ICECAP NOTE: Here are excerpts of a review of the new book by Patrick Moore, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout. See full review at Quadrant.

By Bill Muehlenberg, Quadrant

The taming of a radical environmentalist!

Patrick Moore was a founder of Greenpeace back in the early 70s. He was a radical environmentalist who became a sensible environmentalist. In his important new book he tells his story, and much more. It is an eye-opening account not only of the inner workings of one radical green group, but a story of how balanced environmental concerns can be expressed.

Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout (Beatty Street, 2010), chronicles his involvement with Greenpeace and his eventful disillusionment with it. The first half looks at all the now famous activities of Greenpeace and his involvement with them. There are all the stories of anti-nuclear activism, anti-whaling programs, campaigns against chemicals, and so on.

We learn about how he became involved in radical environmentalism; how he became president of Greenpeace in 1977; how he reacted to the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland; how he grew aware of ideological and politicised agendas amongst his peers; and how he eventually decided he had had enough of a once important organisation.

He describes in detail his growing disillusionment with Greenpeace. He came to see that these people were ideologically-driven activists, not scientists, so they were often going off half-cocked, lambasting things which were not in fact harmful or dangerous.

The last straw was when Greenpeace decided to run with a global ban on chlorine:

This is when Greenpeace really lost me. As a student of advanced biochemistry, I realized chlorine was one of the 92 natural elements in the periodic table and that it is essential for life. You don’t just go around banning entire elements, especially when life without them would be impossible!

A number of related concerns eventually led to his decision to leave. He was tired of the politics, the grandstanding, the propaganda, and the radical, inflexible warfare mentality of Greenpeace. He knew there must be a better way to achieve genuine sustainable environmental outcomes.

I wanted to move from constant confrontation, always telling people what they should stop doing, to trying to find consensus about what we should do instead. I had been against three or four things every day of my life for the past 15 years. I now decided to figure out what I was in favour of for a change. I wanted to find solutions rather than problems and to seek win-win resolutions rather than unending confrontations.

In 1986 he finally parted ways with the organisation he helped to form some 15 years earlier. The second half of the book examines the various major environmental issues, examining how Greenpeace has been more interested in activist politics than in sound science.

Moore he points out how greatly global temperatures vary, and how there have been warmer periods in the earth’s history. He believes that CO2 emissions may in fact be mostly beneficial, possibly making the coldest places on earth more habitable and definitely increasing yields of food crops, energy crops, and forests around the entire world.

In sum, he believes that groups like Greenpeace have in many ways been selling us a bill of goods. The environmental movement “is partly a political movement that aims to influence public policy, but it is also partly a religious movement in that many of its policies are based on beliefs rather than scientific facts. Environmentalism is to a large extent a populist movement that challenges established authority and appeals to the disenchanted, social revolutionaries, and idealists. ‘Pop environmentalism,’ like popular culture in general, tends to be shallow and sensational, moving from fad to fad. The pop environmentalists are generally self-assured, even smug in the belief they know the truth.”

He is alarmed by how the political left has hijacked the environmental movement, given how there are clear examples of good environmental policies which can be found on both the left and right side of politics. He concludes with a list of causes he thinks we should be tackling, such as:

1. Grow more trees;
2. Move to hydroelectric and nuclear energy;
3. Deal with the most pressing environmental problem: poverty;
4. Relax about climate change which is always taking place;
5. Make use of advances in genetic science.

World Climate Report

Hold onto your hats, this will come as quite a shock.

Well, not really - unless you count yourself among that pessimistic bunch who sport blinders that only allow you to see bad things from global warming. And if you are one of those poor souls, you better stop reading now, because we wouldn’t want reality to impinge on your guarded (and distorted) view of the world.

But for the rest of us, the following news will fit nicely into the world view that the earth’s ecosystems and are robust, adaptable and opportunistic, as opposed to being fragile, readily broken, and soon to face extinction at the hand of anthropogenic climate change.

A hot-off-the-presses paper in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters by a team of Japanese scientists finds that warming oceans expand the range of tropical corals northward along the coast of Japan. At the same time, the corals are remaining stable at the southern end of their ranges.

That’s right. Corals are adapting to climate change and expanding, not contracting.

But, you don’t have to take our word for it. Here is the news, straight from the authors:

We show the first large-scale evidence of the poleward range expansion of modern corals, based on 80 years of national records from the temperate areas of Japan, where century-long measurements of in situ sea-surface temperatures have shown statistically significant rises. Four major coral species categories, including two key species for reef formation in tropical areas, showed poleward range expansions since the 1930s, whereas no species demonstrated southward range shrinkage or local extinction. The speed of these expansions reached up to 14 km/year, which is far greater than that for other species. Our results, in combination with recent findings suggesting range expansions of tropical coral-reef associated organisms, strongly suggest that rapid, fundamental modifications of temperate coastal ecosystems could be in progress.

This certainly throws buckets of cold water on all the overly heated talk about how the decline in coral reefs as a result of anthropogenic global warming is going to decimate fisheries and tourism the world over. Perhaps it actually will have a negative impact in some locales, but in others, it seems that it could have quite the opposite effect.

And it is this opposite effect - a positive impact of coral reef communities and their dependents - that is routinely left out of climate change impact assessments.

For instance, when the infamous first draft of the still infamous Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program was released for public comments, it included this bit of text from the “Society” chapter (page 47 of the report):

“A changing climate will mean reduced opportunities for many of the activities that Americans hold dear. For example, coldwater fish species such as salmon and trout that are popular with fishermen will have reduced habitat in a warmer world, and coral reefs are already severely compromised. Hunting opportunities will change as animals’ habitats shift and as relationships among species in natural communities are disrupted by their different responses to rapid climate change.”

We submitted the following two comments (from among our 75+ pages of comments that we submitted) in regards to that rather bit of gloomy text:

Specific comment 78. Chapter Society, page 47, Second paragraph, first sentence

Comment: Enough with the pessimism.

Recommendation: Change the sentence to read “A changing climate may mean reduced opportunities for some activities and increased opportunities for many other of the activities that Americans hold dear.”

Specific comment 79. Chapter Society, page 47, Second paragraph, second sentence, “...coral reefs are already severely compromised.”

Comment: Warming SSTs along the U.S. Gulf and Atlantic shores should encourage coral reefs to expand northward. In fact, evidence of northerly range expansion of elkhorn and staghorn has recently been reported (Precht, W.F., and R.B. Aronson, 2004. Climate flickers and range shifts of reef corals. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 2, 307-314). Currently, the southern portions of Florida define climatologically the northernmost portion of the coral habitat in the western Atlantic, a warming climate presents the opportunity for a habitat expansion that could bring corals further northward and closer to the U.S. mainland. Since coral reefs represent a major tourist destination, not only would a northward range expansion be a benefit to the corals themselves, but may well also represent enhanced economic opportunities along the southeastern U.S. coast.

Recommendation: Update the paragraph on the changing patterns of recreational activities to include the likelihood that coral reefs will expand northward into U.S. coastal waters and increase recreational opportunities associated with them. As it now stands, the statement fails to meet the authors’ claim of providing the “best available science” and of conveying “the most relevant and up-to-date information possible” and otherwise violates applicable objectivity requirements.

Apparently our comments had some impact, but not to the full extent that we intended.

See what they mean in the full report. 

Update: see Lubos Motl on Gavin Schmidt’s “There’s no theory that extremes should rise in general”. Also see this Climate Depot compilation.

ICECAP NOTE: Andy Revkin of all the journalists who cover the environmental beat is the one most likely to strike some balance although his readers object sometimes violently when he does and so he treads carefully. You probably saw the much ballyhooed story on a ‘paper’ in the once respectable Nature magazine that in its summary claimed

Here we show that human-induced increases in greenhouse gases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events found over approximately two-thirds of data-covered parts of Northern Hemisphere land areas.

Andy wrote today in the Dot Earth blog: “In scientific literature you rarely see statements so streamlined and definitive. For climate science, this is the equivalent of a smoking gun. News indeed. Add in the extreme floods last year (a period not included in the study) and you have more relevance, although Roger Pielke Jr. this morning notes the importance of distinguishing between analysis of certain kinds of extreme precipitation events and disastrous flooding.

There’s no indication that those caveats (which included links to 9 cited papers) apply to the grand conclusion. Did the authors stress the uncertainties in discussions with journalists? It sure doesn’t look that way. Should the journalists have pushed harder when confronted with definitive language? To my mind, yes.”

Good for you, Andy. There are uncertainties in the analyses of the nature, frequency and varying causes of extreme events - whether they be heavy rains, snow, tropical systems, drought, record cold and heat. We can find natural factors to explain virtually any extreme. Indeed I and many other forecasters including Joe Bastardi and Piers Corbyn use these same factors to predict these events or extremes sometimes many months in advance.

In the words of the great Yogi Berra: “You can observe a lot just by watching.”