Eco Crisis and Alien Abductions

A recent blog about a 2008 news story reminded me of a topic I’ve been interested in long before I became obsessed by climate change. The story was in the Telegraph and was about an increase in reported UFO sightings across Britain that year; there’s a quote from Malcolm Robinson, founder of an organisation called Strange Phenomena Investigations:

There has been an unusual number of sightings recently. Some experts believe it could be linked to global warming and craft from outer space are appearing because they are concerned about what man is doing to this planet.

There does actually seem to be a curious connection between aliens and environmentalism. Before I go there, however, it might be a good thing if I set out what my own thoughts are, on the subject of UFOs. As a science fiction-reading teenager I remember being fascinated by the idea of Earth being visited by aliens, and was very open to the possibility that ETs were flitting about our skies in their exotic, metal-hulled spacecraft.

However, scepticism crept in, as always. Although some who report UFO encounters appear to be solid enough witnesses – pilots, police officers, and so forth – there are others who definitely are not, and I find it wholly understandable that the more dramatic, not to say lurid, accounts tend to be written off by sceptics as delusional episodes, for instance, or outright fabrications.

One argument often used to dismiss UFO sightings is that true aliens would be wise and peaceful – having long since overcome problems such as war and the nuclear arms race – so they wouldn’t be skulking around, kidnapping people and being mysterious. I’m not sure that’s actually such a sound argument, however, as it assumes that civilisation elsewhere in the Universe would follow a path almost identical to civilisation on Earth – with warring nation-states, “the Bomb” and everything else – when we can really make no such assumption. True aliens might be far more unfathomably bizarre than we have been able to imagine, hitherto.

No, what did most to turn me into a sceptic (along with the often suspiciously Earth-centric names and imagery) was the timing of it all. Space visitors arriving precisely at the dawn of the Space Age was, for me, a coincidence too far.

I would add, however, that I’m still open to the possibility that somewhere within the deeply baffling parallel universe of Ufology is a central kernel of accurately reported high strangeness pointing to something, some truth – I know not what – that science has yet to embrace. To all investigators (such as the late John Mack) brave or foolhardy enough to navigate through all the quirkiness and confusion in search of that something, I wish you the best of luck.

Anyway, aliens and environmentalism.

What becomes readily apparent if you start to read accounts of alleged alien contact is that there’s sometimes a message about the environment, often delivered as some kind of graphic warning. Wikipedia mentions this in its entry on alien abduction. Those people who claim to have been snatched from their beds by ETs sometimes report being subjected to frightening movies that show environmental catastrophes – devastating earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and burning forests – which are somehow humanity’s fault, or at least exacerbated by human greed and ignorance. Does this sound oddly familiar to you?

Here’s a good example. One purported abductee, Jim Sparks (aka former real-estate developer Vincent Sparacino) became obsessed with saving the rain forests in 1995, after having been kidnapped by aliens. He believes that the human race is being “farmed” by extraterrestrials but that their investment is now in danger, because humans have chosen an environmentally destructive path.

The following is an excerpt from an interview with Sparks in a book by researcher Linda Moulton Howe, and is about his recollections of an encounter and conversation with reptilian aliens:

‘We contacted your leaders because your planet is in grave trouble. Your leaders said the vast majority of your population wasn’t ready for anything like us yet, so we made time agreements with your leaders as to when your people would be made aware of our presence. This part of the agreement has not at all been kept.

‘It was also agreed that, in the meantime, steps would be taken to correct the environmental condition of your planet with our advice and technology. We say advice, because we respect the fact that this is your planet, not ours. Your government also broke this agreement.’

“I felt an awful emotion of abandonment from these aliens. They are different. I never sensed true emotion from the other aliens before. But the feeling wasn’t at all good. It felt like great loss. I couldn’t help asking, ‘You aren’t giving up on us, are you?’

“There was a long pause of silence and I had a strong feeling of tremendous loss. So I asked again, ‘Well, are you?’ There was another long pause. “Then finally:

‘No. We are now concentrating our energy on the average person. Your air and your water are contaminated. Your forests, jungles, trees and plant life are dying. There are several breaks in your food chain. You have an amount of nuclear and biological weapons which include nuclear and biological contamination. Your planet is overpopulated. Warning: It is almost to the point of being too late unless your people act now. There are better ways of deriving your energy and food needs without causing your planet any damage. Those in power are aware of this and have the capability to put these methods into worldwide use.’

“I asked, ‘Why aren’t we doing it now?’ There was silence, and the whole thing was so strange because I could see that the whole group was thinking and speaking its mind at one time. It felt good because I was a participant in an honest-to-goodness meeting! The best part was that for the first time I was getting direct answers to my questions. ‘Why aren’t we putting these new methods into use now?’

‘Those in power view it [technology for clean energy and abundant food] as a military and security threat.’

“Then I got angry as hell and said, ‘You mean to tell me our people in power have the ability to save and better this planet and they aren’t doing it?!’ The thought that technology was being held back from the public because of paranoia and greed outraged me, and the aliens saw my anger.

References to contaminated air and water, dying forests, overpopulation… The urge to “act now” so as not to damage the planet further… A feeling of rage towards the “paranoia and greed” of those in power. To me, these elements bear a striking and obvious resemblance to the sort of sentiments expressed by those Guardian or Huffington Post commentators with “deep green” sympathies.

One of the most well-known alleged UFO contactees is of course the writer Whitley Strieber, author of Communion (also, incidentally, co-author of 1999 book The Coming Global Superstorm which was the basis for 2004 disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow). Communion and its sequels purport to be about the writer’s own experiences with aliens.

In Communion, published in 1987, following multiple episodes of abduction and contact with the grey alien “visitors”, Strieber describes being the recipient of information about “the danger of impending atmospheric deterioration”, which he later connects to news of the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer.

In Transformation, the 1988 sequel to Communion, he describes a number of alarming dreams, which are possibly linked to his reported experiences with the aliens. These include the destruction of a power station and a vision of giant boulders flying past the Moon. He writes:

Contact with the visitors is almost universally associated with catastrophic predictions. People are told of impending wars, of earthquakes, of meteors directed towards the earth, of polar shifts and the coming of new ages of ice or heat. I myself had been shown graphic depictions of the death of the atmosphere, not to mention the entire planet simply exploding.

Later in the chapter, he speculates that much of this imagery might relate to personal and social upheavals brought on by alien contact, rather than physical disasters. However, he does not rule out the possibility that his premonitions about catastrophic global warming are actually about something real and imminent.

A 2012 article in New Dawn Magazine describes Strieber’s reporting of an episode during which he communicated with, not an alien this time, but a rather weird shamanic sort of individual he calls “the Master of the Key”:

Among other things, the ‘Master of the Key’ spoke about sudden environmental change, and the ending of this current age. There is, he said, a great cycle of climate change, involving “sudden shifts back and forth from ice ages to temperate periods.” Although this cycle is natural, it has been sped up by human activity, and we are about to enter a new ice age, “that will lead to the extinction of mankind, or to a massive reduction in population.” To avoid this, he said, we must find a way to expand off the planet.

Which came first, though, in Strieber’s case – fears of environmental disaster or contact with aliens? In an intriguing passage in Communion, he explains that the environmentalism came first, and that:

… there is always the possibility that I was unconsciously eager to comply with an outcome that I might secretly have longed for. I might want powerful visitors to appear, to save a world that I’m pretty sure is in serious trouble. I’d spent the past three years working on books about nuclear war and environmental collapse. I knew full well that we are going to have a really rough time in the next fifty years. Maybe the idea of visitors coming along and saving our necks was more appealing to me than I might consciously have wished to admit.

There are a number of additional quotes I could have included, by investigators such as David Jacobs and John Mack, which also suggest a connection between alien abduction reports and visions of ecological collapse, but they would threaten to make this post even longer than it already is.

However, I’d like to bring in a final example. It’s a presentation by soft-spoken Oxford University academic Dr Young-hae Chi which was made at a conference held in the UK in 2012 by AMMACH (Anomalous Mind Management Abductee Contactee Helpline) and which you can now see on YouTube. Dr Young-hae comes across as sincere – he clearly believes that aliens are actually abducting and/or communicating with people, and that there is a connection with anthropogenic global warming (he quotes James Hansen during his slideshow and shows graphs from IPCC’s 2007 AR4 report.) One video segment during his presentation shows an interview with a woman who reports standing with hundreds of people in a vast spaceship and watching a movie in which beautiful scenes of mountains and oceans were replaced by scenes in which a virulent black gunge oozes up from the Earth and destroys the biosphere – a representation perhaps, Dr Young-hae speculates, of devastation caused by methane released from melting permafrost.

So – whether or not aliens really exist – there does seem to be a strange connection between extra-terrestrials and environmental doom.

Last year a paper called NASA faked the moon landing — Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax was submitted to the journal Psychological Science, purporting to demonstrate a connection between scepticism about catastrophic man-made global warming and belief in conspiracy theories. In a nutshell, what the authors (Lewandowsky, Oberauer and Gignac) tried to show was that people who are wacky enough to be sceptical about the idea that man-made CO2 is about to bring about the mother of all environmental catastrophes are also wacky enough to believe that NASA faked the Moon landings or that George W. Bush blew up the Twin Towers.

To say that this study was badly conceived and executed would be a gross understatement, and to pronounce it “flawed” would be stretching politeness to its limits. The paper is little more than a smear job. There is not enough space here to list its shortcomings; instead, I will point you to Climate Audit and Geoff Chambers’s blog, where in numerous posts you will find the NASA faked the moon landing study taken apart with forensic precision. Fortuitously, there is also a brand new article in Climate Resistance which will give you an excellent overview.

There is remarkably little evidence, as far as I’m concerned, that CAGW sceptics are particularly prone to “conspiracy theory ideation”. However, I think there is quite a bit of anecdotal evidence that people who report being contacted or even abducted by aliens are prone to worrying or fantasising about ecological catastrophe (one might call it “eco crisis ideation”, perhaps.)

There are some interesting questions that could be asked. Are a greater proportion of people extremely worried about the environment to be found among abductees than among the population at large? Does it work the other way, as well? Is there a correlation between belief in alien abductions and belief in imminent ecological collapse? Is there a negative correlation, perhaps, between belief in alien abductions and climate scepticism?

On the subjects of both environmental disaster and alien visitations, I’m highly sceptical. However, I think this curious connection between the two is a very real one – although what it actually means is still a matter for speculation – and could eventually become the foundation for a hypothesis about the world, or at least about the human mind.

All I need now is for a friendly academic (maybe not Lewandowsky, Oberauer or Gignac) to devise a competent study which will put it to the test. I can’t guarantee that it will end up being promoted in the New York Times or Scientific American (as was the Moon landings paper) but it would at least have the merit of investigating a connection which has been observed in the real world.

The truth – as somebody once said – is out there.

Revenge of the Lawn

A couple of weeks ago I tuned into the PM programme on BBC Radio 4 on my way home from work, and listened to a report by Andrew Bomford from the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden at Wisley. The occasion was a survey being organised by the RHS and Reading University into people’s perceptions of how climate change might be affecting their gardens, and as usual my interest was immediately aroused when I heard the words “climate change”.

Later I found it again on iPlayer, and have written up the segment on my transcript website.

The report is interesting, I find, for several reasons. One is the changing narrative of global warming and the – to my mind – rather reactive nature of the predictions being made about how climate change is going to manifest itself. Many forecasts seem to be more about what was happening when they were being made, rather than about times to come. As Andrew Bomford said, on PM:

…I think a lot of people get quite confused about this and think about global warming – you know, ten years ago, when we talked about this, I think people imagined that right now we’d all be growing cacti and that clearly hasn’t happened.

I commented about this on the Bishop Hill blog (“Unthreaded” page) and also linked to an old National Geographic article from 2003, in which horticulturalist Richard Bisgrove looked forward to the delicious things that might be grown in a hotter, drier England.

Bananas, dates, olives, pomegranates, palms, yucca plants, and other plants not usually associated with the typical English garden may also become increasingly common in the English gardens of the 21st century.

I then got a response from famous commentator ZedsDeadBed, in that person’s typically rather uncompromising style:

Yet more denier quote mining and attempts to mislead. The timeframe in the article you mention is around 70 years. It is also almost exclusively drawn from the work of gardeners, are they really who you look to for your climate science Alex? Or are you just slinging mud around in the hope that some of it sticks?

ZedsDeadBed does have a point about the time frame. The Gardening in the Global Greenhouse report was about climate trends up to the year 2080, which is still 67 years hence – climate-wise, pretty much anything could have happened by then, including, of course, England indeed becoming more like Spain or the south of France. From a starting point in 2003, we are barely a sixth of the way there.

On the other hand, though, who on Earth plans a garden on a 70 or 80-year time scale? Gardeners (of which I am one – I have the scars to prove it, from a weekend of weeding and root removal) tend to want advice they can heed and results they can appreciate during their lifetime. A horizon of ten years, give or take, seems just about right.

As to whether I look to gardeners for climate science, the answer would be: no, not really. A more interesting question, from my point of view, would be: who did the RHS gardeners look to, for authoritative statements about the climate? And the most likely answer would appear to be: they looked to climate scientists such as Myles Allen, who works at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI), which hosts the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP), which in turn was one of the partners of the RHS and Reading University in producing the Global Greenhouse study, over ten years ago.

(By the way, I thought the “slinging mud” remark, in the context of gardening, rather clever, although I also suspect it might have been unintentional.)

Interestingly, there’s an article this year on the Reading University website which does mention the discrepancy between what was predicted then and predicted now.

Vines growing in Scotland, olive trees in England and longer, drier summers – these were among the long-term predictions 11 years ago in a landmark report commissioned by, among others, the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), based on work by scientists at the University of Reading.

Now scientists are conducting the biggest survey of its kind to find how gardeners are responding to the reality of Britain’s changing climate, which has been dominated in recent years by cold spells in winter, extended periods of drought, record rainfall and flooding.

Climate change plant scientist Dr Claudia Bernardini adds:

The latest projections indicate that the climate is likely to affect gardens and gardening in a significantly different way than that predicted in 2002.

Will these latest projections be any better, I wonder, than their predecessors, though?

At the turn of the 21st century, when the future was one of long, hot, parched summers, the English lawn seemed to be doomed, according to some, being “increasingly difficult and costly to maintain.” As late as 2009 it was even suggested that lawns would become a “sign of moral decadence“, due to climate change.

They’re still going on about this. In an article in the Telegraph, back in January, Richard Bisgrove – who had dreamed of English olive groves and banana plantations back in 2003 – “believes people will have to abandon the dream of having the perfect lawn.”

And in the PM report from Wisley earlier this month, RHS gardener Leigh Hunt expressed his doubts about the future of the lawn, because “we’re not going to have those moist, warm summers” (although at the same time he recommended establishing a green roof to soak up water and reflect heat, which seems to suggest that he nevertheless thinks summers will be moist and warm. Go figure.)

No-one really knows what weather patterns will emerge, between now and the mid 2020s – including, it’s becoming ever more apparent, the experts. However, I think it would be a delicious irony if the good old-fashioned English lawn, despite being virtually written off and consigned to climate history’s compost heap, were to thrive and prosper, regardless.

UPDATE

(Just to quickly express my gratitude to Richard Brautigan – wherever he is now – for the use of his wonderful title, which I’ve always loved and intended to borrow at some point. Thank you!)

Circular Economy

Twenty years ago I owned a pretty good portable TV set, which worked perfectly until one day something went wrong with the colour balance and the picture started to take on a sort of weird pink tinge. Taking it to an electrical goods shop which also did repairs, I was dismayed to learn that my TV was basically uneconomical to fix and I’d be better off buying a new one.

It was a shame as I’d become rather attached to my little TV, and wasn’t keen on having to buy another. However, cold logic dictated that I had to get rid of it – either that, or to settle for viewing everything in TV-world through a permanent rose-tinted filter. Luckily, someone then left me their old telly and VCR, as they were leaving the country, so I got what turned out to be a free upgrade (and ended up using the “new” TV for another decade and a half, only parting with it when they finally switched off the analogue signal in the UK last year and the set became unusable.) You can tell that I’m not what you’d call an early adopter.

But I was quite put out to learn that people weren’t repairing old televisions any more. It seemed rather wasteful to me, as it meant throwing away a device that was perfectly good except, maybe, for one small component. Why not, I thought, make things easier to fix? Perhaps these items could be made in modular form, so it would be easier (and cheaper) to remove and replace a faulty part, in the same way that we get new toner cartridges for a printer instead of having to buy a new printer.

That’s why I was interested to listen to an item about washing machines on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, earlier this month – the audio has probably vanished by now, but there’s a transcript of it here. The item was about returning, in a way, to the days when things were fixed rather than junked, and could be more easily rented, as opposed to owned outright.

It’s something that would have been right up my street, twenty years ago, and even now I find the idea appealing. I hate waste, as do most people, which is also why the idea of recycling can be attractive even when we might know or suspect that it is uneconomical. And if it is cheaper in the long run to rent a washing machine, for example, than buy one – as calculated by one Today programme interviewee’s “eco-nazi” daughter – then fair enough.

However, if we did have a “circular economy”, more or less, and consumer goods were built to be far more durable than they are now, what would happen to innovation? If you were renting a washing machine, and if it broke down and was efficiently replaced by the leasing company, would you have the incentive to look around and ask for a more advanced model? Would the leasing company really have an incentive to upgrade their stock (maybe, if they were competing with other similar companies.) If everyone had CRT televisions that were expensive but lasted for twenty years, would this slow down the adoption of more efficient and innovative technology such as LED TVs?

There’s another aspect to this, of course, which is resources; the programme mentions metal, and steel specifically. But steel is not about to run out, and is one of the most recycled materials we have, which means that really, they’re talking about energy (the master resource) – the energy to produce a new washing machine, which would be saved by continuing to use an existing one.

Energy is pretty abundant – we have plenty of coal, and they’re discovering new stores of unconventional oil and gas all the time. But the use of these abundant energy sources is, we’re told, causing dangerous climate change.

So this is really a climate change story, after all. Without the perceived urgency of the planetary crisis, there would be no need to restrict anyone’s use of cheap, fossil-fuelled energy, and so whether we continued to use our old washing machines or scrapped them and bought new ones would be a non-issue.

Well, I’m sceptical about the planetary crisis. I don’t like waste, and tend to recycle and reuse things all the time – it seems to be a personal preference. But I also dislike the thought that the CO2 scare is being used to, in effect, nudge us all into abandoning the idea of abundance.

Sir John Beddington

Sir John Beddington, the current Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK government, is due to be replaced next month and he spent most of this Monday in various radio and TV studios, taking part in some of what will be his final public appearances in that role. He was on BBC Breakfast News, BBC Radio 5 Live and Radio 4 in the morning, and on ITV News and Channel 4 News in the evening.

What did he talk about? Well (not surprising, perhaps, as he’s a Professor of Applied Population Biology) he briefly mentioned the extra billion people there will be in the world at the end of the next 12 years, and he noted the fact that more and more people are living in cities.

However, what he talked mostly about was climate change, and a few of the things he said were quite remarkable.

I have transcribed Monday’s interviews, and here are the links:
BBC Breakfast News
BBC Radio 5 Live
BBC Radio 4 Today programme
ITV News
Channel 4 News

These sequences are interesting in that climate scepticism routinely gets a mention nowadays in the mainstream media. The BBC’s Bill Turnbull quoting Richard Lindzen, Radio 5 Live bringing in Benny Peiser to provide a counter-argument (also transcribed) – all this would have been highly unlikely back in the Copenhagen era, which, lest we forget, was less than four years ago.

The background to the interviews is of course the freezing weather we are experiencing in Britain right now – it is almost April and farmers are digging dead sheep out of snowdrifts. But beyond the UK and its recent string of cold winters, there also looms the great hiatus – 15 years or so with no statistically significant global warming.

With that in mind, here’s the quote I found most intriguing, from the Channel 4 News segment.

Everybody’s sort of looking out of the window and saying “God, it’s damn cold! It’s not global warming – this is nonsense”. “Climate change” is a much better descriptor of what is actually happening in the world, and just one of the symptoms of it is an increase in world temperatures.

So world temperature increase is now “just one of the symptoms” of climate change?

And not a particularly important one, he seems to be implying.

Catastrophic Storm Tide, 1953

Last week saw the 60th anniversary of the great North Sea storms and flooding of 1953, which occurred over the night of 31st January and the following morning, and which wrought terrible havoc across Britain, Holland, Belgium and France, when a strong area of low pressure acted in combination with a high spring tide. A trawl through the newspaper stories at the time makes for some grim reading.

On 1st February 1953, an AP news article reported on the loss of the ferry Princess Victoria (she was one of the first roll-on/roll off ferries), which was sailing between Stranraer in Scotland and Larne in Northern Ireland, a distance of only 20 miles.

Dazed survivors said the 2,694-ton vessel plying between Scotland and Ireland went under after “five hours of hell”.

At 11:13 p.m., hours after the disaster, port officials announced there were only 49 known survivors [Wikipedia says 40 survivors] out of the 177 [Wiki has 179] persons aboard the Princess Victoria.

She was battered by 115-mile-an-hour winds. Huge waves splintered lifeboats before they could be launched.

Terror-struck passengers, all outfitted with lifebelts, plunged into the seething waters as the skipper, Capt. James Ferguson, gave the order to abandon ship. It was barely five miles off the mouth of Belfast harbor in the Irish Sea.

Survivors reaching this port said the Princess Victoria went down within minutes after Ferguson gave the abandon ship order.

She was not the only ship to founder in the storm – many fishing boats and other vessels were also lost that night. The situation was no better on land, however, as the storm surge battered North Sea coastlines, from Scotland down to the Low Countries. AP news again, from 2nd February:

Tidal seas – churned by hurricane winds – flooded thousands of coastal towns and drowned at least 408 persons in England, Holland and Belgium. Fears grew Tuesday that the toll in the three nations might go far higher.

The death of 132 persons on the British carferry Princess Victoria in a hurricane in the Irish Sea Saturday boosted the toll to 540 in two days.

Winds were abating but thousands of relief workers – including many American airmen – worked through the night in near freezing waters to evacuate survivors in flooded English coastal areas. It was estimated that 25,000 persons would have to be moved from their homes.

Hundreds were drowned or made homeless in Scotland and in England along the North Sea coast, at places like Crovie in Scotland, King’s Lynn, Hunstanton and also Canvey Island in Essex. The Sydney Morning Herald reports, 5th February:

The battle to reclaim Britain’s flooded areas is the biggest combined military and civil operation ever staged in peacetime.

It must be won in 12 days before the new high tide which is expected about February 16.

Planes, ships, trucks and trains are carrying millions of sandbags to troops, airmen and civil defence teams of volunteers, who are toiling round the clock to plug the gaps in the sea walls.

However, it was in the Netherlands that the true scale of the catastrophe revealed itself, where almost 2,000 people and 30,000 animals died when the storm surge overcame sea defences and flooded vast areas of farmland, destroying 10,000 buildings. The Age reports, 5th February:

News has been lacking for three days from parts of Holland since the pounding North Sea breached the dykes.

Many Dutch defences which withstood the first onslaught are reported crumbling today, brining danger to the farms and villages which hitherto had escaped.

The North Sea is rolling unhindered across the shattered dykes of the Scheldte estuary islands and south-western Holland covering with salt water an estimated one-sixth of Holland’s total area.

Out of this catastrophe arose the construction some of humanity’s most ambitious flood defences, including the mighty Delta Works in Holland, and the Thames Barrier in London.

As with “Superstorm Sandy” last year in the United States, several events happened coincidentally to make things worse – in the case of the North Sea floods, there was a powerful low-pressure weather system bringing gales, a high spring tide and also the fact that the disaster happened at night, on a Saturday (when local radio stations in Holland were not broadcasting, for example) and in the freezing cold of winter.

If a similar episode of storms and flooding happened again in the North Sea, it would naturally be taken by some commentators (as was Sandy) to be evidence of man-made global warming, which they claim is contributing to the severity of extreme weather events. However, this took place at a time when the globe was relatively cooler – in fact, over 30 years before the late 20th century warming was even a gleam in James Hansen’s eye.

And, although there have been storms and floods in the region after 1953, nothing quite as bad as this has happened here in the decades since.

Some links:

Rome News Tribune – Feb 1, 1953: Howling Storm Sinks British Ferry; 128 Perish Within Sight of Shore:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=J5UFAAAAIBAJ&sjid=UDEDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6320,4761405&dq

The Milwaukee Sentinel – Feb 2, 1953: Hundreds Dead as Floods Sweep Britain, Holland:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=jUMxAAAAIBAJ&sjid=EhAEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6926,2109405&dq

The Sydney Morning Herald – Feb 5, 1953: Hundreds Still Missing:
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/18356010

The Age – Feb 5, 1953: Gale Endangers Flood Rescues: Deaths in Holland Exceed 1200:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=u8NVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=SsMDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6220,3565919&dq

Unlocking the “BBC Climate 28″ Secret

I was going to post today about some recent transcripts, but just had to mark the surprise discovery yesterday of some data that the BBC had long wished to keep under wraps. On 26th January 2006, the BBC had hosted a seminar called “Climate Change – the Challenge to Broadcasting”, and, the following year, blogger Tony Newbery wrote to them, asking to know who was there, especially as there were meant to have been “the best scientific experts” present, whose input would have been key in the forming of BBC policy towards the reporting of climate change.

It’s a long story, and best told by Tony Newbery himself, on his excellent blog Harmless Sky (link below). Suffice it to say that the BBC proved to be more than usually obstructive in releasing the list of names, and events led to Tony’s case being heard in court (Central London Civil Justice Centre) a couple of weeks ago, only to be rejected.

However, things have taken a remarkable turn, following much discussion on climate sceptic blogs such as Bishop Hill and Watts Up With That. Sceptical blogger Omnologos (Maurizio Maurabito) found the list of attendees; it had been in the public domain all along – albeit requiring some considerable patience and skill to locate – on the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive).

As suspected, the list of attendees includes (along with some genuine scientists) a considerable number of people who were not scientists and could reasonably be called climate activists. There’s probably a lot to be gleaned now from researching the backgrounds of the people who were there (including some very senior people at the BBC who have now resigned or “stepped aside” from their roles in the midst of the organisation’s current crisis.)

However, I’d agree with the Register’s Andrew Orlowski that the real story here is that the BBC went to such inordinate lengths to try and prevent the attendees’ names from being revealed. And the full story is not finished yet, I’m sure.

In the meantime, my warmest congratulations go to Maurizio for his tenacity and to Tony for his dogged perseverance.

Some useful links:
Harmless Sky: http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=109
Omnologos: http://omnologos.com/full-list-of-participants-to-the-bbc-cmep-seminar-on-26-january-2006/
Bishop Hill: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/11/12/bbc-climate-28-revealed.html

New Transcript – Prof. Richard Muller at Climate One

Richard Muller, Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley in the United States, is an interesting and controversial figure in the climate debate, and has been in the news quite a lot, in recent years. On this YouTube video, he is being interviewed by Greg Dalton of Climate One, and I’ve transcribed the entire session here.

In some sections of the activist press, such as MSNBC, Prof. Muller is framed, simplistically, as a “climate change denier” who was funded by the evil Koch Brothers to study the Earth’s surface temperature records, and as a result recently underwent a Damascene conversion when he realised that the planet has actually warmed, renouncing his earlier denierhood (is that a real word?) and joining the forces of light and reason. A triumph!

The reality – to anyone who has been following the debate closely, and has more than an ounce of native intelligence – is rather more nuanced.

In the Climate One interview and Q&A, Richard Muller has plenty to say, and not much of it sounds very encouraging for those who are calling (in effect) for the West’s economies to be sacrificed on the altar of CO2 mitigation.

On the infamous Hockey Stick Graph, Michael Mann and the Medieval Warm Period:

What was compelling about what he had done was that he had argued that the signal went back a thousand years. That was shown invalid by the National Academy study. And that it was evident in a wide range of world data. In fact, what had been discovered was that the Hockey Stick that Michael Mann did was derived almost entirely from a few tree ring datasets that were from North America. So, basically, the end of the National Academy study – although it was kind on Mr. Mann – it said that none of the new things that he had come up with his papers in 1998, 1999 – none of them proved out to be correct.

He takes a few swipes at electric cars:

A typical automobile in the United States costs 10 cents per mile to drive, mostly gasoline. The electric cars – the Volt, the Chevrolet Volt, the Nissan Leaf – they cost between 50 cents and 70 cents per mile to drive, when you include the fact that the batteries are only good for 500 recharges. So you don’t save any money.

We have to take actions that will be meaningful in China. Building Tesla automobiles is not a leadership step. They will never be adopted in China.

And at Al Gore:

Back when I first saw An Inconvenient Truth, I predicted that people would discover that most of what is in that movie is either misleading or wrong. And when they discover that, people are deeply offended, and they overreact. I mean, the fact is climate change is a serious problem, but they were oversold with distortions and exaggerations.

And at the insurance industry, who know which side their bread is buttered on (both sides, actually!), and have positioned themselves to benefit handsomely, whatever happens to the climate:

Not that climate change is good but that the perception of climate change is good. You get people to insure against climate change, and then they make more money. That’s certainly true, whether or not – if the climate actually does change, they’ll make more money anyway, because they’re more things to insure. And if it doesn’t change, they make a whole lot more money.

There’s also a statement about winning over CAGW sceptics, which I find somewhat ironic:

So let’s agree on the science, but we don’t do that by consensus, we don’t do this by vote. We do this by addressing the issues raised by other people, and when you’ve addressed those issues, I find myself remarkably capable of convincing sceptics that global warming is real. Then they say “Well okay, I always accepted that. The question is how much it’s caused by humans”.

Actually, there are huge numbers of us who have always accepted that “global warming is real” but think that the important (and unanswered) question is how much it’s caused by humans. That’s been my position from about 2006 and it hasn’t been changed by BEST and their press releases.

Professor Muller’s stance is that the only meaningful action that could halt dangerous future global warming, is if China could be persuaded to convert from coal to natural gas. And when a woman in the audience asks him what the average individual could do, to alleviate global warming, his response is, basically:

In the end – no. You can’t do anything. I’m sorry – you can’t.

To sum up, here’s a bona fide physics professor, whose position is that man-made global warming will be a future danger to us all, but who also believes that:

* The famous Hockey Stick Graph is based on flawed studies.
* The IPCC produces a “policy report, affected by science” but which “doesn’t follow the standards of peer review.”
* The scientists implicated in Climategate behaved in an underhand way.
* Al Gore and others have been guilty of distortions and exaggerations.
* Electric cars may be neat, but they do nothing to mitigate climate change.
* The only thing that would make a difference is if China was converted to natural gas (which is a development that I think most CAGW sceptics would be comfortable with – or indifferent to – anyway.)
* Nothing that ordinary individuals could do would have an impact on climate change.

My summary doesn’t really do the interview justice, and I recommend that you watch the video (and read the transcript) to get the true sense of what he is saying. Then decide whether or not he is an asset to the proponents of CO2 mitigation!

But one thing I think both sides in the climate debate can agree on, whatever their feelings about the man; Professor Richard Muller is certainly not dull.

Norwich Under Water

In a recent interview with Deutsche Welle, neuroscientist Stephen Emmott talked about his play Ten Billion (about which, I will write soon) and also mentioned some of the notable weather events of the summer, including the floods in Manila.

…60 percent of Manila is currently under water. I mean, can you imagine? It’s a capital city of a very populous country – the Philippines. Can you imagine if 60 percent of London were under water, or 60 percent of Washington, D.C.? It’s just unimaginable.

It’s not unimaginable, though. If you have access to history books or the internet, and take an interest in these matters, you will know that Paris had very widespread flooding in 1910 (which I blogged about, last year.) As for the Phillipines, according to the journal Engineering News (January-June, 1913) Baguio City had a record 46 inches of rain over 24 hours in July 1911, an event which caused colossal landslides, destroyed roads and at least one bridge and caused the city to be entirely cut off from the outside world for eight days.

The trouble is, of course, there was no television and no internet in those times. Were the same events to have happened in summer 2012, there can be no doubt that people like Professor Emmott would make quick use of them in interviews to support the case that we’re currently heading for immanent climate doom. But go back in history, and you will find similar or worse events almost wherever you look.

Exactly a hundred years ago it was the turn of Norwich in England, the city where I grew up, to experience catastrophic flooding.

In Norfolk it had rained continuously for two days (Friday 23rd and Saturday 24th August 1912) and after a break for the Sabbath, the storm resumed in earnest on Monday 26th August, 7 inches of rainfall being measured over 30 hours, and many places ending up with five times the monthly average. Powerful winds caused havoc, rivers burst their banks across East Anglia, 40 bridges were destroyed, railways were blocked and the harvest was lost.

After the storm, the river Wensum burst its banks and flood water began to surge into low-lying districts of the city, forcing residents to be evacuated by boat. Here are some newspaper accounts from the time.

DAMAGE ELSEWHERE.

London 27th August. Owing to the floods, Norwich resembles an island city. The railways and telegraphs are interrupted. The flood is the greatest for a quarter of a century. Harvest fields are submerged. Many houses in Huntingdon are flooded, and the inhabitants of parts of Leicester are living in the upper stories, the lower stories being invaded by water. There have been heavy losses of stock in the Midlands.

RAIN FALLS INCESSANTLY FOR SEVENTEEN HOURS. BUSINESS AT A STANDSTILL. CITY IN DARKNESS.

London 28th August. Telegrams dated Norwich, Monday, arrived in London (ninety-eight miles distant) last night. They conveyed the information that it had rained incessantly for seventeen hours, and there were several feet of water in many of the streets, on which boats were plying. Hundreds of people had quitted their houses and taken refuge in the schools on the higher levels, where food was being conveyed to them. Business was at a standstill in the city. The rainfall for twelve hours was 6.32 inches, and it was still raining. The rising waters yesterday stopped the majority of the dynamos on which the electric lighting system is dependent, and the city was plunged into darkness. The flood-waters have washed away a portion of the high mound on which the old Norman castle stands, near the centre of the city. King’s Lynn and the East Coast resorts, Cromer, Sheringham, and Mundesley, are still isolated. A goods train fell through a viaduct which had collapsed near Fakenham, twenty-four miles north-west of Norwich. Several county railway bridges have been destroyed. Further floods are reported in Warwickshire. In the poorer quarters of Norwich yesterday the flood waters reached a depth of thirteen feet. The city is threatened with a shortage of water for domestic purposes, the waterworks pumping station being flooded and the machinery useless. The high-level reservoir contains only sufficient water for two days’ supply.

FLOODS IN ENGLAND

London, Aug 31. The damage in the city of Norwich is estimated at £100,000. The trees are infested with rats, which are taking refuge from the flood. The waters receding have left the flood gauge again visible. It has been hidden for the first time since 1614.

As the above newspaper accounts have mentioned, the floods were not limited to Norwich – they affected many areas in East Anglia and the Midlands. However, Norwich appears to have been hardest hit; four people drowned there, including a local hero – George Brodie, a fish porter – who rescued others before losing his own life.

Not far from where I was born is Cringleford Mill, situated on the River Yare, south of Norwich. During the great flood of 1912, the water rose to what has been described as unprecedented levels, inundating both the mill itself and the mill house and requiring the owner’s daughter to be rescued by boat from a first-floor window. About a mile upstream, there is an area of land, very close to the river and also perhaps threatened by the rising waters, that was then part of the Earlham Hall Estate but which later became a golf course and after that the site for a university campus, where in the 1970s a unit was formed to study the changing climate.

That university is, of course, the University of East Anglia or UEA, and the unit is the Climatic Research Unit, or CRU.

“And it was scientific malpractice”.

The transcript of a recent radio interview with physicist Prof. Richard Muller (leader of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project or BEST), forms the basis of an excellent article by Barry Woods on the website Watts Up With That. For fellow climate obsessives, there’s plenty to find of interest in his dialogue with radio host Betsy Rosenberg and conservative commentator D.R. Tucker.

You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on the Progressive Radio Network website.

New Transcripts from the Climate Debate

One of my current interests is making transcripts out of interesting (to me) bits of audio and video I find on the internet, mostly to do with climate change. One of my favourite sources is BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, which often has good interviews related to this subject and where items seldom last longer than about 6 minutes, making them very quick and straightforward to transcribe.

Here are a few from last week, which saw the Department of Energy and Climate Change, here in the UK, appear to emerge victorious from a battle with the Treasury over cuts to subsidies for onshore wind farms. I say “appear to” emerge victorious, because it looks as though DECC may be conceding that natural gas will play an important part in electricity generation beyond 2030. And that means that carbon targets will be missed.

Before the Today programme excerpts, here’s an item from BBC Radio Scotland, with MP Tim Yeo of the Commons’ Energy and Climate Change Committee describing the rift with the Treasury. And here he is on Radio 4 the same morning. Two days later, Ed Davey – the UK Secretary for Energy and Climate Change – is talking here on Radio 4 and answering (well, actually doing his best to avoid answering) questions on the subject. Finally, an item of related business news here, with Martin Wright, Chairman of the Renewable Energy Alliance giving his reaction to the proceedings.

All this, I realise, will be mostly of interest to fellow die-hard followers of the climate debate.

For anyone reading this blog who finds that topic about as interesting as watching concrete set, there will be a post on a different subject along shortly!