Extra holiday days for travelling without planes

Goethe once wrote:

“All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience”.

On this subject, I had been thinking about ways to subtly encourage people to take any transport but planes when going on holiday. In particular, I was thinking about Europe, and how you can get from one side to the other in 24-36 hours by train, if you really want to.

But late-2019 reality is that not many people really want to, for a combination of reasons:

  1. That’s a long time to be travelling, just to get to Krakow!

  2. It will probably be more expensive than flying

  3. It will require booking several trains from several companies, which is head-hurting

  4. It will eat into your stock of “days off” from work.

This stock is at least 25 days [EDIT: it’s 20 days] in Europe, and even though this may seem a lot to US citizens, travelling for a day or more each way is non-negligible if you have “only” 25 [EDIT: 20] days. (Let’s keep off the subject of trains and days off in the US for today.)

The first two points above are likely price sensitive and to an extent, culturally sensitive (think: flight shaming in Sweden).

The third point is a technical issue, solvable if there is enough institutional will in Europe (this is en route, likely in the next five years).

As for the last point, I had a (minor) epiphany: Why not make it European law that travel time not be included in the legal number of days off if you are taking trains, not planes?

This seems like an obvious step forward. The clear “winners” would be Europe’s train companies. The “losers” would be companies having to give slightly more days off at the same employee cost.

I was all joyful about my new thought, and getting exciting about sharing it.

Then I stumbled across a BBC article from last month entitled, Some firms give more time off to those who shun plane travel.

Not only is my idea not new, but it turns out it was already implemented by the UK ethical insurance company Naturesave back in 2009!

“Matthew Van Den Elst, Naturesave’s legal director, says this was sparked by a conversation between a staff member planning a European holiday and a director who happened to be a fan of train travel. The employee mentioned the extra time and cost of travelling by train, “despite both agreeing it would be preferable environmentally and a more pleasant journey”. So the company decided to encourage this by allowing additional annual leave for environmentally-friendly travel. A quarter of staff members have since taken them up on it.”

Furthermore, a new initiative called Climate Perks by the UK-based charity 10:10 Climate Action intends to encourage the same idea across more and more workplaces. It has signed up 16 companies already.

The more I think about it, the more it seems obvious that this kind of thing has to be expanded to Europe as a whole. There must surely be a price/extra days/time tradeoff at which train travel simply becomes the obvious choice within Europe.

Now all we have to do is keep sharing this idea, thinking it over again and again, until it takes root in our own personal experience.

Please share it and help it prosper.

Low quality Google-fed propaganda quickly linked to the Koch brother(s)

So, this just happened.

Moments ago my Google “news” feed spat out a doozie of an article called, The ‘climate Emergency’ no one is talking about.

Guess what the ‘climate emergency’ they are referring to is? Yep, WINTER!

It’s a bottom scraping “opinion piece” that tries to make the point that because humans can adapt to winter, adapting to global heating will also be a walk in the (very dry, possibly on fire) park. Some people will die, but most of us will keep keeping on.

The author of the piece implies we should just sit back and chill out with a gin and tonic because—putting aside the ambient apocalyptic smell in the air these days—

[the…] “global population is booming, despite declining fertility rates, because almost everyone is living longer than before. There is no reason to expect these trends to go into reverse.”

No reason?!

This flat out false assertion got me thinking that the author could not seriously be a neutral spectator vis à vis climate change. My immediate reaction was, Who is paying this guy? There has to be something shitty going on in the background if you are prepared to put such nonsense into the public space with your name attached to it.

Here was another clue from the piece, referencing Extinction Rebellion’s net zero emissions targets for 2025:

“Meanwhile, the policies espoused by the eco-activists would cause far more suffering than the climate change they fear.”

Translation: let’s stick with fossil fuels.

It didn’t take long to put a plausible scenario together. The author of the piece is science and technology director of the Academy of Ideas and a journalist at Spiked.

Google search. Took about a minute. Here’s the subtitle from a Guardian article by George Monbiot it turned up from December last year:

“That Spiked magazine’s US funding arm received $300,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation suggests a hidden agenda.”

Have a look at Monbiot’s article if you’re not intimitely familiar with the Koch (pronounced: Cock) brothers. And then take a good shower afterwards to feel cleaner.

So, yes, the (extremely rich) Koch family has funded Spiked magazine over at least a two year period. One of the Koch brothers is now dead, but their toxic sludge of slippery-slidey opinion-modification propaganda keeps on hitting us right in the goonies.

If you are up for more punishment, you can also try reading the aptly-named book, Kochland, which reveals that

“Charles Koch, along with his brother David, played an earlier and more central role in climate-change denial than was previously understood”.

That’s enough of this horror story for one day. But I’m still bothered that Google blindly displays this stuff to me in the total absence of context.

Then again, Google is still funding groups that push climate change denial.

Time methinks for a very long shower.

Divestment delayed →

Under pressure from Germany, the European Investment Bank delayed its decision on providing no further fossil fuels loans until November.

Alex Doukas from the NGO Oil Change International had this to say about that:

“This delay is a direct result of Germany and the European commission pushing to add more fossil fuels back into the policy. This is the opposite of the leadership demanded by millions of climate strikers and activists around the world”.

Messy.

Divestment: a big day tomorrow →

Tomorrow is a big day:

“…the board of the EU’s European Investment Bank – the largest public bank in the world – meets to decide whether the time has finally come to stop expanding the fossil fuel sector.”

As Bill McKibben rightly points out in his lovely prose:

“The first rule of holes is, when you’re in one, stop digging.”

In related news, here’s a fun fact from yesterday’s Guardian article on investment banks:

“The world’s largest investment banks have provided more than $700bn of financing for the fossil fuel companies most aggressively expanding in new coal, oil and gas projects since the Paris climate change agreement, figures show.”

The second rule of holes is, screw you, you namby-pamby environmentalists! Dig baby dig!

Juxtaposition #1

One amusing juxtaposition a day keeps the doctor away:

Bringing in a carbon tax on flying that makes it too expensive for them to fly might do the trick.

A European night train fantasy

A few weeks ago, I was convinced that night trains in France were no longer. I remember reading about their demise a couple of years ago. Or so I thought.

Turns out I was wrong! There are still four of them!

Long story short, I went down a rabbit hole, joined a few mailing lists, and discovered that there is a bit of a night train resurgence happening across Europe, despite the sector being given up for dead only a couple of years ago. It’s bubbling under the surface, but it’s such a big movement, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before it hits the mainstream.

Things change fast. Really fast.

So, why this? And why now?

The climate happened, for one. It’s hard to avoid one’s daily dose of the coming climate apocalypse in today’s media environment. It can be done, but you have to swallow a lot of Fox or a lot of Rupert. Leaves an oily aftertaste, I find. These increasingly in-our-faces horror scenarios do seem to be having a slow burning effect on the general population, including even the most cynical oil barrel huggers out there. Ok, I made that last bit up, but you can always hope, right?

The start of a backlash against criminally cheap plane tickets is underway too, sometimes coming from the strangest places.

And then there is flygskam, the Swedish concept of flight shame. Feeling bad about flying. Deciding to take the train instead.

It’s really huge in Sweden, and Sweden is not cut off from the world. Flygskam is coming for us all, folks!

Being humans, the Swedes now also excel at tagskryt, also known as train-bragging.

When it comes to short-haul flights in Europe, I’ve slowly started pestering some friends about their unsustainable addiction to this kind of convenience. Some of them may be reconsidering their friendship. I never liked you anyway, Bob! Unfriend me, you gas-guzzling climate criminal!

I’ll have more to say about night trains soon. Until then, sweet night train dreams to you all.

Jyrki emailed me back

I finally got a short email back from Jyrki.

Before I “kind of” say what was in it, let me just state that I replied to his email, asking whether it would be ok to quote him in this blog.

He replied, “Please, do not quote my replies”.

Even though, as far as I can tell, it is totally legal to quote from a freely sent email, the lack of any real substance to his replies makes it not worth lawyering up in this case. I will simply quote him indirectly. Basically, he suggested that the climatefeedback.org contributors (representing the IPCC to him) made mistakes in their takedown of his article.

He also denied receiving any outside funding for the work.

After a follow-up email in which I repeated the question: “Do you know how this preprint reached RT News, Sputnik, etc.?”, he replied that he had not contacted any news agencies.

He followed that sentence with a whole lot of exclamation marks, like this!!!!! So I’ll have to take it at face value unless anything else comes up.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised for climate denial “news” agencies to have some code running online at all times looking for new output from potentially “friendly” “scientists”.

That would be simple to set up.

Slightly scary to see how quickly you can slip between a silly climate change “article” and the geopolitics of the Russian state (via its “news” media) though.

Cue: five more exclamation marks.

I emailed Jyrki and Pekka

Dear Jyrki,

I am a [[redacted]] at [[redacted]].

Due to my interest in climate change, the Google algorithm recently fed me a news article on your arXiv preprint.

I was wondering if you might be so kind as to answer a few questions surrounding the preprint and its propagation through the climate change acceptance and climate change denial communities?

- The rebuttal website climatefeedback.org gave numerous responses to your preprint from scientists explaining the flaws in it: (https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/non-peer-reviewed-manuscript-falsely-claims-natural-cloud-changes-can-explain-global-warming/ ). Did you realise that this kind of reaction would occur? What do you think of their rebuttal to the preprint? Do you stand by the conclusions in the preprint?

- At the same time, websites like RT News, Sputnik, and Sky News Australia took the preprint as the word of god, and ran with it as a news story. Did you intend for this to happen? In particular, how did the existence of the preprint come to be known by one of these news organisations? (I can well imagine there's a network whereby once it's published on one, the others see it and also publish). But did you directly tell any of these news organisations about the preprint? And if so, why? Which one did you choose? Or did they find it themselves?

- What were you intending to achieve by depositing an article that you probably knew would raise anger in the scientific community? Is there some end goal that you have? Did you intend to prove some kind of point against the pushback of the scientific "consensus"? Was it meant to be a working draft on the subject, never to be seen by other scientists? I'm really confused!

- When I'm this confused, I have to ask: do you receive funding from sources that are interested in pushing back against the climate change consensus? Such as fossil fuel companies? Others? I guess I'm struggling to understand the motivation for depositing the preprint on public arXiv.

Thanks very much for any help you can give me with these questions.

Sincerely

Kevin Bleakley

A reply from the University of Turku

I got a reply from the public relations office of the University of Turku:

Dear Kevin Bleakley,

and I apologize that you have not got answer before. I tried to find your previous message but I can’t find it. But here are the answers:

1) Are these two individuals still current salaried staff of the University of Turku?

Jyrki Kauppinen is an emeritus professor so he has been retired and does not get salary. Pekka Malmi works as a University Lecturer at the Department of Physics and Astronomy and gets salary from that position.

2) Does the University of Turku have any position on this preprint?

University has no position on this preprint. After the article was published University gave following announcement: UniTurku agrees with the prevailing conceptions of the scientific world on the effect of human activity on climate change. The article is not peer-reviewed, and it is not yet a finished scientific publication. One of the underlying principles of science is to subject all concepts to critical examination.

3) Do either or both of the authors receive funding from sources that might influence them in trying to publish this kind of misleading pseudo-science? For instance, do either of them receive funding from the fossil fuel industry?

Unfortunately I can not answer this question right away, but I’ll try to find out (during this summer holiday season it can take a while to find out weather university has that answer or not). You may also ask this direct from themselves. Jyrki Kauppinen has en email-address [[redacted]] (in our university emeritus professors can still use university-email if they want) and Pekka Malmi has an email [[redacted]].

With best regards,

[[Redacted]]

I got an additional reply two days later:

Dear Kevin,

 now I got answer from Research Funding Support at the University of Finland. They told me, that either Jyrki Kauppinen or Pekka Malmi does not work as a responsible leader to any research project that gets additional funding outside the university.

The person who answered me is not the one who is working for the  Department of Physics and Astronomy, that person will come to work next Monday. If she has any additional information, we will let you know.

With best regards,

[[Redacted]]

So they seem to be saying that there are no suspicious funding sources in play. But it’s not terribly clear. Next step is to email the authors themselves. Stay tuned!

I emailed the public relations office of the University of Turku

To follow up on the last two posts, I decided to email the University of Turku to see if they had anything to say about the pitiable preprint on climate change picked up by the dregs of the online misinformation business. Here’s my email:

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am a concerned scientist that is struggling to understand several issues around the recently submitted arXiv preprint "NO EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FOR THE SIGNIFICANT ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE" by Jyrki Kauppinen and Pekka Malmi, who claim to be members of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Turku.

The preprint in question is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.00165.pdf

This unfortunate exercise in pseudo-science was quickly picked up by various websites which aim to blur the line and create doubt about climate change, see, e.g.,

https://www.fitsnews.com/2019/07/11/man-made-global-warming-theory-takes-major-hit/https://www.rt.com/news/464051-finnish-study-no-evidence-warming/


Of course, scientists were quick to explain why this preprint was worthless, see, e.g.,

https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/non-peer-reviewed-manuscript-falsely-claims-natural-cloud-changes-can-explain-global-warming/

But, as usual, the damage is already done to the minds of non-scientific people, not all of which are willing to believe in the reality of climate change.

I was wondering whether you could provide me with further information on this:

1) Are these two individuals still current salaried staff of the University of Turku?

2) Does the University of Turku have any position on this preprint?

3) Do either or both of the authors receive funding from sources that might influence them in trying to publish this kind of misleading pseudo-science? For instance, do either of them receive funding from the fossil fuel industry?

Thank you very much for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Kevin Bleakley

I’ll update if I get a reply.

A teardown of the nutjobbery

Maybe you’ve seen websites like ifixit which take new Apple computers to pieces, and then complain how hard they are to take to pieces.

Today, let us take to pieces the bollocks masquerading as science in my previous post. I can tell you the good news already: No complaining about how hard it was will be required. I do recommend grabbing an ice cream to lick before reading on.

The bollocks is question today is entitled: No Experimental Evidence for the Significant Anthropogenic Climate Change, and can be found on the arXiv preprint server.

For non-scientists, let me briefly explain what arXiv is. arXiv is a place scientists can send unreviewed articles and make them public. arXiv is not a scientific journal. Having an article on arXiv is totally independent of scientific credibility or acceptance by peers. All arXiv does is “get your stuff out there”, which can be useful to show you solved a problem first. It is also a way to post a superficially different version of an article published in a closed-access scientific journal, without causing legal issues. Thus, articles on arXiv may have been peer reviewed but, again, this is not always the case. It is definitely not the case today.

Now, we can continue and move on—past the terrible grammar of the article’s title—to the authors. As a scientist, what jumps out first is how the authors do not put their academic affiliation on the first page. This fails sniff test n° 1, and we haven’t even gotten to the article’s content. The two authors are affiliated with a real university, the University of Turku in Finland, yet hide this away at the end of the article, underneath the references. This proves nothing, but is totally weird, dude.

When it comes to the “science” content of possibly crazy stuff, the website climatefeedback.org is a good place to see what scientists think when it comes through. Its response to this article can be found here. For instance, the scientist Stephen Po-Chedley had this to say:

The main claim is based on a correlation: that as the Earth warms, low clouds disappear. The authors’ narrative is that low clouds are decreasing due to some natural cause (no mechanism provided by the authors) and the disappearance of low clouds then results in surface warming.

If you’re not a scientist and/or it’s still a bit unclear, he then adds:

This is akin to claiming that increased ice cream sales leads to warmer temperatures.

Life would be so much simpler if correlation meant causation! Damn you Science!

Yet another red flag is that the authors don’t say where their data comes from, and do not provide it. Red alert! Red alert!

What is bounteously clear is that Jyrki Kauppinen and Pekka Malmi have no interest in performing actual science. Their motivations are therefore murky. If I find out any more about them, I’ll put it in a later post.

The Google algorithm pushes climate change denier "news"

One side-effect of clicking on a lot of climate links is that the Google algorithm sometimes lets the crazy stuff through too.

Case in point: A “news source” called fitsnews has published an article called “Man-Made Global Warming Theory Takes Major Hit to the Goonies”.

I may have added the last three words because their title like totally sucked, dude.

The article popped up on the Google feed on my Pixel phone. I sent Google grumpy feedback on it, including a swear word to amuse the moderator slaves in their dimly lit cave.

A few hours later, I was fed the same “news” on my Pixel but from a new source: RT News, the Russian state-owned website, whose slogan by the way is: “Question More” .

Indeed.

This chain of events suggests that the Google algorithm correctly recorded my tap on the first item—and decided: Give Him More Of This Good Stuff He Clicks On! —but had not yet taken into account me reporting the first article for nutjobbery. Ok, that’s definitely enough about nuts for one day.

I imagine this algorithmic asymmetry is a feature, not a flaw.

[[I refuse to link to either of the two sites, but you will not have any trouble finding the articles if you are in the mood for propaganda.]]

More crazy sh*t direct from Australia →

As humanity accelerates into the wall, it’s good to know Australia has our back.

Trains carrying 725,000 litres of water a day are the latest weapon to keep a drought-affected [coal] mine in inland New South Wales in production and keep jobs secure.

By “has our back” I mean: “is pushing really hard from behind, mate”!

Trains are back, baby!

A couple of weeks ago, I subscribed to Back on Track’s mailing list, and it was a bit like jumping into a rabbit hole and tumbling out into a parallel universe.

Back on Track describe themselves as a European network to support European cross-border passenger train traffic and in particular the night trains.

It is hard to get a feel for just how dynamic the subject of European trains is from outside the rabbit hole, so if you have not yet taken the leap, let me tempt you with a bunch of articles on improving the European train network. All published in only the last few weeks!

The articles below were listed in Back on Track’s email sent on 20 July, 2019. You’ll need a web page translator to get some of these into your language of choice. Enjoy!

If you feel inspired, join Back on Track’s mailing list. You can even become a member if you want to be more involved!

Australia has all types of jobs

Two job ads on the same page in The Weekend Australian print edition today are a good summary of Australia’s climate confusion.

First, the ad for Climate Science Center Research Director:

CSIRO is committed to complementing its world-class science capabilities with outcome-focused research that will generate economic, environmental and social benefits for Australia in a global context.

Just opposite, an ad for Whitehaven Coal, which starts with:

Whitehaven Coal is the largest Australian producer of high efficiency, low emissions coal…

If you can say that without coughing up some coal dust, please move on to the next test:

The company is at an exciting stage in its evolution…

If this were not Australia, the “exciting stage” would be a death spiral.

But this is Australia, the world’s biggest net exporter of coal. It has nearly doubled its coal and coke exports over the last ten years.

Another fun fact about Australia: the word drought is no longer good enough to describe what it’s undergoing. The correct expression is now: super drought.

Why is Air France buying new planes? →

Air France will this week announce plans to purchase between 50 and 70 Canadian-made Airbus A220 medium-haul jetliners, part of a keenly-awaited revamp of its fleet, France's Journal du Dimanche newspaper reported Sunday.

Air France's board is expected to confirm the huge order on Tuesday, a day before the carrier publishes its results for the first half of 2019.

If it’s true, it’s weird. And not a good weird.

Air France is not short of medium-haul planes. There’s no massive hole in their network because they’ve run out of planes.

They would mostly be buying new planes to replace old ones.

This would be good news for Air France because then they could:

  • sell the old planes on ebay. Sorry, I meant globalplanesearch.com. Yes, there are websites for buying old Boeings! That is kind of cool.

  • show off their new low CO2 emissions “per passenger”, which would be so low the climate emergency would effectively be over, just like that!

  • compete better with low-cost airlines, should these continue to be allowed to sell ridiculously low-priced tickets (which is doubtful).

It would however be bad news for almost every other reason I can possibly think of as a sentient being on planet Earth. Here are a few such reasons:

  • because of the huge CO2 emissions from simply building the new planes.

  • because the old Air France planes aren’t leaving the planet—they’ll just go to countries that need planes and don’t have a lot of cash lying around. So the higher “per passenger” emissions won’t actually disappear, they’ll still be there even if you can’t see them anymore because Air France’s annual environmental report is glued over your face. The emissions will just get moved somewhere else. On the same planet.

  • because if Air France competes better with low-cost airlines, it will carry more passengers, make more money, and buy more planes. There is nothing blocking their total CO2 emissions from increasing even as the “CO2 emissions per passenger” decrease.

  • because! Just because! dammit!

The news would of course not be bad for anyone with a financial link to Airbus: designers, engineers, plane construction teams, etc. For that bunch of Canadians, it’s very good news. I get that. Those lucky so-and-so’s might even end up with enough spare dough to buy an AC unit for home, which would totally help them stay cool during Canada’s next heatwave.

Taking a step back from looking at the winners (a few Canadians/Airbus) and losers (all other humans on the disintegrating planet) for a moment though, perhaps the most depressing thing in all of this is seeing Air France bet that their medium-haul European business is here to stay.

What’s in their predictions for the future that we don’t know about?

Saudi Arabia's fictional future →

Saudi Arabia is proposing to build a megacity called Neom in the desert.

The details are stunning. It’s a mixture of dystopian fiction (AI surveillance cameras everywhere!) and childish imaginings (let’s build a robot dinosaur park!). Taken together, the plans remind of you what a dedicated nine-year-old can achieve in Minecraft. Yes, the scale and ambition are impressive, but it’s not like you could do this in real life, right?

Nothing is impossible. But Saudi Arabia proposed building six megacities in 2005 and only one got off the ground: King Abdullah Economic City. This aims to have a population of 2 million by 2035. A year ago, the population had reached… 7,000.

Good luck with that.

But back to Neom:

Whether Neom will live up to its planners’ dreams, though, is anyone’s guess. A lot of factors have stopped Saudi Arabia attracting international business thus far, notes the WSJ, including corruption, a difficult legal system, and social norms that range from unappealing to straightforwardly immoral for Western visitors. Alcohol is banned; women’s rights are restricted; and homosexuality is illegal. (The WSJ reports that some of these strictures might be relaxed for Neom.) That’s not to mention the sweltering weather, which climate change will certainly exacerbate, creating extreme heatwaves and flooding.

Like sunlight in a desert, the brilliance of this plan blows my mind. It’s almost like they sat down and said, “What is literally the worst thing we could do to the planet?”

This from the country that currently burns 700,000 barrels of oil a day in the summer months to produce electricity. Of which 70% is for air conditioning.