Bishop Hill Shucks
Jun 25, 2011 Climate: Sceptics Climate: other The FT magazine has a brief piece looking at the work of Emily Shuckburgh: remember her?
Emily Shuckburgh spends much of her time wrapped up against the cold on the far side of the world, measuring atmospheric and ocean eddies for the British Antarctic Survey. But over the past few months she has been rolling up her sleeves and travelling across the UK to confront the public heat over climate change.
With support from Living With Environmental Change, a partnership between government departments and funding agencies, she has run a series of focus groups exploring people’s views on media coverage of science. She endorses projects such as oldweather.org, an attempt to engage the public directly in analysing historical sea temperature data. On secondment to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, she has also been posting videos on YouTube and engaging with “sceptics” via blogs.
Do you think we should have been charging for our time?
Reader Comments (64)
@BBD
You're reading too much into it.
Emily Shukman's "outreach" campaign consists of a short sprint when she visited this blog and commented a few times. She's never been back since and it doesn't look like she reads it now.
There's a lot of talk of "compromise" and "peace conferences" from the warmists. This is a good sign because it shows a collapse of confidence.
They've been on the back foot since Climategate and their support is ebbing away. Don't expect them to give up without a fight. There are plenty of warmists whose whole personality is wrapped up in the existence of a global problem. Plus the armies of rent-seekers and jobsworth bureaucrats who have a career ar stake.
Be prepared for an Ardennes-offensive style push back (Emily ?) and maybe some V-weapons.
Jack Hughes
I often have to point out to the renewables people that their arguments lack - amongst other things - a sense of scale.
In this case, I would suggest the same to you. The 'armies of rent-seekers and jobsworth bureaucrats who have a career at stake' stretch over the horizon in all directions. The political infrastructure of Western democracies has now altered to incorporate a multitude of frequently pointless and counter-productive organisations and policy measures originating from concern over projected climate change.
Nobody out there in the serried ranks thinks that there's going to be a retreat. That would take a long period of stable or cooling GAT.
Even that looks doubtful given the inactive sun, which will no doubt be used as the basis for an argument that a stable or cooling period does not invalidate AGW.
Never under-estimate your opponent. Especially when it has the big battalions lined up and seems intent on enveloping and dispersing tactics thinly disguised as outreach.
I see the 'engagement with sceptics' as being a rearguard action in a losing battle to promote climate alarmism. It's a battle to give climate alarmism a scientific basis in the eyes of the general public. The turning point came around the time of the Climategate affair. I'd say that what's informed people's views, is not particularly the scientific debate but is that the weather, or climate, has not played ball with alarmist predictions, alarm fatigue and that the immensity of the costs is dawning in a time of economic turbulence.
The bigger battle is over the apparatus which has been assembled, involving legislation, energy policy, Carbon Trading and useless jobs, which involves big money and power. Huge amounts of political capita have also been invested. I don't expect the people whose livelihoods depend on the scam to wave a white flag and come out with their hands up at the first whiff of gunpowder smoke. There's some evidence they are trying to change the battleground to 'sustainability' allowing them to forget CAGW.
One of James Delingpole's hard hitting articles showcased the parable of Prodigal Son. I never knew what that story was about until I heard it from Delingploe:
I was reminded of that story again by that very catholic word: 'outreach'.
Yes, indeed, there seems to be an 'outreach' campaign put in place by some individuals in the climate catastrophe movement.
But this outreach looks nothing like the kind that seeks to embrace the marginalised, the unfortunate and the unenlightened.
Rather, it resembles the 'outreach' of a prodigal son who wants to return home and who expects the father will slaughter the remaining calf to honour his return.
Some encouraging news about emissions this week though: the price is collapsing.
At close of trading on Friday 17 June, the price of a June 2011 ECX EUA was E15.40.
At the close of trading on Friday 24 June, the price was E12.07.
That's a 22% collapse in a week during which from settlement to settlement it fell every singe day.
(find it here https://www.theice.com/marketdata/reports/ReportCenter.shtml)
There was a Deutsche Bank research note last week arguing that EU governments are facing another recession and will abandon their emissions policies, which may have had some effect. But DB's view is just speculation and it didn't come out until Thursday anyway.
This strikes me as encouraging. If the price is falling it suggests that sellers outnumber buyers. Sellers can only outnumber buyers if a lot of opinion expects the scheme to collapse and be worth nothing in the foreseeable future, and bets on that view by shorting emissions expecting to buy them back at E0.01 in a few years' time.
I'm not one to assert that it's all over simply because nobody believes the pseudoscience any more. As straws in the wind go, though, a loss of commercial confidence in the emissions tax can only be a good thing.
FT: "Andrew Jack is the FT’s pharmaceuticals correspondent"
That says it all, really. He's been force-fed snake oil ever since he took the job.
Robin Guenier wrote: "... a nice cosy leftie website that has claimed that it’s ready to engage with dissenting voices. So I – and a few others – took them at their word on a thread about..."
I did the same on a similar blog called Deltoid. Admitting that I had my reservations about the AGW hypothesis, I willing to engage in frank debate. It was a useful education in that I was derided for not having read the IPCC's last report in detail. AR4 WG2 is worth reading.
After long debate, I could get no agreement on "falsifiabilty criteria". Whilst I stated that if the GISS anomaly went past a certain figure x times in the coming three years I would concede that the globe is indeed warming, not one warmist would sign up to a symmetrical offer to concede if the graph failed to skyrocket.
The most useful result was in sensitivity and feedback. It's clear to me that if the undeniable warming effect of CO2 is dwarfed by other drivers (such as the sun or volcanoes), then it can be dismissed as trivial, it's "insensitive". As for feedback, the claim is that feedback is positive; if it is in fact negative (temperature rises lead to greater heat losses - a self-correcting mechanism) then Global Warming's a dead duck. These are the two scientific battlegrounds on which the war will be decided.
But, the warmist cult being irrational, the real battleground is political.
Only when the general public is hooting with derision at the unfulfilled apocalyptic claims will the politicians change their tune and cut off the money tap which has biased the science and kept so many NGO parasites on the gravy train.
Does the initials FT stand for 'Fables for Toddlers'?. The content doesn't appear to be for mature readers who have the ability to check sources for the articles they read.
I had a look at the website for the British Antarctic lot, and it has gone all coy and won't give any information. |Perhaps there has been too many FOI questions.
Phillip Bratby said:
I had a look at their About page and am miserable at realising how much of a command economy the UK now is. Here we have people being asked to divine the future to decide who gets funding for 'research' which will be used to justify policy decisions. The needs of the public, consumers and taxpayers don't appear to get a look in. And in a sense they shouldn't - because the Government shouldn't be doing this kind of micro-management.
Gareth
And the result has been a fundamental failure in energy policy. Which, as it increasingly impinges on the public (consumers and taxpayers all) will cause resentment.
The government is foolish to pretend that the Climate Change Act can succeed in its aims.
------------------------
Roger A Pielke Jr; The British Climate Change Act: a critical evaluation and proposed alternative approach
2009 Environ. Res. Lett. 4 024010
Abstract
PDF.
J4R @ June 26 11:58pm
Interesting. Agree.
Sorry, I only just picked up on this thread...
I do think that it is important that we improve the communication of scientific research to general audiences and that is what the project I ran with LWEC funding was about. I'm sure you would all agree that there are real challenges, not least in terms of how to communicate scientific uncertainty. I'm in the process of writing up the results of the project and will happily share it with you when that's done.
Bye for now...
Emily - thanks for dropping by. Just curious if you stand by the one-sided ill-informed and poorly researched bollocks put across in Jack's article. When are you climate scientists going to be honest and admit for example that Antarctic sea ice extent is doing just fine - http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_timeseries.png - and that when chunks break off the Wilkens Ice Shelf (or the Petermann glacier in Greenland) this is just part of a natural process, which has to happen every now and again?
This apparent concern over the poor communication of the scientific uncertainty is just a distraction from the real problem, which is that many if not most climate scientists are politically motivated and have let their concern for the environment (which I am sure is well intentioned) cloud their judgement and influence their output, in both the supposedly scientific journals and also to journalists. ( Btw I write this not as an ignorant /poorly educated / gullible layman, but as someone who has a good degree in the environmental sciences, who is disgusted at the behaviour of key climate scientists like Jones and Mann, who have clearly manipulated dodgy data, and done irreparable damage to broader science in the longer term). Have you or your colleagues (i.e. Eric) read the HSI yet as was suggested by others in the original thread? If you don't have time for the HSI, how about Martin Cohen's excellent 2009 essay: "Beyond Debate?" - http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=409454 (keywords, climate science, sociology, AGW, cascade theory, madness of crowds, groupthink). Highly recommended and very pertinent to your LWEC project too I would have thought. Some very good comments also.
To my mind the key problem is not communication - it is [at least in some cases] dishonesty and the apparent general acceptance amongst the majority of climate scientists that the end justifies the means, such that advocacy of the green groupthink has become the norm, rather than any dispassionate and rational scientific analysis of the alleged CO2 induced AGW thesis.
Btw, the longer the majority of supposedly impartial scientists remain silent over the hockey teams' dishonest and incompetent use of dodgy data and statistics, the IPCC's use of fundamentally flawed models and Greenpeace and WWF sponsored junk science, (and the fact that the planet hasn't been warming for 15 years now), the more difficult it will become for anyone with the word 'climate' on their CV to ever find work or funding again. Another windless winter cold spell or two, and a renewables induced electricity blackout (which in the UK we are only a few years away now), and the media and public will very likely turn on you, and it won't be pretty, as the bankers and expense-fiddling MPs found out.
And please let me know if/when you or your chums find some empirical evidence to substantiate/validate the CO2 thesis, I am as they say, all ears. I go for a combination of longer term oceanic cycles and solar magnetic myself - as recently summarised by Tallbloke -
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/what-caused-global-warming-in-the-late-c20th/
any comments on this from yourself or Eric?