By Steven Goddard
Yesterday WUWT reported on the inaccurate #1 environmental story at Guardian.
The Guardian article originally read :
The volcanic eruption has released carbon dioxide, but the amount is dwarfed by
the savings. Based on readings taken by scientists during the first phase of
Eyjafjallajokull activity last month, the website Information is Beautiful
calculated the volcano has emitted about 15,000 tonnes of CO2 each day.
After their article was written, more accurate information spread across the web – The Guardian numbers were off by more than an order of magnitude :
Experts said on Monday that the volcano in Iceland is emitting 150,000 to 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per day, a figure comparable to emissions released from a small industrial nation.
The Guardian responded by updating their article with better numbers, but failed to update their conclusions:
So what is wrong with their correction? Lots of things.
- Their source of information now claims that the numbers are 206,465 tons saved vs. 150,000 tons emitted by the volcano. Those two numbers are well within the margin of error of the volcano estimates, and are the very low end of what scientists are claiming. If we use the average scientific estimate of 225,000 – the volcano was actually producing more CO2 per day than the savings from grounded aircraft. Yet the Guardian story still claims that emissions are dwarfed by the savings.
- The Guardian story claims that there have been 2.8 million tons of savings, and the math doesn’t work out. At the time the story was written there had been six days of grounded flights. 206,465 tons/day X 6 days = 1.2 million tons, not 2.8 million tons.
- The Guardian failed to research the actual volcano estimates, and again published the very low end numbers from an apparently unreliable source.
- They failed to consider that the eruption has been going on for more than a month, while the flight ban has lasted only six days. Total volcano emissions actually dwarf the savings from the aircraft.
- They failed to consider Anthony’s point that people stranded by grounded aircraft seek other means of transportation, including cars, trains and battleships, etc. The BBC estimated that these other modes of transport generate as much CO2 as the planes would have.
- They failed to consider that the airlines will eventually run extra flights in order to catch up.
The evidence indicates that the net balance from the volcano is a large increase in CO2 emissions. The Guardian article was just Plane Stupid.
Furthermore, we know that plants, soil and the oceans generate 30 times as much CO2 as all fossil fuel burning combined. That is 200,000,000,000 tons of CO2 per year from natural sources, compared with The Guardian’s inaccurate claim of 2,800,000 tons in savings from aircraft grounded. In other words, even their exaggerated claimed savings are less than 0.0014% of all natural emissions of CO2.
Numbers from Woods Hole Institute
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Chocolate rations were increased today too.
Re: JAN (23:17:52) :
“Eyjafjallajokull” – pronounced “eya-fialla-yoecull”
—
I saw a couple of YT clips where locals were saying it, and they say it fast with some ‘ch’ sounds in it. Sounded a bit like “eya-fiatchla-yoeclutch”, but if/when Katla joins in, news readers will no doubt breath a sigh of relief.
And stranded passengers are travelling hundreds of miles in taxis, extra coaches, waiting for later flights, empty planes being sent out to pick up stranded passengers, waiting for aircraft carriers and navy ships, spending money that they wouldn’t have spent otherwise etc etc. All contributing directly or indirectly to additional CO2 emissions either now or delayed. So add all that to the volcanic emissions or subtract from the “saved CO2” I don’t care which and it’s probably a zero sum game in the end.
“Fire and Ice”
[…]
“In 1988, health minister Edwina Currie almost destroyed Britain’s egg industry when she said that salmonella in eggs might cause a human catastrophe – only for it to be later discovered that salmonella could not get into eggs.
In 1996, Britain spent £7 billion killing millions of the nation’s cows in response to the alleged threat of CJD killing humans eating burgers made from cattle infected by BSE. We now know that the likelihood of this was almost infinitesimally slight.
In 2009, the government spent £1 billion on unneeded vaccines against swine flu, which we were told might kill half a million people. The SARS virus, said some ‘experts’, could prove more devastating to humanity than Aids. It was once suggested that bird flu might kill 150 million people worldwide.
University of Chicago Professor Frank Knight described the distinction between risk and uncertainty in these words. “Uncertainty must be taken in a sense radically distinct from the familiar notion of Risk, from which it has never been properly separated…. The essential fact is that ‘risk’ means in some cases a quantity susceptible of measurement, while at other times it is something distinctly not of this character … It will appear that a measurable uncertainty, or ‘risk’ proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all.” In other words, Knight wanted to differentiate between risks we could measure and those which we could not estimate. Donald Rumsfeld conveyed the same idea much more eloquently and comprehensively.
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.”
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/04/22/fire-and-ice/#comments
Sensational Journalism will inspire more skepicism as more people start to dig deeper into new understanding and knowledge.
This is why WUWT will be continually growing.
There are many experts here as well as very good researchers that can find out if a story is accurate or full of it.
Knowledge is only as good as it’s accuracy. Garbage science will spawn an idiotic society, not by their choosing but by the science that is taught to them and passed down to future generations. The old mans school of research scientists still rule the nest, but independant researchers (not funded by governments) will one day be the breaking edge to higher knowledge and understanding.
Re Gregg E: Surely Tigers Hole would fall under Tiger the Golfers prerogative, in whichever of its many connotations.
The thing with Grauniad is that it is not, and was never intended to be, a beacon of truth and neutrality, however much it strives to purport itself that way. It is a commercial paper that is owned and sponsored by someone and that someone has their own angle and agenda to push. I would very much like there to be an office of a media ombudsman who would dish out fines for grossly yet consistently inaccurate claims made in the public domain, very much like in Grauniad’s case. It goes without saying however that such an office would soon be abused, likely for the same purpose this blog is fighting against. Unless lies printed therein can be assaulted using the otherwise much abused UK libel laws, the paper can spread disinformation all they like. Such is the price of the freedom of expression.
Eyjafjallajokull
In English (UK) the best way to say this is as follows:-
Hi Jeff Jet Late
Repeat it a few times and you will soon impress your friends 😉
“Eyjafjallajokull,” on the other hand….gimme an abbreviation….something….anything….
How about “Volcano E15”? Simple yet technical sounding, the E15 indicates the first letter in the name, followed by 15 more letters. 😉
Maybe not the best place to post this, but this collection of images is doing the Internet rounds. If I knew the details better, I would insert acknowledgements. I simply have to assume that they have been put into public domain with permission.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/04/more_from_eyjafjallajokull.html
The left wing British press believe it is acceptable to lie if it serves the ‘greater good’ (or ensures their flatulent Hackney-centric eco-pundits keep getting invited to trendy dinner parties). In the case of AGW it is not even seen as necessary to print a retraction when lies are exposed (I stopped buying the Independent after their ‘Northwest Passage open for the first time’ BS). The right wing British press believe it is acceptable to lie in order to sell more newspapers. AGW gives them infinitely extendible scare copy to terrorise readers over morning tea – fits in nicely beside the ‘*insert item* causes / cures cancer’ garbage.
If everything the British press claimed in the past were true, the entire UK population would be dead by now from brain-eating Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease caused by our taste for hamburgers. We’d be dead again from catastrophic outbreaks of Bird Flu, SARS, Ebola and Swine Flu. Our children would be suffering an autism epidemic brought on by the MMR vaccine. Planes would have fallen out of the sky on January 1st 2000 surrounded by atomic mushroom clouds as the millennium bug ravaged our computer systems. If all that didn’t get us, Saddam Hussain’s supposed WMDs would have wiped us out in 45 minutes (the press, not just the Government were complicit in that claim). And of course, by 2006, Winter snowfalls would have been a thing of the past.
UK national newspapers are facing financial ruin (the Guardian is currently on its deathbed). Editors and proprietors wring their hands and blame the internet for usurping traditional journalism, but the real reason for dwindling sales is the disappearance of journalistic standards. The British public are getting tired of speculation reported as fact by pundits with an axe to grind and lazy hacks filling column inches from blogs, TV news feeds and their own imagination, and they are voting with their feet.
The CAGW fixation is the final death rattle of the British national press, and I can’t say I’ll miss it when it’s gone.
AEGeneral (21:23:55) :
Math can be so simplistic in its brilliance.
“Eyjafjallajokull,” on the other hand….gimme an abbreviation….something….anything….
Lets go with an abbreviation for the printed word.
Eyjljlkl or perhaps Eyjkl
Not to be “picky”… But… All of the world’s remaining “battleships” are now either mothballed or have been converted into museums and/or memorials.
Veronica (02:41:45) :
I made a Google Earth image of the location of Windsor relative to Heathrow.
http://docs.google.com/View?id=ddw82wws_614chnjdhgt
It is about two runway lengths west of Heathrow, and most of the flights take off to the west. I used to run a business out of Wokingham – another 10 miles west – and the airport noise wasn’t really memorable there.
On a climate note, I remember from ten years ago flying into Heathrow during the winter, it was normal to see the grass green and not uncommon to see people water skiing on those two lakes between Windsor and Heathrow. The winter climate in England has cooled dramatically since those warm days of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The Long Valley Caldera in California emits enough CO2 to kill trees on Mammoth Mountain.
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/lvo/activity/monitoring/co2.php
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/lvo/activity/monitoring/images/treekilb.jpg
The volcano is not erupting, but still emits over 30,000 tons of CO2 per year.
The time when newspapers reported news from real reporters is long gone. The advent of the Internet, I believe, has driven newspapers to be more of an opinion outlet to be able to compete for readership. While newspapers have always tilted one way or another, now the bias is not just relegated to ‘opinion’ columns, but every article.
ScientistForTruth (01:31:51)
Now that they have Google, journalists can publish the first numbers that pop up on their screen and attribute them to experts.
I remember in the early 1970s The Guardian published a well researched piece describing the “first atomic bomb blast at Los Alamos.” I wondered at the time if any of the scientist’s spouses were annoyed at their husband for blowing up nukes in the backyard.
“Shame on the Guardian for this.. for that.. don’t they have.. this is terrible..” It’s obvious that many here have the impression that freedom of the press somehow includes some wierd idea of truth or integrity or.. whatever. To the pure of heart, I ask that you turn your eyes away for a moment and ‘page down’ a bit.
Pssst… The Guardian, like the other tabloids people have been reading for the past 500 years, DO NOT CARE ABOUT ANYTHING EXCEPT SELLING NEWSPAPERS! As with the spectrum, there are many colors of light (truth) and most of these we can’t even see. Whos’ to say that night isn’t day, that green isn’t red, that hot isn’t cold? We don’t know everything!
Publishers, editors, and journalists are not the slightest bit concerned about anything except selling their newspaper. And people on the Tube don’t even care about that;-)
The more we “talk” about The Guardian here, the more publicity they get, the more people are curious about what the “truth” of the story is, the more newspapers The Gurardian sells. If you want to sell newspapers you have to be imaginative and flexable with everything. It’s a lot like Chicago-style politics at the national and international level.
Ref – JAN (23:17:52) :
AEGeneral (21:23:55) :
““Eyjafjallajokull,” on the other hand….gimme an abbreviation….something….anything….”
_____________________________
“Eyekull”
AEGeneral, if that is the name of a volcano, wonder what the longest word in their dictionary looks like. Yikes! You would run out of breath, spit, and need a drink of water before you get to the last syllable! I would imagine people die from lack of oxygen trying to have a conversation in that language. Wonder what the word is for “help”.
JJB (05:23:09) :
The left wing British press believe it is acceptable to lie if it serves the ‘greater good’
UK national newspapers are facing financial ruin (the Guardian is currently on its deathbed). Editors and proprietors wring their hands and blame the internet for usurping traditional journalism, but the real reason for dwindling sales is the disappearance of journalistic standards….
The CAGW fixation is the final death rattle of the British national press, and I can’t say I’ll miss it when it’s gone.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Very few newspapers now a days pay anymore attention to the truth than the “National Enquirer” and they are not half as entertaining. My Father-in-law, owner of a small newspaper, commented the only thing you can believe in a newspaper is the sports scores. He also said the only newspapers here in the USA that stay close to the truth are the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor.
Post normal journalism?
That USGS page on volcanoes has some spurious links – no one can track down the Gerlach paper as the link links back on itself and it was 1991 anyway.
The other evening on the late night ABC radio they had a leading volcanologist from Leicester University – Dr Mike Branney discussing the eruption and answering questions on volcanoes. One of the listeners asked him how much CO2 did a volcano emit. His reply was – we don’t know, no one has managed to accurately measure it. He’s currently leading a team researching Yellowstone.
Atomic Hairdryer (03:50:43) :
“Eyjafjallajokull” – pronounced “eya-fialla-yoecull”
–
I saw a couple of YT clips where locals were saying it, and they say it fast with some ‘ch’ sounds in it. Sounded a bit like “eya-fiatchla-yoeclutch”,
Danish, Swedish and to a less extent Norwegian and pronounced roughly in line with how they are written. But from what little Icelandic I’ve heard it seems to be very much a insular Norse dialect were there is very little resemblance between what is spoken and what is written.
It’s so often the case that superficial or inaccurate information is beautiful, but the in-depth accurate information is ugly, at least from an idealogical point of view.
I don’t think anyone’s commented this yet, which is surprising:
What about the idea that a volcanic eruption(s) will be lowering temperatures a bit due to aerosol scattering?…My thought is that the media is trying to get it into people’s heads that the volcano has lowered carbon emissions (dramatically). Then, when temperatures drop a bit, they’ll say it’s due to the lower CO2 emissions.
I know this seems silly to scientific-minded people, but to the everyday (uninformed) voter, it could be very persuasive – “See! We told you carbon emissions lowered and now the temperature dropped by 0.4 C!”
Anyone else think there’s a chance of this?
-Scott