Unintended Consequences

Another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences can be found in this morning's Metro.

Paper recycling and eco-friendly paperless offices, apparently, have grown to such a significant proportion that high-grade office paper waste is hard to obtain. This means that toilet paper manufacturers cannot get enough pulp of sufficient quality to produce soft toilet tissue.

Which means that the next time you're on the throne and wondering why the bog roll is the hard and shiny type favoured in schools everywhere, spare a thought for the fact that it's your own fault for not using enough office paper.

I shudder to think what we'll have to use if iPads and the like really take off...

- KoW

Why recycling is wasteful

Today's Metro has a story about recycling - apparently some 200-year-old bottles were saved from being thrown in the recycling bin and have sold at auction for £5000. Which raises an interesting question: how many times has the same mistake been made but without anyone noticing?

I've long felt that the cult of recycling is harmful, and this story is an example of why.

We use huge amounts of energy turning sand into glass bottles, then when we're done we shatter the bottles into fragments and waste huge amounts more energy turning the fragments back into bottles. Why? If you have a bottle, and you want a bottle, why go through all that hassle instead of reusing it?

The simple fact is that people don't think about it. Recycling salves their consciences and makes them feel that they're helping the planet, when it's in fact making sod all difference to the energy consumption or waste levels - and may even be worse given the costs of separating waste. It's become second nature now, though, people don't even think about it. They recycle because recycling is good. Centuries-old antique glass is clearly glass which can equally clearly be recycled, and because recycling is good, it should be done.

Recycling has become a religion, and demands regular sacrifices to its ecological god such that consumerist crap can be reborn and the cycle begun anew.

- KoW

Left Foot in Mouth

Will Straw's blog Left Foot Forward has posted an article (h/t Old Holborn) on the great climate-skeptic conspiracy. Apparently, some "research" conducted by a marketing agency - but not yet published - has shown that bloggers on the internet link to each other, and claims that this is part of an orchestrated plan "to have maximum impact on the Copenhagen negotiations".

Apparently this "research" was conducted for Oxfam. Anyone remember when they were a charity that cared about famine, not a political pressure group demanding Tobin Taxes and promoting global warming hysteria? How times change, eh? Ironically, Oxfam's current policies seem designed to exacerbate famine, but I doubt they care about that when there are political bandwagons to jump on - and policies which keep people starving and in poverty gives the "charity" a reason to keep existing.

The post claims that "the story was picked up by a wide range of media outlets, and went global – the culmination of a concerted effort to push it into the mainstream". That's not how I remember it. I remember the story being completely ignored by most of the media, despite UEA denials, Lord Lawson opening a global warming think-tank, and a scathing blog article from arch-climatista George Monbiot, until "climategate" became one of the biggest search terms on Google in a week and, eventually, the press felt they had to say something about the story people were already talking about. If there's a conspiracy, it looks rather more like it was amongst the BBC and Fleet Street soi-disant elite trying to ignore the story in order to push their own COP15 agendas.

He then goes on to cite some pseudoscience about the Overton Window and a linguist called Lakoff talking about "Framing" (straight out of NLP!) the debate, as if the public are simple-minded sheep who will believe everything they're told. No. People mistrust authority figures, and climate skepticism is deep-rooted in personal experience: no matter what the "global average temperature" figures claim, people over 40 can actually remember warmer and colder years and so the ever-greater catastrophes that are prophesied are in direct contradiction to experience. You've oversold it and now nobody is buying.

Then the author claims that "Oxfam’s study shows that almost no-one bothered to back [Monbiot] up in defending the integrity of the science" - which is largely because Climategate showed that there has been no actual science going on at the CRU: irreproducible "results" are nothing more than anecdote, no matter how many bent "reviews" they go through, how many times they're cited, or how pretty the graph looks.

So, co-conspirators, watch out for an organised pro-AGW propaganda campaign being directed through marketing agencies. Don't let them convince you that things didn't happen the way you remember them!

- KoW

Polar bear trading

I don't know what the bid-offer spread would be, but I suspect the nicotine-yellow bastards wouldn't be happy about it.

Today's Metro (p30, can't find it online) has an article called 'Polar bear trade ban is rejected'. A UN meeting in Qatar rejected a proposal to ban trade of polar bear skins, claws and teeth.

All of the bleeding-heart eco-worriers, talking about how global warming is harming polar bears, seem to have missed a few facts. Polar bears are not endangered, they are not 'losing their habitats', they are not 'sad' or 'unhappy' or cuddly, they don't care if you drive a Prius, they are huge vicious predators who will gleefully kill and eat you for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Polar bears can (and do) swim to shore through arctic waters when they're finished playing on icebergs - they don't drown if they fall in, no matter what inaccurate films you watch.

The proposed ban was backed by the US and all sorts of sunny places, and opposed by Canada, Greenland and Norway who actually have to live with the growing numbers of these things. Funny that.

Polar bears are not your friends.

- KoW

The Day Global Warming Died

Friday afternoon saw a huge story break: the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has been hacked and a large quantity of email, raw data and (proprietary) climate model code has been leaked. The director of CRU, Professor Phil Jones, has confirmed the leaked information as being genuine.

The CRU is one of the leading lights in climatology and, in particular, paleoclimatology - reconstructing historical temperatures from secondary sources such as tree rings and ice core samples. Analysis of some of their data - released only after pressure from the Royal Society - has already shown significant anomolies.

The emails do not paint a flattering picture - in fact, they seem to show a pattern of deliberate fraud and abuse of the peer-review process with conflicts of interest, hiding models/data from review and manipulating editorial boards. These are not trivial charges and, if the emails are shown to be genuine, they should be sufficient to end careers and probably secure convictions for fraud.

As is traditional, this scandal has got a "-gate" suffix: Climategate. But, for once, it might actually be bigger than Watergate.

- KoW

Mission: Impossible

The BBC reports that the IMechE has said that the 80% let's-go-back-to-the-middle-ages CO₂ cuts by 2050 that the government has signed into law are unachievable. No, really. Reducing CO₂ emissions to barely more than the population produces by respiration is a bit tricky. Shocking.

The Department for Energy and Climate Change - yeah, they're going to be neutral with a name like that - have said that the IMechE should be thinking positively. Specifically, they accused the Institution of having a "can't do, won't do attitude". Because that's all it takes to achieve massive geo-engineering projects: the right attitude. And this government wonders why it's consistently failed to achieve anything beyond passing new (and mostly unenforced) laws and pissing people off...

I think the IMechE are wrong about the environmental side of this, but I'm 100% behind their sound engineering approach. You can't make offshore wind turbines or nuclear reactors appear by fiat: you have to build them, which means moving materials and equipment on a massive scale. That takes time and money and people, and there are finite limits to all of them.

More worrying is the quoted prat from the Tyndall Centre saying we need carbon rationing. That really is one step too far: the ability to eat, travel, stay warm and travel restricted by the government and sacrificied to "the greater good". Never.

- KoW

The honourable member for Morley and Rothwell is a pillock

Colin Challen MP tabled this Early Day Motion about a week ago, full of the usual eco-nonsense. Amongst other things, he discusses:

• "the safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration for a stable planet"
• "the need to reduce this level to 350 particles per million or below"
• "the majority of money spent on reviving the economy should be on green measures and that at least two hours of prime time television per week should be used to explain the gravity of the crisis to the public"
• "domestic flights should be phased out by the end of 2010"
• "that a speed limit of 55 miles per hour should be introduced"

Well, it's probably better than Eastenders, but I think the even the State Broadcaster would object to that level of indoctrination. Though, as one wag put it, "Two hours per week? So he's proposing a reduction. Excellent!".

I'll leave off the logical error or needing to reduce the "safe level", since it's obvious what was meant. Isn't it great, though, that we can be Saved if we get the level down to 350ppm? Not 351ppm, or 349ppm, of course... those are poisonous. As Harry Hill might say, "what are the chances, eh?".

That number is a political one, with little or no science behind it. Science doesn't produce neat figures, because the universe isn't neat, so where did it come from? The simple fact is that there is no critical tipping point or runaway positive feedback - if there were, at one of the many points in Earth's history when CO₂ concentration was higher, they'd have been triggered and we wouldn't be here to argue about it. That's how positive feedback works: it doesn't suddenly decide to stop and go back, it goes on accelerating forever. If the change slows or reverses, the system exhibits negative feedback, end of.

So where did that number come from? The IPCC's made-up political target is 450ppm. That's a pretty big difference for anything other than sticking a wet finger in the air and guessing.

Why ban flights? Why 55mph? Some cars at 55mph produce more CO₂ than others do at 70mph, so this isn't purely about the environment. If it were, you could simply ban (or punitively tax) higher emissions rates no matter how they were produced. That might actually result in innovation and job creation as people find ways to do the same stuff but better/faster/cheaper. So why create a fatuous link between speed and carbon dioxide? To buy the political support of the anti-car lobby? To push a personal agenda?

Look at the measures proposed: arbitrary and irrelevant limitations on behaviour, two hours of propaganda per week. Doesn't that sound rather like Soviet Russia? We're spied on through ubiquitous CCTV cameras and RIPA powers, can be searched without probable cause ("section 44"), can be imprisoned without charge for a month (and let's not forget that it was nearly 42 days!)... does that sound like Great Britain to you?

Or is this one of those Early Day Motions which nobody cares about and which serve only to waste taxpayers' money?

(Hat tip to Dizzy)

- KoW