Thursday
Apr082010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill FT letters
Apr 8, 2010 Climate: HSI Climate: Surface David Henderson's letter in the FT yesterday has prompted a couple of responses.
Bob Ward seems to admit that there is a problem with a lack of openness, but maintains that the temperature records are sufficiently rigorous. It seems to me that it is quite clear that the temperature records are not sufficiently rigorous because, as everyone agrees (I think), the surface stations do not meet the standards set for them. Whether the result is affected is another, as yet undecided, question, but "sufficiently rigorous" they most certainly are not.
Mike Post meanwhile thinks that FT readers should get hold of a copy of the Hockey Stick Illusion, an idea which to me seems to be very sound advice.
Reader Comments (17)
Whilst Mike Post has undoubtedly done the FT's readers a favour, just out of interest I wonder if he is another of your pseudonyms, Your Holiness?
;0)
Not guilty! I would have spelt my own name correctly!! (Usually, anyway).
I wonder, has anyone noticed the similarity between Climate Change Expert, Bob Ward, and our old friend Dr. Evil of the GLOBE thread. I think we should be told.
Perhaps Bob Ward's job title should be changed to "Obfuscation Director". Like Gavin Schmidt he has an aversion to inconvenient truths. If the public knew how large the grid cells are, how poor the coverage is in the oceans and the polar zones, and how much undocumented manipulation has gone on, they would have no time for his platitudes.
Bob Ward's letter is just a strawman. Does anyone know if he has any scientific training?
Bob's view of the significance of the CRU emails:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/20/climate-sceptics-email-hacking
Don't links to newspapers such as the FT which want you to log on and eventually pay not encourage little internet cliques and discourage openness and debate ? Like at the CRU etc.
That the temperature records are 'sufficiently rigorous' suggests that Bob W. thinks that temperature records have become hot enough for his tastes?
Merriam-Webster thinks it means harsh or severe, or 'marked by extremes of temperature or climate.....'.
If however, he means the alternate interpretation of 'exacting' or 'scrupulously accurate' I would ask why Hadley/CRU, GISS, NCDC et al all get different answers from the same dataset? Surely, if we are to be constantly assailed with dire predictions and ominous portents given to the second decimal place, and the records are 'sufficiently rigorous', there can be only one?
Joe - I don't like log in sites but FT have never attempted charging me in all the time I've been registered. Nor do they spam me. Try it - Unlike CRU's data, as far as I know, it's open to anyone.
Drew, I confirm that I am me and not the Bishop. NBY, I subscribe to the hard copy FT but I am registered with the internet version and the website has just started trying to charge me. I decline to pay of course and stick with the free bits only.
The FT's website exclusiveness reinforces my view that the only way to spread the message to the as yet oblivious is via the hard-copy letters page.
Kind regards - the real Mike Post
I watched Bob Ward in action, live, at the Royal Institution when Roger Pielke Jr. was there.
He is a PR man, period. He did not say anything of substance in that meeting except maybe during a presentation on the evidence linking global warming to the cost of hurricane damage - which was already discredited by Pielke anyway, a point made during the debate. At the end he reacted to questions with the "think of the children" line of primitive emotional manipulation - also, as if that was a sort of unanswerabke argument - "it's about the future of our children and our children's children".
I don't know if he has any scientific training, but there he seemed to be just a PR man - sort of Michael Mann without the pretence of being a scientist.
Mike Post,
I've used up my ten free articles. Could you post your letter here?
Peter B "I don't know if he has any scientific training, but there he seemed to be just a PR man".
Bob Ward has a degree in geology, and you are right, he is a PR man: Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, headed up by none other than Lord Nicholas Stern as Chairman. Ward was formerly Director of Public Policy with Risk Management Solutions, and before that leading the media relations team at the Royal Society.
The Grantham Research Institute is bankrolled (£12 million in 2007 alone) by the Grantham Foundation, which also bankrolls Greenpeace, WWF, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Woods Hole Research Institute and many other eco-fanatic advocacy groups. Any suggestion that Bob Ward is a dispassionate scientist can be forgotten. His whole role is to broadcast propaganda for his paymasters.
Ward's previous employer, RMS, is an interesting organisation....they sell complex but in my view poorly calibrated models to insurers and have persuaded about 80% of the insurance market to effectively outsource their analysis of catastrophic risk to them, this creating an enormous systemic risk. They recently got in a tangle over whether their head of research, Robert Muir-Wood was misrepresented by the IPCC and the Stern gang - they used to suggest that natural catastrophes were increasing in severity, mainly because of a flaw in their methodology for estimating growth in insured asset values in coastal regions, but as they corrected their models in response to the 2004 and 2005 hurricanes they realised that this was not actually the case. By this time the Stern crew and the IPCC had used RMS' work to argue that hurricanes were getting worse as a result of AGW, in direct contradiction of most published work on the subject. This was a step too far even for RMS, in spite of their obvious financial interest in ramping up fear of weather related disasters. (And mine, in the interests of transparency!)
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/01/robert-muir-wood-on-stern-report.html
PS It's fun to see Josh Halpern aka Eli Rabett in the comments, argung black is white as usual.
Suramantine,
Here is the text of the letter that I sent to the FT with the Bishop's name corrected to include the 't'!
Regards
Sir
Cooler on warming
You rightly criticise the IPCC for its “dodgy claims” yet assert, without providing any evidence, that the consensus remains that man’s activities are contributing to climate change in a way that may be disastrous. You also refer to the UEA e-mail scandal and claim that these events have not disproved the scientific findings.
Surely the Financial Times, with its easy access to expert financial statistical analysis, could commission its own investigation into the painstaking statistical work of the Canadians, Steve McIntyre and Professor Ross McKitrick, who have, in the opinion of many, demolished the hockey stick which is the scientific finding on which the claimed man-made global warming consensus rests. A.W. Montford’s recently published book, ‘The Hockey Stick Illusion’, is a useful starting point.
Yours etc
Mike Post
Well done Mike. Great to have a letter published mentioning all three M's! When you suggested yesterday that people write to the FT I thought that was optimistic, and that they would publish a stream of warmist letters today. Clearly I was wrong - perhaps 'the climate is changing'.
The Real Mike Post
I knew you were the real Mike Post and not His Holiness all along. Honestly. It was just my feeble and pathetic attempt at humour to lighten up proceedings, post Messenger. (I did think it was a dead give-away though, and especial nice touch mis-spelling your, I mean, the Bishop's "real" name.)
The depressing report from Messenger earlier in the day on state manipulation at our eco schools must have pushed me over the edge. The alarmists of course have been warning us about this tipping point, and I'm afraid that I had ignored them.
In any case, as all regular readers here will know, the Bishop is not the Real Mike Post but in fact, really, Lord Monckton, just in one of his cunning disguises. Note the cherry picked evidence, approved by a consensus of climatologists: both names begin with a capital M. Coincidence? I think not.
No, only joshing of course. Still, if I understand these things correctly, the "basic physics" does actually prove this beyond all doubt, along with AGW, that Gordon Brown has simultaneously saved both the planet and global economy, and, of course, 42.
Now, having upset the Real Bishop and the Real Mike Post, and no doubt bored everyone else silly, can I ask that we don't lose sight of the real issue here? Is Dr Ward, the world renowned geology student, actually the Real Bob Evil?
I wonder if Josh could illuminate us on this matter? And Real Mike, another letter to the FT perhaps?
“Bob Ward seems to admit that there is a problem with a lack of openness, but maintains that the temperature records are sufficiently rigorous.”
Rigorous, my a**e. Adding the environmental biases, due to poor station siting and urban encroachment etc., it seems that the temperature measuring instruments, themselves, are not of the required precision nor long term stability, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/09/accuracy-of-climate-station-electronic-sensors-not-the-best/ , to mine miniscule trends from the data. There is a big question mark over the proper, regular calibration of the instruments, as well, to ensure meaningful, reliable data.
All in all, the whole data base is corrupt from top to bottom, as a means of detecting any alleged human contribution to natural climate change.