a vicious attack on Neo-conservatives and Communists yet when I read it I realised it points also apply to anarchism. His ultimate and most devastating point is that all utopian political experiments leave behind a vast wreckage of human lives; the 'democratising' of the middle east by Bush and Bliar with the Iraq invasion, the Great leap Froward for examples. Millions died trying to see a pure radical vision implemented in the messy real world. The assumptions we all make about how others will behave based on how we would, just don't work out. Humans are messy thinkers who like to think they are logical and yet are illogical tribal and emotional even about supposed factual subjects (just look a climate denial!)

The state is not all bad - Ok, deep breath.... Now when anarchist ideas emerged a couple of hundred years ago, the function of the state in most people's lives would have been an oppressive. It enforced taxes to the rich, enforced monarchy, land ownership by the gentry etc. Its easy to see at this point how it's removal would have benefited most people. Now however, as we live in much more complex societies with a greater population, the state no longer has an almost entirely oppressive role. For me it offers the a national health service, and a year or so ago having been though a tough time when a close family member and then a few months later, a close friend both died, the involvement of a semi-centralised system providing ambulances, emergency rooms, care and staff that tried unsuccessfully to save then both, showed me that the solution to human relations can forgo all centralised structures. Would we want to rely on volunteers voting to help or not at that point? The right hates these social aspects of the sate because they want us to pay for our own care. Yet the NHS, for all its ills, is full of people doing a job because they care and helping all who come in regardless of race, gender or wealth. That's anarchist ideas in action! The welfare state, for all its ills also provides for basic social dignity and there was a reason the post-war Generation voted in 1945 election not for Churchill but for Labour. Take a look at the BBC's experiment The Street that Cut Everything, where residents essentially became a self-managed collective. The right hated it (e.g. 1 and 2) because they claimed it was not accurate, but they hated is mostly because cos they hate the social functions of the state. This program showed how we have to have a joint co-operative means to care for those less fortunate and the rich and grumpy can't be allowed to opt-out.

Though I must stress that anarchism offers many, many valuable tools to help us progress; it's critique of the current system, it's enlightened struggle for equality and it's questioning of how the state monopoly on violence works - all valuable stuff!

So where next? I don't know, but I'm working on new ideas and planning new things and thinking... lots of thinking... still in it for the long term, just not here....

Climate Denier Smashed by Simple Analogy

A simple analogy has stumped the vitriolic but scientifically illiterate Telegraph blogger, James Delingpole - heehee.

The Telegraph blogger is not on the receiving end of an acerbic Jeremy Paxman or belligerent John Humphrys. He is questioned by the new president of the Royal Society, the distinguished geneticist and Nobel prize-winner Sir Paul Nurse. I have not seen the programme, but Delingpole apparently complained to the BBC afterwards that he had been "intellectually raped" by Nurse. More about that later.

Such a confrontation is perhaps inevitable in a programme about why public debate and science sometimes seem so far apart. Scientists have always had to argue their case, and rightly so, but Nurse believes they are now fighting a more fundamental battle – one for public trust. As the programme blurb puts it:

Key scientific ideas – such as climate change, MMR vaccinations and genetically modified foods – now polarise public opinion; it's clear that scientific opinion and consensus isn't always supported by the public. Sir Paul sets out to investigate how this gap between scientists and the public has developed, meeting leading investigators and well-known critics of some of the world's most contentious scientific theories.

Among others, Nurse talks to Tony, an American with Aids who is not convinced that his disease is caused by the HIV virus. So, instead of receiving clinically supported anti-retroviral treatments, he treats himself with yoghurts and his own nutritional programme.

And then there's Delingpole.

Nurse told me that he simply presented Delingpole with a hypothetical question: if a dear relative was suffering from a fatal disease, would he opt for the "consensus" treatment recommended by doctors, or advice to drink more orange juice offered by a fringe maverick quack? In terms of the science of climate change, that fringe maverick is analogous, of course, to Delingpole's own position.

Delingpole apparently found the line of questioning too much to handle and was purportedly lost for words. He at one point, according to Nurse, asked for the film crew to stop filming.

WikiLeaks: Royal Bank of Scotland Shocka!

Now remember before I continue that there are people arguing that we should not know the information in the WikiLeaks cables.

Ok, so Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) collapsed during the finaincal crisis and had to be bailed out using our money. Just prior to the collapse chief executive Fred Goodwin gets £700,000 per year pension award from RBS. Then a month later RBS announced that its 2008 loss totalled £24.1bn, the largest annual loss in UK corporate history.

So who was to blame for this? Turns out - nobody! Like rain or loosing a sock, itturns out it was just one of those things..

The Financial Services Authority is poised to announce it has closed its investigation into Royal Bank of Scotland and will take no further action against any of its former directors – including chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin – despite the £45bn bailout of the Edinburgh-based bank.

The City regulator appointed accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct a detailed analysis of the events that took place in the run-up to the near-collapse of the bank in October 2008. They are understood to have concluded that while management made poor judgments, there are no grounds to take enforcement action against the individuals involved.

Then comes WikiLeaks and in private conversations it was revealed that perhaps somebody was to blame after all..

The cables sent from the US embassy in London, report that [RBS Chairman Philip] Hampton told a visiting delegation of politicians that one of the biggest mistakes made by the bank was its takeover of Dutch bank ABN Amro just as the credit crunch began in the autumn of 2007. This acquisition left the bank with a wafer-thin capital cushion and ultimately led to the £45bn taxpayer bailout of the bank in October 2008.

But again, there are some who argue we should not know this information...

We are All WikiLeaks

This is it folks! This is the moment that web technology promised, but that never arrived - until now. We can now say no to the Man. The Man wants to keep us in the dark about His wheelings and dealings. We say NO, WikiLeaks gives us the power to say no.

I'm with I Heart WikiLeaks in downloading the Insurance Torrent.

We are all WikiLeaks now;

WikiLeaks has never been charged with a crime, let alone indicted for one or convicted of one. A consensus of legal experts agree that prosecuting the organization or Julian Assange for any of its leaks would be difficult in the extreme. Despite those facts ... Just look at what the U.S. Government and its friends are willing to do and capable of doing to someone who challenges or defies them -- all without any charges being filed or a shred of legal authority. They've blocked access to their assets, tried to remove them from the Internet, bullied most everyone out of doing any business with them, froze the funds marked for Assange's legal defense at exactly the time that they prepare a strange international arrest warrant to be executed, repeatedly threatened him with murder, had their Australian vassals openly threaten to revoke his passport, and declared them "Terrorists" even though -- unlike the authorities who are doing all of these things -- neither Assange nor WikiLeaks ever engaged in violence, advocated violence, or caused the slaughter of civilians.

The Man, like an angry parent caught in His double standards wants to shut down the open door into His secret room. Our job is to make sure that the door is kept firmly open and that we defend those trying to keep it open. I quote;

In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government". The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.

We are all WikiLeaks.



PS If in London, there is a Demo on 11th Dec.

The Climate Change Data Scandal You Won't Read Much About in the Telegraph, Mail or the Express

This is a very techey story and much of it is above my knowledge but from what I can understand, but it is very, very interesting. It also shows the inner workings of a denial home-goal. Here's the background. There is this statistics professor Wegman who gets commissioned to write a report examining the famous Hockey Stick (that's the graph that shows global temperatures with a sharp and scary rise at the end of the 20th Century.) Now, climate deniers hate the Hockey Stick and they hate it's most prominent author, Michael Mann. I guess because it's an easy to understand graphic that communicates the serious situation we find ourselves in and also became Mann speaks his mind.

So they went after it. They commission Wegman who produces a big report and it's conclusions tear into the Hockey Stick and all the denialists cheer! Woo! Woo! The meat of the report is an allegation that the computer code that Mann and others used to error-correct the data for the Hockey Stick was doctored to produce a hockey-stick shaped graph, whatever the data that was input. In short they are saying that Mann faked it and the Wegman report proves it.

Except that there a murmurings of problems with this report. Murmurings that wont die. First there is an accusation of plagiarism; the unattributed copying of somebody else's work. This is a serious charge in academic circles. Second the data analysis that 'proves' the fake Hockey Stick result itself looks, well, fake...

[George Mason University] spokesman Daniel Walsch confirms that the university, located in Fairfax, Va., is now investigating allegations that the Wegman report was partly plagiarized and contains fabrications. Last month, a 250-page report on the Deep Climate website written by computer scientist John Mashey of Portola Valley, Calif., raised some of these concerns. Mashey says his analysis shows that 35 of the 91 pages in the 2006 Wegman report contain plagiarized text (with some of the wording taken from a book, Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary, by Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts) and contain erroneous citations of data, as well.

Some denialists have argued that this is just about a missing attribution and it means nothing. Now remember that a couple (out of thousands of studies) of incorrectly attributed references to a study in an IPCC report was blown out of all proportion by the denialosphere. But now they argue we should not worry about a couple of attribution errors.. (Can't have it both ways!)

Here's the interesting bit; about the Hockey Stick. In essence the data analysis used by Wegamn, which was copied uncritically from the work of a couple of other denialists, generated some noisy data (but meaningless) data then feed it into a version of Mann analysis and out pops a Hockey Stick-like result.

Except that the generation of the input data was far from random - oh no! It generated 10,000 sample sets of data - then selected the 100 from that huge pool that were the most hockey-stick like! These 100 cherry picked results are then fed into the replication of Mann's analysis. Wegman's analysis is far from an objective analysis. It would appear that far from being a random test, Wegman was using loaded dice. It seems the Wegman report may be a huge fudge. (You can read a very detailed breakdown of the full fudgey nature of the fudge here.)

Forget the so-called 'climategate' - this is the Climate Change Data Scandal You Won't Read Much About in the Telegraph, Mail or the Express

The Rightward Drift of Politics

It has been claimed that there is a right-ward drift in US politics. I don't know enough about it to say either way, but the Republican gains in the recent US election are depressing. Not that the White House under democratic rule was doing much to be happy about. As ever the US elections have implications for us globally and again I'm depressed that political parties there to represent the working people are either so hamstrung or so two-faced due to the corporate funding they get, that there seems little hope for mainstream politics. Here's a couple of examples of what I mean:

In the US:

The Democrats aren't preparing to stand up for anything, either. They're already talking about backing down on the repeal of the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy in the military. I didn't vote for the Democrats so that they could turn tail at every Republican whim: they're supposed to work for the policies Democrats claim to stand for.

In the UK:

Thirteen years ago, I had my defence epiphany on the lay committee for Labour's first and only strategic defence review in 1997. This was under George Robertson. I vividly remember our first meeting when we were given our terms of reference. Such was the radical mood of those euphoric early Blair days that were told to think the unthinkable and discuss everything, no holds barred.

This lasted about five minutes. It turned out we could not discuss the nuclear deterrent; we could not question the Trident programme and its submarines; we could not discuss the Eurofighter contract; nor could we discuss the need for two or perhaps three new aircraft carriers. I remember the smug look on the faces of service chiefs in the room. Our excluded items had nothing really to do with Britain's defence. They were political. Robertson and his colleagues were under instructions not to give an inch to the Tories on defence procurement, lest they be seen as soft on defence. We could think the unthinkable – but not the thinkable.

Thanks Labour, 'cos it's worth spending billions of crappy weapons systems of little use to us to keep the Daily Mail and crew of your back... Thanks Democrats, your inability to fight for things you believe in and push to compromise with people only willing to compromise to the right has now given us a man running for House Energy and Commerce Committee, John Shimkus, who thinks we don't need to worry about climate change because God says it's all ok.

And behind all this pumping out piles and piles of shit is the rightward media...
.

The Black Hole of Stupid: US Right Goes (Even More) Mental

This is a staggering political position to end up with as a major political party in a democracy:

The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones. ... Just for the record, when the nonpartisan National Academy of Sciences last reviewed the data this spring, it concluded: "A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems." Not only William Hague but such other prominent European conservatives as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have embraced that widespread scientific conviction and supported vigorous action.

Indeed, it is difficult to identify another major political party in any democracy as thoroughly dismissive of climate science as is the GOP here. Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, says that although other parties may contain pockets of climate skepticism, there is "no party-wide view like this anywhere in the world that I am aware of."

Wow - serious nuttyness. What is also staggering is the position that so many denialists seem to have which is if they don't know about and/or understand the science of climate change, then it can't be true. As if the laws of nature only operate if we humans can get on consensus on understanding...

It's a black-hole of stupid that is also sucking vast sections of the media (Fox, Telegraph, Dail Fail etc) in with it.

ScepticGate: The climate scandal you won't read about in the Telegraph

So the so-called 'Climate Gate' scandal has come and gone and left more than a few people wondering about why it was even given the media coverage, out of proportion to the non-scandal it appeared to become in print etc.

But there is another scandal brewing about academic standards; however this is one the Denialists are keeping very quiet about - why because it may well be a huge home goal for them.

Our tale starts with a report known as the Wegman Report, after it's author co-author Edward Wegman. This report was commissioned by two republican politicians. One was Joe Barton who gained notoriety when he apologised to BP after the oil spill because Obama (sort of) went after the company. He's also heavily funded by the oil industry.

Anyway, these guys commission Edward Wegman, who is chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, to look into the famous 'Hockey Stick' graph produced by climate scientists including Michael Mann. Wegman does so and when it gets released it has lots of coverage and denialists point to it over and over and say, 'see, we told you (insert whatever odd position the denialist has here: the world is not warming/it's a conspiracy/the sun is doing it/ec)'.

For example it's currently one of the key documents being used by Republican and Virginia Attorney General Cuccinelli in his witch-hunt against Michael Mann.

Except that after the reports release, amongst other criticisms of it, Raymond Bradley complained that about a third of it had been lifted from a 1999 textbook he had written. This is called plagiarism and is a serious charge in academia. Bradley complained years ago and the shrouded process only now seems to be moving. This is in contrast to the so-called ClimateGate investigations which were public and started almost straight away:

When a formal research or professional misconduct complaint is received, universities are required to open an inquiry. This is a less formal procedure, usually conducted by administrative personnel with or without academics taking part. it is very confidential. Only when the inquiry finds strong evidence of misconduct is a formal investigation opened. In this regard what Penn State did with respect to charges against Michael Mann was exceedingly irregular. First, they opened an inquiry without a formal complaint (which can be anonymous) on the basis of the uproar fed by friends of Judy (and no one else). Second they published their report, something that can be done but usually is not. Third they started a formal investigation without the inquiry finding grounds for it.

Now Mann agreed to the irregular way it was done - I guess he was confident that there was - and the findings showed - nothing wrong.

So why does this all matter? First off, if the findings go against the Wegman Report, then a whole plank of denailism falls away. It's hard to complain the hockey stick is broken when your main tool for breaking it, is itself broken.

Second, Virginia Attorney General Cuccinelli's second attack on Mann is severely blunted if the accusations are upheld (his first was struck down by the courts for being not 'objective.'

Third it (again) shows us why denialists are denialists; they can happily chat about evidence that agrees with their bias but have trouble processing information that not not agree with their pre-conceived notion.

Fourth it is interesting to see the (lack of) media coverage of a growing scandal of denial, in contrast to the rubbish written about ClimateGate.

Download the report on Wegman from DeepClimate if you want to read more...

Pyrrhic victory: Another denialist admits climate change is real

Time to add another denialist to the growing list of high-profile U-turns.

Republican strategist Frank Luntz and editor of sceptic magazine Michael Shermer and oil giant Exxon and then Lomborg.

Now to the list we can add Daily Mail science correspondent, Michael Hanlon:

I have long been something of a climate-change sceptic, but my views in recent years have shifted. For me, the most convincing evidence that something worrying is going on lies right here in the Arctic. Because while across most of the world evidence for current climate change is often inconclusive and anecdotal, the huge ice sheet which sits atop this, the largest island in the world, appears to be cracking up before our eyes. And on a timescale of decades rather than the millennia many predicted.

Just five days ago, a 'superberg', measuring 100sq miles broke off the Petermann Glacier in the north-west of the island and floated into the ocean - the largest chunk of ice to break off Greenland for nearly half a century.

(Amazingly he still thinks it might be eagerated a bit after that, but hey, you don't expect Rome to be built in a day - at least now he's open to the evidence).

Great commentary on this and more here.

Another Denialist Talking-Point Retracted; Telegraph Officially A Shit Newspaper

That bastion of journalism sub-GCSE science science reporting paper, the Telegraph has had to retract another climate-linked story;

In reports in December 2009 we said that Tata had used the carbon trading scheme to transfer steel production from Redcar to India, pocketing £1.2 billion in carbon credits at the cost of 1700 jobs. We accept this was wrong. ... We also accept Tata’s assurance that it has no relationship with the Chairman of the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

We apologise for these errors.

What the denialists-in-residence at the paper had been doing is trying to make the IPCC look dodgy by hugely over-playing reports of inaccuracies and trying to insinuate it's chair was corrupt. In this instance by linking him to a carbon trading scheme.

So now we have:
- Retraction of the IPCC-Tata-carbon trading scheme (it's a myth)
- Retraction of story suggesting that the chair of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri cashing in on climate change (also a myth)
- Retraction of bogus rainforest claim (IPCC was right, Telegraph was 100% wrong)
- Totally wacked-out coverage of the so-called Climategate scandal (the scandal was that there was no scandal)
- Telegraph Pulls Blog Failing to Toe the Party Line
- Telegraph commentator claims big oil interests were not funding climate change denail (they were wrong - oil interests are funding denial)

...and that's just the Telegraph!!!

Wow, what will they get right? Only the cover price and date, I suspect.

Another Climate Denial Myth Bites the Dust

Climate Change Deniers, having long ago lost the argument of the science - have concentrated much of their energy on smearing the most prominent people associated with the IPCC: chair of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri came in for loads of flack about him cashing in on climate change - serious allegations - except that none of it was true. So yet again the bastion of anti-science reporting, The Telegraph got it wrong - 100% wrong;

In December, an article in the Sunday Telegraph had claimed that the UN climate chief was "making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies" and that payments from his work for other organisations "must run into millions of dollars". The article has since been removed from the newspaper's website.

Last weekend it issued an apology to Pachauri. "[The article] was not intended to suggest that Dr Pachauri was corrupt or abusing his position as head of the IPCC and we accept KPMG found Dr Pachauri had not made 'millions of dollars' in recent years. We apologise to Dr Pachauri for any embarrassment caused."

This is after another withdrawn article on climate science, alleging that claims over rainforest depletion in the IPCC report were wrong and unsubstantiated - when they were right and substantiated. Again 100% wrong.

Again, it's a huge fail.



PS. On the bright side the climate denailists are typically humbled and conciliatory..

He is one of the global warming liars and is scum. I will apologise when hell freezes over.

Oh.

PPS. AND! don't forget that Dr Pachauri was the choice of Bush's administration, who lobbied (and put pressure on other countries to lobby) the IPCC into picking him over Bob Watson, who was considered too extreme for Bush & co!

Metro needs to get a sense of humor

Getting the lawers out to tackle a spoof - seems a bit like bullying to me...

The Metro has obtained a High Court injunction against “all persons responsible for the publication and/or distribution” of a Metro spoof paper that was distributed by campaigners at London tube stations on Friday morning. But since the spoof was produced and distributed anonymously, the injunction seems to have been served upon the wrong people, in what appears to be a guilty-by-association verdict.

The spoof paper, which has also been circulated on the web, has a similar masthead and layout to the free daily, with a zero instead of the O. The owners of Metro, Associated Newspapers Limited, claim this is an infringement of the company’s trademark copyrights, while campaigners argue the company directors “do not have a sense of humour” and have “gone too far in suppressing free speech to protect their commercial interests.”

You can see the spoof in question here: http://metr0.co.uk/

David Mitchell Spells it Out

Great polemic that makes a lot of sense...

We are going to need people like David to counter the denial bullshit - why because the denial crew have got a lot of things in their favour.

- Using oil and stuff has lots of nice things about it - like flying.
- The right-wing media (which is most of it) are on their side so can be relied upon to twist, distort and bullshit along with then.
- There is lots of money on the denial side - big oil and think thanks have pumped the denial side with lots of cash.
- Most people would rather it is not happening. We'd all love to be told it's not true. Thus counter information appeals to us while the facts don't.
- We tend not to like scientists much - we think of them as smart asses. (Which is not true if you meet them)

However as David says - the facts are it is true. After the denial crew and their wealthy and powerful allies have been attacking every single pillar of climate science relentlessly for decades, the science (not it's perception) is more solid than ever. It's more real than ever and getting real-er!

So we have to get real.

Climate Science Is Right

The main news from the final of the slew of inquiries into the hacking of some climate scientist's email (the CRU or Climate Research Unit) is that apart from a few minor areas, they were honest and accurate in thier work. Put simply - climate science is right. Not that you'd know that from the right-wing media who are busy focusing on the minor points - but then they have to else it makes all the rubbish they wrote prior to this look like, well... rubbish.

Within the denailosphere, the predictable doddering ediface of conspiracy grows ever more absurd. Why? Because when a conspiracy thoery encountered information that disproves it, it must grow and absorb the counter-information into the conspiracy. Hence all the climate-creationsist conspiriacy does it grow more and more absurd by the day... Here's what one denialist had to say:

I guess the main question coming out of the Muir Russell report is: when is he going to be appointed to the House of Lords and his choice of appellation? Lord Muir of Holyrood? They adopted a unique inquiry process in which they interviewed only one side – CRU. As a result, the report is heavily weighted towards CRU apologia.

See how that works? The twisted logic is; Muir Russell does not agree with denail therefore Muir Russell must be in on the scam.

But lets ask another question - how do we know that the climate science is right? The report's authors did a very clever thing to test if they were right. What they did is got hold of some publically avalible temprature data (not from the CRU) and got hold of some publically avalible computer code to analysie it (not from the CRU) and ran the analysis. If the CRU were lying/wrong then the tempature reconstructions would look different to the results the CRU got. If the CRU were right, then the resonstructions would look the same as the CRU's results. What happened? The resonstructions looked the same as the CRU's results. Slam dunk. Here's how one commentor put it:

the report has proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Inquiry had enough independent brains to reproduce the software code on the original information available in a short space of time.

Which in turn proves that all climate sceptics who complain about the code not being available are not particularly bright - at least when it comes to writing and/or understanding code.

Which in turn also makes me openly wonder whether climate sceptics bleating about unavailability of the code would even have the faintest idea what to do with it if it was served to them on a silver platter.

Give it up mate. You guys are really starting to look like a flock of headless chooks now.

Amen. And here's the kicker to the conspiracy theory - there are very powerful forces who would love nothing more than climate change to turn out to be a scam - the Republican Party, the oil, coal and gas industries, the right-wing media, Russia, Saudia Arabia (home to the largest reserves of oil) etc. If somebody could come out and show it's a hoax, from from being in danger - they'd be fetted by all of the above and more as heros. So why would sombody risk thier reputation to back a handful of climate scientists? Again, this comment sums it up...

After each inquiry we all have heard the same calls long and loud from the denialosphere: "Whitewash, whitewash ..." but it can be shown to hold no water with a simple explanation. I have a coin (20c)and i'll flip it. If it comes up heads then you can have the coin. If it comes up tails then you give me $100. Will you take that bet? No? Why? Because it is a dumb bet. Only an idiot would risk $100 to win 20c. This is the case with these inquiries. If it were truly a whitewash then I do not know anyone who would risk their reputation and the reputation of an institution to which they belong to rescue the reputation of another. If there was even a hint of impropriety, Mann, Jones and the CRU would have been hung out to dry and the members of these panels would have distanced themselves quicker than you can pass wind. When the currency of these researchers and institutions is reputation, if dodgy deeds were done no-one would risk their reputation to ressurect another's. Why? Because it is a dumb bet.

Wikileaks Under Attack

Please read...as the first casualty of war is not truth - that's always a casualty - but open information... WikiLeaks reporting the sad killing of civilians via US botched airstrikes - and rather than trying to find out what happened - the US is trying to shoot the messenger - Wikileaks:

One of our alleged sources, a young US intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, has been detained and shipped to a US military prison in Kuwait, where he is being held without trail. Mr. Manning is alleged to have acted according to his conscious and leaked to us the Collateral Murder video and the video of a massacre that took place in Afghanistan last year at Garani.

The Garani massacre, which we are still working on, killed over 100 people, mostly children.

Mr. Manning allegedly also sent us 260,000 classified US Department cables, reporting on the actions of US Embassy's engaging in abusive actions all over the world. We have denied the allegation, but the US government is acting as if the allegation is true and we do have a lot of other material that exposes human rights abuses by the United States government.

Mr. Manning was allegedly exposed after talking to an unrelated "journalist" who then worked with the US government to detain him.

Some background on the Manning case:

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/06/11/transcript-daniel-ellsberg-says-he-fears-us-might-assasinate-wikileaks-founder/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/wikileaks-chat/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/state-department-anxious/
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2010/06/143011.htm

[ note that there are some questions about the Wired reportage, see: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/13/video-wikileaks-foun.html#comment-809677 ]

WikiLeaks a small organization going through enormous growth and operating in an adverserial, high-security environment which can make communication time consuming and the acquisition of new staff and volunteers, also difficult since they require high levels of trust.

To try and deal with our growth and the current difficult situation, we want to get you to work together with our other supporters to set up a "Friends of WikiLeaks" group in your area. We have multiple supporters in most countries and would like to see them be a strong and independent force.

Please write to friends@sunshinepress.org if you are interested in helping with Friends of WikiLeaks in your area. You will receive further instructions.

We also have significant unexpected legal costs (for example flying a legal team to Kuwait, video production. Collateral Murder production costs were $50,000 all up).

Any financial contributions will be of IMMEDIATE assistance.

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Special:Support

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Donate if you can!

Telegraph Shamed By Bogus Rainforest Claim

In Torygraph world, up is down and down is up. Here's a extract from a 'news' story:

IPCC Shamed By Bogus Rainforest Claim by Jonathan Leake, The Sunday Times
A startling report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.

Here's the truth from a retraction by the Torygraph:

The article "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim" (News, Jan 31) stated that the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had included an "unsubstantiated claim" that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be sensitive to future changes in rainfall. The IPCC had referenced the claim to a report prepared for WWF by Andrew Rowell and Peter Moore, whom the article described as "green campaigners" with "little scientific expertise." The article also stated that the authors' research had been based on a scientific paper that dealt with the impact of human activity rather than climate change.

In fact, the IPCC's Amazon statement is supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence. In the case of the WWF report, the figure had, in error, not been referenced, but was based on research by the respected Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) which did relate to the impact of climate change. We also understand and accept that Mr Rowell is an experienced environmental journalist and that Dr Moore is an expert in forest management, and apologise for any suggestion to the contrary.

Wow - how could you get is so wrong - almost the total opposite of what was said - but then this is Jonathan Leake writing, for whom up is down and down is up. So let's help correct that article:

IPCC Telegraph Shamed By Bogus Rainforest Claim by Jonathan Leake, The Sunday Times
A startling An accurate report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated a peer-reviewed substantiated claim by green campaigners an expert in forest management who had little scientific lots of expertise.

That's better. As for Jonathan Leake - Epic fail:

Telegraph Pulls Blog Failing to Toe the Party Line

Global Warming is a huge conspiracy and is not really happening. It's a Marxist Green Lobby plot. The earth is not warming and even if it is, it's not warming much so don't worry. But it's not warming, it's cooling so worry about that. But even if it warming it would be the sun doing the extra warming and not us, no way sir-e. At least that is the party-line in Telegraph-land. A true blue land of hope and glory and alternative rules of science.

Now, in Telegraph-land, the debate on climate change is over - it's not real (see above) but the debate is ongoing - and the evil Marxists Green Lobby are stifling debate.

Except that one of it's writers - had the audacity to speak freely:

Lord Monckton is a fantasist, a blethering popinjay useful only for amusement. He can be safely ignored in all serious scientific debate. But it reflects badly on those people who want seriously to argue against the science of climate change that this capering jester is among the public figureheads of their movement. If I were, for example, m’colleagues James Delingpole or Christopher Booker, I would publically wash my hands of Lord Monckton, and soon.

But now the post has gone from the Telegraph - go to the original link - and you'll just get the message:

Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.

Ooops. What is going on? Additional comments below the original post noted that Monckton had phoned the paper to complain about the article. And now it's gone. Airbrushed out of the site like a Soviet clean-up propaganda operation - no sign of it on the author's page. Still the memory hole that is the web means it is gone and yet not gone. And now it's removal is it's own story.

Reframing the Climate Issue (Thanks BBC)

So here comes the next line of attack from the climate change deniers - the idea that somehow they are a legitimate voice and should be in the process. Roger Harrabin of the BBC gets taken as the patsy on this line of attack:

When at the launch of the Sir Muir Russell inquiry I asked about the credibility of the review panel in the blogosphere, Sir Muir dismissed the enquiry with the flick of a wrist - he had been a senior civil servant and he had run a university, his bona fides were beyond question.

But the blogosphere does not respect past reputations, only current performance. And some of the top performers in the blogosphere are critics of the establishment.

There is so much wrong with this I don't know where to start. The blogosphere is not a monolithic enterprise, so you can't make assumptions about what a platform (it's not a person) is/does/thinks. How do you asses 'top performers'? It's almost like you need some kind of criteria to asses the validity of information, else the 'top performer' just comes from selection bias. Something like peer-review? But we already have that and it's spoken. Clearly.

Not only that this article assumes that climate change breaks down into two factions:

Even at the Heartland Institute climate sceptics' conference in Chicago last week most scientists seemed to agree that CO2 had probably warmed the planet at the end of the 20th century, over and above natural fluctuations.

But they did not agree that the warming will be dangerous - and they object to being branded fools or hirelings for saying so.

This is simply not true. The Heartland Institute climate denials sceptics' conference had a mishmash of views; it's cooling, it's not cooling or warming, it's warming but only a bit etc. They had no consensus except a desire to stop any political changes in response to climate change. The bollox continues...

Steve McIntyre, for instance, is a mining engineer who started examining climate statistics as a hobby. He has taken on the scientific establishment on some key issues and won.

He arguably knows more about CRU science than anyone outside the unit - but none of the CRU inquiries has contacted him for input.

He arguably does not. His ham-fisted attempts at science have never passed a proper peer-review process because it's crap. Other bloggers have taken his rubbish to pieces (e.g. part 1 and part 2) concluding:

So parting questions are these: Why should anyone take Steve McIntyre seriously? And how long will it be before responsible journalists and commentators expose his baseless “analysis” for the nonsense that it is?

Clearly it is going to take Roger Harrabin longer to get the message that provably McIntyre is full of shit. But he goes on...

I have been told by the review teams that they can read McIntyre's blog if they want to learn about his views. But they can't have read all his blog entries surely? And they would have saved a lot of time and effort if they had asked him to summarise his scientific scrutiny on a couple of sheets of A4.

McIntyre submitted to the house of commons on the CRU hack - and they concluded that the CRU were right. Nothing has changed since - except more analysis of McIntyre's work showing more holes in it.

(Hat-tip dbmm)

PS. On a brighter note, it is good to see the Guardian starting to name people's area of expertise when quoting them:

Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University who is the foundation's director, said in December last year: "We look out of the window and it's very cold, it doesn't seem to be warming."

Yup - what the fuck does a social anthropologist know about climate? Judging by his comments, zero.

When Quoting a 'Dr' State His Area of Expertise...

This is a great demolition of the media coverage of the recent hacked climate email hearings:

What really irked me about the BBC piece however is its concluding section in which we find: Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, criticised the panel for producing a report that was “not even-handed” and appeared to be the product of a “rushed job”. He said: “This has produced a very superficial report. The panel should have taken more time to come to more balanced and trustworthy conclusions. They should have heard evidence from critical researchers who have been working in the same field for many years.”

First of all, for those who aren’t familiar with Benny Peiser while he is indeed an academic, simply describing him as a Dr within an article concentrating on science and scientists is somewhat misleading. Peiser is a senior lecturer in social anthropology and sports sociology. Yup that’s right, instead of getting information about climate science from climate scientists, or maybe physicists or atmospheric chemists the Beeb turns to a sports sociologist. Right… Well he has published peer reviewed papers. Three in fact, in the following journals: Sports Medicine, 2006; Journal of Sports Sciences (2004); and, Bioastronomy 2002: life among the stars (2004).

What clearer way could the omission of information allow the reader to form a misleading reading of the text. So to quote again:

Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, criticised the panel for producing a report that was “not even-handed” and appeared to be the product of a “rushed job”.

This clearly gives the impression that the man quoted is some kind of a related expert - else why else call him a doctor. Now add in the area of expertise:

Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation and a doctor of the sociology of sport, criticised the panel for producing a report that was “not even-handed” and appeared to be the product of a “rushed job”.

How does that read now? Truthier, I think.

Man Accusing Climate Scientists of Fraud, is Talking Money from Man Accused of Fraud

Roll up! Roll up! It's the full of shit event of the year! A right-wing nut-job by the name of Cuccinelli has started a witch-hunt against climate scientists Michael Mann, asking for every single paper and email he produced while working at a the University of Virginia so as to cherry-pick and quote-mine for evidence of fraud:

[The] Virginia attorney general has filed papers against the climate researcher, Michael Mann. Mann had worked at the University of Virginia for 5 or 6 years, doing climate studies that cost the state about a half million dollars over that time. (To put that in perspective, that's a middling sized grant; big biomedical researchers can get much more than that.) Cuccinelli is claiming that Mann committed fraud, and wants to demand all that money back.

There are no grounds to consider Mann to have committed any breach of ethics. The sole foundation for his legal attack is the hacked email messages from the CRU, which contained no nefarious revelations…other than that some scientists are really pissed off at clueless denialists like Cuccinelli. Most annoyingly, Mann was already subjected to an ethics review, again driven by people complaining about the CRU emails, and was completely absolved of any wrongdoing.

Note that that while Mann has been accused of fraud by this prick Cuccinelli without any evidence and despite a review concluding he did nothing wrong... Cuccinelli himself got over $55,000 in funds from somebody who is under investigation for fraud and there is evidence of wrong doing - and yet Cuccinelli says his donor is innocent until proven guilty:

The second largest individual contributor to Cuccinelli's campaign for Virginia attorney general last year was Bobby Thompson, a Florida man who is the founder of the U.S. Navy Veterans Association, and who donated $55,500 to Cuccinelli.

A lengthy investigative report in the St. Petersburg Times raised numerous red flags about USNVA. For example, the paper could not confirm the existence of 84 out of 85 listed officers for the group. The only one they could find was Thompson, who moved out of his Tampa bungalow, leaving no forwarding address, soon after being questioned contacted by reporters. The group is now under investigation in three states.... But Cuccinelli has refused, with his camp saying he'll give up the money if Thompson is convicted of a crime.

Nice.