Graham Readfearn Posts

DR Russell McKenzie, an associate professor at Southeastern Louisiana University Department of Management and Business Administration, is rather pleased with the guy he has secured to speak to students and the public about the economic cost of cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

"We are honored to have someone of his stature speaking," he told an online university community newspaper. In another story, Dr McKenzie added: "It’s not every day you have the opportunity to have a world renowned speaker to come to Southeastern".

So who is this global powerhouse on climate change and economics? Sir Nicholas Stern, perhaps, author of the UK government's "Stern Review"? Could it be James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and famed climate scientist?

No. The "world renowned speaker" appearing at Southeastern Louisiana University on 2 October is none other than Lord Christopher Monckton, the British hereditary peer who believes climate scientists are part of a plot to introduce a socialist world government.

Apparently, the university is "honored" to host a man who told told climate scientists through a partisan crowd that "we are coming after you. We are going to prosecute you, and we are going to lock you up".

Honored to have someone who compared former Australian government climate policy advisor Ross Garnaut to a Nazi? Honored to have someone who tells young climate change campaigners that they are the "Hitler youth"? Honored to be in the presence of a person shown to have misrepresented climate science (repeatedly) and yet is promoted by coal mining magnate and world's richest woman Gina Rinehart?

And yes, honored to host a man who has written that the chances of Barack Obama having been born in the US are  "no better than 1 in 62,500,000,000,000,000,000".

The lecture in question has been well promoted through official university channels and through a university-based website for student journalists which has written not one, but two stories promoting the event. Between 75 and 120 people are expected to attend.

News went out earlier this week to staff and students via the university's weekly newsletter and on a 21 September daily bulletin, which included a link to a flyer promoting the event. The fawning newsletter article provided a potted biography of Lord Monckton

Monckton is a businessman, newspaper editor, the inventor of "Eternity" puzzles, of the Sudoku X puzzles and of a promising new treatment for infectious disease... Credited with discovering evidence that a group of scientists, officials and politicians had manipulated data to exaggerate the threat of global warming, Monckton has authored more than 100 papers on the climate issue for layman. He is currently writing a book entitled "Climate of Freedom," which is expected to be a worldwide bestseller among his millions of followers on YouTube and Facebook.

 

Monckton, who has no science qualifications, may very well have written more than 100 papers on the climate issue but not a single one of them has been through conventional scientific peer review process, a fact you would think pertinent to a public university.

So how did Lord Monckton get the gig? In a statement to DeSmogBlog, made through the Department of Management and Business Administration interim head Dr Toni Phillips, the university said it had been contacted by another group "to see if we wanted him to speak here while he was in the area. Some faculty expressed an interest, so he was scheduled to speak."

That group was the "Northshore Tea Party".

"He is speaking as an individual who has knowledge of, and presents talks on, CO2 mitigation," the statement said, adding the university was not paying any expenses to Lord Monckton. 

I also asked if Lord Monckton would be covering his latest pet conspiracy in his lecture - you know, the one about President Obama lying about his birthplace and faking a birth certificate. 

"His topic is Is CO2 Mitigation Cost Effective?" the university replied.

Not everyone at the university has swallowed the Monckton propoganda. The university's Professor of Philosophy is Barbara Forrest, a director of the National Center for Science Education, a not-for profit organisation campaigning to keep creationism and climate change denial" out of classrooms. She told DeSmogBlog that Monckton had no scientific legitimacy to speak on the issue and should not be considered an authority "on anything".

Lord Monckton is to the issue of climate change what the creationists at the Discovery Institute are to the issue of evolution. Neither is a credible source on the issues, concerning which, they seek to influence public policy. Lord Monckton, like the Discovery Institute, is trying to influence public opinion and public policy by distorting the science.

Monckton has no earned expertise in the relevant climate science but commands attention because of his aristocratic status and affiliations which, to uninformed laypersons, give him an air of legitimacy. Few people actually know the nature of his Science and Public Policy Institute, which purports to provide "research and educational materials dedicated to sound public policy based on sound science." One look at this page, "Proved: There is No Climate Crisis," on which Monckton says, "Perhaps, therefore, there is no ‘climate crisis’ at all. … The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing," dispels any idea that he speaks with scientific legitimacy. What the science actually shows about climate change is a separate issue from what should be done as a matter of policy.

Lord Monckton is clearly trying to influence public policy. However, he is attempting to do so by making claims that undermine the science. And the ridiculous claims he has made with respect to other things — such as wanting to quarantine AIDS patients for life, and falsely claiming to be a member of the House of Lords — means that no one should consider him an authoritative voice on anything.

The Discovery Institute, in case you hadn't already guessed, is an anti-evolution "think tank" which aims to promote the teaching of "intelligent design" in schools. Professor Forest has been studying and battling the intelligent design and creationist movement for at least the best part of a decade.

Coincidentally, at the conference when Lord Monckton was showing pictures of Nazi swastikas next to quotes from climate policy advisors, he shared the speaking duties with one of the Discovery Institute's senior fellows, Wesley J. Smith.

You have to wonder who the university will have the "honor" of hosting next? Perhaps Mr Smith will oblige? Or maybe these guys have someone available?  

SOME processes of cause and effect are relatively easy to get your head around.

For example, if I smash the end of my thumb with a hammer then the effect will be extreme sharp pain, followed by a short burst of f****** swearing and then probably one of those under-the-nail bruises that stick around for months.

An equally simple process to understand is that burning fossil fuels like oil, coal and gas releases extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which causes temperatures to rise. The extra CO2 sticks around for a century or so, perhaps longer.

Now this is of course a hugely oversimplified version of the greenhouse effect. There's lots of "noise" in the climate system, but the fundamentals are there. This brings us to the Arctic. No honestly, it really does.

Earlier this week, the US Government's National Snow and Ice Data Center declared that more sea ice melted away this year than at any other time since records began in 1979.

Sea ice extent fell to 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles), now the lowest summer minimum extent in the satellite record.... This year’s minimum follows a record-breaking summer of low sea ice extents in the Arctic. Sea ice extent fell to 4.10 million square kilometers (1.58 million square miles) on August 26, breaking the lowest extent on record set on September 18, 2007 of 4.17 million square kilometers (1.61 million square miles). On September 4, it fell below 4.00 million square kilometers (1.54 million square miles), another first in the 33-year satellite record.

This new minimum, NSIDC explained earlier this week, is 3.29 million square kilometres below the 1979-2000 average. Now that's a difficult number to visualise.

Instead imagine losing the states of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria and then, while you're at it, also wipe New Zealand off your map. At that point, you're almost up to 3.29m sq km.

For US fans of melting ice, we're talking about an area the combined size of Texas, Alaska, Oregon, California and Minnesota.

For an alternative scale, remove India (3.28 m sq km) from the map. 

This loss of an ice cap matters because the Arctic's white cover reflects solar radiation back out into the atmosphere, keeping the planet cooler. When the ice disappears, it exposes the darker ocean beneath, kicking of a series of other effects including warmer ocean temperatures, further thinning and melting of ice and disruption of weather patterns in northern latitudes.

This year's record low, however, is part of a long term trend in the decline of sea ice. The six lowest sea ice minimums on the satellite record have all occurred in the last six years.

A study earlier this year in the journal Environmental Research Letters, reported in The Guardian, found that human activity (mostly burning fossil fuels) was responsible for at least 70 per cent of the melting.

Rather than signalling alarm, oil companies see an opportunity in the trend of melting ice. Vast stores of undersea oil await. Climate change campaigner Bill McKibben put the issue succinctly when he said earlier this week

There's no place on Earth where we see the essential irony of our moment playing out more perfectly than in the Arctic. Our response has not been alarm, or panic, or a sense of emergency. It has been: ‘Let's go up there and drill for oil'. There is no more perfect indictment of our failure to get to grips with the greatest problem we've ever faced.

But such is the nature of the "cause and effect" of the fossil fuel industry, that it doesn't essentially matter to the climate (or to the Arctic) just where the coal, oil and gas gets extracted and burned.

Whether it is oil "fresh from the Arctic" or gas "fresh from Australia", the effect is the same.

In Queensland earlier this week Greenpeace released a report suggesting that nine mega coal mines planned for the state's Galilee Basin could potentially see the release of more than 700 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere from burning the coal. If Galilee was a country, the report claimed, it would be the seventh worst greenhouse polluter on the planet.

Mining industry group the Queensland Resources Council dismissed the report as having "zero credibility" claiming the NGO had overestimated the growth in the state's coal industry.

What isn't in question, is that Australia is the world's largest exporter of coal and has designs on being the world's largest exporter of Liquified Natural Gas. The country's biggest contribution to climate change, including the melting Arctic sea ice, comes from the fossil fuels the country exports.

But back to our hammer-smashed thumbnail. Occasionally, if you catch them hard enough, the nail can fall off entirely, which at worst is a little inconvenient.

Losing an ice cap thanks to hammer blows from fossil fuels will in all likelihood be far more painful, with consequences stretching out to future generation and future economies.

Pics: An advert from a 1962 edition of Life magazine for Humble Oil, which later became part of ExxonMobil, declares "Each Day Humble Supplies Enough Energy To Melt 7 Million Tons of Glacier!". Irony to be turned right up to 11. Hat tip to Grist. Arctic image courtesy NSIDC.

JAMES Delingpole is a UK columnist waging a long personal jihad against wind farms, environmentalists and climate science.

A resident blogger and columnist at The Daily Telegraph, Delingpole is probably best known for being among the first mainstream columnists to declare, wrongly as it turned out, that emails illegally hacked from an influential climate research unit showed scientists were trying to con the public.

So he is the perfect person to be appealing for people to donate their cash to the Melbourne-based Institute of Public Affairs, a free market think tank which has been working for about 20 years on a campaign to mislead the public about climate science and the impact of carbon pricing.

In the appeal, Delingpole lauds the IPA's campaign against climate science and action on climate change. Readers of the appeal might be forgiven for thinking the IPA is struggling for cash. Says Delingpole: "Their budget is always stretched. If you don’t give them money they’ll go broke."

Yet the IPA's most recent financial returns to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission suggest that rather than scrambling around for spare change, the think-tank is in fact in rude financial health.

For the year ending June 2011, the ASIC documents show the IPA declared a before-tax profit of $217,000 with an income of $2.42 million. In 2010, the IPA's income was $1.72 million, with before-tax profit of $203,000.

The IPA's executive director John Roskam refuses to declare where the IPA's money comes from. In a story I wrote for the Brisbane Times about think-tank funding, Roskam told me that "the reason we don't reveal our donors is because unfortunately our donors - and people who were believed to be our donors - have been intimidated because of their supposed support for us".

A similar excuse is given by the UK's Global Warming Policy Foundation, a climate skeptic group founded by its chairman Lord Lawson, a former chancellor in the Thatcher government.

Professor Bob Carter, the IPA's science policy advisor, is also an advisor to the GWPF (as well as at least seven other climate sceptic groups), alongside fellow Australian "sceptic" Professor Ian Plimer, who has also made personal appeals for people to hand over cash to the IPA.

As I revealed in a story for The Guardian in March, the only known funder of the GWPF is Michael Hintze, a UK-based Australian-born hedge fund manager, donor to the UK Tory Party, and a man with a personal fortune of $1.4billion, according to Forbes.

The IPA also has close ties to the billionaire set in the form of Gina Rinehart, the coal and iron ore mining magnate and world's richest woman. In an address to "IPA members and friends", Rinehart recently declared her concern that Australia was becoming too expensive, given that "Africans want to work, and its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day". The comments prompted a Ugandan television personality to declare Rinehart was "removed from reality". 

The IPA is currently working in partnership with Rinehart's lobby group Australians for Northern Development & Economic Vision, which wants a separate low-tax economic zone for the north of Australia to make it cheaper to run major mining projects. Roskam writes a regular "Ideas for a New North" bulletin on the ANDEV website.

James Delingpole is also a Rinehart fan. When on Twitter recently someone mischievously asked Delingpole if he was being paid by Gina Rinehart, Delingpole responded: "I totally LOVE Gina. She is a heroine of our age. Bludging scuzzballs like you are not worthy of her!"

The IPA paid for Delingpole to tour Australia in April and May to promote his book "Killing The Earth To Save It", published by Connor Court, which has John Roskam on its editorial board.

Now back in wind swept England, Delingpole has announced he will run as an independent anti-wind farm candidate in a November by-election for the seat of Corby, which the New Statesman pointed out doesn't actually have any wind turbines.

The Daily Mail, one of the UK's best selling conservative newspapers, saw fit to run a hopelessly one-sided story written by Delingpole on the suggested evils of wind farms a few days after he had announced his decision to run.

In the story, Delingpole described a visit to Waterloo, near Adelaide, which he said resembled a scene from a "horror movie" with the turbines cast in the role as evil baddie. Delingpole is convinced that turbines make people ill, despite there being no credible evidence. Delingpole didn't declare in the story that he had been in Australia on the dime of the IPA or that he was currently running as an anti-wind farm candidate in a by-election.

Australian Federal MP Craig Kelly, the Liberal member for the New South Wales seat of Hughes, was nevertheless impressed by Delingpole's article, given that he cut and pasted chunks of it onto his Facebook page under the heading "MORE ON THE MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR WIND FARM SCANDAL".

Kelly also declared on his Facebook page that wind energy was "useless" and "Liked" a comment declaring coal to be the "safest and cheapest" form of energy, and how increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere "accelerates crop growth and improves crop yields, as does warming".

Perhaps some advice to Mr Kelly. Best not to repeat that "CO2 is plant food" myth to drought-stricken farmers in the US. Don't mention either, the Harvard-led study showing how that "cheap" coal was costing the US economy half a trillion dollars a year.

Also not advisable, it seems, is to politely decline Delingpole's request for cash for the IPA, unless you don't mind a return-serve of foul abuse. The University of Sydney's Professor Christopher Wright said "no thanks" to Delingpole. Here's how the IPA fundraiser responded.

IF the world's conspiratorial blogosphere was broken up into food items on a wedding buffet table, then an eclectic array of plate-fillers would surely be on offer.

There would be canapés topped with faked moon landings and hors d'oeuvres of Government-backed plots to assassinate civil rights leaders.

Sandwich fillings would come from US military staff at Roswell in New Mexico (cheese and alien, anyone?). The alcoholic punch would be of the same vintage as that which the British Royal family gave Princess Diana's chauffeur, as part of their plot to kill her. All of the catering would be provided by the New World Order.

Then there's the salad of human-caused climate change being a hoax, with the world's climate scientists, national academies and the declining Arctic sea-ice all in on the conspiracy.

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Western Australia (UWA), is about to publish research which shows that a strong indicator of the rejection of climate science is a willingness to accept conspiracy theories.

His paper, to be published in the journal Psychological Science, is titled "NASA faked the moon landing - Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science".

The study details the results of a controlled online questionnaire posted on blogs between August and October 2010.

Among the conspiracy theories tested, were the faking of Apollo moon landings, US government agencies plotting to assassinate Martin Luther King, Princess Diana's death being organised by members of the British Royal family and the US military covering up the recovery of an alien spacecraft that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico.

In the paper, Lewandowsky concludes that "endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories... predicts rejection of climate science". The research also claims a correlation between people who endorse free-market economics and the "rejection of climate science".

He told DeSmogBlog:

There's a fair bit of previous literature to suggest that conspiratorial thinking is part of science denial. Conspiratorial thinking is where people would seek to explain events by appealing to invisible, powerful collusions amongst individuals, rather than taking events at face value. The absence of evidence for the conspiracy is sometimes taken as evidence of its existence and any contradictory evidence is itself embedded into the conspiracy.

In his paper, Lewandowsky adds: "Endorsement of the free market also predicted the rejection of other established scientic findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer."

Given the well documented links between free market think-tanks and climate science misinformation, this finding isn't surprising.

But back to that "conspiracist ideation" trait which Lewandowsky and other researchers, such as Pascal Diethelm and Martin McKee, have identified among people who reject science.

Because rather fittingly, no sooner had Lewandowsky's paper begun to make headlines than the world's loose, nimble and definitely-not-conspiring network of climate skeptic blogs began to construct their own conspiracies about Lewandowsky's research.

The survey was conducted online and Lewandowsky's research team approached climate blogs requesting they post a link to the survey. Some eight "pro-science" blogs agreed to post the link, which gained 1147 responses.

Lewandowsky's researchers also emailed five popular skeptic blogs, but none of those approached posted the link to the questionnaire.

But had Lewandowsky actually fabricated the claim he had emailed five sceptic blogs, asked Anthony Watts, Jo Nova and others, smelling a consipracy. 

Steve McIntyre, a long-time mining industry consultant and active climate sceptic, even encouraged blog readers to email the ethics department at Lewandowsky's university.

"If Lewandowky’s claim about five skeptic blogs was fabricated, it appears to me that it would be misconduct under university policies," wrote McIntyre.

Once McIntyre had come down from the conclusion he had just jumped to, he later admitted that actually, he had been emailed by one of Lewandowsky's researchers after all but offered a "dog ate my homework" excuse.

Meanwhile, Lewandowsky says he has been "inundated" with requests to release the names of the four remaining bloggers his team contacted.

But since the approaches to bloggers were conducted on the presumption of privacy, the academic has asked his university's ethics committee and the Australian Psychological Society if he is free to release their identities.

Not content to wait, Australian skeptic blogger Simon Turnill has sent a Freedom of Information request to UWA asking for Lewandowsky's emails. Lewandowsky told DeSmogBlog:

So now there's a conspiracy theory going around that I didn't contact them. It's a perfect, perfect illustration of conspiratorial thinking. It's illustrative of exactly the process I was analysing. People jump to conclusions on the basis of no evidence. I would love to be able to release those emails if given permission, because it means four more people will have egg on their faces. I'm anxiously waiting the permission to release this crucial information because it helps to identify people who engage in conspiratorial thinking rather than just searching their inboxes.

Lewandowsky revealed that two of the five skeptic blogs approached even replied to the email they were sent.

One stated "Thanks. I will take a look” and another asked "Can you tell me a bit more about the study and the research design?"

Perhaps an inbox search for these phrases might help some bloggers to move on from their latest conspiracy theory.

Or maybe, just maybe, the real story is that the New World Order hacked their email accounts or a CIA operative secretly dropped a memory-lapse drug into their fake moon juice?