Hard News: I'm in yr Beehive tellin yr MPs about teh internets
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New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research climatologist and IPCC author Jim Salinger says that they wouldn’t consider using tide gauge records “unless they are at least 50 years long”.
Don - that'll teach me for skim reading (hard to read the whole article when i'm also pretending to do work)
BenWilson I've reached more or less the same conclusion - as the new scientist article concludes, how lucky do you feel?
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I take your point, but a part of me wonders, does every documentary or piece of non-fiction have to pass the 'perfectly balanced/showing both sides of the argument' test?
. . . no, I guess not.
But if a documentary's aim is to be educative, then surely the burden of proof must be a consideration? I mean, 'Touching The Void' was an awesome documentary, but that was more the telling of a true story, and thus didn't require any proofs. AIT isn't simply relaying a story, it's educating viewers as to the factuality of a hot topic. And it's doing so in an eye-opening, pseudo-sensationalistic way which, in this age of hyper-information, can too easily make people lose faith in what is presented.
But I hear ya, and am sure that a lot of this is my scientist-educating brain needing some form of 'peer review' before it can accept something. Which wouldn't exactly make for riveting viewing, I agree.
If after 10 years of most of the major CO2 producers cutting back, we haven't seen any appreciable changes in climate, perhaps it could be scaled back again.
Alternatively if, after 10 years of most of the major CO2 producers cutting back we haven't seen any appreciable changes in climate then maybe the whole CO2-emissions thing isn't a factor in all this. A lot of blame is being thrown around, even more solutions are being tossed around, and still more big money is being spent. On something that we don't yet accurately know what the problem/cause/effect is. Surely if we could focus all that effort into actually discovering the source, effectors and factors behind what we're currently observing, then we can more accurately -- and more effectively -- do something about it.
I kinda like science. But when people quote Science as saying something is something, and people then react to it only to find it isn't that 'something' . . . you get the whole 'cry wolf' thing happening. And people then lose faith in and blame Science, when they should be blaming idiots like Micheal Moore who are making the unweighted claims in the first place. Science has -- and requires -- necessary rigour for a very good reason.
All of which isn't to say that I'm saying any of anyone's claims here are false . . .
Here's an article that looks at the topic from both sides.
. . . cheers, Hamish.
Will meditate on it tonight . . .
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"Alternatively if, after 10 years of most of the major CO2 producers cutting back we haven't seen any appreciable changes in climate then maybe the whole CO2-emissions thing isn't a factor in all this."
Depends how much cutting back we do, of course. I don't believe there's any real controversy about CO2 being a greenhouse gas anymore. The big controversy is merely about what we can/should do. And I favor an experimental approach, personally. It's a costly experiment, but the consequences are very weighty too. And we will have to live without fossil fuels sooner or later, so the cost of the experiment will happen at some point anyway. But we could choose the time.
It might even be quite soon. Gas has almost doubled in price over 5 years. It only needs to do that a few more times and biofuel will actually be the same price.
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My point was to challenge the statements by Andrew and Graeme that Al Gore was a liar. There is plenty credible scientific evidence backing up the statements in his documentary (certainly plenty more than in the Channel 4 "rebuttal"). He didn't just "make shit up".
Graeme's comeback is that people from the Pacific don't come to NZ therefore Al Gore is a liar.
Huh?
It is a really well documented fact that Pacific islanders have been concerned about sea level rise for a long time. It is also documented that sea levels have been rising in the Pacific. There is some dispute as to how much this is due to global warming.
Are you suggesting that this would not be a consideration for those 100s of 1000s of Pacific islanders who migrate to NZ and Australia? Hardly the Gore howler of Graeme's claims.
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"I mean, 'Touching The Void' was an awesome documentary, but that was more the telling of a true story, and thus didn't require any proofs"
Good point. And you are right that documentaries that purport to educate rather than entertain have a higher bar to clear.
Which is a shame, because sometimes people miss the central point when not all the little details are right.
The cool movie critic James Berardinelli has written some great stuff about how the whole 'Based on a true story' movie genre sprang up to run an end game around burden of proof.
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Don - you challenged Andrew to back up his claim that Al Gore had lied, he didn't want to play, so I chimed in with the one thing in the documentary that struck me, as a New Zealander, as unfounded.
I have not disputed claims that the sea level is rising; I have not disputed claims that Pacific Islanders are worried about rising oceans or climate change generally. I was taking issue with the single statement in the film that I personally have enough information to know is wrong. Not a claim that climate change is a consideration for emigrating Pacific Islanders (for how would I know?) but a claim I knew was flat out false.
This claim (from a transcript of An Inconvenient Truth - I quote the entire section, to provide context):
This brings me to the second canary in the coal mine, Antarctica, the largest mass of ice on the planet by far. A friend of mine said in 1978, “If you see the break up of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula, watch out, because that should be seen as an alarm bell for global warming. If you look at the peninsula up close, every place where you see one of these green blotches is an ice shelf larger than the state of Rhode Island that has broken up in just the last 15 to 20 years. I want to focus on just one of them called Larsen B. I want you to look at these black pools here. It makes it seem almost as if we are looking through the ice to the ocean beneath. But that’s an illusion. This is melting water that forms this pool. If you were flying over it in a helicopter, you’d see it 700 feet tall. They are so majestic, so massive. In the distance are the mountains, and just before the mountains is the shelf of the continent. This is floating ice, and there is land based ice on the down-slope of those mountains. From here to the mountains is about 20 to 25 miles. They thought this would be stable for about a hundred years, even with global warming. The scientists who study these ice shelves were absolutely astonished when they were looking at these images. Starting in January 31, 2002, in a period of 35 days, this ice shelf completely disappeared. They could not figure out how in the world this happened so rapidly. They went back to figure out where they had gone wrong. That’s when they focused on those pools of melting water. Even before they could figure out what had happened there, something else started going wrong. When the floating sea-based ice cracked up, it no longer held back the ice on the land. The land-based ice then started falling into the ocean. It was like letting the cork out of a bottle. There’s a difference between floating ice and land-based ice. It’s like the difference between an ice cube floating in a glass of water, which when it melts doesn’t raise the level of water in the glass, and a cube sitting atop a stack of ice cubes, which melts and flows over the edge. That’s why the citizens of these pacific nations had all had to evacuate to New Zealand.
(**__emphasis__** added).
You've asked me to do a few things, perhaps you could name two Pacific Nations whose entire populations have "had to evacuate to New Zealand".
Or even one.
Or a single island.
Or village? Or family? Or person?
People have left. People are worried about rising sea levels. Perhaps climate change has screwed ecosystems such that people want to leave. But not a single person has been evacuated to New Zealand let alone for the reason Gore asserts, and to claim otherwise is a LIE.
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The cool movie critic James Berardinelli has written some great stuff about how the whole 'Based on a true story' movie genre sprang up to run an end game around burden of proof.
Here he is on An Inconvenient Truth
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Maybe it's the only lie, but given this howler I suspect there might be others.
Graeme, I have a special loathing for left-wing agitprop but I really doubt if Gore was lying. He was most likely ill-informed. Which I admit is unusal for a US politician.
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3410,
Assuming a statement is not true, it's only a lie if there is knowledge of the falseness of the claim (ie intent to decieve), otherwise its merely a false statement.
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it's only a lie if there is knowledge of the falseness of the claim (ie intent to decieve)
Quite right.
I note that above I did make the distinction:
[the statement] is a lie, or is so reckless and ignorant that it's hard to tell the difference when one is talking about someone with the intellect and knowledge of climate change as Al Gore.
From where can Gore have obtained this factoid? Has anyone else actually claimed that entire Pacific Nations have been evacuated to New Zealand? Certainly Gore should know that he can't back the statement up (as he can with many of his other statements). In a documentary such as his, being so reckless as to whether something is true, not bothering to have someone check for accuracy etc. is pretty dishonest.
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Sue,
maybe we need a thread just for global warming discussions. When the subject turns up again we point people to that thread and everyone can play happy there. :)
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hehe.. good idea. we kind of hijacked this one
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We have to look no further than Russell himself for distorting the opinions about the C4 Documentary.
Right at the end of the article is this
Martin Durkin, who wrote and directed the programme, was unavailable for comment but admitted in an email to Mr Rive that the graph was wrong. "Thank you for highlighting the error on the 400-year graph. It is an annoying mistake which all of us missed and is being fixed for all future transmissions of the film. It doesn't alter our argument," Mr Durkin said.Its a mistake that we missed !!
Sort of destroys the beatup that the Independent ran and Russell fell for
We wait with baited breath for Al Gores corrections.On the topic of graphs , no one but no one talks about the discredited hockey stick anymore. It was usefull information but hyped far beyond the actual reality. Mann both added the final slope based on predicted warnings and mismanaged the analysis of data. The things you can do if you were a lead author for the IPCC.
Of course the graph that has 'interpolated' data is the famous CO2 graph from Mauna Kea volcano. The data from the volcano only dates from the mid fifties , yet the graph is always shown as going back to the beginning of the industrial age. How did they do it. They just took some ice core data showing CO2 levels , but the dates were uncertain and joined it up to the Mauna Kea data.
Conjoined twins, but put together rather than separated -
I wonder if your seditious global warming discussion is what got publicaaddress.net blocked in China?
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We wait with baited breath for Al Gores corrections.
The extra data could be a mistake on the level of Gore's or it might be more on the mendacious side. I haven't seen the doco so don't have a feel for its general tone. But the offended scientist describes the inserted data as "fabricated" rather than the less judgmental "interpolated".
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I'm feeling a bit inadequate. My mother pointed out that the briefing on climate change I received in 1990 from Greenpeace has remained in their loft for the last 17 years. I took no action except always using low energy light bulbs and installing solar hot water systems. Sorry guys.
Thank god Augie has put me right.
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__Martin Durkin, who wrote and directed the programme, was unavailable for comment but admitted in an email to Mr Rive that the graph was wrong. "Thank you for highlighting the error on the 400-year graph. It is an annoying mistake which all of us missed and is being fixed for all future transmissions of the film. It doesn't alter our argument," Mr Durkin said.__
Its a mistake that we missed !!
Of course! Which will be why they've deliberately left it in the DVD version.
But c'mon Steve. Actively inventing data to fill in a gap in the record and thereby bolster your case isn't "a mistake that we missed".Sort of destroys the beatup that the Independent ran and Russell fell for
Hardly. The Independent story is just the latest installment: Durkin also used "experts" who habitually misstate their credentials, grossly misrepresented other people he interviewed and falsified another graph (which was presented as the work of NASA). And he's got form for doing precisely this kind of thing:
http://publicaddress.net/default,4026.sm
An Inconvenient Truth certainly isn't above criticism, and the Gore clanger identified by Graeme is pretty bizarre (I remember thinking "he can't have said that" when I saw the film), but Durkin's on another level altogether.
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Graeme - that line didn't even identify any PI nations. It said citizens had moved for this reason and came at the end of a long explanation on the impact of disappearing ice shelves.
In the US the word "all" is shoved into many contexts where it seems strange to other users of he English language. Vis "you all, they all, we all".
You seem to want evidence of the entire pacific population to have moved to NZ. The phrase you highlight is not inconceivable given the context I have pointed out, it is undoubtedly badly worded but hardly the howling lie you claim it to be.
An Inconvenient Truth certainly isn't above criticism,
Absolutely, but not much of climate (or any) science above criticism, I doubt. To be equating it with Durkin et al, is as pointed out, completely wrong.
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And there was me think Gore and Clinton were quite different people - it's just that Gore doesn't know what the definition of "all" is.
Or the definition of "evacuated".
I'm not equating Gore with Durkin. I'm equating a single clanger of Gore's (sorry if howler was OTT :-P ) with the concept of mistruth.
And then concluding. Well, Gore, through dishonesty (i.e. lying) or recklessness (i.e. failing to have anyone check and not giving a stuff whether it's true) or ignorance (actually thinking it's true and checking, but completely getting it wrong somehow), has made one clanger - I don't have the information personally to know whether there are others, but, given this outlandish statement, think it reasonable to conclude that there might well be others.
What evidence do I want? The name of a single island from which a single person has been "evacuated" because of rising seas.
As for your point that Gore names no PI nations. If my memory serves, he was standing in front of a map of the Pacific on which a number of islands were highlighted.
And as it happens, I'm not criticising any of Gore's science. A claim that people have been evacuated due to rising oceans is not a scientific one.
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Points taken Graeme.
and moving right along...does this:
I can go to the NetGuide Awards tonight
allow me to post this link here?*
*Usual disclaimers apply.
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The usual disclaimer being that I am a ninny (blame the Ninny State).
this is the actual link I tried to post.
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What evidence do I want? The name of a single island from which a single person has been "evacuated" because of rising seas.
Seems there's more than one:
Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.
And more to come:
Dire climate change predictions may seem like science fiction in many parts of the world. But in the tiny, sea-swept Pacific nation of Tuvalu, the crisis has already arrived.
Tuvalu consists of nine low-lying atolls totaling just 26 square kilometers, or 10 square miles, and in the past few years the "king tides" that peak in February have been rising higher than ever. Waves have washed over the island's main roads; coconut trees stand partly submerged; and small patches of cropland have been rendered unusable because of encroaching saltwater.
The government and many experts already assume the worst: Sometime in the next 50 years, if rising sea-level predictions prove accurate, the entire 11,800-strong population will have to be evacuated.
And more (an Indymedia report, and thus perhaps to be approached cautiously, but still quite alarming).
Gore's "all" remains an obvious overstatement, but his claim doesn't seem entirely incorrect either.
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And PA, best blog, again. Way to go.
Back to Graeme, Andrew was equating Gore to Durkin and as I recall, you were taking up the mantle on his behalf.
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How's the head this morning, Russell?
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I've reread the original blog and noticed that ti mentioned Glenn Becks anti GW programme. How does that guy get airtime for his ramblings?
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