Bishop Hill Climate cuttings 36
Mar 5, 2010 Climate: Cuttings Here's a few more climate stories that I've come across in recent days:
A forthcoming review paper claims to have found the fingerprint of mankind on the global climate. Lubos picks over the entrails.
Richard Tol continues to find grey literature cited in the IPCC's WG3 report. Andreas Bjorstrom says that in the Third Assessment Report only 36% of references in WG3 came from the scientific literature.
Climate scientists are planning to take out attack ads in the New York Times. I wonder if they'll call us "deniers". Judith Curry thinks that maybe doing some sound science would be a better approach.
The interest in whether the "great dying of the thermometers" caused a bias in the global temperature average continues. Lucia has invited Chiefio to go a guest post explaining his thoughts.
Roy Spencer has come up with a new way of estimating the Urban Heat Island effect.
Warmist affluence, sceptic squalor? Richard North looks at the sea of money in which climatologists are swimming.
Reader Comments (31)
According to Donna Laframboise, 42% of literature cited by WGIII is gray.
http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/2010/03/almost-half-non-peer-reviewed.html
Why do they want to take a stand on something with question marks around it? Get the science right and then take the stand. They are just setting themselves up to look even more ridiculous. But isn't this the way humans in science make progress? We are in the midst of a Kuhnian paradigm shift. History in the making.
Why do they want to take a stand on something with question marks around it? Get the science right and then take the stand. They are just setting themselves up to look even more ridiculous. But isn't this the way humans in science make progress? We are in the midst of a Kuhnian paradigm shift. History in the making.
A bit of a hiccup...sorry about the double entry...
If they are wanting to take out attack ads, why on earth would they do it in the NYT, whose readers already agree with them? It's be like taking out ads upholding the superiority of cricket over football in Wisden.
I wonder about the scientists. A lot of them deny a climate change but we can clearly see and feel it. The ice at the pole is melting and so on...
"Richard North looks at the sea of money in which climatologists are swimming."
As an alumnus of Chicago Business School I get invited to presentations etc held in London. I was recently invited to register for this one:
http://www.chicagobooth.edu/alumni/events/showEvent.aspx?eventId=1858
As you can infer there's a lot of money in climate change. The "science" may be spurious but the commercial benefits of "believing" in and boosting that "science" are very real - and not just for climatologists.
@Umbongo
That's why it would be so hard to get rid of climate change, even if the science were to be thoroughly discredited.
Did you catch the 0700 news on Radio 4 this morning? The item on the Met Office 'new review' of climate (confirming manmade warming) was followed immediately by an item on the rescue of passengers from a cruise ship trapped in the ice in the Baltic!
Interestingly, the Met Office item was presented not by one of the environment correspondents, but by the science correspondent.
Mr Global warming for us : 'I wonder about the scientists. A lot of them deny a climate change but we can clearly see and feel it. The ice at the pole is melting and so on...'
a) The ice level is already reforming quite fast
b) Ever looked at the history of such 'polar ice melting claims'? They go back a long time and crop up at semi-random intervals
e.g.
"It will without doubt have come to your Lordship's knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.
(This) affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations."
From a report by the Royal Society to the Admiralty. Scary sounding stuff, eh? Oh, the date?
1817 (See http://www.john-daly.com/polar/arctic.htm )
The Lubos blog is very good. And very funny.
And that's the memo! Lubos as usual is on the ball.
Are the ice caps melting or not?
Why do they want to take a stand on something with question marks around it? Get the science right and then take the stand. They are just setting themselves up to look even more ridiculous. But isn't this the way humans in science make progress? We are in the midst of a Kuhnian paradigm shift. History in the making.
Like the famous line in 'Forest Gump': "Stupid is, as stupid does". Since one of the movers and shakers, of that ad, is Paul Ehrlich, the motivation is self explanatory.
Check his wiki. And read this:
http://reason.com/archives/2000/05/01/earth-day-then-and-now
But, IMO, there's a question whether these people are REALLY that stupid. Remember that for 'One World Order' to take effect, first there has to be chaos, confusion and anarchy.. everything has to be 'torn down'.
newbie, come on: it depends on the definition of "ice", "caps", and "melting". And "science" has no answers on any of these. Well, there are definitions, but no scientific consensus on the definitions. It's what will bring in the best research grants that defines the terms at any point.
@newbie
That's not the right question. You should be asking whether any observed melting is due to human activities, or whether it is due to natural effects, as previous episodes of melting were.
I thought newbie was being a bit facetious based on Cambrian Lads comment.
Lubos Motl gets the Guardian's C-ensorshop i-s F-requent treatment.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/mar/05/arctic-sea-ice-climate-change-visualisation
Ian E
1817 of course being the year following the year without a summer due to Tambora with a bit of low solar activity thrown in for luck. I guess all those greenhouse gases and hot air that should have been over most of the NH was pushed up over the Arctic funny things happen to this climate malarkey. I think I’ll stick to engineering.
Interesting fact with the picture from Lubos; it doesn't show Antarctica in the trend prediction for warming. Could this be that as Ant. doesn't appear to be warming at the moment, or maybe even cooling a tad, presenting a map with a bunch of blue squares on the bottom wouldn't look as impressive?
Just a thought.
SDCS
@Mac
I saw that comment there from Lubos yesterday, I seem to remember that he succinctly outlined how little skill was shown in the models - saying something like they were merely projecting a linear downward trend with random squiggles. I think the reason they snipped him was that he attributed the diagram to "Paul Scrotum" which I laughed at, but I guess the mod thought it was a step too far :)
Antarctic Ice extent has increased massively.
http://tinyurl.com/iceup43-nsidc
A quote from the Lubos blog
"In particular, it should have the same values in the Northern and Southern hemispheres because the concentrations of CO2 become rapidly uniform by diffusion."
Apparently it doesn't, according to NASA CO2 tends to clump together
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/nasa-releases-new-co2-data-refutes-conventional-wisdom/
Which if you think about it a while has a lot of implications for just about everything to do with climate science. Like how they calculate CO2 levels from the past.
Leaving aside the usual routine assumption of bad faith and the laughable/insulting notion that hundreds of scientists all over the world are selling their souls for the pittance they are paid, how does that compare to the turnover of Exxon over the same period? For that matter how does it compare to their profits for even a single year?
Similarly how do the costs compare, given that a 'sceptic' misinformation campaign needs only a small number of people, doesn't need to launch any satellites, doesn't even need to do any actual research, especially when a large number of ideologues and sloppy journalists are willing to do the heavy lifting for free?
I'm not sure what relevance you think the turnover of Exxon has to such a comparison. You realise they have outgoings that need to be funded from the turnover right? Surely the only relevant comparison is spend on mainstream climatology versus spend on the "well-funded" sceptic efforts.
Just to clarify, Richard Tol posted this week about Chapter 11 of AR4's Working Group 3 report. After reading his contribution, I tallied the references used in that particular chapter and found that 42% were grey literature. This was astonishing, considering the fact that Tol and others had, in their capacity as IPCC expert reviewers, complained about the quality of the citations in that chapter while it was being written. My post about Chapter 11 appears here:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/2010/03/almost-half-non-peer-reviewed.html
I then chose, at random, another Working Group 3 chapter to examine. In the case of Chapter 5, it turns out that three-quarters (76%) of the citations are from grey literature! That post appears here:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/2010/03/great-peer-review-fairy-tale.html
All the best!
Bishop,
Because North's figures represent the turnover of climate science research, viewed (from his perspective) as a business.
After all (unlike 'sceptics' most of whom just do PR) climate scientists actually do perform research and in order to do so have outgoings that need to be funded.
On that basis one should be comparing turnover of oil companies to turnover of government.
Fair point Bish. But of course the situation is way more complex than that. Very large companies like oil giants have learned to stay close to governments, spending money on lobbying and doing the stuff legislators and bureaucrats would like, trying to achieve a 'friendly' regulatory environment. But in a (relatively) free economy they are also competing with each other and seeking to win contracts with other companies and with us, the end consumers. For that, like every other consumer-facing outfit, they feel they have to try to persuade us that they're doing the 'right thing' vis-a-vis the planet. Hence the plethora of not entirely believable 'green' ads from oil companies in recent years. These giants have masses of conflicting motivations, in other words, and long may that continue. (Fascism is where they would only have to worry about keeping government happy - no thanks.)
When ExxonMobil was putting a very small amount of money into a few climate sceptical organizations (small compared either to its turnover or to the amount being invested in alarmist science) it was trying, it has been assumed, to change public opinion so that it would not be viewed as such a net harmer of the environment through a product that when used emitted a great deal of CO2. A perfectly reasonable thing to try - in a free society. But the bad publicity generated for them and for climate scepticism for a relatively small amount of money makes me wonder if it was ever worth it.
The whistleblower at UEA may have changed all those equations, like so many things. That's a really interesting question.
Anyway, it's simply not true, Frank, that the whole of an oil company's turnover is to be taken as on the side of scepticism. The structure of incentives is complex and not a little influenced by the official stance of governments. This may explain why BP and Shell were so generous to alarmist climate science at CRU. But the hard truth is that we don't know the reasons. As Thomas Sowell argues, prices contain a wealth of information we could never understand using our intellects. With these investment decisions of oil companies, can we open up people's hearts and work out why they choose as they do, with so many conflicting market forces and other influences on them?
No, it's the actual amounts given that can be the only basis for comparison. And when it comes down to that, Joanne Nova and Richard North are showing that it is 'warmist affluence, sceptic squalor' by a mile, as the Bishop puts it. And those without the affluence are winning the argument by a mile. Isn't that something?
The Guardian on Arctic sea ice graph cherry picks in two separate ways:
1. the summer minimum only
2. ignoring the Antarctic.
The picture one needs is from the University of Illinois. We're talking about some claimed effect of global warming. The total ice coverage for the globe, over the whole year, is the thing that matters. But would an eager alarmist reading the Guardian have been as 'impacted' by the relevant graph?
Must read for all
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/assume-a-spherical-cow-therefore-all-steaks-are-round/