It was suggested by Perth Business Gateway to rewrite the 2001 proposal to use the Millennium Dome as a global environmental management centre, this time relevant for Scotland in 2006. The outline executive summary, Scotland:The World's First Ecological Superpower, was produced. The next stage is to implement it, what do you think?

Saturday 10 March 2007

Profesor Lindzen I Presume: Tax lies and Videotape, The Great Global Warming Swindle


The Great Global Warming Swindle has generated some debate around the blogsphere. Here I have to say I do believe in climate change, to me it doesn't matter the driver, whether it is human or natural, it still has to be dealt with. I don't even believe in the Cartesian reductionism that separates human and natural factors. The next level of organisational hierarchy is as a whole and integrated planetary system, applied planetary engineering.


Right for Scotland and Devil's Kitchen both welcomed the programme and it's findings. Prior to the programme I did make make my views know about one of the contributors Prof Richard Lindzen, purely on what he had written in the Daily Mail Global Warming a bogus religion of our age.


Entering his name into Google produced a strange result, and many of the articles relate to him and other associates
working as consultants for the oil and gas industry.

If you are taken to hospital and when lying in a bed the doctor comes up and says I've got some good news and bad news. First the bad, you're going to die, and the good, it's from natural causes. Now I don't agree with the
Stern Report and neither do I agree with Lindzen.

Lindzen does make an appropriate quote on this though."Picking holes in the IPCC is crucial. The notion that if you’re ignorant of something and somebody comes up with a wrong answer, and you have to accept that because you don’t have another wrong answer to offer is like faith healing, it’s like quackery in medicine – if somebody says you should take jelly beans for cancer and you say that’s stupid, and he says, well can you suggest something else and you say, no, does that mean you have to go with jelly beans?

Personally I don't go with either but do have an alternative.

My take on the situation is that this whole body of knowledge and understanding of what makes a planet tick has been hi-jacked by politicians, the media and big business. Unfortunately the debate and presentation by them is only on a very small fraction of the knowledge available. The soundbite culture. Climate change=global warming=man made CO2 emissions. That is what the public are believing through the narrow slot of understanding presented to them.

Let's go to a tropical rain forest in South America. Lush and thick vegetation, hot and high levels of rainfall. This is a waste of space, it is far better to use this area as farmland to feed people, so chop down all the trees. We can make lush farm land like Cheshire or lowland Perthshire. The first thing after chopping down all the trees is the rain stops. About 85% of all the rain that falls on a TRF is made by the forest, transpiration, water passing through the tree and out through the leaves, and also evaporation. It is continually being recycled.

Next there is no soil for the crops. A TRF does not need high quality soils. Nutrient recycling is so rapid and efficient, partly due to the large number and diversity of living organisms supported by the high productivity of the forest. (The primary productivity is the amount of biomass created by the plants and trees per square metre per year).

Having cut down all the trees in a high rainfall region. You are left with arid conditions and poor soils which will grow very little. Climate change. No flights for foreign holidays, car journeys or light bulbs have been involved. Still it is climate change.

The programme also drew attention on the inverse relationship between CO2 and temperature as outlined in Al Gores "An Inconvenient Truth". Which I cannot be bothered to watch. If climate change to you Al is so important, why are you criss crossing the world in aircraft to tell us about it. It is a pointless exercise me turning my TV off and not leaving it in standby as it will take a million lifetimes to save the amount of energy you squander flying about telling me to save it. I don't need you to tell me, please stop. Anyway if you had anything that was really important to say about saving the planet, when you spoke in Scotland recently why did you not permit the media to report it. It wasn't because tables were £3000 a go, and if the press had reported anything important and useful to the public that could save lives, you wouldn't be able to fly in again and tell another group.

Anyway most TVs at present aren't really designed to be turned on and off physically all the time the switches are very frail. Please tell me when someones TV switch breaks and a man in a van has to come round and fix it. Have much emissions have been saved in the switching off and how much have been used in the man coming round to fix it?

For every 10c rise in temperature the rate of reaction doubles. Decay and conversion of biomass to CO2 of leaf fall and other dead material in a forest could be in equilibrium with that produced. Raise the temperature slightly decays speeds up at a rate greater than new material is produced. Hence CO2 levels in the atmosphere of a closed system increase.

Even Lindzen admits CO2 may cause some (but not all temperature rise). If temperature rises say due to increased solar activity, then CO2 levels will increase. These may then feed back into the system and contribute to the increasing temperature. This is positive feedback mechanism. An increase in temperature from another factor my initiate the rise, then afterwards CO2 can still contribute. The increasing CO2 curve may be after the rising temp curve doesn't mean it still can't be contributing.

Co2 in oceans. Fully agree warming water can have less dissolved gas in it, as long as the concentration of the atmosphere remain constant. The shift in the equilibrium of CO2 concentrations in the oceans depends on the temperature of the water and the concentration in the atmosphere. We are not just talking about CO2 in terms of climate change damage. What is the effect of CO2 on increasing acidification of the water, changes in nutrients cycling and a potential reduction of productivity. This linked with increasing pollution, decreased light penetration in estuaries and coastal waters due to siltation and suspension caused by deforestation. You then have marine ecosystem collapse and no fish with your chips.

The biggest lie in the programme was environmentalism was caused by 'reds under the bed' as a result of the collapse of the communist block, Marxists have to look for targets elsewhere. The study and understanding of mans relationship with the environment is as old as man. The rise and fall of the flood waters of the Nile for the ancient Egyptians as one example. Ecology was given it's name by
Haeckel in 1869, evolving with the work of Mobius in 1887, greatly influenced by the Russians Dokuchaev and Morozov through to Tansley's concept of the ecosystem in 1935.

Modern environmentalism has a major influence in the decline of the hippy flower power movement at the end of the 60's and a desire for a more practical application of sustainable ideas. The 60's also had the highly influential
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. The development of the wildlife and ecological documentary in television, David Attenborough and Jacques Cousteau. Psychologically but highly influential was the Apollo space missions to the moon. Not necessarily the moonlanding itself from Apollo 11 in 1969 but Apollo 8's orbit around the moon which gave those first pictures of the beautiful jewelled Earth alone in the infinite and eternal void of space. This produced the collective, cohesive, interconnected and even fragile nature of life on Earth. From this was a defining work Only One Earth by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos. Then we have Gaia by James Lovelock from 1979.

These are just mainstream well known history of environmentalism. At this point the cold war was still on and no one was even considering the
Berlin Wall to come down. How the a documentary maker could even consider such complete lies and fantasy being considered for supposedly informative viewing is beyond me. That contributors could even take part when they knew what was going out was completely and 100% false has to call into question the validity of their scientific contribution.

Ask 100 environmentalists what was the most influential and galvanising book of the 1970s on environmentalism and at no 1 or at least in the top five would have to be
Limits to Growth. Not having it in the list would be the equivalent of asking what were the decent albums of the 70's and omitting Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. Don't think Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is unaware of the work. Limits to Growth was written and published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The most globally influential and important book on modern environmentalism was produced 'just down the corridor' from Prof Lindzens office in 1972 and he seems to have forgotten the fact, preferring to take part in a programme which attributes environmentalism to some Marxist plot after the fall of the Berlin Wall some years 17 later.

How Channel 4 got away with such a complete and easily checkable misrepresentation is a serious question? This wasn't some informed debate presenting evidence for and against a particular view, it was quite simply lies, a deception on the viewing public. What did the makers assume, that no one watching the programme would have any knowledge of the material being presented?

There even seemed to be some confusion over the financing of the global warming swindle. There was a view presented that research into global warming attracts mega bucks funding an unlimited pot of money to further some lie to be foisted on the public. I was part of the original group involved in setting up
Quest, the UK's latest generation of climatic and other models. The total funding for the entire project was £25 million. You can't buy a Premier league footballer for that. It is less than one Harrier jump jet.

Were the money is, is in the climate change industry. Instead of global capitalism we have global carbonism. The point of the exercise should be to save the planet. All we have created is some totally irrelevant global trading scheme. If you can't make big fat cat bonuses in the financial sector why not pop over to the carbon sector.

This life, this planet is the result of 14 billion years of evolution. Why do politicians and the finance industry believe that the entire knowledge of that process and it's sustainable continuation can be condensed into simple "shifting tax burdens" and other centres and forms of global trading.

I don't agree with Stern,
the media know that, and I don't agree with any political party. This programme had the option of challenging the drivel politics and the media foist on us as truth and 'the way forward'. Instead the programme presented another package of lies and misinformation. Trying to disprove one set of lies with another set of lies does not produce the truth.

Professor Lindzen any of the contributors and the programme maker are quite welcome to turn up at Blairgowrie Town hall on 28th March. Famine, fire, war, terror, extinctions, drought, pollution, disease, cruelty, flood, death, injustice and all the other furies fill the news and haunt the planet. Do something about it instead of wasting time presenting one set of misinformation to attack another set!
It was a slick and excellent programme. It told me things I didn't know. Then presented sections that I knew were complete and total lies. So how can I trust what it told me about what I didn't know. A programme which lost all credibility, a wasted opportunity to present something that could have constructively addressed the cuurent world situation in a positive way. Lies to disprove lies do not make truth.

2 comments:

brian in the tamar valley said...

I had a feeling you would have watched this programme Roger! I saw it too, two days after seeing "An Inconvenient Truth". I have to say that I was personally more impressed by the Gore film. But the C4 documentary has certainly stirred up plenty of interest and I am slowly getting through some of the comments on the forum on the C4 website. These and the blogospere in general are giving plenty of food for thought that's for sure.

One aspect of the climate debate that doesn't get much airing is the effect known as 'global dimming'. There was a compelling 'Horizon' programme on the subject somewhile ago (there's a transcript on google somewhere). Much of the science on this is pretty convincing and it suggests that without 'global dimming' global warming would be much greater than that seen today.

I wouldn't be surprised if global dimming was a factor in the apparent dip in worldwide temperatures after the Second World War. In Europe at least there is now less soot and similar pollution so that the effect of global dimming is less severe thus upping the amount of global warming - if one accepts the CO2 cause that is.

On my blog I have had a go at Piers Corbyn (and he must not confuse short term weather forecasting with long term climate change). My problem with him is that his methods haven't been subjected to peer review. People pay him good money for his forecasts so how accurate is he? The instances I've seen suggest not very good! But I would love to see his prophecies over a substatial period of time before making a final judgment. If there is some validity in his ideas about the sun being a prime mover in not only day to day weather but in climate change then many people (including me!) would have to change their beliefs.

There is a particular concept that puts fossil fuel burning into its context in relation to the age of our planet which I find very useful. Imagine the age of planet Earth to be represented by one year. It is now one second to midnight on December 31st. To all practical purposes the fossil fuels so far burnt on our planet have been burnt in that one second. Add the fact (I think I'm right on this) that more people are now living than have lived and died in the past. If the ecology of the Earth is continually trying to adjust to some sort of balance is it surprising that it is having difficulty in such a miniscule time frame. Just a thought!

Roger Thomas said...

Yes I saw the Horizon programme on Global Dimming too. The effect discovered after airline flights were stopped after 9/11. I take the point after WW2, how much dimming has been caused by the smoke and everything generated by war. The we have the question that the C4 documentary presented about the affect of sun, stars and solar radiation causing warming.
The problem is the models of the planetary system are not covering enough parameters and factors and are not running 'real time'projections.
One of the core aspects of using the Millennium Dome as a global environmental centre was to have an independent real time model of Earth systems which would be taking into account of all these factors

Hypothetically global dimming could be offsetting solar and stellar influences. So we still have an underlying temperature rise.

I take your point completely about the ecology of the Earth trying to adjust. My main subject resource base is ecology, ever since a toddler. On top of that I have the experience of being taught by one of the worlds most eminent ecologists.

It is the ecology of the planet we need to be looking at. All I am getting from politicians and media is the very narrow view of climate change=tax.

What abot The Trap: Dreams of Freedom did you see that, latest post after this one.