Ooh Missus! Rap science - more swearing on Nick’s blog!

Before you all get shocked by the robust rap language in the video that this post is about (the second one below), you ought to first watch the LHC rap to get broken in gently to the sight of real scientists speaking out. In 2008, Kate McAlpine (A.K.A Alpinekat) released the Large Hadron Rap about the LHC at Cern, Switzerland. She is a science communicator (click for her website). Her rap music inspired video went viral and has had at least 6 million views so far.

Large Hadron Rap

 

Real climate scientists are a bit sick of the numbers of people in the media who talk disparagingly about climate science as if their views were worth anything (mostly, they’re not…). This video is a fun but serious rap by real working climate scientists from Australia. Here’s a link to an article about the making of the rap video

Be warned, the following video contains the “M-F bomb” - words that are often found in rap music - but get past that (or, if you’re too delicate, I’ve included the “clean” version afterwards – which seems a bit silly by comparison) and this is a shrewd comment on the huge numbers of people expressing opinions about subjects they don’t know enough about – such as those who pick up a few deceptive ideas from climate change denialist propaganda and think their “new understanding” gives their fond beliefs the edge over peer reviewed science. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect writ large. This particular manifestation of human stupidity just might be the death of many of us and untold future generations before the climate settles down again. Alarmism (I hear the deniers cry)? Why not? The potential of climate change is actually terrifying and it should scare people. Remember those multiple AGU (American Geophysical Union) delegates who have already made survival retreat plans? If you read that and don’t get alarmed, you’ve got more than one screw loose… Click for link to post.

The problem is the Dunning-Krugers then go on with such confidence in their own judgement that they pontificate about their ridiculously (and dangerously) warped understanding as if they had discovered some smoking gun holes in the science that the whole of science had somehow missed and this implausible idea seems to be unfortunately received rather well by too many people. No doubt some would like the smartest scientists to fall flat on their faces but, realistically, that’s not going to happen.

It’s all rather like those early stage X-Factor contestants who tell Simon Cowell that he’s a fool not to recognise their fantastic talent. This widespread misplaced confidence (A.K.A. unjustified arrogance) seems to be a bit of an epidemic these days. Unfortunately, most of these people can vote which is why the deceitful forces of denialism are trying so hard to spread their disinformation.

Favourite lines?

“Droppin’ facts all over this wax, while bitches are crying ‘bout a carbon tax”

“Denialists deny this in your dreams, coz climate change means greater extremes”

I'm a Climate Scientist (HUNGRY BEAST)

 

I'm A Climate Scientist - Extended Version - (CLEAN)

 

Another boring economics/climate change rant

One of the denialist movement's widespread tactics these days is to claim that it would cost too much economically to do anything to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Subtle sceptic/deniers like Bjorn Lomborg say that it would make more sense economically to instead spend the money (that it would cost to mitigate emissions) on adapting to any changes that may happen.

They claim to believe that the results of any man-made climate change will be much less than the overwhelming majority scientific opinion predicts (even though both sides may be being over optimistic!). Real world measurements coming in show global warming speeding up, harder and faster than expected previously.

This subtle denier/inactivist "Lomborg" position does not admit in public that they are inviting us to effectively gamble with everybody’s future because they are so convinced that they are right, despite their beliefs being very far away from the best scientific opinion in the world. They may believe their position sincerely, or they may hold it because they believe that the industries and political ideologies that sponsor them are more important than our future.

Actually, the sceptic/denier position on the economic problems with greenhouse gas reductions is complete garbage. True, it will cost a lot to do but the costs of not doing it will be vastly larger.

Deniers/sceptics will never tell you that because they don’t want to believe it. Not believing it themselves makes them sound more convincing when they mislead people.

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What follows is a recent New York Times article which scuppers this denialist position and indeed predicts that the changeover to a green energy system will have positive economic benefits – about as far apart from the “convenient” economic doom and gloom consequences spread by deniers. It’s not “just” the assertions of greenies or scientists either, it’s the cream of academic economists’ thought.

Click for here for original article (you might need to register to read it)

A New York University School of Law survey found near unanimity among 144 top economists that global warming threatens the United States economy and that a cap-and-trade system of carbon regulation will spur energy efficiency and innovation.

“Outside academia the level of consensus among economists is unfortunately not common knowledge,” Richard Revesz, dean of the law school, said during a press conference on Wednesday. “The results are conclusive – there is broad agreement that reducing emissions is likely to have significant economic benefits.”

The law school’s Institute for Policy Integrity sent surveys to 289 economists who had published at least one article on climate change in a top-rated economics journal in the past 15 years. Half of those economists responded anonymously to a dozen questions that solicited their opinions on a range of issues, from the impact of climate change on particular industries to how the benefits of reduced greenhouse-gas emissions should be calculated.

The survey found that 84 percent of the economists agreed that climate change “presents a clear danger” to the United States and global economies – hitting agriculture the hardest – even though the severity of global warming remains unknown.

Only 5.6 percent disagreed with that statement, while 7.6 percent were neutral and 2.8 percent had no opinion.

Not surprisingly, the economists favored a market-based approach to limiting carbon emissions, with 80.6 percent supporting the auctioning of emissions allowances, while 9 percent believed the government should give them away.

Climate change legislation before Congress would initially distribute some free allowances to industry while increasing the number of auctioned permits over time. “Some of the answers we get were fairly consistent with what we expected, to the extent that they are consistent with general economic theory, which is likely to favor an auctioning system,” said J. Scott Holladay, an economics fellow at the institute and an author of the report.

Nearly all the economists – 94.3 percent – said the United States should agree to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions through an international climate treaty. Fifty-seven percent said the country should make such a commitment even without an agreement.

Seventy-three percent of the respondents agreed that the uncertainty surrounding the severity of climate change raises the economic value of implementing measures to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Such measures would increase energy efficiency and promote innovation, according to 97 percent of the economists.

There was far less consensus on how to calculate the economic damage from each ton of carbon emitted, which the survey called the “social cost” of carbon dioxide. The economists’ estimates generally ranged from $20 to $100 a ton, though one calculated the cost at $10,000 and another at $10 million.

According to the report, some economists who responded to the survey felt it was it too focused on the United States, while others objected to the nature of the questions.

“Several respondents argued that the questions were too simple to accurately capture the complexity of climate change or that specific questions could not be answered,” wrote the report’s authors.

Moments of genesis of more denier garbage pinpointed on Climate Crock

The birth of much of the climate change denial myth and misrepresentation, the straw man arguments and general dangerous silliness, is not always clear but Pete Sinclair's latest "Climate Crock of the Week" (see below or click here for Youtube link) skewers a few of the exact moments when US media talking heads in the denial camp picked up on a perfectly rational and objective scientific explanation and severely misquoted, twisted, changed and added to and subtracted from it (AKA they lied through their teeth - either that or they are breathtakingly stupid and/or cannot comprehend English).

A significant climate scientist was explaining (only one month ago) that global average temperature cannot be expected to go up smoothly in a straight line because that’s just not the way that things work. This rather obvious fact was seized upon and perverted by the US pundits who claimed it  meant exactly what they wanted it to in the same way as Humpty Dumpty did in Through the Looking Glass – “when I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”.

They tried to make out that this major climate scientist was having second thoughts about global warming but nothing could be further from the truth. Unfortunately, just about everything that the deniers say generally couldn’t be further from the truth. It is a sad fact that over 40% of the US public have fallen victim to at least some of their propaganda. When Voltaire said he would defend to the death people’s right to say stuff he disagreed with, I don’t think in his wildest dreams that he was expecting poisonous stuff like this to crop up… perhaps, faced with it, he would have retracted his view.

This new lying piece of propaganda will now go out into the "denialosphere" of websites and blogs and will get endlessly brought up by their gullible followers, literally for years afterwards! They will in turn probably fine tune the wrongness to suit themselves as they pass it on in a giant Chinese whisper.

It's Climate Crock time again

Climate denialists, when they're in full flood trying to mislead people, often claim that CO2 is a plant food and they encourage their gullible audience to join up what seem like the common-sense dots like this - if CO2 is a plant food then more of it will act like fertiliser and we'll get more crops and bigger trees which by themselves will suck up any excess. No problem - stupid climate scientists!

Of course, like some of the most effective, twisted propaganda, there is a fair amount of truth behind this claim - increased CO2 does indeed increase crop yield but only if the other nutrients and growing conditions are suitably balanced - if they are not, then increased CO2 is bad for plant growth. In the controlled conditions of a greenhouse, it can increase yields but, on the contrary, in the uncontrolled outside world the climate changes that increased CO2 will, and are, causing will alter growing conditions so much that global food supplies are highly likely to be very compromised.

Furthermore, I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that increased acidification of sea water due to increasing levels of CO2, which is happening now, will not prove to be a major problem for plankton and thereby the entire ocean food chain, which may end up going for a Burton... Here's a link to an article from the Telegraph last week, headlined

CO2 levels may cause underwater catastrophe

Just imagine - the famous "seafood diet" joke - if I see food, I eat it - may end up meaning little in a few decades when people ask "what was sea food, Daddy?"...

Here's the latest Climate Crock of the Week video demolishing the propaganda about CO2 as plant food.

The global warming debate and propaganda

This video points out the sources of some of the misleading claims of the sceptics/deniers. It shows how often the process of "Chinese whispers" and simple, but uncorrected, mistakes has created mountains of deceptive misinformation out of molehills of "misunderstood" (I'm being kind here) information. This 18 minute video isn't as punchy as the "crock of the week" videos, but does contain a lot more analysis.

0. The Global Warming Debate - Introduction

View more presentations or Upload your own.

Yet another in the "Crock of the Week" series

The "crock" video embedded below is about the "Oregon petition" which was supposedly signed by 32,000 “leading scientists”. It goes into some detail about the background of the initiators of the petition and their dubious values. It also touches upon the past links that some major deniers have to the tobacco industry’s previous long term denial (and deliberate deception about) the risks of smoking. It does not, however, mention probably the most misleading aspect of the petition, the whole text of which follows.

“We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, [sic] 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

Firstly, even the re-circulated (in 2007) petition still uses this text which is clearly severely out of date. Secondly, the major deceit comes in the misrepresentation of what can be called scientific philosophy in order to fool the public. When they use the term "convincing scientific evidence" in this way it should be taken to mean there is no final and certain proof that man made emissions will definitely cause catastrophic heating and disruption of the climate. This is true!! What deceitful denialist propaganda like this fails to tell the suckers is that only by "running the experiment", and seeing what actually happens, can there be final proof of the theories. By the time the theories are scientifically proved, if we are then undergoing catastrophic disruption, it will be a bit late to do anything about it.

Another crock that the author is probably working on is the "it's just a fallible computer model" canard. Senator Ferguson loves this one. I'll get around to commenting on that in due course but the basic riposte to this argument is this: seeing as we do not have perfect knowledge of how climate systems alter with varying inputs, nor could we without hundreds of years, possibly thousands, of actual experimental science, the computer models we have, flawed as they may be, are our very best idea of what may happen.

When the best available peer-reviewed scientific prognostication method states that there will be a problem that will range from moderate to catastrophic, it should be basic risk/benefit analysis that we use to show us what to do. Are you feeling lucky, punks?

It is not simply that there is one model anyway - there are at least twenty and they all broadly agree. Even if they are all wrong, policy makers and people generally, and deniers in particular, have to take into account that they can be wrong either way when deciding what to do to mitigate the risk. The models and majority science may be wrong and global warming could turn out to be benign, even ultimately beneficial, compared with our current climate - or it could turn out to be the end of our civilisation and the prelude to one of those mass extinctions of species that happen when some major outside disturbance assaults the planetary systems, like an asteroid slamming in. It would be pretty stupid of the so-called intelligent human race to do that sort of destructive planetary engineering all by itself wouldn't it? Acts of God are one thing but how much dumber would be this “Act of Man”? Jared Diamond would be able to write a much more dramatic sequel to "Collapse”!

Climate denial "crock of the week"

This is one of about 8 or 9 Youtube videos which demolish many of the pernicious deceptive myths and black propaganda that the climate denial lobby put out. This one targets one of the ideas of major denier S. Fred Singer and his highly irresponsible recent book, which puts forward one seriously misleading idea after another. It is prejudicially called "Unstoppable global warming every 1500 years" (click on the link to see a detailed expose of this book) and leans heavily on the so called "mediaeval warm period" and the Viking settlements in Greenland to fool people.

It's very worth looking at the rest of the videos- here's a link to a search page http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=Climate+Denial+Crock+of+the+Week+&aq=f