Roots of the Dutch climate denialists, part 3 : stichting kernvisie

The Stichting Kernvisie (or Foundation Nuclear Energy) was found in 2000 and the president is emeritus Rob Kouffeld, who was working on Energy Technology in the Technical University Delft.

In its newsletter, the Stichting Kernvisie's main focus of course seems to be promoting nuclear energy and it considers Nuclear Power to be one of the answers to the climate change problem.

Even though the reasoning is completely logical, there's something odd going on : De Groene Rekenkamer (DGR) is an organisation of climate skeptics claiming there's basically no man-made climate problem, while Stichting Kernvisie uses this same climate-subject as one of the reasons to be pro nuclear power. Apparantly Stichting Klimaat is satisfied by one side of DGR's story, being their applause for nuclear power.

But there's more going on, as is shown beneath the widget


Rob Kouffeld
On top of the apparant contradiction above, when having a closer look one sees Stichting Kernvisie's president Rob Kouffeld (who is member of the advisory board of DGR) is one of the people signing a letter published in the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant saying man is not altering climate.

So while the Stichting Kernvisie's publications may be accepting manmade climate change, Kouffeld himself clearly does not. How he manages to rhyme those two opinions is something i cannot explain, it looks like the man is playing double game.

As can be seen often in an enviro-skeptical environment, what matters is not the arguments used (they can be excluding each other, it doesn't matter), but what matters is the conclusion. In Kouffeld's case : the promotion of Nuclear Power. And both Stichting Kernvisie and DGR do so.


The S. Fred Singer letter
The letter mentioned above, which has spread widely over the internet, is extremely important as it reads as a "who's who" in Holland. Yet the truly amazing thing with this letter is the appearance of a name of a person without direct connections to Holland. That man is S. Fred Singer, the man who built a career as a lobbyist for anyone who needed an anti-environmentalist viewpoint.

It's the first yet not the last time we'll see Singers name appear in the history of Dutch climate skepticism, as it seems to be S. Fred Singer who seems to have been their most important international contact, and this from the very beginning of the Dutch anti-environmentalism.

Sending letters signed by a bunch of (supposed) experts, as we see here, actually is a tactic which the international climate change denialists have used over and over again. Looks like Singer has been a good teacher to Hans Labohm, the author of the letter. Obviously, there's also a clear connection between the names on that letter and De Groene Rekenkamer, as we will see later on.

Dutch climate skeptical organisations pt 2 : De Groene Rekenkamer (intro)

The next organisation which deserves some more attention is The Green Court of Audit or in Dutch : De Groene Rekenkamer (DGR).

As we will see, this is the organisation where different kinds of environmental skeptics (not just in the field of climate change) come together. Clearly, as will be explained later on, DGR is an organisation with a clear political focus.

De Algemene Rekenkamer is the Dutch court of auditors which on its website summarizes its task as follows : The Court of Audit checks that the government spends public funds and conducts policy as intended.

Of course it's this Auditing institute which inspired the name Groene Rekenkamer. Clearly, just from the name itself, one can already see what kind of organisation DGR will be. The organisation was found in 2008 by scientists and journalists and in the statutes DGR describes the aim they were formed as follows (§2) :

The aim of DGR is to critically look at the governmental policy on environment, health, technology & related areas and to encourage scientific analysis of risks, cost-effectiveness of the policy and to spread knowledge to a broader audience.

As a little sidenote i can't resist mentioning that, regarding what's to follow, i was surprised to see that under revenues the very first source the organisation sees is "subsidy". I was amused :-)

Before the official start of DGR in 2008, there already was a coöporation between the different groups which ultimately would join DGR, something MeerVrijheid's Theo Richel (as far as i understand, he became an employee of DGR) was already asking for in 2005 on the website libertarian.nl (sic). The groups which ultimately would form De Groene Rekenkamer are :

• Stichting Kernvisie, ("Foundation Nuclear Energy") which still exists independently.
• Stichting Heidelberg Appeal Nederland ("Foundation Heidelberg Appeal Holland") which indeed found inspiration for its name in the international Heidelberg Appeal
• Stichting klimaat ("climate foundation")
• vzw de Chlorofielen which, as far as i know, was the one-man personal toy of Ferdinand Engelbeen

For a better understanding of what DGR is about, it is useful to have a closer look at the organisations behind DGR. Which will be the topic of the next couple of blogposts.

Climate change skeptical organisations in the low countries. Part 1 : Stichting Meer Vrijheid

As mentioned many times on this blog, climate skepticism often is associated with libertarian thinkthanks and organisations.

As we will see, this is not only true in the English speaking part of the world, but also in the Low Countries.

There are several organisations denying man-made climate change, but the first one i want to mention is the More Freedom Foundation (in Dutch : Stichting Meer Vrijheid) : The discours used towards environmental issues is just what one would expect to hear from a libertarian movement.

Think of any cliché and it can be found in their environmental statement :

We think the existance of large environmental risks like the greenhouse effect, acid rain or the hole in the ozone layer are exaggerrated.
(...)

We think some environmental regulations are unnecessary and are nothing but a result of a hatred against economical growth & technology.
(...)

MoreFreedom thinks environmental taxes aren't helping the environment, nor are they meant to do so. They are meant to finance the State Treasury; or to manipulate our behavior. (...) MoreFreedom therefore pleads to abandon all environmental taxes.

As seen very often in climate skeptical environments, MeerVrijheid's climate skepticism fits into a broader picture where other environmental issues also are dismissed, and where regulations are seen as an attempt of the state to gain more power or control over citizens. The skepticism isn't scientific, but originates from a paranoid vision twoards anything governmentlike.

Marcel Roele - The secretary
The secretary of MeerVrijheid is Marcel Roele. Roele is a politicologist who is working as a freelance science-journalist.

Roele is a rather controversial figure. To quote the Dutch wikipedia :

In his article "Our own people first"* Roele argues Hitler got his race-theory from the Jewish people. Meaning the Jewish people fell in the hole they dug themselves. Furthermore he claims it has been scientifically proven black people and women are less intelligent; and that handicapped people make mankind ill.

* in dutch it's titled "eigen volk eerst" and is controversial as this very same slogan was used for a long time by the Flemish ultra right-wing party Vlaams Blok (which nowadays is called Vlaams Belang, as the party was forced to change its name after three organisations associated with the party were convicted for violating Belgian law on racism & xenophobia).

Roele claims Africa is such a poor continent because the inhabitants simply have a low iq and that :

the national iq in african countries is 20 iq-points too low to make it possible to create a western style society.

Marcel Roele copies some of the usual arguments about climate change in this article which repeats the "it's the sun" story.

Us knows us
Other people associated with MeerVrijheid are omnipresent Hans Labohm who is part of the foundation's advisory board and who on a regular basis publishes his climate change nonsense on MeerVrijheid's website.

Other articles on environental issues that are published on the website are from the hand of some other people i mentioned before like Vincent De Roeck. The website was one of the four places where his climate change is a religion, not science got published simultaneously.

On the list of authors, we also find the name of climate change skeptics Theo Richel and the names of some people i didn't blog about yet, like Elsevier-journalist Simon Rozendaal who is well known in the low countries also for his skeptical articles and for this book he co-authors with Hans Labohm and Dick Thoenes.

Another new name is Karel Beckman who in 1992 wrote the book "the greenhouse effect doesn't exist"

And then there's Peter van Maanen, who besides MeerVrijheid is associated with the the Belgian libertarian Murray Rothbard Instituut where he's one of the 7 people of the scientific advisory board. Also on this advisory board are two climate change skeptics i adressed before : Jos Verhulst & Frank Van Dun. (to be fair : as far as i know both gentlemen have completely stopped commenting on climate change ever since i mentioned them on my blog.)

The important thing is that we start to see a pattern of, as we say in Dutch : "us knows us". From now on, the same names will keep returning over and over again.

In my opinion, with the MeerVrijheid foundation we are looking at one of the most important branches of Dutch climate change tree, because in almost every other skeptical group we there will appear one of the people mentioned above as we will see in the next parts of this post.

Yet even now my conclusion already is, as you will have already guessed, that in the low countries the same thing is valid as in other parts of the world : climate change skepticism is seldomly scientific, but is usually originating in libertarism. Science gets attacked because it falsifies a polical worldview.

Climate Change is a Religion, not Science

A while ago i already mentioned that the president of the libertarian Mises Youth org, young Vincent de Roeck considers climate change to be nothing but a hoax.

Under the provocative title 'climate change is a religion, not science' De Roeck draws attention to his latest article on the subject. As he's inspired by libertarism, his conclusion is pretty predictable : it's nothing but a worldwide complot.

His piece got quite some attention as it's been published on four libertarian blogs simultaneously. Therefore i suppose it might be useful to have a closer look at what he writes and see if this time he does get any further than just a renewed belief in a conspiracy.
(As usual, my translation)

Climate change is a religion, not science

Last week the British conservative thinkthank "The Bruges Group" published the paper "Cool Thinking On Climate Change". In some 60 pages the author, the British member of the European Parliament Roger Helmer is trying to convince his readers that the alarmism around global warming is based on lies and dishonesty and that the actions proposed are dangerous and counter-productive.

Helmer starts his paper with a prelude titled "The EU: Fully paid-up Climate Alarmists" (imho a rather amusing title given the fact he's a MEP receiving a very nice salary from this very same EU) in which the key-quote probably is :

Global Warming? The EU needs more control over energy policy, over tax, over emissions, over industry, over everything.

Of course those words immediately point towards the real reason for Helmers skepticism : it's not based on scientific doubts, but it's an expression of a vision rather common in libertarian surroundings by claiming science is part of a complot set up by the government

Yes Helmer may be a politician and not a scientist, and he freely admits this, his findings nevertheless are most valuable. Helmer doesn't bring new arguments into the debate but summarizes the most important climate skeptical arguments and theories in an easy to read paper.

When having a closer look at the arguments used, indeed there's nothing new in what he's saying. He starts with a three page long attack calling "the Warmists" all sorts of names, mostly in the religious spheres.

His attack on "climate science" is nothing more than a copy of some of the same old skeptical arguments again. Arguments which have been debunked a zillion times before. Honestly, it is getting rather boring and i'm not gonna look at them in detail.

Coby Beck has a nice overview of some frequent heared "skeptical arguments" in his How to talk to a climate skeptic guide and i'm pretty sure Coby Beck's list handles almost everything Helmer says. The only thing Helmers proves is that, indeed, he is not a scientist.

More interesting than the rather silly attempt to discredit science is what De Roeck wrote above (Yes Helmer may be a politician and not a scientist, and he freely admits this, his findings nevertheless are most valuable). I don't understand how one can think the opinion of a total layman can be valuable in a scientific debate and find it remarkable that De Roeck doesn't seem to notice this point. I don't know about you people, but i like my house built by an architect who knows how to make sure it doesn't fall down. My medical problems i prefer to be looked onto by a doctor, etc..

The strong anti-governmental discourse which can be found in Helmers's work closely relates to other libertarian or conservative critics. Like p.ex. the op-ed "The Climate Debate: When Science Serves The State" by professor Joseph Potts for the "Ludwig von Mises Institute" in Alabama or the essay "Global Warming Revisited" by professor Michael Heberling for the "Mackinac Center for Public Policy Research" in Michigan.

The Potts op-ed doesn't get much further than nagging "it's a conspiracy" & the second one does copy some of the usual fallacies, both pieces imho aren't much more than an expression of a paranoid vision to the real world.


These authors rightfully point out, contrary to mistaken neo-Keynesians like a Joseph Stiglitz that the governement, just like privacte actors, doesn't have acces to the "perfect information" and that only the market can handle inherent imperfect information. Something which is fully applicable to the enormous role of the government in dealing with the supposed climate change.

As a result of his skepticism De Roeck obviously overstates uncertainties making him miss the point that the information avalaible is srong enough and clearly states humankind is contributing to present day climate change. It's no longer a question of "uncertainties". The remaining question nowadays is whether "to act or not" and in the second case to which extent to act.

Nowhere in his text De Roeck provides a beginning of an answer how "only a free market" can respond to this situation. Which is no surprise, as we've come to the core dogma, and dogma's need no proof.


The libertarian conservative Roger Helmer in his paper also looks back on his long carreer within the climate skeptical movement and gives some ankedotes about his life. December last year, he represented the climate-skeptical movement as an observer at the UN climate conference in Poznan and in March he was a guest-speaker at the big climate conference of the American Heartland Institute in New York.
The notorious right-wing thinkthank Heartland has been known to give tribune to anyone who wants to say climate change isn't happening. Whether what the person says actually makes sense from the science point of view is less important.


Furthermore, he demolishes the IPCC and proposes alternative theories like the NIPCC by professor S. Fred Singer (where the 'N' stands for non-governmental. The movie "An Inconvenient Truth" of course gets crushed, while all criticism on the movie "The Great Global Warming Swindle" skillfully is rebutted

Fred Singer is known as one of those people who not only deny almost every possible environmental issue, but who built their career on being a denier. Bart Verheggen has a closer look on his deeply flawed NIPCC report

Some of the most obvious problems with the Great Global Warming swindle have been adressed before on this blog. De Roeck proves to not have the background to detect deliberate flawed lobbywork from actual science.

Roger Helmer's ideas the last couple of weeks get support of quality newspapers liek "The Daily Telegraph" and the "Wall Street Journal". In the first one Christopher Booker calles the idea of "Global warming" and the melting icesheets "the biggest lie ever". In the second one Björn Lomborg could freely present his theory of the climate-industrial complex and the close connection between "big business" and "big government", unhindered by scientific truth.

Booker is one of those people that are so wrong it's painful to watch. Deltoid had it's fun having a closer look at some of the most evident problems in his work. George Mobiot wrote How to disprove Booker in 26 seconds, which shows where much skepticism already fails : checking your own arguments. One of the first things a scientist learns is to be critical towards your own statements and towards your sources.
Lomborgs story would be more interesting if it weren't so deeply flawed as demonstrated on the website Lomborg errors. A shorter look on some of the most obvious problems with Lomborg's work can be found on The Way Things Break.


Libertarians like myself hold their breath seeing the govenrment tendency to spend money in "green" technologies, because probably the American investment-guru Eric Janszen is more than right when he said in "Harper's magazine" that the "green" sector would be the next bubble to burst

I stick to the conclusion i made in my previous post on De Roeck : Young Vincent *really* will need to learn that a right wing think thank is not the place to get your scientific information. May i feel so free to suggest magazines like Nature, Science of GRL instead ?

Young Vincent did nothing more than demonstrating that for a certain type of libertarians, science looses the battle from their free-market fundamentalism.

Derk-Jan Eppink & the Green-Right

Derk-Jan Eppink

In spring, Dutch ex-journalist Derk-Jan Eppink joined the Belgian party Lijst DeDecker (LDD) to become a leading candidate on the party's list for the upcoming elections for the European parliament of next week.
(yes, apparantly it's possible a Dutch citizen candidates in Belgium)

As, if the polls are right, Eppink next week probably is going to be elected into the European parliament, it might be interesting to have a closer look at his views.

I've posted before on this blog that his party LDD is circling around climate skepticism, and Derk Jan Eppink is no exception to this rule.

There's a good post in Dutch already adressing some of the things he said.

In February, Eppink wrote an opinion piece (in Dutch) for the newspaper De Standaard, which clearly is showing what can be expected from the man. Some snippets (my translation)

The green-right thinks positively about the environment

Ecology is a religion without God in which politicians get dragged into a climate of fear. (...) That is why a party like LDD chooses for green-right. In contrary to the others, like the Open VLD [the other Flemish liberal party] which started moving to the left for the envoironmental topics until they became ideological neighbours of Groen! [Flemish green party]
Therefore it's not strange this weekend Open VLD is having a congress on climate change. It may sound like a discovery, but climate has been changing ever since earth exists. Greenland is called Greenland because in the past the country was green.
The central question in the debate is : does climate change because of man or not ? That question hasn't been settled : some scientists say it does, other say it doesn't. Some scientists say the heating [sic] of the earth is caused by solar activity, not man. In conclusion : we don't know.
A good environmental policy is hindered by a theological debate on climate change ruled by ecological fundamentalism. Who doesn't support the thesis that climate change isn't real, is depicted as a heathen, a non-believer or a denialist. The discussion isn't about a good policy, but 'good or evil'

[in the rest of the article, Eppink pleads for the use of Nuclear energy, and an optimistic belief in Technical Development (with a mention of Lomborg) and some fulminating against emission-trading]

Personally, I think Eppink misses the point in the final part i translated. It's not a question of 'good' versus 'evil', but about 'reality' versus 'self-delusion' : science does not get attacked on the grounds that the result is unwanted.
Some creationists created an alternative universum with their own education, their own universities, their own filtered version of wikipedia with comforting lies (conservapedia) and their own creationist museum.

I have the feeling that, in a smaller extent, something similar is being done by free-market fundamentalists. That's not the world i choose for.

Bart & Bart
A couple of days after Eppink's piece published, a reply was written by Bart Martens (member of the Flemish parliament for the social-democratic party SP.a) & Bart Staes (member of the European Parliament for the ecological party Groen!).

In their reply , the two Barts also focus on some more things said by party leader JMDD, who clearly has denied scientific findings on more subjects (second-hand smoking, particulate matter, ...)

As a scientist, i can only hope in future the young party LDD still is, will grow into a more mature view on scientific reality.

The column of Tom Nagels
Eppink's article, encouraged Belgian author and columnist Tom Naegels to write a text (in Dutch) called A viking with a diploma

Naegels isn't adressing climate science but using the thought of Green-Greenland to play and take a trip through fantasy.

Yet in his text he does insert this fragment :

Nowhere [in literature] one can read that, at any given moment in time, Greenland really was Green. Or wait, actually you can read this, on obscure blogs sometimes people will make such claims.
But a respectable man like Eppink, having been a journalist, propagated by his party as being an 'intellectual' - a man who wants to become a member of the European Parliament, such a man wouldn't dare to use such sources, would he ? Not on a subject as important as climate change ?
That would equal a situation where the foreign-matters department of the De Standaard [newspaper] would get her analysis of the humanitarian tragedy in Eastern-Congo based on what's written on the blog of Getikt Rikske, 't Zat Flikske ("Crazy Ricky, the Drunk Cop", of course Naegels is just looking for the rhyme)

Without even writing anything about the subject of climate change Naegels managed to detect the point where most climate skepticism already awfully goes wrong : verifying if what you read is correct and if you are not just blindly repeating without verifying if what you read actually is right or not.

Arthur Rörsch's bizarre way of conducting science

Arthur Rörsch

Follow up to the previous blogpost which was dealing with a Labohm/Rörsch text published on three Dutch denier websites simultaniously

A Dutch blog called Sargasso also noticed the clear cherry-picking and demonstrates what happens if you prolongue the graph Labohm/Rörsch (L&R) use : blogger Steeph went to the NASA-GISS data set and instead of using L&R's ten year timespan he randomly added some extra data: 1,5 year at the beginning, one month extra at the end.

The result can be seen in this graph. Suddenly the temperature decline changed into an increase, and a fast one. Steeph correctly concludes that the chosen timespan by L&R strongly influences the result and that the authors carefully selected the data to get a drecreasing trend. Clearly the definition of a cherry-pick.

Steephs criticism resulted in this comment by Rörsch (my translation)

I think Sargasso presents statistical bullshit. Why, i will explain in future publications

I'm anxious to see what his explanation will be, but he already gives a clou in the comments section of his Klimatosoof article :

in my previous comment i already mentioned what i consider to be sherry pikking [presumably this is humor. J] : It's solemly considering a linear trend without considering other [sinusoïdal] curves.

I have the feeling Rörsch is so obsessed with sinusoïdal curves he fails to understand what the cherry-picking citicism he receives actually is about, which makes him both ignore the criticism and makes him adressing a strawman's argument instead. In the comments section of the Klimatosoof i copied Steeph's graph with the extended time span and the effect on the trend.

Rörsch's commented :

The graph presented by Jules clearly shows a linear trend (on the X-axis the years are missing, but we can understand which period is depicted).

What Rörsch said is painfully incorrect : in my comment i clearly mentioned the graph prolongued Labohm's famous graph a little bit. Rörsch must have missed that sentence. Above that I also clearly put a link to the original Sargasso-piece. Rörsch must have missed that link.

The result is Rörsch actually is confronted with a graph of which he doesn't know what timespan it is dealing with.

Which strangely enough doesn't stop him from commenting on it anyway :

I think no-one will deny this linear trend. It is a result of the recovery of the last ice-age, on which was superposed the one of the Little Ice Age in our Golden Age [in Dutch, the sentence is just as weird, i'm translating it as it is. The Dutch Golden Age roughly spans 17th century]

As said, the Sargasso-graph deals with the last 11 years. Rörsch's comment is adressing a totally different period and is ridiculously wrong.


Resumed, this is what you need to do to repeat what Rörsch has done :

1. see something [in casu : a graph] you don't know
2. do not read the explanation given to it
3. Don't let the fact you don't have a clou what the graph is about stop you from fabricating your own theory on it.
4. do not check whether that theory actually is correct [it isn't, we are not just into a recovery of the last ice-age]
5. do not check whether that theory actually adresses the topic in the first place...

Inadvertently, Rörsch has given a brilliant insight in the way he conducts science ...

Arthur Rörsch's bizarre ideas on cherry-picking

I know i've been absent from blogging for a while but my job, involving real science, still has priority.

Yet simply have to mention this post by Hans Labohm published on Theo Richels website Klimatosoof which presents a paper written by Prof. dr. ir. Arthur Rörsch (a 75 year old emeritus in biochemistry actually, but that's qualifications enough to be a prominent climate skeptic nowadays) in which he summarizes some of his objections towards climate science (my translation, my emphasis) :

Arthur Rörsch

Observations show that CO2-concentrations since the beginning of the century has risen some 5,5% while there was no worldwide temperature rise. There are even some indications since 2006 temperatures have been decreasing, and this trend will continue in the next decade.

The article on the Klimatosoof was written in responce to the Dutch PCCC-report.

PCCC stands for Platform, Communication on Climate Change and is a collaboration of several Dutch scientific research centres. Recently PCCC presented the brochure 'de staat van het klimaatonderzoek 2008' (Dutch only, the title means 'climate research roundup 2008')

Amusingly, given the quote above using a three year temperature trend, Rörsch (or Labohm ?) accuses PCCC of cherry-picking : he complains "PCCC presents a misleading graph" for the time period 1900-2008 which could make the people think earth has been warming as "it gives an impression of a continuous rise".

So, if i may believe the Klimatosoof article presenting the entire available data set that is available (1900-2008) is called "cherry-picking", while isolating 3 single years out of that very same dataset is called "science".

The PCCC-graph which gets attacked looks similar like this one from NASA:

Rörsch/Labohm, instead of using all those data in the graph ditch all data that doesn't fit their predesigned conclusion. Instead of using this 100 years-timescale they present a graph which looks amazingly familiar as it's Labohm's well known misleading graph of the past decade:

A. Rörsch has bewildering ideas on science.
Hans Labohm remains a fraud.


Actually Rörsch presents the graph in a context that CO2-levels in the atmosphere don't correlate all that much with temperature. I believe i linked to it before, but this post on More grumbine Science is a must read on the correlation between the two.

UPDATE : Do also read Rörsch' mind numbing post in the comments section of the article