Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

One of my primary theses is that information technologies grow exponentially in capability and power and bandwidth and so on. If you buy an iPhone today, it's twice as good as two years ago for half the cost. That is happening with solar energy -- it is doubling every two years... But doubling every two years means it's only eight more doublings before it meets a 100 percent of the world's energy needs. So that's 16 years. We will increase our use of electricity during that period, so add another couple of doublings: In 20 years we'll be meeting all of our energy needs with solar, based on this trend which has already been underway for 20 years.

Really? What about cloudy weather? Or will the singularity deal with that too?

Personally, I prefer Karl Schroeder's more pessimistic attitude to the singularity as saviour:

Here's the problem: 25 years [until the singularlity saves us all] is too late. The newest business-as-usual climate scenarios look increasingly dire. If we haven't solved our problems within the next decade, even these theoretical godlike AIs aren't going to be able to help us. Thermodynamics is thermodynamics, and no amount of godlike thinking can reverse the irreversible.

I think all geohacking advocates should give serious thought to having that last line tattooed across the insides of their eyelids...

There are moments when talking to Lawson is like being trapped in a Bird and Fortune comic routine: all assertions and sweeping statements and a stubborn and rather engaging refusal to bow to conventional wisdom.

...

To dance from one to the other suggests a lawyer's concern to win the case rather than establish the truth. His skeleton courtroom argument for the defence seems to be that his client isn't doing it, but even if he is doing it's harming nobody, and even if it is harming anyone it cannot be stopped.

On the subject of Lawson's view of the evidence for climate change:

[Lawson] asserts that "global warming ... is not at the present time happening", basing his claim on evidence from Britain's Hadley centre, which he says shows temperatures have ceased to climb since the millennium. He brushes aside my attempt to point out that the Hadley does not agree with such a sweeping claim or that scientists say no set of data over such a short time can be meaningful.

When I read a quote from Nasa - "the year 2007 tied for second warmest in the period of instrumental data behind the record warmth of 2005" - he gets cross. "They cheat ... I tell you how they cheat."

These calumnies prompted a couple of decent responses in today's paper. Here's Peter Stott, firmly rebutting the temperature myth claim:

It won't wash for Nigel Lawson to impugn the integrity of scientists from Nasa, the Met Office Hadley Centre and other institutes who compile records of global temperature. Combining many observations over the past century and a half from different sources into a single time series of globally averaged temperature is a complex task. Temperatures measured in one way can systematically differ from temperatures measured in another, and the observed coverage of the Earth's surface has changed over time. As a result, different reconstruction techniques differ in their details and researchers continue to refine their estimates and work to quantify the uncertainties that remain. But one simple result stands out from the data. Readings taken from land stations, the decks of ships and records of sea surface temperatures all show a long-term warming trend.

So it seems that Lawson's legendary grasp of figures, so familiar from his days in the Exchequer, has not deserted him — remember, this is the guy whose ham-fisted monetarism caused the economy to go for a burton in the late 80s/early 90s.

More interesting than Stott's straightforward scientific refutation of Lawson is Andrew Russell's analysis (ibid) of the noble lord's potential motives:

I'm not surprised that a politician's view of climate change is sceptical - the nature of the issue does not fit with how governments are run. The problems caused by the climatic change we face cannot be solved in five-year terms or on anything less than a global scale. Our civilisation (not the planet, as I tire of hearing) is at great risk and I fear that our politicians do not have the long-sightedness, let alone scientific understanding, to tackle such issues.

Which seems to me to be precisely right. Were he to be truly open to rational argument, Lawson would have asked himself the obvious question: qui bono? What reason might the scientists have for distorting the data? And what reason might an Tory politician with an investment in the status quo and a laundry list of corporate positions have for wanting to believe that global warming is a great conspiracy?

Perhaps someone should remind Nigel Lawson that sceticism, properly used, should be applied with equal vigour both to one's own views and to those of one's opponents...