Fraudulinking With Marc Morano

Fraudulinking: where a link from a website does not live up to its billing on that website. For example, from Marc Morano's Climate Depot:

But when you click on the link, you find Lovelock's quote has been rearranged and, more importantly, truncated. The next bit reads:

Well, you can see it from space. It's really happening, and that'll affect the rest of the planet in time.

The way I look at it is, if you've got a glass of a cold drink with ice in it on a hot day, it'll stay cool as long as the ice is there. But the moment all that ice melts, whoomph — it heats up straight away.

So while the Arctic is melting — the floating ice, that is — it won't heat up all that fast. But once that's gone, and they reckon it could be anything from five to 20 years, I think the temperature will run away. It'll soar.

Synonym: to be Moranoed. Example: "Cocksucker! I've been Moranoed!"

Think Tanker Supremo, Or: Who The Heck Is Roger Bate?

Ever heard that old story: banning DDT resulted in the deaths of millions of children in the developing world, and therefore enviros in general and Rachel Carson in particular have blood on their hands? Its out there, and I think its managed to con a few otherwise non-stupid people, notably James Lovelock (of Gaia hypothesis fame). Well, it is, quite literally, the creation of one man, a roving think-tanker for hire named Roger Bate. Linked below is one of the very few stories I've read about him in the MSM or at least "off-blog" media about why he did it. The short answer: it was a feint designed to block attempts by WHO (World Health Organization) to curb smoking in 3rd world countries!

Now operating out of the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), [Roger]Bate’s signature coup to date has been to spread the myth that environmentalists, by preventing the use of the pesticide DDT (Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane) to kill mosquitoes in developing countries, have heartlessly caused millions of malaria deaths worldwide. It needs to be said at the outset that this argument is untrue. While some groups have pressed hard to find alternatives, there is little evidence that a concerted effort to abolish anti-malaria DDT spraying ever occurred. Of the few environmental organizations that even pay attention to pesticide use overseas, the ones with any clout all support a clause in the Stockholm Convention that allows DDT use for public health reasons.

[...]

The latter is of particular importance in Bate’s case. His most visible contribution to his chosen cause has been to use the unlikely twin forces of malaria and DDT – both absent from the United States for decades, but facts of life in much of the developing world – to pit potential allies in regulatory efforts, especially environmentalists and public health advocates, against each other in an effort to draw their fire away from regulated industries, including tobacco. In a funding proposal to Philip Morris laying out his vision of a so-called Malaria Strategy, Bate wrote circa 1998 that the “opponents” of tobacco “are quite disparate, yet we have not divided them and shown each how the other’s agenda is damaging their own.” To be more successful, the document said, “we need to . . . [p]ick issues on which we can divide our opponents and win. Make our case on our terms, not on the terms of our opponents – malaria prevention is a good example. Show our opponents where their alleged allies are harming their cause[.]”

The proposal laid out a comprehensive plan, including the formation of a front group to push the idea that Western experts and activists were focusing on the wrong issue. The central argument of the Malaria Strategy, he wrote, would be that “environmental regulations often harm public health in the West and Western policies often harm health in Less Developed Countries.” In other words, the World Health Organization (WHO) and other regulatory bodies shouldn’t even have time to think about regulating American and British tobacco, because the scourge of malaria demanded more immediate attention. Thus emerged Bate’s thesis, which he continues to promote as a proxy for his deeper anti-regulatory agenda: That out-of-touch bureaucrats and misguided environmentalists are ignoring malaria sufferers, either because of incompetence or spoiled-rich fears about comparatively harmless risks like second-hand smoking, and are therefore not to be trusted.

As mentioned in his wiki entry, one of the guys that did heavy labor digging into Bate's past is climate blogger Eli Rabbett. To learn more, I would suggest visiting his site and running "Roger Bate" through the blog search function. For instance, we know due to Eli that Bate was raking in about $18,000 per month for his work.

Almost as weird a story as that of Martin Durkin, the guy behind "The Great Global Warming Swindle", which perhaps I shall attempt to tell at a later date.

Lovelock Is Bummed, The Telegraph Confused

That's the only hypothesis that makes sense of this story from the U.K. Telegraph. The headline and first par. read:

James Lovelock: Reducing emissions could speed global warming

A rapid cutback in greenhouse gas emissions could speed up global warming, the veteran environmental maverick James Lovelock will warn in a lecture today.

But that can't be right. And if you read down further:

Prof Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia theory that the planet behaves like a single organism, says this is because current global warming is offset by global dimming - the 2-3ºC of cooling cause by industrial pollution, known to scientists as aerosol particles, in the atmosphere.

[...]

Prof Lovelock will say in a lecture to the Royal Society: "Any economic downturn or planned cutback in fossil fuel use, which lessened aerosol density, would intensify the heating.

"If there were a 100 per cent cut in fossil fuel combustion it might get hotter not cooler.

Ahh but you see its not greenhouse gas emissions cuts per se that could speed up warming, its cuts in fossil fuel use. Burning fossil fuels involves releasing both green-house gases and aerosols. Lovelock's argument is that while such cuts might reduce the amount of (warming) green-house gases being released into the atmosphere, it might also reduce the amount of (cooling) aerosols more, with the net effect being greater warming. A similar argument is made here, and criticized here (the criticism being, in a nutshell, that most models already assume a decline in aerosol emissions over the course of the next century) .

Interesting to speculate as to whether the confusion is intentional or not. The U.K. Telegraph is notoriously Conservative and has given an outlet to any number of climate change deniers.

More generally, Lovelock thinks we're all freaking doomed, and yet wants a massive societal effort to stave off the admittedly inevitable. I don't think he realizes the shaky logic behind this position. Ethicist Stephen M. Gardiner has posted several papers on his website that deal with the logic of "doing nothing" in response to climate change. Under certain circumstances, the status quo, or even emitting more, becomes the rational response. The idea is to avoid those circumstances.

Another Geo-Engineering Scheme

Jim Lovelock (he of the Gaia hypothesis) and Chris Rapley have proposed a means of geo-engineering our way out of the AGW mess:

The oceans, which cover more than 70% of the Earth’s surface, are a promising place to seek a regulating influence. One approach would be to use free-floating or tethered vertical pipes to increase the mixing of nutrient-rich waters below the thermocline with the relatively barren waters at the ocean surface. (We acknowledge advice from Armand Neukermans on engineering aspects of the pipes.) Water pumped up pipes — say, 100 to 200 metres long, 10 metres in diameter and with a one-way flap valve at the lower end for pumping by wave movement — would fertilize algae in the surface waters and encourage them to bloom. This would pump down carbon dioxide and produce dimethyl sulphide, the precursor of nuclei that form sunlight-reflecting clouds.

From an engineering perspective this is probably not feasible, but even if it was, the effect would be the exact opposite of that hoped for: more CO2 would be released into the atmosphere than would be absorbed by the algae blooms. The simpler of the two explanations of why this should be so is:

“The concept is flawed,” says Scott Doney, a marine chemist at WHOI. He says it neglects the fact that deeper waters with high nutrients also generally contain a lot of dissolved inorganic carbon, including dissolved CO2. Bringing these waters to the lower pressures of the surface would result in the CO2 bubbling out into the air. So contrary to the desired effect, the scheme could result in a net ‘outgassing’ of CO2...

Ah well, maybe we can live in polar cities, and in any case, nobody has shot down my Carbopult(TM) idea.