Bishop Hill Climate cuttings 23
Sep 13, 2008 Climate: Cuttings 
Ian JolliffeBack in March, global warming's canine-in-chief, Tamino, wrote a series of posts explaining why the notorious decentred principal components analysis used by Michael Mann in his near-legendary hockey stick paper were, in fact, entirely valid. He rounded the series of postings up by citing in his support Ian Joliffe, an important authority on principal components. Tamino is now looking rather foolish, because Joliffe has posted a comment on his site saying that Tamino has misrepresented his views and that Mann should not have used decentred principal components. In fact he wonders about the validity of using principal components at all. Oh dear.
Mann's latest magnum opus is still causing much hilarity, with the stick-meister deleting and replacing the data on his website faster than a climatologist can fill in a funding request. Unfortunately he has (to his credit) already placed the raw proxies in a public archive from where it is possible to see the quality of the inputs to his study. This is a particularly hilarious one.. 
Iain StewartThe BBC's "history" of global warming (in reality it's a propaganda piece) showed a few frayed seams. Presenter Iain Stewart spent a lot of time pouting about how Reagan appointed the Nierenburg committee to look at the issue, and hand-picked its chairman so as to bias its findings. Unfortunately, somebody noticed that the committee was actually set up by the Carter administration. This (ahem) error has come straight from the mouth of Naomi Oreskes, so the producers of the programme have only themselves to blame for picking a "player" as the series adviser. The son of the committee's chairman has responded in the comments and notes that Oreskes knew that the committee was appointed by Carter, because she says so in a scholarly work on the subject. I guess the bit about it being wicked Reagan who appointed Neirenburg was a bit of a flourish for the benefit of the proles.
Atmoz (a climatologist from the US) has also been looking into Oreskes' work on the Nierenburg report, and has found some pretty outrageous selective quoting and misrepresentation of the findings. With all these revelations, she is starting to look throroughly dishonest. The perfect series adviser for a BBC documentary, in fact.
This year's Artic melt seems to have come to a end, with small increases in area appearing for the first time this year, slightly earlier than 2007. The minimum area seems to have been some 400,000 sq km higher than last year. Still no sign of the Antarctic warming either.
And lastly, it hailed in Kenya.
Reader Comments (23)
In order to assist in your devotions, I enclose a copy of the Creed. Shortly, I hope to have a full Climate Change Catechism…
The Climate Change Creed - appointed to be read in laboratories.
I believe in Global Warming, which will destroy heaven and earth unless we change our ways.
I believe in Al Gore, Who conceived the Internet
and the hockey-stick graph, born of Professor Mann.
It suffered under McIntyre and McKitrick,
was crucified, disproven, and was buried.
It was cast on the reject pile.
On the third day It rose again.
It was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science,
and is displayed in a prominent position in all IPCC literature.
It will apply again as soon as global temperatures start rising.
I believe in the CO2 tipping point,
the IPCC Assessment Reports,
a CO2 sensitivity figure of over 4 C/W,
the accuracy of GCMS,
an anthropic cause for all climate variation after 1970,
and grants everlasting.
AMEN.
I'll try to watch it online tonight.
In the first programme he showed the perfect Keeling Curve of CO2 concentration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide.png between the 1950s and now, complete with precise wobble as the seasons change (is even the 'wobble' unaffected by temperature, which does vary all over the place?) and stated without any further information that it was incontrovertible that it was caused by man.
Interesting snippet about Iain Stewart. Although he's a lecturer at U Plymouth, he doesn't seem to have published anything for four years. Full time environmentalist, do you reckon?
http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=8547224522119252436
@ Bishop Hill
IMO he is too busy making documentariies. Here he is talking about his Power of the Planet series (and his AGW conversion):
http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=hrPjddK2t-I
To give it its full title: The Climate Wars: <b>Fightback</b>
Followed by one hour of misrepresentation, character assassination and demonisation of sceptics' motives and arguments that was tantamount to incitement, especially considering the rather 'passionate' propensities of the likely audience. I hope someone can be bothered to give it a thorough fisking.
But I did enjoy the unintentional humour, like when he accused the sceptics of using propaganda to promote their arguments, while showing a truck driving around with a huge billboard of the Hockey Stick, and when he remarked on just how flat the Hockey Stick was, and then immediately started talking about the Little Ice Age.
I agree about the misrepresentation. Also, did you notice the blurred, low-res footage of sceptics speaking, a little propagandistic trick to establish distance between the viewer and the speaker? One example among many. That motorised sandwich board was a hoot.
And yes: after talking about warmer conditions for crops, and population increases during the MWP, he then wields the Hockey Stick to erase it all. No further discussion, i.e. as to why England could export wine to the Continent and support a greater population during that time, no further mention of the Norse settlements in Greenland and how they could grow crops and farm livestock then but never since. No debate: swoosh goes the Stick, and all gone.
Now exercising my psychic powers to predict the content of Part 3 ("New Challenges"). Let's see... "Still uncertainty about how bad global warming will be, but may be worse than projected by IPCC, ice caps melting, seas rising, Bangladesh drowning, climate refugees, water wars, drought, big storms, sky's a-falling, Western civilisation the culprit, time for debate over, precautionary principle, must act yesterday." Something tells me that this, more or less, is the script they will follow.
- to thank you for your excelllent Caspar And The Jesus Paper
- to tell you something you probably already know, namely that Monckton in his latest publication ( Hockey Stick? What Hockey Stick?mentions you:" I am grateful to Bishop Hill for the following account –"
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/what_hockey_stick.html
Anyway, I got distracted..and it did not happen....
Climateaudit has started a post on the Climate Wars series and the Oreskes/Niierenberg "clash" has not been mentioned yet,.It would be great if you would post there. :)
Yes, I'd seen Christopher Monckton's post, although I haven't had time to read it all yet.
David
I understand that this will indeed be the theme of episode 3.
The mantra is now solidly "The debate is over". See for example Daid Milliband in the Daily Mail:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-433372/Climate-change-debate-over.html
Can anyone remember the link to a report from a working goup / think tank in this country, about a year or so old, which provided advice on how to present global warming to the public and hammered this phrase (or something very similar). I know there was a pdf. Can anyone provide a link? From what I remember, well worth a read.
"David", of course - not Daid
Perhaps you're thinking of this:
"Much of the noise in the climate change discourse comes from argument and counter-argument, and it is our recommendation that, at least for popular communications, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won. This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective. This must be done by stepping away from the ‘advocates debate’ described earlier, rather than by stating and re-stating these things as fact.The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken. The certainty of the Government’s new climate-change slogan – ‘Together this generation will tackle climate change’ (Defra 2006) – gives an example of this approach. It constructs, rather than claims, its own factuality.
Where science is invoked, it now needs to be as ‘lay science’ – offering lay explanations for what is being treated as a simple established scientific fact, just as the earth’s rotation or the water cycle are considered"
which appears in this http://www.ippr.org.uk/members/download.asp?f=%2Fecomm%2Ffiles%2Fwarm_words.pdf from the IPPR
I was indeed.
That Daily Mail article about the new IPCC report mentions “2500 scientists”. 2500… Hmm… Now that number is strangely familiar.
In both of those cases, there was no immediate sacrifice required of the majority, and the strategy was highly effective. I wonder how this bold strategy will work when not only are the majority expected to make sacrifices, but the extent of those sacrifices is not at all clear.
Those are interesting points. Richard North at EU Referendum has (IIRC) pointed out that people's opinions on global warming are likely to change when the lights start going out. That could be this winter according to some.