Now it's serious

That Jon Stewart is not always very careful with his analysis was made very clear earlier this year when he opined that Truman was a war criminal for using atomic bombs. In particular, he suggested that it would have more appropriate to set off an A-bomb off shore as a warning first; a view that might make sense if you had certainty that the weapons would always work, had more than two at your disposal, and did not have to make such a massive effort to get even those ones made.

The right wing blogs in the US (correctly) lamblasted Stewart for such careless, off the cuff, thinking.

Now Stewart is being careless and trivialising again, but this time the Right is applauding it, because it's about "Climategate".

What's worse, this wasn't Stewart being put on the spot during an interview, it was a prepared piece. It also tried to have it both ways, claiming at the end that it doesn't prove global warming is a fraud, and trying to ridicule Senator Inhofe for his rabid climate change denial.

It would seem that Stewart, like Monbiot, is not smart enough as to realise that if you offer anything that apparently supports AGW skepticism, AGW skeptics will take it as confirmation that they have "won".

Worse, Stewart's "analysis" of the story was completely trivialising and misleading in exactly the same way AGW skeptics have dealt with it. Going on about the phrase "hide the decline" without knowing the context is completely misleading. (Even Trenberth's "the fact is we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty" comment is not the same worry that it first appears.) Stewart ended by saying that scientists shouldn't "cut corners" because it undermines the science. As far as I can tell, "climategate" suggests nothing about shortcuts at all. It does raise issues about the provision of data for scrutiny, but even then the context of the (often) harassing and time consuming use to which FOI can be put needs to be considered.

This is a worry because Stewart is (apparently) an influential source of news for his mostly young, hip audience. If even he is going to provide ill-informed or context-free discussion of the issue, he is misleading his audience in exactly the same way some of them probably first thought "hey, that's right. Why didn't we just set off an A bomb as a warning first?"

Someone (a scientist directly in the field, not just a political advocate like Gore) ought to be on the phone to The Daily Show and asking for a "right of reply" to put the emails in context. Stewart might claim "but I said I still believed in AGW", but there is no doubt in my mind that he has done harm to the promotion of good science and policy.

State of play

BBC News - Climate science, from Bali to Copenhagen

This seems like a fairly well balanced account of the current issue in climate science.

Sports Illustrated covers more than I expected

Of course I don't read Sports Illustrated, but First Things posted about what is probably the oddest paragraph ever written in that magazine:

Whether you consider him genuine or fake, Tebow, at the end of the day, is a Heisman Trophy-, SEC- and BCS-title winning quarterback who goes to class, goes to church and circumcises people less fortunate than him. More people should be so intolerable.

Made me laugh, anyway.

Anything good from Copenhagen?

Barry Brook is feeling very, very pessimistic about anything at all useful coming out of Copenhagen:

In December, we’ll see politicians from all manner of countries strutting around on the world stage saying how seriously they take the climate change issue, why delay on action is unacceptable, and why the world must move towards a low carbon economy — “blah di blah blah blah“. They’ll most certainly earnestly commit to a definite emissions reduction target for some far distant date (probably 2050), and will probably also agree to some vague notion of an in-principle x% cut by 2020 (choose whatever value you want for x — it’s meaningless). Everyone will then head home, and the world will go on cranking up the carbon, much as before.

Then, as we continue to dither and meander our way through the next 10 or so years, the squeeze will start to be felt, with the grip of increasingly severe climate impacts (most notably extreme events and some unanticipated abrupt changes), and energy insecurity, inexorably tightening. Oil and natural gas prices will rise substantially, as unavoidable production shortages begin to seriously constrain business-as-usual. Those who can pay for the oil and its derivatives, or those who have the large remaining reserves, will be set inequitably apart from the rest. Continued rising temperatures, increasingly severe short-term events, persistent rainfall shifts (each with a decent chance of sudden step changes), and so on, will make the reality of global warming starkly apparently to all but the most delusional pea brains. At some point — well within the next two decades I suspect — humanity will, under considerable duress and societal upheaval, move at last into emergency mode.

The only problem with that scenario is that it does indeed appear possible that global warming might not take off again in a big way for 5 to 10 years, thereby failing to supply the crisis that Brooks thinks is necessary, and instead give the re-invigorated skeptics air to continue their campaigns.

In an ideal world, a hold in temperature increases for long enough could actually give some breathing room for the development and deployment of new technology. But, in the very real battle of science, human nature, and politics that is underway, its by no means certain how it is going to play out.

Winners(?) and losers

The Great Beyond: Climate change creates shell-size surprise

Nature reports that a new lab study of several types of sea creatures confirms that some actually grow bigger and better shells in lower pH sea water:

Ries and colleagues from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution grew 18 different species in tanks with differing levels of carbon dioxide. They found seven species had more shell under higher carbon dioxide: crabs, lobsters, shrimp, red and green calcifying algae, limpets and temperate urchins (image top – larger animal grew under higher carbon dioxide).

Another 10 species did worse: oysters, scallops, temperate corals, tube worms, hard and soft clams, conchs, periwinkles, whelks and tropical urchins (image lower – smaller animal grew under higher carbon dioxide). Only one species was unaffected, the humble mussel, they report in Geology.

That Nature link at the top will probably stop working soon, but the press release it is based on is here. The researchers note that this study is pretty preliminary, as the didn't account for nutrient levels. Moreover, the ecological effect of one species building a bigger, stronger shell is not at all clear:

“I wouldn’t make any predictions based on these results. What these results indicate to us is that the organism response to elevated CO2 levels is complex and we now need to go back and study each organism in detail.”

Ries concurs that any possible ramifications are complex. For example, the crab exhibited improved shell-building capacity, and its prey, the clams, showed reduced calcification. “This may initially suggest that crabs could benefit from this shift in predator-pray dynamics. But without shells, clams may not be able to sustain their populations, and this could ultimately impact crabs in a negative way, as well,” Ries said.

In addition, Cohen adds, even though some organisms such as crabs and lobsters appear to benefit under elevated CO2 conditions, the energy they expend in shell building under these conditions “might divert from other important processes such as reproduction or tissue building.”

No surprise

Peru officer suspended over human fat killers 'lie'

I didn't post about this story when it broke, as it had too much of the smell of an urban myth about it. Seems my hunch was right.

Another case of "as I suspected"

Quote mining code : Deltoid

Tim Lambert has a careful look at the claim exciting Boltians and others that there was "proof" of data manipulation in some code including in the leaked CRU files.

Appears to be nothing of the sort. But will Andrew Bolt look at this? I doubt he would ever deem it worthy of his time to look at sites which present the other side of a claim made by a AGW skeptic.

The very old party base and email

Climate scorches Liberals' unity

In my arguments about the "grassroots" campaign apparently waged by Liberal Party rank and file to get Turnbull to delay the ETS, I have mentioned that the average age of the party members was pretty old, and older people are much more likely (for unclear reasons) to not believe in AGW.

Well, it seems I was certainly right about the age of party membership:

When the Victorian Liberal Party conducted a review after the Howard government's defeat, it found that the average age of its members was 60-plus. Few younger Australians are climate change sceptics, and a party that retreats to an unrepresentative base is unlikely to be elected.

The other curious thing, though, is that various Liberals have been claiming to have received "thousands" of emails from concerned constituents. Paul Sheehan writes today:

''I have never seen anything like it,'' said Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells when I called to ask why she publicly abandoned Turnbull's leadership on Friday. By yesterday afternoon her office had logged almost 8000 emails and calls opposing the proposed emissions trading scheme.

There is something pretty fishy about this, if you ask me. As the average age of the party member seems to be so old, surely there is a smaller proportion of them who are internet users in the first place.

Paul Sheehan explains how Alan Jones was leading this anti-CPRS campaign in Sydney. I wouldn't mind betting that there has been some young Jones acolytes behind the flood of emails, and that it significantly over-represents the size of the concern.

UPDATE: James Farrell at Club Troppo also worries about Alan Jones undue influence in national affairs. Here are the key paragraphs:

...if it’s true that Jones inspired the letter campaign, it raises two issues. One is the ability of radio ranters like him to exert influence vastly out of proportion to their knowledge and wisdom. This influence corrupts the democratic process: ideally, citizens take information from a range of sources (including the superior blogs) in the market for ideas, and weigh them up, rather than adopt fully formed opinions from one shrill source. It’s not just that these broadcasters are propaganda tools for vested interests; the type of individual whose opininated ravings rate highly also tends to be motivated by quite arbitrary personal prejudices and preoccupations.

In Jones’s case a relevant foible is that he can’t happen to stand anyone who refuses to be sycophantic. He is vindictiveness itself when not shown due deference. It was astounding to see Turnbull stand up to him in the interview last month (read Sheehan for some highlights), and I confess to having lazily thought to myself, it’s nice to see a federal leader refusing to be cowed by this demagogue. What I’d forgotten is that they grovel for a good reason, and in the last week we may have seen the chickens coming home to roost. Now, it’s possible that Jones helped destroy Turnbull at the behest wealthy and powerful interests, but — and this is my point — it may just have been because Turnbull got under his skin. And that isn’t a healthy basis for determining the course of climate policy.

I've never understood Jones' appeal as a broadcaster.

Ziggy agrees with me, at last

Over the last couple of years, I have been saying that part of the problem with converting the Australian public to use nuclear power is that large nuclear power plants usually use large amounts of cooling water, and in Australian would therefore probably be dotted around the coast. This was certainly the suggestion in Ziggy Switkowski's report on nuclear commissioned by John Howard. The image was of 25 gigantic stations taking up nice bits of coastal views (not to mention warmed water being pumped into the ocean.)

As Australians are, I think, particularly fond of a bit of unspoiled coast, planting nuclear power on them is unappealing.

But, I said, what about smaller, new types of nuclear which do not use water, and can be deployed away from the coast and more discretely? It would seem logical that they can also start making a difference faster than all the planning and building that goes into huge nuclear power plants.

Well, I am happy to report that Ziggy agrees. In his column in the Sydney Morning Herald today, he writes:

Compact reactors are expected on the market by about 2015. These reactors are appealing because they are gas cooled (and therefore do not require access to water), can be incrementally extended, are perhaps the size of two shipping containers, can be built underground, and are much less intimidating than a full-scale installation.

The introduction of nuclear power via these smaller installations may be the path which wins Australian community and political support earliest.

Well, about time you caught up with me, Ziggy.

Sounds about right

Why single-sex schools are bad for your health (if you're a boy)

This study from England will apparently show:

....that boys taught in singlesex schools are more likely to be divorced or separated from their partner than those who attended a mixed school by their early 40s.

I am not surprised. I went to a small Catholic primary school and then a State (mixed sex) high school. Many of my former primary school (male) friends went to a Catholic single sex high school. It always seemed to me that their experience gave them a peculiar, competitive and overall unpleasant attitude towards girls. It's hard to describe it exactly, but it still seemed quite distinct to me. Regular religious instruction in high school seemed to have an extremely limited influence on sexual behaviour, too.

I am not sure that it is a good idea for girls either. I was told by a woman I was dating once about how much she hated the social experience of her Catholic high school due to the incredible level of, well, bitchiness between the girls. One might have thought that, in the absence of males to directly compete about, there would be less of that, but apparently not.

It's a small sample, I know, but it's enough for me to want to make sure my kids both go to mixed sex high schools.

Let the healing begin.....ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

So the Liberal Party chooses a new leader, who, even before last week's meltdown, no one has ever thought electable as PM, and who has now set himself up as the puppet of the do-nothing AGW skeptics, yet has to work out what policy on the topic he can credibly bring to the next election.

Farce on a spectacular scale!

Possible good outcome: by losing by one vote, will Malcolm be convinced to wait around and have again after the next election? Would he happy leading an Opposition of about 30?

Goose

I'm typing this while watching my very own local MP Michael Johnson being interviewed on Lateline. He is a complete goose. I will enjoy not voting for him next election.

You may go back to what you were doing.

Appleyard on AGW

Global warming is real - Times Online

Bryan Appleyard explains how he came around to believing in AGW. That's a relief. He's not exactly conservative, but he is philosophically leery of much of science. If he had come out as a skeptic, I would have been disappointed.

Annabel Crabb on Malcolm's "crash or crash through" tactics

The mad splendour of King Malcolm - ABC News

What's this Annabel Crabb piece doing on the ABC site? Anyway, it's a pretty amusing, even though I still can't bring myself to criticise Turnbull for his tactics. For example:

Watching Laurie Oakes' interview with Mr Turnbull yesterday was to watch a man carefully, deliberately and coolly securing bomb belts around every inch of his person....

All year, he has seemed dull and muffled, as he struggled to placate the warring sides of his party and arrive, through a grim series of manoeuvrings and tactical dodges, to avoid the chasm that lies at the centre of this policy debate for the Liberal Party.

Now, out on his own, increasingly friendless and bristling with self-timed explosive devices, he's never seemed more alive.

Many people have said that his getting stuck into Minchin was a problem because Minchin is held in high regard by many in the party. Why?? Any goodwill people may have borne towards him should be overcome by his forcing a coup because his side lost in the party room.

When is telling the truth acceptable in politics?

I've been thinking. I am strongly of the view that the Liberal Party's current crisis was instituted by Senator Nick Minchin and his skeptic buddies, for no clear reason, telling the truth to Four Corners about their disbelief of the science of AGW. (Yes, I know, they would claim they are the ones interpreting the science correctly, but I would be willing to bet money that their main source of information is Andrew Bolt and his completely one sided, and completely irresponsible, assessment.)

But since Malcolm Turnbull went on TV yesterday and set out in exact detail what he thought of Minchin and his ilk and the disastrous course for the future of the party if they had their way, commentators are suggesting that he went too far in his truthful assessment. For example, Milne writes:

Support for Mr Turnbull was haemorrhaging even before he embarked on a damaging series of media interviews over the weekend, including with the Nine Network's Laurie Oakes, in which he lashed Nick Minchin, Tony Abbott and "cuddly" Joe Hockey.

I have to agree that the use of "cuddly" was not wise.

But every commentator and pollster in the land agrees with Turnbull's assessment of the coming disaster if Hockey takes over and does not get an ETS passed before the next election.

Everyone accepts that politicians lie in the course of leadership fights. Crises are denied, loyalties are pledged, and positions switched in extremely short order.

That's why the sudden outbreak of truth from Turnbull is something I find hard to criticise, even though I suppose it guarantees that even if did win, he'd only be able to pick a cabinet from about half of the party room.

But here is a really important point that has been poorly reported: I only understood yesterday (from watching Lenore Taylor on Insiders) that the party room numbers, when you include Cabinet members (and why shouldn't you?) did vote by a clear majority to pass the ETS (49 to 46, even including the Nationals. Exclude the Nationals and it was an even clearer win within the Liberals) That Minchin and Tuckey came out arguing that Turnbull did not have the numbers is based on a creative interpretation that you only count backbenchers when deciding party policy. How much sense does that make?

In other words, this entire leadership spill is, as Turnbull has been saying, simply about the losing side on a hard-fought policy issue refusing to accept the party room decision. As I have been saying over at Catallaxy, it seems that it's all about how they did not like the way Turnbull announced his win.

Well, if that is the calibre of the Minchin rebels, they actually deserve to be purged from the party, I reckon. If the party can't bring itself to split, I certainly hope that the electorate achieves the same result.

UPDATE: another point I forgot to make, and virtually no media commentator seems to have mentioned it either: Peter Dutton as deputy doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense when it's very unclear that he can hold onto his own seat, does it? If people thought it was a bad look for the party that Howard lost his seat last election, we now have the prospect of both a new leader and his deputy going down. It would be good for a gloat, but as even most Labor supporters would say, not having a reasonably strong opposition is usually bad for the country in the long run.

And another point: with all of this hoo-har about the (in truth, fake, right wing radio jocks led) Liberal grass roots uprising against the Party supporting the ETS, who exactly are those people going to rush to vote for in the next election anyway? The Climate Skeptics Party? (I am dying to see the quality of their candidates, and the loopy ideas they'll drag along behind them. It'll be One Nation all over again.)

UPDATE 2: Lenore Taylor in The Australian looks at the policy options the Liberals have, assuming the CPRS does not get passed after a Senate enquiry.

At some point, if they want any credibility at all, the party would have to come up with some policy that puts a price on carbon. And in whatever form you do it, you can call it a "tax on everything", as the Minchin followers are doing for the CPRS.

Given their rhetorical, the Minchin rebels have undercut the credibility of any alternative the Liberals can come up with, even if in fact it may be a better proposal than the Labor policy.

What will happen to the power stations of Victoria

Power giants crying foul? What a joke!

Kenneth Davidson reckons the panic being promoted over problems in the Victorian power industry is just a beat up. I suspect he is right.

His alternative to an ETS also has a pleasing simplicity about it:

The flawed CPRS should be replaced with a broad-based carbon tax. If it was set initially at $10 a tonne it would be hardly noticed, it would raise $5 billion a year and all the money could be spent on green infrastructure instead of the financial bubble if the CPRS goes ahead.

Let's not forget... ocean acidification

It's been a couple of weeks since I mentioned ocean acidification. You'd think that someone, even George Monbiot, might mention it in the context of "Climategate" (which I still reckon will amount to nothing in the long run) as the other big reason why rapid CO2 increase is Not a Good Idea.

So, what's new from the Ocean Acidification blog?:

a. a couple of types of plankton (two species of coccolithophore) show reduced growth under increased dissolved CO2, even when the increase is more gradual than in some of other experiments;

b. another study on 4 different strains of coccolithophore indicates that they respond differently to increased CO2, presumably on a genetic basis. This is possibly a good thing, if you assume the ones that take increased CO2 in their stride replace those that suffer decreased calcification. But it's going to be very difficult to experimentally tell if that is what will happen in the oceans, I would have thought.

c. a report from an unlikely source (iStockAnalyst!) says that the waters off Japan are showing lower pH:

A group of scientists, led by Takashi Midorikawa of the Meteorological Research Institute in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, has checked the pH readings of surface seawater off the Kii Peninsula at 30 degrees north latitude that have been made since 1986. They have found that the pH has dropped by 0.04 during this period, a considerable change. Such ocean acidification has been observed elsewhere as well, such as off Hawaii.

It seems that this is the 3rd report of long term (20 plus years) measurements which are indeed showing that ocean acidification is happening as predicted:

a. the Hawaiian study from earlier this year;
b. the Icelandic ocean study, which has just been updated, and
c. now Japan.

While there seems to be a considerable divergence in the actual rate of acidification, water temperatures and other factors presumably have a role.

Still, it seems that the skeptic response that ocean acidification can't happen (or isn't happening,) which seemed to be the position of Ian Plimer and Bob Carter, for example, just isn't sustainable.

4. Here's an interesting report on current work underway with coring coral in the Caribbean to see if growth rates can be correlated to decreasing pH. It will very interesting if they replicate the findings of a study on Australian coral.

5. Cuttlefish (and other cephalopod?) eggs are affected by decreased pH, but it seems unclear whether in a good way or a bad way. (They absorb less cadmium, but more silver.) All kind of complicated, isn't it?

Bad for my health

I am officially too depressed about the state of Liberal politics in Australia today to post. Combined with a lack of sleep from a series of early wake ups from the local bird life this last week, I suspect that political idiocy has raised my blood pressure.

I've been commenting at other places, but it's taking up all my time. Must...stop...doing...that.

Tell me, Tony

Malcolm Turnbull is 100% right. It is electoral disaster looming for the Coalition not just for the nest election, but probably for the next few electoral cycles.

I've been arguing all day at Catallaxy about the hopeless, politically inept, rabble of climate skeptics in the Liberals who think that a rush to the phones by the Liberal party members (what, average age probably 55, and avid readers of such sound sources of climate science like Andrew Bolt?) means that they should renege on an approach (good faith negotiations with Labor) they only agreed to a few week ago.

And my question: Tony Abbott, how are you going to deal with an ETS when you are leader? See what happens at Copenhagen? You think you are ever going to get Minchin et al to agree to any action at all on CO2? You are going to lead the Party to the next election as the Party dominated by do nothing skeptics, regardless of whether that election be a double dissolution or later. You think that's a winning strategy?

Absolutely hopeless (if, like me, you are normally inclined towards Coalition policies.) It's the 1980's all over again - Labor with no end in sight.