Piers Corbyn and the War on Termites

For those unfamiliar with Piers Corbyn, he is a weather forecaster from England. He runs a company called WeatherAction, which sells long-range forecasts for various regions of the world. To quote the Weatheraction web site:

The forecasts are based on predictable aspects of solar particle and magnetic activity and sun-earth connections and their modulation by lunar effects. The unique method developed by Piers Corbyn - WeatherAction founder, astrophysicist, theoretical physicist and weather & climate physicist & forecaster - is kown [sic] as The Solar-Lunar-Action-Technique (SLAT) of Long-Range forecasting.

I've been fascinated by Corbyn ever since reading Boris Johnson's 2010 article in the Daily Telegraph The man who repeatedly beats the Met Office at its own game. (Johnson's written at several more articles for the Telegraph about Corbyn since then.) The 2010 article is about Corbyn's success at predicting December 2010 would be very cold, and contains gushing remarks such as

Allow me to introduce readers to Piers Corbyn, meteorologist and brother of my old chum, bearded leftie MP Jeremy. Piers Corbyn works in an undistinguished office in Borough High Street. He has no telescope or supercomputer. Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again.

and

He seems to get it right about 85 per cent of the time and serious business people - notably in farming - are starting to invest in his forecasts. In the eyes of many punters, he puts the taxpayer-funded Met Office to shame. How on earth does he do it? He studies the Sun.

The bearded leftie brother is now leader of the Labour party, which has put rather more focus on Pier's own believes, for good or bad.

Johnson's claim regarding Corbyn's 85% success rate is presented with no evidence. It's a figure often quoted by his supporters, but I've seen no statistical evidence to back that claim. To me, and many others, it seems Weatheraction's claims of success are more to do with confirmation bias than objective evidence - 5 years on, December 2010 is still held as evidence for his uncanny ability to forecast the weather, but the failure to predict the rest of that winter are quickly forgotten.

Piers the Climate Scientist

I want to look at Weatheraction's results in later articles, but here I'm more interested in his claims about climate science. His Weatheraction site makes his views on global warming and the role of CO₂ plain - he spends more time talking about it on that site than he does about the weather. His views are summed up thus:

WeatherAction is involved in the Global Warming/Climate Change debate where we point out that the world is now cooling not warming and there is no observational evidence in the thousands and millions of years of data that changes in CO2 have any observable effect on weather or climate in the real world.

His work on the subject consists of badly written and intemperate rants, with a fair amount of conspiracy theories thrown in. He claims that CO₂ based climate change is a hoax perpetuated by Big Oil to drive up fuel prices - which is a change from the more usual claims that it is a hoax perpetuated by communists to destroy oil companies. To get some idea of his style here's some brief extracts from a recent post on the Weatheraction site:

Happy(?!) Lenin's Birthday & World Earth Day

The dates are the same because Green campaigners & Eco-socialists (whatever that means) wanted to drag former communist supporters into their scheme of increased taxation and bigger national and world government in name of 'saving the planet'.

In actual fact their de-industrialization and asset-stripping privatisation policies to be applied to the UK, USA and most western countries (but not Germany) and fraudulent manipulation of (weather) data conducted through the United Nations Climate Committee (IPCC) and the European Union diktats such as the EUETS (Emission Trading Scheme) are the OPPOSITE to Lenin's promotion of heavy industry and professed intended application of real objective science for the good of mankind.

...

In the UK it is likley that Whitehall and most Tory MPs know the CO2 story is a pack of lies but promote it as an important ideological component of their green-tax, high energy charges, pro-nuclear, living-standards-lowering, asset-stripping - de-industrialization agenda. The LibDems, Greens (especially) and Labour (with the exception of those that actually know something about science such as Graham Stringer MP) largely believe in the delusion, although they cannot put an argument for it and painfully find themsleves watching the destruction of the steel and other heavy industries and whole communities (of their, not Tory, voters) thanks largely to anti-CO2 and related EU policies of their own making - and go into denial, trying to blame China rather than themselves. They will only give-up the CO2 story when they decide to defend the interests of their UK voters.

Weatheraction - Comments from Piers

It's difficult to believe anyone takes him seriously, but he seems to attract a large range of admirers especially amongst fringe politicians across the political spectrum - Boris Johnson, George Galloway and Roger Helmer MEP for example.

Piers on Termites

Piers Corbyn is frequently introduced as a scientist - often as a real scientist. I suspect people use the word real to indicate that he says what they want to believe. It's difficult to see much science in any of his rants, and he rarely backs up any claim with a source.

One of Pier's obsessions is termites. He mentions them at every opportunity, claiming that they produce ten times as much CO₂ as all human activities, and joking about the need to declare war on them.

Recently he made the claim in a profile in the New Statesman - Piers Corbyn interview: Soviets in Shropshire, termite wars, and Jeremy Corbyn's real EU views

His fury at the scientific consensus that humans are destroying the planet is palpable. If it's true that carbon dioxide is a problem, then the powers-that-be ought to attack the main producers of carbon dioxide. Termites produce ten times more CO2 than mankind, so we should have a war on termites. But we haven't seen any of that, he concludes. There's no war on termites.

In his review of the IPCC we have this marvelous non sequitur.

THEIR CLAIM that alleged CO2 warming due to a small rise in the atmospheric concentration (0.04%) of the trace gas, CO2, is somehow hidden in the deep ocean is scientific nonsense beyond reason, fact or observation. The non-observed warming of the atmosphere cannot realistically get to the deep sea let alone make a sensible difference to the massive oceans (71% of Earth's surface). Termites alone produce 10 times the CO2 of all Man's activity. Will Obama start A WAR ON ANTS?

and in this,

Their dire warning of world warming while it gets colder and their call for more switching to gas from coal - which is a bright Green Light to Russian militarism and gas-blackmail of the Eu; rest on two premises:-

1. That in the present real world increases in the trace gas CO2 (0.04% of air) cause warming and climate change.

2. That even if this were true Man's only 4% contribution of total CO2/ greenhouse gases dominates and nature's 96% conspires that all other CO2 etc from termites (10x that of Man) , volcanoes, rotting plants, cow-fart etc stay constant as a whole, leaving Man's 4% in charge.

and in numerous other places.

The Trouble with Termites

The first problem is he doesn't explain how termites emitting a lot of CO₂ would negate human activity. Nature puts a huge amount of CO₂ into the atmosphere each year, but also takes a huge amount out of the atmosphere each year. As long as the amount in is the same as the amount out, the amount in the atmosphere remains constant. What's changed is that humans are now adding additional carbon into the atmosphere, and as a result less CO₂ is leaving the atmosphere than entering it, so the amount is increasing.

Termite CO₂ emissions are part of the natural CO₂ cycle. As long as termite numbers are not changing the amount of CO₂ they put into the atmosphere will have no effect on the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere. (And if termite numbers are increasing it would probably be due to human activity.)

So what source does Corbyn quote for this claim? In almost all cases he never quotes a source - he simply asserts it's a FACT. The one exception I could find was in this slide show, where on the first page he claims ANTS produce TEN times as much CO2 as ALL man's output!

Aside from him mixing up termites and ants, you can just about see on the bottom right of the page a link to a source. But if you were expecting Corbyn to link to an actual scientific report, you would be disappointed. The link is to a list of Termite and Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Facts on a web site for a company who make termite detectors. The site no longer has that list, but it is archived here, It's basically just a list of fun facts regarding termites.

Sure enough the fact Corbyn is using as a source for his quote is there:

Scientists have calculated that termites alone produce ten times as much carbon dioxide as all the fossil fuels burned in the whole world in a year.

Actually that's not quite what Corbyn claims, he says it's ten times all human output, not just that from fossil fuels. But more problematically, Piers appears to have missed, or chosen to ignore, other facts in the list that contradict the ten times figure (my emphasis):

• It is thought "There are 2,600 different species of termites, and it is estimated that there are at least a million billion individual termites on Earth, that they emit two and four percent of the global carbon dioxide and methane budget , respectively-both mediated directly or indirectly by their microbes.
• The Science magazine reports that termites annually generate more than twice as much carbon dioxide as mankind does burning fossil fuels . One termite species annually emits 600,000 metric tons of formic acid into the atmosphere, an amount equal to the combined contributions of automobiles, refuse combustion and vegetation.

So Piers, who claims to be a scientist makes repeated claims that he only backs up with a single dubious source, and that source contradicts his claims.

As to whether there is any truth behind the termite claim - the short answer is probably not, but I'll leave that for a future post.

Update

Follow up post here.