http://www.isthereglobalcooling.com

thanks

Geoff

When are people going to recognize that their would-be controllers will use ANYTHING to tax us into submission.

Thanks for the information, Bruce. However, I can’t see where Richard Courtney’s points make any difference to my comments about his paper. In essence, he is claiming that AGW was a whole-cloth creation by a claque of politicians.

A brief comment on Courtney’s second point: “Remove all reference to science and all the significant feedback loops remain in the influence diagrams.”

Well, yes. After all, Courtney created the original diagram, which contains exactly two linkages out of twenty-two on the actual science, the remaining twenty for political, economic and social factors. It’s hardly surprising that subtracting two linkages would leave the rest largely intact.

And the linkages themselves are Courtney’s own interpretation of the factors that led to AGW. Some of those linkages are strained. For example, Courtney has decided that Margaret Thatcher’s desire for international credibility should share equal billing with the growth of global warming information. The two are hardly of equal import.

As I say, Courtney’s claim ignores the substantial scientific work that was going on into global warming right through this period, as I listed on the “Alleviate world hunger” thread.

And after all, Tickell spent some months researching the subject back in the 1970s. Unless Courtney is claiming that Tickell gleaned his knowledge from political tracts, there must have been some scientific literature in existence at the time for Tickell to have read.

” The article is a summary of the analysis I did at the time (early 1980s) for the British Association of Colliery Management (BACM). It also has a few updates I made in the late 1990s.

BACM was concerned at the potential for AGW to become as serious an environmental issue for the coal industry as ‘acid rain’ then was. Subsequently it became a more serious issue than that. My research consisted of interviews with interested parties (including Sir Crispin whom you mention) followed by evaluation of the interacting influences that I summarised as the influence diagrams that are in the article.

Three pertinent points are worth mention.

1.
The diagrams do not include environmental organisations. This is because environmentalists had not yet taken up AGW at the time I did the original analysis. Indeed, Greenpeace was then opposing AGW as being a distraction from true environmental issues.

2.
The science was (and I think still is) an adjunct to the political issue. Remove all reference to science and all the significant feedback loops remain in the influence diagrams. I concluded from this that AGW would displace ‘acid rain’ as the major environmental constraint on coal usage, and it would continue as such a constraint whether or not it was justified by any empirical scientific data. This conclusion was rejected by BACM as being so extreme as to be absurd (but it later proved correct).

3.
I have had no direct contact with Lord Monckton. He was an advisor to Mrs Thatcher at the time when she was starting the AGW scare and I did not interview any official government advisors (any answers they gave me would be restricted to stated government policy). Last year (i.e. 2007) persons other than me interogated Lord Monckton on his view of my article and he was surprisingly forthcoming. He could not breach any confidences from that period of his office, but he did not dispute anything in my article and in writing he confirmed some significant points (e.g. the role of Sir Crispin). I am surprised by the degree of his agreement with my article: people have different observations, perceptions, interpretations and memories of the same events so I would have expected some difference of opinion between us and none seems to exist.

I hope the above is what you wanted. I will not return to my base for at least a week so I am not able to access old files until then. Please let me know if you want more or different.”

He is very aware of Anthony’s excellent blog. I said a guest post on the history would be nice (hint hint).

The Courtney essay makes many comments about Margaret Thatcher and global warming, but the most pointed would be:

“Then, in 1979, Mrs Margaret Thatcher (now Lady Thatcher) became Prime Minister of the UK, and she elevated the hypothesis to the status of a major international policy issue.”

Courtney does not explicitly claim that Thatcher campaigned in 1979 on global warming. Instead, he associates the terms “1979” with “Prime Minister” and “hypothesis”. This word association gives the impression that Thatcher began to push AGW in 1979. Courtney uses this technique throughout the essay to further claim that she pushed AGW for both domestic political purposes – to defeat the miners – and to enhance her reputation as an international politician.

However, the evidence is that she only began to make major public statements on AGW in the late 1980s, long after her first election victory and after the defeat of the minors in her second term, 1983-87.

Conservapedia: “In the late 1980’s Thatcher began to be concerned by environmental policy and in 1988 she made a major speech accepting the problems of global warming, ozone depletion and acid rain.”

http://www.conservapedia.com/Margaret_Thatcher

This also suggests she only became convinced of global warming — or at least that she was prepared to publicly back AGW — by the late 1980s.

However, there is a germ of truth in Courtney’s implication that Sir Crispin Tickell, British representative to the UN from 1987, helped place climate and other environmental issued on G7 summit agendas from 1979, and that he was a confidant of Margaret Thatcher from the early 1980s and probably helped persuade her on AGW.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13318134.700-the-green-diplomat-sir-crispin-tickell-has-had-adistinguished-diplomatic-career-he-has-also-helped-to-put-climate-changeatthe-top-of-the-worlds-political-agenda-.html

However, Courtney places a wholly cynical explanation on this relationship:

“But she had yet to gain that reputation [as a great UK politician] when she came to power in 1979…Sir Crispin Tickell, UK Ambassador to the UN, suggested a solution to the problem. He pointed out that almost all international statesmen are scientifically illiterate…”

Beyond that, the evidence fails to support the impression given by Courtney that AGW is a politically motivated movement driven by cynical calculation (and of course political considerations do not negate the theory, any more than the space race of the 1960s negates space science).

Nor does it support your explicit claim that: “…Thatcher used the [AGW] issue to gain political power, beginning in 1979…”

Fresh on the heels of yesterday revelation that Global Warming will cause more kidney stones we learn that it also creates glaciers in California. I’m not sure which claim is more ludicrous. First of all, someone actually (two colleges in……

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21494

BTW, were you able to find any evidence to support your claim on the “Alleviate world hunger” thread: “I repeat, Thatcher used the [AGW] issue to gain political power, beginning in 1979.…”
I haven’t been able to find any evidence for this assertion. Perhaps you could throw some light on the matter
It is from a paper by Richard Courtney: Global Warming:
How It All Began
There are no references given, unfortunately. I have just emailed him, though, so hopefully he’ll send me something. There certainly was motive both for her and her UK party to push AGW.
His statement that “a coincidence of interests usually has a more powerful effect than a group of conspirators. The origins of the scare are political and have resulted in political policies that now threaten serious economic damage for the entire world” seems an excellent description.

The IPCC definition of climate change: “Climate change refers to a statistically significant variation in either the mean state of the climate or in its variability, persisting for an extended period (typically decades or longer). Climate change may be due to natural internal processes or external forcings, or to persistent anthropogenic changes in the composition of the atmosphere or in land use.”

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/10th-anniversary/anniversary-brochure.pdf

So AGW could be described as climate change that is due to persistent anthropogenic changes in the composition of the atmosphere or in land use. Nothing there about “disasterous [sic] consequences” though.

Perhaps a more concrete description of AGW would be: “Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming.”

BTW, were you able to find any evidence to support your claim on the “Alleviate world hunger” thread: “I repeat, Thatcher used the [AGW] issue to gain political power, beginning in 1979…”

I haven’t been able to find any evidence for this assertion. Perhaps you could throw some light on the matter.

Here’s what I have on the old “postcard”:

Oort (1010-1050)
Wolf (1280-1340)
Spörer (1415-1534)
Maunder (1645-1715)
Dalton (1790-1840)