Is Matt Ridley a Crackpot?

I have just watched a YouTube video of a lecture by Matt Ridley, who I've written about before - here and here and here.  He's in Australia and spoke to the IPA (the Institute of Public Affairs is a right wing lobby group posing as a "think tank").

The crackpot comment

In the video Matt Ridley complained that some people call him a crackpot.  I don't think he's a crackpot. He's a climate science disinformer who knows exactly what he's doing and what he wants.

He's not a crackpot but he was wrong when he claimed (citing his GWPF mate, Richard Tol) that earth will benefit from global warming for the next 70 years.  That is, until 2083.  And I expect he knows he's wrong. If he doesn't he should. He's clever enough to figure it out. (Matt didn't say what he thinks will happen after that or whether, just maybe, we should start acting now to reduce the harm after his 70 years are up.)

I'm not familiar enough with Richard Tol's work to know if he's ever found that the world will be better off with global warming for the next seventy years.  Or whether Matt or Richard have more prescience than climate scientists and know exactly how much CO2 we will emit over the coming seventy years.

Who made the world a better place - the pessimists or the optimists or both?

In the first five minutes of the video, Matt Ridley complained about what he regards as left wing pessimists who warned the world about overpopulation, famine, the hole in the ozone layer, unbreathable air, acid rain and other problems the world faced.

He spent the next ten minutes gloating that we shouldn't have been concerned about any of those things because none of them caused major problems.

He argued against government intervention.  He is very much against government intervention.

Why is the world as clean as it is today?  Why isn't the world population even greater? 

What Matt didn't admit to (does he even recognise it?) was that the reason that these are no longer the big problems that they might have been is because of people power.  Because of environmentalists and scientists and particularly because of people like Paul Erlich, who Matt seemed to think was an irrational pessimist:

• Ozone hole - addressed by the intergovernmental agreement, the Montreal Protocol
• Over-population - being addressed by international aid programs and particularly by family planning education and subsidised access to birth control - in the developed world and the less developed world
• Acid rain - being addressed by clean air regulation and pollution controls
• Smog - being addressed by clean air regulations and pollution controls

So why is Matt Ridley arguing against controls to limit the harm we are doing to the earth by polluting the air with CO2?

It was controls and government intervention that addressed all the problems he cited as not being as bad as the pessimists said they would be.  Matt must realise that but decided not to admit it.

A bit boring...

Incidentally, Matt Ridley is not a very good speaker.  His speaking voice is okay with sufficient intonation but his speech was overpopulated with quotes, rambled from one topic to another and came across as nothing but a sop to the audience.  I guess the audience liked it enough.  At least some of them stayed awake and laughed when they were supposed to.  However his talk had no coherent message that I could fathom.  He shifted from climate change and environmental issues to free trade.  I'm in favour of free trade (ie I don't favour tariffs and quotas as a rule) but I also think that societal controls are very important.  We can have both.

Rich capitalists are kind people  

Matt spent much of the latter part of his speech rationalising his approach to the world, extolling the virtues of capitalism and saying how kind all the rich people are because they are giving work to people in sweatshops. Is that what he means by "a rational(ising) optimist"?

CO2 is plant food!

Oh, and he finished up with "CO2 is plant food"!

Australia's crackpots...

Update - a comment from one of Australia's more cracked crackpots (see below)


Anthony Watts posts an email from Murry Salby in which Salby alleges he's got the sack from Macquarie University.  I wonder if that's true.  If it is it's probably just as well.  Would you want him teaching your child?

Anthony writes:

Between John Cook, Stephan Lewandowsky, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, plus Mike Marriot and his idiotic ideas, I’m beginning to think Australia is ground zero for AGW crackpottery.

Australia does have more than its share of crackpots, like Salby (who was an import from somewhere or other, with Macquarie Uni slipping badly), but Anthony is citing people who are much respected in the climate arena.

As an example I looked up Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg's publications and top of the list was a paper published in Nature in 2002 which is listed in Google Scholar as being cited 3,850 times.  If that's what constitutes "crackpottery" then crackpottery is something every scientist would aspire to.  (Salby's most cited work got 455 cites, which is not at all shabby but an order of magnitude less.)

John Cook won a coveted award, a Eureka Prize from the Australian Museum for his creation, SkepticalScience.com. Plus, of course, his presidential tweet that sent Anthony Watts into such a frenzy of denial.  Stephan Lewandowsky is recognised for his work in cognitive science, including on science rejection.

As for Mike Marriot, Anthony doesn't like anyone who Watches the Deniers and takes exception to WTD urging him to present the NSIDC charts in the manner of NSIDC.  Anthony is happy to display the charts of the NSIDC despite him thinking they have "idiotic ideas", like showing +/- two standard deviations from the 1981-2000 mean.  (Knowing the grasp Anthony has of charts and numbers, he probably thinks a standard deviation is a human perversion.)

Back to Murry Salby.  In an email, in between rambling down side streets, he describes what he thinks happened in regard to what he says is his 'termination of appointment'.  Professor Salby is still listed on the Macquarie University website so I don't know what the real story is.  After this episode if he has been given the boot then I doubt he'll get offered his job back.

Salby had some strange bits and pieces in his email, like resources he reckoned he was supposed to get while at Macquarie:

Included was technical support to convert several hundred thousand lines of computer code, comprising numerical models and analyses (the tools of my research), to enable those computer programs to operate in Australia.

We drive on a different side of the road to people in Colorado, but I wasn't aware that our computers had some unique language that was different to computers in the USA.  I guess he was saying that he had a contract to employ a couple of techies to rewrite his program.  Can anyone shed some light on what he could be talking about?

And Salby writes:

To promote the Climate Commission’s newest report is the latest sobering claim: “one in two chance that by 2100 there’ll be no human beings left on this planet”

That quote is not from anyone from the Climate Commission.  It is from Admiral Chris Barrie, former Chief of the Australian Defense Force.  When Will Steffen was launching a new report from the Climate Commission on ABC television he was accompanied by Admiral Barrie.  The presenter asked Admiral Barrie if climate change "was something that's been of concern to you for some time, Chris Barrie?", and he replied in part with a reference to a doomsayer book he'd read:

Years ago I read a book called "Our Final Hour" written by Lord Martin Rees the Astronomer Royal and the Former President of the Royal Society in London, and Martin lays out the climate change consequences and some other behaviours that are not so good and predicts that there is a one in two chance that by 2100 there will be no human beings left on this planet.

Maybe Salby had unrealistic expectations of his Macquarie appointment.  Or maybe he's just gone off the rails for good.  Or maybe he didn't keep his end of the bargain. Nick Stokes asks:

July 8, 2013 at 11:43 pm  Murry Salby was apparently professor for five years. Does anyone know of any scientific papers that he wrote (published or not) in that time?

REPLY: Nick, sometimes I think your head is up your arse. This is one of those times. How could he publish in that sort of environment? – Anthony

This is a list of publications since 2008 (from Google Scholar), when Salby says he was first appointed at Macquarie.  Two papers in external journals and his book. That's it.  In five years!  (The list includes four papers in which he's listed as a co-author and published in 2008 but submitted before he arrived at Macquarie University.)

Thomas says:

July 9, 2013 at 12:11 am  Nick, Anthony and temp, did any of you bother to actually check if Salby has published any articles? As a matter of fact he did publish some papers on the ozone layer such as “Rebound of Antarctic ozone”, GRL, Volume 38, Issue 9, 16 May 2011 “Changes of the Antarctic ozone hole: Controlling mechanisms, seasonal predictability, and evolution”, JGR Volume 117, Issue D10, 27 May 2012.

REPLY: According to his summary at McQuarrie, his last publication was 2008.  http://envsci.mq.edu.au/staff/ms/pubs.html
That’s what I was basing it on. – Anthony

Anthony spells Macquarie University wrongly.  At least he got Murry Salby's name right this time around, unlike previously.  And besides Anthony, there are a few of the more pompous gits out in force, like Kevin Begaud, who says (I can hear the plum in his mouth):

July 9, 2013 at 12:16 am  This outrage is being taken up at the highest political level here in Australia. An influential section of the media has also been informed. It is a blight on the proud history of Australian scientific integrity and, if all the facts are as stated, cannot be allowed to stand.

While the distinctly unholy Janice Moore says: "I’ll be praying for you, Dr. Salby. Already started."

Update - one of the biggest crackpots of them all

I see that one of the biggest crackpots of all the Australian crackpots has made a comment on WUWT:
Malcolm Roberts says:

July 9, 2013 at 4:39 am  Anthony, your question as to whether downunder is ground zero for crackpottery understates the situation.

And then goes on to promote his crackpottery, referring to his "review of CSIRO including main report of 25 pages together with 780 pages of supporting details in 32 appendices".  Which got this response from SMH journalist, Ben Cubby, back in February:

Malcolm-Ieuan,
In considering your request that I identify errors in the report you sent to me – CSIROh! Climate of Deception? Or First Step to Freedom? – I find myself confronting an unusual problem: how does one critically analyse a pile of horse shit?

Read the rest of Ben's response here, with more info on the crackpottery of Malcolm Roberts from Graham Readfearn.

Christopher Monckton the Con Man's Lame Deception on WUWT

Anthony Watts can't attract anyone but crackpots to WUWT

Poor little Anthony Watts is running out of people willing to write for his disgusting little blog, WUWT.  He's relying more and more on crazies like Christopher Monckton, David "funny sunny" Archibald, Ronald D "it's insects" Voisin and filling in the blanks with endless repetition of magical leaping ENSOs from Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale and random weird wonderings of Willis Eschenbach.

Today it's back to Christopher Monckton.  He uses a lot of words to try and get rid of the 97% consensus.  He wields wordplay to say words don't mean what they mean.  He tries to con his readers into thinking 97% is actually 0.3%.

Monckton is truly weird, a crackpot, delusional or deliberately deceptive - take your pick.

I bet he wishes it was as easy to disappear the actual 97% of scientific papers and the actual 98.4% of scientists who show that humans are causing global warming.

Way down near the end of his long-winded article Monckton draws a messy picture in that putrid pink he favours.  "That's better", say the rabble.  "We like pictures."  (Does anyone actually bother to read or attempt to translate what Monckton writes or do they just look at his pictures and nod sagely, pretending they understand it.)

Here's one of his pictures.  What do you think is wrong with it?  I went for the ugly theme to complement Monckton's.  Red on pink looks ghastly, doesn't it.

If he'd got rid of the noise from seasonal effects and monthly data, and started just one year earlier than 2001, you would have seen something quite different.  If he'd started his chart ten years earlier, you'd have noticed the trend starting to show up.

What else did you notice.  Did you see how the temperature is sitting 0.4 to 0.5 and a bit degrees above even the 1961 to 1980 mean?  The surface temperature is zooming up very quickly.  

Now for some perspective.  This animation shows the period in Monckton's cherry picked chart compared to the long term record.

Christopher Monckton is a deceiver, a con man, a charlatan, a climate science denier.  And not a very good one.