This is part personal highlights of 2016, and the first few days of 2017, part leftovers of my narrower Christmas Eve post. It looks back, just a little, in the hope of historical perspective. It also covers one foreign policy issue with profound links to so-called climate policy. Whatever else, there’s some recommended reading. It would be great if others did the same, as well as adding their own big moments and commentary.
Brexit
There are two recommended reads that for me tower over the myriads of others on Brexit: Tim Shipman’s All Out War and Dominic Cummings’ long blog post two days ago, with its intriguing reference to Tolstoy, Branching histories of the 2016 referendum and ‘the frogs before the storm’.
Being highly selective, here’s the moment from Shipman’s account I want to highlight, describing the situation in 10 Downing Street as the votes were being announced:
‘Hope was abandoned at 3.30 a.m.,’ said one of those present. ‘I went to the loo and when I got back Ed and Kate and George and Dave weren’t there. I thought I’d better go home.’ Samantha Cameron had disappeared too. The quad, plus Andrew Feldman, were in the PM’s study. They picked over the arguments again, but Cameron had made his mind up. The party would be uncontrollable if he stayed. ‘All political lives end in failure,’ he said. Enoch Powell, whose phrase it was, had been a Brexiteer in 1975.
As anachronisms go those last two sentences take some beating. By the end of 2016 Oxford Dictionaries had declared ‘post-truth’ word of the year, with ‘Brexiteer’ and ‘alt-right’ close runners-up. But the greater irony is that Cameron in quoting Powell was pointing to someone of far greater ‘disloyalty’ to his party than his own erstwhile friend and colleague Michael Gove, of whom it’s said Samantha has vowed he and family will never again darken the Camerons’ door, despite Sarah Vine being godparent to one of her children.
When Enoch Powell argued for coming out of the EEC in 1975 he was going against not just Edward Heath and Harold Wilson but new Tory leader Margaret Thatcher, Nigel Lawson, Norman Tebbit and all. And he was completely right, for all the right reasons, in my humble view. I only began to think about it on reaching eighteen and leaving school, which was too late in 1975 to vote. But I would have opted for Leave in every year since.
‘Brexiteer’ turned into a rather effective, swashbuckling moniker for Leavers, of which Dominic Cummings was initially suspicious. ‘Take back control’ was of course his. The Vote Leave campaign manager made many mistakes, according to his refreshingly honest account this week. He also proved himself to be an outstanding team leader, with a relentless focus, based on data science, on what would convince those largely uninterested – quite rightly he argues – in politics as defined by the SW1 bubble. His contempt for those without that focus, but oodles of vanity as its ready replacement, is a joy to read – though perhaps not for them! And, as I said on his blog yesterday, this really struck me:
The foundation problem with the EU was best summarised by the brilliant physicist David Deutsch, the man who extended Alan Turing’s 1936 paper on computation into the realm of quantum mechanics. Deutsch said:
‘The EU is incompatible with Britain’s more advanced political culture. I’m voting Leave… [E]rror correction is the basic issue, and I can’t foresee the EU improving much in this respect… [P]reserving the institutions of error correction is more important than any policy… Whether errors can be corrected without violence is not a “concern” but a condition for successfully addressing concerns.’
Healthy and effective systems like our immune system and the English common law allow constant and rapid error-correction. Unhealthy and ineffective systems like the EU and modern Whitehall departments block error-correction. They are extremely centralised and hierarchical therefore information processing is blocked and problems are not solved. In politics this often leads to disasters when more and more resources are devoted to reinforcing failure. NB. This most fundamental question played effectively no role in the debate.
Let me repeat that. “This most fundamental question played effectively no role in the debate.” Isn’t that terrible? Many have blamed Cummings for such dumbing down. Try reading his full account before you join them. I only felt to say this:
Absorbing, thank you for everything you and the VL team achieved for our country.
I hadn’t come across David Deutsch’s error correction argument. Totally convincing.
The insurgency leader’s example of a “flat-out lie” told by the Remain campaign, never mentioned in all the angry bluster about “post-truth” since, compared to Vote Leave’s deliberate gross provocation of £350 million per week, is also well worth consideration.
Climate
Three highlights of 2016 here. Steve McIntyre’s moving tribute to Bob Carter on learning of the New Zealander’s death in January:
In 2003, when I was unknown to anyone other than my friends and family, I had been posting comments on climate reconstructions at a chatline. Bob emailed me out of the blue with encouragement, saying that I was looking at the data differently than anyone else and that I should definitely follow it through. Without his specific encouragement, it is not for sure that I ever would have bothered trying to write up what became McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) or anything else.
As with Enoch Powell we do well to honour the pioneers who lit fires for others. There can hardly be a more powerful example in the annals of climate scepticism.
Then there was Nic Lewis’ shocking piece at Judith Curry’s in August: Abnormal climate response of the DICE IAM – a trillion dollar error? How many mentions have you seen of this since? Led by the nose by the climate trolls we tend to be obsessed with other, much more borderline issues. I’ve long felt it’s deliberate misdirection. As Robin Guenier has frequently said our strongest arguments never get mentioned, let alone debunked. Richard Tol was at least honest in response, on behalf of the select company of builders of Integrated Assessment Models – which is of course what IAM stands for. A crucial, deeply flawed step in the argument for coercive emission reduction from the IPCC fed through to the EU and national governments. We do well to pay more attention in 2017.
Lastly there was Matt Ridley’s magisterial annual lecture for the GWPF in October – as stand-in, he explained, for an unnamed head of state who couldn’t make it! I’ve heard most of these things and this was easily the best – despite Matt’s extraordinary claim that the scientific method was mankind’s greatest achievement. Try that one out on the scientist and atheist Jonathan Miller, whose production of Bach’s St Matthew Passion I had the privilege of experiencing in New York in 2006. There is more to life than the scientific method! But, aside from that, which may be considered a quibble for the purpose of continued Cliscep cooperation, we’ve been given the most intelligent summary of Climate Scepticism we’ve had for years. A precious resource.
Before Trump there was Twitter, at least in my telling. Three incidents, or interactions, here too, in which I found myself involved, though I have no links for the first. We’ll have to make do.
In the lead up to Brexit two conversations stand out, the second with someone a good deal younger than me that I know and have worked with. But the first was perhaps most shocking, also involving a young person passionately against Leave who felt she might well be about to be outvoted by a phalanx of much older reactionaries, if not out-and-out racists. In a gentle way I tried to talk about the history, about the vote in 1975, about how many of my generation and older felt as if we’d been misled by promises that this was in no way ever going to be a political union – and that this was a key factor in how we were going to vote this time. The reaction? I couldn’t give a fuck about the history.
The generation gap that many have commented on in Brexit voting is of course the fault of the bigoted elders not their younger betters, as this incident clearly shows.
Three days before the vote Paul Battley, a younger gun I have considerable respect for as a coder, was by contrast the model of discretion in making a key link, with the help of the Guardian, that might explain to another tweeter why it would not be a game-changer for Richard Drake to learn that Martin Durkin, maker of Brexit the Movie, was also a ‘“Deeply Deceptive” climate change denier’:
Despite Paul’s intelligence in other areas it’s typical that I needed to add that little qualifier, just as Matt Ridley had to insert it for the upteenth time in his GWPF lecture. Or else, as Richard Lindzen quipped long ago, “If you say you believe in the greenhouse effect, you agree that the world is going to end next Tuesday.” A key distinction that even our best young people have been allowed never to think about, before they pour their scorn, often on the same oldies who were, to their disgust and astonishment, about to emerge triumphant on 23rd June.
Cliscep readers may find the rest of that thread of interest or at least amusement. I try to maintain both my cool and politeness in such corners but I did end like this:
Demagogue? Who could I have been thinking of?
In October I began to promote Ridley’s GWPF lecture, now online with YouTube video (thanks Ben Pile), as a support in making the same old distinction:
The next day someone else I follow, one of the key programmers at the heart of the well-regarded Django open source framework for Python, often compared to Rails for Ruby (for those who frequent such jargon), and someone who’s moved on from working for the Guardian’s web development team in London to a startup in California, made both a humble and insightful comment on the ‘filter bubble’ problem raised in my Cliscep post in November:
I wouldn’t have stepped in to the resulting conversation if another tweeter, from Brighton, hadn’t used the phrase anti-science. Matt Ridley was deployed again:
And Simon ‘liked’ my original tweet with the link to Matt’s talk. That would not have been visible to anyone else. Perhaps working for a startup with venture capital from Peter Thiel is making him ask some questions. Whether or not this is true I think the emphasis on filter bubbles post-Trump is an opportunity to challenge people, politely, if they haven’t set up just the same thing with the climate conversation.
Trump
My two favourite articles of 2016 that didn’t mention Brexit or climate now come into play. This also means of course that you should feel free to do the same in comments. (Where C++ means Climate plus plus. Or something.) These two also barely mention Trump. But the mystery of the section title should be easy enough to discern before long.
Peter Hitchens’ The Cold War Is Over in First Things in October I consider a masterpiece. Here’s his key theme in a nutshell:
… the experience of living in that sad and handsome place brought me to love Russia and its stoical people, to learn some of what they had suffered and see what they had regained. And so, as all around me rage against the supposed aggression and wickedness of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, I cannot join in. Despite the fact that Moscow has abandoned control of immense areas of Europe and Asia, self-appointed experts insist that Russia is an expansionist power.
And yet:
Here I risk being classified as an apologist for Vladimir Putin. I am not. I view him as a sinister tyrant. The rule of law is more or less absent under his rule. He operates a cunning and cynical policy toward the press. Criticism of the government is perfectly possible in small-circulation magazines and obscure radio stations, but quashed whenever it threatens the state and its controlled media. Several of the most serious allegations against Putin—alleged murders of journalists and politicians—have not been proven. Yet crimes like the death in prison (from horrible neglect) of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor who charged Russian officials with corruption, can be traced directly to Putin’s government, and are appalling enough by themselves.
The second article doesn’t mention Russia at all but its subject may soon become highly relevant: I Served With James Mattis. Here’s What I Learned From Him by Stanton S. Coerr in The Federalist last month. A very UK-centric excerpt will do:
At the end of the drill, questions were answered and then Mattis dismissed everyone. No messing around with this guy. Mike Murdoch, one of the British company commanders, leaned over to me, his eyes wide. “Mate, are all your generals that good?”
I looked at him.
“No. He is the best we have.”
As stern neocon critic of Trump John Podhoretz said on Twitter on reading it, “Wow!”
Thomas Sowell has just said farewell to those like me who have read his syndicated column avidly for over eight years (and for some readers it could almost have been back to 1975) but before he signed off he wrote this:
What do we know, at this point, about the people being tapped as nominees for key positions in the incoming Trump administration? By and large, they are of a higher caliber than usual, especially General James N. Mattis who has been selected to become Secretary of Defense.
The love of rhetoric by both the media and Donald Trump has caused General Mattis’ nickname of “Mad Dog Mattis” to become a distraction from the facts about a man of both high intellect and a great concern for the troops he commanded. He has, for example, taken it upon himself to personally visit many families of those who died fighting in the battles he led.
As a personal note, I have had the privilege of having discussions with many military people who have visited the Hoover Institution over the years, and have been impressed with officers of many ranks, including General Mattis. The young officers I have encountered are head and shoulders above so many young people of similar ages who are graduates of even our most prestigious colleges and universities.
The liberal media are already expressing worry about the number of military people being considered for key positions in the new administration. They would be worried about anyone who has not been brainwashed in the political correctness that reigns among the intelligentsia.
The key individual in any administration, however, is the President — and that remains the key mystery in the new administration.
Sowell has been a trenchant critic of the president elect so this has to be read as a definite maybe to the idea that Trump is looking as if he may turn out better than expected. On the other hand Dominic Cummings writes:
Western liberals (like Clinton and many pro-euro campaigners) and conservatives (like Bush) talked of relations with Putin as if he is a normal western politician rather than an ex-KGB mafia overlord with views very far from western liberals. They tell each other ‘I can’t imagine President Trump, it just can’t happen’. Many conservatives are now telling themselves that they should not take Trump too literally but that too is a failure of imagination – his character is clear to those unblinded by gang mentality and he will govern in character.
None of this is meant as hopeful commentary. And Cummings knows Russia well from first-hand experience. The guy gets about.
Four days ago Rivalry brewing on Trump team from The Hill suggested that General Mattis is unlikely to overcome the ‘doves’ towards Russia within Trump’s team.
Whatever, I’m broadly with Hitchens. Russia is nothing like the threat it once was. This means I’m also broadly with Steve McIntyre in his recent series of tweets. But that will have to wait.
There was another reason for me to point to the Hitchens though and that is my incredulity about how the yoof, especially those on Twitter I follow in tech, have moved left, without it seems to me any concept of learning from tragic history since 1917. This feeds into the climate debate but runs much deeper. Academics have a great deal to answer for. But this one article could be a massive corrective.
All comments welcome, especially those that go to the trouble of pointing to alternative sources for our reflections.
Climate Scepticism 
snip – say what you disagree with without personal invective
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Thank you very much for this post Richard. I need to study it more, and follow up on the links, but it already is helping me get a deeper idea of your perspectives, and I am enjoying that. Thoughts and reflections enhance this internet thing – it is not entirely surrendered to snide remarks and mob mentalities, thank goodness..
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Like John, I’ll be looking up some of your links. I may be some time. But it’s a handy reminder that there’s more to life than poring over graphs from GISSTEMP and HADCRUT.
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Thanks John. This post was never an attempt to generate the largest number of comments on Cliscep in the shortest time! But I hope the links provided do prompt serious reflection. Steve McIntyre in his fact- and evidence-based way is meanwhile using Twitter to give the other side to the ‘Trump in the pocket of Putin’ push:
‘Destabilising the presidency’ is something made easier by this long-term trend laid out by Thomas Sowell in his final column:
All the hopes for deep changes to the horlicks of ‘climate policy’ the US currently has may easily falter on such things, or some other Trump misstep, with the Democrats returning “with a vengeance” on climate and everything else, as Geoff Chambers put it in comments recently.
It’s not the only subject touched on in my post but it seems up to the minute.
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Why should we think that Cohen, let alone McI, knows whether the Buzz-doc is fake? Trump should answer the question from the news conference that he did not answer: ““Mr. President-elect, can you stand here today, once and for all and say that no one connected to you or your campaign had any contact with Russia leading up to or during the presidential campaign?”Should be easy, no?
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Steve isn’t claiming he knows it’s fake, he’s reporting Cohen’s opinion that it is and that the national security issue at stake is the attempt to destabilise the presidency. That played for me into Sowell’s powerful words two weeks ago about POTUS since the Cuba missile crisis in 1962. My emphasis throughout this post is the importance of history as we consider where we’re up to with Brexit, climate and Trump, in contrast to the striking Twitter opinion “I don’t give a fuck about the history.” Geoff’s next thread may well be better for discussion of the latest news.
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“Mr. President-elect, can you stand here today, once and for all and say that no one connected to you or your campaign had any contact with Russia leading up to or during the presidential campaign?”Should be easy, no?
How would that help to establish the veracity of the Buzzfeed bullshit? As far as I know, the question has already been put to the Trump team and denied.
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LEN MARTINEZ
“Can you say…that no one connected to you or your campaign had any contact with Russia leading up to or during the presidential campaign?”
Of course he can’t. There are thousands of people connected with his campaign (one of them called Lewandowski, for his sins.) It’s like asking: “Have you stopped fondling the hundreds of women you’ve sat next to in planes?”
And, while we’re making cheap points, the author of the Buzzfeed report had links to Russia, all the way up to the hotel maid who changed Trump’s sheets.
The point is not so much whether the Buzzfeed doc is a fake, but (I think) whether we should take up positions on it based on immediate reactions to leaks and tweets. Richard has drawn his net large, roping in commentators with eccentric or counter-intuitive views. I think (but only Richard can tell us) that his purpose is to encourage us to think twice before posting, and to read stuff we wouldn’t normally read. That’s what I’m going to do.
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Well, yes, of course he can’t? But why not say that instead of not answering?
What intrigues me is how extreme (in non-climate related ways) or obnoxious a candidate/president who shares your (Cliscep) opposition to climate science would have to be to lose your support. More than Trump, it seems; hard to imagine.
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Len, you’re generalising and you’re doing it wildly. On 18th November I wrote on Cliscep:
Is that what you mean by supporting Trump?
What would I have to say to lose your support for such a boneheaded assertion?
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Richard, yes I’m sorry for catching you in my lazy generalization. I’d already gathered that you are nearer my position on Trump. Like most things, opinion here is not uniform, but I do get the feeling that there is support for Trump because of his expected actions on climate and despite his being an ignorant, misogynist, racist, lying arse, among other things. And some here do support Trump and can’t wait for his inauguration. My question was aimed at such people.
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Len Martinez says: 15 Jan 17 at 1:28 am
” there is support for Trump because of his expected actions on climate and despite his being an ignorant, misogynist, racist, lying arse, among other things. ”
Interesting with only opposing claims, never any evidence!
“And some here do support Trump and can’t wait for his inauguration. My question was aimed at such people.”
Perhaps you refer to me that support no one. We Yanks remain observant, but locked and loaded against the wimpy englitch, just like last time! Krauts are much worse!
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So what about Paul Matthews?
I could find other such quotes from Geoff Chambers and Tom Fuller. And so on and so forth. And yet:
Of course there is. If Trump listens to people like Myron Ebell and Will Happer, with whom he just met, the four people just mentioned will no doubt be delighted. Tom maybe a little less by some measures, because of his views as a ‘lukewarmer’. What’s the mystery here? We support Trump, broadly, in the climate area. That doesn’t imply that we do in other areas. Please stop trying to reduce the discussion here to the level of the kindergarten.
As for Trump being racist, as is often stated, without any evidence being provided (as Will points out in this case), we’ve already more than once cited the excellent November blog post You Are Still Crying Wolf. You are. Please smarten up your act.
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Richard Drake says: 915 Jan 17 at 9:18 am
“Of course there is. If Trump listens to people like Myron Ebell and Will Happer, with whom he just met, the four people just mentioned will no doubt be delighted.”
Indeed!, and the Donald seems to listen to those that demonstrate competence, in areas away from ‘selling’.
“Tom maybe a little less by some measures, because of his views as a ‘lukewarmer’. What’s the mystery here? We support Trump, broadly, in the climate area. That doesn’t imply that we do in other areas. Please stop trying to reduce the discussion here to the level of the kindergarten.”
OK. I also peer out from behind the bushes wondering what is next. Trump must do whatever is best for Trump! Us ‘mericans’ get to ride in the little red wagon that follows the Donald.
“As for Trump being racist, as is often stated, without any evidence being provided (as Will points out in this case),”
The Donald must be ‘racist’ or not. Whatever provides ‘profit’ !!!
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Will:
Exactly. To repeat how Thomas Sowell put it:
Sowell has been one of Trump’s biggest critics so for him to say this, in his very last column on the subject, I found significant. The article I pointed to by a Marine who had fought under Mattis seemed strongly to back this up, as well as being moving in its own right. So did Trump’s own words, as he described in a speech after appointing Mattis how another highly-regarded general had stated without false modesty, when asked, that he was a fine soldier but when Trump asked him, very directly, how he compared to Mattis, he said simply “Sir, General Mattis is better than me.” Trump’s obvious delight in this man’s honesty meant all three came away with considerable credit in my eyes. Who knows how it will all pan out?
I don’t understand the rest of what you’re trying to say about Trump. The racism accusation is widespread, damaging and clearly wrong (judging from his words – and only God can see the heart). I would never joke about it.
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Well thanks Richard, I’m still ploughing through some of the links but I have to say the blog by Dominic Cummings was very interesting. The one area I think he didn’t seem to give significance to about the Brexit vote was the now or never element to it.
A lot of people like me (and him) would have preferred to wait a bit longer for the Brexit election because the timing for success wasn’t ideal (on winning it may be we were wrong) but it was a once in a lifetime, maybe the last ever chance to escape the EU. I could see us drawn ever closer to the EU until it became impossible to separate. Even now, the conditions are deeply painful but in another 10 years we might be destroyed by such a split. That would have assumed another PM would ever offer us a vote which would seem highly unlikely given how Cameron regretted it even before he lost. Mrs Merkel was very cross with him.
The veto he secured wasn’t worth the paper it wasn’t written on. Even if it was ratified, it would have required our PM to use it. And there was the rub, the EU wins by making changes that are usually too small to object to. It will happily make 100 tiny adjustments you can’t make a fuss about rather than one big step that triggers a defence response. It gives leaders something they want in exchange for something they object to and so progress is made. It’s the same way an abusive partner dominates their victim. No one action at the beginning is bad enough to send them fleeing and by the time the abuser is being obviously violent, the abused has lost all self-confidence. They make excuses, they put themselves down and ignore those voices telling them that they deserve better. If you listen to the Remainers, you’d think we were about to become a impoverished third world country with gangs of white supremacists bumping off anyone with skin darker than clotted cream. The worst things that have happened so far is the elites have panicked and driven the pound down which has made many of the elite’s predictions invalid. Of course when the elites were deliberately driving the pound down by printing more money, that was a supposedly a master stroke of elite genius. Anyone with any knowledge of economics will tell you that devaluation is a key tool in a country’s arsenal. Which begs the question why anyone thought the Euro would work.
But the risk of remaining in the EU was that eventually every country gets a europhile and it lurches forward towards integration, often abandoning concessions reluctant leaders had bargained hard for. I could see another time when the Euro was on the agenda and our leader taking us in without debate. What could we do? Almost certainly it would be a time when it looked the right thing to do. From there it would have been impossible to escape the funnel into a single country. Only those old enough to feel that inexorable slide into the abyss, was aware it was there. The Brexit vote was a one time chance to avoid that. Our single vote.
Democracy. It turns out we quite like it. Who knew?
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Richard, racism and other forms of prejudice are probably in all of us. One of the challenges of living in a multicultural society is suppressing prejudice from our thoughts and actions. Some do it better than others, with some parts of the US right (amongst others) succumbing to their primordial urges, witness the birther movement that couldn’t handle the election of a brown man as President. Trump was a prominent birther.
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It’s trying to create a multicultural society that in large part maintains the friction. Not all cultures are equal. If they were then racism, being a long held cultural norm (for all races), should be acceptable. We should be one culture, many races, adopting the best bits from each.
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Len:
Indeed. Michael Gerson wrote this today in the Washington Post about Donald Trump’s attack on John Lewis for questioning the legitimacy of Trump’s presidential victory:
Gerson remains for me one of Trump’s most readable critics coming from a Christian Republican point of view. The rest of the article goes deeper.
Tiny: Thanks for being the first person to say you found the Dominic Cummings thought-provoking. In fact, thank you for being the first person for saying you’ve tried to read it!
Brexit and Trump are such different stories, not least for me, given what I had come to believe by 1976. We need to come back to much that Cummings writes, I believe, to get maximum insight into how to argue and win in the climate area. But in that Trump may just help. I promise to return to it.
(I will also return to Geoff Chambers’ intriguing comment yesterday about my possible purpose in writing such a post. When I’ve better worked out what it was!)
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LEN MARTINEZ (14 Jan 17 at 10:18 pm)
I’m tempted to answer: there’s no limit. Churchill has my support as saviour of my country, despite the fact that he was the first politician anywhere in the world to use poison gas on civilians (in Iraq). That’s rather worse than anything done by Trump so far.
But Trump doesn’t “have my support.” It may prove to be a disaster that the insane climate policies adopted by the oh-so-reasonable centre-left political consensus will be repealed by a president with such an approximate understanding of the world. His hunch about climate is approximately right. His hunches about the intentions of China or the resilience of the American economy may lead to catastrophe – who knows? All we can do is attempt to speak truth, if not to power, at least to the people who are listening – like you.
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Is this the right place to comment on Teresa May’s speech? It seems relevant.
I watched it on CNN, and it was preceded by a build up by a CNN journalist with an English accent interviewing an English expert (Chatham House). My thought: imagine here in France, a major news channel carrying a speech by Angela Merkel live, introduced by a German journalist interviewing a German expert. The idea is absurd. Ergo, the European Union doesn’t exist. The link (historical, racial, linguistic?) between Britain and the USA does exist. Brexit and the election of Trump express historical tendencies with implications far beyond the events themselves.
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It is now. It’s a really profound point Geoff. We wish France and Germany well, of course, and would much prefer the continent doesn’t fall back into war, as in 1914 and 1939. But the link between Britain and the US runs deep. Trump’s enthusiasm for Brexit on Sunday, in front of Michael Gove and the poor guy from Bild, was particularly striking. As you rightly say, some of his hunches may turn out to be disastrous – or alternatively some rash words of his may trigger terrible conflict. But the example of CNN speaks of something beyond the president-elect. Interesting times that even the Chinese don’t yet know whether to interpret as curse or blessing.
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Len, facts matter. If you look back the first person to cast doubt on Obama’s credentials to be a US native was a certain Hillary Clinton. Do you remember that? Were you born then?
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To be fair, Geoff, Churchill probably did not use gas in Iraq, as I believe his memoirs corroborate. https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=churchill+poison+gas+iraq&oq=Churchill+poison+gas&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j0l3.9361j0j4&client=tablet-android-samsung&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
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And, in any case, there is a category distinction in dropping a few cylinders of gas from biplanes and releasing the contents of several hundred gas cylinders, as happened at Ypres.
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MIAB: Geoff is of course free to defend his statement about Churchill. I doubt we’re going to resolve the level of culpability he had within the terrible sweep of the twentieth century use of chemical weapons, which has been much debated. But I’d like to return to the wider point:
Whether Geoff has been totally fair to Churchill he calls him “saviour of my country” then gives his honest evaluation of him in the Mesopotamia case. The crucial point surely is that Trump hasn’t been in a position to do anything like this yet, good or bad. With anyone who has exercised political power we can talk of good and bad, exactly as Trump did himself with Angela Merkel in Sunday’s interview, saying he respected her greatly but that the decision to let in migrants from Syria was catastrophic. Good and bad. And very soon we’ll be able to tot up the ratings for Trump himself.
And as we do all of us in the Cliscep corner are keenly aware that he has the chance for some early, easy wins in the disastrous area of climate/energy policies and subsidies. We can only hope he lasts long enough, without being impeached, to make a real and lasting impact in this benighted area.
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Returning to May’s Brexit speech, two headlines caught my eye as I had breakfast earlier, in The Times and the Daily Mail:
May to EU: give us fair deal or you’ll be crushed
STEEL OF THE NEW IRON LADY
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Here is ‘expert’ economist Danny Blanchflower before Theresa May’s speech, wondering how much the pound was going to fall. In fact it rose 2-3% against the dollar and the euro.
Thanks for your interesting and detailed personal review of the year Richard. I think I’d find it difficult to do something like this. I suppose my one-sentence summary would be that the political upheavals of Brexit and Trump seem to have overshadowed climate issues as well as creating an air of increased bitterness and division.
Richard, other newspaper headlines are available.
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MAN IN A BARREL (17 Jan 17 at 11:53 pm)
Thanks for the correction about Churchill and the use of poisoned gas. From
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/resources/in-the-media/churchill-in-the-news/new-research-uk-did-not-gas-iraqis-in-the-1920s
So the gas attack didn’t happen, but the authorities planned for it to happen, and they knew it would have been devastating if it had happened. A bit like climate change really.
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Thanks Geoff. I had vague memories that people still criticise Churchill for pushing for the use of poison gas, though it never happened. As his generals in WW2 would tell you, he had a lot of wild ideas, every day. But as a team they got the job done. Which again we may hope has some application to Trump and climate from Friday.
Paul: I was challenged by Geoff’s comment about my purpose in attempting such a thing. He wasn’t totally wrong. There was also the issue of accidental agreement and accidental disagreement. And other strange aspects of what are now called filter bubbles. I hope to explain a bit more before the inauguration!
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Richard on 15 Jan ‘Tiny: Thanks for being the first person to say you found the Dominic Cummings thought-provoking. In fact, thank you for being the first person for saying you’ve tried to read it!’
I would like to claim second place in each of these races. I found the Cummings report very thoughtful and full of insights, and evidence of a good appreciation of what good data is all about. But it was a long paper, and amongst the swirl of so many other things around, I have not had time to gather my thoughts about it. Nor to get on with the other links you gave. But still hoping to get to them soon! Pesky intertubes play havoc with things that really need extended periods without distractions. My own fault, I know, but there you go.
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Geoff, I don’t really know what you mean, between there being no limit to what you would accept from him and not actually supporting him. But it would be odd to equate Churchill’s saving of the UK with Trump’s potential dismantling of climate research. Maybe you didn’t do that exactly, I don’t know, but the bizarre implication is that you consider climate research in some way as dangerous to the US as Hitler was to the UK.
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Yeah Len, we all read it that way. Geoff thinks climate research is in some way as dangerous to the US as Hitler was to the UK. Climate research, note, not even climate policy. Pull your socks up, Mr Chambers.
John: Thanks for caring! I have no right at all to dictate people’s reading plans but I do think we need to understand how and why Brexit happened, which was clearly beyond the ken of the experts at the time. I continue to think we have much to gain from it for the climate battle. But I too am trying to process what I’ve learned, both from Shipman and Cummings.
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Richard, I said ‘research’ because that is all that Trump can really modify. He can shut down research programs, de-fund NASA, muzzle government scientists, destroy libraries and historic data etc, all probably greatly to CliScep readers’ joy. But the US doesn’t really have a climate policy worth the name to dismantle, only a hodgepodge of minor actions. He could delight his supporters by destroying the EPA perhaps and allowing coal and other industries to pour whatever shit they want into the atmosphere, rivers and seas. Maybe you all look forward to that. Maybe he could ban electricity from renewables, make it illegal to mobilize electrons directly from the sun or wind; that bizarre thought is perhaps something you would all cheer. That might in some way level the playing field with dirty manufacturers in China, but every industry has got to know that it would be reversed as soon as Democrats returned – would you build a dirty factory on that foundation?
The irony is that the best way to level the playing field might be impose an economy-wide tax that applies to the pollution created in manufacture, wherever that happens. Suddenly, China’s dirty factories would be a liability, not an asset.
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“:That might in some way level the playing field with dirty manufacturers in China, but every industry has got to know that it would be reversed as soon as Democrats returned – would you build a dirty factory on that foundation?”
The so called Democratic party of the USA ceases to exist past 01-20-17! alles ist kaputt!!
“The irony is that the best way to level the playing field might be impose an economy-wide tax that applies to the pollution created in manufacture, wherever that happens. Suddenly, China’s dirty factories would be a liability, not an asset”
What playing field? Only the many vast critters that remain prey for those that consider themselves the-elite! Sit back, grab a beer and some popcorn! Peer out from behind bushes then do, as earthlings have always done in time of stress! -will-
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Len: Sigh. You were suggesting from what Geoff wrote that “the bizarre implication is that you consider climate research in some way as dangerous to the US as Hitler was to the UK”. That was barmy, in a typical troll-like way.
Having said which, I’m sure a lot of us agree with Richard Lindzen that the budget for climate research should be cut by 80 to 90 percent, “until the field cleans up”. Please don’t confuse an analogy that applied to something else with that extremely important point.
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I’m not sure that defunding climate science would help. It’s likely to leave the most beligerent core. The change has to come about from auditing and publishing the results which in the short term takes more money. A state of the science report could then lead to pruning.
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Which satellite programs would you cut?
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Tiny: That’s a very good point. Exactly how one reaches the 80-90% cut is what a great executive team has to work out. I hope we’re looking at one. There’s certainly more realism about climate and energy policy than with Obama.
Len: There’s a good point lurking in there too. Lindzen himself has often argued that money has been spent on the wrong things. We need a lot more quality data, far less mediocre impact studies aka guesswork.
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So where does the big money get spent? Impact studies by post-grads or satellites and ARGO buoys and ice cores etc? You want to cut 90%, what will you cut?
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I’m not going to get into further detail on this thread but I certainly hope we do over the next 4-8 years, as the Trump team starts the process. This though, please note, is the motivation:
I totally agree with Richard Lindzen on this. The current situation is a disaster. There will I assume have to be some losses of what might have been valuable research in the process of putting it right. Nit-picking isn’t going to be enough.
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[snip – no more on budgets. if you want to discuss numbers, please evaluate Nic Lewis’ claim to have found a one trillion dollar error in one of the three integrated assessment models used by the UN and national governments. this was mentioned in the original post and has since been ignored.]
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[snip – as above]
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Len, it’s a pity this thread has long since been visited by Atropos—not only because Richard’s article is the best thing I’ve read in a long time but because one of your hypotheses (at least) is ugently in need of abandonment:
You [claim to honest-to-god] expect that Trump’s ability to
“muzzle government scientists, destroy libraries and historic data etc,”
would be
“all probably greatly to CliScep readers’ joy.”
It almost makes me doubt you’ve read anything we post. Have you any familiarity with my view on Phil Jones’ glib threat to “delete the data rather than let anyone else have it”?
Hint: it’s a dim one. Dim like a black hole. I’m pretty sure I can speak for all (skeptics) here in execrating the deletion of data as anti-science.
“muzzle government scientists”
You mean like Willie Soon? Oh, how we applauded his muzzling! One of the finest scientist-muzzlings I’ve had the privilege to see in my life as a notorious advocate for censorship!
Joking aside, are you lost, Len? You do realize which side of the climate debate you’ve stumbled into…. right??
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