first published as weblog one hundred and seventy six on Sunday 25th June 2006

Christopher Strangeways is in the vanguard of environmental activism in and around Rye and is the mastermind behind the Rye Farmer’s Market. As he is thinking of entering mainstream local politics by standing for the Rye Town Council next year he has started addressing such local issues as a Town Programme to counter the effects of Global Warming. During a recent e-mail exchange I pointed him to my Climate Blog and he responded by giving me his understanding of what my climate blog was saying.

Christopher picked up on Michael Crichton’s presentation in State of Fear of the idea that increasing concern for the environment since the fall of the Berlin Wall had been orchestrated by those with an interest in creating a crisis to preoccupy The West…and that this Fear Generation had got out of control. I share Crichton’s suspicion about the Fear Factories but Fear Generation being out of control is mine...though not my central idea.

I don't think I suggested that environmental fears were irrational and based on dodgy science…although this might be the case...so I responded to this interpretation of my views by remarking that my principal concern was the extent to which the Climate Change scene was bedevilled by bad science. Everybody was spinning findings that were derived from preconceived prejudices and manipulating public information. For the Environmental Movement this was a mistaken strategy. They should change tack and be seen as cleaner than clean whenever they adopt scientific findings to champion a particular case. Truth will win through in the end. The quality of the science matters.

I was also concerned to see a shift in the way the Precautionary Principle was applied. To do anything just because the situation was desperate begged two questions. Firstly how desperate was the situation and secondly whether what was being suggested would help or hinder. The answers at the moment are that we don’t know whether the situation is desperate…the data is ambivalent, poorly collected and badly processed…and we don’t understand the planet’s climate. So we have no way to appraise the consequences of our meddling.

While in this state of limited knowledge Environmentalists should be sceptical about the Smoke and Mirrors Departments. Bad science is always bad science, every scientist is paid by someone and pipers calling the tune have agendas. In summary I am calling for intellectual clarity. One thing we know little about is Ocean Algae.

For centuries there has been anecdotal evidence that small creatures can sense the approach of earthquakes. But it now turns out that tiny algae in the sea are every bit as sensitive to earthquakes. Studies of recent earthquakes with epicentres close to the coast…Gujurat India (2001), Algeria (2002) and Bam, Iran (2003)…have supplied evidence of a huge surge in Chlorophyll levels just before a quake. It might therefore be possible to programme satellites to flag up unexpected algal blooms and to use this data as the basis for a reliable Earthquake Early Warning System.

The behaviour of algae is important because algae fix half the world’s Carbon. Every year more CO2 is produced than can be accounted for in the atmosphere so the numbers don’t work out. Algae and photosynthesis might explain the missing CO2 and European Oceanographers may have found the missing Carbon Sink and how it works.

Water surging into the open ocean from the Iberian Peninsula pulls Carbon out of the air. Nutrient-rich water from a deep Upwelling near the coast causes a burst of algal growth. When algae are eaten the CO2 they absorb is recycled back into the atmosphere. But some of the water travels hundreds of miles out into the Open Atlantic causing even more algae to grow. In the open ocean the algae simply die and sink taking their Carbon with them. The effect is much greater than was previously realised.

Something else that has been puzzling Ocean Researchers is the way that half the algal species in our oceans need to take in Vitamin B12 from outside in order to grow properly. They do so by means of a beneficial relationship with bacteria. Here is the science. It seems that no algae have the necessary genes to produce Vitamin B12. Those that do not require a supply are like higher plants with an alternative metabolic process that does not need the vitamin.

However algae that need Vitamin B12 cannot make it themselves and must get it from somewhere else. But the numbers do not add up because the amount of Vitamin B12 required to grow the types of algae that do not need the vitamin in the laboratory is much higher than natural levels in the seas and rivers.

It turns out that in the natural environment Bacteria supply the necessary Vitamin B12. But this is not a one way relationship. The algae support the bacteria by providing them with Carbon from their own photosynthesis. What these observations demonstrate is that although algae live by harvesting the sun’s energy through photosynthesis many of them are like animals in that they need another organism to supply them with a vital nutrient. Time and time again as you look at the science it becomes apparent that these are early days in Climate Science. Caution and not desperation is what is called for. Don’t just do something…anything…stand there!

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first published as weblog one hundred and sixty nine on Sunday 18th June 2006

Whilst wintering in Llangolman I made it through the long dark Welsh winter nights by watching DVDs of a twelve-part series of The Best of the TV Detectives acquired for the price of a copy of the Daily Express each weekday for two weeks. The plot of one of these dramas hinged on a claim that there was no mobile phone signal. The hero of the hour did his research and at the last moment…with the situation at its bleakest for the poor besieged train driver up for manslaughter…a defence witness was rushed onto the stand. He was an expert on mobile phones and duly explained to the judge and the jury that mobile phone signals are affected by wind and rain.

The strength of a mobile phone signal dips in the rain…and in sleet, snow and hail. The heavier the precipitation the greater the interference. So next time you are on the train tell your caller that it is raining outside as well. This presents an interesting opportunity for a new era of Gentlemen and People Science. Mobile phone networks can replace radar as a back-up to rain gauges…with the big advantage that they record what happens under the clouds instead of guessing that where there are clouds there must be rain like the radar does. But then guessing is what meteorologists do…and climatologists have carried on the tradition.

The atmosphere is a big mystery. The Carbonistas like to push the notion that Global Warming is going to raise the temperature so more moisture will evaporate from the ocean and put more moisture into the air and that this will increase the Greenhouse Effect by fifty percent. Their computer models tell them that a doubling of CO2 in the air will heat the planet by 3 to 8 degrees Celsius. The trouble is when you talk to people who understand things like the scientists at the Center for Clouds, Chemistry and Climate in La Jolla California they tell a rather different story.

A warmer moister atmosphere will create a different pattern of cloud cover. This might dramatically enhance the heating…or it might counteract it. Five years of satellite measurements between 1984 and 1989 established that clouds cool the planet more effectively than they heat it…for now. Clouds remove the heat of a 60-watt light bulb from every six-by-six foot patch of Earth’s surface. These results show that net cloud cooling is four times greater than the warming expected from doubling CO2. Without clouds the planet could be twenty degrees hotter.

So clouds matter…so water is one of the greenhouse gases that Carbonistas have mixed feelings about because it might just play merry hell with their Carbon Story. The H2O molecule has four times the power of the CO2 molecule. So the climate modellers take the only course open to them. They make a stab at it when it comes to clouds. As far as cloud cover is concerned they guess…although it is only the very best scientists that call it that. The rest use words like estimate, parameterisation or approximation. But how do you approximate something you don’t understand? Finger in the wind? Whistle in the dark? It’s a guess. But perhaps the humble mobile phone can come to the rescue.

The evidence is not there yet but the thinking is that if the mobile phone mast is picking up fluctuations caused by wind and rain then it is probably reacting to shifting levels of water vapour in the atmosphere as well. Mobile phone masts might not be the scourge we all thought they were. They could be the leading edge of the War Against Global Warming. Now there’s a thought…and a rather useful one…because collecting scientific date is no simple matter.

It is no accident that so much science is qualified by the term ‘under laboratory conditions’. Operant conditions have a way of playing havoc with the best-laid scientific hypotheses so good scientists always record all of them. Take the temperature-time series to illustrate. You can do one of two things. You measure the temperature in the same place for as long as possible…hopefully for centuries...or you measure under similar operant conditions.

The first course of action seems to make sense because the shape of the landscape affects the local climate. A number this side of the hill will not be the same as one from the other side. But there is a problem. A hundred years ago your measuring point was in the middle of a field five miles out of town. Today it’s in the middle of a shopping centre. In fact as a general statement towns have expanded to overwhelm most of the climate scientists’ data collection points.

Built-up environments are several degrees warmer than similar places without people. On that at least there seems to be a consensus…although I have not delved that deeply and have become sceptical about the idea of consensus. So what does our poor scientist do? He looks for an article in the scientific press with a graph of temperature versus land use. He gets a little hot under the collar when he sees that it swamps any shifts in his own data but he has learnt how you do this sort of thing in college…and besides everybody else does it. It is best practice. So he alters his data.

He has clever names for these alterations like correcting for anomalies. But to you and me what he is actually up to is crossing out the numbers he measured and replacing them with different numbers that he has made up. Now just a minute! What we thought was raw data is now adjusted raw data. And this brings in a whole new question about how the data is adjusted, where that graph came from, what algorithms are being used and the different operant conditions at the graph site and the measurement site. Even something as simple as collecting data is far from simple.

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first published in weblog one hundred and forty four on Wednesday 24th May 2006

It was cold last night. I gave the boat a half-hearted burst of heat for a few minutes in mid-evening but then thought better of it and dug out a sweater. But we had the best of it. In Scotland the Sassenachs shivered through one of the coldest nights recorded for May with temperatures plunging to 25 Fahrenheit at Tulloch Bridge in the Highlands. Clear skies and an Arctic wind produced a freezing snap. We are clearly heading for a New Ice Age.

On 23rd May 1935 Britain was carpeted in snow. Small villages in the Yorkshire Dales were two to three feet deep in snow and villages had to dig themselves out of their homes according to a report in The Times. Cars were abandoned in snowdrifts on roads and trains derailed on frozen railway points. Devon and Cornwall were said to look like a scene from a Christmas card. The bitter cold spelt disaster for fruit and vegetable farmers from South Wales to Kent.

The Times reported a loss of thousands of pounds in Sittingbourne. In desperation one apple grower used thousands of oil lamps to save his crop from freezing. And at the Chelsea Flower Show exhibitors worked frantically to save prize plants using heaters in greenhouses to keep the blooms alive in the bitterly cold nights. With this wasteful and extravagant use of oil no wonder the world is running out. Oil for flowers indeed!

But what does this tell us about the temperature? Snow was falling so it would have been hovering around 32 Fahrenheit. Humidity levels and wind chill factors would have done the rest. A fall in temperature of seven degrees over 71 years is an average drop of 0.0547731 degrees per year. What a disaster. By 2100 temperatures will have fallen by a massive ten degrees. There will be icebergs in the Thames while Londoners mud-skate on the river’s edge.

But there is some good news. There will be no need to tow icebergs from Greenland to solve the capital’s water shortages. Thames Water will be quarrying its own ice and delivering it to the ice houses of the rich and famous in Thames Ditton and Wokingham. But spare a thought for the poor farmer. There are a thousand Sittingbournes in England and there will be thousands of cold spells between now and 2100. With decades of arctic weather, falling sea levels and declining soil fertility the apple orchards will disappear as the farmers throw themselves on the mercy of the bankruptcy courts and their new Debt Orders. There will be massive emigration to Nigeria and the West Indies.

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first published as weblog one hundred and forty two on Monday 22nd May 2006

Media Studies is a standing joke to many...conjuring up images of PhDs in Elvis Presley and studies of the Sociology of Big Brother…not the one from 1984. But occasionally something interesting emerges. What begins as shifting verbal fashions…slang to you…in TV soap operas can lead to investigations of cycles, periodicities, correlation and randomness. From here it is one small step to mental abstractions, ideas, thought…and memes.

Within modern-day cultures ideas rise and fall. For a while everybody believes something and then they stop believing until no one can remember the old idea. In fashion as in natural ecology there are disruptions and sharp revisions of the established order. A lightning fire burns down a forest. A different species springs up in the charred acreage. This happens to science too…the scientific process encourages it. Thomas Kuhn identified the internal mechanisms and structures at work creating these scientific revolutions.

In environmental thought in the 1960s the idea of the balance of nature was widely accepted. Leave nature alone and it will come into a self-maintaining state of balance. The young James Lovelock born in 1926 called it his Gaian Hypothesis but the idea has a longer pedigree…the Ancient Greeks believed it three thousand years ago.

But by the 1990s no scientist believed in the balance of nature anymore. Ecologists spoke of dynamic disequilibrium and multiple equilibrium states. Nature is never in balance, never has been and never will be. Nature is always out of balance. Man…the great disrupter…is nothing of the sort. The environment is being disrupted constantly.

Then one day at the leading edge of Media Studies some American media scientists set their search engines to work analysing the rise and fall of The Idea of Environmental Crisis. Others looked at transcripts of news programmes from the major networks…NBC, ABC, CBS. Others studied stories in the New York, Washington, Miami, Los Angeles and Seattle newspapers. They got their computers to count the frequency of certain concepts and terms used by the media. The results were very striking. There was a major shift towards the end of 1989.

Before that time the media did not make excessive use of terms such as crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, plague or disaster. For example during the 1980s the word crisis appeared in news reports about as often as the word budget. In addition prior to 1989 adjectives such as dire, unprecedented and dreaded were not common in television reports or newspaper bulletins. But then it all changed. These terms started to become more and more common. The word catastrophe was used five times more often in 1995 than it was in 1985. Its use doubled again by the year 2000.

In 1989 the stories changed too. There was a heightened emphasis on fear, worry, danger, uncertainty and panic. The critical question is why it should have changed in 1989 which seemed like a perfectly normal year. A Soviet sub sank in Norway; Tiananmen Square in China; the Exxon Valdez; Salmon Rushdie sentenced to death; the Episcopal Church hired a female bishop; Poland allowed striking unions; Voyager went to Neptune; a San Francisco earthquake flattened highways; and Russia, the US, France and England all conducted nuclear tests. A year like any other.

But in fact the rise in the use of the term crisis can be located with some precision to the autumn of 1989. And it seemed suspicious that it should have coincided so closely with the fall of the Berlin Wall on the Ninth of November. At first the media scientists dismissed this association as spurious. But it wasn’t. The Berlin Wall marks the collapse of the Soviet Empire…and the end of a Cold War that had lasted for half a century.

For fifty years Western nations had maintained their citizens in a state of perpetual fear. Fear of the Other Side; fear of Nuclear War...the Communist Menace, the Iron Curtain, the Evil Empire. Within the Communist blocs it was the same in reverse…fear of us…but with the heightened fear of personal betrayal and incarceration.

Then suddenly in the fall of 1989 it was all finished…gone, vanished, over. The Fall of the Berlin Wall created a vacuum of fear. Nature abhors a vacuum and the evidence suggests that instead of inventing the moral equivalent of the Cold War as William James would have wished…in the absence of any initiative from the Left…the Right homed in on Environmental Crisis to serve up for global consumption. But there is an irony here.

As far as the Right is concerned the Environmental Crisis has served its purpose. It is beyond its sell-by date. They have moved on and have generated new fears like Islamic Fundamentalism and Al Quaeda Terrorism. But in reality they have created a monster…and they cannot stop their Fear Machine. It is like the Sorceror’s Apprentice. Communist Menaces, Toxic Environments, Wars against Terrorism…it is unstoppable.

But the environmentalists are trapped in their time warp. The momentum of their careers and their funding means that like military generals they are fighting the last war. The thinking right are doubtless much amused. Be our guests, they cry. Fight your old stale environmental wars. We have moved on. We have created new fears and new wars for your distraction. But it’s no fun having the field to ourselves. When will you start to catch up?

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first published in weblog one hundred and thirty eight on Thursday 18th May 2006

I have been reading the Financial Times for the past couple of days to understand the European Carbon Trading Exchange. The newspaper clippings spread out on the cabin table in front of me…I am working on my Dell laptop…have headlines like Blair’s Decision Time On Nuclear Power, Carbon Credit Errors Throw Permit Scheme Into Turmoil, Independent Auditing a Must if Carbon Trading is to be a Success, The Real Story Behind the Collapse of Carbon Prices and Give the Emissions Trading Scheme a Fair Chance...written by the ceo of RWE npower. These shenanigans lend credence to those claiming that the whole point of The Kyoto Treaty is that it should fail.

I don’t believe the Global Warming Orthodoxy that sees Armageddon in carbon emissions. But that is no reason not to eliminate them. The side effects often turn out to be the main effects. It is almost a Rule of Nature. The less muck spewed into the atmosphere the better. But some of the side effects have to be seen to be believed…and many have little to do with cutting back on atmospheric pollution or reining in the emission of greenhouse gases.

My Crap Detector first began to register with the allocation of CO2 emissions permits for 2005…based on self-assessments which made Cod Quotas look like divine justice. The Dirty Half Dozen are Germany with 473 million tonnes, the UK with 242, Italy with 215, Spain with 181, France with 131 and Holland with 81. The other ten countries in the European Commission’s scheme account for just 12% of all permits and can be disregarded.

Demand on the Carbon Trading Exchange is driven by the UK, Spain and Italy …respectively 15%, 11% and 4% over quota. The UK has to buy 40 million tons-worth of CO2 emission permits, Spain 20 and Italy 10. Who has them for sale? Last week it was France and Germany. But then Angela Merkel announced that Germany would give 12 of her 21 million tonnes surplus back to Brussels. But France with her massive ‘non-polluting’ nuclear industry wants to keep her 15 for 2006. Market chaos duly ensued as carbon prices shoot up from €9 to €15 overnight. What a game!

It gets worse. Britain has enforced the toughest cuts on the electricity generators. Here’s the logic. The electricity sector is more insulated from overseas competition than sectors like chemicals, cement and steel so costs can be passed on to customers in higher prices. But the giant German polluter RWE owns Yorkshire Electricity and npower which supply UK consumers. Electricity companies have been accused of profiteering by charging customers for the free carbon permits they were given by Brussels. Now there’s a surprise. You couldn’t make it up.

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first published as weblog one hundred and sixty two on Sunday 11th June 2006

My Curriculum Vitae has an entry for ‘Wheelock College, Boston, USA, 1981-1985’ that reads: 1981 Assistant Professor of Education teaching Organisational Development; 1983 Co-Founder and Tutor-in-Residence of Human Scale Institute on Martha’s Vineyard; 1985 Publication of The Ecology of Learning course for teachers and professional educators’. The summer campus for the Human Scale Institute was at Anna Edey’s Solviva Gardens.

Anna Edey was born and raised in Sweden and moved to the USA in 1957 where she raised three daughters and built herself a career on Martha’s Vineyard dyeing and weaving wool from her own sheep and Angora rabbits before the gods took her under their wings and set her to work weaving a web of life. Here is Anna in Growing Edge Magazine.

‘At four o’clock in the morning on the coldest night of 1984, I am awakened by the howling blizzard. To my utter surprise, inside the greenhouse it’s like a balmy night in June. The thermometer reads 13 Celsius. The Angora rabbits are quietly muffling about in their communal dens. Moon and stars shine brilliantly through the four layers of clear glazing. Here among the tall, lush tomato vines loaded with red sweet tomatoes the thermometer reads 7 degrees. I proceed toward the east end, scooping up deep comforting breaths of humid, mild air fragrant with nasturtium, thyme, sage, dill and living earth. At the far end a hundred chickens acknowledge me with sleepy murmurs, cozy at 21 degrees in their spacious quarters’. The insulation comes from the still air between the layers of glazing.

A greenhouse is a hot and sticky place. Light from the sun is absorbed by the dark plants and partially re-radiated as infrared radiation. Not much escapes because glass blocks radiation at the infrared end of the spectrum. This is the Greenhouse Effect and the Earth is a greenhouse…for dark green plants read the planet’s surface and for the glass read the earth’s atmosphere.

There are two problems with this analogy. The earth’s atmosphere does not behave like glass and although the Amazon Rain Forest may be dark green the polar ice caps are not, much of the planet’s land surface is desert and semi-savannah and almost three quarters of the earth’s surface is ocean. We are told that 99% of the earth’s atmosphere has no insulating properties, that oxygen and nitrogen have no role and that carbon dioxide alone keeps the earth warm enough for life. Why do we allow ourselves to believe this nonsense?

Nuclear power plants generate steam that turns turbines to produce electricity. So the nuclear debate is not a debate about energy needs but about electricity supply. Electricity accounts for 18 per cent of total energy used in the United Kingdom and nuclear power stations contribute 19 per cent of this….falling to 7 per cent by 2020 as reactors are switched off before they get so old that they break apart from corrosion and spew radioactivity into the atmosphere.

So that’s 3.4% falling to 1.3% of the country’s energy requirements. The Channel Tunnel cables can cope. So what’s all the shouting about? My mind has started to have uncharitable thoughts about the perfidious French and the dastardly Germans. They are up to something and Brits are the fall guys. My headline would be Blair Duped Again.

First the Texans and the Israelis take him for a ride over the Iraq Invasion. Now the European Bank is trying to get its two biggest clients off the hook by flogging Blair a dead nuclear horse. Nuclear power is an archaic technology for goodness sake. It’s more than 50 years old. It has no more place in a modern economy than a horse and cart. Blair must go urgently. He is dangerous to our health. This latest love-in could be the death throes of President Blair.

Renewable forms of energy are almost limitless in their potential. They are flexible and offer good security of supply. Nuclear, by contrast, requires uranium to be mined and transported, produces toxic waste and poses a potential terrorist threat. No one has the foggiest idea of the cost of new nukes, new designs will have to be imported…so much for freedom from foreign control of our energy supplies…and the Ministry of Truth will have to control the whole of Government if real economic appraisals of actual past and future reactor costs are to be kept as state secrets.

The real opportunity is not renewable technologies but local energy. All the energy we need for a year arrives in half an hour of sunlight…the rest is complications. Cross-channel cables for Surplus French Nuclear Electricity (SFNE) and a gas pipeline from Norway are all the Energy Insurance this country will be needing. All our national utility grids can be dismantled. The English have no need of them. Over the past 14 years Woking Borough Council has reduced energy demand by 50% and made savings of 77% in carbon emissions through green procurement, basic energy conservation, community use of combined heat and power, biomass, photovoltaics and fuel cells. The Woking Strategy is the way forward. Tackle energy locally…town by town, village by village and parish by parish.

Disregard private interests…the personal and the community sectors are more efficient…when working in tandem locally. Get Energy Supply Pricing right…talk to the Danes…and include utilities in your local tax calculations. The job of central government is to stop private interests getting in the way of local investments and to enable local development strategies by shutting down private utilities…tax them ‘til their pips squeak…and phasing out Whitehall and County Council budgets over a single parliament. This is the Labour Party’s back-to-basics way to renewal.

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first published as weblog one hundred and forty eight on Sunday 28th May 2006

The case for Global Warming does not hinge on a tenth of a degree Celsius or a few experts quibbling over the technical details behind a graph of carbon emissions. What the Carbonistas need is something with emotional impact. Tsunamis fit the bill. So their present case hinges upon the sea-level records. It won’t last. Their case will shift again when the scientific community refuses to kow-tow to their paymasters by permitting misleading use of their data. But it has served their purpose well. Truth after all is not where it’s at. With the Fear Factory perception is all…from a Goebbel‘s Primer.

Climate Changelings are shining their spotlights on helpless, victimized, impoverished people being flooded out of their ancestral homelands. They talk of the terror of sea levels rising precipitously…and inexplicably…with no conceivable cause. They tell of extraordinary events and unprecedented happenings affecting the entire world in recent years. Something unknown is causing sea levels to rise and threaten innocent men, women and children.

The idea is that if a convincing record can be shown of rising sea levels then the Carbonistas will be on very strong ground. When the public and the policy makers commanding the public purse strings…insurance companies for instance…see the damage that has been done and the costs they might incur…and here the computer modellers come into their own…they will spend money to solve the problem and scan the horizon for someone to blame for the mess.

Grappling with problems is not what action-oriented types do. They define, act and solve. They get it sorted. Then they look for someone to blame…and somebody else to pay the bill. So not only is the sea level data important to the Carbonista’s Bait & Switch Strategy but the fact that sea levels are rising around the world must be beyond dispute.

Unfortunately that’s the rub. There is considerable dispute about sea level. It is not simple at all. You cannot just put a mark on a dock at high tide, measure it year after year, watch it go up and publish your findings. One of the core concepts in the measurement of sea levels is the geoid…the equipotential surface of the earth’s gravitational field that approximates the mean sea surface.

Then there are the complexities of glacio-hydro-isosatic modelling and the eustatic and tectonic effects on shoreline dynamics. Even with some rudimentary grasp of these subjects there is still holocene sedimentary sequences and intertidal foraminifera distributions to master. And when that is done waiting in the wings are the carbon analysis of coastal paleoenvironments and aminostratigraphy. Sea level is not simple.

Were this enough to determine the precise scientific nature of sea level data, a consensus about this data might be feasible even if some agreed to disagree. However there would be many different hypotheses about the causes of any drift or sudden shift in the data pattern. But unfortunately for the Carbonistas this is likely to be the wrong consensus.

One of several places around the Indian Ocean decimated by the Boxing Day Tsunami was The Maldive Islands. But it would be quite wrong to think that the inhabitants of these islands had been sitting on the beach for the past few decades waiting for the tsunami to strike. They had arranged for a team of Scandinavian researchers to study sea levels in the ocean around them. The scientists found no rise in several centuries…and a fall in the last twenty years.

Michael Crichton started his research for State of Fear...published in 2004...in 2001. At that time I was reading through Tom Clancy’s published works and was somewhat alarmed to notice that many of Clancy’s plots turned up in the real world a few years after he had seemingly invented them. I had two conspiratorial explanations. Either Clancy was on a retainer with the CIA or Mossad were reading the plot outlines he sent to his publisher.

Crichton and Clancy plots have wheels within wheels and move rapidly between different pieces of the action before bringing it all together in one hectic final sequence. Their plots are full of outrageous and improbable coincidences and...as in the old Westerns...the hero comes through unscathed while the baddies and the secondary good guys go down like flies. That’s not a problem for me...it’s the nature of the genre. But one of Crichton’s subplots worries me.

The Island of Gareda is one of the Solomon Islands off the coast of New Guinea north of Australia. Here the Pacific Plate slides under the Ontong Java Plateau resulting in the Solomon Trench...a huge underwater feature that curves in an arc all along the northern side of the island chain and is an active geological region with a deep trench. Along the length of the trench are undersea volcanoes with lots of slope debris and therefore the potential for undersea landslides which displace enormous volumes of water very quickly...the most common way a tsunami is formed.

In Crichton’s book the really really bad guy heads up a global environmental organisation. The underlying action that provides the fiendish plot for the novel involves three earth shattering natural disasters...each timed to take place on the first morning of a conference on Abrupt Climate Change...a lightning-induced flash flood in Yellowstone National Park, an enormous ice floe breaking off from a glacier in Antarctica and...you are there before me...a tsunami activated by giant Hypersonic Cavitators placed on the seabed off the Island of Gareda.

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first published as weblog one hundred and fifty five on Sunday 4th June 2006

In the early eighties I was a Special Graduate Student at MIT’s Alfred P. Sloan School of Management. During my two years as a student much of my waking day was spent in the company of MIT’s System Dynamics Group. The head of this group was Jay Forrester. In his commentary on his background research for State of Fear Michael Crichton remarks that Forrester was ‘one of the must important scientists of the twentieth century’. I had little to do with the great man personally but came to be familiar with his work...and worked closely with Professor Alan Graham and George Richardson. Two entries in my Curriculum Vitae make mention of this brief interlude in my life.

Under Schools and Colleges is the entry: 1980 – 1981; Special Graduate Student; MIT Sloan School Cambridge, USA; System Dynamics & Industrial Dynamics. And in the section on Own Work (1980-2004) under America’s Atlantic Coast (1979-1987): P-E Consulting Cambridge, USA 1979-1985 is another reference to my labours at MIT that goes like this. 'Assignments for a wide range of US clients including managing the European planning cycle and carrying out a corporate integration study in the construction products sector (Norton Company, Worcester); writing a proposal to the US Energy Department on soft energy systems (Technology & Economics, Cambridge); managing partner for project to relate innovation to shareholder value in high-tech high-growth companies (Smith Barney, Chicago); and working partner for the commercial development of a system dynamics model for Canadian printing firms (Interconsult, Cambridge)'.

Professor Jay Forrester was the most influential researcher to model complex systems on the computer. He did ground-breaking studies of everything from high-tech corporate behaviour to urban renewal, and he was the first to get any inkling of how difficult it is to manage complex systems. One landmark essay from Forrester was entitled ‘The Counter-Intuitive Behavior of Complex Systems’. Forrester’s work was an early inspiration for attempts to model the world...particularly the Club of Rome Study from Dartmouth College published as The Limits to Growth.

Forrester was quick to realize that the political voices behind the Club of Rome had a poor understanding of the limits of modelling...and even less interest in the science behind the modelling. They latched onto Forrester’s work because it backed up their pre-conceived notions and political agenda. So Forrester took care to distance himself from the consistent tone of urgent overstatement...bordering on hysteria...of the Limits to Growth book published by Donella and Dennis Meadows from their ivory New Hampshire towers...even though the book was a sexed-up dossier of Jay Forrester’s more technical and conservatively written World Dynamics issued by MIT Publications a year earlier.

Two other giants from the Envionmentalists’ Hall of Fame...Amory Lovins and Rachel Carson...receive a somewhat ambivalent response from Michael Crichton. Amory Lovins became an advocate for Alternative Energy when he authored the 1970s anti-nuclear text Soft Energy Paths: Towards a Durable Peace...which started life as an article in Foreign Affairs. Michael Crichton sees Soft Energy Paths as a major link in the chain of events and thinking that set the US on a different energy path from Europe...though I would not attribute it so much power and influence.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring published in 1962 is a poetic persuasive text that was read with alarm and excitement when it was first published. But with the passage of time the text appears more flawed and more overtly polemical. Crichton estimates it to be about one third right and two thirds wrong. My line would be somewhat different. But I would require that Silent Spring be read in conjunction with an earlier work by Rachel Carson: The Sea Around Us.

I think it unlikely that Rachel Carson would have endorsed the Global Warming by Carbon Dioxide Emissions Hypothesis. Large sections of The Sea Around Us have been airbrushed out of the Climate Debate. Central to the argument in my 1979 unpublished manuscript Green Homes or Blue Moonwaves was Carson’s reporting of the work of the Norwegian Marine Scientist Otto Pettersson. And Carson was also aware of the key role of oceans and algae in the Global Carbon Cycle...something that climate scientists have only recently started to rediscover.

Science has a poor understanding of the behaviour of the ocean’s algae...the subject of a future Shepherd on Climate weblog. Science has similar levels of ignorance about many other variables that might turn out to be crucial to an understanding of local and global climate patterns. Clouds and trees, aerosols and halocarbons, radioactivity and free radicals, solar winds and sun spots are just a few of the subjects on my current research list where I have noticed that good data is absent and well-reasoned hypotheses are thin on the ground.

But as more data is collected and as these specialist subjects are subjected to the scrutiny of Good Science so they will give up their secrets and it will become clearer what role each plays in our planet’s self-regulatory climate system. The natural greenhouse effect at the heart of the Carbonistas’ argument for Kyoto is influenced primarily by water vapour and not carbon dioxide. Does this mean a Khartoum Protocol on Steam Emissions is next on the agenda? Is fear of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to be the harbinger of a New One World Totalitarian Order?

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