Bishop Hill For a few details more
Jan 7, 2014 GWPF Royal Society This is filched from the comments at WUWT and contains, at one remove, a few thoughts from one of the attendees at the Royal Society meeting with GWPF.
Before Christmas I attended an area joint Mech E/IET lecture on Climate Change, given by Professor John Shepherd CBE FRS, a Professorial Research Fellow at the National Oceanographic Centre, University of Southampton, and a leading member of the Royal Society Climate Change Committee. I was quite staggered at what he had to say, and if he is part of the group of people advising Ed Davey I can quite understand why Davy is so convinced that disaster will befall us all if we fail to limit CO2 emissions. In his introduction he told us that he had been one of the six Royal Society “climate scientists” that had met Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation in the House of Lords at the end of November. According to Lawson, although the RS had insisted that would not participate unless journalists were kept away, Shepherd went out of his way to tell us that the meeting was not secret; its purpose apparently was to convince the Global Warming Foundation principals of the seriousness of increasing CO2 emissions. He admitted there had not been a meeting of minds!
Almost at once Shepherd told the audience to take no notice of “sceptics” as they didn’t know what they were talking about, which as far as I was concerned set the tone for his lecture! He began with a graph showing the relationship between CO2 and temperature that was identical to the one in the Al Gore film that purported to show how very high levels of CO2 had caused very high global temperatures on four occasions in history, showing the two to be co-incident, when of course an expanded timescale shows CO2 levels lagging the temperature rise. He then showed the infamous Jones/Mann/Biffa hockey stick that had been the subject of the “hide the decline” emails and which they concocted by being very selective in which tree samples they, and particularly Biffa, had used. The current pause he dismissed as just a little blip; such blips had happened in the past and inexorable warming would start again very soon he said. And so it went on, and I cannot see him ever rowing back from the position he has taken. Further, if his five colleagues are as bad, then heaven help us. I must say I expected a little more integrity from an FRS. Another illusion shattered!
Reader Comments (34)
The hockey stick!! Good grief, the hockey stick!!
Are these people really that insulated within their echo chamber?!
Has he ever published anything unequivocal? Ideally, pinning his reputation on it. Could he be persuaded to?
We're gonna feel sorry for this guys someday, but I've been saying that for years.
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The meeting's "purpose apparently was to convince the Global Warming Foundation principals of the seriousness of increasing CO2 emissions."
Well, yes, it was clear from Nurse's letters that that was his view of the meeting. Lawson envisioned a dialogue, which apparently did not come off. Naturally, if the one side did not come to listen...
Dear God. Can they really be so stupid as to quote The Hockey Stick? Surely not.
Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat.
When your funding comes from government it pays to act stupid. Integrity has disapeared from the RS never to be seen again until Hercules reappears and gives them a good clean.
When I was a student it was considered a privilege to have lectures from an FRS, a scientist who was at the top of his field. Nowadays, judging by the recent membership, one wouldn't want to be tainted by being a member of such a society (shades of Groucho).
Good grief, Gore's misleading graph and the Hockey Stick?!
Really, this is the best that one the the Royal Society's gang of six can do?
Is the man's knowledge that superficial or does he contemptuously think ours is?
I always got the feeling that the RS meeting with GWPF was like those Scientology pressure education sessions. The only difference is scientologists film everything whereas this lot know it's much safer to keep everything off the record or as they call it Chatham House rules.
This very unsettling. If it is an anonymous comment, it will need some corroboration. At face value it speaks of severely irrational behaviour and the ignoring of strong argument and convincing evidence on the part of the professor. It is unsettling because it suggests that some in prominent positions in academia have sold their intellectual heritage for the mess of potage that is climate alarmism.
Surely this leaves Shepherd, and the Royal Society, open to a public question on the specific Gore and Hockey Stick graphs which were presented.
Lawson or Monckton can simply put a public challenge up - stating the known problems with each graph and asking for a public statement on whether those problems make the graphs inaccurate or not. It should be win-win...
This comment could go here or in the earlier one about David McKay's evidence: it's equally relevant to either. I dislike the ad homs which disfigure this debate, on both sides; but (classic use of "but" there) sometimes one must speak to character.
Some years ago I lived in Cambridge; I used to give money to a charity that ran a shelter for the homeless called Overstream House; McKay was, I believe, a Trustee of the charity. He certainly became heavily involved in its affairs, as this page maintained by him confirms.
At that time I spent a lot of time on the river, so the shelter (which was very near the river bridge on Victoria Avenue) was familiar to me. I first became aware that there were problems there when, one evening when I was walking home, a car load of men stopped and asked me directions to it. It was very clear from the car, their clothing and accessories, and their demeanour, that they were neither homeless nor destitute. A day or two later I mentioned this to a friend who was a police detective, and he told me that the police were increasingly concerned by the use of Overstream House as a centre for drug dealing.
Subsequently two of the managers of the shelter were imprisoned for failing to stop the dealing, which had become blatant: I recall one day watching a crusty type walk down Victoria Avenue, over the bridge into the shelter, emerging a few minutes later carrying something small. He recrossed the bridge, went down the steps and under it - where he used the package to inject himself, in broad daylight and clear view of me and others.
So far, so squalid. The academic clique that dominated the charity simply refused to believe that a) anything untoward was going on; b) they and their managers had any responsibility to stop, or even inhibit, it; and c) that allowing drugs to be supplied freely in such a place was a gross betrayal of its clients. These people ran a campaign over a period of years, drawing on all their establishment connections, to overturn the verdicts on their managers: if you want to know more, read the page linked above.
To me this is relevant to McKay's present position in two ways. The first is that McKay, however clever he may be (and they say that he is very bright), has exceptionally poor judgement: so poor, that the idea of him being let loose on any aspect of national policy (let alone one as important as energy) is genuinely terrifying. The second is that the social group from which he and so many of the rest of the CAGW claque is drawn is so deeply arrogant that its members will never - never - admit that they are wrong.
It is a strange fact of human nature that otherwise intelligent people can revert to absolutism. It is not a question of whether man is responsible for climate change but rather as to whether we need to even if we could do something about it. What is absolutely clear is that the UK alone can do nothing to change the climate. Probably no government can either.
It is a bit like wishing away nuclear weapons. For 30 years we lived under threat of total destruction from a nuclear war. The danger has not really gone away but instead our fears have just been transferred elsewhere. Like primitive man we are now again scared of storms, thunder and warmer weather, ignoring the fact that we already deforested Europe and annihilated much of its large wildlife.
What will be will be and it always has been because you can't change human nature.
Quoting the Good Shepherd:-
gshepherd.com/2011/01/16/on-climate-sceptics-or-dissenters/
"People who wish to question the validity of climate science usually call themselves “sceptics”. Scientists object to this, since all good scientists are perennially sceptical (indeed, the motto of the Royal Society is Nullius in Verba i.e. “take no-one’s word for it”). The so-called “sceptics” object to being called “deniers”, although that is usually what they do (i.e. deny the validity of statements, despite the evidence that supports them). Perhaps this is understandable, given the association of the word with the unpleasant business of holocaust denial. To avoid accusations of bad faith, I therefore commend the term “dissenters” as preferable. It is not pejorative, and also accurately describes what they do, i.e. dissent from the consensus of mainstream scientific opinion.
By the way, there is an excellent iPhone app called Skeptical Science that has good answers to lots of controversial questions on climate science. It’s a nice complement to the excellent RealClimate web-site."
Baa, Baa, Humbug.
Not an issues , merely a member of a religion demonstrating their knowledge of and unquestioning belief of that religions dogma.
Its rubbish of course and even worse PP science but his made it clear to other 'believers ' how strong his faith is.
I can believe it - the IET journal is full of articles and comments by equally deluded members.
The Society seems to have overlooked the word Policy in the GWPF name, instead being rather obsessed with the Warming part. The question is, as it always should have been, "What is to be done?"
The answer could easily be "Nothing".
There is simply no appetite, as demonstrated time and time again over the last twenty years, from anyone, warmist, dissenter, denier or doomsayer, anywhere in the world, to live without the benefits provided currently , and for the foreseeable future, mostly by hydrocarbons (aka "fossil fuels") . All the carrots and sticks in the world have not changed that. Time to cut our losses and move on.
From his ivory tower the lofty Shepherd has stated that "dissenters" (he likes name-calling) must "trust and take advice only from those who are trained and qualified to do the job," as it is "the future of the world in which we live that is at stake."
But he is no doubt delighted to be on the board of the Gulf of Mexico Research Institute (GoMRI) which was created to "investigate the impacts of the oil, dispersed oil, and dispersant on the ecosystems of the Gulf of Mexico…."
GoMRI is distributing $50 million a year to "those who are trained and qualified" for ten years. The $500 million in total is being provided by BP.
http://gulfresearchinitiative.org/gri-research-board/board-roster/john-shepherd-phd/
http://jgshepherd.com/2010/02/06/revised-and-extended-version-of-a-letter-to-the-guardian/
Someone from the GWPF should have made a recording of the debate. Now would be the right time to release it.
Allegedly, Shepherd was the inspiration for Sven from Swiss Cottage: (see sayings...).
That's it? They don't have more "evidence" than this? Incredible.
Given that previous presidents (May, Rees) and present president (Nurse) have taken the RS down a darker path, does anyone now believe that RS Fellows have any integrity.
As a young scientist I once admired its integrity and nearly joined the RS, in my old age I consider it sycophantic and disgraceful!
How has such a great institution as is the Royal Society, stooped so low as to elect such lightweights to high office? The man did not even attempt to show any evidence that was not already falsified. What has he been doing with all his time?
Its worse than we thought...
Jan 8, 2014 at 12:55 AM | hunter
I agree. Given that RS bods present have been freely referring to the meeting, it's hard to see why the GWPF should continue to feel under any obligation to remain silent on it.
On Radio Cambridgeshire's Breakfast show this morning, the presenter raised the subject of the latest floods etc in the UK, and (of course) whether 'climate change/global warming' was to blame - and specifically, shouldn't we all now (as it were) 'give in' to the view that this was the case....
(I phoned in with my view.)
Anyway - isn't this precisely why we exist - to CHALLENGE the 'lazy' view that - 'Oh, well - a lot of scientists say it - so it must be true'...?
I rather hoped that 2014 would start to see a significant 'roll back' of the CAGW view - but it seems we've still got a long way to go..!
"We're gonna feel sorry for this guys someday"
You have got to be effing joking!
I try, I really try to give as much respect as I can muster to those who promote climate alarm from the heights of the academy or other prominences. It is hard for two reasons: 1.they do not impress me much, and 2. I think they are doing great harm to society. But so many others seem to trust these people.
We are faced with the prospect that what may the most far-reaching and destructive changes ever proposed, and in the UK's case enabled by the Climate Change Act, are based on very poor quality arguments and evidence, made by people whose minds seem incapable of absorbing criticism and entertaining alternative points of view. Instead, they revert to the school playground and bandy insults about such as 'denier', or 'don't know what they are talking about', and so on.
This post made here by the Bish a few months ago is relevant: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/9/16/the-genius-of-academe.html. This is about an article with multiple authors in the academy agonising over why it could be that there are those who doubt the need for climate alarm:
I made a comment referring to a talk given by Prof Peter Wadhams who also used the two plots, reported above as being used by Prof Shepherd, treating them as gospel not needing discussion, and moving on to his main points with his audience suitably convinced (I presume he presumed) that CO2 drives temperatures and that temperatures have been rising dramatically after a thousand years of running flat. I wondered if there was an algorithm at work there. Let me extract it from my comment:
"Academics too, have been astonishingly trusting of those pushing climate alarm. My most recent experience of this was at the Orkney Science Festival earlier this month. One of the lectures was by Prof Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University. He is a distinguished scientist and explorer of, in particular, the Arctic. He been on at least 40 expeditions there. His work on ice extents and characteristics is surely authoritative and invaluable. His expostulations on climate, less so. He seems to trust the alarmed ones far too much. I wonder if the structure of his talk is similar to thousands the world over in all sorts of scientific areas. Here it is distilled by me:
Wadhams even, during stage (2), noted that he preferred data to models, and that we should not be trusting models. This was because recent ice declines in the Arctic were greater than model forecasts.
I can readily imagine the same structure used with, say, bovine diets in (2), or the spread of ant-hills, or polar bears, or Himalayan glaciers, or motor cars, or power stations, or food production, or wood-burning stoves, or windfarms, or plankton, or whales, or pandas, or ...well, you know the list."
Martyn, not so much effing joking as provoking. CAGW is a madness, these people are sick.
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I don't mind being called a dissenter. It was dissenters who made this country great, when it was great.
There is another hugely serious consequence of this, stupidity, vanity, ignorance and politicized science, Grant Awards, and mis-direction of Public Funds for research, these people are not just deluded cooks, they are Embezzlers on a Grand Scale.
52 -
You think of "dissenter" as name-calling.
I disagree. I dislike "denier" as that was/is intended to evoke "Holocaust denier" which is connected to ugly sentiments indeed. But I don't think "dissenter" has any such disparaging connotation. I'm more used to "skeptic" of course (whether spelled with a "k" or a "c"), but I have no objection to being labelled as a "dissenter". I think Shepherd's reasoning (quotation provided by Humbug above) is fine.
I think it is time to consider why scientists who support AGW do so in such a blind manner. My view is that until recently they came from a part of science which has been insignificant. It has not received financial support and attention such as those in petroleum or mineral geology or those sciences which can win Nobel Prizes. Consequently, attention has gone to their heads.