Wednesday
Jul242013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill My response to Slingo
Jul 24, 2013 Climate: Parliament Climate: sensitivity I few weeks back I noted Julia Slingo's appearance before the Environmental Audit Committee, and in particular her misrepresentation of the evidence for low climate sensitivity.
I wrote to the committee, setting out my concerns, and my letter has now been published here. The committee undertook to pass my letter on to Prof Slingo and to obtain a response. This response, such as it is, is here. It doesn't seem to address the points in my letter, but appears to be an adaptation of some of the points in the briefing papers published yesterday. The ones that Nic Lewis refers to as a misrepresentation of the paper he co-authored with Otto et al.
Reader Comments (26)
Getting their ducks all in a row. Or is it their fish in a barrel? It's hard to tell these days.
"It doesn't seem to address the points in my letter"
Taking her cue from Baroness V, no doubt. Quelle surprise!
RD
"ducks in a row/fish in a barrel"
Very good. I may use that!
I notice that her comment did not include the HadGEM3 Model which is their latest model and a recent subject at Climate Audit.
Peter's Principle applies in the public sector, often with obvious trade-offs between work and career competence
Has Nic explained exactly where the Met Office got Otto et al. wrong? Did I miss it? Details please!
tilting, this was Nic last night:
Here.
That was a very well weighted letter I thought Bish. I haven't made it through all of the 'response' but half a loaf seems better than none - and I'm sure the more nutritious half.
Slingo is a political animal first and foremost , you want to MET office tobe resorted to scientific honest Slingo will have to go for its under her leadership that the MET became an AGW pr agency .
I'm curious. At what point are we allowed to use the word, “liar".
The Bishop's letter says that the Met office statement was “misleading". And that the statistical technique used to derive it was not reputable.
Just like there is a point where a theory or model is falsified by reality, there must surely be a point where the statements made by bodies such as the Met office are no longer supportable, even by the extraordinary statistical sleight of hand and shenanigans illustrated here.
I wonder what that point would look like? Because it seems to me that we're getting very close to it now, and the enormous implications of it are that – with colossal amounts of public money – were stepping into territory where the only recourse will be legal.
Metoffice models are clearly running too hot. They are used to 'justify' draconian decarbonisation targets at huge cost to the nation. It is totally unacceptable that the Metofffice persists in obfuscatiing away the problem with the models rather than confronting them honestly.
It is quite frustrating to have these folk rely on status as a kind of "ordaining factor" for their factually incorrect spoutings and deliberate falsehoods - I cannot dignify this self serving twaddle as misrepresentation - it is wrong - and it is designed to mislead.
It kind of works along the lines of I am CEO / chairperson / Dr. / Professor and because I say it - you, little person are to accept it unquestioningly and submit to my authority, no evidence that contradicts my assertions will be acknowledged and we will continue along the path we have chosen as we are superior and anyway - you can't do anything about it - so there.
Allowing the miserable hodgepodge of subjective, almost emoted justifications and arithmetically tortured and contextually disconnected advocacy *will* continue until somebody picks a proper fight - as the goons are always allowed to escape to the next prepared position.
Time to cut off the lines of retreat.
Paragraph 16 of the response say "16 ............ The spatial behaviour of complex climate models, such as HadGEM2-ES, are rigorously evaluated against observations for numerous variable."
I would love to see those "rigorous evaluations"
Swinglo and truth make very poor bedfellows.
The entire response to criticism by the Met Office is dubious, to say the least. A recent article was critical of its long term forecasting capability. Overestimating warming, due to inclusion of AGW subroutines. The response by their PR man was to claim, that their current forecasts were world renowned for accuracy. Craftily he was, of course, referring to their short term forecasts. Which are now rather good. No attempt to address the ridiculous long term predictions, such as barbecue Summer. And, of course, he used the old attack weapon of 'not quoting accurately the facts.'
"The response by their PR man was to claim, that their current forecasts were world renowned for accuracy. Craftily he was, of course, referring to their short term forecasts. Which are now rather good. "
Do you have a link for where different weather forecasting models are compared to each other. I'm interested how different organisations stack up against each other in different criteria.
Rob - no metrics but you can get an idea how the Met Office Unified model compares with a few others here - Meteociel.fr.
The MO only publish a 5 day forecast on their website but the Norwegians also use the MO Unified model and publish to 9 days - e.g. http://www.yr.no. In my experience (Central Highlands) they both under-estimate inland temperatures in summer and over-estimate inland temperatures in winter. (I don't think the models do topography or the effects of low Sun and winter snow fields well).
They are good for 24 hours and sometimes 2 or 3 days. But here and now is what I like to use - e.g.
www.raintoday.co.uk and www.Sat24.com for context.
I modestly suggest that the MET/Hadley Centre response is nothing compared with this piece of CAGW warning
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23432769
"Scientists say that the release of large amounts of methane from thawing permafrost in the Arctic could have huge economic impacts for the world.
The researchers estimate that the climate effects of the release of this gas could cost $60 trillion (£39 trillion), roughly the size of the global economy in 2012."
And this is from bubbling methane in the Arctic. I thought this one has been brought up before and it was pointed out this methane release has been going on for centuries. Maybe my recollection is wrong.
Anyway the BBC is still firmly in the CAGW grove.
John Peter -
The BBC article refers to this Nature article by Gail Whiteman, Chris Hope and Peter Wadhams, supplementary material here. It uses Hope's PAGE09 model, discussed at BH previously. The US$60 trillion figure is an increase on a US$400 trillion estimate for business-as-usual in the absence of the methane release. Those are net present values, but as the BBC article says that the paper used "an economic model very similar to the one used by Lord Stern" presumably there's little discounting involved.
To knowingly mislead is fraud (see Fraud Act 2006).
Forgive me but could it possibly be the first time the crew of a sinking ship is calling on the ocean to come to their rescue?
Whilst I am not big on Greek Mythology, I am very sadly becoming quite an expert on West Country folklore and graffiti!
Jul 24, 2013 at 5:28 PM | lapogus
I tend to live by raintoday on any decisions that may be weather affected during the day.
Jul 24, 2013 at 5:28 PM | lapogus
Also why aren't there metrics when things like forecasting are supposed to be up for competitive tender. It amuses me that the commercial arm of the met office still includes contracts taken out by government and probably includes contracts caused by government legislation too.
The forecasting side must have studies somewhere for people to be able to decide who to pay for them.
Stuck Record and Phillip
What about misconduct in public office? I rather doubt that any one example of the Met Office's behaviour that I can recall might constitute misconduct in public office but the cumulative effect might count. The only single incident that occurs to me is Folland's silence over "hide the decline". It seems to me that Folland must have discussed this matter at senior level. FOI request useful do you think?
Richard, thanks - I did see that comment. I wanted to know what Nic means by "the Met Office paper 3 factually misrepresents the results of Otto et al (2013) in more than one place."
Nic, Bishop, could you enlighten us?
Isn't there a rather large area of overlap between most of those green and blue curves and the grey band? Doesn't that seem to be quite in line with the statement that "the models we use – and many of the leading models around the world are still within the range of those estimates"?