Tuesday
Sep232014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Bristol bound
Sep 23, 2014 Blogs I'm off to Bristol this morning as I will be attending the Mann lecture this evening. I'm expecting little of the occasion, but it will be nice to meet Anthony beforehand.
Blogging may be light for a couple of days.
Reader Comments (34)
How intriguing. A word of advice Bish; try not to look out of the window on the journey south, the number of (probably stationary) wind turbines you will see as you fly over the Borders will likely cause angst.
Good luck with the trip - you are a true masochist. I can get to Bristol in an hour, but there is no way I would inflict the Mann on myself.
Yes, Bish, good luck with the trip. I wish I could make it but have a companies house deadline and an accountant to meet Edinburgh this afternoon. Who else is going? Heidi de Kleine?
Remember to invite Anthony to the old country if he plans to come back over this side of the Atlantic again.
Will Mann actually let Anthony Watts attend?? Would he have had organisers agree to some sort of veto on attendees?? I would expect Mann to be apopleptic at the idea of his arch nemisis sitting in the audience.
Or maybe Mann might refuse to speak while Anthony is there?
I'm off down the shops to stock up on some popcorn.
More importantly, will the author of "The Hockey Stick Illusion" and "Hide The Decline" be allowed entry. If you are travelling by road, you have at least 50K of futile roadworks to negotiate on the M6 and M5 before being turned away to do a further 50K the other way.
Mann is in a mess. Cook is like a precocious infant in a nursery of his own devising. Lewandowsky is disturbed to the point of derangement. But how pleasing it is that their events are bringing together calmer, clearer minds to meet and get to know one another a little better. Some good, therefore, may yet come of these lectures at the Cabot Institute.
There is IMPORTANT ongoing Hockey Stick histroy discussion by "Jean S" at climateaudit
http://climateaudit.org/2014/09/22/black-tuesday-of-climate-science/
and attack by Greg Laden
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/09/22/steve-mcintyre-misrepresents-climate-research-history/#comment-396743
You do realise that you are committed to entering a Sartreian Climate Hell?
At least after listening to Mann pontificating, you can look forward to a beer in The Channing.
Both Anthony and the Bish are like popes for sceptics, no need to say anything, just turn up and crowds will flock to you. I hope Michael is prepared to be upstaged.
A word of advice to anyone driving to tonight's event. I drove to the Cook event Friday and allowed myself nearly two hours to make a journey that can be done in 45 minutes. I got into the hall with about a minute to spare, and that was after having been very lucky finding a parking space nearby. Bristol's traffic is notorious. Having printed off a load of flyers advertising the Bish's gwpf critique of the 97% paper which I intended to pass around, I had no time to do so before the event, and the warmists in the audience made a quick exit after it. The road to hell is paved with good intentions as they say.
You're a glutton for punishment, Bish....
Good Luck! At least you're sure of good company.
We await your report with interest.
I hope Dr Mann gets ample time to discuss climateaudit.org's recent post ..
We owe it to the nobel prize winner
Please prepare your short clear questions .. don't try making it up on the spot as long rambling lecture type questions can easily be sidestepped & dismissed.
At least after listening to Mann pontificating, you can look forward to a beer in The Channing.
Sep 23, 2014 at 11:32 AM | Bloke down the pub
========================================================
Beer? We're talking Bristol FFS. Real Bristol men don't drink beer! Cider, at the Coronation Tap in Clifton
, for heaven's sake :-)
http://thecoronationtap.com/
Welcome to the world-famous Coronation Tap! Clifton's original, and still its only, ciderhouse. Situated next to Brunel's magnificent Suspension Bridge, this legendary centuries-old venue is also a major attraction with a phenomenal global reputation! Equally well-known as The Cori, The CoriTap, or The Tap, it's the ciderhouse with media profile, and you have to experience it!"
Not surprised bdtp had trouble with traffic and parking. Bristol must have some of the most crowded streets in the UK.
I enjoyed Anthony's fotos of Cook onstage at the Vic Rooms, though. I haven't been in since I saw Sparks (the band) there in 1974 and it looked just the same!
May Mann receive tonight all he deserves from the good(?) burghers and academics of Bristol. And Anthony and Bish.
PS Don't try the Coronation Tap - full of freshers this time of year, underestimating the strength of the scrumpy.
I hope there is a question and answer session like with John Cook last Friday.
From that Q&A we had confirmed that the 97% consensus paper was only on the most trivial acceptance of AGW, and the survey was of peer-reviewed academic papers, not the smaller set of papers by climate scientists.
We will see what happens , but I expect Mann to duck and dive for all his worth or to simple not answer any questions that challenge him , much will come down to who controls what questions are asked and if its Mann or his pop-psychologist side kick , its going to be soft ball all the way.
Hopefully I will be wrong and his ego will get the better of him as he goes 'bang '
good luck and happy travels, Andrew!
look forward to reading about your trip experiences
you deserve a TIP DRIVE for travel expenses, even if you didn't ask (hint, BH folks)
I'm on the move right now but will donate when I get to my computer
Sounds like the perfect opportunity for what my children tell me are called 'selfies'. :)
KNR has it right.
The 'talk' was a stream of self-delusion peppered with ad-homs, slander, appeals to authority, groupthink and lies. There were worse broaches of our trust but I swore to be gentle :)
By the last slide I didn't even believe him when he said (I paraphrase) "I love my daughter and fear for her future... "
The audience was full of - well, those types of people who revel in eschatology and laying the blame for their being born, well fed, educated (to a point), the availability of hospitals, transport, central heating, their iphones and laptops on the eeeEEevil 1%.
The mess was gate-kept by Satan himself. As was, Anthony told me, the cook shindig on Friday last.
So, with lew-paper choosing who would be graced with 'questioning' the bald one it should be no surprise that not a single difficult bump appeared to divert him from the old straight track.
I nearly got one in but the guy with the mic homed in on an Avaaz junkie whose oleaginous sycophancy dripped with abasement and fear-for-the-future and floated two diaphanous whimsies into mann's grateful lap.
Still, I didn't go for the thrill of baiting the deluded and their congregation. I attended to know mine enemy. I met AW and that is enough. The Bishop was there but in a rush to get to a watering-hole which, being pressed for time, I had to forego - drat.. I think I laid eyes on Myles Allen also.
I guess there were 20+ skeptics present, some of whom had questions, none of whom were asked to voice the same.
Oh, yeah, I was going to ask; Why, out of the dozens of excuses for the halt in GW was Anthropogenic CO2 never found innocent of the crimes it is accused of and the models' output never dismissed? More in hopes of forcing (see what I did there) just one of the faithful present to study the subject beyond twitter and facebook than momentarily disconcerting the now proven (to my satisfaction) delusional mouthpiece for all the greenwashed yolks we labour under.
Still, you can't win 'em all.
I think that after so many sceptics got to ask questions of Cook the other night, they had carefully planted their 'spontaneous' questioners this evening, so that not a peep of substance was permitted to get through. But it was very good to meet up with so many sceptics - who are on the whole very pleasant people I think, and good-humoured. well, in my experience anyway.
Henry, CarolineK. Thanks for the reports - was there any sign of a video recording of the event? If so, any ideas by whom and if it will be put up on the internet?
Hello,
I was there - didn't see any other skeptics, apart from Anthony (where were you!). The description by Henry is absolutely correct, although I didn't realise what was going on in the Q&A. I wondered why there were no questions from the skeptics.
There was an official-looking video being made of the event, although I'm not sure by whom. I'm not sure why you would want to see it - sitting though the talk was something of a trial.
Amlyn - thanks. IMO a video of a stage managed event could convey the opposite to that intended.... I hope it appears in full unedited form.
Interesting that seemingly no attempt has been made to survey the attendees who made the effort to attend both these events as they have patently self selected as interested parties - lewpaper missed a trick there - or maybe not....?
Having been to several climate and fracking related public lectures and read the assorted accounts of others on BH - I noted that the oleagenous (thanks Henry Galt) sanctimonious arrogance of the loud eco crew was cringeworthy in the extreme and frankly bordering on the unhinged on a couple of occasions. I suspect that some bog-standard psychological questions would reveal some quite unpalatable facets of the activist mindset....
Better than Mann or Cook was this gathering:
Nic Lewis convenes extraordinary group
Alas, they are under Chatham House Rule, but that was probably the only way to get the more "mainstream" climate scientists in the door. I think it's great that such a discussion can take place, at last, even if we don't get to know the details. One hopes that in the future there will be more of this and that it can start to be wide open to the public.... honest dialogue is badly needed.
re: the Nic Lewis group
UK readers will have a surer sense of the nuances of Chatham House Rule, but a couple of comments at WUWT have said that there is no prohibition on public discussion of what was discussed under CHR so long as nothing is attributed to persons or said in a way that could allow individual or organizational perspectives to be inferred:
Skiphil -
Thanks for the link to that story. Good to see that there can be some grown-up discussion. I see some hopeful signs that the train can be guided back toward the main line to science and away from the side-track to the dead end of advocacy. For one, a certain amount of moderation in AR5 WG1 regarding the reliability of models. [I wish I could say the same for WG2 or WG3, but...] For another, Koonin's article the other day in the WSJ.
Now if we could only get the policy-makers to back up...
Everyone I met who'd been at the meeting at Nic's seemed convinced this kind of thing was the way forward. It was great to have a beer with (indeed to be bought a pint by!) Richard Betts at the end of the evening yesterday. I also felt I really gained from the perspectives of Ian Woolley and Katabasis on how younger people relate to climate debates and marches - something I feel I must understand much more. I also learned a lot more about Anthony's amazing personal story during this trip. How he got into meteorology and then into television seemed completely random and accidental - except perhaps it wasn't. :) Thanks to everyone on WUWT and in England who made this trip the success it was.
Hi Andrew,
please pass on my best to Mike
:-)
Rob
'Beer? We're talking Bristol FFS. Real Bristol men don't drink beer! Cider, at the Coronation Tap in Clifton
, for heaven's sake :-)
Sep 23, 2014 at 4:41 PM | Jeremy Poynton
Last time I was in the Tap was about thirty years ago.
Bloke:
I'll raise you a decade ;)
'The Tap' was all about pot and pool back then.