Tuesday
Sep112012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill DECC 3 - the Marland briefing
Sep 11, 2012 Climate: Models Climate: Parliament This briefing prepared for Lord Marland is, if anything, even worse than the last. It is perfectly acceptable for DECC to discuss a claim about the possibility that recent temperature changes are natural. I find it extraordinary that they would try to do so with a graph of changes in various atmospheric constituents.
Reader Comments (28)
Wow. Kudos to Leo Hickman for getting hold of these and publishing them. I've only skimmed this one but as I reach the section on the IPCC and the Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035, with Pachauri's memorable contribution strangely omitted, the phrase "voodoo briefing" comes strongly to mind.
Saw this 'answer' about water vapour and feedbacks. Classic. Interesting how it starts off plausibly but quickly goes very wrong.
"Whilst water vapour is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere
(making 95% of the total), individual water vapour molecules only stay in atmosphere
for a few days, whereas carbon dioxide remains for decades, continuously
increasing global temperatures over that time. The effects of increasing carbon
dioxide concentrations are magnified by feedback loops which allow more water
vapour to be held in the atmosphere. This greatly exacerbates the warming due to
CO2 alone – the so-called water vapour feedback effect."
If this mindless tosh is genuinely what passes for serious analysis at the DECC we are worse trouble than even I thought.
Just when I thought that the sceptics were beginning to win the arguments I see this. It is very frightening
"...whereas carbon dioxide remains for decades..."
AR4, Executive Summary, The Carbon Cycle and Climate, p. 501:
"Carbon dioxide cycles between the atmosphere, oceans and land biosphere. Its removal from the atmosphere involves a range of processes with different time scales. About 50% of a CO2 increase will be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years, and a further 30% will be removed within a few centuries. The remaining 20% may stay in the atmosphere for many thousands of years."
Funny old (half) life.
It is actually quite frightening. We know that politicians will never have the time to dig into the science and so will take their lead from the civil servants as it is always the safest tack to take. The excerpt that Robin highlights above is simply indicative of how completely at sea on the ocean of common purpose those advisers are.
There are days when I am enthused by our efforts and then this. It is as if we are beavering away with our little shovels of logic and along comes the giant bulldozer of official ignorance . . sisyphus anyone?
This is beyond parody.
Craig King; Common Purpose reportedly uses the IPCC scam in its indoctrination, apparently a form of Scientology. So it may be no wonder these people act as they do. Government was warned at the highest level of the fraud nearly 2 years' ago. The problem is the emissions' traders who apparently can blackmail ministers and own troughers, appear to be forcing the issue. Thus at a meeting in No 10 recently, Hone of Shell reportedly excluded Cuadrilla from discussions about shale gas,
It's all to do with establishing monopolies to shaft the Public.
This is just a reworking of the last DECC 2 document you put up eg:-
DECC 2 -Human emissions of carbon dioxide are tiny in relation to natural flows of carbon dioxide, so how can humans be responsible for global warming?
Isotopic analyses confirm the human sources of carbon dioxide. There is no doubt that the amount of human (or ‘fossil’) carbon in the atmosphere is increasing. While human emissions are indeed relatively small compared to natural emissions from terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans, these natural emissions are in close balance with natural removal: the amount emitted is reabsorbed by ‘sinks’ in the geosphere and biosphere. Human emissions have tipped the balance, leading to an accumulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
This appears in both documents, it appears there is a party line at DECC and you do not go off script.
Re: Alan,
"Carbon dioxide cycles between the atmosphere, oceans and land biosphere. Its removal from the atmosphere involves a range of processes with different time scales. About 50% of a CO2 increase will be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years, and a further 30% will be removed within a few centuries. The remaining 20% may stay in the atmosphere for many thousands of years."
That is based on the BernCC model which appears to be flawed. A basic assumption of all models is that CO2 is a well mixed gas and the BernCC model makes this assumption for CO2 entering the atmosphere. What it fails to do, however, is remix the remaining CO2 once some has been removed from the atmosphere. This is why it has the strange "half life" calculation.
It's a different sort of physics than I was taught - mind you Feynman was in his element then.
It is deeply worrying that government policy should be founded on this sort of stuff. The whole thing reeks of 1984 and doublespeak. The reputation of ministers may suffer as a result of their decisions, but the civil servants, who appear to me to be acting like activists, will get away scot-free. Shocking !
I can't bear to read any more of this stuff. It's straight from the department of propaganda. It's as bad as reading the BWEA website and the "myths" about wind power.
Two additional points.
1. Piers Corbyn on the Arctic cyclone which broke up the ice so satellites can't detect so much, has cooled the Arctic and is a consequence of the Northern Jet Stream moving South as we head towards a new Little Ice Age. Soon the ice extent will rapidly increase:.http://climaterealists.com/?id=10198.
2. 2012 will be well below the previous 15 years' average temperature despite CO2 increasing, hence CO2-AGW is very low if not non-existent. It's because thermal radiation from the atmosphere to the surface switches off its IR emission in those bands otherwise no radiative equilibrium, the real GHE,
OK guys to hopefully cheer you up there is a flip side to this drivel and that is if your government was to agree to a debate about global warming tomorrow you have in advance it's debating points.
So if you take each point and debate them on that they really are looking thin as it appears they have simply copy and pasted the IPCC, the question is will DECC change when the new IPCC report comes out?
Shevva: AR5 will be based on a new fraud, the Trenberth-Hansen 'abyssal heat', the claimed missing 0.9 W/m^2. There is no physical reason for this [check out the UNESCO equation of state for water to confirm]. Also present will be the old 'net AIE cooling' fraud developed by Hansen a year ago into a claim that with the small and real aerosol cooling, it exactly counters CO2-AGW so the World is not warming.
These people are brazen scientific fraudsters abusing their control of the peer reviewed literature and won't give up because they are ultimately backed by the big banks who want emissions' trading to replace the mortgage scams.
My God, this is awful.
I think it might be the first document of its size I have ever seen where EVERY SINGLE PARAGRAPH is open to reasoned and substantial challenge. It is really depressing that this is a "briefing" - completely and utterly depressing.
This is where we are getting "beaten" every time. Its a great window into what civil servants and policy "informers" are up to. I'm really fed up now.
Saw this on another blog recently. Seems apposite, especially after reading the moronic drivel from DECC. Note the description of the element 'Administratium':
The CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) has discovered the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element is called Governmentium ( Gv ).
It has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lefton-like particles called paeons.
Since Governmentium has no electrons or protons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every action with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause an action normally taking less than a second to take from four days to four years to complete.
Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2- 6 years. It does not decay but instead undergoes a reorganisation in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganisation will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.
This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.
When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many paeons but twice as many morons. All of the money is consumed in the exchange, and no other by-products are produced.
TerryS
Thanks. I hope they apologise for worrying our policy makers.
Climate change policy: where the hubristic and the stupid mislead the ignorant to coerce the hapless into relinquishing an uncertain future in favour of a neverending suffering.
The last election was a putsch by the EU and emissions' traders to put in place their Quisling.
We are now in the early months of the counter-revolution, as are all the other major EU economies.
Our local paper has an article today about heatwaves of the past, including the great 1022 drought when both the Rhine and the Rhone dried up.
I've not heard of that happening recently. I wonder if DECC have done their research as diligently as they might!
It would be quite easy to make a point by point rebuttal. Practically every DECC statement could easily be given a counterpoint to show why it is questionable, a misleading half truth, or actually wrong.
However the aim of this kind of briefing is simply to give Marland a series of sound bites he can use to defend his policies and to make sure that his mind stays firmly closed to the possibility that these policies are seriously mistaken.
If he is myopic and foolish enough to be happy with this, then there is nothing we can do other than work to remove him.
"voodoo briefing" comes strongly to mind.
Sep 11, 2012 at 12:22 PM Richard Drake
My recollection is that the phrase was "voodoo science".
When governments sack scientific advisors, eg Prof. Nutt, for telling the truth, this comes as no great surprise. They are told what they want to hear.
You want to keep your job/grant money.......
5:12 PM | dave
"It would be quite easy to make a point by point rebuttal. Practically every DECC statement could easily be given a counterpoint to show why it is questionable, a misleading half truth, or actually wrong."
What a great idea - and at every point, a running total of x questionable, y misleading half-truth, z actually wrong.
Come on, who is going to do it? It really would shame them into discarding such shoddy tactics.
Winston. Oh Winstooooon. Time to go back to Room 101 for a while.
Dellers covers the Marland briefing. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100180349/camerons-reshuffle-too-little-too-late/