Bishop Hill Defence of the realm
Jan 31, 2014 Climate: Sceptics Royal Society Paul Nurse has written to the Times to try to defend the idea that the Royal Society speaks with a united voice on global warming.
Sir, It is possible to think from the letter of Michael Kelly, FRS, (Jan 29) that the Royal Society might not be fully supportive of the views of the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser and the IPCC on the science of climate change. That would be wrong.
In 2010 the Royal Society produced a guide that set out what climate science was well established, where there was wide consensus but still debate and where there remains substantial uncertainty.
Michael Kelly was on the working group which wrote that report, which came to similar conclusions to those of the IPCC. Informed by that report, our Council, the representative body of our Fellowship, recognises that the evidence is increasingly clear that there is increased warming of the Earth, due to human activity.
There are uncertainties about predicting the exact future impact of such changes, but the Royal Society’s and IPCC’s evidence-based and scientific approach gives us the best possible insight into what may lie ahead and should be the basis for discussing the policy decisions related to this issue.
The debate on climate change is too often characterised by those at the extremes — those who refuse to accept the evidence and those who seek to overstate it.
For a productive debate to take place we need to look at the most reliable evidence as presented by the majority of expert climate scientists. The Royal Society and the IPCC reports are a good place to start.
Sir Paul Nurse
President of the Royal Society
This is rather funny. On Tuesday we had prominent climatologists telling MPs that the IPCC's computer models do not include the IPCC's latest estimates of aerosol forcing. This necessarily means that they run too hot. These models form the basis of both the attribution of recent warming to man and predictions of future climate change.
In what strange world are the IPCC reports "a good place to start"?
Reader Comments (82)
Charles Windsor reckons all climate change deniers are headless chickens?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/prince-charles/10610108/Prince-Charles-climate-change-deniers-are-headless-chickens.html
I suppose I should bow down to someone who would wish to be a Tampax:-
Charles: Oh. God. I'll just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier!
Camilla: (laughing) What are you going to turn into, a pair of knickers?
(Both laugh)
Camilla: Oh, You're going to come back as a pair of knickers.
Charles: Or, God forbid a Tampax. Just my luck! (Laughs)
Camilla: You are a complete idiot (Laughs) Oh, what a wonderful idea.
Charles: My luck to be chucked down the lavatory and go on and on forever swirling round on the top, never going down.
Oh Well that's the future King, what a romantic?
dennisa wrote:
I used to like science fiction, but the Royal Society have given it a bad name.
John Pete, r Charley is a big fan homeopathy which means he considers 'magical shaken water ' to be an effective drug , while science rightly says its BS
So the princely is hardly 'pro-science, in any meaningful way.
Another Royal Society
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ixeRWrg0yg
It seems odd that Nurse refers to the opinion of the Royal Society in 2010 as if there has been no further data or debate about climate even among those whose models support higher forecasts of warming and climate sensitivity. That surely is key - for example Trenberth has been looking for a new eipcycle to add since the data appeared to have falsified his previous conclusions. Far from being settled, we now see competing attempts to explain the temperature standstill.
Ah yes, HaroldW, in my haste I used table 2 instead of table 4 in Forster (2013). Thanks for pointing out.
Still, my main point holds: CMIP5 models do not use estimates of aerosol forcing, they model the underlying physics.
Forster (2013) also shows that aerosol forcing is not correlated to climate sensitivity across the models. Look at table 4: the model with the smallest aerosol forcing is CanESM2, and yet you can look it up and find it has a sensitivity of over 3.5 degrees.
So pushing for models with smaller forcing will not necessarily buy you lower sensitivity...
Using strawmen to defend the Royal Society seems likely to fail.
I wonder when they will get around to actually discussing the issues?
Jan 31, 2014 at 6:24 PM Stacey
Any prince called Charles should use the word 'headless' with caution. Might give the energy oppressed masses an idea about the energy rich aristocratic pig dogs.
Will he ever learn? Maybe Nurse and his ilk are advisers to this "Prince Charming". He will clearly not be a king for the people, but mostly for Guardian readers. I feel insulted by a future head of state.
Jan 31, 2014 at 5:34 PM | Unregistered CommenterJohn Peter
He got good cover on the BBC news tonight. No reply allowed as usual.
Constitutionally Prince Charles was most unwise to use intemperate language when referring to "headless chickens" and "deniers" who use "threats and intimidation" against those who promote the global warming hypothesis.
IIRC the threats came from that nasty film aimed at schoolchildren that was sponsored by the advocates of CAGW - the film that showed "deniers" being blown to smithereens; and the threats that "deniers" should be denied freedom of speech or even, as some advocated, locked up.
Are we to conclude that Professors Lindzen and Kelly are headless chickens?
According to the Telegraph`s on-line report, Prince Charles invoked science and technology to support his assertions. It is time he actually paid some attention to what the science and technology is actually able to tell us. He should reconsider his remarks. As they stand they disfigure his status and damage the Royal Family.
Tilting@windmills:the models need input data giving them the aerosol estimates at any point in time. The models of climate cannot deduce that from physics. If you gave the model too big a set of values for aerosols, which would give a cooling (from your modelled physics), then the model would need more co2 effect to offset that and fit the temp curve. I think what you will find has changed to lower values is the estimates of aerosols fed into the models, not the putative physics of the model. So if aerosols are lower than previously thought, the climate sensituvity must be lower in order to match the temp data.
We are all fans of the Queen but maybe not the Monarchy.
Think we will all die of old age before the Queen does.
So Prince Charles has an opinion on Climate Change and Architecture okay fair enough.
So what does his mummy think or is she clever enough to keep her mouth shut which is why she has managed to keep hold of her job for more than 60 years and keep her idiot son out of her job.
And of course Queen Elizabeth 2 is very good at it.UK still the Oldest Democracy and the 5th Largest Economy in the world .So God bless her.
So what then exactly is Prince Charles opinion on Taxation ,Crime ,Immigration,Europe, Stem Cells ,Shale Gas ,War in Syria ,HS2 ,Human Rights in Russia,Sugar, Fat Taxes,Abortion Smoking Bans or his old pervert mate Jimmy Savile and Operation Yew Tree. Any issue you care to name.
Prince Charles if he get any more political the people of Great Britain can then reasonably start demanding that we actually elect our head of state.
See what happened to the first King Charles when he tried to override parliament.
Charles may just succeed in getting the Windsor family permanently voted out of a job.
Simon Hopkinson (Jan 31, 2014 at 3:21 PM)
Well said. We’re not here spouting off in the wilderness because we’re more intelligent than Sir Paul Nurse, or even more intelligent than Ed Davey or (dare I say it) John Selwyn (Lord Deben) Gummer. We’re here - 62 of us so far - because we’ve looked at the evidence and found it wanting, something Nurse and Davey and Deben have never bothered to do.Somehow, we must find a way of persuading people to look at the evidence. Either the 40 million voters who make the final decisions on these things, or the few thousand people in the governing classes who take an interest in the way society is going, or the few dozen key deciders of government climate policy, or some other group in between.
I’m willing to bet that the combined intelligence of the 62 people who have already expressed an opinion on this thread is equal to that of the members of the Royal Society. But they’re there in the oldest and most prestigious scientific society on the planet, and we’re here on a blog. What are we going to do about it?
"...CMIP5 models do not use estimates of aerosol forcing, they model the underlying physics." --tilting@windmills
Actually, they don't model the underlying physics. They only purport to, so the rest of your argument is of no particular relevance.
The following comment ideally portrays my thoughts on our future King:-
Would give a H/T but can't find the original.
Sir Paul has handed us a gift with his characterisation of the state of the science:
“Due to human activity” presumably means “since the measurable increase in anthropogenic CO2 about 60 years ago”.“Increased warming” presumably means the warming that occurred in in the eighties and nineties of the twentieth century, but not the warming that occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and not the increased cooling that occurred in the sixties and seventies.
And “there is” presumably means “there was”. Because there isn’t. Not now.
I hope someone here with a better grasp of the science than me can turn these simple facts into a letter to the Times.
tilting@windmills -
I'll confess that I don't understand the import of the figures in Table 4 of Forster. The values are all over the place, especially when including the breakdown into clear vs. cloudy. But I wonder how much one can put on a comparison of three models in any case. And while CanESM2 has the lowest ECS of the three (at 3.7 K (not 3.5); CSIRO-Mk3.6.0 has 4.1 and HadGEM2's ECS is 4.6), one should also consider that CanESM2 has a very high TCR of 2.4 K (cf. CSIRO-Mk3.6.0's TCR of 1.8 and HadGEM2's 2.5). I would say that all three of those models are in the upper end of the sensitivity spectrum.
To your original point, which was to compare models' aerosol forcing to the -0.9 Wm-2 IPCC central estimate: for what it's worth, those three models have an average aerosol forcing of about -1.2 Wm-2. Certainly larger (in magnitude).
"Think we will all die of old age before the Queen does"
Possibly because she also subscribes to homeopathy.. :-)
The thought of Chazza living forever is a bit sobering, though.
John Peter
I agree about feeling insulted by the future monarch. His opinions on architecture and landscape are all very well, but when he ignorantly insults a section of the people over whom he will eventually rule, he treads on dangerous ground. Look to history, Prince Charles.
Chuckles is in the DM and he's taking a pasting in the comments.
Http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2549658/Prince-Charles-hits-climate-change-deniers-labelling-headless-chicken-brigade.html
"You can think 'here' and possibly 'there' just a little bit, but you certainly cannot think 'Here' or "There' and as for thinking all over... that is wholly verbioten."
Sir Paul Nurse
Nurse is of course quite intelligent, but he is a pinion in the Left. Another brick in the wall. He is NOT a free thinker.
Being intelligent we will not see him yield, because he well knows the consequences for his career and reputation.
John Shade -
(My emphasis).Well spotted. I, and many other parents in this part of Scotland (including our host) are very familiar with the reality of "evidence-based policy" which our second-rate policy makers imposed on our children in school classrooms without parental consent - Creepy and intrusive:
the new world of Scotland's children, Kenneth Roy, Scottish Review, Nov 27th 2013 More at http://www.scottishreview.net/KennethRoy136A.shtml
http://www.scottishreview.net/KennethRoy136B.shtml
http://www.scottishreview.net/KennethRoy138A.shtml
http://www.scottishreview.net/TheCafe139.shtml
Thanks to Kenneth Roy, an old school journalist you will no doubt recall from his BBC and Sunday Herald days, it looks like we parents have won a small victory here over P&K officials. But Whyte is spot-on, and beware the phrase 'evidence-based policy' when-ever you see it; it is just the latest marketing phrase used by academics and policy makers to impose their values and ideas upon the rest of us, using pseudo and post normal science as appropriate.
Jan 31, 2014 at 3:21 PM | Simon Hopkinson
----
From Wikipedia: Intelligence has been defined in many different ways including logic, abstract thought, understanding, self-awareness, communication, learning, having emotional knowledge, retaining, planning, and problem solving.
'Intelligence' implies a greater grasp of many issues ... Nurse may know much about very little ... he might be 'intelligent' in so far as his knowledge of genetics is concerned but he is incapable of extending that 'intelligence' beyond his self impose boundaries.
His opinion on subject in which he has little 'intelligence' is unhelpful.
Is Nurse talking about that UK Royal Society giving away Wolfson Research Merit awards to people like Stephan Lewandowsky ?
I am rather pleased that Charles is on that side of the debate. If I was picking teams...
lapogus
My grandchildren were involved in that disgraceful Perth and Kinross survey. Not only was it a disgraceful survey with many questions quite unsuitable for primary children, especially those from a country area school: ( How many times have you had sex? How many times week do you drink alcohol? Do you carry a knife or other weapon? Have you ever considered killing yourself ?) but the administration was also woefully inadequate, with many parents not asked for their consent, children being obliged to fill the forms in at school, and able to be identified by their school numbers.
.
Members of my family were also involved in the numerous and on-going complaints, which resulted in the Scottish Review articles. Other parents around the country should watch out for attempts to do the same survey elsewhere.
Messenger - I guess you are related to Dee? (she has done a fantastic job in spearheading the parents' case). I did very little in comparison, but I did get Kenneth Roy on the case. Yes, parents beware, the dodgy 'evidence-based' survey is being planned for children in Angus, Dundee and Glasgow City next, and probably all other councils in Scotland in 2015.
It has struck me that Nurse is running scared. He is not quite so foolish as to be unaware that the evidence for CAGW is vanishing in front of our eyes. So he is tryig to hedge his bets with a cautious move in the sceptic direction though he is still not sure how much mileage is left left in CAGW (nor are we!). The last thing he wants is to be seen to be a poor head of the RS.
There has alwasy been a significant sceptical subset of RS fellows. And, I suspect that the percentage has been growing steadily. -- given recent evidence that the CAGW hypothesis is a terrible and costly mistake.
There are only two weapons that the warmist believers have been using very effctively. One is the claimed paucity of peer reviewed sceptic papers (no longer as true as it was) and the other is the fact that the leading scientific orgnizations such as the RS have endorsed CAGW. If the believers loose the second weapon they will be unseated very rapdily.
So, if I am right and the number of sceptics in the RS is much higher than it used to be the case, it might be exactly the right time for us to push as hard as we can for a poll of RS fellows. We would , of coure, have to make sure the quesion in the poll is worded corrctly.
It so happens that one of my former students (whom I know quite well) is an FRS and I will write to him and see if I can set in motion an internal revolt. Maybe other BH frequenters, who also have FRS conncetions, should do the same.
The two most overused words in this farrago are "expert" and "evidence".
I wish someone would actually ask these clowns what do they mean by evidence. Is the now falsified, model-based, assumption-led conclusion that manmade warming is needed to hindcast the 20th century? Or is it expert testimony from people proven not to be particularly expert? Or is it just evidence of general warming from whatever source? Or is it just a lie that they think becomes true by repetition? Some journalist somewhere should ask that question you'd think.
Did you not note that when he said the "deniers" were a problem, he also mentioned those that "overstated" the problem?
Ahhh, very interesting, leads to the question: Sir Paul, who stands for, and what are, these 'overstatements'?
Is 3C/century the overstatement, and 1.4C/century the 'reasonable', in his mind?
Sometimes you hear weasel words that are not weasel words, but disguised backing-down words, words that allow you later to say you never said the world was going to fry, but that human A-CO2 was going to be PART OF a 1.4C/century ... and that a 0.4C part.
In my professional life I have found the most difficult part of any analytical analysis is to ask the right question. When I try to figure out why an oil field can't produce more oil per day (when I think it should), I am told "It is doing the best it can", which is not that it physically couldn't, but that AS IT IS BEING MANAGED or WITH THE CURRENT SETUP, it is FINE BY US. Only by repeatedly asking questions to smaller and smaller parts do you find out that there is a 2 1/2" shim on a key component, not the 4" shim that could be there, that stops the whole operation from doubling its output.
You have to listen very, very carefully to what is being said when you hear an answer, and you have to pay close attention to the specific words. People dissemble, avoid and protect themselves without even realising what they are doing, as the status quo or current situation has morphed into an unalterable fact of life.
Nursey.
Stupid? Dishonest? Couldn't be bothered to do his homework?
Or simply following the money as per countless thousands of others like him?