‘ if you increase the temperature’.

What you write is based on the above proposition. However the average global temperature has NOT increased for the past 10 years.

However the average global temperature has NOT increased for the past 10 years

Says the man from the ‘it’s a bit nippy today, therefore…’ school of AGW denial.

Are you directly attributing the Cumbria floods to climate change or using them as an example of what could happen?

John is, I think, making the point that the Cumbria floods are consistent with changing climate patterns attributable to global warming and, therefore, less likely to be unusual events in future if AGW theory is correct.

This is, as he points out, contrary to the myth that the UK will simply attain a more Mediterranean-type climate.

Andrew Boff @3:

I’m saying that a government expert described the weather in Cumbria as ‘unprecedented’ and that it has since been confirmed that the rainfall in the area on Thursday was the highest on record. I am then describing why global warming is bad for our climate, a bit more accurately than the popular Western rhetoric on the subject. You can tell what I’m saying in the article, from where I in fact say it:

I lived through the African famines of the early 80s, which happened because all the local farmers failed to predict a sudden drought… Just like the Cumbrian tempest, that famine was a symptom of climactic change resulting in unpredictable weather. [...]
When you hear climatologists using words like “unexpected”, “out of season”, “unprecedented”, … “catastrophic”, it’s just a symptom of climate change.

I’ve heard that kind of language used to describe the weather a lot, lately. I suspect we will all be hearing that kind of language a whole lot more over the next fifty years.

Ever since I read a New Scientist article which pointed out the above, very simple, physical phenomenon which is at the heart of our concerns about global warming I have had the image of a boiling kettle in my mind every time I hear a newsreader or weather presenter or FEMA head or similar say “unprecedented” or “unexpected” or “record temperature”… This is why I’m acutely aware of how often it happens.

PS: for those who are scientifically inclined and wondering about my comments on African climate change, there is a local (as well as the global) climactic transition showing up in the numbers where I grew up. The Sahara is a lot closer to my family home than it was when I was born, and that is effectively a change in climactic zone happening over the course of 20 years or so. That affects drought conditions and so on. The thing where the rains come for longer but less predictably and less consistently is probably more to do with the global changes, but at that level it’s really hard to tell.

From Sky News Online “The deluge – reaching 314mm (12.4 inches) in 24 hours – tops the 279.4mm (11in) recorded in Martinstown, Dorset, in July 1955.”

If we start getting rainfall like this more often then maybe I’ll believe your theory. For now though, in my mind, this is just one of those kinds of rainfall event that happen. Call me a close-minded denier, but we’ve had ‘global warming’ for a long time now and it’s taken over 50 years to set a new rainfall record.

MarkM @6: since the periodicity of climate peaks and troughs operates on a scale of millions of years I don’t honestly find 50 years between peak rainfall figures that significant.

Rainfall “like this” oftener… Well. 1996 and the easter floods on the Thames spring to mind, but also the floods in Boscastle, the 2005 and 2007 floodings; all of these were triggered by local rainfall records. The definition of ‘local’ this year happens to be “the UK” rather than a given county; on the scale of what is, rather pointedly, called global warming and climate change, the UK is definitely local.

We’ve not actually had global warming per se. for very long at all, in that there was (if I understand correctly) an arbitrary cool-sun period which masked the impact of medieval European deforestation and wood/coal-fired society (we used to have a lot more trees here, even in Britain, let alone on the mainland). However, comma, we most certainly have had global warming for a long time, since only 14000 years ago we were having a pretty serious cold snap.

To quote;

During the last 2 million years the Earth’s climate has fluctuated between periods of relative warmth and relative cold, with global average surface temperature changing by as much a 5°C between the two climatic regimes. Although over the longer term (50 million years) the Earth has become much colder since the age of the dinosaurs.

It’s worth noting that they’re predicting a rise of 5-6°C this century alone, i.e. the reversal of a cooling cycle which took something like 45 to 50 million years in one century.

I’m going to say this again, as I suspect some people don’t believe me; I’m not claiming human-kind caused global temperature fluctuation. I’m saying that we’re a spectacularly successful species whose primary identifying feature is the scale on which we modify our environment, both deliberately and accidentally; being shocked when that environment changes in ways we didn’t want seems a little kindergarten.

John Q Publican,

Nice to see it’s not only “Those damyankee librul’s … talking out their asses”.

The article was well worthy of Jim Royale’s catchphrase.

Kojak at 8:

An interesting, if entirely unsubstantiated opinion. Care to back it up with anything specific enough to be called a debate, or is this the beginning of the straight-up ad hominem portion of the thread?

I’ll be impressed, tbh, if anyone can break down what I’ve said here because there are only two parts to the point and neither is in dispute; 1. systems which warm up sustain an increase in entropy, and 2. higher entropy in your biosphere is bad news. No-one is arguing about either of these things above the level of the special interest groups and internet trolls; what they’re arguing about, as if in some way it might matter, is whether or not there’s someone to blame.

The only reason to debate AGW is to figure out if we’re doing something so we can stop doing it. For most of those involved, it’s playground politics… “Guys, we may have broken something here…” “NO I DIDN’T YOU STARTED IT YOU DID! NYER NYER NYER”

I grew out of that some time ago, which is why I rarely visit Usenet these days, or watch PMQs.

PSS: a corollary to the “someone to blame” point is, of course, that for Fundy American Christians (a group largely synonymous with ‘Big Money Interests’, ‘Big Oil’ and ‘Grand Old Party’) there is really only one possible candidate for someone to blame if the climate becomes less suited for sustaining human life; God. … Oops.

John

The internet has a tendency to make a lot of us experts on a lot of subjects.

While you’ve got your kettle out, perhaps you could explain to me how a steam engine works. Or perhaps make me a cup of tea.

Yes, that would be nice.

Pagar @10:

Wut?

“If you raise the pressure inside a closed container you can push a lever along. If you’re really clever you can do this repeatedly.”

I’m not a climate-change expert. I am capable of understanding both analogy and illustration as debate techniques. On which of these did I lose you?

On the other hand, a cup of tea sounds perfect, it’s been a very busy beer festival this week. Shall we?

Ignore Kojak John, he thinks Obama is Somalian…and as for pagar…

Horsesh*t. One weather event, two weather events – there is nothing to suggest an increase. It’s weather. We live on an Atlantic storm track

Any fule kno that.

Weather. Climate. There’s a difference. Get a dictionary.

Just a point to ponder: given that the climate by its very nature changes over time, what is the point of trying to maintain stability? Any attempt to do so is as pathetic as an ant trying to move a mountain. You may as well try and stop the tides.

There is no “stable climate”, there is no “climatic norm”. Do yourself a favour and get a beginners guide to Earth Science.

#It means that the system, as it gets warmer, gets less predictable.#

Aside from the question of whether or not global temperatures have risen, if the effects are less predictable then surely the predictions of global catastrophe become less ‘certain’.

Seems the new message is “Temperature’s are rising and making things less predictable and one of the unexpected consequences is that…er…temperature’s aren’t actually rising”. Seems climate change has the power to enable weather related logical contradictions..fuck me..who’da thought it?

Climate change denial = creationism for people who think they’re too clever to believe in silly things like creationism.

Climate change = inevitable “it’s a scientific fact…all the mathematical models say so” by the authoritarian ‘liberal’ moralisers who wouldn’t know a differential equation if it bit them on their well-padded arses.

Zarathustra has it down, something that multiple fake identities troll-git struggles with.

Bless.

[18] I find your vendetta against DHG rather unpleasant – can you please go back to your job as toll booth operator, or whatever it is you do when you are not concocting tedious and repetitive posts with the sole aim of illustrating how sad you are.

Ta.

the a&e charge nurse

Would that be the “someone’s impersonating me” story? Just how would that happen and why? The guy’s beyond parody as it is. I think you’ll find that, having gone way beyond the bounds of sanity, taste or legality, he decided to invent an “it wasn’t me..it was someone who impersonated me” story rather than admit he’d gone too far.

Erm..it is me you’re addressing I suppose? you aimed your post at 18, but at time of writing you are 18.

See the thing is..I haven’t been on here for about a month. Seems they can check IPs so they know that. Yet I’m supposedly Mr. “Multiple identity” posting in an effort to discredit someone who is perfectly capable of destroying any last vestige of credibility he is clinging to at a moments notice…see his ‘mass extermination’ of Nazis proclamation on the immigration thread.

I only nip back now and again because, as irritating and contemptible as I find him, I clearly irk him more. He used to go into fits of spluttering, inarticulate ranting but now he plays it cool by inventing silly stories of victimisation..a shoddy tactic for such a renowned interweb ‘brawler’ but there ya go.

As for ‘unpleasant’..what especially irked me about DHG..other than his ridiculous biographical claims is his habit of getting into a ‘debate’..obviously you have to use the term loosely where he’s concerned…waiting for one of his liberal idiot mates to come along and delete the opponents posts and then crow about having ’seen them off’. This is a regular tactic of his.

It’s difficult to find an analogy. Perhaps finding an adversary tied, helpless to a lamppost. Most people would just help them free or walk on by. Some loathsome types might give them a smack in the mouth. DHG would doubtless run home, ftech a baseball bat, beat them senseless then claim to be the new Mike Tyson. The thing is: he’s unable to win any sort of argument. He’s kept around here as a sort of pet ‘attack gibbon’ for when the more erudite liberal idiots are unable to counter a particular point. They send him in to wave his arms around and scream abuse…as a payback, they’ve indulged him in his ’stolen identity’ fantasy. They know the truth..they can check the IPs. Ask them.

Also..how do any of the above posts constitute a vendetta against the sad bastard.

[19] I’m talking about someone who uses the name DHG to post – but who is not who he claims to be.

18 seems to be directed at myself because the original 18 (the creepy DHG imposter) was deleted by the blog administrator.

I’m sorry if this is all starting to sound like an episode of ‘The Prisoner’ – my comments are not aimed at anybody other than the poster who was deleted a while earlier.

No doubt upsets you multiple identity troll coward that someone actually doesn’t like such underhand and cowardly behaviour but I tell you what pal, come and see Poles Apart and talk about your problem with me face to face but you won’t do that will you?

Coward.

“come and see Poles Apart and talk about your problem with me face to face but you won’t do that will you?”

OK you gonna send me a ticket…I’d bite my own fuckin arm off before I paid to see you.

Actually..I’ll take that back..

I’d pay to see you walk into a building site canteen and tell a bunch of guys who’d had their money slashed that any talk of the economic effects of immigration made them racists.

Or..I’d pay to see you go to Somalia or Iraq with your tired, pointless fuckin schtick..see what it is to be an immigrant of a different colour, in an entirely different culture where you’re likely to face some real hostility.
Taking part in some stale, clichéd stunt which reveals nothing to anybody is just a waste of time and fuckin old hat.

That kinda thing’s outdated, derivative tat. Mark Thomas used to do it 10 or 15 years ago. Then it was new, outrageous..funny and relevant. Since then every half baked, tinpot, would-be comic has done it to fuckin death. Sorta Gormanesque “round Greenland with a tumble-dryer” bullshit….who fuckin needs that shite any more?

It’s not even as though you’re comparing like with like. Poles come here, generally speak the language and possess a relevant sought-after skill. You don’t speak English and have little to offer other than waving around your spaghetti arms and pulling faces.

Do something half clever…or witty..or original. And learn some fuckin grammar…you’re functionally illiterate..most Poles probably write better English than you.

Stepney,

Of course climate changes naturally over time, no one is disputing that. But drastic changes usually occur (notwithstanding sudden triggers such as asteroid impacts) over what in human terms are very long periods of time. The notion of “stability” depends entirely on what timescale you are looking at. We may well have another ice age in tens of thousands of years time but we would not usually expect dramatic changes of the course of a century, which is what we could see if we don’t do something about AGW. So our actions are making a difference and we could do something about it – to say we shouldn’t do so becasue of what might happen at some unspecified time many hundreds or thousands of years into the future is ridiculous.

Climate change = inevitable “it’s a scientific fact…all the mathematical models say so”

While models certainly have an important part to play in climate science the idea that AGW is real does not depend on them.

I agree with pretty much all chairman moo has to say here even if he doesn’t agree with what I have to say.

This barmpot DHG character has taken to calling me names like ‘sentnel’ on another thread for some bizarre reason and has even accused me of spoofing him and other assorted mental stuff when the truth is that this is the first time I have ever come across this demented fool.

In fact the truth is that I have posted a few times on this blog, long before bumping into this DHG nutjob in another thread here today and without any contact with him at all actually, and all under this ID, the last time was over a month ago:

http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/10/25/spot-the-difference-2/

So he can take his very weird accusations and stick them where they belong.

I personally think that DHG is posting these comments that he claims are spoofed purely for distraction away from real debate as he is absolutely shite at it, also for attention but moreover so he can keep getting these plugs for his shitty little tax rip off ‘show’ in, as he inevitably does after all of these ‘spoofed’ comments.

The ultimate in self advertising and self promotion. It would probably be quite clever if it wasn’t so demented.

But like I say, I really couldn’t care less what idiotic process is at work with this weirdo calling me ‘sentnel’ and the rest of the buff. It is pure fantasy.

DHG truly is a nutter, even by internet standards.

Happy Sunday all.

Whoops…shoulda been..

“You don’t speak POLISH and have little to offer other than waving around your spaghetti arms and pulling faces.”

Curious Freedom

I agree. He’s a complete fruit loop. But you’ve got to understand why they keep him around: because when their bluff gets called and their “oh so worthy”, identity/ diversity “we are the arbiters of all that is decent” schtick isn’t actually up to dealing with rational debate about political reality, they send him out snarling and creating a diversion. I’m sure that they find him quite embarrassing but sometimes he’s all they’ve got.

You’re right: the multiple identity stuff is pathetic. A six year old could do better. “A big boy did it and ran away”. What can you say? Deep down he probably deserves a bit of sympathy…but it’s hard to feel sorry for him.

I suspect it won’t bother you, but it’s sites like this and attitudes like theirs that have effectively destroyed any chance of a left-wing presence in this country…and yet they just keep churning it out, avoiding uncomfortable truths and pissing on the working classes. A perpetual student-politico adolescence. Very very sad.

I don’t wish to comment on the validity of the thrust of the main post, but I have a problem with the use of the word “entropy” in your metaphor. “Entropy”, a term with a very precise mathematical definition, is frequently taken out of context and used to mean “disorder”, and a naive reading of the second law of thermodynamics as “disorder always increases” is often used to make a political point. Creationists do this and you should know better.

Roger Clague:

> However the average global temperature has NOT increased for the past 10 years.

1. 2005 hottest year on record – NASA
2. 90% of the excess heat due to higher GHG levels has gone into the oceans, 7% in to melting snow and ice and just 3% into warming the atmosphere
3. 2009 record ocean temperature – NOAA
4. The 10 warmest years on record all occur within 1997 – 2008 (GISS)

Reality does not agree with you.

~~~

Great article, John Q. Keep banging the drum – we need to wake people up before things get any worse.

I lived through the African famines of the early 80s, which happened because all the local farmers failed to predict a sudden drought. Which lasted 5 years.

They really didn’t you know. They happened because of over-stocking, over-reliance on subsistence agriculture, over-population in rural areas, urban unemployment, the absence of property ownership (destroying any incentive to improve farmland), the deliberate destruction of internal transport infrastructure, civil war, actual external war, the failure to implement any anti-land degradation measures, catastrophically poor internal governance, actual malign government policies, the absence of any sustainable agricultural policy and, finally, poor rains.

And for his next trick, Tim J will tell JQP the African sky was green.

30 – do you have anything at all that engages with this argument? That droughts do not “cause” famines? That the economies of Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea (for example) might be a tiny bit more complicated than ‘bad weather’? Or just usual aimless sniping?

Very good article.
I can add to [28] David’s comments re ” ‘global temperature has NOT increased for the past 10 years’ ”

Accurate records of global CO2 levels temperature change have been recorded going back 50 million years using ice core data. There have been many changes as CO2 has risen and fallen. At every stage, global temperature and sea level has correlated perfectly with CO2 levels. CO2 levels are now at 384ppm. The last time they were at this level was 50 million years ago when the earth was a very different place – sea levels were between 75 and 120 feet higher than they are today and the arctic was forested. It took millennia to get to that point and afterwards for the earth to cool.

Denial is a natural human response to a set of events that you feel you have no control over. What interests me is where the deniers are getting their information.
Having spent some time tracing the ‘facts’ that are quoted by deniers (including the rather hackneyed one about the climate being no warmer in the past 10 years) I keep returning to one source – the Heartland Institute. I even tracked a parliamentary question posed by climate denier John Maples MP back to their ‘research’. Heartland describes themselves as ‘discovering, developing, and promoting free-market solutions to public policy problems’. In the past, Heartland has been responsible for much of the disinformation touted about smoking but have now turned their attention to man-made climate change. Between 1998 and 2005 the Heartland Institute received $561,500 from ExxonMobil. This included $119,000 in 2005, its largest gift to Heartland in that period. Nearly 40% of funds from ExxonMobil were specifically designated for climate change projects (Wikipedia).

Heartland place a huge amount of faith in the claims of Lord Christopher Monckton, who worked in a ‘think-tank’ for the Thatcher government. In the past he was described by Heartland as being a science advisor to Margaret Thatcher which he never was – his qualifications are in classical languages. If you really want to see where the deniers’ info is coming from – check out this link – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxzrXhcjAn8

@31 – AFAICT, John Q Publican was there. Were you?

Extreme weather events, of which Cumbria is one example, are consistent with AGW theory.

Richard @ 34:
And would such extreme weather events as the great north sea flood of 1953 be consistent with AGW theory? Or was that just a one-off?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_flood_of_1953

Trofim, Extreme weather events are always part of the scenery.
Increasing incidence of extreme weather events is consistent with AGW theory.
Evidence of such an increase is here:
http://greenerblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/cumbrian-floods-global-warming.html

Saul Glasman @27:

You’re right, entropy does have a specific meaning in mathematics; had I been writing an article about the process used to generate asymmetric encryption keys in PGP, then it would have been clear from context that I was using the mathematical term. The term is also technical in several other fields, however.

I got a lot of the main point of this article from New Scientist, including the word usage “entropy” to refer to the increasing unpredictability of thermodynamically closed systems as extra heat is added. Applying it to unpredictability in our climate seems to be common usage within that field; if my reading has led me astray, what term should be used?

Why I should be expected to know better, given that mathematics is my weakest academic subject by a very long margin and I haven’t done any formal maths above IGCSE level (well, I failed to complete an A/S level due to being crap at it) I’m not sure…

DavidCOG @28:

Thank you. Bizarrely, I am not sold on the idea that our current climate shift is more than accelerated by human activity. I just don’t think who’s to blame matters; the data says the climate is changing and the science says the results will kill people. Who cares whether it’s an anthropogenic process? We still need to modify our species behaviour to survive it. People are obsessed with knowing if we caused it, because they think that if we didn’t we can carry on regardless; we really can’t. This is straight-forward natural selection, on the global scale. In my personal opinion the Rubicon may well have been 1973.

TimJ @29:

They really didn’t you know.

They really did, you know. None of the farmers around our way predicted the weather pattern shift which my father’s records show as beginning in 1979 and ending somewhere between 1985 and 1987 [1]. The local climate since then has been considerably, and progressively, less predictable than the conditions which pertained for the first decade or so of our observation period, but they are also very significantly different to the 81-84 full drought. Now it’s about a change in the pattern of rain and dry seasons, rather than the rains just, largely, not happening for several years.

They happened because of over-stocking, over-reliance on subsistence agriculture, over-population in rural areas, urban unemployment, the absence of property ownership (destroying any incentive to improve farmland), the deliberate destruction of internal transport infrastructure, civil war, actual external war, the failure to implement any anti-land degradation measures, catastrophically poor internal governance, actual malign government policies, the absence of any sustainable agricultural policy and, finally, poor rains.

Ah, you’re thinking of East Africa. Common mistake, assuming that the whole of Africa is equivalent to Ethiopia. The British have been doing that since George III was on the throne, or longer. I was talking about Ghana, which is further away from the countries you name than Britain is from Prague.

It’s in a very different climate complex than East Africa. We have the Bight of Benin where they just have more bloody desert and savannah, we have the Volta river, we have a completely different tribal and lifestyle culture; but we do have the same problem with Saharan encroachment, which I did mention above.

“Over-reliance on subsistance agriculture” is a statement so risible as to border on the personally insulting, partly because it presumes that there is a choice. When you have nothing but yourself and what you can make with your hands with which to feed your family, you do subsistence agriculture. It’s not about fucking “over-reliance”, it’s about total lack of options: bear in mind that ’subsistence’ is a synonym of ‘barely surviving’ and how difficult it was to get any kind of tech into a country where 90% of those over 50 have never been to school, and they only moved from shortbows to flintlock muskets in my village during the 60s.

To take your other points in order:

1. Overstocking; not round my way. Further north, yes; the encroachment of the Sahel belt is driven in part by too many goat-herds further up the Volta. 1/2 a point there.

2. Over-population in rural areas: not in Ghana, though that will become a real problem in Southern areas within the next 15 years. It would have to have been true in the 50s and 60s to have influenced the 81′ crop failure, so no score there.

3. Urban unemployment: not a factor until 15 years later in Ghana. It is now, as is organised crime, and both seem to be recent imports from Nigeria. Both are symptoms of the transition from agrarian to industrial economies, not features of stable agrarian ones anyway.

4. Absence of property ownership; complete bollocks. I can go into that in greater detail but there’s no point unless people want to hear it, the system is quite alien to Western post-aristocratic thinkers and therefore needs some explaining. Ask if you want to know.

5. Deliberate destruction of transport infrastructure; complete bollocks. The bridges up my way have Royal Engineers – 1906 stamped on them, or did until very recently. A huge road network expansion was happening between 1992 and, well, now; most of the old bridges were replaced with modern ones before failing. Ghanaian road transport was just old, not destroyed, and that really didn’t affect four consecutive years of failed harvests.

6. Civil war, actual external war: not in Ghana. The famines started to bite just after the last coup, a bloodless event called “Operation Cold Chop” which installed probably the nicest military dictator I’ve ever met. There was a brief tribal war at the end of the 90s which the (by then, democratically elected) government dealt with effectively and swiftly. Ghana has in fact been instrumental in ending civil wars in two different West African countries, through ECOWAS and ECOMOG which are largely held together by Ghana’s influence, money and troops. None of this is even remotely a factor in the failed crop harvests between 1981 and 1984 in the Northern Region.

7. Failure to implement any anti-land degradation measures: You’re talking about the country which implemented 20-year replantation laws before opening it’s logging industry to Western firms. That means in the 1980s. Any plot licensed for timber must be replanted tree for tree and then cannot be licensed again for a minimum of 20 years. That’s why southern Ghana is still heavily forested and southern Cote D’Ivoire isn’t. Now, yes, before that we were logging without replanting but we were doing it mostly with axes and therefore quite slowly. Unlikely to have affected the climate in the Northern Region, but I’ll grant you half a point there.

8. Catastrophically poor internal governance: Well, yes, I’ll give you that in the 70s. Failed try at Communism, largely because they were more generous with the aid budget than the Yanks. Mind you, after they sent 3 snow ploughs as agricultural aid, we got quite disillusioned. Since 81? Actually they’ve been remarkably good. And I still don’t see how any of our three corrupt military dictators could have affected the climate…

9. actual malign government policies: I suspect this depends on whether you’re a leftist or a rightist. The law banning anyone without a Ghanaian passport from owning land or business, for example, caused two decades of anguished screaming from Western robber barons (such as Nestle) who had to get a local business partner to operate. Of course, that meant that the local trading entity was owned by a Ghanaian, and a much greater percentage of ROI stayed in the country than is typical of Africa. Correlate this with how much more politically stable they are than most of their neighbors. So, yes, malign government policy is clearly present, if you happen to be a robber baron.

10. absence of any sustainable agricultural policy: Well, again, this just isn’t true. Most of the North would not benefit from an agricultural policy yet, because the locals are already managing the land as well as it can be managed at low tech levels (localised variants on the three field system; see above re. complicated explanations and asking if you want to know).

The South is rapidly turning into a top-down managed agri-infrastructure feeding most of its profits to Western food importers and chocolate manufacturers (and cashew nut packagers and tinned pineapple firms and…); this comes originally from the heavy dominance of cocoa and coffee in the economic map of the south. But I point you to the policy on logging above, and suggest you look up for yourself what the equivalents are in the plantations.

11. Poor rainfall: yep, that one’s definitely true. Let me give you an example; in 1982 I walked between two fields of corn which were perhaps a month from ripe. The ears had charred black from the heat of the sun while still on the stalk, not yet ripened. This should have been month 2 of a 5 month, two-harvest growing cycle with daily rains. There was no rain at all for the middle three months. Now lets see you blame that on the incompetent black people?

So your final score is, with some benefits of the doubt given, 2 points out of 11 have some basis in fact.

I’ll admit I drew you into leading with your chin, here. No-one here in the political blogosphere (except possibly Craig Murray) seems to have any idea what the Third World is actually like; or if they do, I haven’t seen any of them writing about it. This is because news broadcasts and newspapers over the last 20 years have gleefully and profitably perpetuated the basic Western prejudice that the reason Africa is a mess of poverty and strife is that the natural condition of Africans is poverty and strife. And then people wonder why the West are seen as arrogant and ignorant…

I am by no means unable to recognise that there are a variety of local factors which influenced the speed and catastrophic extent of the East African famines. If you want to see a little-known but interesting case study of this type of thing, have a look at Chad 1959-present day. However, I happen to have grown up in the country which provides a control group in virtually all categories of analysis, as I have just demonstrated above, and we still had the same four years of famine as everyone else. And have seen the same climactic changes as everyone else.

All of the short-term factors you have listed exist, and are of significance to varying degrees in different places, but the whole pile of excuses do not excise the underlying climactic shift; they merely provide opportunities to ignore it.

Neil: thank you for your support. However, TimJ is right that being there does not qualify me to speak authoritatively beyond the level of an eye-witness, and here I’m speaking systemically. I can anecodotalise the experience because I was there, but the reason I can separate the immediate factors from the long-term ones is because I’ve read around the subject a lot. Many foolish people have tried to tell me that the reason Africa had and has a famine is that black people are; stupid, ignorant, barbarians, stupid, evil, practitioners of witchcraft, communists, stupid, and so on. I got pretty pissed off about it and did some reading.

Richard @34:

Thank you. That’s more-or-less the current affairs hook I used for this article; the underlying kettle metaphor, which I in turn borrowed from New Scientist, has been mulling in my head for a while.

[1] The lack of clarity is because between April 85 and November 87 he was teaching at LBC and SOAS, and there is therefore a gap in his meteorological records for those years. Other than that, with gaps never more than a couple of months, they go back to 19971 and are still being kept today.

s/19971/1971/ oops.

John Q. Publican [37]

“Bizarrely, I am not sold on the idea that our current climate shift is more than accelerated by human activity. I just don’t think who’s to blame matters”.

Who is to blame does not matter – what is to blame does matter, otherwise we can’t hope to sort it.

“Who cares whether it’s an anthropogenic process?”

I do. If it is not anthropogenic it is a natural cycle which could take us beyond the tipping point. If it is anthropogenic then we can do something.

37 – if you are writing specifically about the famine in Ghana in the early 1980s, may I suggest that you write “the famine in Ghana” rather than “the African famines of the 1980s” which, whatever your personal experiences may have been, were very much more a feature of East and Central Africa than they were of West Africa.

The limitation of the entirety of African famine/agricultural history to one country makes my generalist points inevitably less appropriate. Perhaps you would disagree that Ethiopia, Somalia, the Sudan, Northern Kenya, Northern Uganda (and the DRC – though this is a more recent disaster) all experienced civil war, the deliberate degradation of internal transport infrastructure, actively malign internal governments and a total absence of internal agricutural policy? I’d love to see your reasons for doing so.

I’ll admit I drew you into leading with your chin, here.

Well, by stating that you were talking about “African famines” and then doing so specifically about the famine in Ghana. If you can provide so comprehensive an analysis of “the African famines of the 1980s” then you might have a point. As it stands it’s like me talking about the high levels of industrialisation in “the European colonies in Africa” and then, when taken up on it, refer only to the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia.

Seriously, what sort of analysis of “the African famines” of the 1980s ignores Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Northern Kenya, and Tanzania, and focuses only on Ghana?

John Q. Publican: ‘No-one here in the political blogosphere (except possibly Craig Murray) seems to have any idea what the Third World is actually like; or if they do, I haven’t seen any of them writing about it.’

…Yes, or except possibly Conor Foley, who has spent years of his life working in countries like Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, and who writes a great deal about these places in his Liberal Conspiracy posts- like the one he’s just put up today. John Q, I think you must have worked pretty hard not to see Conor’s writing, given that he publishes on this blog.

I’d also recommend Chris Blattman (http://chrisblattman.blogspot.com/), Paul Collier’s ‘Bottom Billion’ blog (http://bottombillion.com/ ) and Dani Rodrik (http://rodrik.typepad.com/ ).

Incidentally – are you seriously suggesting that there was no significant unemployment in Ghana in the early 1980s? The economy was destroyed (largely by the collapse in global cocoa prices) by the mid 1970s – inflation was over 100%, the economy shrank substantially, something like 2 million Ghanaians fled the country.

Ah, you’re thinking of East Africa. Common mistake, assuming that the whole of Africa is equivalent to Ethiopia

Coming from someone who has just said that the whole of Africa is equivalent to Ghana, I find this rather amusing.

I just don’t think who’s to blame matters; the data says the climate is changing and the science says the results will kill people. Who cares whether it’s an anthropogenic process? We still need to modify our species behaviour to survive it.

Who cares????

Well, the nature of the “modification” does rather depend on the answer to that, doesn’t it?

@JQP – no problem, and of course you’re right that anecdotes don’t necessarily contain the whole truth. However, as we just have seen, it’s probably a good idea to establish *what the anecdote is about* before dismissing it out of hand.

Can I just apologise to DHG and everyone else for spoiling this thread with my hateful, ignorant nonsense…things are tough at the mo and I am struggling to keep my head above water, hence the trolling and multiple identities and all that silliness.

It is easier for me to take it out on others than it is to face up to my own problems but I’m changing that as of today.

So once again, sorry to one and all.

Tim; point being that a Ghanaian nation which did not have any of the problems you are attributing as causal of the famine still had the famine, just like everyone who did have those problems. This implies that something happened that wasn’t dependent on local politics.

The economy was destroyed (largely by the collapse in global cocoa prices) by the mid 1970s – inflation was over 100%

yes; that’s what led to Cold Chop. Unemployment wasn’t much of a problem because very little of the country was “employed” in the sense that you’re talking about before the collapse of the cocoa trade. The farmers on the plantations went and grew their food instead; no unemployment there. Urban populations were tiny, I mean really really tiny, and while there was some unemployment in Accra and Kumasi, when you look at the country as a whole those numbers disappear very fast. And as you point out:

inflation was over 100%, the economy shrank substantially, something like 2 million Ghanaians fled the country.

The vast majority of them middle-class (so they could afford to leave) and urban manual labourers (rather like the Irish in the 19th Century) who got shifted to Nigeria among other places on terms remarkably similar to slave labour. Then in 1983 or thereabouts Nigeria kicked them all out because they were having a serious job shortage and the vast majority of them came home. I knew sixteen or seventeen people personally who were involved in this process.

Rawlings said on GBC Radio in 1984: “The next ten years will be the hardest we have ever seen, but if we do not do this now those hard years will never end.” He pledged to broaden the export base from 3 primary industries to 10 by the end of the decade and develop the electricity network further than any other West African nation. He largely succeeded.

A brief repeat: I was pointing out that none of the factors you were claiming caused the 4-year failure of rainfall in Ethopia etc. was actually pertaining in Ghana. What happened to us is the rains failed for four years, and we had a famine. The shitty economy was the result of the 70s; but, again, round there as long as you can predict the weather no-one starves, no-one is unemployed, because everyone knows how to grow food and there’s enough land for them to grow it on.

What caused the famine was when we stopped being able to predict the climate with any accuracy. I.e., for the hard of thinking in the audience, that even without any of the ‘generalist’ factors you mention, which didn’t pertain in Ghana, everyone else would still have had a famine. It just wouldn’t have been the overwhelming, nation-destroying catastrophe that it turned out to be; in exactly the same way that it wasn’t in Ghana. We came out of the experience with an unexpectedly strong economy and a nascent democracy which even the BBC admit runs free elections.

Let’s get beyond the fighting over whether or not Ghana is a decent country. I know it is, and don’t care much if you disagree since we clearly have different definitions of ‘good’ when it comes to politics. What matters is that nothing you have said so far in listing aggravating factors has addressed the actual climate change that is also happening.

No-one is in any doubt that the failed rains across the whole sub-Saharan belt for those 4 years were a climactic aberration. For the careful thinker, that’s an aberrant event. But contextualise: all the data since then from that region says that the rainy seasons are changing length, becoming sparser and, specifically, becoming less predictable (in terms of when they come in the year). Things to check for are date of first rain, consistency (when I was a kid it rained every day in rainy season, starting between 4 and 6pm; every day) and duration. Then look for changes in those numbers over the period between 1971 and the present.

Let’s get beyond the fighting over whether or not Ghana is a decent country. I know it is, and don’t care much if you disagree since we clearly have different definitions of ‘good’ when it comes to politics.

Argh! My definitions of ‘bad’ governance was in reference to countries that were suffering from homicidal dictatorships. You surely don’t disagree that Mengistu, Amin etc were ‘bad’? My point – my sole point – was that the cause of famine in Africa was, generally (and I won’t comment on Ghana, because I don’t know the post-colonial history in any great depth, though I agree that Rawlings was about as good a dictator as Africa has had in his early days – and he was one of the first to democratise too) far more complicated than simple crop failure.

Poor rains lead to poor harvests – but they don’t necessarily lead to famines. In Ethiopia in 84, for example, the harvest failure was highly regional. It was the failure to get food from one part of the country to the other that caused starvation. And that was the result of one part incompetence to two parts malignity. Famine can, in fact, be almost unrelated to quality of the rain. Look at Zimbabwe today. I then provided a non-exhaustive break-down of things that can lead to famine. Over-stocking in pastoral-based communities has been a significant problem in Southern and Central Africa for 50 years. I taught in an old TTL in Zimbabwe, and saw the soil degradation and over-grazing.

You think the argument that there should be a move away from pure subsistence farming to be offensive. Have you been to Mazabuka? A mixture of private and government money is encouraging the development of farms on a commercial basis. When there was a recent crop failure in the Zambezi valley area of Zambia, it was the good harvests from the new commercial farms that prevented a famine.

I think you are conflating ‘crop failure’ and ‘famine’ – the two are not synonyms: the first need not lead to the second, and the second can happen without the first.

You think the argument that there should be a move away from pure subsistence farming to be offensive. Have you been to Mazabuka? A mixture of private and government money is encouraging the development of farms on a commercial basis. When there was a recent crop failure in the Zambezi valley area of Zambia, it was the good harvests from the new commercial farms that prevented a famine.

Good lord. Of course I don’t. There better ways to farm than “barely successfully”, of course there are. Ghana’s internal farming infrastructure has been upgrading steadily for twenty years, and as I already said commercial farming is heavily embedded in the south. The Western world makes a considerable amount of money from that.

What I found offensive was your condescension in suggesting that the four-year rain failure was caused by stupid people of colour who don’t know how to farm properly. The reason Ghanaians were subsistence famers, and why many still are, is that they do not yet have an option offered to them unless they want to leave their tribal lands. There’re 69 different tribes in Ghana and most rural Ghanaians don’t want to go somewhere they don’t speak the language.

Anecdote; my first efforts as a farmer were in cotton, when I was 13. I got a field the way everyone does (through the village land manager, known locally as ‘chief’), planted cotton, farmed it, traded work with other men my age so I could get help in harvest, and made enough money to afford a pair of trainers which weren’t second hand. That was the first time I’d had such a pair in Ghana.

This was part of a general shift into farming cotton by local men in my tribe and across the Northern and Eastern regions. Cash crops (peanuts, peppers, etc.) had been since time immemorial the preserve of women, men farmed food staples. As tractors, better ploughs, radio sets and government education programs became more generally available, young men started farming cotton because they were able to farm more land per worker. That brought a shift towards cash money into a local economy which was still 80% barter when I was young.

The result is that Gbeduuri, and most of the rest of Mampurugu, are no longer subsistence farmers. They’re part of an agrarian economy which is steadily, and rapidly, advancing. The option did not exist for doing that, even on the quite good land the Mamprusi happen to have, prior to the government- and famine-drivevn economic restructuring of the mid 80s.

For the Frafra out past Sandema it still isn’t an option; their tribal territory is arid, difficult to farm and unbelievably difficult to get into and out of. Their local economy is more than half hunting, which Mampurugu hasn’t been for nearly four generations. As a result, the local farmers in the outback are still operating a subsistence, largely cashless economy.

This process that I lived through is equivalent to nearly 200 years of Britain’s agricultural development between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. In about 15 years: external help with bootstrapping really helps.

And none of this, interesting though it clearly is to both of us, has anything to do with climate change.

What has to do with climate change is the increasing unreliability of rainfall seasons in the entire sub-Saharan belt, which follows two general patterns depending on whether you’re to the left or to the right of the Congo headwaters. The first major incident in that trend of unpredictable weather was the 4-year rain failure right across the continent in the early 80s.

I know the difference between famine and crop failure, having lived through both; something virtually no-one in Britain under 70 can remember. Those here who remember real shortage, it was caused by war, so clearly, I know about non-crop-failure reasons for food shortage.

What is relevant about Ghana as an examination case is that the vast majority of the local causes for crop failure -> famine (such as the over-population in some farming districts in Eritrea or the wars pretty much everywhere on that coast at the time, also in Nigeria, Mali, Liberia and Algeria) were simply absent from Ghana. Yet we suffered exactly the same rain failure. We, like everyone else, are still having massively unpredictable rainfall.

One thing I’m beginning to wonder, not just because of this thread, is whether the British are constitutionally capable of understanding what predictable rain means to a country where no rain of any sort falls for 7 or more months of the typical year. Intellectually, I don’t doubt people understand the concept, but there seems to be a comprehension gap between that and what it actually means.

I agree with the analogy, it’s similar to one I use myself. I do wonder though how extreme weather events and more variable climate sit alongside a fairly boring trend in annual rainfall for the UK

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/hadukp.html

Surely total average annual rainfall should show a trend similar to the increase in energy in the system.

Hmmm. Does anyone think that the comment at 45 purportedly by chairman moo just might have been spoofed?

Any prizes for guessing by whom?

Did I hear someone say “come and see my show?”

No Curious freedom..it’s real..it must be.

My ‘vendetta’ against DHG started some years back when we were both patients in a secure mental health facility. We got on quite well at first but then, once he revealed his evil plan to undermine the British Left by attaching himself to a nominally left-liberal blog and posting increasingly bizarre and outlandish claims, I stopped talking to him or having anything to do with him.

One night after I’d reduced him to a hysterical tantrum by refusing to share my Custard Creams, he ate the lightbulb and carpet in my cell, pasted pictures of Judith Chalmers all over his body and hung upside down in a store cupboard for a week chanting “It’s not me, it’s not me, someone’s taken over my body”.

Eventually, he was sedated and they changed his anti-psychotics. He seemed to be making some progress but kept insisting he was a talented actor and sometime inspirational teacher with a normal sort of background. He invented all sorts of biographical details about himself to cover up his remarkable past. He is in fact the love child of Lord Lucan and an alcoholic bearded woman who used to travel with Billy Smart’s circus. DHG was actually raised by a troop of trained hyenas who escaped from the Big Top one night and, mistaking him for one of their cubs, took him away to la la land where he roamed free and educated himself by deciphering a copy of ‘The Book of Revelation’ which fell to earth after being carelessly dropped by a passenger in a passing Zepelin.

Anyway, he eventually made it out of the secure unit and managed to get himself released into the community but soon gave his social workers and probation officer the slip. Ever since he’s been haunting the internet, fulfilling his oath to bring the British Left to its knees by destroying the credibility of every web site with any vaguely liberal pretensions. Whenever he goes too far and risks exposing himself as a fifth columnist super-troll he falls back on his old tactic of pretending his ridiculously deformed and attenuated body has been possessed by some evil spirit who he calls ‘the sentinel’ or various other names.

He really is very ill.

Don’t believe him…I never impersonated antbody

Oh…and…come and see my show. Plenty of tickets left. Pleassssse????

I’ve posted some reviews..

hmmmmm…? (Phillip French Observer)

has it finished yet? (the only other guy in the audience)

switch off the lights when your done will ya? (the caretaker)

Well there you go.

Comprehensive proof, if any were really needed that DHG is as mad a fish.

Certifiable.

And that his claims of spoofing are clearly contrived rubbish from a man who clearly likes to spoof others.

Like I said, this DHG barmpot is doing it himself for reasons best know to a crazed mind, but moreover so he can get a plug in for his tax paid for show and he has managed it yet again.

Attention seeking self-promotion. On top on mental illness. What a combination.

How many others has he spoofed I wonder? No doubt I’ll be next.

What I found offensive was your condescension in suggesting that the four-year rain failure was caused by stupid people of colour who don’t know how to farm properly.

Which is one hell of a leap from my saying that ‘overreliance on subsistence farming’ was a contributory factor to famine in Africa. You can certainly argue that there isn’t much of a choice for most subsistence farmers. You can also argue that top-down attempts to change this have often been disastrous failures – look at Nyerere in Tanzania. But I don’t think that you can credibly argue that it isn’t a factor in famine. And, to repeat, crop failure does not always equal famine.

One thing I’m beginning to wonder, not just because of this thread, is whether the British are constitutionally capable of understanding what predictable rain means to a country where no rain of any sort falls for 7 or more months of the typical year. Intellectually, I don’t doubt people understand the concept, but there seems to be a comprehension gap between that and what it actually means.

Well, for one thing the cricket pitches start to take a lot of turn. I’ve lived in Africa. I do understand the reality of a wet/dry season. And the feeling you get in October/November when the rains are supposed to come and don’t. It’s not called Suicide Month for nothing.

Anyway, since this thread appears to have been entirely derailed, I’ll finish. Unpredictable rainfall does indeed appear to have become a feature of the sub-Saharan African climate. However, famines are rarely solely a product of poor harvests. There are usually a host of additional factors. I can give you a case study if you like. In the early 1980s (the time of the famine you identify in Ghana) there were very poor rains in Zimbabwe leading to a widespread crop failure. Yet famine in Zimbabwe was limited to Matabeleland – not because the rains were worse there, but because of the Gukurahundi. The rains failed all over the country; it took more than that to create a famine.

Bah. The Cumbria floods prove nothing. You can’t generalise from a specific. The probability of such an event is not especially low, certainly not low enough to require climate change as an explanation (even factoring in the other recent flood events). Unity points out that the floods are consistent with climate change, but practically any slightly unusual weather would be consistent with climate change too, so that proves nothing.

Look, I’m as happy as the next person to believe that we’re collectively impacting the climate. We’re wasting energy at a spectacular rate and polluting the atmosphere in a whole variety of ways, many of which remain poorly understood. We need more research, and we need action to change those things that we can identify as being harmful. But I’m astounded by how poor the quality of argument is. John’s original post a fine summary of the basic principle that climate change means unpredictable things happening, but the connection to the recent floods is just not proven. Nor is it provable or disprovable; it’s an assertion that can only be promoted or disputed by “well, I reckon this, nya nya” because it’s ultimate not a testable hypothesis. The fall-back position is “well, this may or may not have been caused by climate change, but it might have been, and it might happen again!” which is such a poor argument that it ends up doing the skeptics work for them.

Skeptics can attack on two fronts: they can attack the quality of your data, your basic assumptions about what’s happening, or they can attack the quality of your reasoning and arguments. Unfortunately, there’s no data to back up the assertion about the Cumbria floods, and the arguments are poor. 1-0 to the skeptics, and they didn’t have to work for it. They didn’t even have to point out that human-affecting weather events are bound to become dramatically more likely owing to the fact that there are many more humans than at any point in history, not necessarily more extreme weather events, and that’s just the first argument I can think of.

Which is one hell of a leap from my saying that ‘overreliance on subsistence farming’ was a contributory factor to famine in Africa. You can certainly argue that there isn’t much of a choice for most subsistence farmers. You can also argue that top-down attempts to change this have often been disastrous failures – look at Nyerere in Tanzania. But I don’t think that you can credibly argue that it isn’t a factor in famine. And, to repeat, crop failure does not always equal famine.

It really isn’t a leap. Implying that subsistence farming is a choice is as insulting as implying that slum-dwellers are evil; it’s the Victorian fallacy of the Undeserving Poor. They have no choice. If they could be just farmers (i.e. technologically capable of growing more food than they need to survive) the ones I know would. The ones I konw, these days, are. Saying “over-reliance on” implies, specifically, that there was an alternative. Those who live on the edge of catastrophe typically do so because they haven’t got any.

I’ve lived in Africa. I do understand the reality of a wet/dry season. And the feeling you get in October/November when the rains are supposed to come and don’t. It’s not called Suicide Month for nothing.

I find this quite interesting. Given that you do have the experience to see beyond the assumptions and arrogance of temperate, rich, Western Europe; why, oh why, did you (in your own words) “derail” this thread by bringing any of these irrelevancies into it in the first place? Climate change led to drought and thence famine. I made no claim that it was the only cause; I merely cited a fucking obvious example of climate change, in an article about symptoms of climate change. I was quoting it with the expectation that I might at some point in this thread talk about the Sahel belt, and the ways that human activity have led to it growing (goats, wars, etc.) Instead I found myself having to defend the idea that black people aren’t stupid.

Why did you argue? You have yet to make one single point which is about climate change; you have, indeed, effectively derailed my post. You did this using the standard technique: attack something the author is personally, and emotionally, engaged with in a manner which baits them into confronting you. In that you succeeded quite admirably.

Unpredictable rainfall does indeed appear to have become a feature of the sub-Saharan African climate.

If you’d said that, in your first post, this might have been a useful discussion. Since you clearly think it, why the fuck didn’t you just say it forty comments ago? You’re usually a more honest debater than this.

However, famines are rarely solely a product of poor harvests. There are usually a host of additional factors.

As you have now recognised, this is irrelevant to this post. One of the causes of these famines was climate change. You admit this. I was writing a post about climate change. I was not attempting to survey the reasons for the African famines of the 80s; I was giving an example of climate change.Why could you not simply accept that in calling the famines a symptom of climate change I was right?

Rob @55:

Bah. The Cumbria floods prove nothing. You can’t generalise from a specific.

… o_0

The Cumbrian floods are a current-affairs hook; they’re a symptom. I’m not, in this article pitching the science behind global warming. You can tell because I’m not a scientist. I’m combating a heavily-propagandised public perception that global warming is about temperate climates becoming Mediterranean in some nice, convenient Hollywood future. GW, be it A or otherwise, is a problem because it generates increasingly unpredictable climate conditions. The Cumbrian floods were described as due to ‘unprecedented’ rainfall by an Environment Agency spokesman: i.e. they constitute unpredictable climate conditions, weather being a subset of climate. They are therefore an example. They are not the reason we think the climate is changing and I’m not generalising from anything.

You talk about poor reasoning; you simply don’t seem to have understood what I was saying.

It really isn’t a leap. Implying that subsistence farming is a choice is as insulting as implying that slum-dwellers are evil; it’s the Victorian fallacy of the Undeserving Poor. They have no choice. If they could be just farmers (i.e. technologically capable of growing more food than they need to survive) the ones I know would. The ones I konw, these days, are. Saying “over-reliance on” implies, specifically, that there was an alternative.

It really doesn’t. Over-reliance on a single commodity was what destroyed (among others) Zambia’s economy in the 1970s. And yet even in retrospect, there was little alternative. I wasn’t implying that subsistence farmers have a choice to stop being subsistence farmers – that was, in fact, the problem I was citing. And going from that to calling me a racist is just too much.

Why did you argue? You have yet to make one single point which is about climate change; you have, indeed, effectively derailed my post. You did this using the standard technique: attack something the author is personally, and emotionally, engaged with in a manner which baits them into confronting you.

And again, I’d argue that this too much. The point I was making is that problems like this are far too complicated to be boiled down to ‘all about’ one cause. Now, I had no idea that you were personally, emotionally involved with this. If you had stated that you were working from your personal experiences with Ghana I wouldn’t have engaged. But I do know about Africa and African history, and I thought that you were making a glib generalist point on an extremely complicated subject.

If you’d said that, in your first post, this might have been a useful discussion. Since you clearly think it, why the fuck didn’t you just say it forty comments ago? You’re usually a more honest debater than this.

And I did! Or at least I did by saying that poor rains were a factor in famines. I just don’t think they’re the only factor. And the reason that this is relevant to this post is that if we treat climate change as the only factor in the consequences of extreme weather events, we risk ignoring factors that may actually be easier to combat. This is directly relevant.

And I’m sorry that you are so emotionally attached to this particular issue that you interpreted this comment as an attack on you. It wasn’t meant to be. It was supposed to be a general point that things are always more complicated than that. As I’ve said on other threads, I don’t have the scientific capacity to assess the arguments on climate change. I do have the knowledge to analyse African geo-politics. You were using it as an illustrative example. I was seeking to do precisely the same thing.

I was quoting it with the expectation that I might at some point in this thread talk about the Sahel belt, and the ways that human activity have led to it growing (goats, wars, etc.) Instead I found myself having to defend the idea that black people aren’t stupid.

If you’ve found yourself defending this, it was not because of any such assertion from me. If you really think that it is racist to say that subsistence farming is a contributory factor to low levels of productivity, and thus to hunger, then you have lost touch with what racism means.

One of the first posts I ever wrote on my own blog, incidentally, was a discussion on the effects of goats on land exhaustion (round about the ’send a goat to Africa’ campaign). Would it be racist to argue that over large numbers of goats have a disastrous impact on soil erosion?

The fact that climate change isn’t about growing grapes in Devon or sunbathing in Aberdeen is already pretty well-known, isn’t it? I can see that you’re pointing out an example, but either you’re pointing out a banal example or you’re trying to make a wider point – I assumed the latter.

The Met Office believe yesterday was the wettest day on record in that proverbially soggy county, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is climate change.

But it’s not! It’s bad weather. It might be climate change, it might not. If the climate is changing (and it seems to be) then we might get more rain. Or we might get less. Or we might get more extremes. The problem here is that if anything happens at all, if can be attributed to climate change. Pretty much any unusual weather is consistent with a climate change narrative.

I just think that by drawing the connection between a one-off event and a massive meteorological process, you’re inviting people to point out how tenuous that connection is. It makes it sound as though you’re saying that climate change is upon us and the Cumbria floods are the proof, when they’re really not (climate change may have caused them, but we cannot possibly prove that one way or the other).

There isn’t a single comment here by Tim J that I can construe as ‘black people are stupid’ and it’s a disgrace for John Q Publican to suggest otherwise. Tim’s clearly not a racist, as his comments above make clear.

Saying that a society ‘over-relies’ on one form of activity does not imply racist contempt for the people in that society, FFS. People without power are frequently forced into vulnerable and unpleasant ways of staying alive, and there is no reason to think that’s not true of African subsistence farmers. We can say that the UK is over-reliant on financial services – and I do say that – without thereby implying that the majority of the UK’s population are stupid.

Also, if you’re going to post on a blog that publishes Conor Foley it would be wise to drop the ‘I am the only blogger who cares about the Third World’ rubbish. Really, this has been a shocking display by JQP and the ‘racist’ accusation should be withdrawn.

I didn’ t know you had a show Curious Freedom?

Is about black people being more criminally inclined than white folk and how Muslims are rapists? Sounds great!

Only kidding mate, although since the car crash I’ve not been the same, my hands withered up like Beadle’s and my hairline receaded to such a degree I had to turn to Regain.

My self-esteem was so low I decided to invade Poland in order to feel better about myself but the Poles were too well equipped so I turned on Andorra and gave those bastards what for.

It was a tough battle but I won with a mixture of ignoring reality, hairy feet and a very clammy back. Tough times but me and Jesus came through with shining colours.

Anyway, enough about me, best to press on with tonight’s activities which include shouting at people from the window of my mum’s car and having some fine real ales and cashew nuts.

My next major aim is to get a girlfriend but let’s not rush things Curious Freedom.

Forever yours in deep affectation.

chairman moo

PS:

I’ve not actually done anything with my life to date, aside from the Andorra episode so looking forward to actually achieving soemthing so all those people that actually do stuff don’t make me feel so bloody worseless. Taking pot-shots at utter strangers from the realms of cyberspace is filling me with a very deep-set sense of terminal dread.

Wish me luck with that!

PPS:

DHG has not spoofed you yet but if you ask him nicely, he just might, unless of course he doesn’t give a hoot! Here’s hoping!

Thinks.

All right; Tim, I apologise. I jumped to a conclusion about your intent from the phrasing, and forgot that I’m not on an American newsgroup; that’s my over-sensitivity and not your fault.

Dan @61:

Tim is not, it seems, guilty of something I see a lot in the general blogging population. Namely, a tendency to talk shit about the Third World and particularly Africa and India/Pakistan, from a position of ignorance. I admit that I’m over-sensitive to it, because I find myself arguing about it a good deal. The description Tim used happens to be one I’ve had used before by people who did have a racist agenda. Tim clearly does not; my fault, I apologise.

The kettle metaphor I found in New Scientist was a good one, and I see a great deal of money being poured into convincing the public that global warming means something different than it does; I saw an opportunity to say something about it. I don’t seem to have handled the trolling (I don’t mean TimJ here) very well, and that has led me to fuck up.

Sorry all.

63 – duly accepted. It’s a subject that gets people very irate very quickly, and I certainly had no intention of offending you.

Thank you.

Hopefully this will arrive: thank you.

“DHG has not spoofed you yet but if you ask him nicely, he just might, unless of course he doesn’t give a hoot! Here’s hoping!”

Actually curious freedom..now I come to think about it, I wouldn’t bother asking DHG to spoof you. Useless twat has enough on his plate spoofing himself. How’s your show going btw? Mine’s coming along very nicely…it’s a little project that I worked on with another useless dick I met at the “Immensely Talented..honest…Just Waiting for a Break” Actor’s workshop and drop in centre sponsored by the local council. It’s a bit hard fitting in rehearsals around his stints at the call centre and my therapy sessions but I think we’re onto a real winner this time.

We decided to highlight the huge injustices meted out to talented young liberal actor / supply teachers in a philistine society which fails to provide lavish grants and funding for its undiscovered geniuses. What we do is to take a camera around the local children’s hospital and uncover examples of waste….do you know what they pay those bloody nurses? And some of the little bin lids die anyway. FFS..that’s money right down the drain..money that could be spent supporting me and my mate while we work on more vital and inspiring artistic projects. We’ve called it “Fuckin Thatcher…grrr…I’ve got some righteous anger man”…snappy title huh?

You can soon follow our hilarious adventures on our two-night nationwide tour of Woolwich and Charlton. It’s a must see for all half-arsed, wannabe radicals who, psychologically, never really made the break from their Diploma in Expressive Arts courses and found the real world didn’t have much use for cack-handed, semi-literate, gibbon lookalikes with no practical skills or imaginable use for anyone and instead hang around supposedly ‘left-wing’ blogs demonstrating their complete lack of political nous but keeping up the requisite bullshit thespian tradition of “of course I’m a socialist dahling”

Er…that’s it

Did I mention I’ve got a show?

Can I just add that in case anyone is confused that I’m not actually in a show, just in case anyone wants to come because…well, I don’t get out much, preferring to stay in and mess about on the internet and I don’t actually have any tangible ability or personality, aside of course from living through other people, which is painful at times but as mother says: “keep your head up and be proud” and I try, really I do but it is hard given my fragile state.

And just to add that I’ve not really done much in life, hence why it’s easier to take shots at others who actually do stuff and have a life. I trick myself into thinking people will miss me and that’s why I lash out, I’m lonely I suppose and long for genuine human contact in my desperate flailing. I hope tomorrow brings a better day for all of us…

Any of you who are using this month’s Cumbrian floods to support The (significant human-made global climate change) Hypothesis is either a scare monger or ignorant of climate history. Climate has always changed and there is no reason why it should stop doing so now. We are (or have been until 11 years ago) recovering from an ice age, but could well be heading into another. This is just a hypothesis, as it was back in the 70’s, but we do not know enough about climate processes and drivers to be able to predict climates. We cannot even predict next month’s weather accurately, let alone predict what will be happening to our global climates in 30 years time.

Talking about weather, that’s what the recent floods are all about, nothing to do with climate change or our use of fossil fuels. The washing out of a few bridges after heavy rain is not unprecedented, not even in the past 300 years, never mind 1000. The UK’s Environment Agency says (Note 1) QUOTE: Climate change will bring wetter winters, stormier weather, sea level rises and great extremes in weather conditions. After the floods in Cumbria a few years ago, work began in Carlisle to defend the city against similar significant floods. Such events could be expected to become larger and more frequent as a result of climate change. UNQUOTE. It keeps repeating that floods of this nature ARE (not MIGHT BE) due to climate change and says QUOTE: Climate change will bring wetter winters, stormier weather, sea level rises and great extremes in weather conditions UNQUOTE as though this is a given. It is nothing of the sort. It is simply weather extremes which we’ve had before and will have again.

The Agency talks about floods in Cumbria a few years ago (2005 in Carlisle) but makes no mention of the far worse floods 238 years ago just along the A69 in the South Tyne valley. Back in 1771 every bridge on the river Tyne in Northumberland excepting one (Corbridge) was washed away (Note 2 – take note that this is also from the UK’s Environment Agency). Can you guess why? Our intense use of fossil fuels over the previous 150 years perhaps? The Agency pushes the IPCC propaganda about future climates (Note 3) as though there is absolutely no uncertainty about these projections. In fact, because of the poor level of understanding of the science behind climate processes and drivers these IPCC projections are little better than fortune-telling. Get wise people.

There is no sound evidence to support scientific, political or environmentalist claims that our use of fossil fuels is having any significant impact upon global climates. The current furore about those leaked University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit files, first on the Internet, then in the mainstream media and now among politicians (Note 4) is opportune, just ahead of the UN’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. It should encourage our politicians to act in our best interests, not their own, for a change (if that is possible – think expense scandal, weapons of mass destruction).

NOTES:
1) see http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/research/planning/109005.aspx
2) see http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/static/documents/Research/text73new_1085389.pdf
3) see http://publications.environment-agency.gov.uk/pdf/GEHO0709BQBW-e-e.pdf
4) see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/lizhunt/6649323/Climate-change-Why-Im-warming-to-Lord-Lawson.html

Best regards, Pete Ridley, human-made global climate change agnos(cep)tic

John Q: fair play to you. It would have been a shame to see you and Tim J not mend the quarrel as you both clearly know and care a lot about Africa.

I’ve learned a lot from reading John Q and Tim J on the subject of African economies here: it would be interesting to read both of you posting on this subject again. Not so sure about the ‘contributions’ from Chairman Moo, though…

Dan @70:

John Q: fair play to you. It would have been a shame to see you and Tim J not mend the quarrel as you both clearly know and care a lot about Africa

Bizarrely, neither of us seemed to know it about the other.

Over-commitment is not an excuse for crankiness but it is a reason; the last week has contained both management of a real ale festival and a (very late) high-intensity writing commission which still isn’t quite shipped. I think I let it get to me.

I’ve learned a lot from reading John Q and Tim J on the subject of African economies here: it would be interesting to read both of you posting on this subject again.

It might be very interesting if we could find an opportunity to prepare an investigation together; I’m not, in general, particularly good on Southern Africa due to it being a very, very long way from my manor. Also, my knowledge base is sociological, linguistic and religious more than it is economic, outside of the instance of Ghana. I suspect Tim has a deeper knowledge of pan-African economics, and probably politics, than I do. If nothing else, my viewpoint is biased; Ghanaians see Nkrumah and Rawlings as the two leading statesmen in the slow march towards peace in Africa. I suspect the rest of the continent would debate that view

Possibly a good complementary skill-set. Now we just need something to write about which we’re both engaged with

69. Pete Ridley

Thanks for that, but I do not agree with your theorys.

Firstly there is a difference between weather and climate.

“we do not know enough about climate processes and drivers to be able to predict climates”

We do know enough about climate to predict what it will be with considerable accuracy.

For the past 10 years climatologists have predicted hotter temperatures, melting glaciers, higher seas and more extreme weather conditions. They have got all of that right. In fact, many of their predictions have been proved to be conservative.

Take a look at this short lecture at the Oxford TED talks.

http://www.ted.com/talks/james_balog_time_lapse_proof_of_extreme_ice_loss.html

The graph used is quite telling.

For more than 2 million years our earth has cycled in and out of Ice Ages, accompanied by massive ice sheets accumulating over polar landmasses and a cold, desert-like global climate. Although the tropics during the Ice Age were still tropical, the temperate regions and sub-tropical regions were markedly different than they are today. There is a strong correlation between temperature and CO2 concentrations during this time.

Historically, glacial cycles of about 100,000 years are interrupted by brief warm interglacial periods– like the one we enjoy today. We are on the cusp of a cycle that scientists believed would take us into another ice-age.

However, things are getting hotter. (ref. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8377128.stm).

Not cooler as Mr Lawson has led many to believe. Take a look at his web site: http://www.thegwpf.org. Check out the headline graph in the top left-hand corner. It is based on global temperatures over the past 9 years. Five of which have been higher than recorded in human history (but of course, he doesn’t tell you this). Additionally it does not include the particularly extreme 2009 figure (see BBC link above). But hey – what is accuracy when you have a book to sell and an organisation to run (that charges £100 to join)?

Higher seas? Check http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601081&sid=aU6tyGmdGPPQ

More extreme weather conditions? Some links above plus http://www.pewclimate.org/global-warming-basics/facts_and_figures/impacts/storms.cfm).

This discussion is based on whether Cumbrian flooding is connected with climate change. Your evidence is based on there being big storms before (you point out one in 1771). However, extreme weather events are becoming more frequent. As predicted.

If I ever end up on murder charges, I really hope that I face a jury of climate change “sceptics”… All my lawyer will have to say is “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we all know that people die of natural causes all the time. The fact that my client was found at the scene with armed with a meat cleaver is entirely circumstantial. Statistically, it is obviously far more likely that the deceased died of natural causes than multiple severe wounds to the torso. In fact, there is no scientific evidence to definitively prove that multiple wounds of this nature would necessarily be fatal to this specific individual. Certainly, there are many “doctors” and “pathologists” who have you believe that such wounds would inevitably lead to death, but that is only a theory, and they all have a clear fiduciary motive in claiming to have expertise in such matters, as they are routinely paid very considerable sums of money to provide such opinions.”

You could be found at the scene of a terrible house fire, reeking of petrol, covered in soot, armed with a petrol can, a bag of rags, and a box of matches, with several witnesses willing to swear that they saw you stuffing petrol-soaked rags through the letterbox and then setting them on fire, and they’d say “The last time a house like this caught fire, it was an accident.”

I am too in a show.

In fact I was in it last night…and for all those people who said nobody would come well…hah!…Chris my case worker? Maureen from Greggs?…the guy who did the lights?…aren’t they people?…too right they bloody are matey…and they were at the show…in fact, Chris stayed right to the end…and we had a party…some Gregg’s pasties and I could have had some of Chris’s lager but it would have interfered with my midnight medication…so there!

And it was a really good show too…everyone said so. Chris said “yeah…er…really quite..er…entertaining”

So anyone who says I’m not in a show is a big fat liar and it probably isn’t them anyway; it’s probably someone impersonating someone else or something. In fact, it’s probably not me who’s writing this; it’s probably someone else pretending to be someone who’s pretending to be me…or someone else…it’s so hard to tell when the medication kicks in…did I tell ya? I was in a show last night.

I’ll probably get a call from Sandy Toksvig soon to go on one of those hilarious Radio 4 panel shows…they’re always looking for right-on, witty liberal types..as long as they’re in shows…and then everyone will see how funny and cutting edge I am..and how I managed to single handedly prevented the BNP taking over the whole world by shouting ‘racist’ and swearing alot and then everyone will say…you’re really great…you’re like a cross between George Orwell and Freddie Starr…and a Gerbil…and I’ll be on the telly all the time…except it’ll probably be someone impersonating me or something.

I love shows.

Chairman moo – you are Lord Christopher Monckton and I claim my £15.

its yours! Really it is cuz i’m confused as to who i am and have actually got my own facts wrong about my own life, which smarts but its better than living with my mum in darlington, who might b dead, i can’t tell. Things are tough but losing your shape is a whole new bag of cashews. Anyone still got my lemons? Seriously, i’m lonely&of little purpose but keep me close to your hearts otherwise what do i have?

“…otherwise what do i have?”

I have my show of course. Where would any of us be without shows?
Naturally, my show will be a huge success once everyone realises that, despite my inability to string a sentence together (see my appalling efforts above), develop a consistent argument, maintain any remote shred of credibility, I am actually a hugely talented entertainer and deep political thinker. It’s difficult to reconcile with the ridiculous, logic-devoid, unbalanced ranting which I so regularly demonstrate on here but ..honest…everything will be OK if you just all come and see my little show…pleassse…just come and see me..it’s all about me and I’m in it.

I see I was starting to get just a little bit riled before. Can’t think why that is but I’m going to calm down before my next post…got to focus..for the show…deep breaths and count to ten as Chris always says.

Fuckin hell…dunno what came over me before..how did I get to Darlington? And what’s that old woman’s festering corpse doing in the armchair?

Right…deep breath…one…two…three..

What a spectacle this DHG character really is! I suppose I shouldn’t really laugh at the mentally ill, but it is difficult with this one.

What a truly surreal experience it has been ‘brushing up’ against someone like DHG on this site

Can anyone tell me, have the “spoofed DHG” comments stopped since he started spoofing someone else?

What a nuttter!

Curious Freedom et al,

I do not always agree with DHG, but if he has been the victim of identity theft, as he claims, you are arguing against a chimera.

So I will assume that Curious Freedom on here, saying:

What a nuttter!

has had their identity stripped too.

It is both an interesting and perhaps bombproof excuse for saying anything whatsoever on the internet.

“It wasn’t me, m’lord, it was identity theft”

“case dismissed”

Putting words into others mouths should, perhaps, be punishable with a rather long custodial sentence. What do you think?

douglas clark,

Considering you haven’t bothered with one comment in 80 on this thread but now post two in an apparent dig, in an apparent extension of another dig from another thread, and just ten minutes after I post a comment, I think I just might have picked up a bitter thread stalker in you.

Least, that’s what it looks like to me….

yes, prison for all, including me! And i’m on in a show you know, i don’t know where or when…hang on, this is the show i’m in and you my audience! Yes, yes, yes! This is it, my show and if people stop coming here what am i but a shell? A nothingless…nothing left inside, leeches drain me dry, stick me with knives and keep watching my show here and now. And curious racist, stop turning up here just to bring a downer. KNIVES!

STOP SPOOFING ME!

Like I said, it was only a matter of time…

yeah…whatever, no one is spoofing you, you’re doing it for attention.

“All the world’s a spoof and we are but sad little showbiz wannabes who desperately court any attention we can get.”

If you “spoof” me do I not shout “RACIST”?

If you prove I’m talking out of my arse, do I not shout “RACIST”?

If you point out I’m barely literate, do I not shout “RACIST”?

If you show me to be a barely formed intellectual midget, do I not shout “RACIST”?

And even though I keep shouting “RACIST”, nobody takes me seriously as an informed political thinker like the ‘big boys’ on Liberal Conspiracy…I always thought it would make me sound radical and progressive but it seems I’m just a hopeless one-trick pony who wants to try and fit in but keeps making such a twat of myself that all I can expect is to be a marginalised oddity playing the class clown.

Not even sure why I do this spoofing thing…I suppose it’s some sort of cry for help..I’m desperate…my show’s shit…everyone treats me like a performing monkey…Oh god…I wish I’d never started it all now..sob..

I’m not really chairman moo…sob…please like me…and come to my show…you can have a free sausage roll…sob

PS

WTF is a “nothingless”?…you fuckin useless goon.

FFS use a spellcheck or learn to write…who wrote your show btw? D’you get funded by the dyslexia association?

to be clear, i am a racist and nothingless, just incase there was doubt

Fuckin hell I’ve just called myself a racist. That must be because I didn’t agree with something I’ve said…or because I transgressed the official list of racist practices, attitudes and haircuts as designated by people in shows. If you’re in a lot of shows it teaches you all about all sorts like racism and trashy pop psychology in fact it makes you a bit of a polymath and ‘nothingless’. It’s great being in shows…I’m so glad I’m in a show and not a racist like all those other people who will never achieve their burning ambition to be in a show because their nasty racists who would probably just get on stage and scream racist abuse.

What those bitter twisted racists don’t realise is that being in a subsidised show (which only attracts an audience from that incestuous little group of other would be show people who turn up to tell you how good your show is and how shows are a great force for healing and cohesiveness) is the greatest calling known to mankind…or at least that part of mankind who can’t do anything else….and any suggestion that my show is a hopped-up, derivative, hackneyed, humourless vanity project is just an evil rumour spread by evil racists who can’t be in shows because they can’t say “of course I’m a socialist”….even though my actual knowledge of socialism would shame the average 15 year old ‘X box philosopher’.

Anyway…on with the show.

Did you notice the way I cleverly snuck the word show into my post so many times…that’s because I’m in a show…wot I rote.

Hello chairman moo, missed you at the gig you coward!

Climate Change is an invented method of taxing the worlds population!!!!
Why would I say this well if you take a look back in history we have had
climate changes many times and we will have them again go on check if you
don’t take my word for it. sea level to rise what trash heres a little
experiment take a glass half fill it with water fresh or salted now place
some ice into it say enough to three quarter fill it leave it alone now
until the ice has melted hey guess what the water level has not increased wow…..
now the ice in the north is floating ice so it will act the same as our glass…
What about the ice in the south I can hear you saying that’s getting colder
and increasing.
We are all being lied to aboout this climate change the only change you will
see is an increase in your taxation which will go to pay for the new one world
government the powers of the world have planed for us all.
Time will tell if I am right.
Time for change..

time for a change

Just for once, I’m going to loose my cool. This may put me at risk of being deleted, but what the heck.

You are a genius! My god, what a wonderful thing to discover, that all ice is floating – when all along geologists have been believing that 9/10ths of global ice is on land! Try this experiment. Take a cup, half fill it with water and measure the level. Take 10 ice cubes. Put one in the water and leave the other 9 to melt in a jug. When they have melted, pour the nine melted ice cubes into the cup and remeasure.

There are a couple of other ‘minor’ issues to do with sea-level rise too. Sea and glacial ice is fresh water. Fresh water is not as dense as salt water so iceburgs float higher. When they melt, more water is displaced. Try the experiment above again with freshwater icecubes and salt water in the cup.

Then there is the warming of the seas. This causes thermal expansion, thought to be the biggest contributor to sea-level rise in the 21st century.

Please will you post evidence of ice in the south that is expanding. Australia has just had it’s hottest winter in recorded history (in Australia, winter is April to September). http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/statements/scs18a.pdf

The Antarctic ice sheet is melting much faster than predicted. A whole ice shelf had broken away. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/melting-ice-sheets-threaten-defences-1831648.html

I have been a victim of one of the three unprecedented floods to hit the UK in the last three years. It is the business of insurance companies to asses risk. They have been measuring the increasing numbers of natural disasters and are are predicting a time soon when many things will be uninsurable. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/susanwatts/2009/11/insuring_against_climate_chang.html

I have heard the ‘ice cube in a cup’ one before, so I know you are getting your ideas from someone else.

Unless you can satisfy yourself completely that whoever sold you this crap about global government and climate change is right, I strongly suggest you punch them on the nose from me, from the 1300 home-owners in Cumbria whose homes have been damaged for the third year running during the UK’s wettest November in recorded history, from the families of more than 40 people killed in Turkish floods this September, the families of more than100 people killed in the Jeddah flash floods this November and from the millions of people suffering from unprecedented drought in Ethiopia and Kenya.

One final thought.

Denial is a response to something you feel that you’ve got no control over. But we do have the technology and the technological ability to invest in energy that doesn’t depend on burning fossil fuels. And we can support third-world countries to develop life-saving strategies and oil-free technologies. That is what the Copenhagen meeting is about, no matter what the oil industry funds the Heartland Institute to say.