Friday
Jan102014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Friday funny
Jan 10, 2014 Climate: WG2 According to Peter Stott of the Hadley Centre, it was fair of David Cameron to suspect that the recent UK storms were linked to climate change. Myles Allen agrees.
Cameron may not be right, but he has the right suspicions.
Reader Comments (71)
To be absolutely fair.... it IS fair to have suspicions of anything you like.
Most of climate scepticism has been (up to recently) a suspicion that the science wasn't settled.
What it is NOT fair to do is to use those suspicions as a basis for policy, or as a basis for censorship,
presentation bias, or vilifying people who have opposing 'suspicions'
Suspicions are fine.
But we don't run countries and economies on suspicions. Facts, please.
Phew! Good to hear that that our climate scientists are now falling back into line with the political lead.
For a moment there I was worried.
This is the same Myles Allen who made the 11 degrees C prediction.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4210629.stm
He had to admit that there was a software error in their simulations
"The mistake probably happened, says Allen, because of the complexity of the model, which was designed at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, UK. "These climate models are some of the most complicated pieces of software in the world," he says. "This model was designed to be the world's best, not to be an easy piece of software to run on a PC.""
http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060417/full/news060417-4.html
And the man who wrote
"Contrary to popular myth, the original "hockey stick" reconstructions of temperatures over the past millennium played no role in the IPCC's 2001 assessment that most of the warming over the past 50 years was likely to have been caused by rising greenhouse gas levels."
"Possibly the most important criticism in the Muir Russell review is their finding that "given its subsequent iconic significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the TAR), the [hockey-stick] figure supplied for the WMO report was misleading" for not making clear that the tree-ring series had been truncated and instrumental data spliced on"
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jul/07/climategate-review-expert-verdict
Does anyone really listen to Myles Allen!
Have Stott & Allen been told by the Cabinet Office to come to Cameron's rescue? At the end Stott concludes
"Dr Stott said the bad weather that Britain had been experiencing was linked to the polar vortex currently experienced by America.
“You can see there is a link between the cold air in the US and what we're getting,” he said: “There is a connection because the air is always circulating around the globe.” This sounds like the original MET line.
There you go, climate science - license to have politically convenient speculations. From Yeb Sano to David Cameron.
Stott and Allen. The new comedy duo, ad lib a speciality.
Myles Allen [snip - manners]could not get his loaded dice to work on national television: http://youtu.be/O1Mv8xWHU44 and then proceeds to lie about what the viewer has just witnessed. Not exactly a scientist.
Not a patch on Flanagan and Allen, though.. :-)
"the air is always circulating around the globe"
AGW must be true, then...
I'm sure Dr Allen has made a principled and independent statement in accord with his scientific understanding of the data.
In other news: (from the Bishop's link above)
"Prof Allen estimated that providing the Met Office or European Centre for Medium Range Forecasts with around £10 million a year would allow experts to model the weather against conditions that would have occurred if humans had not interfered with the climate."
It is just a newly discovered phenomenon:
Causation (speculated) without correlation
These guys know on which side their bread is buttered. It is all but incredible that the cagw saga would have included such a massive impact on politics without a symbiotic relationship between the pushers and the politicians.
@Cumbrian Lad
You beat me to the post - that's a beauty of a quote.
Given that they can't predict what the weather will be in a month, year or decade, it is optimistic to think that they can say what the weather would have been.
But you've got to admire their resolve and their willingness to plough on against the odds - for only £10 million a year they will roll up their sleeves and have a jolly good go anyway.
Was it not Peter Stott who recently asserted that there is a linear relation between atmospheric CO2 and global temperature? And who is "Head of Attribution" or something like that?
They make it up as they go along.
Just a day or so back it was
10 million a year and we'll prove it. Is that confirmation bias, extortion or fraud?
Since Cumbrian Lad beat me to the £10m bit may I take issue with this:
"The public is being asked to spend a substantial amount of money (on climate change), they deserve to know what climate change is doing to them. At the moment we're not delivering nearly as an authoritative answer as we could."
No, the public HAS NOT BEEN ASKED - we are having "a substantial amount of money" (the understatement of the millennium) being stolen from us with no choice in the matter. As for an "authoritative answer" - what, like the Met Office completely changing its tune over this matter in a couple of days?
When my blood pressure has subsided to merely dangerous levels I'm going to paste all the text in the Telegraph piece into a text editor and use the search function to count how many times "climate change" "likely" "extreme" and a few others are used...
So Climate Science embraces the concept of Truthiness?
Well that didn't take as long as I thought - out of 720 words, the leader is climate change (10), then extreme (8), could (5) followed by global warming, likely & intense (3 each).
And since he closed with: "We need to understand how the climate is changing" - how does that square with claims that "the science is settled", "beyond any doubt" and all the other similar utterances from the warming mob?
"Prof Allen estimated that providing the Met Office or European Centre for Medium Range Forecasts with around £10 million a year would allow experts to model the weather against conditions that would have occurred if humans had not interfered with the climate."
As things stand, we have dozens of expensive climate models scattered around the globe - none of them work.
Why don't we identify the one that best reflects reality and focus our efforts, rather than continue to inefficiently scatter resources and duplicating effort on many clearly faulty models? The mere act of defining the criteria for selecting the best model would be a huge step forward.
Will Myles Allen still love Cameron when George Osborne cuts University Science funding.
it is as fair not to link storms with global warming...
We have a saying on this side of the Atlantic that liars use when they are caught out that somehow seems to be a fitting way to think about the defenders of PM Cameron:
"It was false but accurate".
You beat me to it, CharmingQuark. Myles "11°C" Allen, seems a bit like Richard Muller: More interested in self-promotion than self-consistency in their dealings with the MSM. They are both intelligent enough and experienced enough to know when they are playing to the gallery, and when they are choosing to be true to their scientific calling. Yet they appear not to be able to realise that others can spot them doing it.
While we're on the topic of freak storms, did you hear about Tim Yeo's deluge of Christmas cards?
http://www.eadt.co.uk/news/politics/south_suffolk_mp_tim_yeo_says_he_is_playing_strictly_by_the_rules_1_3181508
Dumb comment of 2014 (by Dr Peter Stott, Met Office Hadley Centre, as quoted by Daily Telegraph):
Keep a look out for something dumber from a warmist, it's very likely to happen.
But but but..yesterday, we had this story
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/10562148/Britain-warned-of-more-droughts-caused-by-climate-change-and-growing-population.html
Pharos
Drought/unprecidented rain - not inconsistent with CAGW.
Strange how everything (e.g. cold, hot, ice, ice-free,flood, drought) are never incomsistent with CAGW!
Reminds of the phrase "God works in mysterious ways".
Climate "science" makes astrology believable!
Shouldn't all climate models be Open Source / Public Commons or whatever it's called? Also, there are lots of Programming Challenge competitions out there, designed to test the skills of *real* geeks/nerds/boffins or whatever - how about asking the ACM (don't bother about the BCS, they are long past the point at which any of them aspired to be other than managers/CIOs) to set a compo up to generate the best model.
Preamble to this - crowd-source the datasets which need to be matched. Worth a try? Climate Olympics, anyone??
"Shouldn't all climate models be Open Source / Public"
As we know, climate scientists (like Phil Jones) don't like to show anyone what they're doing in case those people "want to find something wrong with it", after all every time something has leaked it's been found to be hopelessly flawed. While to honest people this furtiveness seems like the action of frauds who know their life's work is junk, to the climate science community it's business as usual.
Climate sceitivists do their own credibility catastrophic damage by claiming they have evidence of the end of the world - while making ridiculous excuses to keep that evidence secret. Only the foolish and the dishonest could accept that.
//
Professor Myles Allen, head of the climate dynamics group at Oxford University, said Mr Cameron had "got the balance about right" with his comments that he very much suspected a link between recent abnormal weather patterns and climate change.
"It is possible to discern a link between these extreme weather events and human influence on the climate."
"We're seeing a change in the frequency of the weather that we get.” //
I suspect Myles Allen will not be able to present any auditable >= 100 year data set which will support his assertions.
I further suspect nobody else could either, but it would be nice to know for sure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_period
Why don't we identify the one that best reflects reality and focus our efforts
Jan 10, 2014 at 6:47 PM Political Junkie
Because they are *all* rubbish. They are attempting to do something that is beyond their capabilities (and beyond anyone's) in view of the effects that are not well understood and are then, at best, modelled by 'parameterisation' plus without doubt effects that are not even known about. Plus they are trying to model a distributed system using a discretisation grid that is far coarser than the details that need to be included. Quite apart from all those issues, there is also the little detail that validation of the model is essentially impossible, which means that models are doomed to remaining essentially useless.
Climate modelling, is, to coin a phrase, nothing more than a great big wank.
Come on, Martin, tell us what you really think. :)
The Beeb have picked it up. I read the BBC article first and thought it was a rather unsubtle rent-seeking request.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25684933
Charmingquark
Yeah. I would love to see Richard Dawkins and other ultra-famous atheists (like PZ Myers) take up the fight against climate change science, clearly a malleable religion, rather than working hard for 'female infant genital protection', 'feminism destruction' and against what average people's beliefs en-route to obtaining mental peace.
Martin A, I don't disagree with you but if were going to dink around with climate models, let's just have just one - preferably not in my tax jurisdiction. As a Canadian, there's little risk that my dollars would come into play - our model is about the worst of the lot. It's running hot, hot, hot!
I'm still waiting for someone explain why we need more than one model. Doesn't the mere existence of many models yielding wildly different results disprove the "science is settled" argument?
"…..around £10 million a year? A mere bauble compared to what Myles Allen has set his sights on.
In January 2003 Allen gave his well known "legal opinion" in an article in Nature:
http://www.climatelaw.org/articles/allen-nature-article.pdf
"As I write this article in January 2003, the flood waters of the River Thames are about 30 centimetres from my kitchen door and slowly rising. On the radio, a representative of the UK Met Office has just explained that although this is the kind of phenomenon that global warming might make more frequent, it is impossible to attribute this particular event (floods in southern England) to past emissions of greenhouse gases."
"…...for my neighbours in Vicarage Road, the information that we have a rigorous attribution procedure for changes in an unobservable attractor may seem of limited interest."
The explanation of the Met Office was not acceptable to Allen. He describes in the article how global warming/ climate change/dangerous something or other, could be resolved by lawyers.
Says Allen:
"The prospect of a class-action suit with up to six billion plaintiffs and an equal number of defendants may seem rather daunting, but if we can overcome these problems in end-to-end attribution, everything else is (at least conceptually) straightforward. Carbon dioxide is a well-mixed greenhouse gas, so an equitable settlement would apportion liability according to emissions, with some discounting over time to allow for the lifetimes of carbon dioxide anomalies in the atmosphere."
So thousands of lawyers representing billions of people, in dozens of differing judiciaries across the globe, all suing each other, is to Myles Allen, "straightforward". Good luck with that.
With Myles Allen living in Vicarage Road he would agree with Stott and Cameron. Or maybe he took his own beliefs seriously, sold his house and moved as far away from any river as possible. Because on Thursday January 9th 2014, the Oxford Mail had this warning:
"8:33am
We've had reports that Vicarage Road off Abingdon Road in Oxford is closed because of flood water and that access is via Lake Street."
Lake Street!
http://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/10924647.Blog__Oxfordshire_flooding_latest__Thursday__January_9/?ref=var_0
Jan 10, 2014 at 9:47 PM | Political Junkie
As Martin says they are all wank... and I worked 4 years with them. They are great for specific ie 'academic' purposes but otherwise generally useless outside their short term weather forecasting origins.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/global-warming-media-propaganda/5364444
Interesting article, picking up on the David Cameron quote.
I'm still waiting for someone explain why we need more than one model. Doesn't the mere existence of many models yielding wildly different results disprove the "science is settled" argument?
Jan 10, 2014 at 9:47 PM | Political Junkie
Well, PJ, one of the features of 'climate science', is that models are evaluated by seeing if they agree with other models. (Rather than with reality.) Climate science has features different from other areas of science of engineering.
Are their results wildly different? I thought that one feature is that their results are all wrong, but with a degree of coherence between them - evidence of the groupthink involved in their creation.
Come on, Martin, tell us what you really think. :)
Jan 10, 2014 at 9:29 PM Richard Drake
Sorry but equivocation is an intrinsic part of my nature.
"I Suspect Everyone, and I Suspect No One!"
Inspector Clouseau of the Sûreté (A Shot in the Dark)
Identical article in the Grun. Fancy that!
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jan/10/david-cameron-floods-global-warming-climate-scientists
sab - Climate Olympics, anyone?? Good idea but a longer term endurance race might be better. Something like an Indianapolis 500 day event.
"Gentlemen, start your models".
That will be a comedy British Empire award for Dr Stott then.
10M extra for the MET? theft !
dve should write a 10M tender for a SKEPTICAL simulation of climate. Doing some competition with the MET's.
enuf of these marxist monolythes
My mother tells me of the storms and flooding during her youth (similar to todays weather) as told to her by her older brothers and mother, as she was too young to remember. That was around 80 years ago in England
The very mention of "climate change" makes me cringe. What they really mean is that it's our fault and that we have to pay.
I suspect that Stott is a science fraud and that Allen is sucking on the public teat ... there, I think that everybody here will agree that these are the "right suspicions".
Next christmas all the Bishophillbillys should all club together and buy Miles Allen a Goat so he can milk that to.
This statement reminds this software engineer of three questions I've never had answered.
(1) Is the software "complex" or just badly designed and written?
(2) What is it about this problem space that determines that the software needs to be complex?
(3) If it's complex, why didn't they ask software engineers for a solution rather than writing it themselves?