Sunday
Feb142010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Harrabin on the Jones interview
Feb 14, 2010 BBC Climate: CRU Climate: Jones Hat tip to the reader who pointed out this Today Programme discussion with Roger Harrabin, in which he describes his email interview with Phil Jones. No startling new revelations, but there is apparently more to come soon.
And also, did Harrabin's voice crack at one point, or did I imagine that?
Reader Comments (18)
I noticed his voice go peculiar at one point, but whether it cracked, I don't know.
Interesting that Harrabin said "I know quite a lot of his colleagues". I suspect he's been in contact with them a lot over the years.
It was a pity that Naughty James, who is scientifically totally illiterate,ly doesn't have enough background knowledge to ask the really searching questions.
No. But I can't tell if its emotion or simply he has that type of voice when he needs to clear his throat. However, it is amazing what he says Jones says. He worded it well enough that the general public will realize that sceptics had at least two important items correct. Both of which support the null theorem. I guess it would be a bit much to expect him or Jones to admit that the problems with the reconstructions not being definite about the existance of MWP, or the RWP, combined with no statistical difference in warming before a large input of CO2 and after a large CO2 input, gives support for the null theorem that some sceptics have been going on about.
Phil needs to assume a new identity and come down to live here in New Zealand.
Mind he doesn't fall off the edge though.
Yes, Harrabin's voice did break towards the end of his chat with Jim Naughtie. If only he'd left his microphone on as he trudged disconsolately down the BBC's corridors mumbling quietly to himself "Ohhhhh God! I've spent half a career promoting this Prophet of Doom and now he goes soft on me. The End is Nigh, he said. Hockey Stick, he said. Vikings Schmikings, he said. And now he fesses up! It was all a silly scare story to raise research funding, and it got out of hand. What about me? The golden green boy's career in tatters? Maybe they'll let me produce that new film: 'The Confessions of Al Gore: Sorry Folks, The End Aint Nigh'. Ohhhhhh God!"
An important interview because it concedes some ground. His reference to judgments about risk are also significant because this where the political debate/argument will develop. It is back to the precautionary principle. Is the only risk to be assessed a contingent scientific risk? Answer Yes if you believe in AGW comje what may. Answer No if, like me, you are a "flat earther" because economic risk must also be added to the mix. This is also the position of Lord Lawson, who argues the pragmatic, affordable mitigation approach.
Re: Philip Bratby's point that James Naughtie lacks the knowledge to ask really searching questions.
I genuinely thought that Roger Harrabin's questions were bang on target, asking the very questions that the skeptics would have wanted him to. Considering that Harrabin's reporting has hitherto been as bent as a nine-bob Offsetting Certificate, I think the guy now deserves credit.
The past three months have been a thrilling success for those of us who doubted the whole rotten edifice of Anthropogenic Global Warming. But I fear that the AGW lobby, funded by our own tax monies, will raise their game in coming months. The financial stakes are very high: these wicked scaremongers in their universities and The City will not give up their seats on the gravy train without a fight. Their deceit feeds their families.
But I remain optimistic because in Science, the truth ultimately comes through. Science is bigger than the current bunch of bent intellectual pygmies posturing as scientists, specifically in 'climate science' a nonexistent discipline. Their breathtaking lack of integrity has led them to many sins of ommission and commission, presumably because research funding is more important to them than professional integrity. Shame, oh shame. Galileo must be rolling in his grave.
Oh, and let's give a round of applause to Planet Earth for refusing to heat up as required!
oldtimer,
Mitigate what? You've all been telling us the models are no good for donkey's years, and apparently IPCC WG2 is no good to you either, so how do you propose to know what and where and when to mitigate?
Events dear Frank, Events. Humanity will adapt to whatever changing circumstances arrive, as it has always done. The climate will change no swifter than it has in the past. We can, I'm sure, even with the politicians we are lumbered with, build sea walls faster than 2mm a year, and we know how to build buildings for heat and lack of it. So, come what may, we will adapt in the most economically appropriate way. As long, that is, as we can rein in the profligate profiteering bankers and their (mainly) innocent stooges that actually have believed the scare stories.
O'Dwyer me ol' mate, there is probably some confusion over the word mitigation, as there is throughout the wonderful world of AGW. In the normal world of English to mitigate means to accept that something bad has happened but to do what one can to reduce its bad effects. In the world of AGW it means drastically reducing CO2 emissions with two purposes in mind:
1. To make an enormous amount of money for the elite few who know how to play the crooked, government-controlled market in carbon permits.
2. What was the other reason, remind me? Oh yes, there was some cobbled-together, so-called science based on computer models not worth the paper they're not normally even printed on (cos the ones they get to print are I'm convinced a very small subset of those that show up on screen - and that's a juicy part of the story yet to be revealed), that purports to prove that we can with exactitude predict the temperature rise in hundred years based on the single input of man's CO2 emissions, regardless of how anything else, including the as-yet little-understood natural CO2 cycle, other greenhouse gases like water vapour, cloud cover, the sun, land use and other natural cycles may vary. If you believe that, you're a bigger fool ... er, sorry, I mean a respected part of the consensus of the world's leading scientists. Until recently, anyhow.
So, in the AGW case mitigation comes to mean 'attempt to prevent' rather than 'reduce ill effects after the event'. And this gives us the resolution to your difficulty with what oldtimer said, because, being an oldtimer, he was clearly using mitigate in its normal, pre-AGW sense, as that is always what Lord Lawson advocates - what is normally in the AGW context called adaptation to any warming that might occur in the future.
Does that help?
Frank O'Dwyer:
Mitigation and adaptation are also my preferred course of action, together with a drive towards sustainability (because wasting resources is counterproductive in the long run, not because we're all gonna fry in Thermageddon soon).
We should put funds aside to be able to react to problems arising as and when they happen IF those problems require mitigation at all. Since computer modelling has been extensively employed already to imagine all sorts of disasters we could easily draw up contingency plans in the event any of them come to pass.
I understand mitigation as a reaction approach which often, but not always, wastes less resources than speculative approaches like bio-engineering solutions and which most importantly is inherently less dangerous than a lot of the precautionary approaches proposed.
If our current interglacial was to return to the more normal higher temperatures prevalent in the past we would also be faced with rising sea levels and a changing climate - how would you prevent that? Or worse still, a new glaciation which is a lot more dangerous to us than a warming climate!
And no, I don't think the models are no good, I think they are not good enough to be used as the basis of and justification for the kind of costly and far reaching policy decisions that are being made right now.
Most skeptics argue that the models have limitations and can not be used to verify predictions made in other ways. There are enough parameters not sufficiently represented in the GCMs to make me feel uncomfortable about relying on them but I do believe they are a useful tool in research.
Going back to Roger Harrabin, who's rightly getting a fair amount of attention these days, people may not have seen my earlier reflections, sparked by my personal relationship with the man in years gone by. (Sorry for the plug but I have a feeling such things can be overlooked in periods of frequent new threads.)
Yes, his voice did indeed go a bit croaky.
He was obvioulsy swallowing hard while talking - like a schoolkid who is being interrogated by the teacher and who is presenting a carefully rehearsed explanation while realising he is about to be found out and sent to the Head.
After all, he must have known that many people would work out that he was effectively saying "Well, in fact, Jones's replies reveal that the line the BBC has been peddling as established fact for as long as I can remember is actually all bollocks".
Haribo has been one of the strongest supporters of the warmist position for a long time. With his access to the airwaves he's been able to push one message and block the other. Listening to the interview it would seem he's shifting position so we should give the guy some room and a graceful way out. If he's had (or is about to have) a Damascene conversion we shouldn't metaphorically pin him to the wall as that will only slow things down.
Let's give him a round of applause but also keep feeding him the hard questions to ask the alarmists and the evidence to support the rational criticism of AGW.
in the radio interview harrabin repeats this point about the CRU paper trail not being as good as it should be, and adds that this is "similar" to the american datasets, yet in the Q&A, Jones tells skeptics to go to the american land station datasets. surely there's a contradiction there! harrabin nicely separated this contradiction in his two articles to date; good to know he will be publishing more of the interview, tho.
'Climategate' expert Jones says data not well organised
His colleagues said that keeping a paper trail was not one of Professor Jones' strong points. Professor Jones told BBC News: "There is some truth in that.
"We do have a trail of where the (weather) stations have come from but it's probably not as good as it should be," he admitted.
"That's similar with the American datasets. There were technical reasons for this, with changing data from different countries. There's a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511701.stm
Q&A: Professor Phil Jones
"Although we all use very similar station datasets, we each employ different ways of assessing the quality of the individual series and different ways of developing gridded products. The GISS data and their program are freely available for people to experiment with. The agreement between the three series is very good.
Given the web-based availability of the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN), which is used by both NCDC and GISS, anyone else can develop their own global temperature record from land stations."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm
listened to BBC Science in Action last nite and Dr. Brown spent his entire interview on Toyota Prius recall saying we MUST reduce our carbon footprint! nicely followed by peru and climate change and potatoes, without any reference to studies etc:
12 Feb: BBC: Science in Action
**Modern cars, software and safety
Dr Colin Brown is the Engineering Director at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers in the UK. He explained why the brakes on the Prius were causing problems..
**Potatoes and Climate change
In Peru, in the Andes, the potato is a vital, staple crop. Due to climate change, in particular a change in rain patterns, crop yields have been falling over the past few years. Now scientists, from all around the world have been working on different strategies to fix the problem…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0063zcn
The BBC should be asked whether Harrabin recorded an interview with Jones, and if so, why it wasn't used. Sources have told me there was a recorded interview and it was decided at high level not to use it because Jones didn't come across very well.
Could Harrabin perhaps even be transcribing the answers, and could that be the reason he didn't get the whole thing out in one go?
Thanks for that rumour cool dude. It seemed very strange to use of an actor to give voice to Jones. As you say, the BBC should be asked what exactly went on and why. More than one person's voice may be cracking under the strain right now.
"so we should give the guy some room and a graceful way out. If he's had (or is about to have) a Damascene conversion we shouldn't metaphorically pin him to the wall as that will only slow things down."
Your dead wrong.
We should actually shoot him.
But since we cant we have to make do with reducing him to a laughing stock.
DavidNcl
I disagree, as you might expect. I think it would be much better to have him broadcasting more balanced (even sceptical) statements on what's really happening in the world of climate change for the next few weeks, months and possibly years, than to see him swinging from the nearest lamp post...attractive as that might be in the short term.