Thursday
May272010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Another climate review
May 27, 2010 Climate: other Royal Society Just back from London and things are hotting up nicely. Roger Harrabin has the big story of the day with the news that 43 fellows of the Royal Society have complained about the Society's climate coverage:
The UK's Royal Society is reviewing its public statements on climate change after 43 Fellows complained that it had oversimplified its messages.
They said the communications did not properly distinguish between what was widely agreed on climate science and what is not fully understood.
The society's ruling council has responded by setting up a panel to produce a consensus document.
This is pretty exciting stuff.
Update on May 27, 2010 by
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill
Interesting to remind ourselves of some earlier thoughts on the Royal Society's position on climate change.
Reader Comments (28)
"The society's ruling council has responded by setting up a panel to produce a consensus document."
Just what the world needs, another consensus.
Marvellous news. I hope that they will examine especially the claim on the RS website that manmade CO2 will remain in the atmosphere for over a thousand years.
“A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.” - Abba Eban, Israeli statesman, diplomat, and scholar.
...there may be some scientists left in the rs...
Hasn't "consensus" made it to the status of a scientifico-political "boo word" yet? It's long past time that happened.
This does indeed read like exciting stuff. Of course, it could all still just fade away into a non-comment. RS could remove its dodgy assertions in compliance with an enquiry's demands but, if they are not able to agree on fresh and more appropriate language, it could then feasibly replace it with literally nothing at all.. not even a corrigendum. This wouldn't be helpful.
The above goes so far to the core of the problem with the RS. That the politicians "wouldn't accept"! If the Society were to honour sciences, the politicians would just have to take what they're given! The Society's master is supposed to be science, not the politician's whim! And since the politicians wouldn't have accepted "honest doubt", one really has to ask.. what did the RS give them instead? Okay, that was rhetorical. They gave them a "dishonest consensus". You know it's true.
Did Harrabin write the following, or is he quoting? I'm not able to tell for sure:
If that's Harrabin, that's more concession. A voluntary concession at that. Holy pooh.
Appeals to an ephemeral RS consensus are inherently politicized, seeking nominally disinterested justification for hysterics of various stripes to peddle propaganda under the guise of objective, rational debate. Assessing individual climatologist's hypotheses on the merits is doable; passing collective judgment on academic groupthink is a matter of convenience, not of substance.
Now six months after Climategate (sic), not one major Green Gang contributor to warmists' pre-November duckspeak has dared surface any new material. On the contrary, Briffa remains out to lunch; James "Death to the Infidel" Hansen is off on pilgrimage; the Rev. Jones is tasting crow, and proctocranials such as Schmidt and Trenberth have ceased warbling from on high. Hiding in decline, Michael Mann has shifted focus to epidemiological vectors of tropical malaria.
Who cares what Climate Cultists' phony consensus ever asserted, then or now? If ye olde Royal Society continues substituting encopretic press releases for research, Warmists will be proven right in one respect: The End is Near.
John Blake, thank you for a marvelous new word, encopretic.
The anti-consensus pudding is regularly overegged. There couldn't be much scientifically-informed policymaking, business or engineering without a willingness to seek out the scientific consensus; there wouldn't be much science education either. That's not at all negated by the fact that, yes, when people start shouting unusually loud about consensus it's often a danger sign. To paraphras Alfred North Whitehead, seek consensus and distrust it.
RayG - "John Blake, thank you for a marvelous new word, encopretic."
I rather liked proctocranials as well.
Who's on this panel?
we've heard lately from thieir ilk a lot about uncertainties. (with the intention of manipulating and using to their agenda i've no doubt). i believe this is just an extension of that. expect an assessment of inherent uncertainties that leaves us all vulnerable and potentially guilty of gaiacide.
What with this and the Oxford Union debate !
Are we observing the first signs of a realism backlash ?
I do hope so.
Just heard this reported by Harrabin on the Today programme. No attempt to downplay it. Harrabin is becoming more of a journalist and less of an advocate.
Don't hold your collective breathe on this one. The RS has turned itself into an advocacy group, go to its website and you'll see letters from the RS and other acadamies urging government action on climate change.
Any change that in any way dilutes the message will be fought tooth and nail by the activist climate scientists in the RS. In reality the RS, not for the first time, has been brought into disrepute by Houghton, Mitchell et al, and the "agnostics" have suddenly caught on as to what's been going on and what might happen to all of science once the politicians realise they have been, is "duped" too strong a word.
The sequence of events has been that the activists, Slingo, Houghton, Pope, Mitchell et al have gotten into positions where they have the ear of politicians, and have advocated action on climate change. The politicians have asked for clear evidence, and of course there is none, so they'be exaggerated and dissimulated to get action for their cause. The politicians who will have to take the consequences of reducing the living standards for hundreds of millions of the voters have acted slowly. This has led to more scary scenarios presented with absolute certainty, but still the politicos haven't acted because to do so on your own would be economic suicide, so the only way to get action is world government which was on the agenda at Copenhagen, but pulled when Monckton got hold of the document.
So these guys are still entrenched having, in my view exaggerated the effects of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere to catastrophic proportions in the name of their "cause". They have also involved other senior scientists like David King who have, with no seeming grasp of the topic, pinned their flag to the CAGW proposition.
It ain't going to be easy to get to the point where they admit a 1C rise for a doubling of CO2 and that they don't really understand what the feedback effecst will be. Too many faces, too much egg.
This modest stirring amongst the ranks of the Royal Society is better than nothing. This Society, and the Edinburgh one, do seem to have been railroaded by political activists into making quite remarkably strong statements about climate science. I suppose those currently in control of the committees and the website will not yield easily, perhaps not at all. But the mini-revolt may yet spread. Cigars will be waved, brandy glasses will be shaken, and armchairs will squeek with members wakening from their slumbers to make a point, and be heard. At last.
A very positive factor in that story is that the voices of 43 Fellows can hardly be put down to foaming at the mouth sceptic crackpots. It has to be obvious now to the dilletante media and politicians that all is not what it seems. Good that they have a realistic target date as well, not the long grass that politicians usually favour.
John Blake, thanks for that entry, a wonderful canter over the open fields for the poor under utilised english language.
If Michael Mann is actually looking at malarial vectors instead of misunderstanding statistics, then he may yet do some good for humanity.
Isn't Martin Rees doing the Reith lectures soon? I understand he is to expound on the relationship between science and politics, and how politicians must get the very best (but completely unbiased no doubt) scientific advice. Man's an idiot.
I've lamented before that the presiding clique of the RS is seeking to position the Society as "the UK's national academy of science". History shows that, in the cases of the Soviet and Chinese Academies, and latterly the American, such organisations attain disproportionate political influence. The move becomes a bid for power.
The scientist's answer to any worthwhile question has to be "I don't know, but let me see if I can find out". That attitude sits well with the Society's history (after all they played a prominent part in establishing the scientific method as we know it today) but doesn't really work for a body that sees its main purpose as advising government. I hope this grass-roots revolt starts to move the Society back on track.
Politics and science (re SimonH and Rhoda's comments).
Here is prescient stuff from Eisenhower in 1961:
'Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.'
Thanks to: an article by Iain Murray in which he adds 'What Ike warned about has now come to pass. The scientific elite, with the help of its allies in Congress, increasingly dictates public policy and thereby secures the continued flow of research funding. Time and again, scientists have told me how they have to tie their work to global warming in order to obtain funding, and time and again — bar a few brave souls, who are immediately tagged as “deniers” — they tell me it would be career suicide to speak out openly about this.'
http://article.nationalreview.com/434861/climategate-and-the-scientific-elite/iain-murray
On the one hand there is the apparent politicisation of the Royal Society, and on the other there is good old down-to-earth loopiness. See: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6814912.ece
'The Royal Society is Britain’s premier science institution and its decision to take geo-engineering seriously is a measure of the desperation felt by scientists about climate change.
Brian Launder, a professor at Manchester University, who is also on the working group, recently said that without CO2 reductions or geo-engineering “civilisation as we know it will end within our grandchildren’s lifetime”. “The only rational scheme is to reduce the sunlight reaching Earth and to reflect back more of it,” he said.'
Interesting - but who are these 43 people and where can we see their statement, does anybody know?
So the sun's light to the earth is to be reduced eh! Less sunlight, less photosynthesis. Um, wasn't it Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren who wanted an excuse to bring in Malthusian ideas on reducing the population of the earth? What do these people have for substantia grisea I wonder? Ferruginous Excreta perhaps.
Don't expect much from the Royal Society while Rees is at the helm. He's spent most of his career stifling and suppressing evidence that contradicts his own fantasies, and dreaming up crafty hypothetical fixes to astronomical theories that fall to pieces when exposed to inconvenient real world facts. Rees lives in a fantasy world where mathematics and models trump reality every time. He's also written fantasy stuff about how unlikely it is that humanity will survive the century. In terms of his arguments, he disgraces the scientific profession by resorting to illogical fallacies. For example, when Ofcom rules that the Great Global Warming Swindle was not 'dangerous', Rees came on the radio fulminating against Ofcom, saying they got it wrong because the programme might have given viewers the impression that there was uncertainty about global warming, and so that was dangerous. Well, of course, that's 'begging the question', petitio principii, which disgraces the RS. I've long come to the conclusion that Rees is basically a fantasist.
Moreover, the official position of the Royal Society is that all climate change, however small, is 'dangerous' (that word again). There is no level at which climate change is not dangerous, according to the RS. That makes natural changes dangerous. That means climate has always been dangerous whether man is on the planet or not. That's a rather silly position.
With such silly people saying such silly things, it's about time we started laughing at Rees and the RS. Show people how daft they are, and how they have therefore brought science into disrepute. People don't respect the things they laugh at. The RS needs to wake up to the FACT that lots of people are already laughing at them and holding them in contempt for their silliness. Sadly, true scientific endeavour is the one that suffers in the long run.
In contrast to the claimed consensus, James Lovelock in this Guardian interview says that the great climate centres around the world are more than well aware how weak their science is.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock
SimonH wrote: "The above goes so far to the core of the problem with the RS. That the politicians "wouldn't accept"! If the Society were to honour sciences, the politicians would just have to take what they're given!"
I think you've misinterpreted the thrust of the argument. It is not that politicians wouldn't accept uncertainty, it's that politicians wouldn't authorise the level of action some scientists believe is required with that level of uncertainty. The RS, and many others, have therefore felt obliged to force action by bluffing the level of certainty and pushing disaster as the only logical outcome.
In the CRU mails there is one from "Harry" to the local Green Party mailing list in 2001 that enshrines the real problem in a nutshell:
"We're looking at an *unprecedented* acceleration in temperature, and it's not due to a sudden lack of volvanic eruptions. Even if it turns out to be naturally-occurring, who's willing to take that chance? We should be trying to wean ourselves off of unsustainable energy generation and use anyway."
"If Michael Mann is actually looking at malarial vectors instead of misunderstanding statistics, then he may yet do some good for humanity. May 28, 2010 | Cumbrian Lad"
Indeed he is; see this link - http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/22/manns-1-8-million-malaria-grant-who-do-we-ask-for-a-refund/ - however it looks like another opportunity for "mann made" global warming spin and misinformation. The "malaria link to global warming" was also being peddled in the recent BBC programs on "The Story of Science" http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00s9mms
I'm expecting a sort of Hitchikers Guide edit - maybe from 'harmful' to 'mostly harmful'
I am still holding out on what GeolSoc will have to say. They sought submissions from their members a couple of months back for a position paper on climate change, but since then there has been no news from GeolSoc