Prehistoric burial monument near Tifariti

The Western Sahara Project is looking for volunteers to participate in a season of fieldwork in the Northern Sector of the Polisario-controlled or “Free” zone of Western Sahara in November 2010. No experience is necessary – just an adventurous nature and a relatively hardy constitution (although you don’t have to be a die-hard outdoor type, an endurance runner, or anything like that – most of our volunteers are just normal folks with a yen to do something different).

The field season will certain involve a survey component, which will consist of 3 weeks in the field assisting with environmental and archaeological surveying. Most of the work will involve the identification and recording of prehistoric burial monuments. However, volunteers will also be able to spend some time with environmental scientists looking for evidence of past humid conditions, and will also have opportunities to do a bit of archaeological “tourism”, visiting rock art and other sites.

We are also hoping to run a season of excavation, subject to funding, the availability of volunteers, and the granting of permission to undertake such work from the local authorities. This might involve a slightly longer time in the field (some 4 weeks). Again, experience is not required, and volunteers will work under the supervision of experienced field archaeologists.

If you are interested in participating in either of the above, you can find more details at http://www.nickbrooks.org/WS/WSahara-volunteers.htm, including details of costs, travel, and how to register as a potential volunteer.

I’ll attempt to get back on a more serious track soon. I simply felt that Copenhagen demanded a vicious satirical response, and had to let it out somewhere. More posts are planned on the topic of Western Sahara, including a look back at some of 2009’s events, and a call for volunteers for a season of fieldwork in November 2010.

After humanity’s spectacular failure to agree on measures to avoid potentially dangerous climate change at the Copenhagen climate talks, the UN announced that Planet Earth itself will attend the next global warming summit. “When it comes to global security cooperation, human beings can’t organise a piss up in a brewery,” said U. R. Kidding, the man tasked with bringing the world’s nations together to forge a meaningful climate deal. “So, we’ve decided to invite the Earth to the next round of talks. We hope that by talking directly to the planet, national negotiators can grasp the magnitude of this problem and transcend their petty differences over minor issues like development and the economy.”

The venue for the next set of talks is yet to be decided, but space is a key consideration. “We need somewhere big enough to accommodate the Earth and all the other delegates, and we’re looking at somewhere outside the orbit of Saturn,” said Kidding. Of course this is a major logistical challenge, and we expect to generate 3000 years worth of greenhouse gases organising and holding the next COP. However, once the Earth gets to the venue it will be cooler anyway, because it will be further from the sun. And if we don’t have another meeting to focus on, world governments won’t have an excuse for continuing to delay action on climate change.”

The move to include the Earth in the climate talks has been criticised by some. Ima Fuquit, from the Post Modern Institute for the Equating of Uninformed Ideologically-Driven Opinions with Scientific Evidence, said “Climate change has nothing to do with the Earth, and the views of the planet are irrelevant. Tackling climate change will be costly to my sponsors, so that means it can’t be happening. If it is happening, it isn’t our fault but the Earth’s, and the Earth must be held to account for the damage its thoughtless actions will do to the economy. If this is the case, we should hunt down the Earth and destroy it. Not that there will be any damage, because this has all been made up by climatologists and programmers who want to establish a world government, abolish the English language and get us all speaking in computer code. Even if it is happening  there won’t be any damage to the economy because God revealed that to me in a vision. Even it’s our fault and is dangerous it’s OK, because at some indeterminate point in the future we’ll invent some technology or other that will save us. But it isn’t happening. And even if it is it’s not a problem. Oh hell, I’m confused.”

There was concern among many negotiators that the Earth might adopt an intransigent position, refusing to modify its physics to enable human beings to continue to emit heat-trapping greenhouse gases without any further rise in temperature. “The planet has to compromise and reduce its sensitivity to greenhouse gases,” said a spokesman for the UK Treasury. “To threaten a 3 degree warming or more at just 550 parts per million CO2 equivalent is simply unreasonable. This has to change, or negotiations will get nowhere.” Others pointed to previous examples of the Earth’s intransigence, such as the last ice age and the Younger Dryas, a young dry period (you’re fired – ed.). “We simply can’t trust the Earth, and we certainly shouldn’t be considering its extreme views in this important debate,” said Xavier Trotsky, Director of the London-based People Against the Planet think tank.

The Earth was unavailable for comment, although some influential scientists have claimed that the last time they spoke with the planet it said “You humans do what you like. I’m not bothered – I can always grow another biosphere once you’ve destroyed this one. So you can all fuck off and die for all I care.”

Not-much-COP 15

There was turmoil today in Copenhagen as world leaders left COP15 without reaching any agreement on how to save their credibility. One senior diplomat described the entire meeting as a “dog’s breakfast”, saying “this was an historic opportunity for the world’s politicians to save face, and the twats pissed it away. It’s their children who will pay for this stupidity, when the other kids in the playground say ‘you’re dad’s an arse’.”

However, sceptics were pleased with the outcome, claiming that politicians didn’t need to worry about their reputations, as everybody trusted and respected them and always had. Senator James Inhofe (Rep., La La Land), said all the scientific evidence proved that public affection for politicians was positively correlated with the latter’s ability to fiddle their expenses.

Further controversy was caused by a leaked email from the Credibility Research Institute, which has long argued that public cynicism about politics has been rising. In the email, a senior member of the institute is reported to have said “Actually, I met that Ed Milliband, and he’s alright”. Hector Pompous, a leading sceptic, responded by saying that “The CRI has long argued that rising public cynicism about politics is a problem, but in their private correspondence they are saying nice things about politicians. This proves that they are part of a plot to destroy the world and, more importantly, raise my taxes.”

Plans for a further meeting were unveiled by Mr V. V. Sad, head of the UN Organisation for the Holding of Pointless Meetings (UNOFHOPM), who was quoted by BBC’s Newsnight as saying “We can’t just give up. We have to do something to save the fragile reputations of these politicians. If we don’t, by 2030 they won’t have any credibility at all. They’re already being undermined by frequent strong wind and intense piffle and, while we don’t know whether wind and piffle will become more frequent in the future, there is evidence that these phenomena are intensifying.”

Public relations companies have argued that trying to restore the credibility of politicians is impractical, and that attention should instead focus on helping them adapt to more intense public hatred. “This is likely to cost billions of Dollars every year, but we’re already committed to a certain degree of public contempt, and I think it will be money well spent,” said Jimmy Moore-Munny, a public relations consultant. He added that there was a need to develop ways of measuring the relative unpopularity of politicians, so that adaptation money could be targeted at those attracting the most public opprobrium. Other experts have warned that this will just result in politicians behaving even more stupidly as they attempt to make themselves sufficiently unpopular to qualify for such assistance, and that throwing money at the problem will divert attention away from the real need for political reform.  Moore-Munny dismissed these concerns, saying “How could politicians be any more stupid than they are already?”

The idea that the political credibility crisis can be solved by giving money to politicians is likely to be unpopular with the public, however. “We need to kick the bastards out, stop fucking around with meetings and frameworks, and just get on with sorting this problem out”, said nearly everybody we spoke to.

Draft Copenhagen climate change agreement in full:

We, the undersigned representatives of the world’s nations hereby agree to: [Note: can we really claim to represent everyone - there are just a few of us after all - while we don't have to worry about the really poor countries, we have to be careful not to appear arrogant, or to be marginalizing them]

1. Continue to talk about how serious climate change is.
2. Support in principle the idea that it would be nice to preserve a viable biosphere capable of supporting the current and projected human population, subject to economic feasibility
3. Feel terribly guilty about the impacts of climate change on the world’s poor. However, we recognise that rights to guilt should be equitably distributed. We therefore undertake to implement a voluntary guilt trading system, which will enable highly guilty countries to sell guilt to low-guilt countries, with the proceeds to be used for the development of guilt-neutral ways of converting natural resources into money, to be held in trust by governments, corporations and financial institutions for use at an indeterminate future date to improve the quality of life of those who deserve it. The level at which to cap guilt at the global level will be debated at some point after the scheme has been introduced, maybe. [note: mechanisms TBC].
4. Think about actually reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases as long as other countries do it first [Note: likely to be too controversial - we need to rethink this, or remove completely, as it looks like it might involve doing something concrete]
5. Develop technologies to ensure that we can continue to burn fossil fuels and convert natural resources into money without any adverse environmental impacts [The dehydrated water team are making good progress on this front - they're nicknaming it the "Clean shitting where you eat" or CASHGET" programme]
6. Continue to support research and development into clean energy technologies at current levels of investment or lower [This is controversial - the Saudis are likely to argue for a weaker and less precise commitment on this front]
7. Have some more meetings [Note: this is good - it will help support our aviation industries during this difficult period]
8. Support efforts to help adaptation in developing countries, building on existing commitments to give at least one US Dollar per person to the most vulnerable, to be spent on capacity development, livelihood diversification and adaptation technology [Note: what do we mean by adaptation technology? This sounds like too much money, particularly when we need to support the banks with public funds. The term "building on existing levels" should be removed as it could be interpreted as a commitment to give more money]
9. When [Note: don't we mean if - that would look better] adaptation is demonstrated to be inadequate and too costly, talk more about geoengineering [Note: we might be more definitive here, as we've had a lot of lobbying from certain sectors to pump public funds into large geoengineering projects, which will create jobs and help the economy. We could look as if we're doing something positive here while helping industry at the same time. The dangers of geoengineering have been overstated - Lomborg says it's OK]
10. Proceed with existing secret plans to terraform Mars, supported by ongoing NASA work on manned interplanetary space travel, with sufficient capacity to accommodate world leaders, the very rich, and celebrities, in order to provide an insurance policy in the event of catastrophic climate change [Note: weren't we going to keep this secret? Also, suggest adding at least 3 scientists to this list. Make sure some of the celebrities are chefs]

[Note: the Saudis will never agree to the above - we might have to dilute it.]

Over at RealClimate.org, Kevin Wood and Eric Steig present the results of a comparison between time series of temperature data taken at random from the CRU historical temperature dataset, and equivalent time series (i.e. representing the same geographical locations) from other historical datasets. The aim is to see if there is any significant difference between the CRU data and the non-CRU data. This is important because a lot of the attacks on CRU are claiming that CRU scientists massaged the data to support the case for global warming. The “sceptics” claim that the world isn’t warming, or that it isn’t our fault if it is – it’s difficult to keep up with which argument they’re using.

Anyway, the upshot is that the trends in the CRU data are also present in the other other data. Wood and Steig describe them as “statistically identical”. The CRU data have not been massaged by CRU scientists to produce a false warming trend (in fact I recall discussions in CRU back in the early 1990s about correcting the data to remove urban heat island effects , in order to avoid spurious warming trends – “CRU scientists massage data to remove warming” shock!).

If you’re not convinced, Wood and Steig provide links to the data, both CRU and non-CRU, the latter from the US University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). Yes, the data are freely available over the internet, as they have been for ages. So you can repeat their analysis yourself. Anyone claiming that CRU have been massaging the data to show false trends needs to do this before they’re in a position to throw any more mud. If you unable to do your own independent analysis then you’re probably not in a credible position to attack the science.

Real swivel-eyed conspiracy theorists will no doubt claim that UCAR are involved in the same conspiracy to mislead the world about climate change. If you’re one of those then you at least need to extend your invective to include UCAR and other organisations involved in data gathering, management and processing, as, given the apparently revealed truth that the world isn’t warming, anyone providing evidence that it is must surely be lying. However, if you’re one of the many normal people who are simply genuinely confused about the science as a result of this fiasco, and who have been persuaded by the sceptics that there is no scientific consensus on climate change after all, maybe this post on RealClimate will help (like I said, if you’re genuinely sceptical in the original and proper sense of the word, you can repeat the analysis or get someone you trust to do so).

Attacks singling out CRU for misrepresenting the science are no longer viable. Either CRU’s science is sound, even if its staff have said some unkind things about sceptics and their work in some private emails, or there has been a global conspiracy to fabricate data stretching back decades – to before anybody had even heard of global warming and predating the 1970s worries about the next ice age. If you think the latter, you’re not going to be convinced otherwise by me, or anyone else, and I’m not going to push it.

I have a new address for my personal website, with details of my research, consultancy, publications and the like, here:

http://www.nickbrooks.org/

The Western Sahara Project also has a new web address:

http://www.nickbrooks.org/WS/WSahara.htm

Note that we are currently looking for volunteers for a season of fieldwork in November 2010. More details here:

http://www.nickbrooks.org/WS/WSahara-volunteers.htm

The website move is the result of the disruption caused by the theft of data and personal emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), on whose servers the above websites were previously hosted. These servers are currently being examined as part of the investigation into the theft. You may have read about the hacking incident associated with the theft, and the subsequent controversy over the content of some of the emails (see a couple of brief previous posts, any newspaper, or the millions of uninformed rantings on the – ahem – blogosphere).

The data and email theft was carried out by people looking for evidence of a grand conspiracy between climate scientists and governments to misinform the public about global warming, which the same sceptics claim is not happening (their view is that scientists are engaged in a massive cover-up and are lying to the public about climate change). The motivation behind this attempt at muck-raking appears to be a desire to wreck the Copenhagen climate summit and ensure that no agreement on reducing the magnitude or impact of climate change is reached. Needless to say no evidence supporting the claims of a campaign to mislead the world about climate change has been found. The emails that are the subject of most of the media coverage contain some fruity language indicating exasperation with the climate sceptics’ misrepresentation of science and their harassment of people carrying out climate change research, but not much else.

I obtained my PhD from CRU in 2000, and I want to express my full support for all my colleagues in CRU, who are currently experiencing considerable harassment from various quarters of the lunatic fringe. I also want to express my support for and confidence in CRU’s science, which shows the same climatic trends as apparent in independent data sets developed by other organisations. The evidence of climate change is all around us, despite the shrill protestations of those who seek to deny the evidence on the basis of ideology or economic interests.

There is a good article by science journalist Fred Pearce about the whole fiasco here: http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2221. I think he’s a bit harsh on UEA, which has tried its best to handle the sudden global media spotlight, which may be unprecedented for an academic institution. If UEA has failed to respond appropriately it’s because it’s out of its depth – scientists are not good at PR, and PR people don’t know the science. Confronting the well orchestrated propaganda of the climate “sceptics” requires a deep knowledge of their tactics and arguments, and the ability to take them on publicly. Given that the sceptics have spent years honing their PR skills this is not a trivial undertaken. Unfortunately science does not automatically trump pseudoscience in PR terms – presentation is important.

UEA’s responses can be found here:

http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements

If anyone wants to argue climate science I suggest they go and hang out at RealClimate.org – I don’t have the time to repeat old arguments about the reliability of climate science over and over again in the blogosphere in response to individual sceptical commenters who seem to think they have access to some revealed truth about the way the Earth’s climate behaves that scientists are not party to.

For those of you following (whether with glee or despair) the story about the theft and subsequent publication of emails and data from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), the discussion of the affair at RealClimate.org is worth a look. You can find the CRU thread here:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/

There are some nice nuggets, such as the fact that a paper by sceptics that the distributors of the leaked material claim were being cut out of the loop by evil climate scientists bent on keeping that sort of thing out of the IPCC reports was, er, cited and discussed in the latest IPCC report.

But then, who needs a sober assessment of the facts when you can get this sort of bilge from the oxymoronic Fox News:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,578206,00.html

This story claims that the notion that emissions of greenhouse gases are causing the world to warm is based on “computerized projections of future temperatures based on vast amounts of previously observed climate data”. It also claims that “the original raw data used to create these models has been destroyed or otherwise disposed of”. So, the scientists at CRU (not scientists but “alarmists” in Fox’s words) have been entirely responsible for the science of global warming, which is based soley on their models of what the future climate might be like (actually CRU don’t run global climate models – they use data generated by places such as the Hadley Centre). And now, CRU have apparently lost or deliberately deleted all the data on which all the world’s climate projections are founded, so we’ll never know if these data were any good! All the world’s observed climate data in one tiny little round building at the University of East Anglia? All of the projections used to assess potential future climatic trajectories based soley on the work of a small group of scientists (sorry, alarmists) at CRU? Well, this is a strange parallel universe. Must be the one in which Fox News lives. It is indeed a scary place – I can see why they’re worried. Thankfully the real world that most of us inhabit is quite different, with intact data (not lost or deleted by CRU or anyone else) and climate science based on the work of numerous groups all over the world, who look at all sorts of things  such as evidence from past climates, energy budgets, and observed changes, as well as models of the future. I know which universe I’d feel better informed in.

Some of you may have been following the scandal about the theft of data and emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, most likely by hackers paid by climate contrarians bent on undermining support for a deal on climate change at the rapidly approaching (and unravelling) Copenhagen meeting. As I did my PhD in CRU, and as I still have strong links to UEA, I might write a post about this little drama. But then again, I might not, as everybody else seems to be busy doing precisely that. So, in the meantime, here is a link to some of the most intelligent commentary on the whole affair.

The Daily Mash – CLIMATE CHANGE EMAILS STOP GLACIERS FROM MELTING

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I’d like to suggest that people sign the following petition against the illegal exploitation of occupied Western Saharan waters by EU fishing vessels. This has been made possible by the EU’s granting of “Advanced Status” to Morocco, despite the latter’s continuing occupation of much of Western Sahara and the continuing efforts of the Moroccan government to subvert the UN mandated referendum on self determination for Western Sahara. The petition is open to organisations and individuals. Thanks.

http://www.fishelsewhere.eu/