First, I asked Stephen Belcher, the head of the Met Office Hadley Centre, whether the recent extended winter was related to global warming. Shaking his famous “ghost stick”, and fingering his trademark necklace of sharks’ teeth and mammoth bones, the loin-clothed Belcher blew smoke into a conch, and replied,

“Here come de heap big warmy. Bigtime warmy warmy. Is big big hot. Plenty big warm burny hot. Hot! Hot hot! But now not hot. Not hot now. De hot come go, come go. Now Is Coldy Coldy. Is ice. Hot den cold. Frreeeezy ice til hot again. Den de rain. It faaaalllll. Make pasty.”

Climate: Public understanding and policy implications 9:05 am; Science Museum

Witnesses: Professor Nick Pidgeon, Understanding Risk Research Group, Cardiff University, Professor Chris Rapley, Communicating Climate Science Policy Commission, UCL and Dr Alex Burch, Director of Learning, Science Museum Group; Professor John Womersley, Chief Executive, Science and Technology Facilities Council, and Champion for RCUK Public Engagement with Research, Professor Tim Palmer, Vice President, Royal Meteorological Society and Professor Rowan Sutton, Director of Climate Research, National Centre for Atmospheric Science

The upshot of all those brains being put together seems to be that it might be something to do with the North Atlantic Oscillation and it might be something to do with Greenland ice melt, as Louise Gray reports in a somewhat strange article here.

Shale gas has revolutionised energy markets in the US and has substantially reduced costs for both consumers and industry and I believe it has the potential to do the same for Scotland.

“Nearly 40% of Scottish residents are struggling in fuel poverty. I want to see a proactive Scottish Government approach on shale gas that will give hard up Scots a route out of fuel poverty.

“Recently I have visited several factories in my region, and they are crying out for shale gas in order to level the energy price playing field. Unless the Scottish Government can devise a balanced, fair and affordable energy policy, high energy prices will cost manufacturing jobs.

“The potential for offshore shale gas has yet to be explored and I would recommend that the Scottish Government follow DECC’s recommendations and use the existing North Sea infrastructure to tap into this resource.

Murdo is the deputy leader, so this should be seen as a significant statement of intent.

Lewandowsky demonstrates that the academic institutions do not produce dialogue that has any more merit than the petty exchanges — flame wars –that the internet is famous for. Dressing political arguments up in scientific terminology risks the value of science being lost to society — its potential squandered for an edge in a political fight. After all, if Lewandowsky’s work is representative of the quality of scientific research in general and the standards the academy expects of academics, what does that say about climate science and the quality of the scientific consensus on climate change? If the scientific argument about the link between anthropogenic CO2 and climate change is only as good as Lewandowsky’s claim that ‘Rejection of climate science [is] strongly associated with endorsement of a laissez-faire view of unregulated free markets’, then perhaps climate sceptics should be taken more seriously.

At WUWT, Bob Tisdale has reviewed the CMIP5 model predictions of Antarctic sea ice and found that they have performed no better than their predecessors.

Judith Curry has focused on a paper by Stevens and Bony that looks at one of the fundamental deficiencies of climate models - their inability to represent clouds - and considers the futility of trying to add complexity in other areas until this basic failing has been overcome.

And then Doug McNeall tweeted the following remarks in defence of the CMIP5 ensemble:

The CMIP5 ensemble is not set up a a calibrated probabilistic prediction system: it doesn't pretend to be one either.

It is just a set of plausible trajectories that the climate might take, given a certain set of forcings.

They're not predictions - just plausible outcomes, and those outcomes have not been borne out in practice. The models have fundamental deficiencies too.

Do the policymakers discussing the Energy Bill in Parliament today understand these issues?

If the bill is read a second time, Baroness Verma to move that the bill be committed to a Grand Committee.

The video should be available here.

I very much welcome the strong position taken by Briffa and coauthors against the use of radially deformed tree ring data. I look forward to the prompt application of these standards by Mann and others to strip bark chronologies. Given realclimate’s endorsement of [Briffa 2013], I presume that realclimate will urge that all reconstructions relying on bristlecones be recalled pending assessment of radial deformation and inhomogeneity according to [Briffa 2013] standards.

[Y]ou asked me to summarise the key points in Aubrey's work. I am assuming you mean on the matter of ‘contempt for the house‘. To do this you need to look at Aubrey’s *written evidence* to the EAC particularly on pages 19 and 20. It is here: -http://www.gci.org.uk/Documents/EAC_Real_.pdf

The key point in this is the *p

The down rating is huge. Green co-leader Russel Norman in his speech to this month’s annual conference never once mentioned global warming...The Green Party did have a climate change conference the following week but Mr Norman’s keynote speech lacked any of the usual end-of-world prophecy and knee-jerk call to de-industrialise. His concern was the pedestrian one that New Zealand is failing to meet its international obligations.

There was no hellfire and no brimstone.

We previously posted an article entitled “New analysis suggests the Earth is warming at a rate unprecedented for 11,300 years” covering the paper by Marcott et al in Nature. The title of our article drew on the original press release for the paper.  However, we note that authors of the paper have since issued an extensive response to media coverage [http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/response-by-marcott-et-al/] which includes the following statement:

One can...speculate why Trenberth didn’t compare the 12 year flat (and negative) trend ending in 2012 to 12 year ‘flat’ trends in the past. The current period is the only period with a “flat” (or negative) trend. Presenting that comparison would certainly give “impression[.] that the global mean temperature is not increasing at its earlier rate”.

Oh dear. Read the whole thing.

It feels a bit desperate to me.

As an aside, the GGGI looks interesting, apparently having morphed from a Korean non-profit organisation into a fully fledged transnational organisation. The relevant order for legal immunities is apparently being rubber-stamped in Westminster.

Saying that we need to wait for a certain interval in order to conclude that “the models are wrong” is dangerous and incorrect for two reasons. First — and this is a point that is stunningly ignored — there are a lot of different models out there, all supposedly built on top of physics, and yet no two of them give anywhere near the same results!