On Friday the 17th James Hansen came to speak at the London School of Economics (LSE), on “Itinerant farming to White House arrests: A scientist’s view of the climate crisis”.
The venue was completely packed and I wasn’t sure initially if I would even get in. There were hundreds of people, already buzzing with excitement before Hansen began his talk.
As expected, Hansen put the frighteners on, emphasising that immediate action was required to stymie anthropogenic CO2’s allegedly noxious effect on our environment. His presentation was littered with continual emotive references to, and pictures of, his numerous grandchildren, showing them gradually growing up. This was important because Hansen is now pushing the line that whilst climate catastrophe is not imminent, it is “in the pipeline” and the victims will, apparently, be our grandchildren. The reason we’re not seeing imminent catastrophe now is because of “climate inertia” and we should be worried because there are further “tipping points” to come after which “we could lose control”. I’m sure all of this sounds familiar.
This is not the only oddity either. The group's events have previously been open to all comers - the IoP is a registered charity after all, so allowing the public to attend is part of their mission of public education. I hear, however, that for the latest event, those who are thinking to go along have been advised to bring their membership cards. It appears that the great unwashed are no longer wanted. Will the IoP be turning the public away at the door? What would the Charities Commission say?
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As you will see, it is fairly clear that the Otto et al results slot in quite nicely alongside the other recent low-sensitivity findings, with most of the density outside the range of the models. The IPCC's preferred range looks increasingly untenable.
]]>Matt Ridley in the Times (£) points to the policy implications and notes that mitigation now looks like a pretty daft approach to take:
]]>It is true that the “transient climate response” is not the end of the story and that the gradual warming of the oceans means that there would be more warming in the pipeline even if we stopped increasing carbon dioxide levels after doubling them. But given the advance of nuclear and solar technology, there is now a good chance we will have decarbonised the economy before any net harm has been done.
Readers may recall that last December I published an informal climate sensitivity study at Bishop Hill, here. The study adopted a heat-balance (energy budget) approach and used recent data, including satellite-observation-derived aerosol forcing estimates. I would like now to draw attention to a new peer-reviewed climate sensitivity study published as a Letter in Nature Geoscience, "Energy budget constraints on climate response", here. This study uses the same approach as mine, based on changes in global mean temperature, forcing and heat uptake over 100+ year periods, with aerosol forcing adjusted to reflect satellite observations. Headline best estimates of 2.0°C for equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and 1.3°C for the – arguably more policy-relevant – transient climate response (TCR) are obtained, based on changes to the decade 2000–09, which provide the best constrained, and probably most reliable, estimates. The 5–95% uncertainty ranges are 1.2–3.9°C for ECS and 0.9–2.0°C for TCR. I should declare an interest in this study: you will find my name included in the extensive list of authors: Alexander Otto, Friederike E. L. Otto, Olivier Boucher, John Church, Gabi Hegerl, Piers M. Forster, Nathan P. Gillett, Jonathan Gregory, Gregory C. Johnson, Reto Knutti, Nicholas Lewis, Ulrike Lohmann, Jochem Marotzke, Gunnar Myhre, Drew Shindell, Bjorn Stevens, and Myles R. Allen. I am writing this article in my personal capacity, not as a representative of the author team.
]]>Proposition
Dr Benny Peiser
Director, Global Warming Policy FoundationDavid Rose
Writer, The Mail on SundayProf Myles Allen
Leader, ECI Climate Research ProgrammeOpposition
David Symons
Director, WSP Environment and EnergyFiona Harvey
Environmental Journalist, The GuardianDr Chukwumerije Okereke
Reader in Environment & Development, University of Reading
That should set the cat among the pigeons.
]]>Critical science journalism takes a different approach and focuses on providing a balanced assessment of the work, one that highlights specific strengths but also emphasises specific limitations or flaws. It is no big secret that the majority of research findings published in peer-reviewed scientific journals will probably not hold up when other groups attempt to replicate them. This lack of replicability can be due to research misconduct, systematic errors or other cognitive biases, which commonly occur even in the most conscientious and meticulous scientists.
Therefore, critical science journalism requires a careful analysis of all the data presented in a paper and is likely to uncover key limitations and flaws that scientific researchers themselves do not readily divulge. This form of science journalism can also encompass some degree of investigative journalism. Journalists lack the resources to check the validity of scientific data by performing experiments themselves, but they can track scientific research in a certain area over the course of months and years as multiple research groups attempt to replicate published scientific findings.
In the climate debate, critical commentary is of course par for the course, at least among the blogs. It's the newspapers that feel they have to act as cheerleaders, usually because the journalists have no scientific background and therefore struggle with any kind of critique.
]]>The Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is preparing to cut the number of civil servants working on climate adaptation from over 30 officials to just six, prompting outrage from green groups who have today accused the government of failing to take adequate steps to protect the UK from worsening climate impacts.
One can't help but wonder if Mr Hague is getting rid of all the FCO's network of climate change advisers too. I'm not sure that showing An Inconvenient Truth to the natives (which as far as I can tell is all they do) quite cuts the mustard as a priority for public spending.
]]>Hansen opened with the most astonishing claim about global temperatures,
In the last decade it's warmed only about a tenth of a degrees as compared to about two tenths of a degree in the preceding decade.
a claim which completely contradicts Hansen's own GISTEMP dataset (H/T Ruth Dixon).;)
There is a suggestion that he might have been referring to a land-only dataset, but this would still be grossly misleading since he says that land-only data overestimates trends.
Hansen also spoke of the climate sensitivity, making the bizarre claim that our understanding is based on paleoclimate rather than models and speaking of the excellence of the data in this area. This is mind-boggling, since these datasets contain so little information that they can barely constrain the climate sensitivity at all. The weakness of the constraint provide by paleo data was noted by the IPCC in the last assessment report, and they decided to base the "consensus" figure largely on models - precisely the opposite of what Hansen said was done.
He also tried to blame the standstill on aerosols, ignoring the fact that the IPCC's best estimate now finds that their effect is small, and he described heat going into the oceans as "a detail" and "a diversionary tactic".
Quite disgraceful.
]]>The guidelines for rating [the] abstracts show only the highest rating value blames the majority of global warming on humans. No other rating says how much humans contribute to global warming. The only time an abstract is rated as saying how much humans contribute to global warming is if it mentions:
that human activity is a dominant influence or has caused most of recent climate change (>50%).
If we use the system’s search feature for abstracts that meet this requirement, we get 65 results. That is 65, out of the 12,000+ examined abstracts. Not only is that value incredibly small, it is smaller than another value listed in the paper:
Reject AGW 0.7% (78)
Remembering AGW stands for anthropogenic global warming, or global warming caused by humans, take a minute to let that sink in. This study done by John Cook and others, praised by the President of the United States, found more scientific publications whose abstracts reject global warming than say humans are primarily to blame for it.
I'm speechless.
]]>THE leader of the Scottish Government review of landownership yesterday pledged to examine ways of redistributing the cash wealthy lairds make from wind farms to benefit the less-advantaged.
Alison Elliot, chair of the Land Reform Review Group (LRRG), said the issue would be investigated amid concerns that aristocrats are benefiting from the renewables revolution while the poor grapple with fuel poverty.
This will be interesting. The poor will still be fleeced for the fuel bills, and then the money will be clawed back in some way and handed out, no doubt to "community groups" or other politically connected bodies.
The winners will be the bureaucrats, as ever.
]]>We know the general theme of Conversation editorial - unadulterated left-wing activism - and the UK edition looks as though it's going to be just the same. For a start, look at the editorial team:
When the PM received a briefing on shale, Cuadrilla was excluded.
Peter Lilley in the Spectator last week
...bizarrely, [Lilley] claims that Cuadrilla were excluded from an inquiry on shale gas conducted by the select committee of which he is a member.
The reason Will Straw has gone astray is that Lilley's next sentence was "The select committee instead had to listen to an array of bodies from the Committee on Climate Change to the WWF". You can see how confusion would arise. But I think Straw can be taken to task for firing off a letter without checking his facts.
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