Saturday
Dec052009
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Unthreaded
Dec 5, 2009 Climate Some of the comments threads are going way off topic, so I'm setting up an unthreaded post for people who want to point to interesting stories or put forward their own theories.
Reader Comments (472)
Virginia attorney general says EPA's ruling that carbon emissions threaten human health was based on "questionable scientific reports" and "falsified data ". The EPA is now facing at least five separate petitions challenging its recent endangerment finding, which ruled that greenhouse gas emissions represent a threat to human health and as such can be regulated under the existing Clean Air Act.
http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2258194/virginia-alabama-crank-legal
Will the EPA have to prove AGW in a court? That'll be fun!
Check this site out( http://www.cpi.cam.ac.uk/gore/the_training/participants.aspx )for a list of people in England who have been personally trained by Al Gore,the names are not on the list but their positions are,heres a starter for 10 points the name of Manchester United's manager is Alex Ferguson,(wonder why he felt it nessasary to attend),
also members of the BBC, no surprise there I guess,a few members of Defra ditto,lots of school teachers but then this was in 2007 the inconvienient truth big push,deputy lord mayor of Londons there as well probably not surprising seeing as Ken Livingston is noted further on in the site as a contributer to the climate leadership program see here .http://www.cpi.cam.ac.uk/our_work/executives_seminars/clp/about_clp/who_delivers_the_programme.aspx .
Interesting post over at wuwt from UEA's Paul Dennis, in which he comments on the ongoing Harrabin BBC search for perspective. Dennis reveals that he volunteered to contribute and got a one line reply from H that he was too busy.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/22/the-most-slimy-essay-ever-from-the-guardian-and-columbia-university/#comment-324561
Blimey according to Terry Barker at Tyndalltv were all going to DIE,blimey he's worse than that guy on dads army "were all doomed I tell ya".
Sorry not sure how to link the actual film to your site Bish, but you should be able to get to it via this, perhaps some one with more ability could put it on here, its an absolute stunner in scaremongery.
http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/tyndall-tv
ahah! think I can help you to see the youtube vid a bit easier,copy the following into the youtube search bar.
Terry Barker on Decarbonisation and the Credit Crisis
the worst thing is this guy is serious!!
No brouhaha in USA comparable to UK. However, big companies jumping ship:
Defections Shake Up Climate Coalition
Copied over from the thread saying use the unthreaded thread, which I was apparently not the only one to misunderstand! Sorry for those stuck with reading again:
Oh good, now I have a place to ask again. I'm in Switzerland so can't get English books easily from a library. I'm trying to find out about a David Archer who wrote The Long Thaw (yes, I could order through Amazon but is about $30 - and I preferred getting Hockey Stick Illusion and CRUTape lettersI).
Can anyone point me to a site that analyzes his point of view (critically, not fawningly)? Or, if anyone has the book, what does he base his arguments on?
I have found a summary that is quite general and does not incentivize me to buy the book and also there are some audio bits I have found (not yet listened to).
The reason I keep asking, is that my own critical abilities re climate science are not yet as developed as I'd like them to be, so I still rely on others' analyses to a large extent.
Thanks for any help.
It has to do with a debate with someone, where I'm supposed to find her arguments in his book!!! I know it's a bit ridiculous, but since that proposal I've gotten a bit obsessed with trying to find out about him and the more I can't find out (seemingly, he's not very important?), the more I want to.
Interesting interview with Monckton on how he came to be sceptical, and on the discovery of the deeply hidden new world govt attempt of the Copenhagen draft, here:
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/02/monckton-on-the-ipcc
Josh,
Can you make a comic of King (Ben) Santer or a likeness of a highly self-important climate scientist sitting on his thrown with crown and staff, etc looking down at retired engineer & blogger and saying something like "Away With You!!".
Inspired by Santer's response to McIntyre:
Please do not communicate with me in the future.
Ben Santer
Big front page picture on the Guardian site...
Guardian coral break up piece
Seems acidic oceans (caused by CO2) killing corals is the new line of attack... but a lot of the commentors are not buying it... 2100 is the big day...
Bjørn Lomborg has replied to Friel's Lomborg Deception:
http://www.lomborg.com/dyn/files/basic_items/118-file/BL%20reply%20to%20Howard%20Friel.pdf
Hi Your Grace,
Does anyone know if the Met Office is tracking errors in their forecasts? I live in East London (so I refer to both the London and Barking forecasts to get an idea of the weather.)
Last Wed night, there was a hard frost as I went home at 11pm. In contrast, the Met forecasts that night for both London and Barking were for temperatures to remain at 4C until morning.
Today, the current forecast for 1500 2010-2-23 ie now, is 4C + light rain. We've just had an hour of sleet/snow.
What I'm asking I guess is does the Met office publish the errors in it's forecasts, and if so, is there a bias in the errors.
Slow Joe
Not as far as I know.
just sent a write up of the Wellington debate via the contact link. Not sure if it worked as there was no confirmation, just a blank screen.
Same old story in new brown wrapper:
James Hansen convinces FuturePundit, all too easily
"The size of continental-scale ice sheets is mind-boggling. Although thinner toward the edges, ice over New York towered several times higher than the Empire State building--thick enough to crush everything in today's New York City to smithereens. But not to worry--even though we sometimes hear geoscientists talk as if ice ages will occur again, it won't happen--unless humans go extinct. Forces instigating ice ages, as we shall see, are so small and slow that a single chlorofluorocarbon factory would be more than sufficient to overcome any natural tendency toward an ice age. Ice sheets will not descend over North America and Europe as long as we are around to stop them"
.......
So stopping ice ages is no big deal. Those of us who live to the day when rejuvenation therapies stop the aging process will not have to worry about a new ice age several thousand years from now.
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006965.html
Caution....There may be a pony in there, somewhere.
What powers Hansen assigns to mankind!
Yer Grace
Richard Drake has commented on CA
"Submissions to the committee will be published, on paper and online. When I spoke to the Clerk on Thursday 11th he said that this should happen by the end of the month – and the committee members will have the full compilation before that, to help them prepare for Oral Evidence. I’m expecting something public by Friday, therefore."
Also NASA has a new climate change webpage
http://climate.nasa.gov/warmingworld/
Revealing Q&A between John O' Sullivan and the UK chiefs of police organisation, concerning the lack of charges under FOI at UEA, ending with an appeal to UK tax payers to join the fight:
http://www.climategate.com/exclusive-qa-on-climategate-with-britain-chief-police-officers#more-5066
The author, John O'Sullivan has experience litigating against government corruption in the U.S., and has recently been asking increasingly awkward questions in the UK.
On related FOI matters, did anyone else see the BBC4 "On Expenses" dramatic portrayal of how the UKMP's expenses scandal of 2009 was brought about by FOI? It's worth a watch on iplayer and has many parallels with our present debates.
I couldn't help thinking the whole way through how the dogged independent US journalist, whose FOI requests and refusal to be brushed aside brought about the exposé, was really wasted on this issue, all the time missing the much more significant and wider scale scandal that is the Big Govt funded AGW industry.
Once exposed, an ultimately small scale rip off of taxpayers' money became the story of 2009. And yet, the spending of whole orders of magnitude more taxpayers' money on AGW propaganda, quangos, inquiries, social research, and so on, as so skilfully exposed by Richard North at eu referendum and Chris Booker, buried deep at the back of the Sunday Telegraph, goes largely ignored.
Why isn't any of this front page and headline news? Serialised for even greater effect, as per MP expenses.
Surely it doesn't even matter which side of the AGW argument you are on, just like the MP scandal works as its across all sides. It simply makes no sense to any rational tax payer, whether a believer or not.
The ever increasing and totally unjustified spending of billions of EU taxpayer's money on tenuous AGW driven causes, and on "research" wholly unrelated to any fundamental scientific work on energy creation, or mitigation of whatever future climate occurs, surely this must be the big story that should be pursued.
I wonder if anyone has seen this rather excellent little drama about Heather Brooke's work in applying the Freedom of Information act to get the details of MPs expenses?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00r3qf4/On_Expenses/
Very entertaining, lots of familiar stuff in there, especially the depiction of the MPs shock at realising that they could be actually accountable to the public ;)
Ah! I scanned the first few pages, but then didn't fully read Drew above who I now notice also mentioned On Expenses :)
Bishop Andrew,
Any chance we could have a new thread along the lines:
Comments that have been deleted or snipped on RC.
Preferably they should be screen copies of when they were posted with the status:
Your comment is awaiting moderation together with date and time, and a copy of the existing accepted post immediately above it.
I have a few that might be found to be entertaining, and I doubt that I‘m alone.
Here is my latest to be deleted:
http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=264#comment-45261
You may have already picked this one up:-
From The Times
February 24, 2010
And now for the weather – from New Zealand
This week Liam Fox, the Shadow Defence Secretary, said that there was a “very strong case” for selling off large MoD assets. Privatisation could also spell the end of government responsibility for the Met Office research programme, including funding for the Hadley Centre’s 150 climate scientists.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7040291.ece
THE SAD CASE OF THE MARRIAGE OF BAD SCIENCE AND SLOPPY JOURNALISM
How science should not be done:
The people responsible for collecting and sorting / adjusting where necessary the raw data were actively lobbying for a particular interpretation of that data, i.e. dangerous future effects of warming. Purely coincidentally, an interpretation which is very good for funding.
Instead of making the data and methodology of collection and adjustment publicly available, actually trying to hide it and even losing it.
Giving privileged access to the data only to those who they favour their interpretation.
“Independent data collectors” - CRU & GISS - comparing notes before issuing their adjusted data (this one you can sort of forgive on a human level, but it shouldn’t happen).
Threatening journalists who question the message with being cut out of the pre-release loop, effectively making their task of reporting climate impossible. In short, blackmail.
How journalism should not be done:
Surprise, surprise, concentrating on the most alarmist information provided.
Colluding – understandably – in the pre-release system.
Total and abject failure to investigate anything at all. Not even the most suspiciously outlandish of claims made usually by environmentalists rather than climatologists themselves. In fact the systematic failure to distinguish “science” reporting and “environment” reporting (see the BBC website), when the first is an objective pursuit and the second is politics.
Why haven’t science journalists been poring over the IPPC reports to find errors? Incapable or unwilling? The errors have been found by other scientists in the respective fields.
Constant vilification of anyone who had legitimate questions.
Negation of space to anyone who had legitimate questions.
For those in Scotland there is a lecture given at Stirling University next week by Professor Philip Wookey, (School of Biological and Environmental Sciences) titled - The Arctic and the Greenhouse Effect
Looking at his homepage he seems to be pro-AGW:
http://www.sbes.stir.ac.uk/people/wookey/index.html
and he was one of many Stirling signatories to the Met Office's statement in support of AGW:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/news/latest/uk-science-statement.html
The professorial inaugural lecture is on Wednesday 3 March in the Logie Lecture Theatre, at 2 pm
Here for full details: www.externalrelations.stir.ac.uk/events/ProfessorialInauguralLectures.php
To reserve a place in advance, email externalrelations@stir.ac.uk or call 01786 46 7055.
Hi Bishop!
Would it be possible for you to write a summary on the "trick" and "hide the decline"? It is so very often misunderstood, and I really can't find a good summary to show people who are asking, or people who believe the RealClimate version of things..
Of course everything is available at Climate Audit, but to fully understand the matter requires reading at least three different posts.
I'm halfway through your book now. I think it is really good, and you do have an excellent way of making complicated things easy to understand! (perhaps I'll send some cookies too..)
I know one is needed Anna, but I'm going to struggle for time in the next week. Maybe after that.
Anna
Steve Mc has this evening posted a pdf file of his submission to the Parliamentary Select Committee, it includes a good summary of the prestidigitation surrounding the decline, complete with very useful diagrams. It may be what you're looking for.
If any readers are travelling to Asia at the end of April, please be aware that the Goracle is speaking at a cneference in Manila on April 30. There is bound to be an extreme weather event such as an early Typhoon to keep the Gore Effect going. If he is coming here then he is probably going to other countries in the region as well. You have been warned.
I guess he is hoping that news of the collapse of global warming hasn't reached here yet.
Thanks for the tip, Steve Mc's PDF is excellent!
My husband was watching news 24 early this morning (he's a farmer, so that explains why he was watching tv at 5.30am) and he watched this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00r9pxf/Our_World_The_Rise_of_the_Sceptics/
It was about the rise of climate sceptism in . I found it on iplayer. It didn't really go into the science, more the politics, scandals, taxes etc.
should have said 'It was about the rise of climate sceptism in Australia'
Does anyone know if members of the public can turn up to listen in on the select committee hearing on monday?
I understand it's open to the public. It might be worth contacting the committee first. Channel Four will be livestreaming the hearings on their website.
Channel 4 seemed to have picked up the story about Boultons CV mentioning "Intergovernmental Panels"
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/sceptics+seek+second+climtegate+panel+casualty/3564682
The heat's been off Geoffrey Boulton for a little while now, but Channel 4 have now picked up on the story again. The story isn't on their website now, but I got this from Google's cache: Sceptics seek second Climtegate panel casualty http://66.102.9.132/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=cache:http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/sceptics%2Bseek%2Bsecond%2Bclimtegate%2Bpanel%2Bcasualty/3564682&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8.
Boulton is claiming that the final line in his cv about him being a "contributor to G8 preparatory groups and Intergovernmental Panels on climate change" is not correct, and that he has "no idea" about where it came from or where/when it was added.
He has sent a copy of his 2007 cv to Channel 4 news, which doesn't have this final line. However, if you check the properties of this Word doc., it's creation date is 3 July 2008, not 2007!
The 2007 Boulton CV is currently available (28.2.10) on the Xiamen University web site at:- http://wise.xmu.edu.cn/viewNews.asp?id=1026 the “properties” are now limited.
Could it be that the CV was saved by Nini Yang only to be able to add it to the University web site
【10月23日讲座更新】——主讲人：英国爱丁堡大学副校长Geoffrey Boulton教授
被阅览数：1785次 发布时间:2007-10-17 17:08:02
讲座题目(Topic)：
爱丁堡大学以及英国与欧洲研究型大学政策（Edinburgh Univ. & Policies for Research Universities in Britain and Europe）
演讲人(Speaker)：
英国爱丁堡大学副校长Geoffrey Boulton教授
(Prof. Geoffrey Boulton，Vice Principal of University of Edinburgh, UK)
讲座日期和时间(Date and time)：
2007年10月23日周二上午09:30-11:00 (09:30-11:00am, Tuesday, October 23, 2007)
讲座地点(Location)：
克立楼三楼报告厅 (Conference room, 3rd Floor, Keli Building)
附： Professor Geoffrey Boulton CV.doc
欢迎大家光临！
上一条：【10月15日讲座】中英 下一条： 转发研究生院通知“学
I would like to add, as someone who worked at a Chinese university for a month in 2009, they so like to "sex up" the CVs of their visiting academics a bit.
I guess they thought an "IPCC" type reference was actually a positive thing. Oh well.....
I have just read Dr. Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen memorandum submitted to the Select Committee an enlightening read.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/contents.htm
Phil Jones comes before the Science & Technology Select Committee today: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5hBl9go-DmGcqP359Qxr4poraRGuw
Michael Mann on Point of Inquiry.
Andrew Neil has George Monbiot listed to appear on Thursday's Daily Politics show.
For readers who might not know Neil, I haven't seen anyone on UKMSTV grill AGWarmists like he does. He clearly hasn't been reading the BBC memos.
BBC2, 1200GMT, March 4.
Segments usually available after broadcast here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/the_daily_politics/default.stm
along with a viewable archive of all his AGW discussions.
Should we add mansalughter to the charges against Gore and the hockey team?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/argentina/7344329/Baby-survives-parents-global-warming-suicide-pact.html
Independent Climate Change Email Review website updated
There's an account of the pre-launch team meeting held on 4th February: http://www.cce-review.org/Meetings.php. It's only taken them a month to publish it!
They're learning: the Properties of the pdf file are completely blank.
Institute of Physics backtracking: http://www.iop.org/News/news_40679.html
Now they're saying "The Institute's position on climate change is clear: the basic science is well enough understood to be sure that our climate is changing – and that we need to take action now to mitigate that change."
How they reconcile this view with points 4 and 5 of their submission to the Inquiry is anybody's guess.
"4. The second category relating to proxy reconstructions are the basis for the conclusion that 20th century warming is unprecedented. Published reconstructions may represent only a part of the raw data available and may be sensitive to the choices made and the statistical techniques used. Different choices, omissions or statistical processes may lead to different conclusions. This possibility was evidently the reason behind some of the (rejected) requests for further information.
5. The e-mails reveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented; for example, the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements."
Sounds to me like the physicists aren't all singing from the same hymnbook!
Sounds like they've been told off by teacher.
Seems the Guardian went chasing down members of the board for comments, which may have prompted back peddling....
"The institute statement says its submission was approved by its science board, a formal committee of experts that oversees its policy work.
The Guardian has been unable to find a member of the board that supports the submission. Two of the scientists listed as members said they had declined to comment on a draft submission prepared by the institute, because they were not climate experts and had not read the UEA emails. Others would not comment or did not respond to enquiries.
An institute spokesperson said the submission was "strongly supported" by three members of the board. "All members were invited to comment. Only a few did, all concerned approved [the submission] unanimously."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/02/institute-of-physics-emails-inquiry-submission
Must see video of a Richard Lindzen lecture is linked here
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/02/dr-richard-lindzens-talk-at-fermilab.html
Read this hilarious transcript of Hilary Benn's webchat on the subject of global warming.
See if you can spot the rogue poster among all the anodyne stuff about growing your own veg!
Found an interesting prediction of trees dying here in the UK as well as in the Amazon, obviously sanctioned by some guy called K. Briffa (UEA);
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/aug/02/weather.homesandgardens
Four years on, still struggling to see the context here, we've seen no mass die off of our arboreal resources. Perhaps the story was seeded (if you'll excuse the pun) as a bit of viral marketing for the main event.
Maybe UEA should get John McCririck in as a visiting fellow to beef up their probabilistic forecast skills.
More IPCC bias - this time it economics
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/03/bias-in-ipcc-wgiii-guest-post-by.html
Washington Times says Gore's Nobel Prize should be rescinded.
It's quite a good article, but really I wanted the 100th post on the Unthreaded thread.;)