GWPF | 17 Feb 2015
An End To Snow? Not Quite
Whenever environmental doomsayers run out of arguments, they turn to the sea for hope – or rather, fear. Fish stocks are collapsing, and if climate change doesn’t get us, ocean acidification will. But how true are these claims? The panic of popular science writers (and some scientists) notwithstanding, it appears many of the scares related to the oceans have been overblown. –Ivo Vegter, Daily Maverick, 16 February 2015
The scientific community plays an important role in identifying threats to human welfare and the environment, and in researching remedial actions. However, overstating threats or misattributing their causes leads to unwarranted public fear and to the misallocation of the scarce resources dedicated to mitigating these supposed dangers. If that isn’t enough of a deterrent to alarmism, there is the risk that scientists, and the media through which they often communicate, lose credibility, and become seen as the boy who cried wolf. –Ivo Vegter, Daily Maverick, 16 February 2015
1) Are The Oceans Really Dying? – Daily Maverick, 16 February 2015
2) Record-Breaking Cold Grips United States, Cripples Central States – Reuters, 17 February 2015
3) The New York Times‘ Laughable Climate Change Coverage – Reason Online, 16 February 2015
4) Bill Nye Pleads With MSNBC: More Climate Hysteria, Please! – Newsbusters, 16 February 2015
5) And Finally: They Sought Green Utopia — And Found Hunger, Boredom And Mosquitoes – The Spectator, 14 February 2015
Record-breaking cold has gripped the eastern United States while an icy winter storm crippled the nation’s central states. Federal offices in Washington, DC are closed today because of the poor weather. States of emergency have been declared in North Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky, as well as in Washington, DC. —Reuters, 17 February 2015
Boston is having the second-coldest February in its history, according to the National Weather Service. The temperature has averaged 19.6 degrees Fahrenheit, colder than any year since 1934. Since it is so cold and miserable outside, I’ve been spending some time indoors, curled up in front of the computer watching comedy. No, not the 40th anniversary program of Saturday Night Live, but The New York Times newspaper coverage of climate change, which in this context is bitterly humorous. –Ira Stoll, Reason Online, 16 February 2015
Climate change enthusiast Bill Nye appeared on MSNBC, Monday, to lobby the network for more global warming cheerleading and the importance of linking all weather events to the phenomena. Talking to Joy Reid about the cold and snow hitting much of the country, he implored, “…Just say the word climate change. Just, like, ‘It could be climate change. It’s a possible connection to climate change. Is this evidence of climate change?'” Nye demanded, “Could you just toss that in now and then?” A compliant Reid agreed: “Absolutely. I would like to toss that in every single time.” –Scott Whitlock, Newsbusters, 16 February 2015
Dylan Evans, the author of The Utopia Experiment, was one of those oddballs who rather looked forward to the apocalypse, because it promised ‘challenging times ahead’. What Evans calls ‘preparing for the end of the world’ was in actuality deadly boring — getting fires going, keeping dry, trying to prevent small cuts from becoming infected and eating nothing save thick lentil soup. It soon became apparent that ‘the whole experiment had been a huge mistake’. Jittery, with a permanently wide-eyed expression and wanting only to kill himself, Evans was eventually detained under the Mental Health Act in a maximum security psychiatric hospital. Here the students of the mind explained to him that his project had been bonkers from the beginning. –Roger Lewis, The Spectator, 14 February 2015
1) Are The Oceans Really Dying?
Daily Maverick, 16 February 2015
Ivo Vegter
Whenever environmental doomsayers run out of arguments, they turn to the sea for hope – or rather, fear. Fish stocks are collapsing, and if climate change doesn’t get us, ocean acidification will. But how true are these claims?
It may not surprise you to learn that I have a lot of conversations about the supposedly disastrous impact on the planet of human civilisation. As a defender of said civilisation, I’m often at the receiving end of disdain and even hatred from those who believe humans are a plague ravaging the planet.
Often, once the most obvious myths, exaggerations and misconceptions are exhausted, my interlocutor retreats to the water. That is, they point at the sea as the final proof of humanity’s depravity and guilt. After all, what is more obvious than the collapse of fish stocks, and the fact that this time next year, the ocean will be vinegar?
It is a matter of record, if you’re a regular reader of my columns, that exaggeration is common among green-minded people. There are good reasons for this. People tend to believe environmentalists because they appear well-intended, despite the fact that green groups have a marketing job to do. Their careers, like those of any company staffer, depend on meeting revenue targets.
Environmentalists are not immune to using hyperbole, lies of omission, red herrings, and appeals to sentiment, fear, guilt, reward or empathy. These are the exact same techniques that a corporate spin doctor would use in advertising. True, many environmentalists are motivated by a genuine belief that they have science on their side, and that they are doing something good for society (or, if they are more misanthropic, for the earth). However, this is also true for many corporate employees.
Few people knowingly spend their lives doing what they consider to be evil, but motives and good intentions don’t matter half as much as facts and consequences.
If green exaggeration is so common, what about the claims about places most people don’t actually go, like the ocean? Are they real concerns, or are they mere bogeymen to scare us onto the straight and narrow path of green religion?
It is easy to believe that the crises are real. After all, the sea, unlike land, is for the most part not owned by anyone. That means that it is subject to the tragedy of the commons. Because everyone has to look after it, nobody does.
I’ve cited the decline of major fisheries myself as an example of a serious environmental issue that needs to be addressed. (Of course, I believe that the best solution is to establish and trade property rights in fish stocks, and that individual transferrable quotas go some way towards doing so.
Disconcertingly,environmentalists agree.)
But, if the media are to be believed, things are much worse than having to order tuna-friendly dolphin at the sushi bar.
No lesser authority than the New York Times warned that “ocean life faces mass extinction”.
All this sounds terribly serious. However, a bit further into the story, we discover this: “Compared with the continents, the oceans are mostly intact, still wild enough to bounce back to ecological health… Until now, the seas largely have been spared the carnage visited on terrestrial species.”
Well, are the oceans on the brink of a mass extinction event, or are they mostly intact because they’ve been spared carnage? Pick one.
Another typical newspaper account, from the Seattle Times, read: “Ocean acidification, the lesser-known twin of climate change, threatens to scramble marine life on a scale almost too big to fathom.”
The idea of humanity’s disastrous effects on marine ecosystems is far from new. In one of the most cited papers in the field, Jackson (2001), one can find this alarming line:
“Synergistic effects of habitat destruction, overfishing, introduced species, warming, acidification, toxins, and massive runoff of nutrients are transforming once complex ecosystems like coral reefs and kelp forests into monotonous level bottoms, transforming clear and productive coastal seas into anoxic dead zones, and transforming complex food webs topped by big animals into simplified, microbially dominated ecosystems with boom and bust cycles of toxic dinoflagellate blooms, jellyfish, and disease.”
Ouch. If true.
The panic of popular science writers (and some scientists) notwithstanding, it appears many of the scares related to the oceans have been overblown. That is the finding of a recent study entitled “Reconsidering Ocean Calamities”, by eight scientists led by Carlos Duarte, published in the journal BioScience.
“News headlines convey the notion that the ocean is in [sic] imminent risk of ecological collapse,” they write. However, upon testing the accounts of calamities, it turns out they sometimes lack robust evidence. The authors also point the finger at marine research scientists themselves, who they say “may not have remained sufficiently skeptical”.
The authors consider calamities as events that satisfy three criteria: whether they can be attributed to human activity, whether they have spread to a global scale, and whether they cause severe ecosystem damage.
“An analysis of some of the calamities reported in doom and gloom media accounts shows some – at times, severe – disconnect with actual observations. For instance, there is no evidence that ocean acidification has killed jellyfish predators, nor that jellyfish are taking over the ocean, and predictions that the killer algae, Caulerpa taxifolia, was going to devastate the Mediterranean ecosystem have not been realized, despite claims to the contrary from the media.”
For each criterion, they cite examples of issues for which there is robust evidence, equivocal evidence, and weak evidence.
In the first category, we find that fisheries depletion can be attributed to human impact, as expected, and that this also has a serious impact on marine ecosystems. However, the authors disagree that this means, as one CNN story would have it, that the oceans are “on the brink of collapse”.
Harmful algae blooms like red tides and associated hypoxia (depletion of oxygen), are often attributed to human activity. However, the paper finds that the evidence for this claim, or even that it is a global problem, is ambiguous at best.
Ocean acidification is the notion that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels causes an increase in carbonic acid, which in turn causes serious damage to ecosystems because it inhibits calcification in creatures such as corals, molluscs and crustaceans.
Duarte et al. acknowledge that there has been a measurable decrease in ocean pH, and that it is widely expected to reach levels at which it may harm some sea life by the end of the century. However, they dispute claims such as those made in the Seattle Times article cited above, that it has already “killed billions of oysters”, mussels and scallops. The scientific evidence they cite points to other causes.
“There is, as yet, no robust evidence for realized severe disruptions of marine socioecological links from ocean acidification to anthropogenic CO2,” they write, “and there are significant uncertainties regarding the level of pH change that would prompt such impacts.” […]
The scientific community plays an important role in identifying threats to human welfare and the environment, and in researching remedial actions. However, overstating threats or misattributing their causes leads to unwarranted public fear and to the misallocation of the scarce resources dedicated to mitigating these supposed dangers.
If that isn’t enough of a deterrent to alarmism, there is the risk that scientists, and the media through which they often communicate, lose credibility, and become seen as the boy who cried wolf.
2) Record-Breaking Cold Grips United States, Cripples Central States
Reuters, 17 February 2015
Record-breaking cold has gripped the eastern United States while an icy winter storm crippled the nation’s central states.
Federal offices in Washington, DC are closed today because of the poor weather.
Heavy snowfall and ice moving eastward from the Southern Plains hit Missouri, Arkansas, southern Illinois, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, the National Weather Service said.
The storm is headed east, with sleet and freezing rain expected to also affect the south.
States of emergency have been declared in North Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky, as well as in Washington, DC.
Airlines cancelled nearly 2,600 US flights, with the hardest hit airports in North Carolina and Tennessee.
Freezing rain covered Tennessee in ice, closing roads, schools and tourist attractions, including Graceland mansion in Memphis.
3) The New York Times‘ Laughable Climate Change Coverage
Reason Online, 16 February 2015
Ira Stoll
The End Of Snow? Not Quite
Boston is having the second-coldest February in its history, according to the National Weather Service. The temperature has averaged 19.6 degrees Fahrenheit, colder than any year since 1934.
The city has only been at or above the freezing mark for 28 hours in the entire month so far, or 7.7 percent of the time, according to the National Weather Service. It’s so cold the salt and friction of the car tires don’t even melt the snow on the roads, making travel dangerous and difficult.
Speaking of snow, there is plenty of it. The Blue Hill Observatory in Milton, Mass., which says it is home of the longest climate record in the nation, reports that it has an average snow depth of 46 inches, “the greatest snow depth ever measured in our 130 year existence.” The Observatory reports that February 2015 is “the snowiest February on record, as well as the snowiest month on record.” The National Weather Service reports that for Boston, too, it is the snowiest month on record, with at least 58.5 inches of snow so far in February. That brings the season’s total snowfall here this season to 95.7 inches, the city’s third snowiest winter on record, according to the National Weather Service.
Since it is so cold and miserable outside, I’ve been spending some time indoors, curled up in front of the computer watching comedy. No, not the 40th anniversary program of Saturday Night Live, but The New York Times newspaper coverage of climate change, which in this context is bitterly humorous.
There was the February 9, 2014, Times article headlined “The End of Snow,” which ran on the front page of the paper’s Sunday Review section, and which the ever-shrewd Matt Drudge remembered, and linked from his Drudge Report site, amid the snowmaggeddon roughly a year later. “In the Northeast, more than half of the 103 ski resorts may no longer be viable in 30 years because of warmer winters,” the article warned. “It’s easy to blame the big oil companies and the billions of dollars they spend on influencing the media and popular opinion. But the real reason is a lack of knowledge. I know, because I, too, was ignorant until I began researching the issue for a book on the future of snow…. This is no longer a scientific debate. It is scientific fact.”
But that article was just one of many. Others ran not in the opinion sections but in the news columns. “Rising Temperatures Threaten Fundamental Change for Ski Slopes,” was the headline over a December 2012 dispatch from New Hampshire by the Times’ Katharine Q. Seelye. “Scientists say that climate change means the long-term outlook for skiers everywhere is bleak,” she reported. “The threat of global warming hangs over almost every resort, from Sugarloaf in Maine to Squaw Valley in California. As temperatures rise, analysts predict that scores of the nation’s ski centers, especially those at lower elevations and latitudes, will eventually vanish.”
“As Snow Fades, California Ski Resorts Are Left High and Very Dry,” was the headline over another Times news article, from November of 2014. It reported, “The ski industry, which expects higher temperatures, less snow and shorter seasons in the coming decades, is seen a bit like the canary in the coal mine of climatology.”
None of this is to say that global climate change is nonexistent, or that human activity may not contribute to it, or that it may not make sense to consider some policy actions to avert the chances of potentially damaging consequences, such as sea level rise. The Web site Climate Central, an organization of scientists and journalists funded by government and foundations, reports that some climate scientists suggest that global warming could “paradoxically” be behind the “non-stop sucker punches of frigid air,” but acknowledges that “many people who study the dynamics of the atmosphere are dubious about the connection.” The cold and snow could be a matter of “natural fluctuations” or “random shifts,” Climate Central says.
4) Bill Nye Pleads With MSNBC: More Climate Hysteria, Please!
Scott Whitlock
Climate change enthusiast Bill Nye appeared on MSNBC, Monday, to lobby the network for more global warming cheerleading and the importance of linking all weather events to the phenomena. Talking to Joy Reid about the cold and snow hitting much of the country, he implored, “…Just say the word climate change. Just, like, ‘It could be climate change. It’s a possible connection to climate change. Is this evidence of climate change?'”
Nye demanded, “Could you just toss that in now and then?” A compliant Reid agreed: “Absolutely. I would like to toss that in every single time.” Nye then stated the obvious: “MSNBC is, in many ways, regarded as a progressive station.” He spoke to the few conservatives watching MSNBC: “We need you.”
Nye quickly turned insulting, “But if the conservative side are going to continue to deny what 97 percent of the scientists in the world are saying, we’re not going to reach a consensus. We are not going to make progress.”
Before fist bumping Reid goodbye, Nye reiterated the need to make every other word “climate change”:
BILL NYE: Just talk about it…If we were talking about it, we’d raise awareness and get to work and I, as a guy born in the U.S, would like the U.S. to be leading this effort. It’s President’s Day.
The genesis of the segment on Monday was a Time magazine article slamming Pat Sajak for dismissing the winter storms as “weather.” The Time headline dismissed, “Wheel of Fortune Host Tweets About Climate Change Again.” (Of course, climate change activists are not often derided as mere celebrities. James Cameron has been a frequent guest on the network. He’s not derided as the “Titanic director.”)
On January 26, Nye connected the storms in Boston on climate change and sneered, “I know there will be certain viewers who will become unglued.”
A transcript of the February 16 Reid Report segment is below:
5) And Finally: They Sought Green Utopia — And Found Hunger, Boredom And Mosquitoes
The Spectator, 14 February 2015
Roger Lewis
A review of The Utopia Experiment by Dylan Evans reminds us that designs for living always end in tears, or worse
Dylan Evans, the author of this book, was one of those oddballs who rather looked forward to the apocalypse, because it promised ‘challenging times ahead’. If, in the not too distant future, famines and droughts more or less wipe us out, that will be our own fault for allowing population levels to reach an unsustainable nine billion — the predicted figure for 2050. How much better the planet will be with a select handful living in their villages of yurts, log cabins, teepees and straw-bale huts, the children gambolling happily ‘amidst the bracken and the trees’. The air will be cleaner. Wildlife ‘will make a comeback’. Neighbours will help each other out. People will be fitter as a result of their manual labour.
Evans couldn’t wait to create his retrograde society, where waif-like girls ‘with long, tawny dreadlocks’ would be doling out ‘bowls of bean stew from a steaming cauldron’. He sold his house, gave up his academic career and moved to a field near Inverness. He looked at an adjacent waterfall and thought it could ‘generate electricity’. He gazed at an acre of scrubland and believed he could ‘keep a few pigs and chickens’. He spotted a deer and, though he had no butchery or tanning training, imagined turning its hide into shoes and gloves.
Fair play to Evans: by the time he came to write this book he realised he was delusional. Though he had no difficulty recruiting like-minded eccentrics to join him in his ‘experimental community’ (a former Royal Marine who had ambitions to be a cobbler; a computer-programmer ‘passionate about vegetables’; a teacher who’d once met an Inuit; a graffiti artist from Belfast; a Cambridge student keen on the recorder), Evans admits that his utopia was doomed to failure. It attracted only idealists and disaffected romantics when what was needed were people with practical skills, like plumbers, carpenters and engineers. Soon the militant vegetarians were squabbling with the meat-eaters, and the small group began to disintegrate. One member even started to invent his own religion, building a shrine with ‘carefully arranged’ bits of driftwood and old coins.
Those who didn’t behave like Gandalf became like ‘hobbits on speed’, says Evans. He himself was soon fed up with sleeping under rancid fleece blankets and wearing clothes woven from sisal ‘to ward off mosquitoes’. You couldn’t make a brew, as ‘there wouldn’t be tea in Scotland after civilisation collapsed’. There was neither soap nor detergent. ‘We got used to a thin layer of slime covering the pans and bowls.’ There was no toothpaste or lavatory paper — the sanitary arrangements were grotesque. There was also no music.
What Evans calls ‘preparing for the end of the world’ was in actuality deadly boring — getting fires going, keeping dry, trying to prevent small cuts from becoming infected and eating nothing save thick lentil soup. It soon became apparent that ‘the whole experiment had been a huge mistake’. Jittery, with a permanently wide-eyed expression and wanting only to kill himself, Evans was eventually detained under the Mental Health Act in a maximum security psychiatric hospital.
Here the students of the mind explained to him that his project had been bonkers from the beginning. He fretted unduly about global warming and ‘the looming energy crisis’, he was convinced that deforestation would result in soil erosion, and that with no trees he’d be unable to build canoes and go fishing once the supermarkets had vanished… Evans, the doctors concluded, was already craving the abyss and in the throes of panic-attacks and a breakdown. Bored sick in utopia, Evans had been bored to distraction before, when he was an academic, seeing no ‘passion or joy’ in his pampered and safely salaried public-sector existence.
That’s one explanation: that no sane person shouts, ‘Stuff your pension!’ and clears off to a field near Inverness. Another is that designs for living always end in tears, or worse. From the Russian Revolution to Jonestown, programmes for human happiness come a cropper.
