A Place to Stand

Well University of East Anglia have appointed their "independent" investigator into the climate fraud emails & he is indeed a "sound chap" as described by Sir Humphrey "sound chaps are the sort who don't have to ask what to do - a sound chap knows".

Sir Muir Russell, chairman of the Judicial Appointments Board for Scotland, who has no previous links with the climate science community, will lead the investigation into allegations that leading academics at the University of East Anglia manipulated data on global warming.

He will also look at whether the university’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) was in compliance with its Freedom of Information (FOI) policies and the Environmental Information Regulations for the release of data. contd

Nigel Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation has, at least to some extent gone for it

Benny Peiser, director of the "sceptic" thinktank the Global Warming Policy Foundation, welcomed the choice of Sir Muir, saying that it was essential that the university chose someone without connections to the climate science community.

"We're not giving the inquiry a blank cheque, we will be monitoring it very carefully," he said. "If the inquiry is done properly and the scientists are cleared we welcome their restoration into their jobs."

However what is not mentioned is that while Sir Muir Russell is not a climate scientist or indeed scientist at all he does have previous experience of whitewash which seems to have escaped notice in London.

He was appointed Permanent Secretary at The Scottish Office in May 1998, and to the Scottish Executive since its establishment in 1999. He was widely believed to be primarily responsible for the massive overspend on the new Scottish Parliament Building and was criticised by Lord Fraser of Carmyllie's enquiry for failing to keep the politicians informed that the expenditure was far in excess of the budget. - wikipedia

The Scottish Parliament building was the project of Donald Dewar, then Scottish Secretary & subsequently first First Minister. If "Tam Dalyell is wicked and alarmist in saying that the Scottish Parliament will cost a penny more than £40 million" would be truthful. In fact it actually cost officially £414 million (in practice £430-£470m including landscaping etc). It was a scandal of enormous magnitude here & correctly seen as the Holyrood politicians were "numpties" (overblown incompetent fools is the best translation).

The subsequent greywash managed to avoid making anybody to blame for this & in particular blaming any of the ministers. Insofar as anybody was in any way responsible it was "senior civil servants" who alone had decided to keep all the information from government ministers & decided not to put the contract out to a fixed price bidder. The most senior of these was the permanent Secretary Sir Muir Russell. The result "did not rule out the possibility of taking disciplinary action against civil service staff, although subsequent Scottish Government investigations resulted in no action being taken against individual public officials involved with the project."

Sir Muir's subsequent history does not show that being the alleged primary person responsible for blowing £400 million reflected adversely on his career prospects. Indeed the cynical could say that it looks rather more like reflecting political gratitude that he had prevented those in charge getting the blame they deserved.

All in all anybody want to bet against East Anglia's enquiry deciding that none of the emails are as bad as they look, there is nothing much wrong with breaking the Freedom of Information Act, that destroying the data was a sensible way to save space rather than a breach so basic to science that Jones & co simply can't be called scientists & that none of it impinges on the credibility of the theory based on the destroyed data.
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Meanwhile the IPCC have announced an enquiry into climategate

"Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the allegations raised by leaked e-mails in the so-called "climategate" controversy were too serious to ignore.

"We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it," he told BBC Radio 4's The Report programme. "We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail."

& instantly concluded with the new line

The vice chairman of the IPCC panel, Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, says there had been a purpose to leaking the emails.

"The intention is clearly to distract the confidence negotiators have in the science," he said.

"I had to look at some of the emails, not all of them, but even if you remove the evidence that those scientists were working on, it doesn't change anything to the IPCC conclusion."

Which means business as usual for the catastrophic warming "believers" gathering in Copenhagen who in the interests of saving the planet have ensured "the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”

Whatever one thinks of the original lentil eating Luddites of the "environmental movement & I have made it clear I do, they look pretty good compared to the corrupt parasites of big government who have co-opted their programme as a way of keeping us paying taxes to them.

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Dear Gordon Brown,
I understand you have called me & all the others who doubt that the current global cooling is is a sign of a catastrophic level of global warming "flat-earthers" I deny believing the Earth to be flat or indeed to be in any way anti-science.

I must ask that either you publicly retract that lie in connection with myself & anybody else of whom it is untrue, or provide some evidence that I hold such a belief. Obviously those 2 options are the only possible ones open to anybody who is, in any way whatsoever, honest

In the event, which I do not anticipate, you prove yourself to be a totally dishonest & corrupt person by not taking either option I will ask the Labour party to dissociate themselves from such claims. Obviously in the event of the party or any member not being wholly dishonest, corrupt & unable to be trusted ever on any subject whatsoever, they would have to dissociate themselves from the claim.

(I'll let you know if he or his party or any member retract)

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And finally
A couple of people have pointed out that I am named by Prof Jones as a "prat" in these leaked emails. That puts me in very good company & lets be fair - I haven't exactly been kind to him either.

I had sent Mr Briffa an email on the tree ring data actually being based not only on a sample of only 12 but much more damagingly that Russian tree rings from the same site which would have changed the average to show no warming had been excised.

This is the response they decided not to send

If we are to respond, it would be to indicate that there are multiple sources of supporting
evidence and that we continue to place our confidence in the international scientific
assessment process. This confidence has proven to be well placed.

Roger

This is simply fluff not answering the question. Since this "international scientific assessment" is based on these & related figures it seems this structure is being kept up there by each end using the other as its foundation.

Labels: British politics, Fear, global warming

David Cameron has done a rather good speech on the need to slash the amount spent on Health & Safety. He naturally concentrates on its direct effects on what individuals get prevented from doing rather than the overall damage to the economy (4 million man years a year wasted) & causing over 1,000 deaths through poverty for every one it "saves" as I have done but it is a progressive step. This is the conclusion & he makes a good point I hadn't about the need to reform liability rules before we get as browbeaten by parasitic lawyers as America is

I know the over-the-top health and safety culture that has grown in our country in recent years provokes a lot of understandable anger.

But anger itself is not solution.

Instead we need a forensic examination of what has gone wrong and the steps we need to take to put it right.

We know what has gone wrong.

Excessive rules have given the impression that we have a right to a risk-free life…

…and that impression has been exacerbated by prominent claims and pay-outs.

The consequence has been spiralling costs and a slow death of discretion, judgement and social responsibility.

And what I have described today is the beginnings of putting it right.

For every piece of health and safety legislation, we need to ask whether it fulfils a useful purpose – and if not, it must go.

And we must bring some common sense to the laws surrounding compensation.

I want people to know that with the Conservatives, government will let you get on with your life without unnecessary rules and regulations.

I want everyone to know that with the Conservatives, if you do good, get involved and make a contribution, the system will back you.

And I want people to know that with the Conservatives, the legal system will be there protecting those who need it most.

That’s the change I believe people want – and that is the change we offer.”

I saw this speech via LibDem Voice which was rubbishing the idea that we could cut the nanny state in the normal illiberal manner. I put up this comment

You say the conkers stray is a myth. And to prove this quote a department PR piece saying it is true but is such a silly idea most schools don’t do it. This is a redefinition of “myth”. When it is true it isn’t a myth.

This is an unusually sensible position of Cameron’s & the “LibDems” have put themselves firmly on the side of ever bigger & immensely destructive government micromanaging of everything no matter how silly. National wealth is the single greatest factor in safety & it is easy to prove that all the national wealth wasted on such nanny-statism causes the deaths of orders of magnitude more people than the H&S regulations save. Their purpose is bureaucratic big government for its own sake & absolutely nothing to do with safety. How illiberal of you to support that.

which in the party's normal illiberal manner, they censored.

Labels: British politics, Government parasitism

East Anglia University, home of the CRU, is going to hold an enquiry into this affair. The BBC's Roger Harrabin writes on on it. He obliquely discusses the problems in giving it credibility while still under control. I will address the same subject from the opposite direction.

I've tried to speak to the people at UEA who are making the key decisions on the inquiry, but haven't managed to.

So I've jotted down a few questions they might be likely to face when they announce their decisions.

Mainstream sic scientists may feel that many of these questions hand far too much power to climate sceptics, some of whom have tried to discredit them and their work - by fair means or foul.

But the inquiry will need to be supported by the global public in a wired world. So it will need to strive as far as possible to avoid reproach in the blogosphere. Here are some questions:

1 - What is the purpose of the inquiry? Is it to reach a judgment on the ethical conduct of the scientists involved, or on whether their activities affected the science on which the Copenhagen deal is being forged. Or both?

Professor Phil Jones, the researcher at the heart of the e-mail affair, insists that his science is clean. And most scientists I have spoken to sic again say that if any potential anomalies in the CRU data were to be uncovered they probably wouldn't prove significant because that data set is almost identical to other ones.

But the public will want to see both issues - science and ethics - fully addressed.

2 - How will UEA ensure that its chairperson is acceptable to commentators and the public, as well as to the mainstream scientists convinced of the risks posed by climate change and angry that media attention is being diverted by an apparent sabotage campaign?

Will the university find a way of seeking the opinion of key sceptics like Lord Lawson before they name the chair? My guess is that if key players like Lord Lawson don't support the chair's independence, the inquiry will be compromised.

How will the inquiry command international respect? Will there be an international element - perhaps from the US?

3 - Can UEA allow the chair to determine (with the university's agreement) the remit of the inquiry and to nominate other members of the inquiry panel? If UEA tries to control the remit, sceptics won't accept it.

4 - Will the university ask for the inquiry to report in a specific time period?

5 - Will the inquiry have to consider all aspects at once, or report in stages? Under the two-stage scenario, stage one might examine the key scientific question. This is important because politicians preparing to ratify any Copenhagen deal will be asked by their publics to ensure that the assessment of the risks of climate change doesn't need to be re-visited because of the CRU affair.

Stage two of the inquiry might ask broader questions about the peer review process and about procedures for dealing with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This has been discussed in my earlier column. Stage two is very important, but in my view it's not as urgent as stage one.

6 - How will the inquiry be run? They are expensive and need staff. Who will pay and will the funders be trusted by the public? Some bloggers appear not to trust anyone with anything, but they do not form the full court of public opinion.

7 - How will the inquiry team communicate with the public? This is a key issue. Any chair who turns up in a UEA hall for his/her press conferences will be described by sceptics as a patsy. But if communications are not to be arranged through the university, then who will do it?

This is a scary time for the people running UEA. There are big risks for them in floating the inquiry into total independence. But in my view, the risks of not doing it are far greater for the world of science and climate policy.

The timetable here is important. For the US climate bill to pass in its current form, it arguably needs to get through the Senate by June.

Republican climate sceptics in the Senate will demand conclusions from any inquiry before they agree to sign off any bill.

So basically a transparent whitewash entirely run by "mainstream" ie alarmist scientists won't wash. It needs to do the absolute minimum to make one major sceptical figure say it is genuine. For this Lord Lawson is the obvious figure - while he has been a literally lone voice among UK politicians for years he is a member of the Lords, former Chancellor & having worked with the Civil Service he is, in the words of Sir Humphrey, "soundness" is the ultimate virtue & that somebody who is sound doesn't have to be told what to do - a sound chap knows. I am not accusing Lawson of being sound but I am saying he moves in such circles & will undoubtedly now be coming under immense pressure not to rock the boat.

So what sort of enquiry should they do. Firstly & most importantly it must be open, taking evidence in public. This is even more important than who chairs it since there is an old unofficial legal maxim that no judge, however corrupt, behaves openly corruptly before an audience.

It has been suggested that a high court judge would be more impartial. I disagree as the Hutton Enquiry proved - they are all sound chaps. Moreover this has been a dreadful blow to the credibility of British science so British scientists must be seen to be the ones fixing it. Obviously we would oppose any scientist who has been on the alarmist side. While I personally have no doubt that Benny Peiser or Stephen McIntyre would do the job properly & that it would be insulting to say otherwise, I can see they must be ruled out.

I suggest that what we want is a very prominent scientist in one of the "hard" sciences, who doesn't work for the government (probably an emeritus professor), hasn't taken a stand publicly or privately, on the subject & isn't going to be impressed by honours. I suggest a British Nobel Prizewinner. I admit I don't know individuals in more detail than that but anybody in that group knows how science works & is unlikely to be overawed.

I must admit would prefer it to be a government enquiry as that could take evidence under oath & I would like to see Jones giving evidence on whether anybody in government ever told him that funding was available for alarmists & not sceptics with lying being a criminal offence. An enquiry which does not, without very good reason, match these standards will clearly have been nobbled.

And talking of nobbling - on Thursday the BBC evening news after spending 20 seconds on mentioning that East Anglia was going to conduct an enquiry they spent 5 minutes on the evening news assuring us that climate change was causing Saharan Taureg to replace their camels with trucks.

They were adamant that this was purely because of global warming making the desert a difficult place for camels to live rather than calling it progress. Presumably nobody at the BBC knows that Steptoe & Son don't use horses now either.

On Friday they had their resident Climate expert Harrabin (degree in English) putting a short piece on how unquoted stuff in the emails had been damaging but implied it wasn't that important & then went on to much longer coverage of the Copenhagen shindig. He also mentioned that Saudi Arabia have specificaly said they now believe catastrophic warming a scam - but that is just Saudi Arabia & thus of no importance!!

I firmly believe that the broadcasting of a formal, public debate between both sides would inform the public far better than all the spinning. This is something the new Global Warming Policy Foundation could sponsor. With the BBC having spent many thousands of hours pushing warming & effectively none reporting the other side supportively getting a 1 hour balanced programme might allow the BBC to be able to claim, in arithmetical terms, to be merely 99.99% corrupt propagandists. So far neither they, ITN or C5 have felt any urge whatsoever to demonstrate any impartiality on anything, which I think is damaging to Britain's political culture.

An interesting interview with Space Elevator technology expert Brad Edwards on Next Big Future. I have highlighted:

"Question: Current nanotubes are not sufficiently strong to be used in a space elevator. How much progress do you anticipate in nanotube technology during the next decade?

Answer: Small quantities of some nanotubes have been made that are sufficiently strong to be used in a space elevator. We would obviously need to produce hundreds of tons of such nanotubes to build a space elevator. With sufficient funding, we could create a nanotube-based material appropriate for a space elevator within a couple of years.

Question: How much of an improvement is needed from nanotubes?

Answer: Nanotubes of lengths up to an inch can already be created. These materials can be bundled together to form arbitrarily long lengths of cable that would be appropriate for a space elevator. So the primary problems at this point are not technical but rather economic and political.

Question: Are any other materials, such as graphene, seriously being considered as ribbon material?

Answer: Graphene has some wonderful properties and will undoubtedly be used in a number of capacities, but nanotubes are the only material known that could be used in a space elevator. Graphene has edges that make it unsuitable as a building material. But nanotubes have a strength of 63 Gigapascals, which is greater than that of any other material, and nanotubes do not have any edges.

Question: To what extent are the space exploration prizes facilitating space elevator development?

Answer: These prizes are stoking interest in the concept, and have the potential to address some of the initial hurdles of the project. But what is really needed is a larger scale effort ...

Question: How difficult will it be for a space elevator to avoid satellites and space debris?

Answer: Any debris that is a centimeter or smaller will hit and damage the ribbon. Objects larger than a centimeter will be tracked & continuously monitored. The elevator, which will be located in the ocean, will need to be moved approximately once every 14 hours in order to avoid hitting larger debris. So these issues are by no means intractable.

Question: Current plans call for climbing vehicles to be propelled by lasers. How large, efficient, and powerful will these lasers need to be?

Answer: For a 20 ton climber, a 20 megawatt laser would be needed. Boeing has already demonstrated thin-disk solid state lasers that are 50% efficient, and Boeing is capable of bundling these lasers together to create a megawatt laser today. So by employing 20 of those megawatt lasers in concert we would have the requisite laser power.

Question: How long would these lasers need to operate?

Answer: They would need to operate fairly continuously for years. The aluminum-free lasers have operational lifetimes of years, so operating these lasers for years presents tractable problems.

Question: What about radiation issues?

Answer: The space elevator would employ both active and passive radiation shields. I did research on using a large toroid and that would eliminate most of the charged particles. A small amount of additional shield would absorb the remaining radiation. The weight penalty issues would be rather modest - only a few tons. Four tons of extra weight on a twenty ton satellite is not prohibitive.

Question: How many launches would be required to get a space elevator up and running?

Answer: The initial stage would require 4 launches of a heavy lift, Saturn V class rocket. After that it would take several years of sending up climbers. The initial rocket launches would put up two 10 centimeter ribbons. The climbers would attach additional ribbons, like a spider spinning its web. There are scenarios for 8 launches, but the general concept is similar.

Question: How long would it take and how much would it cost to develop and assemble the space station?

Answer: The entire process of building and deploying could be done within a decade. Initial estimates are that it would cost $10 billion to build. Even assuming cost overruns and delays, the project could be built in a dozen years for not more than $20 billion.

Question: Has NASA been supportive of the space elevator concept?

Answer: To some extent, yes. But NASA is driven by forces other than simply what is good for space exploration.

Question: Are any corporations or institutions funding space elevator technology?

Answer: Unfortunately, no organization is seriously funding this effort. Corporations are looking for shorter term returns and most other organizations are not willing to fund such a radical concept.

Question: Given proper funding, when is the earliest that you could see the space elevator becoming operational?

Answer: Given sufficient funding, I am confident that the space elevator could be up and running within 15 years. There are no insurmountable technical issues to the concept. The show stoppers at this point are funding and support. This is unfortunate given that the space elevator has the potential to reduce the cost of getting to orbit to perhaps $20 per pound, including human passengers. The space elevator, more than any other project or concept, has the capacity to quickly open up the field of space and create a massive space-based industry.
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This is an extremely positive assessment. Even the 12-15 year timeframe seems to be based on doing it relatively cheaply. When Kennedy made his Moon speech about getting to the Moon "in this decade" possibly Werner von Braun thought it possible but no other expert was that certain. Kennedy simply decided it would be done "not because they are easy but because they are difficult" & inspired the nation to throw everything at it. One may argue that Kennedy had personal feet of clay & that the goal was not the best possible but his willingness to make America make the effort for greatness makes him an outstanding leader.

$20 billion (£12 billion) over 15 years is small beer. As projects go this is clearly much more important to space development than the Moon landings, though what they proved is that American missiles were bigger & tougher than Russian.

By comparison the Apollo programme & Moon landings cost ($25.4 bn in 1969 dollars. That is listed as $145 bn in 2005 dollars but that is the inflation cost. As a proportion of GNP. As a relative share of GDP the Moon landings cost $373 bn in 2009 money.

So a Space Elevator costs about an 18th, as a proportion of GDP, than Kennedy persuaded the US people to pony up, in what may or may not have been more adventurous, certainly more optimistic, days. By any objective standards the gains from a Space Elevator are far greater than the Moon landings could have been because once you have built it you have more than just photos, feel good & technical knowhow. You have an extremely valuable property that allows very cheap entry to space, indeed if the cable is extended outward you have a system, using the Earth's centripetal force, to reach anywhere in the solar system without using power. Also the builder of the first Elevator can very cheaply supply crew & materials to build lots of others. Sounds like lots of money for new rope.

In fact if the USA isn't willing to do that there are a lot of possible contenders for new kid on the block. $373 is 0.039 of 1 years US GDP, which is what was sacrificed for the Moon landings. $20 bn for an Elevator 5.4% of this so any country with an economy 5.4% of the current US economy could afford this as easily as the that. That is an economy worth $774 bn a year. That is the richest 17 countries down to Turkey. It easily includes Brazil (10th) through which the equator runs. Indonesia (19th), through which it also runs, would have a slight stretch. Singapore (44th), a tiny but extremely innovative country, through which it also runs would have to pay a 4 times higher proportion of GNP (but then they wouldn't have to fight the Vietnam war at the same time).

This makes 2 assumptions - that Edwards' costs are about right & that there wouldn't be lots of other investors eager to put in a little bit. The first, I suspect, may be optimistic & certainly is if money is a lesser object than getting it built in under 12 years. The second is unbelievably pessimistic. I suspect Ecuador (71st & 1/14th the optimum size) could afford this by [providing not much more than the site & a few guarantees). We may see China & Japan competing to finance one in Singapore. I suspect that any country putting up 1/3rd of this as an X-Prize will see it won.

Note that he specifically says that endpoint of this should be at sea so that it can move about. That puts it within the capacity of virtually any country. The equator is over 400 miles from Ascension Island so outside technical national waters but certainly close enough to provide a main base. the US has several Pacific islands suitable including Baker island which is 13 miles from the equator.

For the attention of British politicians note that this £12 bn is only double NERC's budget alone for 12 years producing reports of which the more valuable are about how bees enjoy their environment & the more useless pushing the global warming fraud. Or we could have it 2/3rds privately financed & only 1/3rd by a prize. If we can afford NERC we can easily afford to build a Space Elevator. Only one of these will bring on a massive economic boom.

So will somebody get on with it! Who wants to be the national leader who says "We choose to build this within a decade"?

Labels: Science/technology, space, X-Prizes

A year ago I reviewed a lecture by Colin McInnes at the royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow about our possible, if we don't go Luddite, future.The Herald published this on Saturday which is based on the first part of it. Presumably the 2nd half, about space, solar power satellites, orbital settlements & terraforming Mars were a bit too far sighted for the Herald.
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Sustainability was defined by the 1987 Brundtland Commission as the ability to “meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

Few would argue with this. However, the response to the need for sustainability has evolved into a modern orthodoxy with three key messages; the release of carbon dioxide due to human activity has been a catastrophe; we need to prioritise energy efficiency over energy production; we need to curtail energy intensive long haul travel. I believe that the thinking behind each of these ideas while well meaning is misguided, ultimately damaging and quite often misanthropic.

The growing availability of low cost energy since the industrial revolution has been an overwhelmingly civilising and liberating influence. By largely mechanising food production, replacing carbohydrate fuelled farm labour with hydrocarbon fuelled machines, most of us have been freed from agriculture to think, innovate, create and improve. A wonderful 1920s advertisement for a new kerosene tractor has a call to “keep the boy in school”, freeing the farmer’s children from manual labour to pursue education in a virtuous circle of enlightenment.

Humans are by their nature ingenious and in the future will continue to find a plethora of new uses for energy which we cannot yet even imagine. More importantly, we need to meet the current energy needs of almost half of humanity who still cook using wood or animal waste with appalling consequences for the health of families.

If our generation chooses to stagnate or reduce its capacity to produce energy then we will certainly compromise the ability of both current and future generations to meet their own needs, whatever they may be.

Our ability to generate energy has improved greatly since the industrial revolution, due to dramatic increases in the energy density of fuels with a transition through wood, coal, oil, gas and nuclear fission. A largely unacknowledged result of this increasing energy density has been a reduction in carbon emission per unit of energy produced and a continual decoupling of energy production from the environment.

Low energy, carbon rich wood from forests was abandoned for easily transportable coal and now energy dense, zero carbon uranium. The overall growth in carbon emission which we now worry about has been the result of these continual improvements in energy density and innovation driven efficiencies leading to greater energy use. This is human progress.

The reason that there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than in the past is that economies are developing, particularly those of recently impoverished nations such as India and China. The century-long rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is an indicator that poor people are becoming prosperous, and correlates with a rise in a host of other metrics such as life expectancy, health care and literacy.

We will however turn the corner on carbon emissions when decarbonising energy production through improving energy density and growing prosperity finally outpaces energy demand.

This is the same long-term process which enabled air and water quality to be greatly improved in the developed world once clean technologies were devised and our economy could afford the costs of the necessary stringent environmental regulation to ensure their implementation.

Economic growth and technical innovation should not be about crass consumerism, but having the resources and tools to improve the human condition and indeed improve the environment. A retreat to a low-energy 1950s lifestyle will only lock in inefficient modes of production and lead to declining standards of living for our children and ultimately regressive environmental degradation.

If we’re serious about displacing carbon from energy production we would be well advised to accelerate the trend of improving energy density. Large-scale adoption of nuclear energy has allowed France to deliver a carbon emission per unit of electrical energy production less than 20% of the UK while providing some of the cheapest electricity prices in Europe.

More importantly, we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible with nuclear energy. The current generation of once-through reactors turn less than 1% of uranium into useful energy. What’s often classified as nuclear waste is in fact just partly spent fuel with vast quantities of untapped energy. Future generations of so-called fast reactors will burn almost all of their fuel, leaving extremely small volumes of short-lived waste products, while there is enough known thorium to provide essentially limitless energy into the far future. There is certainly no shortage of clean, high-grade energy, only a shortage of ambition in some quarters and a retreat from the idea of human progress through technical innovation.

Turning down the thermostat and putting on a sweater is a miserable and ineffectual response to the energy challenges of the future. While energy conservation is important, we should remember that the efficient use of energy has long been the result of technical innovation and ultimately leads to greater energy use. The Watt steam engine was significantly more efficient than the Newcomen engine, but this increased efficiency and improved utility led to a rise in demand for coal.

Rather than pursuing real growth in clean energy production, the orthodox interpretation of sustainability is leading to a socially regressive policy of enforced abstinence. A principal targets has been the continued popularity of air travel. Since the beginning of large-scale civil aviation in the 1950s, technical innovation has led to a reduction in fuel burn per passenger mile by an impressive 75%.

The effect of these continual efficiency improvements has been to reduce the cost of air travel and so increase and democratise its utilisation. Travel is an invaluable glue that binds together economies, cultures and nation states in a common future.

The way forward is not the stay-at-home policy of socially regressive taxation to suppress demand for travel, but continued technical innovation such as carbon-neutral synthetic fuels for long haul air travel and cheap electricity for ultra-fast short haul rail.

Sustainability has rightly become engrained in our thinking, but its orthodox interpretation risks a stagnating future of contracting material and intellectual horizons.

The truly sustainable course is to meet the needs of future generations by gifting them the intellectual tools of technical innovation to deliver an economically and culturally rich global society of shared prosperity in which human needs are decoupled from nature.

Human progress has of course never been easy, uniform or certain. However, we should be very wary of those advocating a transition to a low-energy, low-ambition society. This is a dangerous idea which will inhibit the undreamt of ambitions of future generations, ultimately harm the natural environment and risk consigning the developing world to the prospect of never-ending poverty.
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Coincidentally yesterday the royal Phil had another lecture by Professor Simon Garrod of Glasgow University on how we recognise social clues in faces, body language etc.

This is their website - http://www.socialinteraction.gla.ac.uk/

Astonishingly it turns out that 70% of US elections were won by the candidate who, in decisions made in 1/5th of a second after seeing, were judged to look more competent! The same applies to CDEOs of companies & that the most profitable companies had the most competent looking CEOs. Since the correlation between actual trustworthyness & competence & our perception of it is far from perfect that last point gave me some problems. This decisionmaking is done in measurable points of the brain corresponding to parts used for hunting by animals.

One thing I found interesting is that professor Garrod said that most of the research in this area has been in the last 10 years because it depends heavily on computer measurement of the brain & very complex statistical analysis. It simply could not have been done without such advanced technology. This strikes me as another example of how technology is progressing ever faster & also that the ability to do such analyses may make it easier for the "soft" sciences (sociology, economics) to develop the rigour expected in physics.

In the Q & A section at the end I suggested that the reason CEOs of the most successful companies look most competent may be not effect & cause but a common cause - that companies with a culture of success are more successful & more likely to choose a successful looking CEO. This in turn implies that an awful lot of companies are run on the basis that so long as the founding family is still there & business is ticking over that is fine. Professor Garrod confirmed that that was his assessment too.

Labels: Big Engineering, Science/technology, Social

I mentioned earlier that the Australian opposition party had split with many of the most prominent shadow cabinet members resigning over the leader's insistence on supporting global warming. Well now they have a new leader who is sensible on the subject.

This may be a first: a major political party has dumped a global warming believer as leader and replaced him with sceptic who last month called AGW “crap”. Tony Abbott has tempered his public pronouncements since, but has today become the new Liberal leader, toppling warmist Malcolm Turnbull, specifically because he was the only one of the three contenders today to promise to delay the Government’s emissions trading scheme.

And immediately the government's cap & trade bill has been defeated

KEVIN Rudd has lost his bid to deliver an emissions trading scheme in Australia before talks in Copenhagen but won an early election trigger after the Senate formally rejected the laws again today.

Just two Liberal senators broke ranks with a clear mandate among Coalition MPs to delay an ETS and voted with Labor on an emissions trading scheme

Fair dinkum.
Looks like that "early election trigger" will give the people a chance to express their opinion. Iain Dale has an article explaining that the British Conservatives haven't the balls to do this - doesn't phrase it like that but that Cameron has total control of the party. However strong your hold appears you can't stop the tide.

Here is an honest acknowledgement from a previously alarmist journalist of the clear extent of fraud.

Meanwhile our media continue to censor. Last night the BBC's important news about warming was that Antarctica is more doomed than previously thought (it isn't) & John Snow, on a warming junket to Rio promised thet "The Science" says we have catastrophic warming - not "a few people with no scientific principles, paid by government" as he would have said if honest, or "some scientists" if half honest, or "scientists say" if only 75% corrupt, or "some scientific results" if only 87.5% corrupt, or "science says" if only 90% a liar but "The Science says".

And in the personally pleasing stuff I found yesterday that somebody in Australia Googling "Professor Phil Jones" had got me as 8th hit in the entire world. Today it is down to 18th which I still find incredibly unlikely.

History of the CRU
There is also an outstanding article in The Register on warming & I am linking to page 2 of it which gives the history of alarmism & its connection to the CRU.

What I found that I hadn't known is that when the Climate research Unit was founded by Hubert Lamb "the father of climate science" he was not taken in by this. Compare & contrast his assessment of global temperature with the alarmist lies.
Lamb's original graph
Mann's fraud

As you can see not only was Lamb right about the Medieval warming period but he had even got the blip showing 1934 as the warmest of last century which Stephen McIntyre independently rediscovered hidden within America's GISS figures.

This means the fabrication overlays the correct assessment we knew of years ago. So what growth factors caused the fraud to overwhelm the known truth?

CRU was founded in 1972 by the 'Father of Climatology', former Met Office meteorologist Hubert Lamb. Until around 1980, solar modulation was believed to be the driving factor in climatic variation. A not unreasonable idea, you might think, since our energy (unless you live by a volcano vent) is derived from the sun. Without a better understanding of the sun, climatology may be reasonably be called "speculative meteorology".

But CRU's increasing influence, according to its own history, stemmed from politicians taking an interest. "The UK Government became a strong supporter of climate research in the mid-1980s, following a meeting between Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher and a small number of climate researchers, which included Tom Wigley, the CRU director at the time. This and other meetings eventually led to the setting up of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, within the Met Office," the CRU notes.

Lamb (who died in 1997), however remained sceptical of the greenhouse gas hypothesis to the end.

In addition to inheriting all the problems of climatology, the greenhouse gas hypothesis has several unique issues of its own, and addressing them is a challenge for the most scrupulous researcher. How CRU addressed them was to define climatology for two decades - and ultimately defined the public debate and policy, too...

The first IPCC report in 1990 used the established temperature record created by Lamb. It's very different to the one we're familiar with today ...we find Jones unambiguous in an email: "We will be rewriting people's perceived wisdom about the course of temperature change over the past millennium," he wrote...

'Climategate' raises far more questions than it answers, and one of the most intriguing of these is how a small group (backing a new theory, in an infant field) came to have such a huge effect on global policy making. Is it fair to hang CRU Director Jones and his colleagues out to dry - as some climate campaigners such as George Monbiot have suggested? If the buck doesn't stop with the CRU climatologists - then who or what is really to blame?

Poring over the archive, it's easy to find a nose here, and a large leathery foot over there - and to conclude that the owner of the room may have a very strange taste in furnishings. The elephant in the room can go unnoticed...

the very nature of the problem itself has led the "science" onto shaky ground - onto modelling (which has no predictive value) and anecdotal evidence (which merely demonstrates correlation, but not causation). That's why the 'Hockey Stick' was a very big deal: it substituted for hard evidence; if fossil fuel emissions affected the climate at all significantly, this remained a future threat, and certainly not an urgent one.

The demand from institutions, (principally the UN, through its IPCC), national policy makers and the media has taken climate scientists into areas where they struggle to do good science. Add professional activists to the mix - who bring with them the Precautionary Principle - and the element of urgency is introduced.

So that is what happened. "Policy makers" (aka politicians) decided, with the fall of the USSR, as detailed in Michael Crichton's State of Fear, to quite deliberately fund, push & demand a scare story which was completely opposite to that which the emerging climate science had already proven. With money & a very small number of buyable "scientists" such as Jones & Mann replacing a real giant & perverting his life's work & the obedient media, at least within the English speaking & NATO areas, to promote this false story they had deliberately manufactured this fraud.

This goes somewhat beyond climate science. On another blog, where the reasons why climate science, social science & economics don't achieve the level of scientific accuracy that physics takes for granted. The conventional explanation is that these sciences are newer & have unique problems. One commenter explained:

This science has a lot of similarities with social sciences (like economics):

(1) The system you're trying to understand is complex.

(2) Controlled experiments are difficult or impossible.

(3) The knowledge you can be somewhat confident about is qualitative, not quantitative.

(4) Given the inability to reach verifiable, quantitative conclusions, there will be a tendency for scientists to reach conclusions on a non-scientific basis (such as a desire to conform to the consensus).

I disagreed saying

A 5th similarity to social sciences & economics is that the main customer, usually government, is more interested in funding findings that support what they have already decided to do than which will, in due course, turn out to be accurate. I suspect this is the main thing holding all these proto-sciences back...

Climate science differs from proto-sciences like social science& economics in that it used to be a real, albeit boring, science, having liked day by day weather forecasting, because of satellites, it was making slow but steady progress in understanding underlying trends. Then it became politically useful & vast amounts of money were poured into it but only to climate modellers who produced the required scare stories. This enhances my earlier point that the thing holding back proto-sciences is not lack of information or their complexity (compare with quantum physics) but that they are funded by politicians who want their prejudices confirmed rather than accurate science.

...when Hubert Lamb established the CRU it was doing good, mathematically rigorous, science. Then the politicians & their political spinners moved in & it "just growed". Lamb's graph of climate differs in all respects from the present one, particularly in being far less jazzy looking & in being correct - not only showing the Medieval warming but also the 1934 peak McIntyre rediscovered by analysing GISS figures.

Political support has caused this Lysenko style perversion ...

I regard the accuracy of Lamb's initial graph as proof that climate science was & thus could be a real rigorous science before the politicians took control of it by their control of funding. The effects of state funding of science seem to be negative. The lesson for anybody who wants real sciences of sociology or economics is clear. I believe we could have accurate replicable sciences of economics & sociology if the funders did not simply want their interests catered too.

This article has a similar opinion of the "Voodoo sciences".

UPDATE An interesting Wall Street Journal article on the government funding of alarmism & pressure to prevent any funding at all of anything sceptical. I think that supports the point made here entirely. H/T to Al Fin who links other articles too.

Labels: Fear, global warming, Government parasitism, International politics, Science/technology

The 3rd of the 4 letters on the CRU emails I mentioned yesterday as not having been published is in today's Scotsman along with another also critical of the CRU (it calls for prison). The paper itself has a story on warming - that "the" explanation for Antarctica not warming is the hole in the ozone layer (!) & a silly editorial which manages to be on both sides at once & wrong on both. Note that of 6 comments on the Scotsman online 5 1/2 are from sceptics including a John Cameron who says "It is the biggest scandal in British science during my life as a professional scientist".

"LAST week I watched a guest on Question Time talking about e-mails from the Hadley Climate Research Unit, the world centre for collating information on global warming, which show scientists there had been "juggling with the figures".

If this leaked material is faked or if the interpretation is entirely wrong, we should know. If it is right, the entire catastrophic global warming story, which has induced government to increase our taxes, regulate us and spend billions on subsidising windmills and preventing economic growth, has been a fraud. The e-mails show one scientist saying he received £13.7 million for his research. We need an immediate public enquiry."

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I should also mention that I missed a letter of mine published by the Herald last Monday. It was another attempt to raise interest on the option, now that the SNP have cancelled the Glasgow Airport Rail link, of a monorail to Paisley Station. Since this would be a small fraction of the cost if other parties were to push for it I doubt if the SNP would have a serious objection. Labour are making capital of the SNP's cancellation proving that the SNP are anti-Glasgow & pro-Edinburgh so people who want the pork barrel rolled out for Glasgow should support Labour. This glosses over the fact that Labour & the other parties pushed through the expensive but pointless Edinburgh tram system. One might almost think that none of these parties had the people's interests in mind & merely wanted to maximise the profits of preferred bidders, particularly if they happen to be donors.

When the previous Labour/LibDem administration decided we should pay for Garl, it was costed at £130m, whereas anything up to £400m is now being ?quoted. It also had an offer to build a monorail connecting to Paisley Gilmour Street station for only £20m – which, since there are trains to and from Glasgow Central every few minutes, would have enabled people to reach their destination faster. It would also have allowed cross-connection to Prestwick, effectively turning the two airports into a regional hub.

Though the monorail offer is still available, the SNP has decided to cancel everything. The Conservatives and Greens, though well aware of the monorail option, refuse to support anything in any way innovative.

This is typical of the way Scotland is run. Public projects are on average 13 times more expensive than in other ?countries. There can be no dispute that Garl, a Forth tunnel, affordable modular housing and other projects could be ?easily afforded under competent government.

This is a short version of a previously unpublished letter (19th Sept)

UPDATE - The Scotsman published the third of these letters (about Question Time) today (Tues) along with another on the same lines.

UPDATER - I was told last night, at an ASTRA meet, that the Metro published a warming letter, I assume the 4th of those listed, on Monday. 2 out of 100 is still not a wonderful publication rate but I should retract somewhat on my complaint of non-publication.

UPDATIST - I also find I had a letter in the Daily Record on Mon the 30th, thanks Rae.

Labels: global warming, letters, Scottish politics