A report of the recent climate change discussion at the Foundation for Science and Technology has been published here. Audio of the main speakers is available from the FST's website.
Featuring Mark Walport, Jim Skea, Peter Lilley and David Davies, the subject was "What is the right level of response to anthropogenic induced climate change?". From the report of proceedings, little new ground was broken. I was, however, interested to learn from Walport that it is "clear" that climate change is happening and that its impacts are already evident, a position of delicious imprecision: I imagine we are supposed to infer that he means manmade climate change, but of course manmade climate change is not "clear". As I have mentioned previously, I have put it to Walport that we are unable to demonstrate a statistically significant change in surface temperatures because of the difficulty in defining a statistical model that would describe the normal behaviour of surface temperatures, a claim that seems to have the support of the Met Office. I don't know of any other metric in which a statistically significant change has been demonstrated. Walport did not dispute my position on surface temperatures but suggested that seeing many observational metrics moving together led to a conclusion that manmade global warming was upon us.
This may be the case, but I wonder if there is a robust statistical analysis of to support Walport's position. Perhaps a letter is in order.
(Please could we avoid comments that are simply venting about Walport - stick to the issues please.)