Here come de heap big warmy

Telegraph blogger Sean Thomas was at the Met Office meeting and was able to get the low-down on what was said. I think we should be worried.

First, I asked Stephen Belcher, the head of the Met Office Hadley Centre, whether the recent extended winter was related to global warming. Shaking his famous “ghost stick”, and fingering his trademark necklace of sharks’ teeth and mammoth bones, the loin-clothed Belcher blew smoke into a conch, and replied,

“Here come de heap big warmy. Bigtime warmy warmy. Is big big hot. Plenty big warm burny hot. Hot! Hot hot! But now not hot. Not hot now. De hot come go, come go. Now Is Coldy Coldy. Is ice. Hot den cold. Frreeeezy ice til hot again. Den de rain. It faaaalllll. Make pasty.”

It's not just the Marxists

The Science and Technology Committee has announced a new panel of witnesses for its inquiry into the public understanding of climate science. After hearing from a Marxist think-tank and an ex-Marxist public relations wonk later today, they will also take evidence from some scientivists and some plain activists next week. If the web page is to be believed they are going to do this session at the Science Museum rather than in Parliament.

Climate: Public understanding and policy implications 9:05 am; Science Museum

Witnesses: Professor Nick Pidgeon, Understanding Risk Research Group, Cardiff University, Professor Chris Rapley, Communicating Climate Science Policy Commission, UCL and Dr Alex Burch, Director of Learning, Science Museum Group; Professor John Womersley, Chief Executive, Science and Technology Facilities Council, and Champion for RCUK Public Engagement with Research, Professor Tim Palmer, Vice President, Royal Meteorological Society and Professor Rowan Sutton, Director of Climate Research, National Centre for Atmospheric Science

That Met Office meeting

The Met Office's meeting to discuss the run of poor weather we have endured in recent years has been the subject of considerable interest on the blogs and Twitter, although to tell the truth I can't get that excited about it. I find it a bit odd that the Met Office would want to publicise the fact of holding a meeting anyway. Having done so it's a bit rum to then complain that the media have done what the media do, blowing it up out of all proportion and saying that it's a crisis meeting.

The upshot of all those brains being put together seems to be that it might be something to do with the North Atlantic Oscillation and it might be something to do with Greenland ice melt, as Louise Gray reports in a somewhat strange article here.

Shale blithe spirit

Reality seem finally to be dawning on the Scottish Conservative Party, whose deputy leader Murdo Fraser has suddenly started making positive noises about shale gas.

Shale gas has revolutionised energy markets in the US and has substantially reduced costs for both consumers and industry and I believe it has the potential to do the same for Scotland.

“Nearly 40% of Scottish residents are struggling in fuel poverty. I want to see a proactive Scottish Government approach on shale gas that will give hard up Scots a route out of fuel poverty.

“Recently I have visited several factories in my region, and they are crying out for shale gas in order to level the energy price playing field. Unless the Scottish Government can devise a balanced, fair and affordable energy policy, high energy prices will cost manufacturing jobs.

“The potential for offshore shale gas has yet to be explored and I would recommend that the Scottish Government follow DECC’s recommendations and use the existing North Sea infrastructure to tap into this resource.

Murdo is the deputy leader, so this should be seen as a significant statement of intent.

Lew deconstruction

Ben Pile has written an excellent deconstruction of the Lewandowsky papers for Spiked! It's good to have the failings of Lew's work summarised in this way, but the article is particularly interesting for what the academy's celebration of this kind of nonsense tells us about their standards.

Lewandowsky demonstrates that the academic institutions do not produce dialogue that has any more merit than the petty exchanges — flame wars –that the internet is famous for. Dressing political arguments up in scientific terminology risks the value of science being lost to society — its potential squandered for an edge in a political fight. After all, if Lewandowsky’s work is representative of the quality of scientific research in general and the standards the academy expects of academics, what does that say about climate science and the quality of the scientific consensus on climate change? If the scientific argument about the link between anthropogenic CO2 and climate change is only as good as Lewandowsky’s claim that ‘Rejection of climate science [is] strongly associated with endorsement of a laissez-faire view of unregulated free markets’, then perhaps climate sceptics should be taken more seriously.

Some model thoughts

There have been a few interesting bits and pieces floating round on the subject of climate models in recent days.

At WUWT, Bob Tisdale has reviewed the CMIP5 model predictions of Antarctic sea ice and found that they have performed no better than their predecessors.

Judith Curry has focused on a paper by Stevens and Bony that looks at one of the fundamental deficiencies of climate models - their inability to represent clouds - and considers the futility of trying to add complexity in other areas until this basic failing has been overcome.

And then Doug McNeall tweeted the following remarks in defence of the CMIP5 ensemble:

The CMIP5 ensemble is not set up a a calibrated probabilistic prediction system: it doesn't pretend to be one either.

It is just a set of plausible trajectories that the climate might take, given a certain set of forcings.

They're not predictions - just plausible outcomes, and those outcomes have not been borne out in practice. The models have fundamental deficiencies too.

Do the policymakers discussing the Energy Bill in Parliament today understand these issues?

Energy Bill second reading

The second reading of the Energy Bill takes place in the House of Lords today at 3pm. From the Parliament website we learn that:

If the bill is read a second time, Baroness Verma to move that the bill be committed to a Grand Committee.

The video should be available here.

Radial pulses

Good to Steve M back in the saddle at CA, where he notes some comments of Keith Briffa's that would seem to condemn much of the IPCC's millennial temp reconstruction corpus to oblivion:

I very much welcome the strong position taken by Briffa and coauthors against the use of radially deformed tree ring data. I look forward to the prompt application of these standards by Mann and others to strip bark chronologies. Given realclimate’s endorsement of [Briffa 2013], I presume that realclimate will urge that all reconstructions relying on bristlecones be recalled pending assessment of radial deformation and inhomogeneity according to [Briffa 2013] standards.

An odd coupling

Reader Jelle U. Hielkema left an interesting comment about Aubrey Meyer's evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee last week. Meyer has accused the Met Office of deliberately misleading the committee in earlier evidence:

[Y]ou asked me to summarise the key points in Aubrey's work. I am assuming you mean on the matter of ‘contempt for the house‘. To do this you need to look at Aubrey’s *written evidence* to the EAC particularly on pages 19 and 20. It is here: -http://www.gci.org.uk/Documents/EAC_Real_.pdf

The key point in this is the *p

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Kiwi greens downgrade climate concerns

Reader Peter sends me an article from the New Zealand Business Review. The article is paywalled, but it reveals that the Kiwi Green Party has been downplaying concerns over global warming, with the subject now barely warranting a mention at the party's annual conference.

The down rating is huge. Green co-leader Russel Norman in his speech to this month’s annual conference never once mentioned global warming...The Green Party did have a climate change conference the following week but Mr Norman’s keynote speech lacked any of the usual end-of-world prophecy and knee-jerk call to de-industrialise. His concern was the pedestrian one that New Zealand is failing to meet its international obligations.

There was no hellfire and no brimstone.

Birthday gongs

The Queen's birthday honours list was announced today. Climatologists were not in evidence but there were a couple of familiar names: Iain Stewart of Climate Wars fame and Fiona Fox of the Science Media Centre.

Met Office withdraws article about Marcott's hockey stick

The Met Office's My Climate and Me website has removed a blog post about the Marcott Hockey Stick:

We previously posted an article entitled “New analysis suggests the Earth is warming at a rate unprecedented for 11,300 years” covering the paper by Marcott et al in Nature. The title of our article drew on the original press release for the paper.  However, we note that authors of the paper have since issued an extensive response to media coverage [http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/response-by-marcott-et-al/] which includes the following statement:

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Kevin Trenberth is a very naughty boy

Lucia Liljegren has discovered Kevin Trenberth being naughty with one of his graphs. I mean very naughty.

One can...speculate why Trenberth didn’t compare the 12 year flat (and negative) trend ending in 2012 to 12 year ‘flat’ trends in the past. The current period is the only period with a “flat” (or negative) trend. Presenting that comparison would certainly give “impression[.] that the global mean temperature is not increasing at its earlier rate”.

Oh dear. Read the whole thing.

Update on Jun 14, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Trenberth is even naughtier than we thought.

Just remember folks, if you commit the sin of publishing sceptics, you have to apologise to Dr Trenberth.

GWPF and the Charities Commission

The Grantham Institute for Climate Change continues to spend its time pursuing GWPF rather than doing anything constructive with the money it receives from Mr Grantham and the Global Green Growth Institute. Bob Ward has issued a complaint to the Charities Commissioners about something or other.

It feels a bit desperate to me.

As an aside, the GGGI looks interesting, apparently having morphed from a Korean non-profit organisation into a fully fledged transnational organisation. The relevant order for legal immunities is apparently being rubber-stamped in Westminster.

On the meaning of ensemble means

Readers have been pointing me to this comment at WUWT. It's written by a reader calling themselves rgbatduke, and it considers the mean and standard deviation of an ensemble of GCM predictions and asks whether these figures have any meaning. It concludes that they do not.

Saying that we need to wait for a certain interval in order to conclude that “the models are wrong” is dangerous and incorrect for two reasons. First — and this is a point that is stunningly ignored — there are a lot of different models out there, all supposedly built on top of physics, and yet no two of them give anywhere near the same results!

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