Y Safle

There is a campaign afoot to make Wales the first fairtrade country. Fair trade products ensure that producers of the product are given a fair price for their product, rather than all of the profit being taken by middle men. It is a great scheme, although it is easily abused by middle men who also charge a premium on the product!

But we buy fair trade whenever we have the option. Despite these abuses of the scheme, and the fact that sometimes the administration of the scheme is not 100% perfect, it is simply more just that we ensure that producers in poorer nations are not exploited by a drive to lower prices in countries that can afford to pay a fraction more.

Here is a lint to the web site for the “Make Wales a Fair Trade Country” campaign. The campaign has a lot of support, including in the Welsh Assembly.

However, they could probably have chosen a better domain for a campaign about wales. The domain they are using is gwe.nu. Now .nu is the top level domain ID for the island of Niue. A little to the east of Tonga, this island is just about as far away from Wales that you can get!

After I wrote my piece in this blog about Dr Timothy Ball’s opinion piece, where he claims that no one is listening to him, even though he was one of Canada’s first climatology PhDs, and a researcher in the field – Dr Ball wrote me a reply in the comments section arguing that the piece was ad hominem.

As I pointed out to him, the piece was in fact evaluating an appeal to authority using the same criteria that I proposed for evaluating such appeals. It is entirely valid to review the expertise of an authority when such an appeal is made.

But Dr Ball made one point which I will deal with a little more fully here:

Elsewhere you (I assume it was you, but no matter because the point is still important) make the argument that there was no consensus on global cooling in the 1970s. First of all, as with global warming today, consensus is not a scientific fact. Second, as an active climatologist during that period I can attest there was a general consensus, but as with warming today there were those who disagreed that the trend would continue.

Now I am sure that these are Tim Ball’s recollections of the time, but as with all things, our recollections will be coloured by anecdotal evidence and specific converstaions we had. Was there ever hype about global cooling? Certainly, as articles in Newsweek and National Geographic demonstrate. Would Dr Ball have been asked about the issues? I presume so.

But was there a scientific consensus on the issue? Certainly not.

How do we know? The same way we know anything about what is happening in science – by reading the scientific literature.

And that is very revealing, because there is very little literature on the subject, and clearly no consensus.

There is a site that has set out to evaluate all papers from the time to examine this. The challenge on the site is to present any paper that predicts an ice age in the 1970s. Thus far there are some 16 links to papers, and no obvious link to global cooling. Indeed, the action of carbon dioxide in warming the climate is a stronger theme in these papers! But if we allowed all 16 papers as candidates – that is a long long way from a scientific consensus.

A good summary of the field is found in:

National Research Council, US Committee for the Global Atmospheric Research Program, Understanding Climatic Change: A Program for Action, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, (1975), appendix A.

This paper has been summarised by W M Connolley, who also is gathering the other papers mentioned above. It is quite clear that (a) there was no consensus on global cooling, and (b) that the worldwide scientific consensus of the IPCC is wholly quantified where the above report only spoke of very small risks, without giving any numbers.

So what really happened in the 1970s? Essentially there was some cooling from the post war period into the 1970s as per the graph on the right.

No consensus was ever reached on the cause of the cooling, because at this time there was also a great deal of concern about acid rain. Consequently sulpher dioxide emissions were reduced through a series of international treaties and technological change. The result was that sulpher dioxide rapidly declined as an atmospheric aerosol. This had been very effectively masking the effects of carbon dioxide since the the second world war, and as sulpher dioxide emissions were reduced the temperatures started to rapidly climb.

This is all well known, and there has even been a half baked suggestion that we deliberately pump sulpher based aerosols into the atmosphere to keep global temperatures down!

What of the coverage in the popular press?

Well anyone who knows anything about science will be aware that the popular press love to latch on to preliminary studies – particularly when they are controversial, and make a big thing of them. The journalists do not quantify uncertainty in their reporting, and the result is a bit of hysteria, followed by ignorance of later refutations.

An example of this is seen, for instance, in breast feeding studies, where breast feeding has been linked to high IQ in the popular press. What the press do not mention is that earlier studies were contradictory, because they failed to factor in factors such that higher IQ mothers were more likely to breast feed. Even now that the science is settling, and it seems that there is a link between IQ and breast feeding, no-one actually mentions that whilst the effect is observable scientifically, we are not talking about an improvement that anyone would actually notice.

So don’t rely on the press for science reporting.

And in interests of balance, I will mention a recent article in “The Independent” which was predicting the possibility of extinction of life on earth at the upper end of the warming estimates from the IPCC. That was just as poor reporting as any I have seen on global warming science.

A comment on this blog points to three articles, all making the same points about there being a medieval warm period. The one below is typical:

Vikings raised crops and cattle in Greenland 1000 years ago, while Britons grew grapes in England

I have already answered the point about Greenland in an earlier post. However, I did not mention this bit about grapes being grown in Britain.

I just wanted to confirm that my parent’s house, built in 1900, has a grape vine growing on the south wall. It is by no means impossible to grow grapes in Britain (and not just because Britain is now warmer than it was in the medieval warm period. This vine has been there for a very long time. I do not know if it was planted when the house was built, but it must have been there for at least 50 years).

Warren Wierbse says in his introduction to “The Best of A. W. Tozer,”

He was not afraid to tell us what was wrong. Nor was he hesitant to
tell us how God could make it right. If a sermon can be compared to light, then A. W. Tozer released a laser beam from the pulpit, a beam that penetrated your heart, seared your conscience, exposed sin, and left you crying, “What must I do to be saved?” The answer was always the same: surrender to Christ; get to know God personally; grow to become like Him

Tozer also said to an acquaintance:

“I have preached myself off of every
Bible Conference platform in the country!”

Because the popular crowds do not rush to hear a man whose convictions make them uncomfortable.

So when somebody said to me:
>It’s just too bad that the author of Born After Midnight and The Root of
>The Righteous [i.e. Tozer] never took Galatians 5:22-23 to heart and asked the Lord to
>develop the fruit of the Spirit in them. Their writings would reflected
>it.

I think the point is that Tozer did indeed take Galatians 5:22,23 to heart.
Instead of using it as a balm for a guilty conscience he understood the
underlying message as written: Those who have the Spirit of God will
demonstrate the fact with deeds worthy of repentance. Christians are called
to bring forth fruit, and we know what Jesus said of the tree that brought
forth no fruit.

Tozer’s writings are a wake up call on a par with those of Leonard
Ravenhill. His book “Keys to the Deeper Life” should be compulsory reading
for all Christians (it is only about thirty pages long after all).

Again the point is that so much that passes for modern day Christianity
would be disowned by our forefathers as carnal and ungodly. Believers take
other believers to court. Believers live in immorality but are allowed to
arrive each week at the communion table [or whatever your church calls it].
Christians step on each other in their rush to “the top”. Christians ignore
justice and mercy, and reflect in so many ways the attitude of the world
around them.

To repeat Tozer’s quote:

> We modern Christians are long on talk and short on conduct

We love to talk and debate, but how many of us are doing things practically
in our own situations? How many of us are making a difference in our own
communities, for no reward but to know that we serve our LORD?

We can talk much of working out our salvation, but our Christian faith is no
academic exercise, but a practical walk. This site is meant to be about "practical
Christian life" and the reason is that a Christian life that is not
practical is also not alive.

Faith without works is dead, being alone.

So let us examine ourselves and consider how we could better serve God in
the family of the Church. Don’t talk about it. Do it!

I received a long comment in this blog this week that included something I see from time to time by those who want to believe that climate change is not man made:

1300AD — when exploring vikings named ‘Greenland’ Greenland, they did so for a reason: they cultivated the land for two centuries — before they couldn’t grow any more (it wasn’t human greenhouse gas that interrupted their cultivation LOL

Firstly, let’s get the facts straight. The Vikings colonised Greenland towards the end of the 10th centure (c. 982). They remained there for over 400 years, but their settlements were abandoned by the 15th century (after c. 1430 AD, but it is unclear exactly when the colony was abandoned).

Now the argument that is made is that the name of the country – “Greenland” and the fact that people lived there implies that at this time (during the so called “medieval warm period”) the global temperature must have been much warmer than it is now.

But this argument is made in ignorance of a few key facts. Firstly, people live in much the same locations of Greenland now as the two Viking settlements. These areas are indeed very green even today. Look at this google map of the area of the Western settlement. The eastern settlement area is here. Notice the strong green colour in all the valleys! Whilst travel to the settlements and trade with them would have become very hard in the Little Ice Age, it is not as if they were overwhelmed by the Greenland ice sheet!

Indeed the average temperature in Greenland now is higher than it would have been in the medieval warm period[1].

But there are other misconceptions in this argument. Greenland was settled by Erik the Red, who was expelled from Iceland. It is a very likely theory that the naming of the land as “Greenland” was a bit of 10th century marketing hype to encourage others to settle there.

Another point is that “grn” is an indo-european word meaning something akin to a nugget, and at the root of hundreds of words in a multiplicity of languages. Words including “ground”, “corn”, “grain” and so on. Some early maps actually refer to Greenland as Groundland (the Old Norse equivalent at least), and it may be that the country was not named for the colour green at all.

Finally, the medieval warm period was primarily a Northern European phenomenon, and not one found worldwide.

So an argument made on the existence of the Viking settlement, and the naming of the country as Greenland, is a very tenuous argument against global warming.

*Notes*

1. Crowley TJ, Lowery TS (2000) How Warm Was the Medieval Warm Period? AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment: Vol. 29, No. 1 pp. 51–54

Five people found my blog yesterday because they were looking for information on the Rathbone plot. Unfortunately all they found was my article about bonfire night, which is a pity, because Google turns up virtually nothing on this long forgotten act of treason.

So for anyone else visiting here, looking for details of this plot, here is what I know:

The Rathbone Plot took place in early 1666, coming to trial in April of that year. The key conspirator was Colonel John Rathbone. He and a group of eight former parliamentarians were arrested, tried and executed for conspiring to overthrow the King and Parliament and restore the Commonwealth.

The plan had apparently involved setting fire to London on September 3rd. The London Gazette reported this and speculated that the conspirators had consulted William Lilly’s almanac and horoscopes that predicted the fall of the king in that year. I suspect that the speculation may have been designed to discredit the conspirators, as the date also commemorated two of Cromwell’s victories at Dunbar and Worcester, as well as his death. It seems unlikely that puritan parliamantarians would have consulted with horoscopes.

For some background information, the 17th century was a turbulant time, particularly in English history. The English civil war saw the overthrow and regicide of king Charles I, who had been emulating the French absolutism, and advocating the doctrine of the divine right of kings. He was defeated by the puritan Oliver Cromwell, who was installed as Lord Protector in 1653.

Cromwell died on September 3rd 1658, and left a political vacuum. Whilst his son, Richard, was installed as Lord protector, there was a growing movement for a restoration, and in 1660 Charles II was restored to the English throne. Later in the century, in 1688, the glorious revolution would depose James II and lead to a second interregnum, in which the transfer of absolute power from monarchy to parliament in England was sealed.

However, the Rathbone plot was in 1666, and was an attempt to undo the restoration. It is principally of interest because of the coincidental starting of the Great Fire of London on 2nd September 1666. The fact that the fire started so close to the chosen date of the Rathbone plot is curious.

Whilst the fire is only known to have killed 6 people, it destroyed most of London. This tragedy eventually turned out to be a good thing, because Sir Christopher Wren was able to impose his magnificent artistic vision on the city, giving us the new St Paul’s, the London monument and much more. The redesigned city is also sometimes credited with imporoved sanitation that led to the great plague of the year before being the last plague to affect London.

Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it.

The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright–to promote progress, for the benefit of the public–then we must make changes in the other direction.

Richard Stallman

The BBC reports on a new publication by Dr Aric Sigman, which indicates that watching television is bad for children – and that the damage can set in by the age of three!

He has carried out desk research on a number of studies that demonstrate links between viewing television and obesity, short sightedness, fatigue and hormonal changes. His recommendation is that viewing should be limited, and that todlers should not view the television at all.

Some will find the prescription extreme, but when interviewed, Sigman pointed out that when we go out and buy a new TV, we do not throw the old one away. Instead we move them into other rooms, and that significant numbers of toddlers have TVs in their bedrooms. I did not quite catch his figure but, a quick web search reveals that 26% of US children under the age of two have a TV in their bedroom. I expect the figure is similar in the UK.

26% of children under the age of two?

One rule we hope to always employ is to keep our televisions in communal areas in the house. The idea being that watching television be something we do together as a family. These things are not child minders for when you cannot be bothered to play with your children.

We also try to keep the programmes educational, but we have not come to the point of banning the box yet. But this research is food for thought.

Do you know how much television your children watch? And do you watch it with them?

In Nigel Calder’s piece in the Times he says:

The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.

A case of selective use of the evidence. There is excellent data from a variety of sources. I have chosen two developed by scientists in conjunction with the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office. These measure land and sea temperatures at multiple sites around the world. The datasets can be downloaded here and are described on that site and in the papers referenced below.

I then plotted these data sets, and it is quite clear that there is no loss of the warming trend since 1999. (Click the thumbnail to see the full sized graph). All I can think that Calder is referring to is the spike in 1998 (I have drawn a line to indicate this), making that year the hottest on record.

But such spikes are not a surprise. In any such dataset there will be outlyers – but what is quite clear is that there has been a strong warming trend, particularly over the last few decades. Compare this graph to my graph in my post earlier today, and you can see that there is also no correlation between the warming trend over these decades and cosmic rays.

So Calder is wrong to say that the warming trend has topped out, and he is wrong to attribute the warming to cosmic rays. He is also wrong to suggest that no-one would publish Svensmark’s paper – it is published in the august proceedings of the Royal Society. He is wrong to say that scientists who oppose global warming are locked out of the process – science thrives on people trying to prove other scientists wrong.

Calder is wrong on just about every point.

References (for the data sets used in this graph)

• Brohan, P., J.J. Kennedy, I. Haris, S.F.B. Tett and P.D. Jones, 2006: Uncertainty
  estimates in regional and global observed temperature changes: a new dataset from
  1850.
  J. Geophysical Research 111, D12106,
  doi:10.1029/2005JD006548
  – Available as PDF

• Jones, P.D., New, M., Parker, D.E., Martin, S. and Rigor, I.G., 1999: Surface air
  temperature and its variations over the last 150 years.
  Reviews of Geophysics 37, 173-199.

• Rayner, N.A., P. Brohan, D.E. Parker, C.K. Folland, J.J. Kennedy, M. Vanicek, T.
  Ansell and S.F.B. Tett, 2006: Improved analyses of changes and uncertainties in
  marine temperature measured in situ since the mid-nineteenth century: the HadSST2
  dataset.
  J. Climate, 19, 446-469.

• Rayner, N.A., Parker, D.E., Horton, E.B., Folland, C.K., Alexander, L.V, Rowell, D.P., Kent, E.C. and Kaplan, A., 2003:
  Globally complete analyses of sea surface temperature, sea ice and night marine air temperature, 1871-2000.
  J. Geophysical Research 108, 4407,
  doi:10.1029/2002JD002670

Finally – this graph is used to demonstrate that the warming trend in global mean temperatures still continues. Any reliance on this representation of the data beyond this is discouraged. I have deliberately used the variance data simply to demonstrate the trends. I have chosen two data sets to demonstrate that I am not being deliberately selective of data that supports my point of view.

There is an article being widely touted by those who don’t want to believe the current consensus for man made climate change in our world. The article is written by Nigel Calder, the ex editor of New Scientist magazine – a popular science magazine giving a round up of current science news.

There are many things that could be said about the article, but it makes one important point. Calder says that the sun has become increasingly active over the 20th century, but the activity has levelled off, and that this corresponds with a levelling off of global warming noted since 1999.

He also points to a paper by Henrik Svensmark, published in the proceedings of the Royal Society, demonstrating the role of cosmic rays in the formation of rain clouds. Calder’s summary of the issue is:

[Svensmark] saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun’s magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world.

The problem with Calder’s thesis does not lie in Svensmark’s work, but in the fact that he has selected perfectly good science to bolster a claim that is not supported by the evidence.

The Climax station in Colorado has been measuring cosmic rays reaching the earth since 1953 (before the rapid warming of the last three decades or so). I have created a graph from the Climax Station data, and included it here. Click on the thumbnail to see the full sized version.

Notice that whilst there is a (well known) ten year cycle to these data, there is emphatically not any trend here. It is not the case that the sun’s magnetic field has been intensifying (until 1999) and thus batting away more cosmic rays. These data show that, whilst Svensmark’s thesis is excellent science, and furthers our understanding of cloud formation, it says *absolutely* *nothing* about the climate change we have been experiencing over recent decades.

Nigel Calder does us a disservice, by confusing the data in this way. (Indeed, the levelling off since 1999 he mentions is also wrong I think. I will see if I can get hold of some data).