US Presidential Candidates in "Ties to Industry" Shock

Catherine Brahic, "New" "Scientist"'s online environment reporter continues to reflect the magazine's confusion between environmental science and environmental politics.

If I didn't know better, I'd say "so much for the pulling power of oil money". Reports suggested that it played a big role in George W Bush's two terms in office, but according to this stunning online interactive graphic, it was powerless to save Rudolph Giuliani in the 2008 primaries.

The graphic is from OilChange International, who have made an online toy showing the relationships between past US presidential candidates and oil industry donors.

But what is the significance of oil money? Is it really surprising that corporations and businessmen donate to presidential candidates? Not a lot, and no. US presidential candidates are not going to have got to where they are by not taking donations and by refusing to be friends with rich people. You might find something equally scurrilous by looking at donations from any industry sector - toys, for example - and their donations. Even greener-than-though, pledge-making eco-warrior Al Gore took $142,014 in 2000, according to this silly database. (Only enough to pay his gas bills for just a couple of months though.) Rich people hang out with each other. It's what they do. Companies (and individuals) make donations to US politicians. It's how it is done.

Corruption? Hardly. Right or wrong? That's a very different question. There are many discussions to be had about whether what goes on in Western democracies is 'right'. But that it it 'all about oil' is an argument which comes up again and again, and again, in the climate debate. Why?

It reveals an awful lot about the Green movement (as well as a large part of the liberal left) that it can't actually challenge its counterpart, or call for a new form of politics which doesn't require such vast sums of capital. It's easier to say, for example, that John Kerry ($184,037) lost the election to George Bush ($2,649,725) because of oil money, or because people are stupid, or like rats, and republicans appeal to stupid people. Instead of reflecting on why their ideas have failed to find a home in the public imagination, increasingly commentators have looked for other reasons to explain the failure of the self-proclaimed good guys. If politicians eager to identify with progressive movements were to try to challenge the politics by which powerful interests gain influence, they would undermine themselves. This is perhaps more evident in UK politics. We've linked to this video before... David Cameron, standing on top of Greenpeace's HQ in London, showing off his ethical credentials, and announcing a new policy.



Is it any less dodgy to be in bed with Greenpeace (a multi-national player if ever there was one) than with an oil Baron? Who is Cameron trying to appeal to here? His plans for micro-generation will be appealing to about 0.001% of the UK population - mostly his landed school chums. Meanwhile, micro-generation is likely to serve only as a colossal pain in the arse to anyone who has to depend on it - everyone else. His policy has not emerged from a well-developed political philosophy that he wants to share, but just the immediate need to appear to be in bed with the "right people" in the mistaken belief that it will appeal to "the people". Greenpeace are only too happy to be the powerful corporate interest in that relationship. All it has to complain about is that it's own vast spending power hasn't had the effect on the electorate that it imagines the oil money has.

If $2 million were enough to buy a US president, the US wouldn't be quite the superpower it is. Like the shrill cries about ExxonMobil-funded sceptical scientists, the claim lacks any sense of proportion.

The oil argument is a big, black...er... red-herring tossed out by a movement that thrives on the exhaustion of political elites, but finds itself the object of just as much cynicism from the public. Naturally, then, the movement finds faults with both. The former is corrupt, and the latter is stupid. Tired politicians are turning to the environmental movement as a PR move for empty campaigns.

Back to the New Scientist blog... Brahic is, of course, not reporting science, but politics. We certainly don't dissapprove of coverage of the politics of the environmental debate. But Brahic and the New Scientist's agenda don't actually bring a fresh perspective on the debate more than they epitomise it. You could hear the same old stories and tired rhetoric from any mouldy old hairshirt ecowarrior. Recycling internet innuendo, conspiracy theories and doom-mongery is not 'news'. There is an interesting debate to be had about the relationship between science and politics, but New Scientist is not fuelling it.

Imminent Shortage of Stories for "New" Scientist

(Or "Global Production of Alarmist Story-Lines Past Peak" or "Gloom-Mine Reserves Increasing According to Demand" or "New Scientist in Search of Renewable Sources Of Gloomy Stories" or [INSERT OWN HEADLINE HERE])

An editorial in last week's (19 Jan) New Scientist magazine claims that “there is a case for nuclear power, but the future is with renewables”. Gone are the days of scientific optimism. The new scientists are now pessimists. The editorial concludes, following some seemingly intractable political problems with nuclear energy that “… don’t let’s delude ourselves that [nuclear power] still has a long-term role to play”.

This miserable theme is continued on page 38 by David Strahan in his article The Great Coal Hole (available in full here), in which he reports that the world is facing an imminent shortage of coal. “And not only because of logistics”, warns Strahan, “but also because of geology”. This runs counter to many previously held studies which have attempted to estimate how much black stuff we have left. One 1996 study even suggested that there may be as much as 7.8E12 tonnes (7,800,000,000,000) of coal – enough for around 1200 years at today’s rate of consumption.

According to the article, however, even the World Energy Council’s far more conservative 2007 estimate of 847 billion tonnes of known coal reserves world-wide (enough for 140 years at present consumption) may be vastly over-inflated. Known reserves of economically recoverable coal are actually shrinking faster than coal is being consumed, says Strahan.

Another less noticed reason is that in recent years many countries have revised their official coal reserves downwards, in some cases massively, and often by far more than had been mined since the previous assessment. For instance, the UK and Germany have cut their reserves by more than 90 per cent and Poland by 50 per cent ... Figures for two of the world’s biggest coal producers are particularly hard to glean. Russia has failed to update its numbers since 1996, China since 1990. “There is really nothing very certain or clear-cut about reserves figures anywhere,” Clarke says. Even senior officials in the coal industry admit that the figures are unreliable. “We don’t have good reserves numbers in the coal business,” says David Brewer of CoalPro, the UK mine owners’ association.

A more sobre analysis of Britain's coal situation, from 1993, is available from the New Scientist's own archive. It reveals that the true size of the UK's coal reserves has never been certain.

The nature of the real problem is well illustrated by the deceptively simple question of 'How much coal is there in Britain?' A great variety of answers has been provided over the years. A report of a Royal Commission in 1871 estimated the figure to be 149 billion tonnes. Reserve figures based on coal workable for the following hundred years were estimated in 1942 at 21 billion tonnes. In 1973, 'operating reserves' were estimated at 4 billion tonnes and in 1979 to be about 7 billion tonnes. Also in 1979, British Coal estimated 'coal in place' at 190 billion tonnes, of which about 45 billion tonnes might eventually be shown to be a reserve, a figure that has been taken to indicate that there is enough coal for the next 300 years at the prevailing rate of mining. Recently the British Geological Survey has suggested that the true operating reserves may be as little as 3 billion tonnes. So, over the years we have seen an extraordinary range of figures for Britain's coal reserve/resource.

Evidence from the Coal Authority to a 2001 House of Lords Select committee suggested that the UK had even less coal.

The CA has consulted with the British coal industry and have advised the Cabinet Office Energy Review that estimated established reserves amount to 222 million tonnes with a further known potential of 380 million tonnes; in addition currently un-accessed deep mine and open cast resources potentially (see para 11 below) provide many years of future production at present levels.

These increasingly conservative figures appear to support Strahan's thesis, albeit while detracting from its newsworthiness. But, as the evidence points out:

Section 5(6)(b) of the Coal Industry Act 1994 specifically prevents the CA from exploring for new coal or proving known occurrences. It is also barred from obtaining planning permission or any other authorisations required for carrying on coal mining operations. In today’s circumstances, this prevents an overall approach being adopted in the public interest. Equally important, known reserves of coal are universally in danger of being sterilised by non coal related surface developments. There is little, if any, effective planning policy to prevent the sterilisation of coal which may be required for working in the future. Unlike the situation with aggregates for example, there is no land banking policy for opencast coal embedded in the formalities of the Town and Country Planning system. Even if Britain's considerable opencast and deep mine coal resources are not to be extensively worked under the existing planning regime, it is important that they should be kept available to facilitate any future change in policy which might favour their exploitation.

Uncertainty remains, even in the UK - a small island, one of the richest countries in the world, and one of the most comprehensively surveyed, by some of the keenest geologists and geographers. Nonetheless, the gloominess in the New Scientist continues...

Taken together, dramatic falls in some countries’ reserves coupled with the stubborn refusal of others to revise their figures down in the face of massive production suggest that figures for global coal reserves figures are not to be relied on. Is it possible that the sturdy pit prop of unlimited coal is actually a flimsy stick?

This seems to imply that something nefarious is going on. This "stubborn refusal" is presented as though it were a deliberate attempt to deceive, when in fact, as is clear, the truth is that there are no such data, even for the UK. How can we expect it to exist in Russia, and China, given their comparatively vast sizes, and arguably more limited human resources? The article goes on to explain that we know that coal is running out - in geological terms - in spite of the conspiracy to keep us misinformed, because price increases would have the effect of increasing known reserves, as geological reserves became economically viable.

Problem is, the real world seems to have forgotten this piece of economic lore. Although the price of coal has quintupled since 2002, reserves have still fallen. This is similar to what is happening with oil, where fresh reserves have not been forthcoming despite soaring prices. To a growing number of oil industry commentators this is because we have reached, or are just about to reach, peak oil – the point at which oil production hits an all time high then goes into terminal decline.

That is to say that we know that prices have risen, and reported reserves have fallen, indicating that prices are rising because of depletion, not confounding economic factors. But Strahan has already explained that reserve reporting is unreliable. Now that they are being downgraded, he seems sufficiently confident in them to make some alarmist statements.

Yet we know that the downgrading of reserves has political causes. For example, one reason for the UK downsizing its reserves might just be because of Britain’s recent history. Coal mines in the UK were shut down amid a historic dispute between the Government and miners, and the declining cost of importing coal from elsewhere against the rising costs of domestic production, not because Britain had run out of coal. In the case of oil, the rising price has much to do with uncertainties caused post-9/11 and by the War in Iraq and tensions in the Middle East. Reluctance to invest in exploiting new reserves might reflect the fact that global economic forecasts are currently as gloomy as the New Scientist. With economic downturn comes a reduction in demand. Who would invest in bringing new sources online in the face of economic uncertainty? Furthermore, it is not true that known geological reserves can switch on and off according to the price. Mining is an expensive business, even more so when mistakes are made.

As the 1993 article tells us, in the wake of two economic recessions:

But recent years have seen the opposite trend, with a progressive decrease in the price of most fossil fuels. Variations in the price of a barrel of oil have resulted in oilfields being brought into production or 'mothballed' as the price has gone up, or down. In the short term, price variations of a commodity have little to do with available resources or reserves and everything to do with Gulf crises, new environmental legislation, the state of the economy or perceptions within the commodity market. In the longer term, however, the price must be related to the availability of resources and reserves and the ease and relative potential cost of transferring estimates from the resource category to the reserve category.

ie, politics not geology. But what is behind this idea that the super-abundance of coal is a fragile illusion, and that the truth is in just two decades we will run out? The first thing is a need to create stories about the future. This is no bad thing in itself. After all, the good news that we've got a millennium of coal left is as uplifting as the news that we've only got two decades left is depressing. But Strahan does not report about new research about the actual, physical amount of coal in the ground, but a fairly old and clunky way of divining that same data from proxies. In the process he forgets that both the downgrading of reserves and the current high price of energy can be explained by political forces rather than geological ones. Downgrading merely reflects a lack of any meaningful data, and the peculiarities of geopolitics and the market explain high prices. Second, the bigger storyline is the New Scientist's editorial agenda, which seems bent on pursuing alarmism, and taking environmentalist political positions on matters which it really ought to be shedding light on. Strahan's thesis also relies on the (controversial) work of M. King Hubbert:

To forecast coal production Rutledge borrowed a statistical technique developed for oil forecasting known as Hubbert linearisation. M. King Hubbert, after whom the method is named, was a the Shell geologist who founded the peak oil school of thought. In 1956 Hubbert famously predicted that US oil production would peak within 15 years and go into terminal decline. He was vindicated in 1970.

So what's the truth? How much coal is there really left? Probably somewhere between the highest and the lowest estimate. Which still gives us good time for finding out how much is left, and developing alternatives. Hubbert said some interesting things about those, too:

... it appears that there exist within minable depths in the United States rocks with uranium contents equivalent to 1000 barrels or more of oil per metric ton, whose total energy content is probably several hundred times that of all the fossil fuels combined. The same appears to be true of many other parts of the world. Consequently, the world appears to be on the threshold of an era which in terms of energy consumption will be at least an order of magnitude greater than that made possible by the fossil fuels.

Not if the "new" scientists have their way, it isn't. But even Strahan and New Scientist can't help looking on the bright side, just a little bit:

The sliver lining to this gloomy scenario is its effect on climate. Forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assume more or less infinite replenishment of coal reserves, in line with traditional economic theory. Less coal means less carbon dioxide, so the impact on emissions could be enormous. Using one of the IPCC’s simpler climate models, Rutledge forecasts that total CO2 emissions from fossil fuel will be lower than any of the IPCC scenarios. He found that atmospheric concentration of CO2 will peak in 2070 at 460 parts per million, fractionally above what many scientists believe is the threshold for runaway climate change. “In some sense this is good news,” Rutledge says. “Production limits mean we are likely to hit the general target without any policy intervention.”

Hurrah for not having enough energy.

Climate Deniers Are Slaves to Democracy

On the New Scientist (which is neither) blog last week, Catherine Brahic, the rag's online environment reporter was struck by a paper published in the journal Climatic Change. Brahic summarises:

Davidson claims that historical hindsight shows how preposterous the claims made in favour of slavery were. He suggests they bear striking resemblance to claims made against taking any action on climate change by contemporary members of Congress.

Like the mag itself, this argument is neither new nor science. It poses as philosophy. Which is fine. But really it's just a rehash of the climate-denial-equals-holocaust-denial chestnut. Yet it is still interesting, because, just like the climate-denial-equals-holocaust-denial chestnut, it tells us more about the people making it than it does about its subjects. In spite of being 'not convinced the comparison is helpful', Brahic is sufficiently sympathetic to finish her article with the cynical words:

Political decisions are based on money, not morals.

It's that money argument, again, even though abolition is about as good an example of a political decision based on morality rather than money that you are likely to find. Brahic's sympathy for Davidson's thesis appears to be based on the idea that arguments for the continuation of slavery were preposterous, and business-as-usual arguments are preposterous, therefore, denying climate change is as bad as being in favour of slavery. Or something.

The causes of 'bad science' in today's society - such as the rise of alternative therapies, creationism, and new religious movements - are the subject of many a hand-waving thesis. But when that discussion extends to arguments about the role of oil and money in society, people claiming to have science on their side are adding bad politics, bad history and bad philosophy to the mix. And in his paper, Parallels In Reactionary Argumentation In The US Congressional Debates On The Abolition of Slavery And The Kyoto Protocol, Marc D. Davidson certainly claims to have science on his side. In fact, he goes as far as to equate the science of climate with the morality of equality. Well, he has to really, otherwise he wouldn't have a paper to write. Davidson's abstract reads:

Today, the United States is as dependent on fossil fuels for its patterns of consumption and production as its South was on slavery in the mid-nineteenth century. That US congressmen tend to rationalise fossil fuel use despite climate risks to future generations just as Southern congressmen rationalised slavery despite ideals of equality is perhaps unsurprising, then. This article explores similarities between the rationalisation of slavery in the abolition debates and the rationalisation of ongoing emissions of greenhouse gases in the US congressional debates on the Kyoto Protocol.

He then makes equivalents of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 1856 13th Amendment to the US constitution, abolishing slavery. The earlier document, states:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

On the UNFCCC agreement, Davidson writes:

Despite this commitment [“to protect the climate system for present and future generations.”], the US Congress has as yet rejected any mandatory regulation of greenhouse gases, including the binding emission targets for the industrialised nations agreed to under the Kyoto Protocol

But how is using slaves the moral equivalent of using oil? The subtitle of the second section of Davidson's article - 'Similarities between slavery and the use of fossil fuels' - promises to answer the question... but doesn't. Instead Davidson argues that they are similar because (i) abolition of slavery/oil is not in the interests of the electorate - people who had a vote did not have an economic interest in abolishing slavery, or in the later case, oil; (ii) the electorate shifts costs onto those outside of the electorate - the slaves do all the work in the same way that oil does, and the costs of using that oil (as opposed to labour) are borne by future generations, who are not yet part of the electorate; and (iii) arguments against both the slave trade, and efforts to reduce CO2 are similar because they both resist social change.

Davidson's problem, it seems, is with democracy - that it does not represent the interests of people who do not yet exist; people in the future are excluded from the process because they aren't alive yet, just as slaves were denied access to the democratic process. But this does not make equivalents of using slaves and using oil. In order to be deprived of 'rights' it is necessary to exist. So to grant rights to people who do not exist, or to claim that they are being denied their rights, or to imply that you somehow speak for them are all totally absurd.

And it's far from clear that using oil does leave a cost for future generations to pay. This claim cannot be tested until such time as such people exist. It is a significant assumption. Davidson defers the argument to the future, in order to escape being challenged. And he admits that reducing CO2 emissions is not without its detrimental effects: after all, he agrees that it's not in the electorate's interests. It is democracy itself which creates slaves out of the humans of the future, according to Davidson; democracy is the means by which social progress is thwarted; it cannot transcend self-interest in favour of the interests of people he has conjured from his imagination. The "social progress" (and it is neither) he has in mind (even though he agrees it's not in people's interests) is one where people who don't exist yet are spoken for by anyone who wants to call the precautionary principle, against the interests of people who actually exist.

More interestingly, especially given that he's a philosopher, Davidson doesn't even explain why slavery is wrong. Slavery is wrong, of course. But if you want to show that something else is wrong in a similar way, you have to make it clear why it is wrong. Were we to claim that tap-dancing is the moral equivalent of drug-pushing you'd want to know why. If we answered in terms that failed to connect tap-dancing to drug-pushing, you'd close your browser, never to return.

Phillis Wheatley was a slave from Gambia bought by a wealthy Boston Family at the age of just seven in the mid 1700s. Unusually, the family encouraged her to read and write, especially poetry - for which she became famous on merit.

On being brought from Africa to America

`Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

You don't need to be a Christian to see the message. Wheatley was grateful for being brought to the USA, and for the opportunities she had, but not for being bought and sold as a slave. This is pertinent because no barrel of oil could ever write a poem which expresses such potential. As her poem suggests, the act of buying, selling, or using slaves is immoral because it creates a relationship between people which degrades humanity, when in fact, slaves were in every respect as capable of achieving as much and contributing to civilisation as their white counterparts.

The trouble for Davidson is that were he to state a principled objection to slavery, he would undermine his own argument. It would fall apart because, of course, people are not oil. It is only by dint of similarities in the shape of certain arguments, without historical and political context, superficially sharing some conceptual space, that slavery and oil usage can be seen as moral equivalents. Morality, for Davidson is more like geometry than an expression of humanity. This reveals far more than any resemblance between arguments against abolition and against climate change mitigation.

Davidson goes on to look for more geometrical congruence between arguments made hundreds of years apart, and finds another six arguments used by both Kyoto sceptics and anti-abolitionists: (i) What is deemed bad is in fact good; (ii) The benefits of the proposed policy are uncertain; (iii) Change brings economic ruin; (iv) Solo action will be ineffective and unfair; (v) Sovereignty will be undermined; (vi) Social change will hit other groups.

This is utterly mundane. What political issue is not debated on these lines? What divides camps on any matter, where one sees a thing as a good, and the other bad, with one arguing for either progressive or retrogressive change, the other for the status quo? Davidson might just as well argue that using oil and using slaves are moral equivalents because arguments in favour of their continuation were both constructed using words and marks of punctuation, arranged into sentences. What he is describing are six questions that will likely be at the centre of any political discussion about change. The closer you look at these six points, the sillier they become. In fact we are starting to seriously wonder whether his paper is some sort of clever spoof.

(i) Opposing political ideas will necessarily always differ about what is bad, and what is good. That's why we have arguments. From some perspectives, a welfare state is bad, while others maintain that it is a good. Environmentalists argue that industrial society is bad, and deep ecologists argue that nature is itself a good. Others see nature as 'red in tooth and claw'. Davidson juxtaposes statements by vice president John Caldwell Calhoun, on February 6, 1837 with bogeyman du jour, Senator James Inhofe:

“the Central African race...had never existed in so comfortable, so respectable, or so civilized a condition as that which it now enjoyed in the Southern States”...Slavery was not “an evil. Not at all. It was a good – a great good.” - John Caldwell Calhoun

"Thus far, no one has seriously demonstrated any scientific proof that increased global temperatures would lead to the catastrophic predictions by alarmists. In fact, it appears just the opposite is true, that increases in global temperature have beneficial effect on how we live our lives." - Sen. James Inhofe.

We know why slavery is wrong. It deprives individuals of their liberty, and the institution limits the development of human society. Meanwhile, Inhofe's point finds support among among many mainstream climate scientists, such as the Tyndall Centre's Professor Mike Hulme, who has observed that catastrophe "is not the language of science". And the idea that climate change might produce benefits - however true or false it is - is not a moral argument. By contrast, the ideas that slavery is either right and good or wrong and bad are not testable, are moral arguments, and more to the point, slavery is an idea which disgusts us today not because of scientific investigation, but because of our understanding of humanity. Yet Davidson uses scientific and moral arguments as though they were interchangable.

(ii) The benefits of any proposed policy are always uncertain to any opponent. How can somebody who doesn't see the policy as good, ever see the benefits as certain?

(iii) No doubt the end of slavery did bring economic problems, and yes, sceptics do worry about the economic costs of policies to mitigate climate change. But anyone who cites the Stern report in support of immediate mitigation also makes an economic argument. Does that make them the moral equivalent of slave traders, too? And even Davidson agrees that the economic effects of Kyoto would cause economic problems.

Although economic forecasts vary widely, there are few studies predicting that climate policy will benefit employment or economic growth.

(iv) It is precisely the environmentalists who are arguing that solo action will be ineffective and unfair. That is why they - and Davidson - are calling for international frameworks.

(v) Sovereignty is not only a key concept in most political theories, it was also at the heart of the abolitionist argument, for slavery denies personal sovereignty. Davidson contrasts the argument that it is for individual states to decide the legal status of slavery in the 1800s with more recent complaints about supranational organisations (IPCC) creating policy frameworks.

As sincere as this fear of supranational bodies may be, however, the arguments become suspect if they are not accompanied by proposals for unilateral action.

And yet he's already claimed that the "solo action will be ineffective and unfair" argument is "reactionary"! Only, it seems, if it doesn't conform to climate orthodoxy. Again, Davidson's contempt for democracy is palpable.

(vi) All change creates winners and losers. Whether that change is progressive, or retrogressive, is, of course, the point. And as political scientist Harold D. Lasswell explained, "Politics is who gets what, when, and how." Even Davidson recognises this...

Apart from specific groups like manufacturers of solar cells or windmills, few people have a personal interest in rising energy prices.

For Davidson, Kyoto sceptics are "reactionaries", but it is Davidson who shows contempt for democracy, and for politics. He is unable to make moral equivalents of slavery and using oil, and so searches for abstract ways to connect them that bear no scrutiny. In doing so, he also shows contempt for humans. The relationship between slave and master is vicious, exploitative, and deliberate. The link between slaves and not-yet-existing-slave-like-people-of-the-future is merely tortured. The only person deliberately exploiting future generations is Davidson. The irony is that it is people in the present who suffer.

Environmentalism Causes War

Hey, who needs politics or history when we have climate science? New Scientist reports on a new study that finds (not for the first time ) a correlation between climate change and war, the implication being, of course, that the former causes the latter.

"Our basic model is that deviations in temperature can hamper crop production," says Peter Brecke of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, US. This, in turn, has three effects: increasing food prices, a greater risk of death from starvation, and increased social tension, which leads to violent conflict.

And as New Scientist points out, people in high places are wont to agree that stable climate = world peace. They quote UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon:

Sudan was "a conflict that grew at least in part from desertification, ecological degradation, and a scarcity of resources"

What this research does show is that humans have experienced climate change, and survived, and got better at both, to the point where we now need 'scientific' research to show us that once there was a relationship between the climate and people's lives. Now, thanks to industrial agriculture - and development in general - that vulnerability is massively diminished to the point that climatic variation no longer has as significant social consequences as does the actual organisation of society itself. In this age, the means exist to feed the entire world, whatever the weather. Wars and politics - not climate - cause famines, and exacerbate the effects of drought. And yet ask yourself this: which political movement is against technological developments in industrial agriculture? Which political movement is against the mechanisation of farms in the developing world? Which political organisations campaign against the use of chemical agents in agricultural production?

If scarcity causes wars, environmentalism causes wars.

Fat Swedish Men are Killing the Polar Bears...

Another gem from the New Scientist, caught our eye - though even they don't seem to be taking this one too seriously.

The fact that women travel less than men, measured in person-kilometres per car, plane, boat and motorcycle - means that women cause considerably fewer carbon dioxide emissions than men, and thus considerably less climate change.

On further investigation, Gerd Johnsson-Latham's "study on gender equality as a prerequisite for sustainable development" is confused about whether it wants to stop global warming, or achieve equality between the genders. Men, who are violent, risk-taking, and selfish, take all the resources, while women are more likely to be generous, help others, care about the environment and live in abject poverty. Even feminism seems to struggle to justify itself in today's world without appealing to fears about global warming.

For a much funnier take on this, see Luboš Motl's blog.

Scientific Consenseless

Writing in New Scientist this week, James Hansen tells us that the scientific community (you know, those 'thousands' of specialised scientists at the IPCC) are wrong, and have massively underestimated the extent of polar ice melting as a consequence of anthropogenic global warming.

I find it almost inconceivable that "business as usual" climate change will not result in a rise in sea level measured in metres within a century. Am I the only scientist who thinks so?

Apparently he is. And the reason? All the other scientists are being too cautious.

I believe there is pressure on scientists to be conservative. Caveats are essential to science. They are born in scepticism, and scepticism is at the heart of the scientific method and discovery. However, in a case such as ice sheet instability and sea level rise, excessive caution also holds dangers. "Scientific reticence" can hinder communication with the public about the dangers of global warming. We may rue reticence if it means no action is taken until it is too late to prevent future disasters.

Scientists, in other words, should adhere to the scientific method except when it's politically inconvenient. (And only, presumably, when it's Hansen's politics that are inconvenienced.)

Most scientists who go against 'the consensus' get labelled as mavericks, sceptics or denialists. New Scientist covers their work only to show it up as scientifically flawed, politically motivated, the result of industry-funded misinformation and bad moral fibre, just as they did when they reported on Willie Soon's paper challenging received wisdom that climate change is imperiling polar bears. Or just as Michael Le Page did in May this year when he wrote:

Indeed, those campaigning for action to prevent further warming have had to battle against huge vested interests, including the fossil-fuel industry and its many political allies. Many of the individuals and organisations challenging the idea of global warming have received funding from companies such as ExxonMobil.

Hansen, however, gets a 3000-word feature all to himself. Even though it doesn't take much digging around to find that Hansen himself has more than his fair share of dodgy financial interests.

The consensus, it seems, may only be challenged from one direction.

Fat People are Killing the Polar Bears

Two recent gems from New Scientist magazine...

First up, Climate Change Sceptics Criticise Polar Bear Science, a story about some bad scientists, funded by bad money, who have apparently published some bad science in what is presumably a bad science journal, for bad reasons.

As the poster child for the climate change generation polar bears have come to symbolise the need to tackle climate change. But their popularity has attracted the attention of global warming sceptics funded by the oil industry, who have started to attack polar bear science.

Willie Soon's paper, which appears in the journal Ecological Complexity, questions 'whether polar bear populations really are declining and if sea ice, on which the animals hunt, will actually disappear as quickly as climate models predict.' But that's all New Scientist has to say about the science.

Soon, who receives funding for this and other work from Exxon-Mobil, has been attacking climate change science for several years. Three of the six other authors also have links to the oil industry.

The social construction of science doesn't get much attention from the science press - or anyone else - these days. Science won the Science Wars. Scientific findings flourish or fail by the cold, objective, rational method of hypothesis testing, peer review and replication. And that's all there is to it. Except, of course, when the science in question is funded by the oil industry. Because oil money, or just the faintest whiff of it, trumps the scientific method every time.

Ultimately, carping on about Exxon-funded scientists only serves to undermine the worth of all that hypothesis testing, peer review and replication. Because if dirty money overrides them, what else does? Is it any wonder that science doesn't get the respect the scientific establishment thinks it deserves? Science is having its own Science Wars all by itself - with not a sociologist to be seen.

Even more absurd is Say No to Global Guzzling - How the Obesity Epidemic is Aggravating Global Warming by Ian Roberts of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who appears to be offering an epidemiological perspective on global warming.

We tend to think of obesity only as a public-health problem, but many of its causes overlap with those of global warming. Car dependence and labour-saving devices have cut the energy people expend as they go about their lives, at the same time increasing the amount of fossil fuel they burn. It's no coincidence that obesity is most prevalent in the US, where per capita carbon emissions exceed those of any other major nation, and it is becoming clear that obese people are having a direct impact on the climate.

Roberts speciously reasons that obese people, who (allegedly) consume 40% more calories than non obese people, (allegedly) use their cars more because they are too fat to move properly, and (allegedly) eat the kind of things which are more CO2 intensive, contribute disproportionately to global warming than their thin counterparts.

Roberts's argument is not scientific, but a narrow, shallow, and hollow critique of capitalist society:

The social stigma attached to obesity is one of the few forces slowing the epidemic - even though obesity is not a personal failing but a problem of society. We live in an environment that serves primarily the financial interests of the corporations that sell food, cars, and petroleum.

This serving of 'financial interest' traps people in vicious cycles of low-self esteem and comfort eating, diminished mobility/health and car use - all to the detriment of the environment.

And as the number of obese people increases, a kind of positive feedback kicks in. Obese people in the US are already throwing their political weight around.

Roberts then asks us to panic about the possibility of the political voice of fat Americans being used to demand, elevators, escalators, and other forms of labour-saving mechanisation, which in turn worsens the cycle of increasing fuel use, carbon emissions, and the world's waistlines.

When all that the best clinical minds can offer is the political idea that people's desire for food and labour-saving devices (ie, higher standards of living) are expressions of a kind of false consciousness, small wonder that people complain about 'health fascism'. Roberts has such contempt for the public that he assumes to know their political and material interests better than they do, and pretends that it is 'capitalism wot makes 'em do it'... that people are too fat headed to know what to eat.

It must be lean times at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, because this poverty-stricken argument is so bloated, it needs four bandwagons to wheel it onto the pages of the New Scientist: obesity, global warming, anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism. All that's missing is a photo of a polar bear perched on a dwindling ice floe.