Environment

Another own goal for the denialists?

John Quiggin141 Comments

Blogospheric opinion has divided on predictable lines over the Queensland Land and Resources Tribunal’s rejection of objections to a new coal mine by environmental groups who wanted offsets for the carbon emissions of the mine. Brickbats have come from Andrew Bartlett, Tim Lambert and Robert Merkel, while Jennifer Marohasy and Andrew Bolt have cheered the Tribunal and its presiding member, President Koppenol.

But this looks awfully like an own goal for the denialists to me.

The environmental groups relied on the IPCC and Stern reports, but the Presiding Member did a little digging on the Internet and came up with the responses recently published in World Economics. These were two papers, one on the science of global warming and one on the economics (there was also a separate piece by Tol and Yohe, to which the comments below do not apply).

I plan a full-length response when I get some free time, but for present purposes its sufficient to observe that the list of authors coincides pretty closely with the promoters of, and witnesses at, the bogus House of Lords inquiry, set up and run by Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher.

This effort seemed like a modest success at the time, since it was one of the few occasions when a body with an impressive sounding title came down in support of denialism, but it turned out to be a massive strategic error, since it led directly to the establishment of the Stern Review, which not only discredited the climate science denialism being promoted by Lawson, but also challenged the view, supported by a number of prominent economic modellers in the field, that policy responses should incorporate a large preference for current over future generations, and therefore a strong bias against short-term action. Debate over this is continuing, but (in my view at least) the advocates of immediate action have gained the ascendancy.

Having been prosecutor, judge and jury in the case against climate science, Lawson is now appearing as a witness in the appeal against the judgement of the Stern Review. His already weak position is undermined by the inclusion of well-known hacks like Ross McKitrick of the Fraser Institute in the team.

Coming back to the Land and Resources Tribunal, a judge in an ordinary court who made a decision based on stuff he found on the Internet, which had not even been led in evidence, would be lucky to get off with a stern talking to from the Court of Appeal. Certainly, no such judgement could stand, even if the material on which the judge relied stood up to critical scrutiny, as the Lawson-McKitrick piece most certainly does not.

The Tribunal is not a court, but I imagine there must be some sort of review process to respond to such an obvious breach of standard procedure. Even if this decision stands, the reliance of the Tribunal on such a weak reed is hugely problematic for the denialists. The weight of evidence is so strong that future cases fought on the same ground will inevitably be won by environmentalists. A far worse result for environmentalists would have been one that ruled climate change considerations out of court on statutory or procedural grounds.

I’m not convinced that legal actions like this are necessarily the best way to go in achieving a coherent national and global response to climate change. But I’m confident that this will turn out to be a Pyhrric victory for denialism.

Update An interesting aside is that Greg Koppenol’s bio reports that he “appeared as counsel in a large number of cases including some of the most important in Australia’s history – Mabo (No. 2) and Wik.” I was of course interested to find out what role he played in those cases, and unsurprised to find that he appeared for the state of Queensland against both Eddie Mabo and the Wik people.

The legal tactics employed by the state government throughout the Mabo case were deplorable, including personal attacks on Mabo that were irrelevant to the main legal points at issue, but relied on fomenting division among potential claimants. As we have seen in numerous recent cases, the Queensland legal establishment protects its own, and it’s not surprising to see that Koppenol’s career hasn’t suffered in the slightest from this episode.

141 thoughts on “Another own goal for the denialists?”

  1. Ricchard T do you think that this economic progress will be hampered by major social upheaval in China? Considering even without major climate change things are pretty bad environmentally with pollution, water shortages and an imncreasing number of civil disturbances, among other things.

    I remember some expert on China saying that even a modest drop in GDP- to levels most countries would envy- would lead to major social upheaval. What would you suppose would happen that even modest climate change effect on their water or food production would do in a country already living on the edge and what that would do if social upheaval seriously distrupted China’s demand for the worlds raw resources or their financing of US deficits?

    Considering how heavy their reliance on coal and their % of global co2 production, will the 1st world come to the party to make a major contribution in helping them cut their dependence on fossil fules?(or India for that matter)

    Funnily enough this may force the first world to realize they have had their develoment cake of using the world as a free tip and now to save their own asses they have to raise the living standards of the thirdworld in a sustainable way or else they will do it in the same dirty way they did and screw everyone.

    BTW considering the amount of money China is putting into their military what better than to start a war to divert internal unrest if a climate change pushed them over the edge?

    What the denialists haven’t even started to figure in is security worries, that alone is enough reason to take this seriously.

    People like SATP & Howard may think the developed nations have no moral responsibilty in this regard, but if the shit hits the fan there is no where to hide.

  2. Majorajam: Your were dead right when you said “you’d have to put these guys somewhere in the stratosphere” – your link “these guys” was to Patz et al in Nature 17 November 2005. Apart from their wild and unsubstantiated claim that climate change is already causing 150,000 premature deaths annually, they also claim that “On local and regional
    scales, changes in land cover can sometimes exacerbate the effect of
    greenhouse-gas-induced warming, or even exert the largest impact on climatic
    conditions. For example, urban ‘heat islands’ result from lowered evaporative
    cooling, increased heat storage and sensible heat flux caused by the lowered
    vegetation cover, increased impervious cover and complex surfaces of the
    cityscape. Dark surfaces such as asphalt roads or rooftops can reach
    temperatures 30–40 C higher than surrounding air. Most cities show a
    large heat island effect, registering 5–11 8C warmer than surrounding
    rural areas (fn12). But the effects of land cover change on climate are not limited to
    small areas: at the scale of the entire continental USA, Kalnay
    and Cai (fn13) estimated that land-cover changes (from both agriculture and urban areas)
    caused a surface warming of ,0.27 8C per century. Also, in southeast China, a
    warming of ,0.05 8C per decade since 1978 has been attributed to land-use change
    from urban sprawl (fn14).�

    We know from JQ that there is no heat island effect at all, and that a single error vitiates a complete paper. This paper must therefore be consigned to the trash can in its entirety.

    Tim, your unlimited capacity for error never fails to astonish. The urban heat island effect is well known, but the claim that it generates biases in measured global warming is false. Whether or not a single error vitiates a paper, a record of uniformly erroneous statements like yours is a pretty clear indication of the reliability of the person who makes them.

  3. SimonJM: good points on China.

    Majorajam: You insist on an answer, but there is not really a question, is there? Cardiovascular diseases are separate from infectious diseases, so what I say about the one has no bearing on the other.

    Yet, the net change in cardio is probably more important than the net change in infectious, at least in relation to climate change, because the former is projected to go up and the latter to go down in the future.

  4. JQ: I apologise, I had forgotten that you can get these clever thermometers that clearly separate urban heat island from ambient effects both at spot and for trends, we have one at Canberra Airport that separates out the impact of increased jet traffic and the new Mall and industrial centre from the JQ warming effect.

  5. JQ, any chance my post here will be emancipated from the spam filter? It’s been held up since yesterday.

  6. Lost forever, I’m afraid, Majorajam. It went straight to Akismet Hell, while Tim’s latest silliness got into Purgatory. Akismet moves in mysterious ways. If the post was long, try breaking it up and posting the bits.

    BTW, Tim, why don’t you try commenting at Climate Audit? They might pay some attention to you there.

  7. Tol “To make matters worse, the majority of infectious disease epidemiologists think that I am a raving lunatic for suggesting that there is a relationship between climate change and infectious diseases — received wisdom is that there is none.”

    Wow – funny that I can’t seem to have a conversation with an epidemiologist about infectious diseases without them saying something like “of course global warming will make this worse”, usually followed by “but we don’t know by how much”.

    Quiggin is of course right that the issue is change rather than a particular temperature being better or worse (although that could be the case if you started to move towards Martian or Venusian climates). However, there are not a lot of biological scientists who are expecting net benefits from global warming, at least in my experience and I am coming up for my 2000th interview so it’s a non-trivial sample size.

  9. Ironic that now to save itself the developed world has to help the developing nations.

    I’ve always found it strange given how pious many Christians in the US- and here as well- are that they are so obsessed with God helps those that help themselves but the parable of the Good Samaritian or rich man and the eye of a needle gets ignored. I thought compassion and helping the poor was a big part of Christianity?

    There seems to be a trend mainly in the UK to examine the ethical foundations of our current lifestyles not only the consequences of our lifestyles but a bigger question is ethical to live affluent want fulfilling lifestyles when others are dying from preventable causes esp in a globalised world. I know Singer has touched on this.

    BTW If anyone would like to create a group for this micro loan organisation let me know.

    http://www.kiva.org/index.php

    We let you loan to the working poor

    Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

  10. Ironic that now to save itself the developed world has to help the developing nations.

    I’ve always found it strange given how pious many Christians in the US- and here as well- are that they are so obsessed with God helps those that help themselves but the parable of the Good Samaritian or rich man and the eye of a needle gets ignored. I thought compassion and helping the poor was a big part of Christianity?

    There seems to be a trend mainly in the UK to examine the ethical foundations of our current lifestyles not only the consequences of our lifestyles but a bigger question is ethical to live affluent want fulfilling lifestyles when others are dying from preventable causes esp in a globalised world. I know Singer has touched on this.

    BTW If anyone would like to create a group for this micro loan organisation let me know.

    http://www.kiva.org/index.php

  13. Tim Curtin: “I had forgotten that you can get these clever thermometers that clearly separate urban heat island from ambient effects both at spot and for trends,”

    That’s right. They save these clever thermometers for satellites, rural stations, marine measurements and boreholes. The thermometers in those places are just wicked clever.

  15. Chris — I don’t think Tim was suggesting an urban heat island effect on satellite data. Unfortunately he can’t defend himself now as he’s been banned for being too much of a skeptic… opps, I mean a denialist… opps, I mean delusionalist… opps, I mean [insert additional insult here].

  16. JH, Tim was banned not simply for making consistently (and I mean very consistently) and unabashedly false statements, but additionally for never registering in any way the relevance of their falsehood being pointed out to him. He’d just drop the argument and propagate a different falsehood, often one that he’d had blow up on him previously. How do you debate with that?

    In short, he’s what we call a troll and he’s truly an exemplar of his species. That many denialists fit such a profile is less than coincidental.

  17. What Tim Curtin tried to say was that cities have warmed much faster than the global mean (a fairly uncontroversial claim), that no big negative warming effects have been observed in cities (true, but that may be because nobody is looking), and that people continue to flock to city (again, not very controversial) which would suggest that they do not mind the heat that much. He did not say that people also flock to hot places as soon as they have holidays or retire. People may object to global warming, but individual warming is quite popular.

    Will I now get banned too?

  19. Humphreys: “I don’t think Tim was suggesting an urban heat island effect on satellite data.”

    I don’t think he was either. He was just recycling the urban heat island explanation for why thermometers are telling us the world is getting warmer. I was just pointing out (after this has been done many, many times by others) that temperature meaurements outside of urban areas, which are unaffected by urban heat islands in any significant way, all show global average warming. As he suggests, Tim Curtin certainly has a memory problem.

  20. Chris: See my #117. Tim is banned from explaining himself, so he did in an email to me. If the global mean temperature record has been properly correctly for the urban heat island effect, then most of humanity has experienced much more rapid warming in the past century than the global temperature record suggests.

  21. Pr Q stated:

    “The urban heat island effect is well known, but the claim that it generates biases in measured global warming is false.”

    To which Tim Curtin replied: “I had forgotten that you can get these clever thermometers that clearly separate urban heat island from ..”

    If Tim Curtin says something quite different from what he “tried to say” it’s not my problem.

  22. Chris O: For the actual message, see #117. John Q just tried to distract attention from this inconvenient fact, to which Tim replied that there are problems in the construction of the global mean temperature (this is true), but that is just a sideline.

  23. I’ve been ignoring this Richard, but since you insist, let me observe that even your charitable reinterpration of Tim C doesn’t stand up. You say “What Tim Curtin tried to say was that cities have warmed much faster than the global mean (a fairly uncontroversial claim)” but this claim is false.

    There is no evidence that cities are warming faster than other areas (and no reason to believe they should), though of course cities are warmer, on average, than the surrounding countryside. Those who claim(ed) an urban heat island effect on measured trends postulate contamination arising when previously rural measurement points are urbanised. This issue has been examined pretty thoroughly and no significant effect has been found.

  24. John Q: We could quibble about the quality of the correction of the global average for the urban heat island effect, but I will not as you are not known to be an expert in statistics or meteorology. (I have five papers published on the subject.)

    If cities are warmer than the country-side, then urbanisation implies warming. As a larger share of a growing population is living in the city, people have experienced more rapid warming than the global average.

    If cities are warmer than the country-side, and cities are growing, then today’s cities have warmed more than the average, even if yesterday’s cities have not.

    However, yesterday’s cities have warmed too, because their environment has warmed by suburbanisation and space heating and cooling is more wide-spread and more intense than they used to be. The analysis of this is confounded by spatial and interannual variability, global warming, and acidification.

  25. Richard, arguments from authority aren’t helpful here. There have been quite a few occasions (notably on discounting) where your statements on this blog contradict your own published work, and I assume #117 must be another example. Here’s the IPCC (2001)

    The SAR reviewed the three databases of land-surface air temperature due to Jones (1994), Hansen and Lebedeff (1988) and Vinnikov et al. (1990). The first and second databases have been updated by Jones et al. (2001) and Hansen et al. (1999), respectively, and a further analysis has become available (Peterson and Vose, 1997; Peterson et al., 1998a, 1999). The last paper also separates rural temperature stations in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) (Peterson and Vose, 1997) from the full set of stations which, in common with the other three analyses, have been screened for urbanisation effects. While there is little difference in the long-term (1880 to 1998) rural (0.70°C/century) and full set of station temperature trends (actually less at 0.65°C/century), more recent data (1951 to 1989), as cited in Peterson et al. (1999), do suggest a slight divergence in the rural (0.80°C/century) and full set of station trends (0.92°C/century). However, neither pair of differences is statistically significant. In addition, while not reported in Peterson et al., the 1951 to 1989 trend for urban stations alone was 0.10°C/decade. We conclude that estimates of long-term (1880 to 1998) global land-surface air temperature variations and trends are relatively little affected by whether the station distribution typically used by the four global analyses is used, or whether a special effort is made to concentrate on rural stations using elaborate criteria to identify them. Part of the reason for this lack of sensitivity is that the average trends in available worldwide urban stations for 1951 to 1989 are not greatly more than those for all land stations (0.09°C/decade). The differences in trend between rural and all stations are also virtually unaffected by elimination of areas of largest temperature change, like Siberia, because such areas are well represented in both sets of stations.)

    and you (at #117)
    “cities have warmed much faster than the global mean”

    If you want to retract this claim and say you really meant to talk about urbanisation, go right ahead. You might even want to notice that I raised this very point in #123.

  26. John Q: The stations that the IPCC talks about were either homogenous or homogenized — that is, they either did not show an urban heat island effect, or the urban heat island effect was removed from the series before they entered into the database.

    As I said, I worked with these data and the people who prepared them.

    It is quite wrong to conclude from the above that there is no urban heat island effect. Your quote supports the assertion that the urban heat island effect is no explanation for the observed global warming.

  27. Well, we seem to have reached agreement somehow, since my opening statement on the topic (at #102) was

    The urban heat island effect is well known, but the claim that it generates biases in measured global warming is false.

  29. Heads Up Denialists Fight Back

    The Great Global Warming Swindle!!

    UK’s Channel Four looking to do shock jock anti-science -rating must be falling-& will probably do a deal with Fox News for fair and balanced news in near future.

    http://www.celsias.com/blog/2007/03/11/the-great-global-warming-swindle/

    You can watch it on http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=9005566792811497638

    Looks like same old same old but with packaging
    Maybe they can have a go at claiming the 10 grand from Exxon

  30. Richard Tol: “Chris O: For the actual message, see #117. John Q just tried to distract attention from this inconvenient fact” in #102.

    He must be prescient.

  31. Professor Richard Tol,

    Back on planet earth, this is what Tim Curtain actually said: due to its assertion of an urban heat island effect, the paper in Nature can be ignored, because, according to Professor Quiggin, there is no such thing and, also according to him, one error means you can ignore the paper (except in that his was notable in its tedious intonation).

    In other words, he made an unequivocally false, asinine and alltogether characteristic statement. So naturally I am astounded by powers of revisionism that go so far as having JQ ‘ducking’ the eminent Curtain’s point. Seeing as we’ve finally touched on your area of expertise, I figure you could ‘explain’ to me what Tim meant by this letter to the FT which is proudly posted to his website:

    LETTER TO THE EDITOR – Net change in emissions after ‘successful’ trade: zero.
    16 June 2006

    Sir, Stavros Dimas, the European commissioner for the environment, was, as to be expected, unctuously bland when he claimed that trading volume in the European Union’s emissions trading scheme in 2005, at Euros 5bn, demonstrates “success” (“Europe’s emissions trading is a model for the world”, June 8). But apparently a full column of the Financial Times left him no space to inform us of how large a reduction in CO emissions this produced.

    Anyone with knowledge of stock exchange trading knows that for every buyer there has to be a seller, and that therefore Mr Dimas’ statistic means no more than that Euros 2.5bn of emissions were saved and sold, and that an extra Euros 2.5bn of emissions were allowed from that saving, for a net change in emissions of precisely zero.

    Tim Curtin
    Emeritus Faculty
    Australian National University

    I was as embarrassed reading that as I am watching anyone publicly make a fool of themselves, but at least relieved that America isn’t the only country in possession of economics faculty that don’t know a thing about economics. But perhaps I’m missing the underlying subtlety? Have at it Doc.

  32. Majorajam, my anonymous friend, trade value does not define environmental success, or does it? Dimas could have said how much emissions were saved, but that is embarrassingly close to zero, or he could have said how much money was saved by emissions trade, but the Commission does not have a clue, so Dimas opts for a meaningless statement instead. Not that this has anything to do with the urban heat island effect.

  33. You’ve outdone yourself there Tol. Indeed, Dimas makes a largely meaningless statement (except in that a market for carbon emissions is a necessary milestone along the road to climate friendly policy, albeit the easiest). He would probably prefer to make a more meaningful statement about the economic impact of the trading except that, well, it appears he’s not given to making false statements, (or perhaps just insufficiently ignorant). Tim on the other hand knows no such boundary, (on either count), so his is meaningful and meaningfully false statement. Little wonder then that you’re so enamored of the man.

  34. Majorajam, earlier, you admitted to being a US politician, and then immediately withdrew that admission. I am fairly certain now that you are a politician. Only a politician would claim that politicians are not given to making false statement.

  35. Every man has the right to speak his mind, so I copied Tim Curtin’s words from Deltoid.

    John Quiggin has his own claims to be judged The Most Deluded, not only in regard to his self-estimation, but also on an issue as simple as the well attested urban heat island effect (UHI). He admits now that it exists, but claims that it is of no consequence because when global surface temperature series are adjusted by removing urban temperatures, a rising trend remains. What he cannot seem to grasp is that the same trend evident from rural weather stations when applied to urban areas necessarily applies to a higher base temperature, and so reaches the IPCC “targets” for 2100 much sooner than rural areas will.
    That means that the world’s cities will suffer sooner and more severely from many of the claimed negative effects of global warming, even though life expectancy and all other social indicators tend to be higher – and exposure to diseases like malaria tends to be lower – in urban than in rural areas.
    Quiggin also misses the rather stark policy implications of higher levels of warming in urban areas. As these are due not to CO2 but to the heat generated by economic activity of all kinds, including computers and air conditioners, that heat will not be affected by cuts in CO2 emissions arising from switching to carbon-free power sources, whether nuclear or solar etc. That after all is why Greens like Quiggin do not countenance replacing coal by nuclear, as knowing that neither can be substituted by solar etc for base load, their real motivation is to return us to green contemplation in an energy-free Arcadia.
    Quiggin is additionally deluded when he asserts that the rural and urban warming trends are the same. Studies both in England and Australia show that in fact urban areas are warming faster than the “global” (actually rural temperatures that exclude the urban), for example, the Hadley Centre’s Parker & Horton (August 2004) show that Oxford’s temperature series eventually had to be excluded from its series for central England, as the adjustment needed INCREASED from minus 0.1-0.2 degrees F from 1960 to 1973, to minus 0.2C for 1974-2003.
    Similarly a recent Australian study of temperature trends in three small Victorian towns and Melbourne related the maximum UHI effect at the centre of a town over grass to population via a regression equation. The urban-rural temperature difference was found to increase with increasing population via the equation. (Urban heat island features of southeast Australian towns, Torok, Simon J., Morris, Christopher J.G., Skinner, C., Plummer, N. 2001 , Australian Meteorological Magazine. Vol. 50, no. 1, March 2001. pp. 1-13).
    So sadly, drastic cuts in GHG emissions are not going to have much if any impact on our warming cities, which now account for more than half of the world’s population, but those cuts will very likely, by cooling the countryside, reverse the remarkable gains in agricultural productivity since 1970 that are at least partly due to rural warming (especially in the northern hemisphere).
    Thus Quiggin’s hero Nicholas Stern is also a great delusionist, not least because while a true believer in the greenhouse effect on climate, he goes to great lengths to claim that either (1) there is no greenhouse effect on agricultural yields, or (2) if there is, it has already reached its limits. So why do the Dutch still build greenhouses on such a vast scale?

  36. #135: Still guessing your identity, but your name and language suggest the Indian subcontinent. Earlier, you displayed unfamiliarity with the story of the Wizard of Oz. Now, you got your trolls wrong. Trolls are stupid throughout the western world — with the exception of South Sweden.

  37. Richard (posting stoopid Tim Curtin rant that had been being justifiably ignored at Deltoid)… are you on drugs, or high on life or something?

  38. No, Krusty, I just think it is terribly unfair that someone may be dragged through the mud without the right to speak back. I do not necessarily agree with Tim Curtin, but John Q is wrong to silence him in this way.

  39. Inspector Kluso, I would attribute your ignorance of homonyms to an understandable lack of command of your second language, except that I’ve heard you have these in Dutch too. More probable is that it serves as yet another testament to central tendency, together with your reading of Weitzman and half a dozen other notable gaffes. Smell you later.

  40. Tim Curtin has objected to the fact that his contributions continued to be criticised after I had advised him that he was banned from the site. I offered him a final right of reply before closing the thread, which he has accepted. Any further comment referring to Mr Curtin will be deleted.

    John Quiggin has allowed me to respond to the personal attacks leveled at me on this Blog after he had “blocked� me by his email of 26 February 2007.

    WITHOUT PREJUDICE

    Prof. Quiggin allowed his contributor “Majorajam� to state (at #116 in “Another own goal for the denialists� on 7th March) that I had been banned for making “consistently and unabashedly false statements� amongst other pleasantries. Naturally M’jam provided no proof of his accusation that I consistently make false statements. If publishing “consistently false statements� to the JQ blog were cause for banning, there would be few surviving submitters, not including Majorajam.

    Moreover it is fair to suggest that Majorajam relies on his anonymity when feeling free to make libelous statements about both myself and various other contributors to JQ – yet rarely addresses the substance of their contributions. As most likely an employee of a government agency in the USA, Majorajam may well be obliged to hide his identity, but then he should refrain from personal attacks on those who cannot respond in the same coinage.

    More generally, I suggest that all contributors to the JQ blog should be aware that his server administrator (TextDrive Inc, a Joyent company) has an Acceptable Use Policy that states inter alia (1) “Customer shall not post, transmit, re-transmit or store material on or through any of Company’s Services or Products which, in the sole judgment of the Company is …..(ii) threatening, obscene, indecent, defamatory or that otherwise could adversely affect any individual, group or entity… “ (2) “The Customer is not permitted to post any material that is illegal, libellous, and tortuous…”. Majorajam is of course known to JQ, but would be revealed by subpoena, and while both are hardly worth suing, a joint action against them and TextDrive could well be rewarding, not least because the last has quite deep pockets (as Joe Guttnick found when he successfully sued Dow Jones more profitably than if he had only sued their reporter).

    Here are my specific rebuttals of Majorajam’s allegations about my “consistently false statements� on the thread in question. I had made the following contributions before I was banned:

    #33. My comment here was on JQ’s diatribe against the Queensland judge who had ruled against an attempt by Queensland Greens to prevent a new coal mine project from proceeding, and pointed out that the mine in question would itself have only a minuscule impact on global CO2 emissions (because mining as such produces very few emissions), and that the Kyoto Protocol places the onus on end-user emitters of CO2, not on the producers of the fuels the end-users choose to burn to produce electricity or other energy. But according to Majorajam, my statements at #33 were “false�, so if he is right Kyoto pace its text places the onus on the producers rather than the users of greenhouse gases. I think my comments were both true and in the public interest.

    #65. My comment here was to the effect that according to the IEA, the EU15 were 3% above the 1990 level of CO2 emissions in 2003, and therefore unlikely to meet their Kyoto targets for reductions from the 1990 level. It also noted that setting targets to be administered by bureaucrats would be a licence for same to enrich themselves, as already evident in Australian states, with their exemptions for major corporations from compliance with their nascent emission reduction schemes. But Majorajam did not rebut the specifics of my assertions, contenting himself with dubbing them “false�. So now we know from Majorajam that when the named States exempt major new industrial coal and aluminium smelter projects from emission reduction targets, they are actually implementing these targets.

    #89. Here I merely reported Richard Tol’s various affiliations to institutions in Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, and the USA, and their respective climates. So Majorajam by stating that all statements I make are “false� thereby claims that Tol does not have any of these affiliations. Should I choose to proceed with legal action, I shall be glad to call Richard as a witness against Majorajam’s assertion that he has none of these affiliations. I also noted that despite global warming in Australia since 1945, malaria still does not exist here. Presumably this is also one of my “consistently� false statements. It will be incumbent on M’jam, JQ, and his server administrator to prove in court both that malaria will soon be endemic in Australia because of AGW, and that it is not in the public interest for me to assert this is unlikely.

    #102. Here I cited Patz et al in Nature (17 November 2005) to the effect that “On local and regional scales, changes in land cover can sometimes exacerbate the effect of greenhouse-gas-induced warming, or even exert the largest impact on climatic
    conditions. For example, urban ‘heat islands’ result from lowered evaporative
    cooling, increased heat storage and sensible heat flux caused by the lowered
    vegetation cover, increased impervious cover and complex surfaces of the
    cityscape….� However M’jam’s view is that this is another of my “consistently false statements�, so Patz et al never said this. Note to all libraries stocking that issue of Nature: insert slips citing Majorajam’s correction.
    I also added the comment that “We know from JQ that there is no heat island effect at all, and that a single error vitiates a complete paper. This paper must therefore be consigned to the trash can in its entirety�. To this JQ commented editorially: Tim, your unlimited capacity for error never fails to astonish. The urban heat island effect is well known, but the claim that it generates biases in measured global warming is false. Whether or not a single error vitiates a paper, a record of uniformly erroneous statements like yours is a pretty clear indication of the reliability of the person who makes them.
    After banning me, JQ continued to attack my contributions as at #123, March 11.
    #104. My final comment before my ban was (with irony, a scarcity in the blogosphere) “JQ: I apologise, I had forgotten that you can get these clever thermometers that clearly separate urban heat island from ambient effects both at spot and for trends, we have one at Canberra Airport that separates out the impact of increased jet traffic and the new Mall and industrial centre from the JQ warming effect�. That rara avis, an honest contributor to the JQ blog, Richard Tol, later (#136) posted my post on Deltoid citing unimpeachable sources that there is indeed warming at a higher level and with a faster rising trend in urban areas than in the sanitised IPCC series for the non-urban “globe�. But then again, anything I say is “consistently false� (M’jam) or “uniformly erroneous� (JQ). Even if they are right, it could well be in the public interest that my views should get a hearing (under English and arguably also Australian libel law), but alas never again if M’jam and JQ prevail. However, my sources on UHI (including the Hadley Centre which is the main source of the IPCC’s scariest forecasts and whom I would summon as witnesses if necessary) might be surprised to hear that they are “uniformly erroneous� etc.
    On this topic, it is interesting to read JQ’s own citation of Lenin back in 1995 (RBA) that “households everywhere are voting with their feet� (towards warmer climes). Good old VIL, prescient even when embalmed in Red Square, it was not long before JQ’s feet took him from the “bitterly cold climate� of Canberra to the benign rarely less than 20oC of Brisbane’s urban heat island.
    #131, March 13th. Here Majorajam kindly quoted in full my letter to the Financial Times (16 June 2006) ridiculing the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme on the grounds that in each trade, a tonne of CO2 emissions avoided was “sold� to allow a tonne of CO2 to be emitted, for zero net effect on emissions, and stated it was both “asinine� and “a meaningfully false statement� (at #133). My statement has to be true as it is of course a tautology, and it had an underlying serious purpose, to highlight the fallacies in the ETS, now abundantly evident with the price per tonne of traded CO2 having fallen from about 30 Euro a year ago to just one Euro today. The CO2 in the average 600 ml Coke or other carbonated soft drink is worth more than that – which raises the thought that perhaps Coca Cola Inc could apply for carbon credits under Kyoto after the US ratifies it! It seems fair to dub Majorajam the Rosinantes of climate change.

Comments are closed.