George Monbiot’s article in today’s Guardian features a critique of the media’s handling of economic growth which is so spot-on it’s worth quoting in full:

“As the Guardian revealed yesterday, the British government is now split over product placement in TV programmes: if it implements the policy proposed by Ben Bradshaw, the culture secretary, plots will revolve around chocolates and cheeseburgers and ads will be impossible to filter, perhaps even to detect. Mr Bradshaw must know that this indoctrination won’t make us happier, wiser, greener or leaner; but it will make the television companies £140m a year.

“Though we know they aren’t the same, we can’t help conflating growth and well-being. Last week, for example, the Guardian carried the headline “UK standard of living drops below 2005 level”. But the story had nothing to do with our standard of living. Instead it reported that per capita gross domestic product is lower than it was in 2005. GDP is a measure of economic activity, not standard of living. But the terms are confused so often that journalists now treat them as synonyms. The low retail sales of previous months were recently described by this paper as “bleak” and “gloomy”. High sales are always “good news”, low sales are always “bad news”, even if the product on offer is farmyard porn. I believe it’s time that the Guardian challenged this biased reporting.”

Sure is. And clearly there is an internal battle going on for the soul of the Guardian, as manifested in some admirable recent editorial commentary on the subject of GDP growth (even if this piece does represent a speculative break from the assumptions embedded in much of the paper’s usual reporting). But although the paper is evidently not a monolithic corporate entity, unfortunately this battle leads its resident critics of growth fetishism into a head-on confrontation with the routine practices of economic reportage, evident not only in the Guardian but in every paper across the board. As John Dryzek points out in his recent book The Politics of the Earth (Oxford University Press 2005, p. 52),

“The entire way in which economic news is reported assumes that growth is good. This refers to growth in wealth, growth in income, growth in profits, growth in the stock market, growth in employment, growth in housing starts, growth in passenger miles travelled. That economic growth usually means increased stress on environmental systems – more pollution, more congestion, faster depletion of resources – is never reported along with these economic aggregates (though this stress is reported elsewhere). The political-economic discourse of liberal capitalist systems still generally floats free from any sense of environmental constraints.”

If the Guardian is conflicted, its nearest competitor in the liberal media appears to have few such qualms. A recent editorial in the Independent (which was actually cited by Tim Jackson in his important recent report for the Sustainable Development Commission, Prosperity Without Growth?) levels at critics of economic growth the kind of contemptuous cliches one might expect to encounter in the Telegraph or the Daily Express:

“… we do not agree with the anti-capitalists who see the economic crisis as a chance to impose their utopia, whether of a socialist or eco-fundamentalist kind. Most of us in this country enjoy long and fulfilling lives thanks to liberal capitalism: we have no desire to live in a yurt under a workers’ soviet.”

If that seems like a shockingly cavalier dismissal from an ostensibly liberal paper, it makes more sense in light of some information on the Independent’s ownership – by Irish billionaire Tony O’Reilly – and senior management. As Media Lens have revealed in some detail:

“O’Reilly is a former chairman, president and CEO of H J Heinz, the leading food company. He is also a former member of the board of the New York Stock Exchange. His personal fortune, estimated at £1.3 billion, makes him the richest man in Ireland. He makes £15 million a year in salary and dividends. He is married to Chryss Goulandris, a Greek shipping heiress who has a personal fortune estimated at £442 million. (Colm Murphy, ‘The Rich List 2005: Ireland’s richest 250’, Sunday Times, April 3, 2005)

“Together with brother-in-law Peter Goulandris, O’Reilly controls Waterford Wedgwood, the crystal and luxury goods manufacturer. O’Reilly has a controlling 72% share in Arcon, the zinc mining operation, and he has interests in oil and gas exploration. He also owns Fitzwilton, a large industrial group with core activities in food retail and light manufacturing. In 2004, he made a £29 million tax-free profit when a consortium he led refloated Eircom, the former Irish state phone monopoly.

…

“The [non-executive directors on the board of Independent News and Media] include Ken Clarke, candidate for the Tory party leadership and deputy chairman of British American Tobacco; Brian Hillery, chairman of UniCredito Italiano Bank (Ireland) Plc and Providence Resources Plc; Baroness Margaret Jay, a former member of Tony Blair’s cabinet when she was leader of the House of Lords; and Brian Mulroney, a former Prime Minister of Canada and now a senior partner at the Montreal law firm of Ogilvy Renault. (www.inmplc.com/main.php?menu=menu2&mb=ned)

…

“O’Reilly explains:

““For the advertiser, the newspaper remains the most effective mechanism to convey to the potential consumer the virtue, value, colour and style of any new product, service or offering that he has.” (O’Reilly, Independent News & Media Plc Annual Report 2004, p.3)”

…

““O’Reilly counts among his friends and acquaintances a veritable who’s who of world leaders and notables. His castle wall has a photo of him playing tennis at the White House with former President George Bush [Sr.], signed ‘Tony, greetings from the White House Field of Combat – George Bush.’” (Cristina Rouvalis, ‘Living large; Anthony O’Reilly rules a global business empire, enchants all those in his sphere and is now addressed as “Sir”’, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 22, 2001)

…

““I am a maximalist,” O’Reilly freely admits. “I want more of everything”. (Richard Siklos, ‘“I want more of everything”’, Business Week, December 20, 1999)

“Not just more wealth, but also more power. As one Irish newspaper puts it, O’Reilly’s “acquisition of a full stake in the Independent in London in 1998 gave him complete control of the British broadsheet and the attendant clout and respectability that he had craved.” (‘O’Reilly’s global empire is still built on print’, Sunday Business Post, April 29, 2001).

It is, of course, not impossible that such a character and his entourage at Independent News and Media would be prepared to admit that the economic paradigm sustaining their vast wealth was harmful and unsustainable. It’s not impossible. But it is entirely unheard of.

Merry *hacking cough* Christmas, y’all. (And thanks to Roger Johnson for the picture.)

Mark Lynas, environmental journalist and author of Six Degrees, who was also apparently part of the delegation from the Maldives at Copenhagen, has just pitched in with his account – or rather, his interpretation – of what happened at Copenhagen. You can read it here. His own personal heroes appear to be the rich world, from the EU to Obama; his villains China, India and Sudan – a country he claims acted as a Chinese puppet – and the NGOs, who by blaming Obama and the rich world in the wake of the conference, Lynas claims, played into China’s hands, exactly as that country’s leaders predicted. The US, by contrast, “put serious cuts on the table for the first time (17% below 2005 levels by 2020), and was obviously prepared to up its offer.” Lynas concludes: “I am certain that had the Chinese not been in the room, we would have left Copenhagen with a deal that had environmentalists popping champagne corks popping in every corner of the world.”

Got that? It’s a fairly familiar narrative, overall: the weak victims (in this case the poorest countries); the wicked and tyrannical bad guys (China, India, Sudan – plus their hapless dupes, the NGOs); and the benevolent, struggling heroes (the rich world). Substitute for this set of characters Belgium, Germany and Great Britain respectively, and you would have essentially the same story relayed in British propaganda circa 1914.

Lynas’ account has unsurprisingly met with some criticism already. David Wearing, author of The Democrat’s Diary, commented on the piece:

“Mark – you say the US offered a 17% cut in emissions on 2005 levels, and that this was a serious offer. This is not a serious offer, and you should know as much.

“Cuts are measured by everyone else on 1990 levels, not 2005 levels. We need a 40% cut on 1990 levels at least to give us a fighting chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees. You know how the US offer of 17% translates to 1990 levels? Is it 40%? Is it even 17%? Is it f*ck. Its four. Four per cent. And this you call “serious”, while lecturing “leftists” about their starry eyed view of developing countries?

“The US offered an emissions cut of 4% on 1990 levels when over 40% was needed to reach the 2 degree target. Obama stated flat out that this was non-negotiable. Blaming China for scuppering a “deal” with a 2 degree target when we know full well that the deal would have been worthless given the pathetic cuts offered by Washington is not exactly giving the whole story is it?

“Wittingly or not, Mark, you’re relaying Western spin. You weren’t the only one at Copenhagen. We have a lot of reports now. And even your insider account can’t mask the pathetic stance of the United States. By all means blame China for what its responsible for. I’m under no illusions about them, or India and its uniquely vile political class. There’s plenty of blame to go around. But the idea that the nasty Chinese spoilt the brave idealistic Westerners’ great humanitarian bid to deal seriously with climate change is a lot of nonsense.”

Richard Seymour, author of The Liberal Defence of Murder and the Lenin’s Tomb blog, has also noted two important factors that are worth recollecting: Obama’s apparent “preemptive diplomatic strike to lower expectations” prior to the talks, and the fact that even the pathetically weak target the US managed to offer is compromised by the loopholes and get-out clauses offered by the “cap-and-trade” system set out by the Waxman-Markey Bill. As Seymour comments:

“This is an interesting account of the negotiations, but it is also a deeply credulous article that insults the intelligence of readers. Notwithstanding the specific allegations against China’s diplomacy, a few observations are pertinent:

“1) Obama announced long before Copenhagen began that there was not going to be an agreement. This was announced in November:

“http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/15/copenhagen-climate-deal-obama

“This was a preemptive diplomatic strike to lower expectations.

“2) The leaked ‘Danish text’ reflected the commitment of the leading powers to imposing unequal targets, with the majority of emissions cuts accounted for by developing nations. The text essentially allowed for developed countries to devise their own targets based on their own standards, rather than a globally relevant standard based on the science.

“3) The “serious cuts” that Lynas claims Obama put “on the table” were a) pathetically inadequate, b) based on carbon-offsetting mechanisms that are ineffectual and unjust. The bill passed by the House that effectively authorised Obama’s offer (it still has to be passed in Senate) was based on a ‘cap and trade’ scheme that enables polluting companies to buy the right to pollute. If a deal based on such a miserable concession by the world’s major polluter would have “had environmentalists popping champagne corks popping in every corner of the world”, then we have to ask how seriously environmentalists take the threat.

“Lastly, the whole piece is informed by shrill Sinophobic hysteria. China is not an “uncontested superpower”. It has nothing like America’s military might, and is economically dependent on the US. China may be obstructing a meaningful climate deal, but it isn’t the only party doing so, and it certainly isn’t the most powerful.”

New Scientist’s Fred Pearce – although he may have helped cast even more of a saintly glow over Ed Miliband in his piece today than anyone else so far (“Did British climate secretary Ed Miliband save the planet early on the final Saturday of the Copenhagen conference?”), no mean feat – offers some revelations on the loopholes surrounding the rich world’s offers at Copenhagen that are worth quoting at length. (The Independent’s Johann Hari also provides a valuable explanation here and here.) Writes Pearce:

“beyond the targets lies a legal morass over the definitions of what the target numbers mean. The text of the Copenhagen Accord contains even more loopholes than the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, say analysts.

“Environment group WWF – reaching roughly the same conclusions as Climate Analytics and Ecofys – calculates that rich-world promises to make cuts of 15 to 19% in their collective emissions between 1990 and 2020 could, once the loopholes are taken into account, result in an actual increase in emissions by 4 to 10%. Another unpublished assessment by Simon Terry of the Sustainability Council of New Zealand puts the increase at 2 to 8%.

“The main loopholes are:

• Hot air. The Kyoto Protocol gave Russia and other Eastern European countries rights to emit far more CO2 than they needed because of the collapse of their industries post-1990. They have accumulated large numbers of excess permits – 10.7 billion tons by the time the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, according to a European Union study. Potentially these credits, often called “hot air”, can be sold to other countries. The Copenhagen Accord appears to allow the spare credits to be carried forward for sale after 2012. If the EU bought them all to offset emissions between 2013 and 2020, it could achieve even a 30 percent “cut” in emissions without making any domestic cuts at all.

• Carbon offsets. This is another way in which countries faced with difficult emissions reduction targets can offset them by investing in projects to cut someone else’s emissions. Done well, they allow carbon to be kept out of the atmosphere more cheaply. Done badly, they amount to carbon fraud, writing off emissions via green energy projects that were going to happen anyway. According to WWF, the European Union has already announced plans to make half a billion tons in emissions “cuts” through offsets in developing countries between 2012 and 2020. Other nations could triple that figure, it says.

• Airline and shipping fuel. A notable failure of the Copenhagen Accord is the absence of proposals to limit growing emissions from international shipping and aircraft, which do not fall under the umbrella of anyone’s national emissions. Currently that is another loophole of one to two billion tons a year.

• Forests. Copenhagen also failed to agree on a plan to allow countries to claim either cash or carbon emissions credits for changes in managing forests to retain carbon. Insiders say the talks faltered because the US and others refused to close a loophole that would allow countries to claim credits for improving things in one part of the country – by planting trees, for instance – while not being held to account for cutting down trees elsewhere within their borders. Unless fixed, another billion tons could slip through this loophole, says WWF.”

As I concluded in a comment on Lynas’s piece:

“The fact of having been present somewhere is obviously a powerful device to employ to lend credibility to your account, and Lynas is playing that particular card to the full here. Yet various aspects of his account amount to little more than his own guesswork. He has no idea what China’s overall “agenda” was, particularly as it conerned the PR battle with NGOs and Western leaders. He has no idea what Sudan’s overall motivations were. He is offering his own speculative interpretation of events, and giving it rhetorical force with the vocal declaration that “I was there”. But the mere fact of presence does not give you the ability to read minds. And that is what most of this account (read it carefully) consists of.

“Other parts of this account give cause for serious skepticism. Mark suggests, extraordinarily, that the US’s offer was “serious” – even though, as David Wearing has very rightly pointed out above, all they were offering was a 4% cut on the 1990 baseline, and in the context of all the issues of historical responsibility, equity and relative per capita emissions we should all be well aware of by now. It’s not difficult to see how and why that might reasonably be construed as a pretty insulting offer.

“Mark also suggests that the US “was obviously prepared to up its offer”. So what’s the evidence for this? It certainly seems to conflict with the details reported by this paper in the late stages of the summit, which point to the fact that the US was simply not budging on what it had already offered. If there’s real, substantive evidence to the contrary I’d love to hear it, but all we seem to have at the moment is Mark’s reading of what was “obvious”. And given his highly flattering reading of what was “serious” in the US’s proposal, I’m frankly inclined to take that with more than a pinch of salt.”

Clearly, the credibility of Lynas’ account turns on whether the claim that the US was “obviously” prepared to go further has any substance. Yet I’m not aware of any evidence to this effect, and what evidence I have seen suggests that the opposite is the case. It is very far from being an “obvious” point.

That’s not to infer that Lynas is necessarily wrong. But his account does have all the hallmarks of the one Western leaders want you to hear. Behind this facade, the reality looks considerably less flattering.

Certainly, there’s some truth to this charge. China certainly appears to have stonewalled throughout the negotiations, refusing to offer anything more substantive than a cut in the “carbon intensity” of its massive, and exponentially increasing, patterns of economic growth. If you think that sounds better than nothing, it’s worth pointing out that decreasing carbon intensity has been the norm in the West and across the global economy over the past century. It may mean that each unit of economic value generated impacts more lightly on the earth than otherwise – a good thing, or we’d all be in a position even more dire than we are at present – but it takes place in the context of an economic system with an inbuilt imperative to increase the number of those units as fast as possible. Like a shark, the capitalist economy requires constant forward motion, or it begins to perish. The result has been that, while efficiency gains have been made across a whole plethora of sectors, in absolute terms we are on an exponentially increasing upward trajectory, in terms not only of our carbon emissions, but of resource consumption of all kinds. In many cases, the benefits of greater energy efficiency (or “reduced intensity”) even cancel themselves out, on account of the “rebound effect” or “Khazoom-Brookes postulate”, as it’s been variously referred to. With better insulation, you can get used to a more comfortable temperature more of the time; greater fuel efficiency in aircrafts allows more and cheaper flights to take place; and so on. China’s offer to decrease its “carbon intensity”, therefore, offers nothing in the way of real carbon cuts – and could even accelerate its economic growth still further – a major problem when that growth is being driven by fossil fuels. There’s also, it’s worth pointing out, no guarantee that its emissions will be honestly or independently accounted for.

But China’s stonewalling at Copenhagen takes place in a certain context. Firstly, the other major polluting nation the US has refused to budge from its derisory offer of a 4% cut on 1990 levels by 2020 (which it has been selling as a more palatable 17% on 2005 levels – helpfully nudging its baseline year to one that no-one else uses), and is contributing a meagre level of funding to help China and other poor countries adapt to the impacts of climate change that are already being felt, or are in the pipeline. Secondly, the weight of historical responsibility for carbon emissions falls almost entirely on the rich world. We have not been aware of the facts of manmade climate change for long, but we have been broadly aware of the risks for over half a century, and took them without a second thought. As a result, we have benefited handsomely from our industrialisation and development (certain sectors, admittedly, considerably more than others). There is a pretty basic principle in play here, as ethicists Peter Singer and James Garvey have pointed out: “you broke it, you fix it” – or, in the case of adaptation funding, “you pay for it”. Thirdly, China’s per capita levels of carbon emissions are also around a fifth of those of the US – and its larger population ought to entitle it to greater emissions rights. Fourthly, given that large numbers of people in China still suffer dire poverty – and, perversely, many of the poorest people are forced to depend on particularly carbon-intensive processes – many of these emissions are simply of a different kind to the overwhelming majority of those in US: they provide for the basics of life, rather than for some of the most extravagant luxuries. Fifthly, many of these luxuries take the form of cheap consumer goods, manufactured in China for the benefit of Western consumers – a form of “carbon outsourcing” that leaves the West with the benefits and puts the carbon on China’s balance sheet.

For all these reasons, it seems highly unlikely – and frankly, unreasonable – that China would budge without seeing anything better than piss-poor commitments, and subsequent intransigence in its negotiating position, from the US.

If, in spite of this, China has been portrayed as the main villain, by contrast Brown and Miliband appear to have returned as heroes, with newspapers and environmental NGOs alike doling out praises for their efforts. Again, the echoes of the 2005 Make Poverty History campaign – with Blair and Brown successfully emerging as heroic campaigners on poverty when the more forthright NGOs were accusing them of active complicity – are stark.

Yet what was the UK’s record at the summit? From the fragmentary and often dubiously sourced evidence available, it’s a little difficult to know, but there are some clear clues. The UK seems to have been part of the “circle of commitment”, which stitched up a secret draft climate deal in advance of the talks – the so-called “Danish text”. This document made developing countries shoulder the weight of emissions cuts; shredded the Kyoto treaty; shifted power from the UN to the (rich world-controlled) World Bank; and offered a paltry $10bn in adaptation money in return for such concessions.

Later on, Brown was implicated in the ouster of Danish climate and energy minister Connie Hedegaard from her position as president of the conference, to be replaced by the Danish PM. Hedegaard was perceived as “too radical”, and was unhappy with the “Danish Text”, sources inside the conference told the Guardian’s John Vidal; the PM’s ouster was aimed at pushing the document through. Brown was party to the discussions of the ouster – which he approved.

Brown has apparently forwarded the idea of a $100bn adaptation fund for the developing countries – the deal ultimately agreed starts at $10 billion per year, and is supposed to reach $100bn by 2020. But, as has been seen on innumerable occasions with aid and debt relief, there’s little new money on the table, no guarantee it will ever be paid, and yet again what there is comes with all manner of strings attached. According to the World Development Movement,

“For the last two weeks, rich countries have been pushing their $10 billion in short-term finance. This money is being channelled through the World Bank, and so the Bank’s paymasters in rich countries can choose which countries will receive the money. Over recent months, the UK told Bolivia its eligibility for funding could be determined by its cooperation.”

Of the UK’s adaptation money commitments, according to WDM:

• All of this comes from pre-existing aid commitments, so is not new money, just diverting finance from other aid areas

• $430 million, over half, was first pledged by Gordon Brown in 2007, and has already been given to the World Bank

• So far 75 per cent is loans which will just increase unjust debts, rather than grants

• So far 80 per cent is being spent through the World Bank, compared to nothing through the United Nations

All this, remember, is from our chosen “heroes of the hour”. Clearly, when one wrenches this episode out of the frame into which much of the media has forced it and begins to examine the cracks in the surface, Copenhagen looks less like a story of heroes and villains than a bunch of leaders looking out for their own national interests, often – particularly in the rich world – at others’ expense, all the while trying hard to look good for the cameras.

In the wake of the “Climategate” affair – the illegal hacking and publication of a huge number of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit – I’ve been trying to put together some “points to remember” on the episode, along with some of the key points of evidence. Below is what I’ve managed to come up with. Owing to the story’s media profile, the volume of material out there is now pretty enormous and somewhat unwieldy. Nevertheless, I hope this at least begins to cover most the bases, and will generally be of some use.

1. The most damning quotes have been cherry-picked, out of context, from thousands of lines of material.

The CRU emails represent around 13 years’ worth of material. As George Marshall of the Climate Outreach and Information Network commented,

“The denial industry (and hordes of climate nerds) has trawled through these emails and found sentences which, when removed from context, support their storyline that climate science is being deliberately distorted and exaggerated for a mixed bag of self-interested and politicised ends.

But you could find anything in here. I looked and found lots of references to lunch and fun, 94 to hate, 31 to love. Generally, though, the emails are extremely focused, technical, and, dare I say it, really dull.”

The same method can easily be applied to the greatest figures in scientific history, yielding similarly “scandalous” results. Who could have known, for instance, that Sir Isaac Newton was involved in conspiring to avoid public scrutiny, manipulating evidence, knowingly publishing fraudulent scientific material, suppressing evidence and abusing the peer-review system? String him up …

One trawl through the emails by a veteran science correspondent actually turned up this curious example of scientists going out of their way to distance themselves from advocacy and campaign statements on climate change (what NASA’s James Hansen calls the persistent habit of “scientific reticence” on policy issues). The email has gone unnoticed, presumably because it is impossible to square with the deniers’ theological account of climate scientists’ aims and motives (deliberate scaremongering; the destruction of industrial civilisation; the promotion of world Government; and so on).

2. The leak appears to have been timed deliberately to coincide with, and maximise damage at, the Copenhagen negotiations.

One source close to the criminal investigation into the hacking of the CRU has stated that the hacked material was deliberately withheld in order to be released immediately prior to the Copenhagen negotiations. As Ben Webster of the Times has written, the emails:

“were held back for weeks after being stolen so that their release would cause maximum damage to the Copenhagen climate conference, according to a source close to the investigation of the theft. … The computer was hacked repeatedly, the source close to the investigation said: “It was hacked into in October and possibly earlier. Then they gained access again in mid-November.” By not releasing the e-mails until two weeks before Copenhagen, the hacker ensured that the debate about them would rage during the summit.”

3. Nothing was “hidden” – and there was no “decline” in temperatures.

The most infamous, oft-quoted passage from the emails concerns an attempt by Phil Jones to use “Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline”. But the decline refers not to the temperature record itself, but the decline that shows up in one paleo-climate record derived from tree-rings beyond the 1960s, universally held to be divergent from the established, directly observed late-twentieth century temperature record. Jones was attempting to construct a reliable long-term temperature reconstruction for the World Meteorological Organisation, for which he combined the earlier tree-ring data with the late 20^th century temperature records. As the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change point out in their report on the emails,

“It cannot be said that Jones was literally hiding this fact because two years before he wrote this email he was a co‐author on the first paper to document this “divergence” issue. That paper, published in Nature in February of 1998, concluded publicly that these post‐1960 tree ring data produce inaccurate temperature estimates”.

As CRU have pointed out, this background information is all referenced in the WMO reconstruction to which Jones was contributing. None of it was hidden. Moreover, as the science correspondent mentioned above notes, the word “trick” crops up frequently across the scientific literature, and is used to mean essentially a statistical device, mechanism or “clever thing to do” in handling data. If the conspiracy theorists’ reading of the word is correct, all of these published, publicly available papers are admitting to complicity in the grand plot.

4. Remarks about our inability to explain the recent apparent slowdown in rising temperatures refer to the details and complexities of tracking energy flows in the earth system, not whether climate change itself has simply stopped.

Another of the most often cited remarks comes from Dr Kevin Trenberth, referring to the “travesty” of being unable to explain some very recent temperature trends. This is the opinion of one scientist in particular, and two other scientists actually take issue with it in the emails themselves. In any case, it is not just privately expressed: it is fleshed out in a publicly available, published paper, which Trenberth himself is referring to directly in the email concerned. The idea that these are private doubts that have been concealed from the public is therefore entirely without foundation. Indeed as Peter Sinclair points out in his own broadcast on the subject, in this very paper Trenberth “unequivocally” backs the scientific consensus on climate change. The issue he is raising concerns nuances in this overall picture. Trenberth’s area of expertise centres around the tracking of energy flows into and out of the climate system, and his comment concerns the fact that, in his own words “[t]he observing system we have is inadequate” in the difficult and important task of accounting for the complexities in the various mechanisms by which the earth system absorbs and releases heat – within the overall context of man-made climate change.

As the Economist concludes:

“… to take this [quote] as evidence that Dr Trenberth questions global warming seems foolish. He does not mean that a comparative lack of warming over the past decade shows greenhouse warming has stopped. He knows that the climate has natural ups and downs imposed on such trends, and that cold snaps happen. He is expressing frustration that the monitoring needed to understand how these variations work is not as good as it could be.”

5. It is impossible for two scientists to “keep out” material or “redefine peer-review” at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – and the IPCC process was demonstrably not manipulated in this way.

George Monbiot has drawn attention to Phil Jones’ remark on one email that he and another scientist would deliberately “keep out” a couple of papers from the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. It is undoubtedly an ill-advised remark. Yet the exclusion demonstrably did not happen: the (highly contentious) papers were themselves discussed in the final IPCC document, and the nature of the IPCC process precludes any such attempt at manipulation by one or two individual scientists. As the Pew Centre put it,

“when writing their individual research papers, scientists are free to choose which published papers to cite based on their own judgment, and it is not standard practice to cite all relevant publications, since many are redundant and some lack credibility. In this case, the authors were contemplating the refusal to cite two discredited papers in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. In the end, since IPCC reports are more inclusive and comprehensive than individual research papers, both of the suspect papers were cited and discussed (p. 466 of the Working Group I report cites Soon and Baliunas, 2003 and McIntyre & McKitrick, 2003; http://www.ipcc.ch/ pdf/assessment‐report/ar4/wg1/ar4‐wg1‐chapter6.pdf).”

As the IPCC’s Chair Rajendra Pachauri points out:

“The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report …

“Every single comment that an expert reviewer provides has to be answered either by acceptance of the comment, or if it is not accepted, the reasons have to be clearly specified. So I think it is a very transparent, a very comprehensive process which insures that even if someone wants to leave out a piece of peer reviewed literature there is virtually no possibility of that happening.”

The journal Nature concludes:

“Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, … what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.”

6. Attempts by senior scientists – only ever discussed as an option in the emails – to keep flawed material out of peer-reviewed journals represent little more than an outcome the peer-review process produces on a regular basis.

As climatologists Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt suggest, while peer-review is an important mechanism in authenticating and legitimating scientific material, like any human institution it is obviously not infallible, and can be undermined. As such, while peer-review may be a necessary criterion for credible scientific material, it is by no means a sufficient criterion. As Mann and Schmidt write:

“Put simply, peer review is supposed to weed out poor science. However, it is not foolproof — a deeply flawed paper can end up being published under a number of different potential circumstances: (i) the work is submitted to a journal outside the relevant field (e.g. a paper on paleoclimate submitted to a social science journal) where the reviewers are likely to be chosen from a pool of individuals lacking the expertise to properly review the paper, (ii) too few or too unqualified a set of reviewers are chosen by the editor, (iii) the reviewers or editor (or both) have agendas, and overlook flaws that invalidate the paper’s conclusions, and (iv) the journal may process and publish so many papers that individual manuscripts occasionally do not get the editorial attention they deserve.

“Thus, while un-peer-reviewed claims should not be given much credence, just because a particular paper has passed through peer review does not absolutely insure that the conclusions are correct or scientifically valid.”

It is clear that the concern discussed in the emails is that two journals – Climate Research and Geophysical Research Letters – are publishing material that is “deeply flawed”, “crap”; “crap science”, in each case apparently on account of an editorial agenda. The scientists discuss a number of solutions to this: writing rebuttals in the journals concerned; sending a letter of protest, signed by a large number of distinguished scientists, to the publishers, expressing their loss of faith in the journal’s conduct; bypassing the publication altogether; or gathering and presenting “a clear body of evidence” of the editorial agenda compromising the publication. As the Pew Centre note of this discussion:

“To interpret this correspondence in proper context, one must recognize that science is a community‐based professional enterprise. It is expected and appropriate that investigators choose in which journals to publish and recommend to their peers in which journals to publish or not publish. The notion of organizing a boycott against any journal that repeatedly departs from accepted scientific standards is both reasonable and ethical.”

If an attempt to keep flawed material out of the leading journals constitutes an attempt at “suppression”, it is certainly comparable with the decisions individual editors and reviewers routinely make to reject the publication of material in virtually any journal. Rather, this seems simply to have been an attempt to uphold the integrity of peer-review – an important but not infallible process – in one particular publication.

7. Unjustifiable attempts were made to withhold or prevent the release of information, but in the context of: (a) a campaign of harassment, misrepresentation and vilification by a powerful industry-backed lobby; (b) CRU’s contractual obligations to keep some data out of the public domain.

Some of the emails do suggest attempts to keep scientific data out of the public domain, and apparently to delete emails either in anticipation of or response to a Freedom of Information Act request. While such behaviour cannot be justified, the emails concerned also contain evidence of the concerted campaign of harassment, misrepresentation and vilification these scientists were being exposed to, and which forms the overarching context of their remarks. As Phil Jones says in one of the emails concerned, “As an aside and just between us, it seems that Brian Hoskins has withdrawn himself from the WG1 [Working Group 1 of the IPCC] Lead nominations. It seems he doesn’t want to have to deal with this hassle.” As the Economist notes, “Caspar Amman, one of Dr Trenberth’s colleagues at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, wrote [in one email]: “Oh MAN! When will this crap ever end??””

As John Houghton, former co-chair of the IPCC, recently told the BBC’s Roger Harrabin, information was routinely leaked and spun in the public domain by a critical fossil fuel industry lobby in order to undermine the IPCC. As Harrabin records:

“Professor Houghton said that in future it would be wise to offer the IPCC protection from harassment in its work. “IPCC meetings were open to all – including (representatives) from organisations such as [fossil fuel industry lobbying coalition] the Global Climate Coalition whose clear agenda was to weaken our work and our conclusions.

“A particular way they continually did this was to publish selected provisional material from the IPCC process, for example draft chapters or contributions not meant for publication, and used this to discredit the IPCC and the process.

“For people being targeted, it is very difficult to be completely open when provisional material emerging during the process is being used as stick to beat the scientists with.”

Climatologist Michael Mann states:

“They’re not looking to reproduce your analysis, in many cases. They’re looking to badger, and to make unpleasant for us what we love doing as scientists. It’s obvious to other graduate students and post-docs rising up: if you choose to do this [climate science], this is what you will be subject to.”

This by no means excuses the failure to adhere to the ideal of openness that is a cornerstone of good scientific practice, or apparent attempts to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act. But it does go some way to explain why – in the absence of malicious or conspiratorial motives – such information was withheld. The Economist concludes:

“As Judith Curry, a climatologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, observes, attacks on climate scientists, sometimes paid for by carbon-emitting industries when global warming first became a public issue, have made many researchers in the field nervous and defensive. This does not excuse attempts to resist transparency, but does help explain them. … Little wonder that the scientists are looking tribal and jumpy, and that sceptics have leapt so eagerly on such tiny scraps as proof of a conspiracy.”

As Nature concluded:

“In the end, what the UEA e-mails really show is that scientists are human beings — and that unrelenting opposition to their work can goad them to the limits of tolerance, and tempt them to act in ways that undermine scientific values. Yet it is precisely in such circumstances that researchers should strive to act and communicate professionally, and make their data and methods available to others, lest they provide their worst critics with ammunition.”

As the Pew Centre have also pointed out, the CRU had contractual obligations to keep some data private – again, a problem in terms of openness and transparency in science, but also fundamentally an institutional problem, far from unknown in other fields and departments, and which can hardly be said to be the fault of the scientists themselves. As the Pew Centre note:

“The CRU is barred by non‐publication agreements with some countries’ meteorological services from releasing to the public a small amount (less than 5%) of the weather station data the CRU uses to estimate land‐surface temperature trends. The university has confirmed that the CRU is legally barred from releasing these data. A few commentators have used this situation as a basis for accusing the CRU of suppressing data.”

As Gavin Schmidt writes:

“From the date of the first FOI request to CRU (in 2007), it has been made abundantly clear that the main impediment to releasing the whole CRU archive is the small % of it that was given to CRU on the understanding it wouldn’t be passed on to third parties. Those restrictions are in place because of the originating organisations (the various National Met. Services) around the world and are not CRU’s to break. As of Nov 13, the response to the umpteenth FOI request for the same data met with exactly the same response. This is an unfortunate situation, and pressure should be brought to bear on the National Met Services to release CRU from that obligation. It is not however the fault of CRU.”

8. Not one piece of evidence or data has been altered or found to be wrong as a result of the affair.

As Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics group at Oxford’s Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department writes in the Guardian:

“A colleague working in astrophysics was expressing bemusement to me yesterday about why the reputation of British science was apparently under threat, given that no evidence had actually emerged of scientific misconduct. Her specific question was: “Has anyone found evidence of an error in a published paper or dataset?” If they had, then of course the error would need to be corrected, which happens in science all the time.

“If it could be proved that figures had been deliberately altered to give a specific result then it would be very serious, but so far no evidence has emerged from these Climatic Research Unit (CRU) emails of any error in the HadCRUT instrumental temperature record at the centre of the row, never mind proof of deliberate intent to mislead. How often have you heard that repeated, clearly, by the mainstream press reporting on this incident? …

“So the narrative journalists have collectively decided upon is that a few scientists may have manipulated their data, and either (a) it doesn’t matter because the evidence for human influence on climate is so strong or (b) this shows the whole edifice is now crumbling, depending on their editor’s predilections. And George Monbiot laments that the high priests of his climate change religion have let him down. All without any evidence that any number, anywhere, is actually wrong.”

9. Even if every piece of evidence discussed in the emails were found to be flawed or compromised, the scientific evidence supporting the idea of man-made climate change would remain overwhelming.

As Nature put it,

“Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.”

Pew spell things out in more detail:

“The two data sets highlighted in accusations of misconduct are very limited and consist of:

• High-latitude tree ring data that inaccurately suggest that local temperatures declined after 1960; thermometer readings from the same locations demonstrate that the tree rings accurately reflected local temperatures prior to, but not after 1960.

• A small fraction of the weather station data used by the CRU to estimate global surface temperature change …

“The key point is that those data that comprise the most important evidence for human‐induced climate change are not in play in the emails, including those documenting:

• snow and ice cover

• sea level rise

• ocean heat content

• surface temperature records maintained in the U.S. (NASA, NOAA)

• upper and lower atmospheric temperatures monitored by satellites

• atmospheric water vapor

• greenhouse gases

• solar activity

• modeling experiments

“As a result, the evidence for rapid warming of the Earth in recent decades remains unequivocal, including:

• Worldwide loss of snow and ice

• Rising sea levels

• Records of rising global surface temperatures maintained in the U.S. by NASA and NOAA

“Further, the evidence for human dominance of recent warming remains very strong, including:

• Concomitant warming of the troposphere and cooling of the stratosphere (a greenhouse effect signature)

• Without the strong warming effect of human-induced rise in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the observed changes in solar activity over the past several decades would have led to a slight cooling of the Earth’s surface.

• Climate models only reproduce the warming of the past 50 years when they include the observed rise in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.”

As Gavin Schmidt writes:

“before you conclude that the emails have any impact on the science, read about the six easy steps that mean that CO2 (and the other greenhouse gases) are indeed likely to be a problem, and think specifically how anything in the emails affect them.”

George Monbiot has had a go at imagining the kind of email we would need to find in order to genuinely expose the scientific consensus as a conspiratorial fabrication. Needless to say, no such email has yet turned up.

10. Media coverage of the affair has been constant, high-profile, and profoundly misleading.

You will no doubt have seen the Fox News coverage. You may even have read this dolt’s execrable conspiracy theorising in the Telegraph (“Conservatives believe in a small state. The Climategate scientists are part of a global conspiracy to expand it …” etc.). You may have heard, via the Wall Street Journal, that “science is dying”; or noticed Radio 4’s The Moral Maze debating roughly the same thing. One of the most important and alarming signs of just how far this contrived narrative of crisis has penetrated mainstream coverage, though, is its appearance almost as presumed fact in many of the more sympathetic accounts. Check out the Guardian’s groundbreaking recent front-page editorial, for instance, published jointly with 55 other international papers, in support of action at Copenhagen – which characterises the CRU material as “emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data” – despite a complete lack of evidence that any data was withheld on account of its “inconvenience”. Or take The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, here – wryly reporting, with astonishing recklessness, that the scientists have indeed been deliberately attempting to fool us.

11. Compared with the manipulation and deceit routinely practiced by the denial industry, “Climategate” isn’t even worth mentioning.

For some representative evidence of what is a very large topic, see George Monbiot (here and here); or check out the Sourcewatch, ExxonSecrets and DeSmogBlog archives.

First off, George Monbiot on The Real News Network:

Second, Peter Sinclair’s explainer for DeSmogBlog:

Third, another explainer from a former veteran science correspondent:

Splitting the Conservatives: “Climategate”’s political repercussions for the right

The timing of the UEA’s hacked emails’ publication – widely seen as a deliberate PR coup against the entire Copenhagen summit – turns out to have been far from coincidental. While the CRU was first hacked in October, according to the Times, one “source close to the investigation” into the hacking has stated that the emails “were held back for weeks after being stolen so that their release would cause maximum damage to the Copenhagen climate conference”. The “Climategate” label itself, with its overtones of corruption, cover-up, political malfeasance and investigative heroism, was itself coined in a comment on a right-wing blog, and soon taken up by the media – a victory for the denial lobby in framing the episode that few seem fully to have acknowledged.

The Conservatives’ former Shadow Home Secretary David Davis – a right-wing economic libertarian who has forged links with like-minded American groups, among whom anti-environmental rhetoric and climate change denial tends to resonate most strongly – weighed in on 2^nd December in a comment piece for the Independent. Repeating the canard that “the planet appears to have been cooling, not warming, in the last decade” and claiming that the UEA emails “seemed to show” the world’s leading climate scientists “conspiring to rig the figures to support their theories”, it was an embarrassing performance, or ought to have been. For Davis, “the single biggest change in mindset that is necessary is to give more prominence to a policy of adaptation” – meaning by this everything from better sea defences to a strategy of geoengineering through “maximizing cloud reflectivity”. There is barely a hint of recognition in his commentary of the dangers reckless interventions in delicate and poorly understood natural systems pose; nor of how humanity will successfully “adapt” to the 5 or 6 degrees’ climate change towards which we appear to be accelerating. Nevertheless, Davis’s position has a seductive internal logic. If the debate on the causes of climate change really is still live, and action on the issue such a net cost to us (more robust economic assessments notwithstanding) why should action to cut greenhouse gas emissions be such a pressing priority? The atrocity follows from the absurdity.

It seems likely, however, that electoral gains stand to be made by right-wing parties from attempting to appease sectors of the public split between denial, ignorance and uncertainty, and that are – for the time being, at least – quite simply a net beneficiary of the carbon economy. UKIP’s recent embrace of leading climate denier (and all-round charlatan) Christopher Monckton suggests that that party may be attempting to appeal to some of the more ardent denialists and anti-environmentalists among Tory supporters, which – since there’s some evidence to suggest that UKIP’s threat to the Conservative Party is primarily a matter of stealing not only a right-wing fringe, but support from across the Party’s base – may well be a source of pressure.

With other former Tory luminaries such as ex-Chancellor Lord Lawson, Michael Portillo and others weighing in with similar observations, the controversy has clearly been a major bone of contention within the Conservatives. Lord Lawson in particular has recently been instrumental in forming The Global Warming Policy Foundation, an organisation aimed at blocking action on climate change, of which he is now the Chairman. In a supreme irony, the group itself has already been caught mangling data to fit its line – a practice also eerily reminiscent of previous high-profile climate denial efforts. Curiously, the GWPF also shares its offices with the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining – whose Petroleum and Drilling Engineering Division includes two employees of BP’s Exploration Operating Company. Its Director, meanwhile, was formerly a leading member of the Scientific Alliance, a quarrying industry front-group co-founded by a PR firm specifically to fight efforts to introduce climate change legislation. Some of Lawson’s own links with fossil fuel industry money – through his major role in corporate consultancy group the Central Europe Trust – have also recently come to light.

More broadly, however, many of the most outspoken and high-profile Conservatives on the issue have initially tended to back the deniers’ corner, its base leans in a similar direction, and a very large majority of the Parliamentary Party either abstained on or voted against the Climate Change Bill. The efforts of this newly emboldened denialist wing are undoubtedly becoming something of an embarrassment to a leadership pushing the green credentials of a “reformed” Conservative Party, and indeed seem to have engendered a kind of panic, prompting fevered attempts at damage limitation from the “moderates” of the Tory Reform Group, as well as the Party leadership. The Telegraph – effectively the Party’s house publication, and a regular propagator of climate change denial – has even seen divisions erupt, and recently published an editorial which, while clearly not unsympathetic towards the deniers’ position, adopted a general position of “better safe than sorry”.

Labour’s strategy: Make Poverty History with a coat of green paint

Since Labour suffer few comparable constraints within its own party, it should probably not be too surprising that senior figures have been keen to capitalise on this split among Conservatives – Ed Miliband and Gordon Brown both publicly attacking the Conservative denialists as “flat-earthers”. How this partial polarization along party lines will play out in the public domain can only be guessed at, though it surely raises concerns that any association between the issue of climate change and New Labour risks dragging it into that Party’s own internal implosion.

If the reflexive antipathy towards the scientific evidence and case for action is not so evident within Labour, the Tories’ internal conflict and Copenhagen itself have ensured that Labour’s efforts at co-opting the climate issue and “greenwashing” its record have begun to take the lead over David Cameron’s offerings in recent days. The repeated invocation of Make Poverty History as a model for Governmental-civil society collaboration by senior New Labour figures, combined with efforts at cosying up to the climate movement, has rather given the game away in terms of this wider strategy. As during the flawed and ultimately unsuccessful 2005 campaign, the aim appears to be the straightforward co-option of an NGO-fronted popular movement; the generation of public goodwill and favourable publicity; and the deployment of this valuable political capital as a substitute for real change. In each case, the purported goal (eradicating poverty/ tackling climate change) is set sufficiently high that failure can easily be construed as compatible with a genuine effort on the part of Government; while each case also involves a sufficiently large number of other major actors that the UK can easily disclaim responsibility in the event of an ultimate failure – particularly if the Government has been making the right noises along the way. As a result, a business-as-usual course can be maintained, concerned sectors of public opinion at least partially appeased, and the political costs any real change inevitably incurs, from the business lobby in particular, avoided.

NGOs: serious risks of co-option

How successful such a strategy on the Government’s part is likely to be will depend among other things on how much of a nuisance – how alert, vocal, independent and above all brutally honest – the climate movement makes itself, and how far it is able to mobilise public outrage in the same direction. At present its record is mixed. But co-ordinated PR stunts with Downing Street; over-hyping the level of commitment, and even assisting in the greenwashing, of the worst Governmental and corporate offenders; and glowing reports that “we know that the Government have been doing their best” inspire limited confidence. Tom Burke, former head of Friends of the Earth, has previously noted that the NGOs “got sucked in too close once Labour was elected”; he “believes one of the green NGOs’ fundamental mistakes was their naive trust that new Labour would keep its promises”. Former Friends of the Earth boss Jonathan Porritt agrees: NGOs have been “beguiled” by Labour. “Overall,” he states, “the green groups have been too reticent and have given Labour an easy ride.”

Prominent campaigning NGO Avaaz have even recently featured a picture of Gordon Brown on the front page of their website, standing outside 10 Downing Street and gazing wistfully but resolutely into the distance. The accompanying text tells us that

“Brown took a phone-call from our September 21st flashmob in London’s Parliament Square, and promised to go to Copenhagen and work for a fair, ambitious and binding treaty. Now, with the summit in danger of failure, he is one of our best hopes to champion a strong deal – and refuse to accept a weak one.”

Rather different thoughts were expressed in August by NASA’s pre-eminent climatologist James Hansen. As a consequence of the UK’s commitment to expanding coal burning and extraction, at Copenhagen, he suggests,

“[The] UK will be a joke. It is moral turpitude, depravity, to build more coal-fired power plants or open coal mines, knowing what we know now. … It was one thing to dig coal when we didn’t know the consequences, but quite another thing today. …The UK would not be in a position to ask anybody else to do anything [at Copenhagen]”.

The UK has also been implicated in the recent ouster of Connie Hedegaard, the Danish climate and energy minister, who was serving as president of the conference. Rumours circulating early on at Copenhagen suggested that the Danish Prime Minister would later take over from Hedegaard – as has now happened – in an attempt to put his weight behind the “Danish Text”, the leaked document drawn up by rich nations in the “circle of commitment”, understood to include the UK, US and Denmark, which prompted a walkout by developing nations. The text hands the rich world roughly double the emissions rights allocated to the developing world up to 2050; trashes the only legally binding treaty mandating emissions reductions currently in place; hands power over finance to the (rich-world dominated) World Bank, sidelining the UN; and in return for such concessions, offers a paltry $10 billion in money for adaption to the developing world (credible estimates suggest $100 billion at least is required). Hedegaard was said to be unhappy with the Danish Text, and, as one source told the Guardian, was considered “a little too radical and just not senior enough, and the PM hates her”. A spokesperson confirmed that Brown had himself been involved in discussions regarding Hedegaard’s ouster – which he approved.

Doubtless the NGO sector has its own motives and structural limitations, which sometimes lead it to give credit where it isn’t due. As Naomi Klein recently put it:

“Serious activists have a responsibility to the truth, and sometimes NGOs are governed by other priorities, just like politicians are – it’s more important to be able to claim a success, because claiming a success means you can go raise more money, it means that you look positive and efficient and effective. I don’t think the environmental movement should be governed by those concerns.”

The temptation to try to rally a by now fairly demoralized climate movement will also undoubtedly be a strong motivating factor for NGOs, potentially leading them to buy into and even help promote much of the Government’s rhetoric at Copenhagen. If in so doing such organisations inspire false hope and lend credibility to Government’s attempts to greenwash itself, however, the price of such a strategy will inevitably be far too high.

“The documentary was OK, but flawed. Firstly, a deliberate choice was made by the programme-makers to pull their punches, as its presenter Professor Iain Stewart in fact admitted in an interview with the Radio Times. Though there was some talk of triggering feedback mechanisms and tipping points, the discussion of effects was limited to a warming of 1-3 degrees C, which is now looking like a very, very conservative range – Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research has said we’d be incredibly lucky to limit warming to 4 degrees, for example. That’s pretty shocking – why was a decision made to simply exclude half of the range predicted in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, when its findings are if anything now looking decidedly conservative?

“Hot Planet also had almost nothing to say on the politics and economics of climate change – it jubilantly presents techno-fix after techno-fix (it even proposes artificial, lab-created meat as a potentially viable substitute for the meat we consume at present); the only other advice it offers is “change your lifestyle” – illustrated with the now ubiquitous icon of individual consumer choice, households changing their lightbulbs. Any suggestion that political action or fundamental economic change might be required was placed firmly off the agenda. Yet it’s difficult to see how any of the technological changes they suggest could be effectively employed as solutions to climate change without major political interventions and economic reforms. Without this context, we are simply presented with a set of technologies and no notion of how they might ever come to be implemented.

“Moreover, there was no apparent awareness of limits. It conveyed the impression that there was a shiny new substitute for almost every major bit of polluting consumer behaviour we now engage in, but was unprepared to countenance the idea that, say, simply substituting high-speed maglev trains, hydrogen-fuelled cars and artificial lab-grown meat while preserving current levels of mobility and consumption might itself pose profound problems in terms of energy and resource consumption. Business-as-usual resolved with a techno-fix was the basic model for every one of the programme’s solutions. That climate change might be inherently linked either to current, unsustainable levels of consumption, or a commitment to indefinite economic growth was territory the programme seemed simply unprepared to explore.”

Alongside Christian Aid’s inspired and rather brilliant ad at the top of the page – which unfolds to reveal the rest of the iceberg, giving the whole the shape of Africa – is an advert for energy company Eon, the second largest carbon polluter in Europe and sponsor of the first proposed new dirty coal plant in the UK in 30 years, the Kingsnorth power station in Kent (now temporarily shelved following a concerted campaign of popular pressure). The paper, it’s worth pointing out, conducted a touchingly friendly interview with Paul Golby, head of Eon, earlier in the year.

And effect and cause, via the Independent – advertising car essentials and American Airlines flights to New York as the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are made known (February 2007):

… and advertising cheap Ryanair flights, as yet another study reveals just how conservative those predictions have turned out to be (from 2009):

As Professor of Media and Communications Simon Cottle writes in his Preface to Climate Change and the Media (Peter Lang, 2009, p. x):

“… sections of the mainstream media now often dramatize and spectacularize climate change as an impending peril. When they do so, however, such media representations are offered within a prevailing sea of media content that sends very different messages: whether adverts encouraging us to buy petrol-guzzling 4x4s or programs like the BBC’s Top Gear mindlessly extolling high performance cars; whether endless adverts bombarding us throughout the year to take weekend flights to idyllic destinations or the continuous stream of “feel good” holiday TV programs and magazine features that normalize the exponential rise in passenger flights each year.

“The mass media, evidently, are not carbon-neutral – whether in terms of their industrialized means of production or in their endorsement of an unsustainable culture of consumption. Could it also be that this ubiquitous culture of consumption also contributes to the comforting but simplistic hopes placed in technology? When climate change is viewed as a scientific challenge requiring technological solutions rather than as a social problem of globalizing modernity dependent on incessant growth, then producers, consumers, and governments are too easily let off the hook and the difficult politics needed to engage with questions of global social justice and sustainable futures become sidelined.”

Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker’s new book, The Real Global Warming Disaster, seems to have been well-received in some quarters. As he writes:

“We have “less than 50 days” to save the planet, declared Gordon Brown last week, in yet another desperate bid to save the successor to the Kyoto treaty, which is due to be agreed in Copenhagen in six weeks’ time. But no one has put the reality of the situation more succinctly than Prof Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technolgy, one of the most distinguished climatologists in the world, who has done as much as anyone in the past 20 years to expose the emptiness of the IPCC’s claim that its reports represent a “consensus” of the views of “the world’s top climate scientists”.

“In words quoted on the cover of my new book, Prof Lindzen wrote: “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly exaggerated computer predictions combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age.”

Shocking stuff. But who exactly is this Lindzen fellow? The editors of Media Lens comment:

“Journalist Ross Gelbspan noted that in May 1995, Richard Lindzen and Patrick Michaels were hired as expert witnesses to testify on behalf of Western Fuels Association, a $400 million consortium of coal suppliers and coal-fired utilities. Gelbspan said of Lindzen:

““I don’t know very many supporters of Mr Lindzen who are not in the pay of the fossil fuel lobby. Dr Lindzen himself, his research is publicly funded, but Dr Lindzen makes, as he told me, $2,500 a day consulting with fossil fuel interests, and that includes his consulting with OPEC, his consulting with the Australian coal industry, his consulting with the US coal industry and so forth. That’s not to say Dr Lindzen doesn’t believe what he says, but it is to say that he stands in very sharp distinction to really just about virtually all of the climate scientists around the world.” (Tony Jones, ‘Journalist puts global warming sceptics under the spotlight,’ Australian Broadcasting Corporation, March 7, 2005; http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2005/s1318067.htm)”

You can discover more about Richard Lindzen’s fascinating back story from Sourcewatch, DeSmogBlog and ExxonSecrets. That Lindzen is the single climate scientist Booker was able to find willing to provide a supportive quote for his book frankly speaks volumes.