Bishop Hill Nice sentiments
May 17, 2014 Climate: Sceptics Climate: Ward Simon Buckle of the Grantham Institute at Imperial has penned some nice thoughts about the Bengtsson affair:
Professor Lennart Bengtsson’s resignation from the GWPF Academic Advisory Council has received wide coverage and raises important issues.
Whatever anyone’s views are on the role, motivation and integrity of the GWPF in this matter, it is up to individual academics whether or not to associate themselves with it in an advisory role.
It is regrettable that perceived political stances on the climate issue are apparently so affecting academic activity. The Grantham Institute at Imperial has always opposed such behaviour, believing that scientific progress requires an open society. We try to engage with a wide range of figures, some with radically different views on climate change.
The outcome in this case is probably a reflection of the “us and them” that has permeated the climate science debate for decades and which is in part an outcome of – and reaction to – external pressure on the climate community. But we must be clear: this is not a justification. Concerted external pressure – if that is what it was – on Professor Bengtsson to resign from his GWPF role was wrong and misjudged.
This is all excellent stuff and I share his feelings entirely. I'm glad he feels that Bengtsson should be free to work with GWPF, just as Buckle works with the Green Alliance.
I'm also glad that he was clear that it was the Imperial end of the Grantham Institute he was defending. The LSE end, as readers here know, has been at the very forefront of efforts to smear any scientist showing signs of independent thought on global warming. It is a sewer.
Bishop Hill
The media people at the Grantham Institute (that's you Bob!) need to get their act sorted out. Here, at the website of the Science Media Centre, are Simon Buckle's words being spoken by Joanna Haigh.
Prof Joanna Haigh, Co-Director of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, said:
“Professor Lennart Bengtsson’s resignation from the GWPF Academic Advisory Council has received wide coverage and raises important issues.
“Whatever anyone’s views are on the role, motivation and integrity of the GWPF in this matter, it is up to individual academics whether or not to associate themselves with it.
“It is regrettable that perceived political stances on the climate issue are apparently so affecting academic activity. The Grantham Institute at Imperial has always opposed such behaviour, believing that scientific progress requires an open society. We try to engage with a wide range of figures, some with radically different views on climate change.”
“The outcome in this case is probably a reflection of the ‘us and them’ that has permeated the climate science debate for decades and which is in part an outcome of – and reaction to – external pressure on the climate community.
It occurs to me that Bob Ward is the PR guy for both bits of the Grantham Institute, so I may in fact be far too charitable in this post.
Bishop Hill
In the comments Tamsin says that Bob Ward is only the PR "director" for LSE and not Imperial.
Reader Comments (123)
May 18, 2014 at 2:56 PM | Registered CommenterMike Jackson
+1
The only minor quibble I have is your description of the climate system as "chaotic."
I don't actually believe it is. Instead, it is so complex that it appears to be chaotic - hence Dr. Curry's "uncertainty monster." A small, but important, distinction, I think.
Either way, it should come as little surprise that climate scientists know very little. The true scandal, IMO, is that so few of them are prepared to acknowledge it.
AIP,
Chaotic in this sense,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhOBibeW5J0
Very lay man but a set of universal laws that overlay and interact with one another, such that you cannot predict the system behaviour.
Reality is at fault:
’The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ is an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing universe. For though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does make the reassuring claim that where it is inaccurate, it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it is always reality that’s got it wrong. So, for instance, when the Guide was sued by the families of those who had died as a result of taking the entry on the planet Traal literally - it said “Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal for visiting tourists” instead of “Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal of visiting tourists” - the editors claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing; summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty, and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party in this case was life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true. The judges concurred…and in a moving speech held that life itself was in contempt of court and duly confiscated it from all those there present before going off for a pleasant evening’s Ultra-golf.
During the 1976-1998 warming the climate scientists convinced themselves that correlation also meant cause and effect and blamed all of the warming on CO2. They said that nothing else could have caused it. They based their models on these assumptions.
Now there is no correlation, something else has negated the warming and something else may have caused all or some of the earlier warming.
In my mind, all bets are off. The same climate scientists are in denial, clinging on to all the discredited assumptions. We just don't know. Climate sensitivity is a reasonable concept, bur calculating its value using the same flawed models seems dubious to me. So does claiming that the warming will return. We seem to have been warming since the Little Ice Age and have now returned to pre-LIA values, so who knows what will happen next?
I can hear a chorus of "what about the ongoing rise in GHG?" Based on the events so far, we have no evidence that it feeds through to substantial and sustained warming.
AIP
I'll not quibble over the odd word but Schrodinger's Cat adds another thread to the same tapestry.
Why the climate scientists picked on CO2 is something we could debate and would probably end up as conjecture anyway. They weren't the first to do so. What machinations went on in the grubby little meeting places where ardent greenies and the other control freaks foregather to sup their elderflower wine and nibble their ethical peanuts I wouldn't know but there has been a commonality of interest from the very beginning between those who wish to see the end of fossil fuel use and those who wish to scare us into believing the End is Nigh (Global Overheating Version).
The more anyone looks at the scientific papers that have started appearing in the last few years some of which dispute outright the influence of CO2 and many of which hypothecate other possible influences the more it becomes evident that it was in nobody's interest to go looking for alternative explanations.
Further to my 6.16 PM comment, maybe we do know what will happen next. An El Nino is expected. The warmists will probably hail this as being due to CO2.This reminds me that the PDO, AMO and various other natural oscillations have become more serious contenders over recent years as events that influence global temperatures. Then there are solar effects, clouds and the interactions between both of these and cosmic rays.
Corruption of the funding process, peer review and the publication process and intimidation of those who seek to investigate "unhelpful" aspects of climate science have all meant that there has been very little objective research into the true causes of climate change over the last 3-4 decades.
SC
Surely they would be laughed out of court if they tried suggesting EL Nino was a result of CO2 though I suspect that some of the Charlatan Tendency that lurk around the warmist blogs and are quick off the mark to pin anything and everything on global warming will have a go!
They will avoid mentioning the El Nino and bang on about the end of the pause, suggesting that the warming they promised is back with a vengeance and we are all going to fry!
They will go for the MSM headlines and alarmist comments from the usual suspects. The BBC will milk it like mad. the GWPF and the sceptical sites will point out that it is an El Nino but by then the propaganda message will have fooled the public, the government, the Royal Society, the Chief Scientific Advisor to the Government, etc.
This has nothing to do with science.
On academic ethics and the LSE: Gaddafi bought a vanity PhD for his son from the LSE - the LSE academics plagiarized the dissertation from sources on the web (the son was too busy to copy and paste)...and that thesis is still proudly cataloged by the LSE: https://catalogue.lse.ac.uk/Record/1187568.
Thank you, Mike Jackson, for expressing my views in more depth and eloquence than I have managed, and to Schrodinger’s Cat for expanding on it. I do suspect that many within “the community” may have logic similar to H2G2, as pointed out by Philip Foster, though they might not have the same sense of humour.
It is a shame that neither Richard Betts nor Tamsin Edwards have offered any enlightenment. Perhaps, like me, they have been visiting family and friends this weekend (the Rodent family is numerous, wide-spread, and often difficult to find), and may join us later. Should they be able to blow my argument out of the water, I will not even be mildly miffed at being wrong, but ecstatic that I now possess better information; with the evidence we have so far, how many of their fellows in “the community” could say the same thing?
Here's a link to the effects of a non-CO2 driven El-Nino, which may prove useful in the coming months :
http://www.dgf.uchile.cl/ACT19/COMUNICACIONES/Revistas/aceetal08.pdf
"Climate change" in 1878!
There is no "let's keep it civil" way to say that either Simon Buckle or Joanna Haigh is a liar. The original statement can only have come from one individual. So one of them is dissembling (actually, that is a polite word for lying, I stand corrected) by passing off those words as their own.
[Snip O/T - There is a discussion board if you want to start your own topic]
Still OT, it is now 4 days since I could read WUWT on my Android phone. I can open all other websites I choose but in 2 seconds I get the 'no such website or it's changed address etc.
Has anyone else had this trouble? What should I do, please?
[AS already requested, please take O/T comments to Unthreaded or to a discussion board.BH]
Limerick first line...
A Warmist attack dog named Ward.....
"The more anyone looks at the scientific papers that have started appearing in the last few years some of which dispute outright the influence of CO2 and many of which hypothecate other possible influences the more it becomes evident that it was in nobody's interest to go looking for alternative explanations."
-----------------------------------------------------
Nicely put, Mike Jackson.
It is like the plot of many a classic crime story, where the cops make up their minds almost at once whodunnit and then waste valuable investigative time and resources propping up their hypothesis to the exclusion of all other possibilities. And (as also happens in real life sometimes) it is quite possible that they can cobble together enough of a case to secure a conviction, even though they are wrong and have been from the start. Trouble is, they become so deeply invested in their belief that the humiliation of admitting that they might be on the wrong track entirely precludes changing course.
That is surely why, after decades of research and truckloads of money, so little real progress has been made in understanding climate science. It is like the vast amounts spent by gastroenterologists over many decades in trying to find cures for stomach ulcers, back when they insisted that the ulcers were mainly caused by stress, spicy food etc.
Global climate is a lot more complex than stomach ulcers, and I doubt that there is an equivalent to h.pylori out there waiting to be discovered. In other words, I doubt that there is a simple control knob that humans can just twiddle to get the desired effect. But even getting the current crop of gurus to make that modest admission seems to be a bridge too far just now.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Edmund Burke
This quote seems to fit Bengtsson!
Andrew,
Might it be possible to inquire of Prof Richard Betts about a separate thread to develop some important emergent properties?
Richard has opened up a little more than usual, but there are some interesting themes in his responses.
Their development, if Richard agrees, could well help parties to understand each other better, which might be a public benefit.
Geoff Sherrington
I did an "Ask Me Anything" session on Reddit recently - the page is here and I believe it is still open, so feel free to post questions there.
I am an alumnus of Imperial. I have tried twice to respond to Buckles' comments but have been blocked both times as 'spam.' Nothing here about 'both sides to an argument'.'
Dr Betts,
Thank you for posting here and for the link and invitation to your redit site.
The shocking thing about the Bengtsson affair is not so much that first he joined, but then left the board due to reactions from his peers, but the kind of reactions that elicited. Generally he might have expected reactions like being ostracized. The climate warner community might have decided not to invite him to their conferences, drop him from a few email lists and generally pass over the fact completely. Instead though they, as if on command (from the little that Bengtsson himself lets us know), they started an ACTIVE witch hunt making even fear for his health and security. Now, let me see, when did I last hear of something like that? Ah yes, Islamic apostates or non-believers who penned caricatures of a certain religious figure were the last ones I remember speaking about their plight in a similar vein.