Tim Blair takes umbrage at a claim by Michael Gawenda that most Americans are creationists and also at my suggestion (put forward as a “fun factoid”), that “The great majority of climate change sceptics, globally speaking, are also creationistsâ€?.

I’ll leave it to Tim Lambert to deal with Blair’s numbers. Meanwhile, what interests me is why Blair apparently regards “creationist” as an insult, a point raised rather plaintively by one of his commenters. As this Gallup poll report shows, the only groups in the US to show majority agreement with the proposition “Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Is a Scientific Theory Well Supported by the Evidence” are
* Those with postgraduate education (65 per cent)
* Liberals (56 per cent)
* College Graduates (52 per cent)

By contrast, only 29 per cent of Republicans and 26 per cent of conservatives believe evolution is well supported by the evidence. Surely Blair is not suggesting that there is an important issue on which pointy-headed academic types, and, worse still, liberals are correct, while right-thinking conservative Americans are wrong.

Of course, the liberals are right about evolution. But they’re also right about global warming. The evidence for and against the global warming hypothesis is much the same as the evidence for and against evolution (not quite as overwhelming, but more than enough for anyone who takes scientific evidence seriously). In favour of both hypotheses are the conclusions of the vast majority of scientific studies of the subject and the professional opinion of virtually all independent experts; against are the claims of a handful of qualified scientists (mostly with an obvious conflict of interest), and the fervent wish of large numbers of people to believe the opposite of what science says on the topic.

And far more damage is being done by interest groups denying the reality of climate change than by religious groups denying evolution. It’s the creationists and not the global warming contrarians who ought to be worried here.

While I’m on the topic, my Fin column last week was about the National Water Initiative, which is in danger of becoming collateral damage in the fights between the Federal government and the states. It’s over the page.
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A couple of people have suggested that I should comment on some stories in the Australian about water and the rice industry. Since I’m busy, along with the RSMG team, working on models of this very topic (for all irrigated industries, not just rice), I’m happy to oblige.

The first, by Amanda Hodge and Matthew Denholm, presents a fairly negative view of the rice industry as a profligate user of water, and the second, by Laurie Arthur, is a response from the industry. A lot of interest focuses on the amount of water used to produce a kilogram of rice. In the original article, this was erroneously reported as 21 000 litres: the correct figure is about 2000 litres/kg, or 2Ml/tonne which is still a lot of water[1].
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I’ve had an interesting discussion over at the new blog of Jennifer Marohasy, who runs the environment unit at the Institute of Public Affairs. Marohasy has criticised virtually all the main scientific groups working on the Murray-Darling Basin, and in this post, she nominates The NSW Rivers Survey by the CRC for Freshwater Ecology and NSW Fisheries. as the “worst ever”. She says

The report’s principal conclusions include that “A telling indication of the condition of rivers in the Murray region was the fact that, despite intensive fishing with the most efficient types of sampling gear for a total of 220 person-days over a two-year period in 20 randomly chosen Murray-region sites, not a single Murray cod or freshwater catfish was caught.”

Most remarkably at the same time, in the same years and regions, that the scientists were undertaking their now much-quoted survey that found no Murray cod, commercial fishermen harvested 26 tonnes of Murray cod!

Criticism of the report’s findings from a local fisherman goes something along the lines “The scientists, although having letters behind their name, spending some $2million on gear, and 2 years trying, evidently still can’t fish.”

Zing! Those egghead scientists are conclusively nailed! Well, not quite.
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Geothermal energy is one of those alternative sources that always seems to be waiting in the wings. The basic idea is to exploit the heat (derived from radioactive decay) of granite rocks about 4k below the earth’s surface to superheat water which can then be used to drive a turbine at ground level. It’s a closed cycle so the water can be used over and over. Sounds good, but so have lots of other alternatives to carbon-based fuels that have so far failed to deliver on a large scale.

But now, it seems to be a lot closer The test run by Geodynamics produced 10MW of power and they are talking about a 250 MW plant, with orders already in place from Origin Energy. The Cooper Basin appears to have gigawatts of potential capacity, and large areas of the country are unexplored.

Of course, the big issue is cost. It’s hoped that power can be delivered at 4c/KwH, but it seems likely there will be some overruns. Nevertheless, if the cost of C02 emissions is taken into account, geothermal will very probably be a winner. Once again, it’s evident that, unless we ratify Kyoto now, we are in danger of missing the boat. Australia has a huge endowment of this resource, and a good start on the technology, but no doubt it can be found elsewhere and will be.

My column in yesterday’s Fin was about the option of nuclear energy as a solution to the problem of climate change, an issue that’s been discussed a few times here already. One point I didn’t make is that the availability of nuclear-generated electricity as a ‘backstop’ technology puts an upper bound on the costs of a strategy that would reduce CO2 emissions enough to stabilise atmospheric concentrations (this is much more than Kyoto which aims only to stabilise emissions from developed countries, as a first step to a solution).

There’s lots more on global warming over at Troppo Armadillo, with a lengthy comments thread raising some interesting points.
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In the discussion over Michael Duffy’s SMH article, we had a lot of trouble with a survey supposedly showing that 25 per cent of climate scientists doubted the reality of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. We’ve tracked the survey downhere and it appears that the relevant question is number 40

Climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.
Respondents have to answer on a 7 point Likert scale from Strongly agree to Stongly disagree

Tim Lambert observes that this was an online survey, which may raise doubts about the sample frame, though it appears that Dennis Bray, who ran the survey, tried to keep participation limited to those in the study population.

Brian Bahnisch comments

To me the question is too open-ended. Surely any rational, logical scientist would see that “climate change� has been going on a lot longer than we have been walking upright.
It is also possible to think that anthropogenic causes are less than natural ones, but still a significant, indeed critical, influence.
How does he count the fence-sitters who marked “4�?

and I share these concerns.

Anyway, the immediate problem is that Bray has set up some fancy code to display the survey results and neither Brian or I can make it work. It appears to be set for either Mozilla or Windows IE. Can anyone find the results and advise me.

Update Thanks to TIm Lambert, who has located what appear to be the results to Question 40 here The number giving “Disagree” responses (29 per cent) roughly matches the 25 per cent cited by Duffy, who was apparently relying on a second-hand and not very reliable source. But, as we’ve seen the description of the question given by Duffy was incorrect, as was the date of the survey and the description of the sample population, not to mention the characterisation of the thinktank where the results were presented.

There’s obviously a big difference between “the modest warming of the past 150 years is due to human activity” (Duffy’s description) and “Climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes” (Bray’s actual question) and neither represents the IPCC position, which is that at least some of the warming observed over the last 50 years is anthropogenic and that, under current policies, this warming will continue. For appropriate time scales (say, as short as an El Nino cycle or longer than 1000 years) it seems pretty clear that natural causes are dominant, so it’s perfectly reasonable to disagree with, or give a “Can’t answer” response to Bray’s question, while agreeing with the IPCC view.

Tim Lambert introduces Global Warming Sceptic Bingo. List the discredited arguments put forward by any given sceptic/contrarian/denialist. When you get four in a row, you win. Allow me to suggest another column for Tim’s card with the following entries (refutations of claims are indicated by #)

Uses bogus Schneider quote #
Claims IPCC projections are way off because of incorrect exchange rate conversions #
Claims Kyoto will be economically ruinous #
Relies on Copenhagen Consensus #

Michael Duffy has run a second climate change show on Counterpoint, responding to critics of his SMH column and earlier show. His guest was Bob Carter, whom he described in his SMH column as an “environmental scientist”. The ABC site description is “Research Professor of Geology … geologist and environmental scientist, an adjunct research professor at James Cook University, and he specialises in climate change.” which is still an inaccurate description, as you can see here[1]. It would be more accurate to describe Carter as a prominent research geologist with a personal interest in the issue of climate change, and a strongly-held view that Kyoto is a bad idea.

As regards the major issues, I see little evidence to suggest that Carter is any better informed than I am. He claims, presumably relying on the increasingly absurd McKitrick and McIntyre, that “the hockey stick [showing rapidly rising temperatures over the last 100 years] is broken”, and then goes on to recycle long-exploded claims about urban heat islands and satellite data, all of which have been addressed in detail on this blog .

Duffy’s performance on this issue has been disgraceful. If he did the same thing pushing creationism[2] he would surely have been sacked, or at least pressured to put on some real experts.

Tim Lambert has more

fn1. A few of the papers listed for Carter are relevant to paleo-climate issues, and he’s well qualified to make the point, as he does in the show, that climate has varied over time. But since that’s not in dispute, it can only be used (as it is by Duffy) as a straw man to attack unnamed critics of his previous shows.

fn2. Fun Factoid: As I’ll argue in a bit more detail later on, the great majority of climate change sceptics, globally speaking, are also creationists – why doesn’t Duffy give them a go on his program?. Feel free to supply your own examples, counterexamples and statistical arguments in the meantime.