Science and Pseudo-Science

Faithful Circle – A response to Noam Chomsky’s book ‘Fateful Triangle’

Israel has never fired a shot in the defense of American interests

By Jay Knott | September 17, 2010

Hypotheses and Tests
1. Hypotheses

“Dear Mr. President: We write to affirm our support for our strategic partnership with Israel, and encourage you to continue to do [so] before international organizations such as the United Nations. The United States has traditionally stood with Israel because it is in our national security interest and must continue to do so. Israel is our strongest ally in the Middle East and a vibrant democracy. Israel is also a partner to the United States on military and intelligence issues in this critical region. That is why it is our national interest to support Israel at a moment when Israel faces multiple threats from Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the current regime in Iran.” – Jewish Virtual Library [1].

This is the beginning of the resolution passed by the US Senate on June 21 2010, supporting Israel’s attack on a convoy of unarmed aid ships headed toward Gaza, which killed nine people.

It begins with four sentences, each one of which asserts that Israel is a strategic asset of the USA. But if Israel is such an ally, why the need to emphasize it? It’s as if the senators are arguing with someone who says that Israel is NOT as useful as we tend to believe. Whoever that is, it’s not Noam Chomsky. Both left-wing thinkers like Chomsky and establishment politicians reinforce the idea that US interests coincide with those of Israel, though they differ on how good US interests are. Sometimes, when people say something too stridently, it is because they secretly know that it is false.

This review was sparked by an online critique of Noam Chomsky’s views on the Middle East by Jeff Blankfort, a reply to it, and the internet discussions around them [2], [3]. Several contributors to these discussions come from traditional anti-racist left-wing backgrounds, but, unlike most of the left, have taken it to its logical conclusion, opposing Jewish power as the most important form of ethnically-based oppression in the West today.

Chomsky fan Jeremy Hammond [3] urges Blankfort’s supporters to read Chomsky’s “Fateful Triangle” [4]. So I did. I am not impressed by Chomsky’s fame nor by the book’s approximately two thousand references. I look at the arguments.

Professor Chomsky made one of the greatest discoveries in twentieth-century science, the language instinct, in a 1959 critique of psychologist B. F. Skinner [5]. Because he’s a genius, we expect more of him than unsubstantiated platitudes. But everyone makes mistakes. Einstein spent the better part of his career trying to explain why the universe is not expanding, and Chomsky didn’t figure out that there are genes for grammar [6].

He flayed Skinner on the vagueness of his terms, and for changing the meaning of words when convenient. Chomsky therefore knows that vagueness makes a hypothesis untestable, and therefore unscientific.

Chomsky brought clarity to the science of language development, but he is surprisingly contradictory on the politics of the Middle East, for a man with such a scientific, logical brain. For example, on the one hand, he denies the importance of the Israel Lobby. After all, if Israel is helping US ‘elites’ maintain their ‘hegemony’ in the ‘region’, they would hardly need a lobby to remind them of it. Universities and co-operatives are tentatively discussing a boycott of Israel. Chomsky argues against a boycott of Israeli produce, because the Lobby would call us ‘hypocrites’, unless we boycott the US too [7]. So he thinks this ‘unimportant’ Lobby could undermine a boycott of Israel by mere accusations.

By page 4, Chomsky already makes it clear that he defends the Jewish State. He criticizes its current policies, which he says are caused by American Zionists, who cause its “moral degeneration and ultimate destruction”. In my pamphlet “The Mass Psychology of Anti-Fascism” [8], I sarcastically cited Stephen Zunes [9] for claiming America was responsible for pushing poor little Israel into Lebanon in 2006. I didn’t realize how close Zunes’s attempt to make excuses for Jewish murderers was to Chomsky’s position until I read ‘Fateful Triangle’. Chomsky and his followers want us to believe that Israeli ethnic cleansing has ‘degenerated’ since 1948 because of American influence. This means the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948 was morally superior to those in Lebanon in 1982, but the Hanukkah slaughter of 2008-9 was worse.

He says US ‘support’ has blocked Israel trying more moral policies, to the ‘despair’ of progressive Israeli Jews, on page 442. There is a cruder version of this ‘corruption’ narrative. It is part of the almost universally believed story of Jews as eternal victims. It enables Jewish Americans to support apartheid whilst thinking of themselves as liberals. They blackmail the left into accepting a much softer attitude toward Jewish supremacy than toward white identity.

Chomsky is by no means the worst example of chutzpah in the left. He is contradictory rather than duplicitous. He exposes Jewish emotional blackmail. He is contemptuous of professional Holocaust survivors like Elie Wiesel. He is fearless and merciless at ridiculing the hypocrisy and hysteria for which American Jewish organizations are notorious, who claim that critics of the Lobby are anti-Semitic. Some on the left also harass and slander pro-Palestinian peace activists. Since Israel is the only beneficiary of these divisive tactics, we call them ‘crypto-Zionists’.

But Chomsky’s main weakness is his failure to scientifically test his assertion that Israel is an ally of the USA. On page 3, without evidence, he says that US policy favors “a Greater Israel that will dominate the region in the interests of American power”.

To this end, Chomsky assumes that Arab nationalism is anti-West, whereas Jewish nationalism is pro-West. The former was allied to the Soviet Union. But this is at root a circular argument – the US supports Israel because it is an ally, and Israel is an ally because the US supports it. The reason some Arab leaders temporarily turned to Russia is because they were rejected by America, and the main reason for that is the influence of Israel. Chomsky confuses cause and effect.

The phrase ‘control of the oil’ is thrown around by Chomsky and his circle as liberally as the word ‘region’. It’s a vague leftist feel-good dumbing-down designed to prevent us from thinking through exactly what ‘control’ means, why precisely cruise missiles are useful to oil companies, and if killing Palestinian children helps US interests.

At this point, I should define ‘US interests’. I mean the interests of the US capitalist class. Unconditional support for Israel is obviously against the interests of the majority of Americans, who belong to the proletariat. But in that respect, it doesn’t differ from other unethical US foreign policies. What differentiates Zionism is that it is opposed to the interests of most of the ruling class too.

I used a Marxist phrase there. Chomsky prefers saying ‘elites’ rather than ‘bourgeoisie’ in his bestselling books. Even if the ‘elites’ really do ‘perceive’ it is in US interests to throw seven million dollars a day into a black hole, they are mistaken, and Palestine Solidarity has the task of explaining that to them and to those who work and vote for them.

Chomsky claims that the US supports Israel because Israel supports US war crimes – “Israel showed how to treat third-world upstarts properly” (page 29). This puts the cart before the horse. Right after World War II, Zionists were third-world upstarts themselves, engaged in terrorism in Palestine against an imperialist power. President Truman supported these upstarts, and later, when they were no longer upstarts, president Eisenhower supported upstarts against them.

This shows two things:

1. America doesn’t automatically oppose upstarts, and
2. Israel persuaded America to support its fight against upstarts which threaten Israel, rather than America supporting Israel because it combats upstarts which oppose America.

Israel has never fired a shot in the defense of American interests. But its friends in the media make it look as if the two countries’ enemies are the same, by amalgamating very different Arab and Muslim causes and parties. Most of these oppose Israel in principle – only a very small subset are inherently anti-American. It is in America’s interests to divide them. It is in Israel’s interests to prevent this. And it is in humanity’s interest to divorce America and Israel.

Chomsky claims that to be a Zionist means a bi-national state, with the right of ‘self-determination’ of the two nations within Palestine. It’s clear which of the nations would dominate the other, but Chomsky appears to be unaware of this.

To his credit, on page 442 of his book, Chomsky predicted the defeat of the Israeli Defense Forces, which didn’t happen until seven years later, in Lebanon, in 2006. The Gaza flotilla massacre of 2010 was another disastrous error for Israel, leading to a split with Turkey, formerly its most important ally in the ‘region’. There is an opportunity to start to undermine Zionism, the only remaining example of serious racial oppression in the Western world. Is Chomsky on board?

Contradicting his view that Israel obeys America, Chomsky refers to the normal state of politics in the USA as ‘complete obedience’ to Zionist opposition to freedom of speech, on page 337, under the heading ‘The West Falls Into Line’. He also says how the allegation of ‘anti-Semitism’ is used to blackmail the elite political spectrum in Western countries into supporting Jewish supremacy in the Middle East, but then he drops the ball, reiterating hackneyed rhetoric about US policy. It’s not really US policy. It is the policy of supporters of a foreign power pretending to be pro-American.

Note that my argument does not imply promoting patriotism. It means saying, in effect, IF you are a patriotic American, you should oppose your country’s ardent support for Israel. Neither does it imply anti-Semitism. It means recognizing that the interests of most of the inhabitants of the USA would be served by reducing support to Israel. The interests of the Jewish minority would be served by increasing it. This should not be controversial. In particular, the American left, with its keen awareness of ‘privilege’, should be able to listen to this argument. But mostly, it cannot.

At one point, Chomsky discusses the hypocrisy of the Israeli leaders in using pogroms against Jews in Russia in the nineteenth century as an excuse for doing the same thing in Lebanon in 1982. But he doesn’t try to question the view that Jews have always been victims, wherever they have wandered. This myth was reiterated by Republican president George Bush Senior when he was trying to defend himself against the ‘anti-Semitism’ slur by groveling to the Lobby in 1991.

On page 446, Chomsky describes young American Jews, raised on the handouts of the Anti-Defamation League, having a ‘corrupting’ effect on Israel. He must also be very aware of the corruption of Israeli teenagers effected by taking them to the ruins of German concentration camps and teaching them to hate [10], or the Hillel Jewish campus organization which teaches young American Jews that Israel is their homeland. He doesn’t go far enough in criticizing the obsession with ‘the’ Holocaust which gets more intense the further it recedes into history.

After complaining about Israel’s rape of Lebanon in the nineteen-eighties for a few hundred pages, Chomsky resorts to the ‘region’ trick to try to explain it. Page 442:

“The US has been more than pleased to acquire a militarized dependency, technologically advanced and ready to undertake tasks that few are willing to endure – support for the Guatemalan genocide, for example – while helping to contain threats to American dominance in the most critical region in the world, where ‘one of the greatest material prizes in world history’ [the Saudi oilfields] must be firmly held”.

On page 462, he regrets Israel’s “dependence on the US with the concomitant pressure to serve US interests”. One would expect that the USA would not give a country $7 million a day, more than all other countries combined – without demanding that it serves its interests. But the predictions of this hypothesis fail. Israel feels no pressure at all to serve US interests, and Israeli politicians boast of American subservience, whilst their American accomplices harass those who state this simple truth. This is true whether you are a media mogul, a movie star, a politician, or an anti-war activist.

At the beginning of his book, Chomsky claims that Israel helps the US by protecting the Saudi oilfields. At the end, he says it blackmails the US by threatening to launch a nuclear attack on this great material prize. Iran could also greatly harm the Western world by blocking the Strait of Hormuz through which fleets of oil tankers pass – but somehow, America stands up to Iran. Why can’t it stand up to Israel? Because it’s an asset?

Chomsky expends effort showing how the US media is biased in favor of Israel and against Palestinians, but he doesn’t call a spade a spade: the only serious racial prejudice left in America is pro-Jewish bias. That is why Israeli children’s deaths are reported at a rate seven times higher than those of Palestinian’s [11].

2. Tests

I propose testing Chomsky’s views using the time-honored methods of asking
– what does the theory predict will happen, and does it actually happen?
– is the theory the simplest explanation of what happens?
– what would we expect to happen if the theory was not true, and does it actually happen?
– is there an alternative theory which better explains what happens?

There are two rival hypotheses:

1. The main reason for the USA’s unconditional support for Israel’s unique persistence in imposing apartheid is that it is in US capitalist interests
2. The main reason for this support is the power of American Jewish organizations
Chomsky defends, with contradictions, the first hypothesis. Mearsheimer and Walt defend the second.

Let’s test each theory using scientific methods. Politics is not an exact science like physics, but we can at least try.

1. The basic principle of science: does Chomsky’s hypothesis [4] lead to a simpler explanation of events than Mearsheimer and Walt’s Israel Lobby theory [12]?

2. An abstract test. ‘Abstract’ does not mean ‘vague’, but is scientifically respectable. Without any concrete examples, one can test the Chomsky hypothesis as follows: it is reasonable to say that, for any two nations, they have areas where their interests coincide, and areas where they clash. The USA never acts against Israel’s interests, with some very minor exceptions. This means that, without giving any examples, we can say that America always supports Israel’s interests when their interests collide.

3. Falsification: ask what would be the case if Chomsky’s hypothesis is wrong. What would poor little Israel do if it were NOT serving US interests, if Americans ceased to corrupt it? Would it let the Palestinians back, decommission its nuclear weapons, and abandon its racial definition of citizenship?

4. Which of the arguments depends on the scientific methods outlined above, and which on vague, shifting definitions?

Chomsky makes, without argument, the assertion that if it were not for Israel’s ‘perceived geopolitical role’, a trite, content-free phrase, the Israel Lobby would ‘probably’ be unable to persuade the ‘elite’ to support Israel (page 22). So why do they bother, then? Why do Jews rant and rave in the media about ‘anti-Semitic incidents’ whenever anyone in the US makes timid criticism of their country? It’s not that politicians perceive that Israel is an asset, it’s just that they know what happens to those who perceive otherwise – the Lobby makes some calls, and they lose their jobs [13]. Chomsky’s theory that Israel is an ally would predict the Israel Lobby would barely exist – real allies of the US like Japan don’t have energetic, well-funded lobbies in Washington DC, ready to call on hordes of faithful followers to phone politicians and write letters to newspapers defending their nations’ interests. They don’t need them. Chomsky’s theory fails the test.

There is more to it than just rich Jewish organizations like the ADL and AIPAC. There is social pressure not to mention the Lobby. Whereas no-one accuses Chomsky of racism for claiming that Jews suffer for the interests of other Western peoples, in complete defiance of the evidence, those of us who point out that the reverse is true, with the facts on our side, are accused of anti-Semitism. If Israel were an asset, there would be no need for this manipulation of Western European culture, which has a unique record of abandoning racism, despite what the left tells us.

The ‘Israeli Sparta’ argument put forward in the Wall Street Journal etc. by Jewish neoconservatives posing as classical scholars can easily be disposed of. Sparta defended Greece. Israel does not defend America. On page 21, ignoring the evidence, Chomsky agrees with the pseudo-Hellenists, saying that the Israeli Defense Forces provides a backup for the US armed forces. In fact Israel has never been able to supply soldiers for any US operation in the region. In the Iraq crisis of 1990, Syria gave military support to the US, but not Israel. Israel was unable to respond even when Iraqi missiles landed on Tel Aviv, because it would have split the coalition invading Iraq. Chomsky’s argument fails the test.

Chomsky reviewed ‘The Israel Lobby’ [12] when it broke through the censors of the US liberal left [14]. “Another problem that Mearsheimer and Walt do not address is the role of the energy corporations. They are hardly marginal in US political life… How can they be so impotent in the face of the Lobby?” he asks [15]. Chomsky’s review of ‘The Israel Lobby’ implies the oil companies CANNOT be powerless in the face of a mere lobby. But the assumptions behind Chomsky’s question don’t stand up. Mearsheimer and Walt DO address the role of these companies, explaining how, if they had their way, US policy in the Middle East would change. Leftists in America half-adopt Karl Marx’s ‘materialist conception of history’ without naming it (they say ‘corporate greed’ instead). It is one of the few aspects of Marxism which can be tested, and it fails miserably to explain the US position on the Israel/Palestine question. The interests of big corporations do not lead to invading Lebanon, persecuting Palestine, and stirring up Islamic extremism.

Why has the US consistently supported Israel, and inconsistently supported Arab nationalists? Egypt’s Nasser, Iraq’s Hussein and Syria’s al-Assad all had a pretty good record of keeping down ‘upstarts’, particularly radical Islamic ones, so why not, according to Chomsky’s logic, ally with the radical Arab nationalist states? The US has allied with various Middle Eastern states at various times, but only its support for Israel is invariant. Again, these questions constitute a test of Chomsky’s hypothesis. You try to figure out what the hypothesis would predict, then try to find counter-examples, where the actual events are incompatible with the predicted ones. It isn’t difficult, particularly in this case.

Chomsky claims that one reason America supports Israel is because it is a ‘laboratory’ for US military and surveillance technology. This is easily tested by asking if any other country would be eager to take Israel’s place.

The argument that oil is the main reason for US support for Israel is too trivial to waste time on. When America attacks a Middle Eastern country, the left chants ‘no war for oil’. If the policy causes the price of oil to drop, capitalism benefits. If the price rises, the oil companies benefit. Either way, the left trumpets the evidence. The ‘oil’ explanation cannot be falsified. It is not wrong – it is not even a valid hypothesis.

In a similar violation of scientific methodology, Chomsky tries to use the fact that the USA approves of Israeli war crimes as evidence that the dog wags the tail, that Israel serves Uncle Sam. In fact, this ‘evidence’ contributes nothing at all to our understanding of the relationship between the two states. It is equally compatible with the two opposing arguments, so it is not a test which selects which of them are true. Chomsky does give some of the same examples of American subservience as Mearsheimer and Walt in ‘The Israel Lobby’ [12]

– US presidents mildly criticize Israel building settlements on Palestinian land
– Israeli politicians express open contempt for the supposedly most powerful man in the world, bragging of how ‘The Jewish Lobby’ (their words) will bring this uppity goy into line
– And so it comes to pass

but Chomsky doesn’t ask the obvious question – is this all

1. an elaborate charade to make it look as if the Lobby can determine US policy regarding Israel in order to cover up for white/US/capitalist hegemony, by diverting attention to the Jews, or
2. is the most elegant/economical/likely explanation that Jewish power trumps Western European interests in the USA?

By means of the Lobby, the tail wags the dog. Its the simplest, clearest, and most economical explanation of the facts. This is how science progresses. A good example of why simpler is better can be found in a recent paper on the evolution of social insects such as ants and bees [16]. We should try to use the same criterion in the study of human societies.

Like everything else, the question of Jewish control of the media can be approached emotionally. I prefer the scientific approach. I approach the argument about Jewish control of the press, etc., on its merits, not on how much it reminds people of ancient Tsarist calumnies. Surely the most simple explanation of the fact that

“Israel has been granted a unique immunity from criticism in mainstream journalism and scholarship” (page 31)

is because Jews are overrepresented in mainstream journalism and scholarship, and quite a few of these Jews defend Jewish interests. This kind of statement is acceptable in Israel, whose inhabitants are mostly proud of what they call ‘the Jewish Lobby’ in America. It is acceptable in countries like Malaysia. Why is it so difficult for us?

The answer is obvious. We are afraid of being anti-Semitic. I found a solution to this problem. I stopped caring about it.

1. – US Senate Resolution, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/ussen062110.html
2. – Jeff Blankfort, http://palestinethinktank.com/2010/07/21/jeff-blankfort-chomsky-and-palestine-asset-or-liability
3. – Jeremy Hammond, http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/07/rejoinder-to-criticism-of-chomsky-asset-or-liability
4. – ‘Fateful Triangle’, Noam Chomsky, South End Press, 1999
5. – “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior”, Noam Chomsky, http://cogprints.org/1148/1/chomsky.htm
6. – ‘The Language Instinct’, Steven Pinker, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, November 2000
7. – Alison Weir, radio interview with Noam Chomsky – http://www.wsradio.com/internet-talk-radio.cfm/shows/CNI:-Jerusalem-Calling/archives/date/selected/07-08-2010.html
8. – ‘The Mass Psychology of Anti-Fascism’, Jay Knott, 2008, http://pacificaforum.org/mass
9. – ‘How Washington Goaded Israel Into War’, Stephen Zunes, http://www.antiwar.com/orig/zunes.php?articleid=9605, August 2006
10. – ‘Defamation’ – a movie about the Anti-Defamation League – http://ishare.rediff.com/video/others/defamation-movie-trailer/888451
11. – ‘If Americans Knew’ media analyzes, http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/
12. – ‘The Israel Lobby’, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2007
13. – “They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby”, Paul Findlay, Lawrence Hill Books, 1989
14. – ‘The Atlantic’ magazine rejected the original ‘Israel Lobby’ paper, on the transparently false grounds of ‘poor scholarship’. When it came out as a book, the authors toured the USA to promote it, but found that local papers didn’t send reporters to cover it. The Lobby demonstrated the authors’ hypothesis by trying to suppress it.
15. – ‘The Israel Lobby?’ – Noam Chomsky, 2006, http://www.zcommunications.org/the-israel-lobby-by-noam-chomsky
16. – “Natural selection alone can explain eusociality”, Nowak, Tarnita and Wilson – http://www.physorg.com/news201957206.html

September 17, 2010 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, Israel, Jewish Virtual Library, Middle East, Noam Chomsky, Stephen Zunes, United States | Leave a comment

I Am So Tired of Malthus

By Willis Eschenbach | Watts Up With That? | September 8, 2010

Daily we are deluged with gloom about how we are overwhelming the Earth’s ability to sustain and support our growing numbers. Increasing population is again being hailed as the catastrophe of the century. In addition, floods and droughts are said to be leading to widespread crop loss. The erosion of topsoil is claimed to be affecting production. It is said that we are overdrawing our resources, with more people going hungry. Paul Ehrlich and the late Stephen Schneider assure us that we are way past the tipping point, that widespread starvation is unavoidable.

Is this true? Is increasing hunger inevitable for our future? Are we really going downhill? Are climate changes (natural or anthropogenic) making things worse for the poorest of the poor? Are we running out of food? Is this what we have to face?

Fortunately, we have real data regarding this question. The marvelous online resource, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics database called FAOSTAT, has data on the amount of food that people have to eat.

Per capita (average per person) food consumption is a good measure of the welfare of a group of people because it is a broad-based indicator. Some kinds of measurements can be greatly skewed by a few outliers. Per capita wealth is an example. Since one person can be a million times wealthier than another person, per capita wealth can be distorted by a few wealthy individuals.

But no one can eat a million breakfasts per day. If the per capita food consumption goes up, it must perforce represent a broad-based change in the food consumption of a majority of the population. This makes it a good measure for our purposes.

The FAOSTAT database gives values for total food consumption in calories per day, as well as for protein and fat consumption in grams per day. (Fat in excess is justly maligned in the Western diet, but it is a vital component of a balanced diet, and an important dietary indicator.) Here is the change over the last fifty years:

Figure 2. Consumption of calories, protein, and fat as a global average (thin lines), and for the “LDCs”, the Least Developed Countries (thick lines) . See Appendix 1 for a list of LDCs.

To me, that simple chart represents an amazing accomplishment. What makes it amazing is that from 1960 to 2000, the world population doubled. It went from three billion to six billion. Simply to stay even, we needed to double production of all foodstuffs. We did that, we doubled global production, and more. The population in the LDCs grew even faster, it has more than tripled since 1961. But their food consumption stayed at least even until the early 1990s. And since then, food consumption has improved across the board for the LDCs.

Here’s the bad news for the doomsayers. At this moment in history, humans are better fed than at any time in the past. Ever. The rich are better fed. The middle class is better fed. The poor, and even the poorest of the poor are better fed than ever in history.

Yes, there’s still a heap of work left to do. Yes, there remain lots of real issues out there.

But while we are fighting the good fight, let’s remember that we are better fed than we have ever been, and take credit for an amazing feat. We have doubled the population and more, and yet we are better fed than ever. And in the process, we have proven, once and for all, that Malthus, Ehrlich, and their ilk were and are wrong. A larger population doesn’t necessarily mean less to eat.

Of course despite being proven wrong for the nth time, it won’t be the last we hear of the ineluctable Señor Malthus. He’s like your basic horror film villain, incapable of being killed even with a stake through the heart at a crossroads at midnight … or the last we hear of Paul Ehrlich, for that matter. He’s never been right yet, so why should he snap his unbeaten string?

APPENDIX 1: Least Developed Countries

Africa (33 countries)

Angola
Benin
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Central African Republic
Chad
Comoros
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Djibouti
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Gambia
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Lesotho
Liberia
Madagascar
Malawi
Mali
Mauritania
Mozambique
Niger
Rwanda
São Tomé and Príncipe
Senegal
Sierra Leone
Somalia
Sudan
Togo
Tanzania
Uganda
Zambia

Eurasia (10 countries)

Afghanistan
Bangladesh
Bhutan
Cambodia
East Timor
Laos
Maldives
Myanmar
Nepal
Yemen

Americas (1 country)

Haiti

Oceania (5 countries)

Kiribati
Samoa
Solomon Islands
Tuvalu
Vanuatu

September 9, 2010 Posted by aletho | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Wind Energy’s House of Cards

By Steve Goreham | August 31, 2010

The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently issued their 2009 Wind Energy Report. Brian Smith, chair of the IEA Wind Executive Committee, states that wind member countries “installed more than 20 gigawatts of new wind capacity” (nameplate capacity). The report was written by representatives of 20 member countries, consisting of 14 European nations, Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, Mexico, and the United States.

The report is very optimistic about wind energy’s prospects. Member nations report on “how they have progressed in the deployment of wind energy, how they are benefitting from wind energy deployment, and how they are devising strategies and conducting research to increase wind’s contribution to world energy supply.” But a deeper analysis shows that the wind industry is a house of cards built on a foundation of sand.

The house of cards is a global industry based entirely on subsidies, price guarantees, and mandates. Wind generation systems are not deployed anywhere in the world without extensive government financial or mandated support. Fourteen of the 20 IEA member nations use feed-in tariffs (FITs) to force utility companies to buy electricity from wind farms at above market rates. Examples are FITs used by Finland, Germany, Greece, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, which are set in the range of 7.8-12.1 Eurocents per kilowatt-hour, equal to 11.2-17.4 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour. These are subsidized wholesale prices, yet significantly above the average U.S. retail price of 9.7 cents per kilowatt-hour. Nine of the twenty nations mandate that utilities supply a percentage of electricity from renewables. Nations that have provided little government support for wind, such as Japan, Korea, Mexico, and Norway, have seen little growth in installations.

In the U.S., the 2009 Recovery Act authorizes a direct cash grant of 30% of the total value to wind projects. Alternatively, the federal government provides a 30% investment tax credit, or a 2.1 cents per kW-hr production subsidy. State governments add loan guarantees, further investment tax credits, and the forbearance of property and sales taxes. Twenty-nine states have enacted Renewable Portfolio Standards to force utilities to purchase renewable energy, primarily wind. These mandates raise the price of wind energy, a further subsidy to the industry. In total, taxpayers are subsidizing 30-50% of the price U.S. wind energy installations. Wind must be subsidized because it is much more expensive than electricity from coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, and nuclear sources. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, wind-generated electricity is about 80% more expensive than coal-fired power, and off-shore wind is significantly more expensive. The IEA representatives from Denmark and the United Kingdom estimate costs for offshore wind at roughly double the cost of onshore wind. The planned Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound reportedly will deliver electricity at a whopping 27 cents per kW-hour, compared to the Massachusetts average price of 16 cents per kW-hour and the U.S. average of 9.7 cents.

Advocates claim that subsidies are needed to help wind energy move down the learning curve to become cost competitive with other technologies. But wind turbines have been deployed for more than 20 years. As of 2009, the United States had installed about 33,000 wind turbine towers. World installations have exceeded 140,000 turbines. When will this cost competitiveness be achieved?

Despite the growing number of installations, total wind energy costs are increasing. Wind installation costs per kilowatt-hour decreased from the early 1990s until 2001, but have been rising since. For example, U.S. installations reached a cost low of $1,285 per kw-hr in 2001, but have since risen steadily to $2,080 per kw-hr in 2009, an increase of 62%. It’s unlikely that electricity from wind will ever be competitive with conventional fuel sources.

A close read of the IEA Wind Report reveals issues with actual wind turbine operating lifetimes and maintenance. Wind turbines that were installed in the 1990s are now being replaced in Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, and other nations. In the harsh weather environments of high-wind corridors, many of these turbines have not reached the 20-year lifetimes claimed by manufacturers. In comparison, operating lifetimes for coal-fired power plants consistently reach 50 years.

Very costly repairs are often required to maintain wind turbine operation. Japan reports that lightning hits and typhoons have damaged “a considerable number of wind turbines,” finding that on average, each turbine will fail three times over its 20-year life. Denmark reports that each turbine’s gearbox must be replaced on average four times during its lifetime, costing about 20% of the price of a wind turbine.

The story of Denmark is illustrative. Over the last 20 years, Denmark has installed 5,100 wind towers, one for every thousand citizens. A map with a black dot for each wind farm shows that 300-foot-high steel and concrete towers can be seen from almost every field, farm, hill, and seashore of this nation. In 2009, these towers provided only 767 megawatts of electricity, less than the output of a single conventional coal-fired power plant. This single power plant would occupy the space of one black dot on the map.

Wind towers provide only about 10% of Denmark’s electricity, but contribute to electricity rates of 28 Eurocents per kilowatt-hour, the highest in Europe and four times the U.S. price. Yet, Danish government officials are proud of their wind system. Why would they install 5,000 towers instead of one coal plant? It’s because they believe they are reducing global warming.

In fact, the global wind industry is built on a foundation of sand—the hypothesis that man-made global warming is destroying Earth’s climate. The IEA report contains repeated statements about carbon emissions saved by wind installations in each nation. Yet, mounting satellite temperature data, new studies of ocean cycles such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and research on solar activity, show that global warming is due to natural cycles of the Earth,not man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Should global warming alarmism fail in its efforts to promote wind energy, the subsidies will disappear, and the house of cards will collapse. Then the world will be left with 140,000 silent monuments to Climatism.

Steve Goreham is Executive Director for the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of Climatism! Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century’s Hottest Topic.

September 9, 2010 Posted by aletho | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | United States Department of Energy, Wind power | Leave a comment

Reconstructing climate change…

Andrew McKillop | VHeadline | September 6, 2010

Through the whole year of 2009, building up to the failed Copenhagen “climate summit,” climate change was heavily promoted by a small but powerful group of OECD political leaders and their corporate, press and media elites as a major challenge to the planet and to our way of life. It was also the big signal for selling Low Carbon energy: from nuclear power and windfarms to landfill methane gas recovery or electric cars.

Anything not needing oil or seeming not to was a great big emerging and breaking business opportunity.

By midyear 2010, the climate change and green energy transition to “a new ecological society” theme had imploded and fallen off the teleprompters of the few political leaders whom had taken this theme as serious and had invested political “face” or capital in it. Climate change almost disappeared from public view. The USA’s voluntary but legally binding CO² emissions trading exchange, in Chicago, announced that it was scaling back its activity, and possibly going out of business, as the traded value of a ton of CO² fell to US10 cents. The UN IPCC was swiveled back into view with the role of scapegoat: this climate experts panel had delivered the wrong newsbytes and soundbytes to the few but important politicians who ran with the climate change ball in 2009.

By 2010 it was a ball and chain, the IPCC needed reform, and the IPCC’s communication needed serious reconstructing.

Reconstruction of news, science data, other views and different opinions is a long-term stalwart in modern society and its politics. From organizing public support for wars, even when the public itself may be attacked or subject to economic loss, to ensuring that political leaders are re-elected, or that women start smoking and the public keeps buying the consumer products which rack up the highest profits, the role of “communication” is primordial.

Communication & Public Relations (PR) are most basically propaganda, because the underlying facts and reality have to be reconstructed to make the message easy to sell. The climate change theme of 2009 was an example of this process, but in its quest to serve its masters and lever up its own prestige, the UN IPCC had gone too far in reconstructing climate science and data.

THE CRITICAL MOMENT

The window of opportunity for “saving climate change,” and perhaps re-launching it as a new dominant social, political and business theme, is narrow and likely already closing. For climate change this is a critical moment. The largest of its lies, or “enhanced truth” in PR newspeak have been exposed, and lesser extremes of generating constant fodder for the press, media and TV to uncritically recycle were also heavily criticized in the Climategate process. This underlines the critical challenge for attempts at saving the Climate Change and Anthropogenic Global Warming (CC and AGW) theme. When a big lie starts being exposed in public, or a previous completely accepted and slickly sold “truth” starts to slip in the opinion polls and lose traction in the minds of average consumers, the theme is in danger. At this time the role of PR is critical.

To save the theme, or in ecological parlance to “recycle” it needs a re-powering of the propaganda machine. This also needs political leaders prepared to stick their necks out a second time, and due to the presence of new truths and new doubts about the basic reality of climate change also competing for dominance, the so-called public debate is necessarily chaotic and clumsy, unsure and uncertain. The outlook for saving CC and AGW is therefore doubtful.

One key fact concerning the failed launch of climate change fear and admiration of green and low carbon energy is this effort only concerned 4 major political leaders. To be sure, these were from 4 leading OECD Old World rich nations, but this was always a minority — or elite — political quest. Their year-long and massive PR campaign on CC and AGW, ending in farce and chaos at the December 2009 Copenhagen “climate summit,” was only a minority endeavor.

Until December 2009, the four leaders Obama, Merkel, Sarkozy and the soon-voted-out Brown gave regular interviews where emotive soundbytes of the type “catastrophe,” “saving the planet,” “our last chance” were regularly utilized. Their doomster rhetoric was so extreme it was hard to believe they were much concerned about the trifling problem of their economies being mired in the worst economic crisis since the 1930s Great Depression, according to the equally hysterical IMF. Their handling of the economic crisis tended to confirm this conclusion.

The alternative offered by these four-only leaders was typically confused. Supposedly an “ecological” society totally dependent on “green energy” would arise, perhaps by about 2035, but this magical transformation would just as magically not affect sales of BMW cars, Boeing airplanes or French nuclear reactors in the meantime.

CO² emissions trading would of course vastly expand, but to what end?

How would this cash be “recycled” to build the bicycle-dependent eco-society just around the corner, in an eyeblink of time?

Proving the theme was launched in haste, with bad planning and logistics, the missing strands were more substantial than the substance of the magical transformation dangled by these 4 political leaders at the microphone, through 2009, but dropped like a lead weight in 2010. Since their failure at the Dec 2009 Copenhagen meeting to vendre la meche and obtain worldwide support for a supposed global transition to an ecological society depending on green energy, the 4 leaders have predictably “walked away” from the issue: this was especially easy for Gordon Brown. Today, the implosion of this new social, political and business theme is starkly evident.

RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST

With CC and AGW we are still in the “shock” phase following the effective collapse of what was launched as a new and dominant theme. These new dominant social themes are not painstakingly built, using large amounts of funds and the investment of “face” or personal prestige by political deciders and corporate elites for the fun of it. The new theme is launched to either reinforce existing, or build entirely new economic and financial, business and commercial themes. The personal investment by the four leaders was made clear by the speeches and pronouncements of this 4-person OECD launch team of CC and AGW fear and public admiration of so-called ecological lifestyles and alternate or renewable energy, throughout the whole year of 2009.

Failure of the launch process was made concrete by the North-South divide, between Old World and New World, on all parts and components of the new theme. This culminated in open stand-offs between the 4 OECD leaders and powerful Emerging economy leaders, at the ill-fated Copenhagen meeting. Quite shortly after this, culprits and scapegoats had to be found, and this was materialized by the UN IPCC group of experts on CC and AGW, who were blamed for various faults. These extended from plain lying, to exaggeration, distortion and more technical failures such as “imperfectly quantifying uncertainties,” yet another example of the incoherent, confused and unrealistic values and goals surrounding the CC and AGW theme.

Today, a “decent interval” after the Copenhagen farce and the resignation of its director, Yvo de Boer, the UN IPCC is now fully playing its scapegoat role. It is now in “reform and reconstruction,” and in major part this concerns its communication. The remaining figurehead, Rajendra Pachauri, may however not be forced to immediately quit, given the further loss of prestige for the IPCC that this would inevitably cause, a point well appreciated by Pachauri himself.

In a Times Of India interview, September 3, 2010, Pachauri had this to say about what the IPCC is supposed to communicate. Speaking of how he would go about “repairing” the panel’s governance and methods and keep his job, he said:

“At the (IPCC) meeting, we dwelt at length on Article 2 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which says the central objective of the convention is to prevent the anthropogenic interference with the climate system which is in terms of ecosystem, ensuring food security and ensuring that development can take place. These are the three central pillars.”

The newspeak or PR speak stands out in this confused mix-and-mingle of dominant social themes. Keywords like “ecological” and “anthropogenic interference” are jumbled with “pillars,” “food security” and economic development, while the now-controversial roles of green energy and energy transition are totally downplayed. This signals that green energy is at least on hold or has already been “recycled” to the wastebin of IPCC “communication.”

GIVING UP ENERGY TRANSITION

In early 2009, when the four-only world leaders who most openly nailed their colors to the mast or “pillar” of CC and AGW took their supposedly courageous, or foolhardy political decision to launch this totally new theme, world oil prices were still declining from their most recent all-time high of about US$ 145 a barrel, attained in July 2008. Natural gas prices would soon fall even more massively than oil or traded coal prices, due to the recession and the “supply side miracle” of shale and fracture gas reserves, at least in the USA. Due however to the slow-moving process of political thinking, or slow thinking by the persons who write politicians’ speeches, the very high price levels for oil and other traded fossil fuels in 2008 were a “founding fact” to exploit, as a key motivation for preaching energy transition away from oil and other fossil fuels.

The global economy had entered recession, also offering the CC and AGW theme as a way to get the public distracted from economic rout. The recession slashed economic growth, energy demand and traded energy prices along with employment, raised government debt and budget deficits to new and extreme highs in the Old World OECD countries — but not in the “decoupled growth” Emerging economies of Asia.

The political pressure, as well as economic rationale for “jump-starting” and “ramping up” green energy was always different in North and South, or East and West: recession sharpened and intensified this. The high oil and gas price driver, or rationale for green energy development greatly declined through the year of 2009, thanks to recession and the gas supply breakthrough. This made the December climate conference a conference too late for the OECD team’s announced goals of creating new and massive funding and financing mechanisms for green energy in the low income countries, mainly in Africa, to prevent them “getting the oil habit” and to siphon off more of their growing oil production. Similarly, the rationale for “ramping up” carbon finance and CO2 credits trading, to generate funds for investing in the Old World’s own transition to green energy also greatly declined in a single year, notably because the “feed through” from trading, to on-the-ground and real world green energy projects was so low. This was quickly reflected, in 2010 by “fledgling carbon markets” showing every sign of being crippled birds unable to fly, even if they chirruped loud and strong in their cash-stuffed nests.

To be sure, this left two of the IPCC’s supposed “pillars” — ensuring food security and economic development, but this through using more and more oil and other fossil fuels, as in China and India. World agriculture’s link with and dependence on climate and weather is of course well known, but its extreme, near-total dependence on oil and other fossil fuels is less well known or carefully ignored. Notably in the developed Old World North, in the OECD countries, farming and food production can attain extreme highs of oil intensity, as in Japan, exceeding 10 barrels of oil per hectare, per year, of direct farm input oil energy. Food security, very simply, is oil security. Using windmills and solar collectors to raise food output very simply lacks any credibility.

Also the IPCC’s role in preaching energy transition away from oil was never direct: the logical framework created to buttress this PR role of the IPCC was complex. It firstly posited a large or even near-apocalyptic CC and AGW, established this was heavily due to CO2 emissions by a careful choice of exaggerated data, and then identified mainly oil as being responsible for these CO2 emissions. This was despite the clear and massive role of coal-fired power stations as CO2 emitters, as underlined by James Hansen and the windpower, nuclear power, and other “low carbon” energy lobbies. The role of natural gas or methane, of which extremely large and fast increasing unburnt amounts are emitted each year, was never given high prominence by the IPCC, and will probably be given less in the future due to natural gas returning, provisionally of course, to the nice-price fold of cheap energy.

RECONSTRUCTING THE IPCC

It is certain the IPCC will be reformed and reconstructed, if only because of the heavy loss of face suffered by the three remaining political leaders of the 2009 four-person OECD leadership team advocating CC and AGW, and accelerated energy transition. From this year, the IPCC will be expected to be more scientific and less controversial, that is less easily faulted and harder to expose. Despite this “new moderation,” Pachauri engaged in “fighting talk,” in his September 3 Times of India interview, seeking a second term as chief of the IPCC, and promising, or threatening: “(I will) certainly shed any inhibitions or feelings of cowardice. I believe this is now my opportunity to go out and do what I think is right. In the second term I may be little more uncomfortable for the people than I was in the first.”

While oil prices stay relatively low — and as set by present ‘realistic anticipations’ of political and business leaders this would be anywhere below US$ 90 a barrel — and the OECD group remains mired by extreme public debt and budget deficits, the need for massive PR to achieve a quick transition away from oil has melted much faster than Pachauri’s melting Himalaya glaciers. Energy transition is now the “long term issue” it always was, and for political leaders a long-term issue is anything which extends through all or most of their mandate, about 4 years. This further places the CC and AGW theme outside the range and out of time for the real world temporal framework of political deciders.

The IPCC may therefore be allowed to die a timely death. Its budgets can be cut or frozen, and its transition to the added status of becoming a full-blown UN agency pushed further back.

To be sure, the vast quantities of impressively imaginative studies and scenarios produced under its aegis, some of which was the “meat” of Climategate, will continue being recycled in the press and media, on the inside pages, and in TV documentaries at off-peak hours, but as a new and powerful social theme announcing large scale economic, financial, business or commercial action the time has passed and the theme has failed.

Reconstruction will shade into destruction — unless the IPCC and budding green energy czars get the windfall gift of much higher oil prices and a raft of climate catastrophes to feed on.

###

Background:

Chicago Climate Exchange drops 50%, new record low

The only lower price than today’s closing price on a ton of carbon is ZERO

August 31, 2010 by Anthony Watts

And:

Where “Global Warming” and “Peak Oil” meet

Aletho News – November 11, 2009

September 7, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

And the hits just keep on coming: ‘The Book the IPCC Plagiarized’

Anthony Watts | September 3, 2010

I have to hand it to Donna Laframboise of nofrakkingconsensus, she’s a tireless detail ferret. She’s already found a boatload of errors in the various IPCC reports, now she finds word for word copying from a book to write the health effects section of the IPPC WG2 report.

Donna writes in “The Book the IPCC Plagiarized”:

It appears unlikely that a good faith, bona fide review of the scientific literature took place prior to the writing of significant sections of the IPCC’s first health chapter. Instead, the climate bible surreptitiously incorporated numerous opinions expressed a few years earlier by the activist-oriented person in charge of writing this chapter.

Then the media told the world that the IPCC’s proclamations regarding global warming and diseases such as malaria were the considered, consensus view of thousands of experts.

Of course we’ve been saying for some time that the “malaria link” to global warming is unsupported, one might even call it hyped, seeing how bad the correlations (or lack thereof) are. Now we find the IPPC didn’t really bother to check research. They just copied it from a doomsday book by an activist. See below.

Donna points out this word for word similarity between the book and the 1995 WG2 report:

McMichael’s 1993 book, page 154:
In eastern Africa, a relatively small increase in winter temperature would enable the malarial zone to extend ‘upwards’ to engulf the large urban highland populations that are currently off-limits to the mosquito because of the cooler temperatures at higher altitudes – e.g. Nairobi (Kenya) and Harare (Zimbabwe). Indeed, such populations around the world, currently just outside the margins of endemic malaria, would provide early evidence of climate-related shifts in the distribution of this disease.

Climate Bible’s 1995 Working Group 2 report, page 574:
Hence, it is a reasonable prediction that, in eastern Africa, a relatively small increase in winter temperature could extend the mosquito habitat and thus enable faciparum malaria to reach beyond the usual altitude limit of around 2,500 m to the large, malaria-free, urban highland populations, e.g. Nairobi in Kenya and Harare in Zimbabwe. Indeed, the monitoring of such populations around the world, currently just beyond the boundaries of stable endemic malaria, could provide early evidence of climate-related shifts in malaria distribution.

another example:

McMichael’s 1993 book, page 150:
Sandstorms in Kansas (USA) and in the Sudan have been accompanied by increased illness and death from bronchitis and asthma.

Climate Bible’s 1995 Working Group 2 report, page 578:
Sandstorms in Kansas (USA) and the Sudan have been accompanied by increases in bronchitis and asthma.

Sheesh.

Read the whole IPCC train wreck here. It’s not just a couple of sentences, there’s plenty more where this sample came from.

September 4, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Chicago Climate Exchange drops 50%, new record low

The only lower price than today’s closing price on a ton of carbon is ZERO

August 31, 2010 by Anthony Watts

Perhaps reacting to the news yesterday about the IPCC getting taken to the woodshed, the growing number of stories in the MSM about the IPCC failure, and the recent layoffs at CCX, carbon trading has once again been devalued by the market. Amazingly, it lost 50% of it’s value for 2006, 2007, and 2008 “carbon instruments” today. Unless CCX starts making adjustments in single cents, the next downward adjustment is zero. The latest CCX advisory says they will be closed for labor day, and will reopen for trading September 7th. One wonders.

Here’s the CCX front page graph at closing today:

The CCX end of day table really says it all, 50% off, from a dime to a nickel in a day:

CCX end of day, August 31, 2010

September 1, 2010 Posted by aletho | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

James Cameron—King of Hypocrites

By Ann McElhinney | 22 August 2010

Last March James Cameron sounded defiant.

The Avatar director was determined to expose journalists, such as myself, who thought it was important to ask questions about climate change orthodoxy and the radical “solutions” being proposed.

Cameron said was itching to debate the issue and show skeptical journalists and scientists that they were wrong.

“I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads,” he said in an interview.

Well, a few weeks ago Mr. Cameron seemed to honor his word.

His representatives contacted myself and two other well known skeptics, Marc Morano of the Climate Depot website and Andrew Breitbart, the new media entrepreneur.

Mr. Cameron was attending the AREDAY environmental conference in Aspen Colorado 19-22 August. He wanted the conference to end with a debate on climate change. Cameron would be flanked with two scientists. It would be 90 minutes long. It would be streamed live on the internet.

They hoped the debate would attract a lot of media coverage.

“We are delighted to have Fox News, Newsmax, The Washington Times and anyone else you’d like. The more the better,” one of James Cameron’s organizers said in an email.

It looked like James Cameron really was a man of his word who would get to take on the skeptics he felt were so endangering humanity.

Everyone on our side agreed with their conditions. The debate was even listed on the AREDAY agenda.

But then as the debate approached James Cameron’s side started changing the rules.

They wanted to change their team. We agreed.

They wanted to change the format to less of a debate—to “a roundtable”. We agreed.

Then they wanted to ban our cameras from the debate. We could have access to their footage. We agreed.

Bizarrely, for a brief while, the worlds most successful film maker suggested that no cameras should be allowed-that sound only should be recorded. We agreed

Then finally James Cameron, who so publicly announced that he “wanted to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out,” decided to ban the media from the shoot out.

He even wanted to ban the public. The debate/roundtable would only be open to those who attended the conference.

No media would be allowed and there would be no streaming on the internet. No one would be allowed to record it in any way.

We all agreed to that.

And then, yesterday, just one day before the debate, his representatives sent an email that Mr. “shoot it out ” Cameron no longer wanted to take part. The debate was cancelled.

James Cameron’s behavior raises some very important questions.

Does he genuinely believe in man made climate change? If he believes it is a danger to humanity surely he should be debating the issue every chance he gets ?

Or is it just a pose?

The man who called for an open and public debate at “high noon” suddenly doesn’t want his policies open to serious scrutiny.

I was looking forward to debating with the film maker. I was looking forward to finding out where we agreed and disagreed and finding a way forward that would help the poorest people in the developing and developed world.

But that is not going to happen because somewhere along the way James Cameron, a great film maker, has moved from King of the World to being King of the Hypocrites.

August 22, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

New Zealand’s NIWA sued over climate data adjustments

August 16, 2010 by Anthony Watts

NIWA is being sued by the NZ Climate Coalition, mainly due to the differences in data in this graph:

Niwa sued over data accuracy

The country’s state-owned weather and atmospheric research body is being taken to court in a challenge over the accuracy of its data used to calculate global warming.

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition said it had lodged papers with the High Court asking the court to invalidate the official temperatures record of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa).

The lobby of climate sceptics and ACT Party have long criticised Niwa over its temperature data, which Niwa says is mainstream science and not controversial, and the raw data publicly available.

The coalition said the New Zealand Temperature Records (NZTR) were the historical base of NIWA’s advice to the Government on issues relating to climate change.

Coalition spokesman Bryan Leyland said many scientists believed although the earth had been warming for 150 years, it had not heated as much as Government archives claimed.

He said the New Zealand Meteorological Service had shown no warming during the past century but Niwa had adjusted its records to show a warming trend of 1degC. The warming figure was high and almost 50 percent above the global average, said Mr Leyland.

”Twentieth-century temperature records are now being challenged all around the world” said Bryan Leyland, spokesman for the NZCSET. “But I think we are the first country where the issues are to be placed squarely before an independent judicial forum.”
“Many scientists believe that, although the earth has been in a natural warming phase for the past 150 years, it has not heated as much as Government archives claim. The precise trend figure is extremely important, as it forms the sole basis of the claim that human activities are the dominant cause of the warming.

“The New Zealand Met Service record shows no warming during the last century, but NIWA has adopted a series of invariably downward adjustments in the period prior to World War 2. Because these move the old temperature records downwards, the 7SS NZTR shows a huge bounce-back of over 1°C in the first half of the century” said Mr. Leyland. “Although this is out of line with dozens of other records, and has been the subject of sustained questioning by both the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition and the ACT party, NIWA refuses to accept that there are serious problems with the adjustments. In fact, no one has been able to explain exactly how they were arrived at.”

The Court proceedings also allege bias and unethical conduct on the part of NIWA’s National Climate Centre. These are based partly on NIWA allegedly delegating the NZTR decision to a former employee, James Salinger, knowing that he had a vested interest in an untested theory put forward in his own 1981 thesis. NIWA also knew that the data and calculations for that theory had been lost, and, thus could not be replicated.

The Court will be asked to rule that NIWA has refused to repudiate the current NZTR in order to avoid political embarrassment, and feared loss of public confidence in the objectivity of its scientists. The proceedings were filed and served this week, and NIWA has up to a month to respond.

Full story here:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/4026330/Niwa-sued-over-data-accuracy

August 17, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

The Sierra Club: How Support for Industrial Wind Technology Subverts Its History, Betrays Its Mission, and Erodes Commitment to the Scientific Method

Jon Boone | April 18, 2010

Between the Gush for Wind and the Hard Place of Reality

The physical nature and enormous size of industrial wind projects has caused a lot of blowback. Between Maryland and West Virginia, for example, there is potential for around 2000 wind turbines, each nearly 500-feet tall; they would be placed atop 400 miles of the Allegheny Mountain ridges. About 20 acres of forest must be cut to support each turbine—4-6 acres to accommodate the free flow of the wind per turbine; one or more large staging areas for each wind project; access road construction; and a variety of substations and transmission lines. Cumulatively, about 40,000 acres of woodlands would be transformed into an industrial energy plant far larger than any conventional facility. Most of this montane terrain contains rare habitat and many vulnerable wildlife species.

How can such a looming industrial presence be reconciled with the goals of maintaining choice natural habitat while reducing the impact of human activity? For the Sierra Club, the answer is: The use of siting guidelines and wildlife assessment studies that would restrict limited liability wind companies from placing their huge machinery in the most sensitive places and away from rare and threatened species of plants and animals. If the war on carbon is to be won, and if skyscraper-sized wind turbines are part of the price for winning that war, then accommodation must be made. In the words of one wind developer, “some will have to sacrifice if we’re to have the clean, green energy from the wind” replacing coal and putting a stop to mountaintop removal coal extraction practices.

More than a few Sierra Club members and local chapters have resisted the national organization’s encyclicals on wind precisely because such hulking intrusion seems inimical to environmental common sense. The chair of the Maryland Chapter’s Conservation Committee, one of the nation’s leading naturalists, resigned in large part because of this concern. In response to such dissidents, the Club’s national leadership insists that it, and not its member chapters, be the final arbiter of what wind projects meet its standards: “It is important for the Club to speak with a unified, clear voice in its reaction to wind energy projects. It will not be good for the Club if one chapter is focusing totally on concerns about impacts on birds while the chapter in the next state is urging the public to support wind projects as a crucial element in reversing the impacts of global warming.” The organization enforces its authority under threat of expulsion, as was the case when its executive chairman, Carl Pope, in the wake of another controversy, excommunicated the entire Florida 35,000-memmber chapter for four years.

To “manage the negative environmental impacts of wind,” the Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy, the American Bird Conservancy, Greenpeace, and the Audubon Society all recommend guidelines that, if followed, provide wind projects with their environmental seal of approval. Even on public lands. And with no evident sense of irony for the Sierra Club—since this is a policy taken from Gifford Pinchot’s playbook. John Muir is likely turning in his grave.

Siting guidelines that appear to make the wind industry more environmentally friendly, cognitively dissonant as the prospect seems to be, make sense only if the premise behind the policy is true, only if the technology can back down coal and offset significant amounts of carbon emissions.

Reality Bites

What is the scientific evidence that age-old technologies like wind, dressed up in high couture fashion, can provide clean, reliable, affordable, secure electricity to the masses, as the ruminations of Jacobsen and the optimism of the Department of Energy suggest?

Astonishingly, with 35,000 industrial wind turbines extant on this continent, no coal farms have closed because of the wind technology, and there is no empirical evidence there is less coal or natural gas burned per unit of electricity produced as a specific consequence of it. Contrary to the hopes of the Sierra Club, wind evidently is not an alternate energy source.

When the provisional ideas of ongoing scientific inquiry become politicized and then supported by a concatenation of groups seeking to profit from the ideas, both financially and ideologically—when science meets James Cameron and becomes entertainment for the masses in order to sell soap or sophistry, then we’ll get flying pigs, everywhere. Wind is not progressive, cutting edge, or effective, as the Sierra Club maintains. It is rather antediluvian, uncivil, and dysfunctional.

As a justification for wind promotion, science has become, for the Sierra Club and nearly all prominent environmental groups, not a method of seeking truth, but rather propaganda employed to prosecute its war on carbon. They routinely confuse engineering mechanics with science, and publish all kinds of techno-gismo birth announcements about saving the earth from those badass Big Oil/Big Coal corporations. But rarely do they provide the consequent obituaries. Or demand measurement of actual wind performance, which is the essence of scientific inquiry.

Promoting siting guidelines for such a rude, intrusive, shaggy beast of a technology implies that if wind machines were properly situated—somewhere, just not in the Sierra Club’s neck of the woods—they might actually do some good. This is the thinking behind the movement known as Responsible Windpower—an oxymoron at virtually every descriptive level, for it does little more than give a second-story burglary ring a ladder and an alibi.

Citizen wind opposition to the outsized nature of the technology began as a “not-in-my-backyard” phenomenon, eventually becoming a prod for the Sierra Club’s current wind siting guidelines. Responsible Windpower campaigns gave succor to those who support wind as a credible energy source, allowing them to save face with mainline environmental groups while protecting hearth and home, and vulnerable wildlife, from the worst of wind’s gigantic presence.

The wind industry perversely encourages discussion about wind plant siting and wildlife studies, much in the way cigarette manufactures once encouraged health-warning labels. But debate over set backs, noise levels, proximity to vulnerable flora and fauna, etc, distracts from the central issue: whether the technology provides the benefits claimed for it. Even as this discussion takes place, however, limited liability wind companies routinely ignore siting prescriptions, knowing there’s virtually no enforcement against wrongdoing. Siting guideline discussions and he said/she said bird studies foster a lot of dithering.

At the very least, support for massive wind technology betrays sound environmental and scientific precepts, ideas that many knowledgeable environmentalists hold dear, while putting at risk vulnerable species and valuable habitat and furthering the cause of civil discord. Every environmental group has expressed grave concern about bird mortality and cell towers. Wind projects are much more problematic.

Michael Morgan | Allegheny Treasures | October 26, 2009

August 15, 2010 Posted by aletho | Economics, Environmentalism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

BBC to issue correction on rice yields story

Yet another catastrophic AGW alarmist scare without basis in fact

August 12, 2010 by Anthony Watts

From: Richard Black
Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 7:01 AM
To: Anthony Watts
Subject: RE: Your article on rice yields

Dear Anthony,

Thanks for your email. You are correct – I am mistaken – a correction will be made to the news story shortly.

Best regards,
Richard Black

…my letter follows

From: Anthony Watts
Sent: 11 August 2010 00:51
To: Richard Black; Richard Black-Internet
Subject: Your article on rice yields
Importance: High
Dear Mr. Black,

I’m writing as a courtesy to advise you that I believe your article:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10918591

Which says “Yields have fallen by 10-20% over the last 25 years in some locations.”

…is in error.

The actual press release says ”Rising temperatures during the past 25 years have already cut the yield growth rate by 10-20 percent in several locations.”
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-08/uoc–htt080610.php

It is not the gross yield that has supposedly fallen, but the rate of increase in the yield.

Further, I have a graph from the International Rice Research Institute which supports this and demonstrates that gross rice yields are still increasing in Asia:

http://beta.irri.org/test/j15/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=393&Itemid=100104

I think it’s just a simple interpretive error on how you read the press release, but it does have large consequences for how the story is interpreted by readers. Here in Northern California, one of the largest rice growing areas of the world, a call to our local Rice Association confirmed this. A correction might be in order.

Thank you for your consideration.

Best Regards,
Anthony Watts

August 12, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

NY Times full-page ad demonstrates who is pushing for war against Iran

Also, the organizers say they’re actuated by fears of climate change, but why the Netanyahu quote and the emphasis on missiles?

And the NYTimes is still on message, Global Warming, Peak Oil and the War on Terror all seem to merge to support Zionism:

Letters to the International Herald Tribune – How to Fight Climate Change – NYTimes.com
The only way to effectively address climate change is for our leaders to make it an issue of national security: Emphasize the link between consumption of fossil fuels, especially foreign oil, and the rise of international terrorism. Once that link is clearly established, people will be willing to make an effort: The home-front will contribute to fighting against terrorism, which threatens every one of us. People will understand that there is no way to put a value on the lives of any of the nearly 3,000 people who perished in the Sept. 11 attacks, and that any effort is worth making to prevent recurrence of such a tragedy.

Update:

The Israel Lobby’s War on America’s Middle East Oil Dependence

By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | October 26, 2012

Kola Temperature Reconstruction Shows Solar Correlation – Refutes The Hockey Stick

By P. Gosselin | August 7, 2010

Last week I wrote about a Russian-German temperature reconstruction from 1600 to 2000 derived from tree rings from the Kola Peninsula in northwest Russia . The paper appeared in the journal Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, Vol. 41, No. 4, 2009, pp. 460–468, by Kononov, Friedrich and Boettger.

In response, German media outlets all hollered “RAPIDLY RISING ARCTIC TEMPERATURES!”, focusing solely on one statement that temperatures have been rising since 1990.

It’s a classic example of how a scientific study comes up with Result A, but the public ends up understanding Result Z, all thanks to sloppy and incompetent communication that exists between the two.

The press release here provides the following Kola temperature reconstruction graph for summertime temperatures:

Kola Peninsula tree-ring temperature reconstruction. Source: Stephan Boehme/UFZ

Here it’s plain to see that the temperature reconstruction shows that Arctic temperatures in the Kola Peninsula have been rising since about 1670. This corresponds exceptionally well with Loehle’s 2007 reconstruction using 18 non-tree-ring proxies for the last 2000 years shown as follows:

Both graphics show the Little Ice Age from 1650 to 1750, at which point a warming event ensues. Then it was generally flat from 1750 to about 1920, and then followed by another rise that took place until 1950. Then Kola tree-ring proxies show a cooling up to 1990. Since 1990 warming has occurred again, but it’s a warming that is completely within the natural range of variation.

The Kola reconstruction (1) agreed with an earlier reconstruction (2) done in the area, see map below. What’s more, the Kola reconstruction (1) was compared with tree-ring reconstructions from other Arctic regions: Swedish Lapland (3), Yamal (4), and Taimyr (5).

Proxy locations used for Kola comparison. Source: Journal Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, Vol. 41, No. 4, 2009, pp. 460–468

The result of the comparison:

The reconstructed summer temperatures of the last four centuries from Lapland and the Kola and Taimyr Peninsulas are similar in that all three data series display a temperature peak in the middle of the twentieth century, followed by a cooling of one or two degrees.

Only the Yamal reconstruction differed completely, resembling the shape of a hockey stick with the blade beginning at 1900. The hockey stick is becoming an artifact of activism.

Except for the Yamal reconstruction, all tree-ring and non-tree ring reconstructions appear to agree, and so indicate no correlation between temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration.

So what could be driving temperatures then? The authors compared the tree-ring based reconstructions with historical records of sunspots (Lean et al, 1995; Lean, 2000), and say:

We found that over the whole investigated period fluctuations of summer air temperature reconstructed for the Khibiny Mountains in the central part of the Kola Peninsula have a good consistency (r >0.50) with changes of solar radiation (Fig. 10), especially for the low-frequency signal.

In the paper’s conclusion we read:

The broad similarity between this temperature construction and solar radiation indicates that solar activity is an important driver of centennial to multi-decadal trends in summer temperatures of the Kola Peninsula.

So why did all media reports holler “RAPID TEMPERATURE INCREASE IN THE ARCTIC”. Call it complete communication incompetence by the media players between science and the public.

The Kola reconstructions show no link to atmospheric CO2 concentrations. It all started with a solid scientific paper, and but then was distorted (purposely?) by a vague press release that culminated in alarmist media headlines.

Let’s call that press release incompetence-gate.

August 7, 2010 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

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Iran UN ambassador calls for destruction of all nuclear weapons

Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo

Press TV – March 29, 2017

Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo has called for the total eradication of nuclear weapons.

Khoshroo reiterated Iran’s call during a UN conference aimed at creating a nuclear weapons ban treaty in New York on Tuesday.

“Iran, as a victim of chemical weapons, strongly feels the danger posed by the existence of weapons of mass destruction and is determined to engage actively in international diplomatic efforts to save humanity from the menace of nuclear weapons,” he said.

Khoshroo stressed that Iran is committed to its Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations, which include negotiations based on effective nuclear disarmament measures.

He added that several countries continue to ignore international calls and treaties for nuclear disarmament and even continue to increase their nuclear stockpiles. “They do not have political determination to abandon doctrines of nuclear deterrence and nuclear terror,” he went on to say.

Iran’s UN ambassador noted that boycotting the talks by many countries, including the US, shows that the world’s nuclear powers are by no means committed to the eradication of nuclear arms. Britain and France were also among the some 40 countries that did not join the talks.

“We note that prohibition of nuclear weapons must be accompanied by the elimination of such weapons. There can be no doubt that without complete abolition of nuclear weapons, there will be no absolute guarantee against the danger of nuclear war and the use of such weapons,” Khoshroo added.

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