Was just trying to find out if it's really true that the USA broadcast of Frozen Planet will not include the last episode, 'on thin ice', when I found the Daily Mail apoplectic and red-in-face: "Moving polar bear footage filmed in Germany! Eight million people tuned in! Show sold around the world! BBC denies it misled viewers!!!" That list should really end with "BBC causes mass jowel-shaking incident among the home counties! A-brbrbrbrbrrbbr!"

It's a technique that's been used in previous BBC wildlife programmes, of course, for filming something that would otherwise be next to impossible. Even in this series, I'm guessing they probably didn't have a tiny side-on camera able to follow this vole. (In fact, obviously not, it would have been impossible.) It's probably my natural leaning towards the BBC's liberal commie outlook, but I didn't feel particularly cheated by that. Actually, in both cases above, I thought, 'wow, that must have been a bugger to set up.'

What could possibly have triggered the Mail to turn the jowel-shaker to 11 on this? Might it be anything to do with the great global warming conspiracy, perpetuated by the final episode's blatant presentation of actual, physical evidence? I mean, did you see the number of scientists who are clearly swindling the taxpayer solely so they can fly around the arctic in cool planes looking sexy and rugged?

Polar bears, of course, are pretty much guaranteed to trigger this kind of reaction. Witness the recent suspension and reinstatement of Charles Monnett, following his devious reporting of seeing four dead polar bears.

Backing off slightly from my own buttons being pushed, there's an interesting comparison to the recent Jeremy Clarkson nonsense. Paul Sinha did a good job on the Now Show: however clumsily, Clarkson was actually making a joke about attempts to provide balance, giving both sides of every story. But the meme that escaped was too good to question for many, with some even calling for legal action. Hmm.

Whether the Grauniad or the Mail, pushing your reader's buttons sells papers. It gives them a little addictive high and makes them feel vindicated in their own beliefs. The long hard slog of building a daily, working relationship with the truth is much less exciting.

Update: Discovery have decided to air the climate change episode, it seems.

Just watched this Spanish salt-melting solar plant at climate crocks and the previous vid on distributed power systems - something that everyone apart from the utilities seems to want.

Putting aside the practicalities, listening to Rifkin made me think back to a recent post, where Hayek is pointing the finger at scientists and engineers, claiming they have some natural affinity with totalitarianism.

But then, Hayek's big argument is also about distributed power. Political and energy power are never far apart - I mean, that's a truism, isn't it? Nothing radical there. Given that, what sort of energy systems would Hayek's ideal world have?

For myself, I think we've probably got the mix of centralised and distributed exactly back to front. It suits all the large energy and state players that way, but what we need is good economies of scale for producing the components of the distributed system. There's an interesting spatial effect from economies of scale too: you increase the value density - transport costs as a proportion of overall value drops. You can shift stuff further. Magic!

Freedom of information: a jolly good thing, we can all agree. In the states, they're being used to try and get all of Mann's emails: the Washington Post had a recent editorial on it - followed quickly by WUWT lamenting the `bigoted' nature of the article. (The writer does at least seem to acknowledge that FOIAs can be used improperly, an argument that seems to apply only when people they don't like use it.)

The weird element to all this for me has always been the attempts to use FOI requests to actually gain data: as if academics were generally an awfully uncooperative bunch. I keep on having the following dialogue pop into my head...
---

How most people ask for the time:

p1: excuse me, do you have the time?

p2: yup, it's half past one.

p1: thanks.

p2: no worries.

How a climate skeptic asks for the time:

p1: (from some distance away, with a megaphone).

You! You in the street! Tell me the time!

p2: Errr. Half past one?

p1: What, exactly half past one? I find that very hard to believe.

p2: Well, it's actually one twenty-n...

p1: I KNEW IT!! You lying sonofabitch! Try to pull the wool over my eyes, would you? Who do you work for?

p2: What?

p1: Government, I bet. That watch belongs to the people. You can't keep the truth from us. Put the watch in a paper bag and throw it over.

p2: Look, it's now gone one thirty, do you think you could...

p1: Trying to change your story now, are you? Right, that's it - I demand to see all documentation relating to the purchase of the watch, and all your emails in case you've ever said anything to anyone about the watch.

p2: What? Why? How is that going to help you find out the time? Listen, there's a clock over there on the town hall building...

p1: Government clock! You guys are all synchronised, don't try and pull that one on me. Your watch is clearly a fraud. Only 450 million other government watches to go and the entire edifice of state lies will be exposed...

p2: Look, why don't you go and buy your own watch, then?

p1: Why would I do that? I paid for *your* watch.

etc.

A nice little example from Oz of the view of climate scientists that's been slowly growing in strength - accompanied this week by those death threats:

At the heart of many scientists - but not all scientists - lies the heart of a totalitarian planner. One can see them now, beavering away, alone, unknown, in their laboratories. And now, through the great global warming swindle they can influence policy, they can set agendas, they can reach into everyone's lives; they can, like Lenin, proclaim "what must be done". While the humanities had a sort of warm-hearted, muddle-headed leftism, the sciences carry with them no such feeling for humanity. And it is not a new phenomenon. We should not forget that some of the strongest supporters of totalitarian regimes in the last century have been scientists and, in return, the State lavishes praise, money and respectability on them.

Interestingly, Phelps quotes Hayek; here's the original; there's a lovely extra snippet where Hayek hints that scientists and engineers are peculiarly susceptible to the fascist siren song:

It is well known that particularly the scientists and engineers, who had so loudly claimed to be the leaders on the march to a new and better world, submitted more readily than almost any other class to the new tyranny.

From some comments at initforthegold:

Question from Grant - "how can raising the temperature be other than good?" This is an area I'd like to learn more about myself: what are the likely impacts, and what's the scope for us taking action to avoid the negative impacts or adapt to them if we have to?

Here, I avoid discussing ways of measuring impacts, though there are a lot of places to start looking to answer your question. The IPCC, of course, has written entire reports on 'impacts, adaptation and vulnerability', as well as mitigation. The Copenhagen Diagnosis is good place to get an overview of the physical impacts and associated risks.

I think you can avoid a lot of the confusion about measuring impacts by remembering one thing: risk is expensive. Even if we had 100% certainty about global temperature changes, we wouldn't know exactly what the regional impacts were going to be. Starting in the present, this means insurers are calling for action. Without it, as they point out, it will become massively expensive, or just plain impossible, to insure against climate-related outcomes. One thing about insurers: you can be reasonably certain they've looked into the issue pretty thoroughly.

Risk has always been expensive: a study back in the 70s looked at the village of Daiikera in Rajasthan, near Jodphur. Monsoons mean an unreliable quantity of rain. The result: farmers cultivated many distant plots to hedge their bets because they knew only some would produce. The more carbon we put into the atmosphere, the more we face exactly this situation: any one food-producing region is going to be more at risk, and the cost of managing that risk will continue to rise. The Chicago Exchange has its roots in this kind of hedging, for producing egg and butter; the World Bank's work on agricultural risk nicely outlines various ways it can be managed, but none are free. I know I'm repeating myself, but - climate change just makes all this more and more expensive.

I dipped a toe into climate skeptics' blogland this morning. There goes the morning. Starting here with Derek Tipp, who I found a while back via the Freedom Association. He links to a story in the Asian Correspondent asking, ‘what happened to the climate refugees?’

Of course, WUWT got onto this as well – “the UN ‘disappears’ 50 million climate refugees, then botches the disappearing attempt.” (We’ll come back to the disappearance in a moment.) The internets eats them both up: forty thousand results for the original, six thousand for WUWT’s take on it.

The claim from the original Asian Correspondent article: “In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010.” This is supposedly refuted by claiming that four islands – the Bahamas, St. Lucia, Seychelles and the Solomon Islands – have seen their populations increase. To spare the suspense: (1) based on the references the article is pointing to, no, UNEP did not predict that at all. (2) Census data from four tropical islands is not a good way to check, especially when you haven't checked what it is you're checking.

... or as the U.S. military calls it, degrading the enemy narrative. It's particularly amusing that, by using sock puppet systems where one person can pretend to be many (with very thorough work done to make sure that's undetectable), they aim to "follow the admonition we practiced in Iraq, that of trying to be 'first with the truth'." One's truthiness is a little compromised if you lie about who you are. (Guardian story. )

Persona management software is catching on more generally, and the idea of pretending to be someone you're not isn't new (recent example). I wonder, though, whether there's a tendency for square-eyes like myself who spend too much time on blogs to overplay the importance of online comments for actual opinion forming. The implicit idea behind one person managing many personas seems to be that heavy information assault can work just like any other artillery. To an extent, that must be the case, but I hold out a perhaps forlorn hope that in some things, reasonable people can shortcut hegemonic assault with, you know, reason and shizzle.

Well, not quite. Here's the Inhofe-Upton energy tax prevention act. My favourite part: "The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the law is wrong." Separation of powers schmeparation of powers. Via Wonk room (where there's a video), here's Ed Markey:

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to a bill that overturns the scientific finding that pollution is harming our people and our planet. However, I won’t physically rise, because I’m worried that Republicans will overturn the law of gravity, sending us floating about the room. I won’t call for the sunlight of additional hearings, for fear that Republicans might excommunicate the finding that the Earth revolves around the sun. Instead, I’ll embody Newton’s third law of motion and be an equal and opposing force against this attack on science and on laws that will reduce America’s importation of foreign oil.

This bill will live in the House while simultaneously being dead in the Senate. It will be a legislative Schrodinger’s cat killed by the quantum mechanics of the legislative process. Arbitrary rejection of scientific fact will not cause us to rise from our seats today. But with this bill, pollution levels will rise. Oil imports will rise. Temperatures will rise. And with that, I yield back the balance of my time. That is, unless a rejection of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is somewhere in the chair’s amendment pile.

Obviously at this point in the PhD I should be avoiding climate blogs, and mostly I'm managing. But I just fell off the wagon slightly, and had a gentle saunter around Watts Up With That. In the words of Father Dougal Mcguire, I'm now hugely confused.

So: the office of inspector general just completed Senator Inhofe's request to investigate CRU-related malfeasance. Here's the (nice and short) report. Predictably, both 'sides' interpret the outcome completely differently. But WUWT - following hot on the heels of Inhofe himself - gets in there with the headline:

Inspector General Finds NOAA Climategate Emails Warranted "Further Investigation"

Inhofe promises to follow up on this to 'ensure taxpayer dollars are being spent according to federal law'.

Perhaps you wouldn't know if you hadn't read the report's summary, or the report itself (it's not linked to in the WUWT story) - but those emails are investigated, in the report. That's one of the main things the report does. It was just saying, 'there were a lot of emails, we've picked out eight to concentrate on. We do that now.'

I can't quite bring myself to seek out anyone claiming the cold proves climate change isn't happening - as if foreign weather doesn't count somehow. But I thought it worth ending the year with a quick note on two of 2010's most striking climatic occurances. The common theme emerging this year: if a complex system is changing, how do you measure when specific events mean anything? Ultimately, the answer is: for any one 'event', you can't, but you can say pretty definitively that climate change = climate disruption, and the definition of 'extreme' will shift as the variance changes.

First-off were two stories that were actually one, connected story from the summer: Russian drought and Pakistani floods. Initforthegold is as good a place as any to start with that, including a good discussion of the difference between loading the dice and changing them for ones with higher numbers. The weather underground has some good graphics showing the jetstream changes tying the two together. Russia lost a quarter of its grain crop. In Pakistan, two and a half million people were affected.

As far us freezing our asses off - it was just listening to the news, and the impact the cold is having all across Europe that prompted me to write. There's one perfect graphic for this, via Peter Sinclair's blog. The NOAA has a pretty nifty live output showing the temperature anomaly over the Northern hemisphere. Compare also to this at init: most of the total anomaly is away from the equators, towards the poles. The NOAA anomaly graph shows some spots far North that are 15 degrees celsius warmer than the 68-96 average. Spending a few moments contemplating the breadth of the difference in both directions, and having a little think about how low and high pressure work, should be enough to get across that climate change was never going to mean an even increase.

There's no real need to make any specific claims about this being 'caused by' co2-induced climate change. The important question is: can we expect this sort of disruption to increase in the future? It's not rocket science, of course: if you push a complex dynamic system with any kind of forcing, it will attempt to get back to an equilibrium. In the meantime, you get disruption - and in chaotic systems, they'll manifest themselves in all sorts of exciting ways. We already have plenty of relatively well-understand oscillations, even if their timings - like the NAO - are never predictable. It would be one thing if we could expect to get this sort of winter regularly - that's something you can prepare for. But we actually have to prepare, as much as possible, for any eventuality, since there's no exact way of knowing how the system will eventually settle.

And that's presuming, of course, we decide it might not be a good idea to carry on pushing it. The more we do, the more the regional uncertainties increase (as well as uncertainties relating to feedbacks). That's an irony that MT over at initforthegold often points out: anyone claiming that uncertainty should mean inaction hasn't understood what's happening. Or they have, and they know that doubt, however slight, is a massively appealling get-out clause that many of us would dearly love to grab with both hands.