Akademic shambles

The travails of the green climatologists on board the Akademik Shokalskiy have been providing us all with a lots of fun over the last few days. I've been a bit busy painting the office, so haven't been posting, but there's an excellent roundup over at WUWT.

With the latest rescue attempt having been postponed, prospects for the ship to escape the ice are not looking too good at present, although fortunately an air evacuation is available as a backup option. We will have to wait and see how things go. But in the meantime one can appreciate the sheer majesty of the propaganda failure that Prof Turney and his colleagues have achieved.

Friends

An interesting bit of intelligence from a correspondent: Steve Jones is a close friend of Chris Huhne's.

So when the BBC were casting around for someone to look at impartiality in the BBC's science output they picked a man whose wife worked for the BBC and who was pals with the deep-green climate change secretary of the time. I guess he ticked every box.

Interesting.

Steve Jones and his research

Felicity Mellor of Imperial College has been mentioned at BH from time to time, chiefly because of her view that media coverage of science is insufficiently balanced. At a lecture at the University of Nottingham last summer she discussed the even more radical idea that there is just too much science reporting in the media, along with many other aspects of science journalism. There was also much discussion of the Jones review of the BBC's coverage of science, for which she did the underlying research.

Along the way (12:00 or thereabouts) she reveals that BBC executives tried to get the output of the report changed to make it less critical of the corporation's reliance on press releases as the source of their stories.

Click to read more ...

No challenge

Even in the season of goodwill to all men, the mispresentation of the climate debate continues apace. This morning we had Professor Steve Jones interviewed yet again on the subject of BBC coverage of science, with the great man once again given the opportunity to portray the climate debate as being between "science" and "deniers".

Once again I wonder whether the BBC has ever interviewed a denier, in the sense of someone who disputes the existence of the greenhouse effect. Once again I wonder why the BBC feels that we need to have this false representation of the debate put forward. And once again I wonder at the failure of the BBC's interviewers to challenge it.

The audio is below.

Jones Today Prog

Season's greetings

The celebrations are about to begin at the episcopal palace, so I'm now signing off for a couple of days.

Season's greetings to all BH readers.

Christmas cheer

There is more to life than conspicuous consumption, without a doubt, but take a look at this tweet from Richard Dixon of Friends of the Earth.

Mulled spice scented loo cleaner in Waitrose #christmasoverconsumptiongonemad

I'm at a loss to understand how buying bleach with a slightly different scent in it represents "overconsumption". Or to comprehend the sheer joylessness of the tweet.

Into reverse

Anthony reports that Michael Mann's libel suit against the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Review has suffered something of a setback. Last summer a judge blocked an attempt to have the case thrown out, but appeared to blunder by confusing the actions of the two defendant corporations and their writers. This decision has now been reversed by the appeal court.

Happy Christmas to all - Josh 253

I dont think S. Claus et al will have been too pleased with the 'Christmas in a Bunker' Greenpeace video so I suspect they are on the naughty list. What with our very own Yeo and Deben 'Troughers' and lots of Anti-frackers it has been rather a naughty year.

Wishing you all a very peaceful holiday.

Josh
Cartoons by Josh

Brian Hoskins, then and now

The question of how fair a representation the Royal Meteorological Society has given of the reliability of climate models has been discussed in a couple of posts now and readers seem to have concluded that if you wade through the obfuscation they are in fact only giving weak support to climate models. I don't think anyone has made the case that they have given a clear and balanced account though. In my opinion, by speaking of “a confidence in the models’ suitability for their application in detection and attribution studies and for quantitative future predictions and projections” the authors strongly imply that such a confidence in fact exists.

I thought it might be interesting to see what the Science-y Grantham Institute at Imperial (as opposed to the eco-warrior bit at LSE) had to say on the subject. The author team behind the submission was headed by Brian Hoskins, who has been quite vocal on the subject of climate models. Famously, he described them as "lousy" and "terrible" in an interview with the Economist in 2010.

Click to read more ...

The professionals

The Telegraph has a good story this morning, looking at some of the protestors who have been arrested as part of the protests against fracking in Salford. They are very much in the professional protestor mould rather than concerned locals.

The Telegraph can reveal that the leading campaigners against “fracking” in the North West have no connection to the area.

An investigation has found that many of the group’s members are in fact veteran protesters who live hundreds of miles away, with one previously involved in demonstrations as far afield as Turkey and Gaza in support of Palestinian rights.

EU backs down on fracking

For a couple of days I've been meaning to mention Richard North's article about attempts within the EU to crush the onshore gas industry before it even gets off the ground. However, before I got round to doing so, the Commission seems to have backed down:

Fracking for cheap gas moved a step closer today after EU officials dropped proposals for new industry regulations.

Click to read more ...

Unqualified evidence

Following my post on the Royal Meteorological Society's evidence to the AR5 inquiry, Doug McNeall and I had a long and interesting exchange on Twitter. Although he arrived at his point somewhat elliptically, Doug appeared to want to suggest that although in Ed Hawkins' graph the observations are on the cusp of falling outside the envelope described by 90% of model runs, this did not actually represent falsification. In his view, the test was too harsh.

The precise determination of when the observations should be seen as inconsistent with the models is one for the statisticians, and I know that Lucia, for one, disagrees with Doug's view (and I feel pretty sure that Doug Keenan will say that they are both wrong). However, this is not actually germane to my original point, which is that the poor performance of the models to date - as represented by Ed's graph - needs to be communicated to policymakers. We are without doubt less confident than we were that the model ensemble captures the true behaviour of the Earth, even if we are not (in Doug M's view at least) absolutely certain that it does not.

Click to read more ...

Davey's reckless gamble

Dieter Helm has a (paywalled) article in the Times this morning, taking Ed Davey and his predecessors to task for their reckless assumption that energy prices would rise inexorably.

By about 2020 it was assumed that expensive technologies such as wind farms and solar panels would be competitive against what would by then be much more expensive fossil fuels. Add in a bit of energy efficiency, and ministers could confidently predict that household energy bills would be 8 per cent lower by 2020 than they would have without their policies.

Almost everything that could be wrong with this is in fact wrong, and it explains the mess that British energy policy has got itself into. There is no shortage of oil, gas or coal. We are not running out of any of them. There is enough to fry the planet many times over. There is no reason to assume that oil and gas prices will go on ever upwards, and it is at least possible that they will fall, joining the sharp fall in world coal prices. If so, renewables are unlikely to become cost-competitive by 2020. The subsidies will not then wither away. They would be permanent. Therefore, bills would be higher than they would have been as a result of government policies, not lower as Mr Davey claims.

Where the corruption and personal enrichment ends and mere incompetence begins is hard to ascertain, but we will all be paying the price very soon.

The eagle has crash landed

I few days back I was pressing Harry Huyton, the RSPB's climate change bod, about the society's weak opposition to wind farms. His position is that the RSPB opposes windfarms when inappropriately sited. I pointed out that windfarms tend to be in upland areas, where raptors - particularly prone to wind turbine collisions - tend to be found in large numbers.

It also occurred to me that the society has been trying to reintroduce sea eagles in the east of Scotland, an area in which windfarm development is frantic and so I thought I would try to work out just how much overlap there is between the two. The RSPB's sea eagle newsletter has a useful map of sightings and maps of windfarm developments are also easy to get one's hands on.

Here are the results. I've fairly crudely superimposed the two maps and shaded out the east-coast wind farms in black, leaving the large coloured dots that represent the sea eagle sightings (ignore the small dots - that's just more windfarms).

The size of the dots for the eagles represents the number sighted rather than a range, but given that sea eagles have a range of up to 70 km, it's clear that the RSPB is going to have to oppose all east-coast windfarm developments north of the Firth of Forth and South of Aberdeen.

I'll ask Harry if he'd like to comment.

A discrepancy

The Royal Meterological Society's evidence to the AR5 inquiry was apparently written by Emily Shuckburgh, incorporating comments from the society's Climate Science Communications Group, including Ed Hawkins, and the governing council. I was struck by their remarks about the reliability of climate models:

Does the AR5 address the reliability of climate models?

13. The Report devotes Chapter 9 to a comprehensive, balanced and realistic evaluation of climate models which is based on the published literature and draws extensively on the results of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). As stated in the report (Chapter 9, final draft) climate models are based on physical principles, and they reproduce many important aspects of observed climate. We agree with the report when it states that both these aspects contribute to a “confidence in the models’ suitability for their application in detection and attribution studies and for quantitative future predictions and projections”, and when it notes that “whereas weather and seasonal climate predictions can be regularly verified, climate projections spanning a century or more cannot. This is particularly the case as anthropogenic forcing is driving the climate system toward conditions not previously observed in the instrumental record, and it will always be a limitation.”

This seems an astonishing thing to say, given Ed Hawkins' now iconic graph showing the divergence of the temperature record from the projections, to the verge of falsification. It seems like one story for the climate debate and another for the policymakers.

I've tweeted Ed to see if he can shed any light on the discrepancy.