We’ve just completed our latest piece of work, The Common Cause Handbook.

It’s a practical and accessible introduction to the importance of values and frames for organisations working towards a more sustainable and just society.

The Common Cause Handbook makes the case that civil society organisations can find common cause in working to engage and strengthen intrinsic values  - such as concern for others, social justice, creativity, self-acceptance, and a connection with nature – whilst working to diminish the importance of extrinsic values – for example, social status, material success, image, wealth, and power.

The handbook was inspired by WWF’s groundbreaking report Common Cause: The Case for Working with our Cultural Values and its sister publication, Finding Frames: New Ways to Engage the UK Public in Global Poverty. We’ve worked with WWF, Oxfam and a wide range of civil society organisations to develop, trial and produce our guide. We hope you’ll enjoy the result.

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h/t Greenfyre, we’re glad he’s back.

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• Why positive feedback doesn’t necessarily lead to runaway warming – Positive feedback happens when the response to some change amplifies that change. For example: The Earth heats up, and some of the sea ice near the poles melts. Now bare water is exposed to the sun’s rays, and absorbs more light than did the previous ice cover; so the planet heats up a little more. In both of these cases, the “effect” reinforces the “cause”, which will increase the “effect”, which will reinforce the “cause”… So won’t this spin out of control? The answer is, No, it will not, because each subsequent stage of reinforcement & increase will be weaker and weaker. The feedback cycles will go on and on, but there will be a diminishing of returns, so that after just a few cycles, it won’t matter anymore.
• Himalayan Glaciers: Wrong Date, Right Message – Is the AR4 terribly flawed? It is important to note that this is one error in a roughly 3000 page technical document, an error percentage similar to the Encyclopedia Britannica. The 2035 claim was not included in the Technical Summary, the Summary for Policymakers, or the Synthesis Report. Does this error show the IPCC has an ‘alarmist’ bias – a tendency to exaggerate the negative impacts of climate change? In fact, there are far more documented instances of the AR4 being too conservative, rather than too alarmist, on emissions scenarios, sea level rise, and Arctic sea-ice melt. Many of the Himalayan Glaciers are retreating at an accelerating rate (Ren 2006) and roughly 500 million people depend on the melt water from these glaciers (Kehrwald 2008).
• A history of international climate change policy – An overview of the history of international climate policy over the last 30 years, divided into five periods. The article shows (1) the increasing complexity of the definition of the climate change issue from an environmental to a development issue; (2) the inability of the developed countries to reduce their own emissions and raise funds commensurate with the nature of the problem and their initial commitments; (3) the increasing engagement of different social actors in the discussion and, in particular, the gradual use of market mechanisms in the regime; (4) the increasing search for alternative solutions within the formal negotiations—such as the identification of nationally appropriate mitigation actions for the developing world, reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and the use of geo-engineering solutions; and (5) the search for solutions outside the regime—the mobilization of sub-national policies on climate change, litigation, and markets on biofuels.
• Coffee threatened by beetles in a warming world (!) – The Arabica coffee grown in Ethiopia and Latin America is an especially climate-sensitive crop. It requires just the right amount of rain and an average annual temperature between 64 degrees Fahrenheit and 70 degrees Fahrenheit to prosper. As temperatures rise — Ethiopia’s average low temperature has increased by about .66 degrees F every decade since 1951, according to the country’s National Meteorological Agency — and rains become more variable, Ethiopian coffee farmers have suffered increasingly poor yields. Last year was especially bad, with exports dropping by 33 percent. Some have moved their coffee trees to higher elevations, while others have been forced to switch to livestock and more heat-tolerant crops, such as enset, a starchy root vegetable similar to the plantain. Now, there is evidence that a warming climate may be linked to one of the major threats facing the coffee industry in Ethiopia and elsewhere…

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Johan Rockström recently appeared on TED to present the ‘planetary boundaries’ approach, published in Nature last year. It’s a great presentation well worth the time. (You can get the paper the approach is based on, or read Nature’s special feature.)

I’ve heard a few scientists complaining about what they see as arbitrary boundary choices, or the false confidence such an approach can arouse.

Nature’s editorial acknowledges:

[E]ven if the science is preliminary, this is a creditable attempt to quantify the limitations of our existence on Earth, and provides a good basis for discussion and future refinement. To facilitate that discussion, Nature is simultaneously publishing seven commentaries from leading experts that can be freely accessed at Nature Reports Climate Change (see http://tinyurl.com/planetboundaries).

Defining the limits to our growth and existence on this planet is not only a grand intellectual challenge, it is also a potential source of badly needed information for policy-makers. Such numerical values, however, should not be seen as targets. If the history of environmental negotiations has taught us anything, it is that targets are there to be broken. Setting limits that are well within the bounds of linear behaviour might therefore be a wiser, if somewhat less dramatic, approach. That would still give policy-makers a clear indication of the magnitude and direction of change, without risking the possibility that boundaries will be used to justify prolonged degradation of the environment up to the point of no return.

Shame about the chart junk:

Here’s a (slightly) better version by New Scientist:

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• Climate experts agree: Global warming caused unprecedented Russian heat wave – “I agree with Michael Tobis’s take at Only In It For the Gold that something systematic has changed to alter the global circulation and you’ll need a coupled atmosphere/ocean global model to understand what’s going on. My hunch is that a warming Arctic combined with sea-surface-temperature teleconnections altered the global circulation such that a blocking ridge formed over western Russia leading to the unprecedented drought/heat wave conditions. Without contributions from anthropogenic climate change, I don’t think this event would have reached such extremes or even happened at all.”
• Myth of the climate science gravy train: scientists studying Greenland forced to pay their own airfares – One of the more absurd claims made by the denialists is that climate science offers scientists a veritable “gravy train” of funding. I’ve always found it a curious argument: after all do biomedical researchers need to “make up cancer” in order to obtain funding? Do biologists make up evolution in order to get grants? How about those wacky physicists over at CERN who managed to scare up nine billion US dollars to build an atom smasher?  That’s your tax money being scammed by leftist-pinko-scientists who believe in relativity! Did they fabricate quantum physics in order to get some hot grant money? I mean, who has actually seen a sub-atomic particle?
• Lords distance themselves from climate sceptic Christopher Monckton – Monckton argues his use of the portcullis emblem, which has appeared on his letterheads and lecture presentations, does not breach any rules: “My logo is not a registered badge of parliament, and is plainly distinct from parliament’s badge in numerous material respects. The Lords do not use the portcullis at all on their notepaper: they use the Royal Arms within an elliptical cartouche.” A House of Lords spokeswoman said: “The emblem is property of the Queen, and Parliament has a Royal Licence granted for its use.” … In June, following the death of Viscount Colville of Culross, Monckton, as a qualifying hereditary peer, put his name forward as a candidate at the resulting byelection to find the replacement elected peer. However, he failed to secure a single vote among the 29 crossbench hereditary peers eligible to vote.
• RealClimate: Expert Credibility in Climate Change – Having lived through the plate tectonics revolution, I can clearly see the differences between that scientific revolution and this one. In the case of plate tectonics, there were initially few convinced but they kept coming up with exciting new data. When others tried to falsify the idea, they found more interesting observations that got them excited. It really didn’t take long to convince almost everybody, except a few diehards, that the science was right. Meanwhile these diehards (e.g., the Meyerhoffs) continued to publish for decades about ‘problems with plate tectonics’.For all I know, they are still publishing. In the scientific (vs media) discussion of global warming, all the interesting new data points to warming changes in the system… It is no wonder why the Lindzen idea of strong negative feedback is not well regarded in the scientific community–it doesn’t lead anywhere and doesn’t match with the other data available. Nevertheless he will probably keep publishing.
• A dark ideology is driving those who deny climate change – In each case the tactics are identical: discredit the science, disseminate false information, spread confusion, and promote doubt. As the authors state: “Small numbers of people can have large, negative impacts, especially if they are organised, determined and have access to power.” In Britain, links between deniers and big business are less obvious. Yet it is clear lessons have been learned and tactics copied. Consider these examples: the leaking of the “climategate” emails and the wild over-reaction to the mistaken insertion of a paragraph in the IPCC’s last climate assessment, that suggested wrongly that Himalayan glaciers are melting rapidly. Both created a furore with the former revealing “a massive fraud” that represented “the final nail in the coffin” for the theory of global warming, deniers argued. This claim was later shown to be nonsense, though it took three inquiries to establish the point.

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• And yet it works. Adam Corner on ‘ClimateGate’, transparency & peer-review. – “Open access is based on the premise that there are those outside the inner circle of peer reviewers who are competent enough to provide a second opinion on the science. This is indisputably true. But while talk of throwing open the lab doors might be rhetorically satisfying, it would provide only an illusion of democracy. Certainly there are non-academics competent enough with statistics to find errors in a piece of published science. Correcting errors in science would be a valuable service for an auditor to offer. But if several auditors reached conflicting conclusions, then somehow a judgement would have to be made about their respective competence. And who should make that judgement? Presumably a group of suitably qualified, honest individuals with a proven track record in a relevant discipline – in other words, peer review.”
• Climate email inquiry: bringing democracy to science | Richard Horton – “Scientists need to do more to emphasise their uncertainties, not recoil from them. Uncertainty may be uncomfortable, but its admission builds trust. It demonstrates integrity. One of science’s great strengths is its quantification of doubt. Fourth, scientists need to take peer review off its pedestal. As an editor, I know that rigorous peer review is indispensable. But I also know that it is widely misunderstood. Peer review is not the absolute or final arbiter of scientific quality. It does not test the validity of a piece of research. It does not guarantee truth. Peer review can improve the quality of a research paper – it tells you something about the acceptability of new findings among fellow scientists – but the prevailing myths need to be debunked. We need a more realistic understanding about what peer review can do and what it can’t. If we treat peer review as a sacred academic cow, we will continue to let the public down again and again.”
• Economics Behaving Badly – A great NYT article on behavioural economics & its failings, important for climate policy.
• Institute of Physics disbands Energy Sub-Group following ‘skeptical’ ClimateGate submission – Hopefully the end of the embarrassment for the IoP.

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Anthony Watts’ latest source of information is none other than the British National Party – yes, those known to the rest of us as the British Nazi Party.

Garman continues:

Anthony Watts blogged today at 15.30 GMT about how “climate scepticism could become a criminal offence in UK” – and his source? BNP leader, Nick Griffin. Unsurprisingly, by 16.11, the page had disappeared. No doubt, after one of his friends in the UK pointed out it doesn’t look great when you post Nazi propaganda on your blog and twitter feed.

But Left Foot Forward caught screen grabs here, here – and here.

Ouch.

You may remember Watts Up With That from such hilarious climate science fails as:

• Wrongly claiming Arctic sea ice was growing 50,000km² per year. (To their credit, they did correct this obvious error, but it didn’t stop them coming out with other howlers like suggesting the ‘Arctic ice looks generally healthier than 20 years ago’ or that sea ice has returned to ‘normal‘. Both completely wrong.)
• Once claiming anyone wanting a price on carbon was ‘criminal’, the same as ‘murdering people’.
• Painstakingly asserting that global warming is due to the ‘Urban Heat Island’ effect, something scientists are already aware of and correct for. And then in arguing their case, providing data scientists used to show they were completely wrong: temperature stations they argued were causing a warming bias in the temperature record were actually causing a cooling bias!
• Not understanding basic statistics
• Falsely claiming that the Antarctic ice sheet can’t and won’t lose mass, because air temperatures are below 0°C. Unfortunately they failed to look at any ice mass data to see what was actually happening. If you don’t like the data, just ignore it!
• And finally, they recently concluded that the Greenland ice sheet can’t be melting. Their evidence? Temperature data from a single weather station and some photos taken while flying over the ice sheet! They conveniently failed to mention the ice mass data which pretty conclusively shows that Greenland IS losing mass. Again, if you don’t like the data…

We thought Watts up With That had reached as low as they could go with shoddy fact-checking, but citing the BNP plunges them to new depths.

On the other hand, at least Anthony Watts had the decency to take the story down when he realised where it came from. Monckton’s outfit, the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI), hasn’t even done that. So while Monckton is happy to dish out words like ‘fascist’ willy-nilly, at the same time he apparently has no qualms about using genuine fascists as a source of material.

Certainly brings a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘grey literature’.

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• Will 2010 be the hottest year on record? – it all depends on which data source you choose: GISTEMP (likely) or HadCRU (about as likely as not).
• Climate change is leaving us with extra space junk – Even the space junk is trying to tell us we’re changing the climate. One more independent line of evidence to add to the pile, how many do we need?!
• Black Carbon’s Grey Areas – A brilliant, must-read article on black carbon. Who would have thought it has such broad geopolitical implications? Worth the effort. It’s conclusions: 1. Stop throwing cook-stoves at the problem. 2. Target diesel. 3. Be very careful about comparing black carbon with carbon dioxide.
• Ocean acidification – still happening.
• Arctic climate may be more sensitive to warming than thought – “Our findings indicate that CO2 levels of approximately 400 parts per million are sufficient to produce mean annual temperatures in the High Arctic of approximately 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees F) [19 degrees Celsius warmer than today!],” Ballantyne said. “As temperatures approach 0 degrees Celsius, it becomes exceedingly difficult to maintain permanent sea and glacial ice in the Arctic. Thus current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere of approximately 390 parts per million may be approaching a tipping point for irreversible ice-free conditions in the Arctic.”
• Network Rail study to assess impact of climate change – eco-stealth taxes are being used to… strengthen our vulnerable rail network, oh.
• Troubling ice melt in East Antarctica – it’s losing mass, which is not good. – “It’s too early to know what the ice loss in East Antarctica really means, says Isabella Velicogna, a remote-sensing specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “What is important is to see what’s generating the mass loss,” she says. Reductions in snowfall, for example, might reflect short-term weather cycles that could reverse at any time. But thinning caused by accelerating glaciers—as seen in West Antarctica—would warrant concern.”
• Peru inventor ‘whitewashes’ peaks to slow glacier melt – In a remote corner of the Peruvian Andes, men in paint-daubed boilersuits diligently coat a mountain summit with whitewash in an experimental bid to recuperate the country’s melting glaciers. Peru’s Environment Minister Antonio Brack has said the World Bank’s 200,000 dollars in funding would be better spent on other “projects which would have more impact in mitigating climate change.” “It’s nonsense”, he commented bluntly last year.
• Leakegate: A retraction – “It is an open question as to what impact these retractions and apologies have, but just as with technical comments on nonsense articles appearing a year after the damage was done, setting the record straight is a important for those people who will be looking at this at a later date, and gives some hope that the media can be held (a little) accountable for what they publish.”

And finally, on a slight tangent:

• Ben Goldacre: Yeah well you can prove anything with science – “When presented with unwelcome scientific evidence, it seems, in a desperate bid to retain some consistency in their world view, people would rather conclude that science in general is broken. This is an interesting finding. But I’m not sure it makes me very happy.”

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• Sustainability: Choices, choices, choices – great piece by the BBC’s Richard Black.
• Matt Ridley and the Holocene Optimum – Matt Ridley making elementary mistakes again, you’d think he has some sort of wider agenda. Oh, he has.
• Could global brightening be causing global warming? – short answer: unfortunately not.
• A brief update on hurricanes & climate change – was Al Gore right to focus so much on hurricanes?
• Some excitable climate deniers just don’t understand what science is – “The essential problem is that the public — the media very much included — generally doesn’t understand science. Most of us think science is a list of absolutely certain facts that are not open for debate. If a theory is on the list, it’s not debatable and we should act on it; if it’s not, it is debatable and we should not act on it. As a result, scientists often find it hard to communicate scientific conclusions to the public. If they speak scientifically, they have to acknowledge that even though most scientists have come to a conclusion they are reasonably confident is true, there is continued uncertainty and debate. But if they do that, people will think the conclusion isn’t yet a scientific fact — and we shouldn’t act on it.”
• Massaging the Climate Message: New Political Conditions Bring Shifting Strategies – how the climate discourse is shifting, in the US at least.
• Only mother nature knows how to fertilize the ocean – more research needed, but yet another reason not to heavily rely on bio-sequestration.
• Investors step up climate change demands – follow the money.

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