Bishop Hill That dinner
Oct 3, 2014 Climate: Sceptics The dinner at Nic Lewis's house the other day, at which sceptics and mainstream scientists got together to chew the fat, has already been reported by Anthony Watts. (I was invited, but unable to attend). There's now a fuller report at the Responding to Climate Change site here:
It was one of science’s strangest social events to date.
Some of the best known names in the climate debate – including Mail on Sunday journalist David Rose, blogger Anthony Watts, and Met Office scientist Richard Betts – shared salmon and civilities at a dinner party last month.
Hosted by the sceptical scientist Nicholas Lewis at his house in Bath in September, the group discussed their similarities, differences, and how they might calm the debate that rages across the pathologically provocative medium of Twitter.
“Both sides are really fed up with the outrageous alarmists who are not representing science properly. Both don’t like those who shout about it and call people names and take a polarised point of view,” says David Whitehouse from the sceptic think-tank The Global Warming Policy Foundation.
I gather that Tamsin's account will appear shortly.
Bishop Hill
The article is crossposted at the Guardian, where the comments thread is typically bilious. Tamsin Edwards is taking part, valiantly defending Nic.
Reader Comments (138)
“Both sides are really fed up with the outrageous alarmists who are not representing science properly. "
Then its real shame that some have refused to say this in public and so the impression is that this ‘science by press release is acceptable . But if your career depends on you making sure you do not rock the boat, even if you know its full of dead rotten fish , I can understand .
Good, I'm pleased that it went well.
Probably the most striking conclusion that was disclosed is this: ".... the current rate of emissions will still tip the world over the catastrophic warming threshold sooner or later."
I'm not sure I agree with that for a number of reasons. At some stage it would be interesting to hear more about how agreement was reached on this point.
Wish I could have been there. Here is my contribution.
1. AGW is 100% bollocks.
2. The left vs right antagonism is nonsense.
3. Global warming politics was invented by Enron.It is a multi trillion dollar carbon trading / banking scam.
4. Gore is an extreme right wing thug, owned and operated by Occidental Petroleum. Pachauri is also an oil man (Indian Oil Corp)
5. The GWPF is a 5th column organisation designed to give credibility to the lies from a phony position of opposition.
6. Climate scientists are cowardly little wage slaves
7. Salmon is murder.
8. Do you have any Carlsberg Special ? I'm from Paisley and can't drink anything else
"But if your career depends on you making sure you do not rock the boat, even if you know its full of dead rotten fish , I can understand."
Hmmm a worthless career of 100% bollocks.
Self snipped.....
esmiff,
The right v. left is at the heart of climate obsession.
It is hilarious to Americans to hear Al Gore Jr. called a rightwing thug. He is certainly thuggish, in a con-artist sort of way. But he is no rightwinger by American standards.
He is a pathological opportunist. But you are confused: It was his father, Al Gore Sr. who was the Senator from Occidental (please do recall just who founded and ran Occidental, btw) Al Gore Jr. is the former Senator and VP now representing Big Green and busy filling his wallet.
“Both sides are really fed up with the outrageous alarmists who are not representing science properly. "
It only took them 18 years to decide that!
The only reason certain people are fed up with the alarmists, is because they keep reminding them of all the half truth, misleading assertions and downright lies they once told as "unequivocal" truth .... and which are now embarrassing them as they are endlessly repeated by the alarmists.
The answer, is not to talk such rubbish in the first place, not to blame their own supporters for regurgitating their rubbish.
The new Climate Alchemy Mantra: near zero CO2-AGW as the atmosphere self-rgulates; 1980s' and 1990s' warming was from the warming ENSO, the Solar Grand Maximum and AGW as aerosols increased due to Asian Industrialisation!
But there is already a significant disagreement emerging.
Sophie Yeo's article claims that salmon was served, but David Rose insists that it was beef stew.
Let's hope that this controversy can soon be resolved.
resmiff "The GWPF is a 5th column organisation designed to give credibility to the lies from a phony position of opposition."
The diplomatic way to put that is that the GWPF headed by a Thatcherite is not very persuasive in Scotland and that they haven't seen it as their role to do anything to help us in Scotland.
Ooops ... just realised that wasn't a mistake for "Salmond" as in Alex Salmond, however "Serving Salmond for dinner" is just what has happened in Scotland.
The postscript humorously states, "there has been some disagreement among the guests on whether they ate salmon or beef at the dinner. We are awaiting reliable data records to resolve the controversy." I shudder to think of the proxies they will use...
Seriously, it's unfortunately rare to see such sentiments as "almost all attendees at the dinner party, and many other sceptics, are scientifically trained", when "deniers" are systematically characterized as "anti-science" by the more vocal partisans.
Schrodinger's cat --
".... the current rate of emissions will still tip the world over the catastrophic warming threshold sooner or later." As a lukewarmer, I would agree with this in general but quibble with the word "catastrophic". That is, if one accepts that there is a positive climate sensitivity -- perhaps a TCR of 1.3 K of Lewis&Curry -- then the current rate of pCO2 growth of 2 ppm/year implies a secular rate of change of about 0.1 K/decade. [TCR is the change in 70 years at 1% annual growth in pCO2, while 2 ppm/year is 0.5% growth, so the rate of change is approximately (0.5%/1%)*(1.3 K/70 years).] And while it's far from certain, with increasing energy consumption in the developing world, it would not be surprising to see pCO2 growth increase in terms of ppm/year, maintaining or even increasing the percentage rate of increase.
So then it becomes a question of when, not if. My own perspective is that, even without active government intervention in terms of subsidies etc., our energy sources will naturally transition from being predominantly fossil fuel to some other source -- likely nuclear -- before a somewhat arbitrary boundary of 100 years. So pCO2 will not exceed a "catastrophic" level. [Not that there's any agreement on a concrete definition of that term, which is why I would avoid it.] The "we have do something -- anything! -- now!" voices appear to be willing to throw all sorts of (our) money in the general direction of energy transition, without much actual thought about aiming, or waste.
hunter
I was being deliberately provocative about Gore being right wing,. Anyone who spends his whole career working for an oil company instead of his constituents can fairly be described as right wing. The point I'm making is that big oil and big green are the same thing.
This is as thuggish and gangsterish as you can get as a politician.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/677105.stm
Tiny tribe thorn in Gore's side
This dispute is threatening Al Gore's reputation as an environmentalist. He has close ties and a large financial stake in Occidental Petroleum, despite its poor environmental image. As vice president of the United States, his son helped the company win drilling concessions.
Charles Lewis, of the Center for Public Integrity, has examined the ties between Al Gore and Occidental.
"We have looked at the records for 25 years around Al Gore," he says.."We've followed every penny he has ever received and I'm telling you that the company he is beholden to, the one company that has helped make him financially whole and has helped him politically is Occidental Petroleum."
MikeHaseler
The fat, little Scottish fish committed suicide, he wasn't murdered :-)
"Shepherd agreed that the difference was fairly small – and said even the sceptics’ lower estimates did not justify delaying action on climate change, as the current rate of emissions will still tip the world over the catastrophic warming threshold sooner or later. "
...and there we have it. "See, they agree with us!" then the bait and switch. They are not discussing, they are recruiting.
Also no mention that the "action" might be pointless and ineffective but very conveniently require adopting certain political ideologies.
"sooner or later"
I love the scientific precision. LOL
What a *bleepin* joke.
Andrew
9. Margaret Hilda Thatcher, the Great Earth Mother of Climate Change who gave birth to global warming as a global issue was a tool of the American oil industry (North Sea Oil bonanza) . Her husband was a director of Burmah (sic) Oil.
10. The most powerful NGO promoting global warming is IETA. It was the biggest lobbying group (486) at the Copenhagen global climate conference .
Its members include :-
BP, Conoco Philips, Shell, E.ON , EDF, Gazprom , Goldman Sachs, Barclays, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley..
http://www.ieta.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=19%3Adefault&id=168%3Aour-members&Itemid=82
NW
Well observed and stated. That was my point above.
It was a grand thing that such a meeting took place, and a sad thing that we find it so remarkable. The coarsening of public, and private for that matter, debate about climate has been a relatively minor harm compared to other harms caused by 'outrageous alarmists' and all who went along in the bandwagon they did so much to get trundling along. Perhaps that minor harm will be one of the first to receive treatment, and that would give hope that the major harms such as starvation, suppressed economic development, frightened and/or dismayed children, and the headlong rush into renewables, might get some remedial action in due course.
Two extracts from the linked report caught my attention in particular:
I got to thinking, what if each one present had written down a list of names of candidates (who could be entire organisations, or just prominent individuals) to be included under 'outrageous alarmists', then combined them into one grand list about which a further survey of the table was to be taken. Who would be on the list? Who there would vote for which names to remain on the list? Would there be unanimity on any name?
I always thought it a shame you weren't at the dinner - and so glad there is an innocent explanation for your absence. But not being there - that's going to hurt for a long time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Good fun and very useful but still the insistence that nature, which has had a lot more thrown at it than a paltry 500ppm of CO2 over the millennia, doesn't have any sort of regulating mechanism. On a planet that is 75% water, I don't believe it.
As NW says, and always with the need to adopt their political ideologies along with the scientific methods (I use the word "scientific" advisedly).
@Mike Jackson: the assumption is that the regulatory mechanism is positive feedback, when in reality it is intensely negative......
I may be wrong but I always thought a regulatory mechanism tended towards the mean (or do I mean median?). Either way the earth has generally speaking done a pretty good job for a long time.
Agreed, unless there are no ice caps therefore no thermohaline circulation whence you get 1.2 K CO2 climate sensitivity and another warming factor, the 'Hot House Earth'.
Here's names for four types of player:
politician - Al Gore
scientist - James Hansen
agitator - Bill McKibben
organisation - Greenpeace
Of the people at the dinner, which if any of them would have voted to keep any or all of these names on the list as 'outrageous alarmists'?
It would be easy to find more examples, but the reactions to these four alone would help us calibrate our measurement scale relevant to ' all sides are really fed up' (see my previous comment above).
Schrodinger's Cat
Just to clarify, those are, as indicated in Sophie Yeo's blog article, Ted Shepherd's views, I assume expressed by him to Sophie, not a conclusion reached at the dinner.
Off Topic, but gives you an idea of close I was to playing for the other team. Only my science education saved me.,
I once went to a Green Party related dinner party attended by then Scottish Green Party leader Andrew Black (Turing Institute) in Mount Florida, Glasgow. It was hosted by my ex, who's boyfriend was transport spokesman. During a rather serious conversation about hiking the price of food (starving the peasants) , Black's companion started shouting filthy remarks to me and eventually demanded I go through to the next room and have sex with her. You can imagine the outrage and carnage. I obviously refused using the 'no Carlsberg Special' defence which has saved me on numerous occasions.
The hilarious thing is that the two of them supported Queens Park because it was their LOCAL team and trotted along to a completely empty Hampden Park every home game. It was their moral duty . Supporting Queens Park is like watching paint dry on drugged sheep. That is dedication to the cause.
For there to be any effective long term benefit from "The Dinner" it is essential the version of "Chatham House Rules" agreed on the evening is adhered to by all concerned.
This evening is best left as a potential of unknown future benefits. The benefits could be significant but any correlation to one particular meet would be at best counterproductive and in the worst case ensure a terminal breakdown of communication, never a sound alternative.
I remember when the Guardian was a liberal paper. Nowadays it (or rather its climate blogs) appear to be dominated by people who believe that freedom of speech and association are crimes against the people.
I do wonder about the agreement between the participants however (assuming it was accurately reported).
The "pause" not only invalidates the models, if the warmists favourite explanation - the warmth has gone swimming - is correct, then it will have gone - never to reappear.
If the "missing warmth" has gone into the oceans, then it will have been diluted: the oceans having a much greater storage capacity than the atmosphere.
If, therefore, (say) 1 deg atmospheric warmth goes into the ocean, it will not warm the oceans by 1 deg. It would warm the oceans by (much) less than 1 deg - I've seen 0.01 deg mentioned - and that is the only warmth which can, or will, emerge from the ocean back into the atmosphere.
I'd, therefore, the ocean is soaking up the predicted warming, excellent. Problem solved.
WFC
Thanks. The missing warmth in the oceans gambit is pathetic. I can't understand why anyone would debate the validity of climate science .
Too bad James Annan wasn't there. I know he disagrees with Nic's work but he shoots straight from the hip. His latest post and the money quote: http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2014/10/much-ado-about-sensitivity.html
"Clearly, the longer the relatively slow warming continues, the lower the estimates will go. And despite what some people might like to think, the slow warming has certainly been a surprise, as anyone who was paying attention at the time of the AR4 writing can attest. I remain deeply unimpressed by the way in which this embarrassment has been handled by the climate science insiders, and IPCC authors in particular. Their seemingly desperate attempts to denigrate anything that undermines their storyline (even though a few years ago the same people were using markedly inferior analyses of this very type to bolster it!) do them no credit."
"The article is crossposted at the Guardian"
Following some totally misguided critical reviews I am no longer available to comment at the "Guardian". A long ago revered title, well by this Manc of birth, now "Defender" or "Luddite Times" or even "Defender of Luddite Times" seems more apt.
This is also remarkable as any possible survival of this ailing ideological outpost depends entirely upon the latest technology (wind and solar powered print runs appear not to be cutting the mustard) so the once vanguard of the 4th Estate finds itself a newcomer scrapping to get a foothold in the now established 5th Estate.
The comments at the Graun are quite scary, especially the ignorance shown by people who clearly don't have a fraction of Tamsin Edwards' knowledge of the subject. I suspect they don't even know who she is.
Fortunately only 1 in 45 of all daily newspapers sold is a Guardian, it's just a pity that the BBC takes so much more notice of it than it deserves.
It's the central tenet of warmism, forged by necessity out of the complete lack of actual evidence of anything significant happening. Without it they have nothing, and no hope of selling the brave new world they are peddling because it looks remarkably like the one Eastern Europe so soundly rejected not so very long ago.
esmif:
" Salmon is murder"
Alas, there are so few salmon in Whitehouse these days that there is scant prospect of luring Whitehouse there to kill one, and the GWPF remains the hated fish farms' lawful prey.
NW
Germany is the spiritual home of the Green movement, not Eastern Europe. It is still the greenest country on earth. The woman referred to above (Shona D) was largely cured of her extremism by representing the Scottish Green Party at an international conference in Germany. She was disturbed by what she heard.
http://alturl.com/xxmqe
skeptical scientist"... Isn't that straight from the Department of Redundancy Department?
Mark
From the Guardian piece Ted Shepard is quoted:
Policymakers and campaigners *do not* mean it in this way. When they claim the science is settled they mean 'stop questioning our evidence'.
Eastern Europe is their model. Compulsory state housing, heating, public transport (no private cars), employment, food supplies etc. etc. They of course will be in charge and thus entitled to a rather different standard of living.
The negotiating phase of grief of loss of their paradigm, trying to tame the monster they willfully and enthusiastically created out of whole cloth. And Anthony wants to give them a soft landing. That will only encourage new upstart careerists in science in general to fly to such heights of fraud and the public will never trust science again. Were this the field of genetics, half the room would be in jail.
I had hoped that an appraisal of the nature of risk to career for speaking a bit more frankly in public would come out of this. I also appreciate that were too few people likely exposed to this risk at the dinner to make any such observations untraceable.
Still, I'm sure the people who are apprehensive about the adverse effects speaking freely are so for very good reason.
Bish, I don't know how you would get into this, but it might be worth the effort. Of course we on the western shore have plenty of examples of what might happen to you in academia if your views stray in the wrong direction. Maybe it's no different there.
"there has been some disagreement among the guests on whether they ate salmon or beef at the dinner. "
Hardly a disagreement- it's hard to carve a whale without some cuts turning out rare and others well done.
On the conversation between "two sides," I think I found this link on Judith Curry's site: http://julesandjames.blogspot.ca/2014/10/much-ado-about-sensitivity.html
James Annan saying he has his doubts about the Nic Lewis sensitivity estimates, but then he also has (I venture to say) bigger doubts about what we were all told in AR4, and the way the climate establishment is coping with the loss of their precious evidence:
"Clearly, the longer the relatively slow warming continues, the lower the estimates will go. And despite what some people might like to think, the slow warming has certainly been a surprise, as anyone who was paying attention at the time of the AR4 writing can attest. I remain deeply unimpressed by the way in which this embarrassment has been handled by the climate science insiders, and IPCC authors in particular. Their seemingly desperate attempts to denigrate anything that undermines their storyline (even though a few years ago the same people were using markedly inferior analyses of this very type to bolster it!) do them no credit."
I'd be happy to be known as that kind of skeptic--simply pointing out that the evidence has changed, that people with credentials are clinging to a storyline rather than go where the evidence takes them, and by the way, the work that was used to build up the storyline, complete with dire warnings, was shoddy.
Things you wished you hadn't revealed ...
The woman above wasn't Andy Black's partner, she was a companion there to make up the numbers. She was bored to death and as sloshed as a salmon. I on the other hand haven't drunk alcohol for 25-30 years. If offered alcohol, I ask if there is any Carlsberg Special. There never is and I say 'sorry, I'm from Paisley, I can't drink anything else'.
The idea came from a bunch of Paisley 'colleagues' of mine going to a conference in the Midlands. One of them had a major fit of hysterics because they didn't sell Carlsberg Specials saying she couldn't drink anything else.
Wish I could have been there. Here is my contribution.</>
Mr smiff, I am 97% in agreement with you.
Reading the comments in the Guardian can be amusing but since the zealotry reached new levels (Nucciteli et all) I had my posting rights revoked and so told them tgft. That was after commenting there for seven years. I note Richard Betts didn't bother commenting on the dinner piece, not sure Tamsin Edwards should have, or will again because there's very little actual debate in the Guardian.
Swiss Bob
I agree that some of those who fondly believe themselves to be supporting a "consensus" are hilarious.
"There is no pause, there is no pause ... Exterminate those who say there is a pause. Exterminate."
The dear old Grauniad seems to be the only place left which refuses to acknowledge it.
Classic confirmation bias, those who wanted beef thought it was beef, those who wanted salmon thought it was that.
Mikky,
From the flushed faces I'm guessing they were sloshed. How one can mistake lamb for beef I have no idea, then again the only regular English cooking I have suffered in the last twenty years is my own.
The comments on the Guardian piece are really awful. Is this the quality of their readership?
there's very little actual debate in the Guardian.
Swiss Bob
true once it handing its self over to the poor cartoonist side kick and Bob 'fast fingers ' Ward it became little more than a circle jerk for true believers . Ironically when Moonbat was running the show , despite the fact he was pushing the whole denier idea as a way to link AGW sceptics to those that deny the holocaust , it was more civil and much more likely to actual results in discussion
Best approach to take is to leave them to their ranting , although its tempting to poke this particular nest of fools . Has they simple do not understand how their extreme stance comes across not a positive but has a negative to anyone who is not 'strong in the faith ' so in the end the do their own 'cause ' much disservice.
Check out that Guardian thread!
Such fury. It's a sure sign that things aren't going their way.