IoP and the great unwashed

The Institute of Physics Environmental Physics group seems to be very pressed for time at the moment. While meetings are usually announced well in advance, the organisers of the next event, the members day meeting on 22 May, seem to have left things until the last minute. The notice, which, from the document properties, was prepared by Simon Buckle of the Grantham Institute at Imperial, was only sent out yesterday evening. How unfortunate!

This is not the only oddity either. The group's events have previously been open to all comers - the IoP is a registered charity after all, so allowing the public to attend is part of their mission of public education. I hear, however, that for the latest event,  those who are thinking to go along have been advised to bring their membership cards. It appears that the great unwashed are no longer wanted. Will the IoP be turning the public away at the door? What would the Charities Commission say?

Click to read more ...

ECS with Otto

Further to the last posting, and in particular the claim in the BBC article that the 2-4.5 range is largely unaffected by the Otto et al paper, here's my graph of ECS curves with the incorporation of the Otto et al results - both the full-range and the last-decade curves. These are shown in black.  As previously, the other studies are coloured purple for satellite period estimates, green for instrumental, and blue for paleoestimates. The grey band is simultaneously the IPCC's preferred range and the range of the climate models.

As you will see, it is fairly clear that the Otto et al results slot in quite nicely alongside the other recent low-sensitivity findings, with most of the density outside the range of the models. The IPCC's preferred range looks increasingly untenable.

Reactions to Otto et al

Updated on May 20, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Updated on May 20, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Updated on May 20, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Press reactions to the Otto et al paper vary from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Matt Ridley in the Times (£) points to the policy implications and notes that mitigation now looks like a pretty daft approach to take:

It is true that the “transient climate response” is not the end of the story and that the gradual warming of the oceans means that there would be more warming in the pipeline even if we stopped increasing carbon dioxide levels after doubling them. But given the advance of nuclear and solar technology, there is now a good chance we will have decarbonised the economy before any net harm has been done.

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New energy-budget-derived estimates of climate sensitivity and transient response in Nature Geoscience

This is a guest post by Nic Lewis. Please note that although the embargo on the paper was lifted at 6pm, at time of writing the paper itself had yet to appear on the Nature website. It should be at the link given below in the near future.

Readers may recall that last December I published an informal climate sensitivity study at Bishop Hill, here. The study adopted a heat-balance (energy budget) approach and used recent data, including satellite-observation-derived aerosol forcing estimates. I would like now to draw attention to a new peer-reviewed climate sensitivity study published as a Letter in Nature Geoscience, "Energy budget constraints on climate response", here. This study uses the same approach as mine, based on changes in global mean temperature, forcing and heat uptake over 100+ year periods, with aerosol forcing adjusted to reflect satellite observations. Headline best estimates of 2.0°C for equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and 1.3°C for the – arguably more policy-relevant – transient climate response (TCR) are obtained, based on changes to the decade 2000–09, which provide the best constrained, and probably most reliable, estimates. The 5–95% uncertainty ranges are 1.2–3.9°C for ECS and 0.9–2.0°C for TCR. I should declare an interest in this study: you will find my name included in the extensive list of authors: Alexander Otto, Friederike E. L. Otto, Olivier Boucher, John Church, Gabi Hegerl, Piers M. Forster, Nathan P. Gillett, Jonathan Gregory, Gregory C. Johnson, Reto Knutti, Nicholas Lewis, Ulrike Lohmann, Jochem Marotzke, Gunnar Myhre, Drew Shindell, Bjorn Stevens, and Myles R. Allen. I am writing this article in my personal capacity, not as a representative of the author team.

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This house would stop the annual UN climate summits

The Oxford Energy Society is to hold a rather interesting debate on 28 May. The motion, 'This house would stop the annual UN climate summits' is interesting enough, but take a look at the two teams:

Proposition

Dr Benny Peiser
Director, Global Warming Policy Foundation

David Rose
Writer, The Mail on Sunday

Prof Myles Allen
Leader, ECI Climate Research Programme

Opposition

David Symons
Director, WSP Environment and Energy

Fiona Harvey
Environmental Journalist, The Guardian

Dr Chukwumerije Okereke
Reader in Environment & Development, University of Reading

That should set the cat among the pigeons.

More critical science journalism required

Jalees Rehman, a medical professor from the US, reckons we need more critical science journalism.

Critical science journalism takes a different approach and focuses on providing a balanced assessment of the work, one that highlights specific strengths but also emphasises specific limitations or flaws. It is no big secret that the majority of research findings published in peer-reviewed scientific journals will probably not hold up when other groups attempt to replicate them. This lack of replicability can be due to research misconduct, systematic errors or other cognitive biases, which commonly occur even in the most conscientious and meticulous scientists.

Therefore, critical science journalism requires a careful analysis of all the data presented in a paper and is likely to uncover key limitations and flaws that scientific researchers themselves do not readily divulge. This form of science journalism can also encompass some degree of investigative journalism. Journalists lack the resources to check the validity of scientific data by performing experiments themselves, but they can track scientific research in a certain area over the course of months and years as multiple research groups attempt to replicate published scientific findings.

In the climate debate, critical commentary is of course par for the course, at least among the blogs. It's the newspapers that feel they have to act as cheerleaders, usually because the journalists have no scientific background and therefore struggle with any kind of critique.

Happer on CNBC

William Happer recently appeared on CNBC's Squawkbox show, discussing the 400ppm story.

Defra slashes climate change staff

Hoorah for Owen Paterson, who seems to be taking the lead in getting rid of some of the waste in his department:

The Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is preparing to cut the number of civil servants working on climate adaptation from over 30 officials to just six, prompting outrage from green groups who have today accused the government of failing to take adequate steps to protect the UK from worsening climate impacts.

One can't help but wonder if Mr Hague is getting rid of all the FCO's network of climate change advisers too. I'm not sure that showing An Inconvenient Truth to the natives (which as far as I can tell is all they do) quite cuts the mustard as a priority for public spending.

Hansen's scandalous interview

The Today programme also interviewed James Hansen on climate sensitivity this morning (see link below). This was an extraordinary performance by any standards.

Hansen opened with the most astonishing claim about global temperatures,

In the last decade it's warmed only about a tenth of a degrees as compared to about two tenths of a degree in the preceding decade.

a claim which completely contradicts Hansen's own GISTEMP dataset (H/T Ruth Dixon).There is a suggestion that he might have been referring to a land-only dataset, but this would still be grossly misleading since he says that land-only data overestimates trends.

Hansen also spoke of the climate sensitivity, making the bizarre claim that our understanding is based on  paleoclimate rather than models and speaking of the excellence of the data in this area. This is mind-boggling, since these datasets contain so little information that they can barely constrain the climate sensitivity at all. The weakness of the constraint provide by paleo data was noted by the IPCC in the last assessment report, and they decided to base the "consensus" figure largely on models - precisely the opposite of what Hansen said was done.

He also tried to blame the standstill on aerosols, ignoring the fact that the IPCC's best estimate now finds that their effect is small, and he described heat going into the oceans as "a detail" and "a diversionary tactic".

Quite disgraceful.

Hansen Today

Update on May 17, 2013 by Bishop Hill

The Carbon Brief provides further information. Apparently when Hansen said "the trend over the last decade", he meant "the trend in the 5-year running mean over the period 2000-10".

"Sex that I woman did not have with" are the words that spring to mind.

Cook's unreported finding

I really have been struggling to summon up much enthusiasm for the inanities of John Cook's paper, but Brandon Schollenberger has written an extraordinary analysis of the data, which really has to be seen to be believed. Readers are no doubt aware that the paper involves rating abstracts of a whole bunch of research papers to see where they stand on the global warming question.

The guidelines for rating [the] abstracts show only the highest rating value blames the majority of global warming on humans. No other rating says how much humans contribute to global warming. The only time an abstract is rated as saying how much humans contribute to global warming is if it mentions:

that human activity is a dominant influence or has caused most of recent climate change (>50%).

If we use the system’s search feature for abstracts that meet this requirement, we get 65 results. That is 65, out of the 12,000+ examined abstracts. Not only is that value incredibly small, it is smaller than another value listed in the paper:

Reject AGW 0.7% (78)

Remembering AGW stands for anthropogenic global warming, or global warming caused by humans, take a minute to let that sink in.  This study done by John Cook and others, praised by the President of the United States, found more scientific publications whose abstracts reject global warming than say humans are primarily to blame for it.

I'm speechless.

Read the whole thing.

Today does climate sensitivity

BBC Radio's flagship Today programme covers climate sensitivity and features, among others, yours truly. I haven't heard it yet, but this is a holding post until I can find the audio.

Update on May 17, 2013 by Bishop Hill

The audio is here.

What goes around...

It has long been noted that country landowners are using wind farms to make small (and large) fortunes at the expense of the poor. The big political parties are relaxed about this of course, and no doubt the landowners are pretty pleased about it too. However, things may be changing:

THE leader of the Scottish ­Government review of landownership yesterday pledged to examine ways of redistributing the cash wealthy lairds make from wind farms to benefit the less-advantaged.

Alison Elliot, chair of the Land Reform Review Group (LRRG), said the issue would be investigated amid concerns that aristo­crats are benefiting from the renewables revolution while the poor grapple with fuel ­poverty.

This will be interesting. The poor will still be fleeced for the fuel bills, and then the money will be clawed back in some way and handed out, no doubt to "community groups" or other politically connected bodies.

The winners will be the bureaucrats, as ever.

Hefce misuses public funds

I read today with interest that Australian website The Conversation has started up a UK edition (see here), with funding provided by, among others, the higher education funding councils for England, Scotland and Wales.

We know the general theme of Conversation editorial - unadulterated left-wing activism - and the UK edition looks as though it's going to be just the same. For a start, look at the editorial team:

• Stephen Khan, ex-Guardian, Independent, Observer and Sunday Herald.
• Megan Clement, ex-Conversation Oz
• Will de Freitas, ex-Guardian
• Jo Adetunji, ex-Guardian
• Jonathan Este ex-Independent (as well as The Australian - wayhay!)
• Arshat Rathi, ex-Economist, The Hindu and Ars Technica

Click to read more ...

Write in haste, repent at leisure

When the PM received a briefing on shale, Cuadrilla was excluded.

Peter Lilley in the Spectator last week

...bizarrely, [Lilley] claims that Cuadrilla were excluded from an inquiry on shale gas conducted by the select committee of which he is a member.

Will Straw, letter to the Spectator today

The reason Will Straw has gone astray is that Lilley's next sentence was "The select committee instead had to listen to an array of bodies from the Committee on Climate Change to the WWF". You can see how confusion would arise. But I think Straw can be taken to task for firing off a letter without checking his facts.

Update on May 16, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Anybody notice the other letter about Lilley's article? Here's Lilley:

...state bodies are egged on by powerful environmental NGOs, which are heavily financed by the EU (WWF receives €600,000 and Friends of the Earth Europe €1.2 million) and our government (we pay WWF £4.1 million) to create the semblance of popular support.

and here's David Nussbaum of WWF:

Peter Lilley is incorrect when he implies in his recent article that WWF-UK receives funding from the UK government for public lobbying

 Also hugely amusing that Nussbaum would claim that the LSE isn't in the pay of big green. Grantham Institute, anyone?

Cosmic-ray effect small?

A new paper in Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics says that the effects of galactic cosmic rays on clouds is small:

The problem of the contribution of cosmic rays to climate change is a continuing one and one of importance. In principle, at least, the recent results from the CLOUD project at CERN provide information about the role of ionizing particles in ’sensitizing’ atmospheric aerosols which might, later, give rise to cloud droplets. Our analysis shows that, although important in cloud physics the results do not lead to the conclusion that cosmic rays affect atmospheric clouds significantly, at least if H₂SO₄ is the dominant source of aerosols in the atmosphere. An analysis of the very recent studies of stratospheric aerosol changes following a giant solar energetic particles event shows a similar negligible effect. Recent measurements of the cosmic ray intensity show that a former decrease with time has been reversed. Thus, even if cosmic rays enhanced cloud production, there would be a small global cooling, not warming.

It will be interesting to see if Svensmark has anything to say.