Saturday
Jul132013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Lindzen broadcast
Jul 13, 2013 Climate: Allen Climate: Sceptics Lindzen Last night Al Jazeera broadcast the Lindzen debate at the Oxford Union, which readers may remember took place a couple of months ago.
It is repeated on 13 July 13 at 13:00 BST; 14 July at 02:00 BST; and 15 July at 07:00 BST.
Details here.
Reader Comments (57)
Geoff Chambers
Perhaps half a dozen.
Alternate title: "The voice of reason versus the pants-wetters and rent-seekers.
Just a thought...
You can watch the Al Jazeera broadcast online:
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/headtohead/2013/06/201361311721241956.html
Vernon E:
Looking through July's TCE earlier I read the 'UK needs clear energy policy, says IChemE' article, is this the one you are referring to? It is certainly in the nauseating category, including such gems as
"IChemE says that energy policy has also been damaged by continued disagreement over the existence of climate change, thanks to the influence of climate change sceptics and the divisions within the coalition government"
and
"In a letter to Davey, IChemE's policy director Andy Furlong welcomes the energy minister's stance against climate change sceptics"
The article reproduces Davey's claim that the scepticism of groups and individuals that reject climate change is destructive, and his reference to Cook's 97% survey.
Today's been a hot day, but reading that rubbish - which my subscription is helping to pay for - has raised my temperature off the scale.
DaveS,
Yes - that's the article in the June TCE.
Here was the letter I sent to TCE, rejected by editor Claudia Flavell-White; the letter was in response to her editorial entitled 'Carry on Fiddling':
"Madam,
Your editorial in tce 858/9 asked why there was little interest in last year’s UN climate change conference in Doha. The answer may lie in the fact that nobody seems able to point to any great problems caused by the modest warming of the globe observed at the end of the last century: with global flood and hurricane levels near their historical lows, sea ice coverage at the long-term average, and new research suggesting that claims of increased levels of drought have been overstated. The fact that there has been a distinct absence of warming during the last 16 years may also have given delegates little cause for alarm.
Nevertheless with lavish funding at stake, such developments cannot be allowed to initiate a change in direction. The vast majority of those at Doha rely on the continued perception of global warming as an imminent threat; their jobs are simply going to disappear if they come up with a less catastrophic answer on climate change. Any statements emanating from the UN climate machine have to be seen in this light.
This is particularly true when it comes to the science, where we are largely dependent upon the UN’s IPCC. This body is supposed to objectively assess the prevailing understanding of global warming. However its methods fail to follow its own procedures and a third of the literature it references is not even peer reviewed, but rather press releases etc. The damning report by the InterAcademy Council declared that there were “significant shortcomings in each major step of IPCC’s assessment process”. Many of its lead chapter authors are either employed by green groups like Greenpeace and WWF, or are affiliated to them. The idea that the IPCC represents the ‘gold standard’ of scientific inquiry is a myth.
With this in mind I had thought that the headline on your leader, “Carry on fiddling”, was referring to IPPC affiliated organisations such as the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the UEA or the UK Met Office. Both institutions have been shown to have used inappropriate statistical methods. Readers who doubt this should read Andrew Montford’s excellent book The Hockey Stick Illusion, which reveals how scientists failed to demonstrate scientific integrity in confronting their critics, resorting to withholding data and subverting the peer review process at a number of scientific journals.
In your closing remarks about the possibility that sea level rise is accelerating you quoted two papers: one using satellite altimetry which NASA says is inaccurate; the other using a tenuous “semi-empirical” technique to predict sea level from future temperatures predicted by climate models. You could equally have quoted two other recent papers that show no such acceleration, notably the one by Gregory of Reading University. One should be wary of papers launched with a press release, especially those extolled by the Science Media Centre.
Many Chemical Engineers work in energy intensive industries and the decarbonisation policies being brought in unilaterally under the 2008 Climate Change Act threaten employment in these sectors as these industries relocate abroad. One would have hoped that the IChemE would be more supportive of their plight and perhaps call for a complete re-think of this ill-conceived legislation, considering the uncertainties in the embryonic field of climate science and indeed the mendacity revealed in some parts of academia working in it.
"
Mr Hasan does not come out of this report very well. It seems he is not what he seems or seems to think he seems: http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/daily-mail-demonisation-and-hypocrisy.html
Some more background on Mehdi Hasan here: http://my.telegraph.co.uk/saifrahman/saifrahman/129/mehdi-hasan-the-great-pretender-2/
(hat-tip stewgreen on Unthreaded today)