Agenda video online
Video from Saturday’s Agenda programme, which was a special on the Green Party co-leadership, is available on the programme’s website, as is a transcript of the show, for those without a broadband connection.
It was an interesting show. The four candidates answered questions from the host, Lisa Owen, a small studio audience, and from callers at home. It was the poorer, I think, for the lack of vetting of phone-in questions like this one:
Mark [caller]: Would any candidate be willing to actually test policy particularly on climate change, it’s a major thrust for the Greens, I want to focus on Jeanette Fitzsimons’ speech on budget night, she actually made this statement that the earth now is warmer than it has been for 650,000 years when there were no humans, well that to me is hypocrisy on the Green Party policy, she’s saying that when there were no humans and that means no cars, no factories….
LISA: So what’s your question Mark – get to the nub of your question.
Mark: If the earth was warm when there were not humans …
LISA: Okay so should global warming be one of your key policies I think is what our caller is saying.
Actually I don’t think anyone had any idea what he was saying, but the candidates did an admirable job of trying to answer him anyway. For the record, Jeanette was actually talking about CO2 levels in the atmosphere not the temperature, but I doubt a trifling fact like that will make much difference…
May 29th, 2006 at 2:17 pm
So the claim is not that temperatures are the highest for 650,000 years, but only that CO2 levels are?
Sorry to be obtuse, but why isn’t that lack of correlation evidence *against* the CO2 climate forcing theory?
May 29th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
Jeanette said…
“Yet in just the last year we learnt that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are now the highest for at least 650,000 years—since before there were humans.”
So the caller to Agenda was mistaken, or deliberately making mischief.
To answer your question, mouldwarp, time lag. Give it time for the unprecedented CO2 levels to cause the tempature increase. CO2 has risen in the last 100 years, temperature is rising on a more geological timescale. Maybe in several hundred years there will be a clear correlation between CO2 and temp.
May 30th, 2006 at 7:26 pm
This is probably the “the climate has been warm/had high CO2 levels before human influence before” challenge. I’m surprised that the speakers didn’t recognise his question as such, but nevermind that for now.
The challenge is quite an interesting one - to restate it for a time period for which we have more accurate records - why was the earth much warmer in the 1300’s, then cold again in the little ice age? And, if it was warmer/colder then, why would we assume that this cycle continuing would have such disastrous consequences this time around, or that we can do anything about it now?
Civil responses, please
May 31st, 2006 at 2:51 am
OK Wump, I suggest you do a bit of background reading on palaeo-climatology before we start the discussion :
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/howdo.html
And in particular, this abstract of a paper published in Nature in 2000 : “Causes of Climate Change
Over the Past 1000 Years”
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/crowley.html
That’s a US government site, by the way. I supply that as a source because they are very conservative about announcing any conclusions that would tend to demonstrate anthropogenic warming (because they have political commissars breathing down their necks, like in the old USSR). So we can be pretty sure that they are not erring on the side of alarmism.
In the popular mind, the dominant idea is that we don’t understand what’s caused climate variation in the past, therefore we can’t predict it in the future, let alone ascribe any change to human activity.
But that’s actually a crock of cr*p. Palaeo-climate events are increasingly well-understood, as are the causal factors (mostly, forcing due to variations in the earth’s orbit and tilt, plus short-term but violent effects from vulcanism, meteors and the like). By controlling for those historically well-attested trends, we can deduce that “something else” is causing a pretty major forcing effect these days. What could that be I wonder? By an amazing coincidence, the physico-chemical properties of C02, methane etc can be demonstrated to have a climate forcing effect when their concentration in the atmosphere increases.
Let me know which points, in particular, you want to discuss when you’ve been through the sources, Wump.
May 31st, 2006 at 9:42 am
to answer wumps question on the past temperature record, the ref that Alistair gave says “41-64% of pre-anthropogenic (pre-1850) decadal-scale temperature variations were due to changes in solar irradiance and volcanism”.
to answer wumps question on why would we assume that this cycle continuing would have such disastrous consequences this time around, or that we can do anything about it now?
the thing is wump, the warming is going to be more than the natural cycle. And that natural cycle had pretty devestating consequences for some civilizations, e.g the Norse were wiped out of Greenland (see Jared Diamond’s Collapse). And it is going to be worse than the natural variations.
Yes we can do something about it. The usual argument for not doing something about it is that to do something will wreck our economy. Well it doesn’t have to, we can reduce emissions cheaply, and also if we don’t do something about it climate change will wreck our economy.
May 31st, 2006 at 7:36 pm
Alistair - while I’m not going to do a complete review of that reference at this point in time, it appears that they are using at least one set of findings that has been shown to contain quite deep flaws. Namely, the “hockey stick”, referred to as Mann et. al. There is some mention of to the problems with this study in a document on the ClimateScience.org.nz site Owen McShane on why Kyoto is a fraud. Again please feel free to draw your own conclusions as to the quality of their challenges. But to me, use of this flawed dataset is not a good sign.
Stuey - I appreciate what you’re saying, but you’re confusing two different arguments into one. You say that the last time we had a little ice age, there were large scale famines and suchlike. This is true. But so what? We’re not talking about entering another little ice age. You move straight from that to “it is going to be worse this time”, which could refer to a number of things, but the onset of the little ice age making Greenland too cold for the Norse is not something that forced warming makes worse.
The assertion that it will wreck our economy might not hold up, either - if it so happens that the net effect of increased CO2 - as commercial greenhouse growers well know - is increased yield, then there is actually economic benefit to increasing CO2 levels, ignoring the “windfall” benefits of using the deposited oil/coal/etc.
Reducing emissions is something I agree with and why I oppose current design coal power stations - but only poisonous emissions, not ones that we are relying on a highly speculative model to call a “pollutant”.
May 31st, 2006 at 9:59 pm
mate, “You say that the last time we had a little ice age, there were large scale famines and suchlike”, no I didn’t, I said that natural climate variations in the past, both hot and cold, have had devestating effects for civilisations. And then I said that the unatural climate variations that we’re going to experience in the future are going to be worse than them.
(Meanwhile, there could be localised coolings, haven’t you heard of the fact that the Gulf Stream is slowing down, which will lead to an unpleasant cooling for north-western Europe.)
Anyway, I submit that you are out of touch with the science of global warming, which is not speculative or unproven any longer. There has been so much evidence in the last 5 to 10 years that only a handful of belligerent old vested interest-funded cranks still remain skeptic. For example here are two formerly skeptic conservatives, saying they’ve changed their tune.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/opinion/24easterbrook.html
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=000B557A-71ED- 146C-ADB783414B7F0000
June 1st, 2006 at 5:33 am
But to me, use of this flawed dataset is not a good sign.
OK, tell you what, you can discount Mann et al (for the sake of argument), but now explain how you’re going to discount the other half dozen studies referenced, which use different methodologies and proxies, share no common assumptions, and converge with respect to temperature forcing in the late 20th century which is not explained by the well-established cyclical stuff.
Or are you proposing that all these studies are tainted by being referenced on the same web site as the Mann study?
In which case, can you explain why the the web site owner (the US Dept of Commerce) would be interested in brainwashing us? in that particular direction, in any case??
Happy reading, anyway.
June 1st, 2006 at 9:48 am
that Owen McShane article is a classic man,
for instance do you know that he says, we don’t need to worry about global warming and we must not let Kyoto interfere with economic growth, because if we have unconstrained economic growth then we will all be able to afford to deal with the consequences of global warming.
Is that not the most simplistic and dumb argument you have ever heard? It completely leaves out the fact that the cost of goods and services will similarly rise negating the growth in income. It completely leaves out the fact that catastrophic weather may prevent economic growth. And it completely leaves out the fact that in a finite world un-ending economic growth is impossible.
Other gems include “However, there is no scientific consensus. Many more scientists challenge the IPCC assumptions than support them.” Now that’s complete and utter bollocks Owen. 10s of thousands of scientists support the IPCC position and only a handful are skeptic. NOT the other way round. There have been research studies that did extensive literature searches to prove this.
I could go on, but I have to do some work. Final point. McShane quotes an Economist essay that says
Hmm, the Iraq war is costing hundreds of billions of dollars. How come we can afford that, but we can’t afford to mitigate climate change?
June 2nd, 2006 at 10:12 pm
I’m not going to let Mugwump off that easily.
The paper (Storch et al) that claimed serious problems with the “hockey stick” graph (Mann et al) has itself been discredited because it used heavily shaped statistics.
See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/04/a-correction-wit h-repercussions/
Get with the programme and stop playing silly games with the truth.