Friday
Nov182011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill The Myles and Mike show
Nov 18, 2011 Climate: WG2 Having decided it is not going to permit sceptics on the airwaves. the BBC is going to struggle to generate any fizz in its climate change output. I guess the environmentalist sponsors of BBC shows must be the first to want to fund dull, uninteresting television. \sarc
The BBC's Newsnight show featured Myles Allen and Mike Hulme going head to head over the IPCC's forthcoming report on attribution of extreme weather events. There was another scientist whose name escapes me, who was also speaking against Allen, although perhaps not particularly effectively.
Allen came across as rather too keen to inform policy decisions to me - a political scientist we might say.
(H/T Jabba the Cat)
Reader Comments (28)
I don't know if the 'loaded dice' analagy was a good one for the side that believes in AGW.
You can bias policy by loading the dice as well...peer review, manipulating data to suit needs, attacking sceptics. Loads the dice towards the warm side...
Wow!
"What you saw, if you were counting them, were three or four 6's"
Er, no. There was just two for us all to see. But him being a climate scientist I am sure I am risking just being contrasted as showing disgusting sceptical bias by making that observation! Way to show bias and hindsight distortion in a one short simple demonstration ;)
BTW Was that supposed to be a weighted die?
We often hear the meme of false balance means sceptics get an unfair hearing, but in that film the Moscow heatwave is contrasted between two papers as evenly disputed, and emphasis is given to the paper that claims it "80% likely" due to climate change. Roger Pielke Jr has shown convincingly that that paper was an example of cherrypicking and using a novel non-linear trend concept to shoe horn that "balance" into the literature.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2011/11/anatomy-of-cherry-pick.html
Would it be 'heretical' to say that I am warming to Mike Hulme? He seems to talk a lot of reasonably practical sense to me. If sea levels are rising (for whatever reason) you build bigger sea walls...or put your next development on higher ground. This does not seem to be a hugely intellectually challenging policy to me.
The other guy just seems to be firmly in the fire and brimstone ' Repent For Ye Have Committed Original Sin and Ye Must Be Flagellated' camp.
I hope he isn't going to Durban, but will stay home to keep all the carbon sequestered in aircraft kerosene.
But I guess its the Big Annual Gig and P.. Up so its a must for the Head of Climate Dynamics at Oxford to attend. He will somehow salve his no doubt very troubled conscience about his Air Miles (10,800 return) I am sure.
Sorry Bish, I just cannot bring myself to click play on any BBC content these days. They break the rules of their own charter, hold in house investigations into their own bias/rule breaking, act as the television version of the Guardian etc.
At least the U.S. Discovery Channel had the sense to refuse episode 7 of BBC's Frozen Planet, due to the fact that over 50% of people in the U.S. now accept its a crock!
On a similar topic I've just been listening to the eminent Prof. Brian Cox, in one of his many "comedy" appearances on the Shaun Keaveny radio show comparing Climate Change "Deniers" with Crystal Healers (and other loonies). Plugging an upcoming show with Paul Nurse on "how much air time to give to idiots" (his words not mine). This is another supporter of the theory of AGW who spends his entire life jetting around the world in the cause of scientific enlightenment - most of which funded by the good old BBC (or rather the British public).
Shaun Keaveny 6Music - 7am to 10am (his spot about 2hours 30 mins in)
Beware the game plan of Hulme, he who designed CRU on Marxist post-normal science principles therefore is directly responsible for this new Lysenkoism.
The game plan appears to be to appear reasonable but to bias discussion to considering how bad the effects of CO2-AGW will be. The aim is to claim the CO2-AGW is substantial and real when in reality it could well be slightly net negative and the real AGW is from the 2nd AIE, which also explains the amplification of TSI at the end of ice ages long before any CO2 rise [you must start the deep current first and that requires very substantial Antarctic ice melt without CO2-AGW.]
These Marxists know that the Lysenkoism is under serious scientific attack if these new papers are published so are desperate for AR5 to be as planned without deviation.
My view is that any scientist who plays politics should lose his/her scientific grants and become a politics' academic!
Game set and match to Mike Hulme, even though Miles had the loaded dice.
Lesson for Miles. Anyone gives you a loaded dice; check it out before you demonstrate it.
Interesting. Adaptation presents moral and judgmental dilemmas that most of us hadn't foreseen. The elephant in the room here seems to be mitigation . The BBC hasn't decided to keep climate skeptics off the airwaves it's just that we've moved on to a point where skepticism in the observed facts of warming is no longer relevant , as evidenced by the complete lack of talk about mitigation.
You can't mitigate something that for all intents and purposes doesn't exist. Net CO2-AGW is very low perhaps net negative. The proof of this is that the deep ocean warming that triggers the end of ice ages starts 2,000 years before any CO2 increase in the atmosphere.
That reveals the real AGW which is aerosols, in the ice age case a form of biofeedback evolved by phytoplankton over millennia, switching off a second optical process. This is completely missed by the climate models which falsify cloud properties to hide the imaginary 'back radiation', an elementary error.
So, it ain't mitigation, it's identify the fraudsters, reconstruct the science and ensure the bent politicians and the carbon traders are pushed out of the equation.
PS the Arctic 60-70 year freeze melt cycle, now on the freeze track, is a beautiful example of this biofeedback in action. 5 times the money spent on the Manhattan project and giving control to politically extreme 'scientists' like Hansen has led to the Wrong Answer.
Latimer Alder asked "Would it be 'heretical' to say that I am warming to Mike Hulme?"
No, rather sensible actually. Well worth a read if you haven't already.
A well written report. It's a pity that the science upon which it is based is wrong in four key aspects and the climate models cannot predict climate!
It really is that bad.
I admit I've had very mixed feelings about Mike Hulme. Like Latimer Alder this video has made a difference to that.
James Delingpole has been one of Hulme's most trenchant critics. James sees post-normal science as of the devil and Hulme his disciple, a bit like mydogsgotnonose. I've listened, as I always will with James, but it's not been the most important factor to me.
On the other hand I was struck last year that Roger Pielke Jnr, at Policy Exchange in London, spoke warmly of Hulme as a fellow-author of the Hartwell Paper. Once again I wasn't totally convinced.
What's made the difference now? I see Hulme as a leftie - or starting from that standpoint long ago. I have no problem with that, as long as it translates into practical compassion for those most at need in this world. And this is the first time I've heard the guy publicly argue for something that was clearly much better for the poorest but less lucrative for the climate modellers.
I was very put off Hulme by the comment he made in a Climategate email in May 04 comparing a paper on rainfall in the Sahel as "almost on a par with holocaust denial". He was I think totally wrong on the science there and certainly the rhetoric, which went on to do massive damage. But if it was Hulme's concern for the poor in Africa that motivated him then and again last night then I can begin to see some light in the darkness, a strand of consistency. And it's this kind of social conscience that is the single most important attribute that is needed in climate scientists.
And I guess at that point that I part company with those that say that climate scientists should not be political. They should be political - just in the right way, with the poorest truly at the centre of their concerns. That will drive them never to exaggerate, never to cut corners. If Hulme can model that, then all power to him. Certainly he seemed to last night, in contrast to modeler from Oxford.
So the question boils down to adaption based on probabilistic methods and concepts dealing with attribution or adaption based on actual human vunerability.
Mac:
Exactly. Real human beings at the centre, not the abstractions of software.
Excuse the impertinance, but why is a lecturer from Essex University speaking with a back projection of Exeter behind him? Is this more bad reporting/editing from the BBC or is the only way really Essex? I think they meant Exeter not Essex!
Also, is Mike Hume not backtracking from earlier statements made during his tenure at the Tyndall Centre? He certainly sounded like it to me. The Oxford prof is nothing more than an intellectual onanist imho, another intellectual elitist who wants to rule the world, literlally!
Thanks for that @mmydogsgotnonose.
"for all intents and purposes [AGW] doesn't exist" Would you object if I described your position as denialist rather than skeptic ?
I get the impression that mainy people on the sceptic side judge the ideas of Post-Modern Science too harshly. Briefly, Post-Normal Science is not really science: it instead refers to the way in which scientists, policy-makers and the public should think about and act on the link between science and policy in certain cases. These cases are those in which the scientific facts about the problem are uncertain, the values used to make judgements based on the facts are disputed, the economic or quality of life implications of the various policies debated are large in either direction, and there is a need to reach urgent decisions. For anyone who is a lukewarmer, and not a died-in-the-wool CAGW-er or an "Its all rubbish and a fraud" sceptic, it seems obvious to me that global warming science is Post-Normal Science in this sense. Normal science, by the way, corresponds to situations where the facts can be ascertained with confidence on a short enough timescale to lead to a tight enough predictions of what is going to happen if one does one thing or another, such that decisions about which thing to do can be made rationally.
Jerome Ravetz, one of the inventors of the idea of Post-Modern Science, had a post on WUWT about his ideas, and got rather savaged in comments. I read his essay as being very much in favour of scepticism on climate change, at least in terms of policy implications. I think Mike Hulme is also doing this. In my view, it would help very much if people on the science side of climate change, e.g. Myles Allen, would think through what the implications of Post-Modern Science are. The temptation among leading climate scientists as represented in the IPCC upper echelons looks to me to involve assuming that Climate Science is a Normal Science. Where the facts are not clear enough, they tend to simply assume that this does not matter, and barge on with demanding policy actions regardless. For the more lucid scientists who do this, they would justify it based on value judgements such as the Precautionary Principle. But this tends to be ill-thought out, because scientists are not good at making policy judgement calls. Ravetz suggests that in these cases, scientists need to be more modest, and explicitly accept that their work is too uncertain to be able to dictate decisions. Instead, policy needs to be decided upon using "extended peer community". This means, as I understand it, using science as one of the inputs into a balanced political debate aimed at trying to make a mature estimate of the likely costs and likely benefits of different policies.
Hengist; I had some hopes for you because it seemed that for a lefty would-be-serious journalist you were open to non-conformist ideas but to imply that I have a 'denialist' position is misrepresentation.
I made it very plain that there has been substantial climate change, recently by AGW, but it has not been from CO2-AGW. Instead there is an optical process which has been the subject of much research in climate science for ~30 year without being resolved - why do rain clouds go dark? Add in the fact that CO2-GW does not start the end of an ice age and the key question is 'Is there any net CO2-AGW at all?' Notice the 'net'.
I am a real scientist, not like the lightweights and political freaks that populate climate science and have come to the same conclusion that other proper scientists like Will Happer in the US have come to, which is that at IR band saturation near the Earth's surface self absorption may make present incremental CO2 climate sensitivity slightly negative.
This is not 'denialist', it is being a scientist and establishing the facts. So for the avoidance of doubt, here's my analysis of the appalling state of present climate science.
1. We now know CO2 has no influence on the first ~2000 years of warming at the end of an ice age so Hansen is probably wrong about 4.2 K CO climate sensitivity. There may be some though.
2. 'Back radiation' is a elementary mistake; Aarhenius and Fourier were wrong and any process engineer like I have been will confirm this. The problem is the poor quality of even some professors of physics who do not know statistical thermodynamics.
3. Cloud science is completely cocked up. It came from Sagan and climate science fondly imagines that lots of small cloud droplet in polluted cloud make clouds dark underneath: it's a large droplet phenomenon.
4. 33K present GHG warming is ~3 times too high, again an elementary mistake, failing to take out lapse rate warming.
The problem is, the politicians who paid for this farrago to frighten the population into accepting the carbon taxes the bankers want to fill the MBS debts won't allow the truth to be told. Hansen has only recently doubled the imaginary 'cloud albedo effect' cooling, impossible. He is an expert in this area so must know the NASA claims of 'surface reflection' are fantasy physics.
So, write 100 lines; 'I really must understand that when a serious scientist sets out to reverse engineer a scientific fraud, and come up with a complete explanation not needing any CO2-AGW, but there could be [have been] some, this is far more likely to be the truth than anything the Koch Bros. could commission!
This 'science' has been constructed as a new Lysenkoism. It's now being killed off by heavyweight, honest people who have had enough of shysters abusing science.
Jeremy Harvey,
"These cases are those in which the scientific facts about the problem are uncertain, the values used to make judgements based on the facts are disputed, the economic or quality of life implications of the various policies debated are large in either direction, and there is a need to reach urgent decisions."
Shouldn't this rather be: "We don't know if there is a need to reach an urgent decision, as the facts are uncertain, and the values disputed." So, whether someone thinks that action is required or not will tend to boil down to whether they are favourably predisposed towards taking the prescribed action or not. In other words, Post Normal Science seems to be an excellent method of turning poorly understood science into political argument.
James - good point, I wanted to rephrase that when I reread it before posting, but then I forgot. I guess that if you allow for one outcome of the "urgent decision" case being, "OK, lets carry on as is for the moment, but keep an eye on it", then that covers your argument? I definitely had such a decision in mind when writing. I believe that Ravetz would include such "decisions".
Myles should have learned by now that when playing with loaded dice it is critical to understand the surface you are throwing them on to. The smooth glass table causes them to slide, and so keep their initial random orientation, rather than tumble and so head for the loaded side.
I had a long talk with Jerome Ravetz about six months ago. An interesting man, and well worth the time, but his writings are not always easy to understand at first glance. I bought his book, but still haven't found the time to read it.
Referring to The Leopard In The Basement’s comment about Roger Peilke’s conclusion that the second (German) paper mentioned in the BBC report (it pains me to watch them) was based on cherry picking of data (http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2011/11/anatomy-of-cherry-pick.html) I searched for the paper and the abstract is at http://www.pnas.org/content/108/44/17905.abstract?sid=3e1d5e0f-7ec6-490c-a565-693f61184a4a
In the middle of it is this sentence
“We further find that the sum of warm plus cold extremes increases with any climate change, whether warming or cooling”
The authors obviously decided to cherry pick in the warming direction and thus toe the party line. I’ve seen many reports on papers that say we have had no warming for the last 10 years, so that sentence could well be invalid as well.
Re: Nick R
Maybe it is just me but I read the sentence as:
"Any change, whether warmer or colder will result in more extremes. Therefore we must be at the temperature that produces the smallest number of extremes."
Hulme is smarter than most alarmists in realizing that when one door closes, there are many more ways to skin a cat.
Nick R
Up until that cherry pick paper there was a pretty much reasonable general acceptance that the Moscow heat wave showed no evidence of an underlying Anthropogenic climate effect, and a paper by Dole et al said so. I reckon this left many alarmists despondent so, the upshot is a not very high quality paper heavily skewed to a predefined judgement gets aired on Realclimate and so obviously this means this gets Susan Watts of the BBC’s attention and she says “Ooh, there are two equal side to this coin I must put this in my report while walking through the warm November air in a London Park!” –and hey presto! We have a fair balance that works for alarmists, but is considered unreasonable for sceptics;)
Lubos Motl also has a pretty withering critique of another recent paper from Hansen claiming the Mosocow extreme meant something significant.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/11/james-hansen-and-3-sigma-proofs.html
Of 3 principal reasons why it is flawed, the chief principals that Motl use to critique the paper the one I found most interesting is the “Look Elswhere Effect”. I.e. It depends where you where looking for these effects.
Can anyone remember before 2010 who predicted heatwaves being more regular in Moscow?
No neither can I. Yet after it happens we see papers being generated claiming this remarkable fact will be more common, amazing eh?
The LEE means that a 3 sigma event (0.3%) is almost certainly bound to happen somewhere in the world it only becomes notable if someone predicted it would happen ahead of time and was look for only at that one location.
Only just had a chance to view the video. The feeble performance of the chap from Oxford was astonishing for someone from such a great university. His 'trick' with the die was both botched and ill-conceived. The chap from the humbler UEA did a better job with his slots, but seemed to be overly-generous to the other one. I guess this is what passes for climate debate on the BBC, and may even have been a brave and bold initiative by the producers and presenter given the decadent yet directed intellectual culture of that corporation.
@ mydogsgotnonose
RE
that at IR band saturation near the Earth's surface self absorption may make present incremental CO2 climate sensitivity slightly negative.
I've asked this question a few times and never gotten a response. When I was taking Atmospheric Physics and we touched on GHG's and I recall that on CO2, it being near saturation in the bandwidth it absorbs at. I concluded it was not a gas to worry much about and this also served as the basis for my doubts on increasing CO2 being a driver of global warming.