Thursday
Nov152012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill WUWTTV live
Nov 15, 2012 Climate: Sceptics Anthony Watts' climate telethon schedule is here. I'm on at 5pm UK time today. That's 9am PST.
The stream should appear below. Don't forget you can hit the full screen button if graphs are small.
Reader Comments (40)
Very cool presentation by Anthony.
I am getting a message by wordpress that Judith Curry,Climate Etc is no longer available - archived or suspended. Does anyone here have information about this?
I'm getting a "DNS error" page when I try to go to Judith Curry's site:
found Dr. Ryan Maue's presentation on WUWT-TV very interesting, thanks Anthony and all
next up, Mosher and Fuller, can't wait for some new sparks about Climategate!
Beth Cooper, Skiphil -
I see the following:
Love the Kenji-cam on WUWT!
kudos to WUWT & all involved.
the ads seem to be country-specific, and in australia there has been a regular insertion of a Blackmores vitamins ad that is so loud, the neighbours must be wondering what's going on. the ad has heavy metal and screeching unlke anything i've encountered online. as i have speakers connected to the tv, it means rushing over to the speaker controls and turning them down to zero til the ad ends. also, the ad seems to interrupt when crucial points are being mad.
curry's blog definitly down. pielke sr retired his blog just days ago.
looking forward to your presentation, bish.
Loving Bert Rutan's prezzie. First time I've seen him and he's an impressive and persuasive speaker
ber rutan is brilliant.
btw bish, u r listed as "live", so am wondering if you would give a shout-out to john daly, who should and would have a place in this historic event, had he lived. good luck with your presentation.
apologies... meant to write 'burt rutan'.
This is the same impeccable logic with which Burt has convinced himself that space aliens built the pyramids, which were then re-arranged by ice age.
@russell
He wasn't talking about space aliens. He was talking about temperatures.
Do you have a temperature-related argument wrt his remarks on WUWT-TV?
And Burt's computer models are always test-flown!
From what I've seen I like it. Pretty slick and impressive, it has the same production values as the mainstream alarmist stuff except without the hand wringing and nagging, and the depth of background seems more informative and less patronising. Seems pretty balanced (though I would say that :) ) .
It's like a peak into an alternate reality where alarmist patronising idiots don't hold sway.
Quite refreshing. :)
"If a blog has been suspended for violating our terms, its domain/URL and content will not be returned."
-Wordpress
Just tuned in to WUWT-TV. Brilliant piece of counter publicity by Anthony Watts, and thank you to all those who made it possible and who participated.
With re Curry's Wordpress suspension
I'd find it hard to believe Curry in breach of any WP terms of use. There must have been some mistake. The loss of JC's blog's content would be a huge loss to history. As in all top blogs, the debates in Climate Etc's comments threads were much more interesting and informative than the posts that initiated them.
Forgot to add.
Coleman to Watts: "I've been forecasting weather since you were born" :D
Just 'tuned in' via the Bishop's embedification above, but I'm getting just sound, with a black screen and a blue circle on it, with advertisments superimposed. Is the current programme just sound?
Cumbrian Lad, I am getting sound and visuals. Never came across an advertisement or a situation similar to what you describe.
It's most bizzare I can hear two gentlemen discussing the state of weather stations and in the box is the last frame of an advertisment for a cream based liqueur overlaid with a message about beautiful chinese women.
It is always a good idea to try a different browser when something funny happens. ;-)
14 Nov: Telegaph: Cristopher Hope: George Osborne is driving force behind anti-wind farm agenda, says his father-in-law Lord Howell
George Osborne is the driving force behind an apparent policy shift against onshore wind farms, according to the Chancellor’s father-in-law Lord Howell of Guildford
In a seven-minute long video posted by Greenpeace on the internet on Wednesday, Lord Howell said that it was Mr Osborne, not Prime Minister David Cameron, who was behind the changes.
He said: “The Prime Minister is not familiar with these issues, does not understand them. Osborne is of course getting this message and is putting pressure on.” ...
The comments were allegedly backed up by senior Tory MP Peter Lilley who told the campaigners: "Basically I think Osborne wanted to get people into key positions who could begin to get the Government off the hook of the commitments it made very foolishly."
Mr Lilley suggested that the Government would try to reverse out of its commitments on renewable energy by amending the Climate Change Act.
In other recorded comments, Chris Heaton-Harris MP, a leading wind farm sceptic, suggested that Liberal Democrat Energy and Climate Change secretary Ed Davey had tried to take away the windfarm brief from Mr Hayes after the reshuffle.
He said: “At the moment it is looking a lot better with Owen Paterson and John Hayes. I’ve still got Ed Davey to dump on from a height from somewhere.
“So Number 10 helped John Hayes, so actually Ed Davey’s got the ‘strategic stuff, so he can go and talk b------- around the world, where[as] John Hayes is in charge of deployment.” ...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9678627/George-Osborne-is-driving-force-behind-anti-wind-farm-agenda-says-his-father-in-law-Lord-Howell.html
Hey, it's Chiefio! A hero of mine, what a mind. Not as I imagined at all.
cached version of homepage with the Mark Thompson quote:
ClimateEtc: Policy, rhetoric and public bewilderment
Posted on November 14, 2012 | Leave a comment
by Judith Curry
Science is the most formidable intellectual force of our age, perhaps any age. The irony is that, without the insights of the humanities, it may still find itself without words. – Mark Thompson
Continue reading →
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5Hf4842Llg0J:judithcurry.com/+%22judith+curry%22+%22mark+thompson%22&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au
full cached version:
Policy, rhetoric and public bewilderment
Posted on November 14, 2012 | Leave a comment
by Judith Curry
Science is the most formidable intellectual force of our age, perhaps any age. The irony is that, without the insights of the humanities, it may still find itself without words. – Mark Thompson
Bishop Hill points to a remarkable essay by Mark Thompson, the former head of the BBC. This was a lecture given at Oxford about science and rhetoric, focusing on the climate change debate and the problems of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. It is rather lengthy (16 pages), the whole essay is well worth reading. I excerpt here the parts of his argument that I found particularly interesting:
I’m going to explore the present state of the argument from authority through a single prism—namely the way in which science is handled in argumentation about public policy. And I’m going to attempt to tease apart a paradox which genuinely perplexes most of the scientists that Iknow, which is this: almost everyone accepts that science gives us our most secure understanding of the physical world – so why doesn’t it always carry the day?
Surely, if anything can, science can pierce what I’ve called the cloud of unknowing and replace public bewilderment with public enlightenment. So why is it so often questioned and challenged by non-scientists witout anyone accusing them of stupidity or absurdity? Why, when it comes to public policy formulation or media discussions, is science typically regarded as one of the considerations rather than the card that trumps every other card?
Hume’s sense that science represents an epistemological gold standard almost universal today. Like most non-scientists of my age and background, I accept that fundamental authority completely and whenever it comes to an argument I usually find myself instinctively on the side of mainstream science. I don’t do that because I have personally checked the evidence which underpins The Origin of Species or examined Bohr’s or Schrodinger’s equations: I haven’t the expertise to do either. No, I back science because I find Popper’s account of the scientific method and its falsifiability intellectually compelling and because, at the level of common sense, the explanatory and predictive success of science is so overwhelming. Moreover, I’ve spent enough time with scientists to be wholly convinced that the culture and practice of science genuinely aim at truth.
As non-scientists then, our acceptance of the primacy of science is based less on our own scientific training than on a mixture of cultural, social and philosophical factors. This is exactly what is implied by the argumentum ad verecundiam if you can work out the equation for yourself, after all, you don’t have to take it on trust.
At the same time, many of us know that it’s too simplistic to say that science always and immediately right. Sometimes there’s not enough data, or the puzzle of what the data means has yet to cracked, or the whole thing is still a work in progress: sometimes, in other words, the science is or at least appears unfinished.
On other occasions, scientists disagree there are rival explanations, or there’s one candidate explanation which some sicntists back but others oppose: in these cases, the science is disputed.
On still other occasions, someone may call into question the good faith of the scientists – they’rein the pay of the government or Big Pharma or they’re committed to some cause and therefore their work may lack impartiality and thus reliability: we might call this corrupted or even perverted science.
We also know that, on a few very rare occasions, there have been dramatic revolutions in the history of science when a consensus view has been overturned in favour of a radical new theory Copernicus, Einstein and that, before such revolutions, scientific group-think is possible; this is what Lee Smolin alleged about contemporary American physics and M-theory and string theory in his 2006 book The Trouble with Physics, though one would need to understand the science rather better than I do to judge whether he’s right or not.
So as we listen to a given scientific debate, in theory any number of doubts can appear. Yes, of course we still believe in the authority of good, finished, honest science but maybe in this case it’s not quite ready; or maybe we’re in the middle of a he-says-she-says wrangle and God only knows who’s right; or maybe there is something fishy about the way that report was paid for; or maybe that lone scientist I heard on the radio is right and it’s the other 99% of physicists who will be proven wrong in the end. In an age of pervasive suspicion and uncertainty, and it doesn’t take much for the weevils to get to work.
Sometimes one comes across a letter about some matter of public concern signed by a long list of notables from many different and unconnected backgrounds: this is authority sliced and diced and repackaged like the Collateralised Debt Obligations which precipitated the financial crisis, authority each piece of which may be far from its point of origin and justification, but where it’s still hoped that the whole can be greater than the parts.
We might have hoped that authority might be one sure way of piercing the cloud of unknowing. Instead, we find that even the most clear-cut authority, that derived from science, can find itself in the most opaque, impenetrable regions of the cloud. And if what I’ve said this evening is true of science, it is probably even more true of economics and the other social sciences, indeed of any area of professional expertise which intersects with the world of public debate and policy.
Misrepresentation is undoubtedly often part of the problem, but it’s too easy to blame the public’s lack of knowledge of, or unwillingness to trust science entirely on the dark forces of misrepresentation. When science enters the public arena, it almost always ends up having to play by at least some of the rules of that arena, rules which often confuse the question of authority. It also finds itself in competition with radically asymmetrical rhetorical forces which derive their power from the spheres of morality, culture, superstition, even the mystic.
But to wish we could eliminate those ‘divisive cultural meanings’ is to wish away the freedom and openness on which modern democracies are built –and, short of dictatorship, its impossible to achieve anyway. In my view our task rather is to find practical ways of helping the public to pick their own way through this difficult, cluttered landscape. I’ve tried this evening to give some examples of how it is possible to parse public statements about science and disentangle them so that one can analyse and understand the different elements: exposition, assertion, opinion and advocacy. It takes time and, in its own way, a little training. Our challenge is how to encourage more people to take the time and acquire the skills to do this for themselves
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QKSn2u4sU7EJ:judithcurry.com/2012/11/14/policy-rhetoric-and-public-bewilderment/+http://judithcurry.com/2012/11/14/policy-rhetoric-and-public-bewilderment/%23more-10472&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au
I don't see anything in there that would upset anybody/anything, pat. What could the matter be?
Clicked over for a few minutes of Marc Morano and have to say that I found I was anjoying the excitable, quickfire Italian delivery, and the quote from the Medieval Pope who said the fact that witches were causing bad weather was now beyond doubt hit the target absolutely.
Just connected again ready to attend the Bishop's service at 5pm, but again there was an advert that screened fine, but the WUWT visual is not showing, just black screen, but the sound is fine (Chris Monckton is speaking). I'm running Firefox on XP. Anyone else seeing this problem?
on Firefox I wasn't getting anything but then I have got cookies turned off
Andrew coming through loud and clear (including visually) on my Firefox on Mac OS X.
Just resurrected a laptop with XP/IE6 on and that's giving the visuals as well as sound.
Just watched the Bish on the iPad. Great stuff
Very good - The calm logical style is impressive. Covered both the books, with quite a bit on climategate and the enquiries, then moved on to 28gate. Regular readers will know most of it of course, but there were some snippets that were news to me, eg getting up at 5am to write, and the fact that Andrew had already spent hours on the wayback machine looking for the list of names, and the early Harrabin stuff related to pushing the message on Al Gore's film.
I particularly liked this bits with the giant dancing teddybears.
Fascinating stuff BH - very clear except for the ads!
I have yet to buy your latest book, will do so next week.
I am very struck by the timeline of events, especially the sequence under which Rules of the Game
was published (Oct05 - effectively giving out the govt`s marching order), followed by the notorious BBC seminar (Jan06) and Warm Words (Aug06 - a sophisticated inguistic primer on the tools and techniques of persuasion) and Warm Words II (Sep07 a follow up). Then of course we get the Climate Change Act 2008. I am sure there are other elements to such a timeline. Its development could be the basis of a very compelling narrative _ if you have not already covered it in your latest book.
Just watched His Grace on WUWT TV, an excellent presentation which was skilfully delivered. I'll wager that some BBC buttocks were squeaking!
Being received okay here, brilliant content from the Bishop.
Previous speakers also informative. Lord Monkton on form ending with the real world costs for us all, Dr. Sebastian Lüning was interesting to see as he presented his case for a strong solar influence. Marc Morano good for his current state of play review and some amusement. :) Dr. Ross McKittrick for the Economist methodology and observation re. energy generation and by-product management.
I had viewing problems during the Dr. Richard Lindzen presentation but did get to view the wrap-up at the end okay.
Only intended to step in for a sampling and have had trouble getting away. :)
Mick.
Agreed Paul. At a more touchy-feely level Andrew simply comes across as a nice person. That is a real gift on video, even the slightly unreliable combination of UStream and Skype in this case. He doesn't talk too fast and explains clearly for the newbie. I hope others in main(er) stream media take note.
u were great, bish. reality tv.
I am very impressed with this - I only 'dropped in' this morning, whilst having a coffee, and I have had it on ever since.
Well done Mr Montford, even my 16 year old step son enjoyed listening to you!
Anthony Watts has done some great things but this is surely one of the most wonderful. It's the unity thing, the words of blessing expressed one to the other. If people can forgive me (and them), the last words of James Inhofe to Anthony were "You're doing the Lord's work." Christopher Monckton, having praised the next chap in the relay's latest book generously, finished with "God bless you all." I think He has.
Wow! What a day!
Highlights for me were (in order of appearance) Evans & Nova, Montford, Spencer, McIntyre, Ambler, Maurabito and Laframboise ... and, of course, Kenji.
I don't do early mornings, so unfortunately I missed McKitrick and Lindzen - and others yesterday and during the day, today (because of other commitments) - whom I would like to have heard. So I look forward to watching the replays on YouTube.
The technical glitches in this tremendous effort on Anthony's part provided additional notes of authenticity that - when the history books are written - I believe will do as much to demolish the Mann-made myth of a "big oil funded skeptic campaign" as McIntyre, McKitrick & Montford have done to demolish Mann's most famous "creation" [h/t J. Gergis], his hockey-stick.
Many thanks to Anthony, his benefactor, and to all the presenters; and as the old song goes ... this could be the start of something big!
P.S. Helpful Hint from Hilary to Steve McIntyre (if you're reading this) ... next time you do a Skype interview from that same location, you might want to try reflecting some light on the wall behind you and on the ceiling above and behind you. Then you won't appear as though you inhabit the "dark side" ;-)
Hilary:
It's nice to see one's own feelings articulated better than one could have done oneself. Including the advice on avoiding the dark side in downtown Toronto. But especially this.