Bishop Hill More diary dates
Here are a couple more dates that may interest readers here. I'm sure all my readers in the Northern Isles will be interested in this courtroom-style confrontation on 10 September between upholders of and dissentients from the IPCC consensus, and featuring Benny Peiser and BH regular, John Shade:
A courtroom format in Orkney next week will tackle the question of climate change.
For many years the debate has raged in newspaper columns and internet blogs – Is the climate really changing? And are we the cause?
Now as part of the Orkney International Science Festival the courtroom method is bring applied. The aim is to get at the truth by bringing the two sides together, gathering the evidence from each, and subjecting it to examination and cross-examination.
The Festival say that despite all the arguments about climate change, they have not heard of this courtroom-style approach being tried before, and on Monday evening (10 September) a team of Orkney lawyers and debaters will get into action.
Solicitors Alistair Bruce of Lows of Orkney and Katharine McKerrall of OIC will marshal their witnesses in a courtroom procedure of strict rules. Each side will call two main witnesses, and then the other side will cross-examine. The audience will have an opportunity to feed in questions and to act as the jury in making a final decision at the end of the evening.
And then there's this valuable opportunity on 26 September to question Peter Wadhams on his Arctic findings:
Arctic Meltdown
With Professor Peter Wadhams, Head of the Polar Oceans Physics Group at Cambridge University and John Vidal (Guardian Environment correspondent) who will just have returned from visiting the Arctic on a Greenpeace vessel...
Organised by the Campaign against Climate Change with the Arctic Methane Emergency GroupThe Arctic ice cap is disappearing before our eyes: this is the first large scale unmistakable impact of climate change, clearly visible from space.
The arctic sea-ice broke an all time record for lowest ever extent on Friday 24th August (after breaking several other records according to other methodologies of measurement by other scientific institutions etc…). This was a bombshell because it was nearly a month before you would expect the ice to reach its seasonal minimum – it is still decreasing now and we can expect it to continue decreasing until around mid September (so we should probably have a good idea of the absolute minimum by the time of this meeting).
What does this mean for our estimates of when the arctic will be completely ice-free at the end of the summer ?
What will be the consequences when this happens ?
Finally, on 2 October the Frontline Club in London is hosting a debate about journalism's ability (or otherwise) to respond to the global warming question.
With the UK's Energy bill on the verge of coming before parliament and world leaders preparing for the latest climate summit, this time in Doha; some are worrying about the ability of a struggling media to play an effective role in the debate on energy and the climate.
As the press struggles to recover from a collapse in advertising during the recession and the damage done by the phone hacking scandal and subsequent inquiry the discussion will examine the challenges facing journalists reporting on an area of great scientific and economic complexity. The event will ask what impact those challenges have on the wider policy debate over energy and climate change and what - if anything - should be done to improve the discussion on this crucial area.
Chaired by editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, an expert panel will be exploring whether our journalism is up to the debate over energy and climate change.
Reader Comments (17)
Chaired by Rusbridger? You have got to be kidding.
Sponsored by Greenpeace, with five eco activists/money-makers as the 'debaters' (by the look of it) and Rusbridger in the chair. No thanks. But the Arctic Sea Ice situation I'd like to hear more about, even if it's partly from a slanted point of view. Thanks for keeping us Londoners up to date Bish.
Bish are you sure you are English?
A debate in Edinburgh followed by a debate in Orkney?? How are your poorer followers ever going to get a glimpse of his grace?
Here's the kicker:
"The audience will have an opportunity to feed in questions and to act as the jury in making a final decision at the end of the evening."
So so easy for Warmists to rig. It's simply Question Time 'rules'*.
*A completely neutral cross-section of the public that always contains a majority of left to extreme left-wingers, regardless of wherever it's held in the country.
The second two are establishment greenwash.
Dung
Orkney isn't me- Benny and John Shade.
The Frontline Club debate is ridiculous. Look at the participants. Not one of them has any track record in reporting environmental issues and not one of them has a sceptical bone in their bodies. Surely the organisers could have asked a 'sceptical' journalist to be part of the panel? Wouldn't that have made just a tiny bit of sense?
Clueless, utterly clueless...and arrogant to boot.
Considering The Frontline Club is one of the main supporters of Saint Julian Assangina I think we can take their journalistic credentials with a pinch of salt.
can't be worse than the "real" courts!
7 Sept: JoNova: NZ Justice shows courts are useless in a science debate
The NZ court case of skeptics versus NIWA has come down against the skeptics.
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/09/nz-justice-shows-courts-are-useless-in-a-science-debate/
btw this is the Australian MSM's insult of the day, given Aussies are having one of their best ski seasons EVAH:
8 Sept: Sydney Morning Herald: Jacqueline Maley: Great season but climate change brings snow blindness
THE ski bunnies, the electro-engineers and the resort operators all agree on one thing: 2012 is the best season in the Snowy Mountains for a long time.
According to the levels measured by Snowy Hydro, the snow was 204 centimetres deep on August 30, which is as deep as it has been since 2004.
Some say the quality and consistency of the snow is as good as it was in the famous 2000 season. Others mutter about 1990. Thredbo resort is so excited it has extended its season until next month.
What they can’t agree on is how long it will last.
Advertisement While climate scientists predict Australian ski seasons in future will have scantily clad slopes, the ski resorts prefer to focus on the here and now, while hedging their bets with technology that maximises the snow they have, for however long they have it….
But nature will have its way, at least according to climate scientists.
The CSIRO predicts that compared with 1990 levels, there will be 60 per cent less snow on the slopes by 2020, under a high emissions scenario, which is what we’re tracking towards.
”Resorts, national parks and local government researchers have all moved on from ‘Is it happening?’ to ‘How do we deal with it?’,” says Catherine Pickering, a climate scientist and associate professor at Griffith University.
When asked about Thredbo resort’s contingency plans for climate change, the communications manager, Susie Diver, says that snow, just like rainfall, ”goes up and down”…
Elliss says the business operators and resort personnel in the area err on the conservative side when it comes to climate change thinking.
”I think they would like to believe the sceptics, but it’s pretty bloody obvious to me,” he says. ”It’s real. You can be in denial about it all you want.”
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/great-season-but-climate-change-brings-snow-blindness-20120907-25jno.html
Orkney is one of the windiest places I have ever been. Never had to pedal down a steep hill against it before. Its also one of the wettest, foggiest and coldest. Its also stuffed full of rampant liberals, and has returned Lib MP's forever. And SSE Renewables is sponsoring the festival.
All a bit challenging.
Pharos
Have you come across this:
https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~tf/poem24.html
"The motion itself will be: ‘That we should adapt to climate change rather than try stopping it.’ Speaking in support of the motion will be Dr Benny Peiser, the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, an organisation set up by Lord Lawson to challenge government policies on climate change."
I am disappointed that yet again we have the inference that "climate change" aka "global warming" aka "climate disruption", aka " climate weirding", is actually anthropogenic and something to be adapted to. We have always adapted to changing climate, as has nature.
Historian Brian Fagan had this to say about Cod populations and changing climate:
"Sea temperatures around Greenland and Iceland dropped precipitously for much of the time between 1600 and 1830, decimating cod populations, another staple of the Icelandic diet. Cod flourish in waters between two and thirteen degrees Celsius, but their kidneys do not function in colder water. Even a minor shift in polar water causes the fish to follow warmth. The Norse had subsisted off cod during the heyday of their settlements in Greenland, but there were no stocks off Greenland during the Little Ice Age.
Cod disappeared completely from the Norwegian Sea during the seventeenth century as polar water spread southward. Iceland has exported fish since the fourteenth century, although the size of cargoes was limited until the introduction of decked ships in 1890. But the industry has always been at the mercy of cooler sea temperatures. Even with modern industrial-scale fishing, herring and cod catches rise and fall with water temperatures.
One of the major reasons for Iceland's bitter confrontations with Britain in the 1960s over fishing rights was the deterioration of fish stocks around Iceland as a result of falling sea temperatures."
"Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations" (Basic Books, 1999).
Brian Fagan
Dreadnought
A bloody good poem.
"Arctic ice broke the all-time low record" - WRONG.
"This is climate change before our very eyes" - WRONG. Why is ANTARCTICA increasing? What, did that continent suddenly drift south?
Satellites detect no warming, and the ice is recovering. Oh, warmists. Please shut up.
The debate took place as scheduled, with some 100 people in the audience. Each speaker only has 10 minutes for their presentation, which meant time for very few points to be made. The planned cross-examination by lawyers was displaced by a question and answer session which allowed direct engagement with the audience, and that worked pretty well. The debate concluded with a brief cross-examination by the lawyers followed by their doing a brief summing up for each side. It all seemed to work pretty well, not least considering that our contact with the lawyers was first made in the hall an hour or so before the start! We on the side of the angels lost the vote at the end, (41 for the motion, 54 against - with a swing of some 23 votes from our 'side' to theirs between the anonymous vote at the start and the show of hands at the finish). The debate was well run, and took place in a congenial atmosphere. In grasping for excuses for our defeat, I think the way the other side proposed and took ownership of the notion that 'we should do both' (i.e. mitigation and adaption) was important for winning support, since it seems such a common-sense position in the face of a threat (but of course the point of the debate had been to contrast the two options). We had argued that the costs of mitigation were already large and would be huge, that there was not a snowflake's chance of international agreement on it, and that the matter of how important the CO2 is anyway was by no means settled by inadequate computer models. I was very shocked to see the hockey-stick used by the other side, which claimed in discussion that it had been recently replicated by the BEST study. It felt like someone had raided some old tomb, where the stick ought rightly to have been deeply buried, and found the old relic with which to scare people - just like in the olden days of 10 years earlier. Other arguments from the other side included reference to the summer ice melting in the Arctic, claims that sea level rise was accelerating, and that climate change was going out of control so fast we would not be able to adapt to it. A very timely report of the debate was published on a blog here: http://www.glebedigital.co.uk/blog/?p=6755
John - thanks for your update, very interesting to hear how it went.
That is a shocker - it is quite incredible that the professional advocates of AGW are so ill-informed of the scientific actuality.
Sorry to hear you didn't win the vote at the end, but at least it wasn't 3 for and 97 against!
p.s. I have noticed you have not been on here much - hope that is just because you have been busy with Orkney and other things - and that you will be popping in here with your insightful and eloquent comments. (and sorry I never replied to your last email - non-business things have to be shelved in summer).
lapogus - you are too kind! I have been taken up with other things over the past few months, but I can see my way to getting back to doing more studying and posting on climate matters soon. Glad you found the report of the debate interesting. I was really pleased that it took place at all, and hopefully we helped a bit with reducing the numbers of people 'ill-informed', or at least motivating some to do more digging into it all.
John, well done for showing the flag. I was working on my own presentation, and I don't envy you trying to make the case in 10minutes.