;)
Mark Walport's lecture at the Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy is now available on YouTube. It's simultaneously fascinating and infuriating and I encourage readers to watch, although it's an hour long and there's half an hour of questions afterwards, so you will need a clear diary.
Walport is new to his post and to the climate debate and so we should probably cut him some slack, but it has to be said that the scientific part of the lecture was very shallow stuff - much more in the rally-the-troops mould than a serious look at the science of global warming. So we got lots of stuff about carbon emissions and atmospheric lifetimes but nothing - and I mean nothing - about climate sensitivity. This could be seen as an astonishing oversight, but it makes sense if you see his lecture as trying to shore up support for the global warming hypothesis rather than informing the audience.
There was some very dodgy stuff about weather extremes, but in the Q&A Walport was asked, via Twitter, about the IPCC's conclusions about the lack of any appreciable increases in weather extremes. His answer was too poo-poo this position, and say that we are seeing weather extremes now. This is quite a dramatic step for the government chief scientist to take if you ask me. Isn't he supposed to be supporting the IPCC consensus?
There was a whole section on communication, suggesting that the scientific establishment are still labouring under the misapprehension that if they can just get enough PR people or develop just the right message all will be well. I think we have told them where they are going wrong enough times, so let's not labour the point.
Finally, a word on the audience. Cambridge University is supposed to be a hotbed of intellectual activity, but I think it's fair to say that there was not a single probing question delivered to Walport (apart from the one via Twitter) - this was an audience with an oracle, not somewhere where science was to be discussed. And since the great man showed a splendid facility to bat away questions with a combination of platitude and attitude, it is unlikely that any meaningful questions would have got anywhere anyway.
All in all it was pretty poor stuff, but it's still fascinating to watch Walport in action and to wonder who he gets his knowledge of the climate debate from and who is writing his speeches. It's fair to say that he is only getting part of the story.