Tuesday
Feb172015
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Climate change by numbers
Feb 17, 2015 BBC Diary dates Tamsin Edwards points us to the BBC's latest efforts on the climate change front, to be broadcast on 2 March at 9pm. Details are remarkably thin on the ground, but here's what they are willing to tell us:
Presented by 3 mathematicians, this programme gives a unique perspective on climate change by taking 3 key numbers to tell the story of our climate's past, present and future.
I gather from the comments at WUWT that the mathematicians involved are Hannah Fry of UCL, Norman Fenton of QMUL and David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge. Tamsin says she was involved as a consultant and I gather that Doug McNeall was on board too.
Not the usual suspects then.
Update on Feb 17, 2015 by
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill
Here's a (somewhat rough and ready) rip of the TV trailer.
Reader Comments (81)
No-one was misled!! I've seen a near-final version yes, and will see final very soon. As you can see, the presenters are statisticians so the focus is in that area.
Jamie - I refer you to my blog name - you've underestimated the percentage ;)
Again, before all piling in I urge you to wait the 13 days until transmission to watch it yourself.
No sharks though, only killer robots and lasers:
https://twitter.com/dougmcneall/status/567702078555193345
3 statisticians (or maybe 2 statisticians and 1 mathematician) tell us that, in Bayesian Climate Science Land, the following applies:
1 trillion = 0.8 (95% confidence interval)
Simples
I was being generous Tamsin! But yes, you're right, we should all curtail the urge to pile in, irresistible as it is, and judge the program after watching it.
Tamsin, thank you! I look forward to seeing it, and wish you the best of luck with post production editing!
Could you squeeze in a man killing shark, making wood pellets out of a hockey stick, whilst surfing down a tidal wave to extinguish the CO2 observatory on Mauna Loa, so rescuing the sunburnt penguins on the beach, from drowning?
It would make a better cover for the Radio Times, and science has to be sold!
"this is a program about the maths of climate science"
Oh yes 2035 was just a typo.
Has the BBC ever produced a fair and balanced programme about climate science in the past?
No it has not - remember for example "Climate Wars"!
Do not hold your breath, history tells us that this will be more propaganda than science!
I'm still a bit nonplussed as to how you can be an 'expert' if all your predictions are wrong yet a 'non-expert' when you accurately predict all the experts to be wrong. It is indeed a real challenge to explain why you've been wrong all this time, especially when the feeble excuses contradict each other. The simplest way out is to admit that you are guessing on the pessimistic side but the bottom line is that you really don't know. But of course turkeys don't vote for xmas. I am also sure that climate will continue to change but then that really isn't the question.
Meanwhile let's estimate what the alarmists currently touting the highest recorded temperature (if you ignore the more accurate satellite data) will say when next years la nina causes a drop in temperature as it did in the previous el nino boosted years. I expect it'll be yet another pre-emptive strike at some imaginary skeptic/denier who would blatantly and evilly mislead the confused sheeple by cherry-picking a single years data rather than looking at the overall trend.
Good points, JamesG. The pretentiousness of the climate science cabal over the past several decades is quite astonishing. Egged-on by the political opportunists, hero-worshipped by the fanatics, lauded by docile journalists hanging on their every word, they can scarcely be entirely to blame for all the resulting harms, but they are surely 'part of the problem'. I hope this new programme will deflate their balloon a little rather than pumping it up even more.
I will keep an open mind, but, based on BBC form, I bet:
1 trillion will be a catastrophically amount of that highly dangerous "greenhouse gas" that traps humungous amounts of heat and we will all fry if we don't stop using fossil fuels.
0.85K is a huge rise in "global average temperature", whatever that is, and we are all going to fry .......
95% means we are almost certainly all going to fry unless .....
It would be a lot better if the BBC forgot the numbers and did a programme about the physics of the earth's energy balance, then they could get rid of the "greenhouse gas" nonsense. To dream awhile.
How about we wait until seeing it before damning it?
Tamsin Edwards
Once a liar, always a liar. Why would they braodcast anything accurate or non consensive. You see Tammy that's the problem we have with climate science and scientists. They have lied and lied again for decades why would they change now with Paris approaching.
97%...The number of people who do not give a tinkers fart about climate change in the UK.
0.85 degrees C......The difference in temperature between my feet and my head as I sit at my desk.
145........The number of pounds per annum I do not, and will not, give the BBC to produce endless irrelevant soaps, cookery, talent, faux science and political bias in spades, so called TV programs.
Stephen Richards
Agreed. Climate science is lies. All of it. the temperature record is a fantasy.
Ivor Ward
So true. It's drivel. I do like Cuckoo. That's it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01n8ltr/cuckoo-series-1-3-ken-on-e
@Stephen Richards, Yesterday you made some abusive comments about me on the 'Happy Mr Farage' thread. This morning you were called a bigot for your comment on the Sturgeon thread by TBYJ. And now you're calling other people liars on this thread. Don't you think that, perhaps, you are getting a bit 'over-excited'?
I wonder what the average viewing figures are for BBC4 on a Monday night.
Waiting Golf Charlie :-)
Martyn, I dunno.
I have learnt that people who admit what they don't know, are more reliable, than people claiming to be experts.
In the wild west, of folklore, and Hollywood, everybody was the fastest gun in the West, until they met somebody faster. They were normally unable to admit they were wrong, as a result.
I look forward to Tamsin's programme, and hope it reflects the views and concerns of the named presenters, rather than the self appointed grauniads of the consensus, some of whom are reviewing their chances of a Peerage, subject to satisfactory peer review.
Raid the BBC video tape archive again
The same swimming Polar Bears
Maybe the 3 numbers will be the 3 Laws of Climate?
Same theme music by REM
"It's the end of the World as We Know it"
jamspid, if the BBC climate experts, spoke to the BBC natural history department, they may find evidence to suggest that polar bears like swimming. Certainly the latin name ursus maritimus, indicates a close association, made by naturalists, rather than sunbathing naturists.
I have no doubt that Tamsin is a lovely, honest lady and has done her best.
But "Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?"
I will happily wait for this broadcast but expect as little likelihood of the BEEB (or the MET) broadcasting anything honest on 'climate' as there is of Dave Boy securing a meaningful negotiated revision of the EU treaty by 2017.
If I am proven wrong, I will happily bare my *rse in Burton's window.
Well, Tamsin brought the topic and trailer to our questing intelligences.
But the BBC? They didn't by any chance have wooden poles set up with piles of faggots laying around?
It's about the math, so I watched the trailer. I am strongly reminded of Bill Murray's version of a trailer in Scrooge that caused heart failures. I was sorry that I turned my laptop's sound on.
Then Tamsin chimes in with: (my bolding)
Well, those quote IPCC statements sure could use a lot of expert discussion regarding how IPCC's confidence levels increase while their science encounters more holes and outright falsehoods and failures...
The good Bishop has faith, so I guess we should too. In spite of Tamsin getting to check out the 'final' version soon, I'm not holding my breath. BBC always seems to do what is necessary from their bias perspective and that will be what is actually shown.
BBC Impartiality over Climate Change , BBC Impartiality over the EU Referendum? amongst other things.
The Beeb did luckily swung the Scottish independence vote.
BBC mouth piece for the political establishment.Got to Protect their License Fee with an Election and new Government coming in.
From the Guardian, following climategate. James Lovelock's excoriating view of the lying, dumb, little rascals who do modern climate science (his words). This is the informed opinion of a human being who has no financial interest in lying.
on CRU scientists
I was utterly disgusted. My second thought was that it was inevitable. It was bound to happen. Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely vocational. Back when I was young, I didn't want to do anything else other than be a scientist.
They're not like that nowadays. They don't give a damn. They go to these massive, mass-produced universities and churn them out. They say: "Science is a good career. You can get a job for life doing government work." That's no way to do science.
I have seen this happen before, of course. We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done
on computer models
I remember when the Americans sent up a satellite to measure ozone and it started saying that a hole was developing over the South Pole. But the damn fool scientists were so mad on the models that they said the satellite must have a fault. We tend to now get carried away by our giant computer models. But they're not complete models.
They're based more or less entirely on geophysics. They don't take into account the climate of the oceans to any great extent, or the responses of the living stuff on the planet. So I don't see how they can accurately predict the climate.
on predicting temperatures
If you look back on climate history it sometimes took anything up to 1,000 years before a change in one of the variables kicked in and had an effect. And during those 1,000 years the temperature could have gone in the other direction to what you thought it should have done. What right have the scientists with their models to say that in 2100 the temperature will have risen by 5C?
The great climate science centres around the world are more than well aware how weak their science is. If you talk to them privately they're scared stiff of the fact that they don't really know what the clouds and the aerosols are doing. They could be absolutely running the show.
We haven't got the physics worked out yet. One of the chiefs once said to me that he agreed that they should include the biology in their models, but he said they hadn't got the physics right yet and it would be five years before they do. So why on earth are the politicians spending a fortune of our money when we can least afford it on doing things to prevent events 50 years from now? They've employed scientists to tell them what they want to hear.
on scientists
Sometimes their view might be quite right, but it might also be pure propaganda. This is wrong. They should ask the scientists, but the problem is scientists won't speak. If we had some really good scientists it wouldn't be a problem, but we've got so many dumbos who just can't say anything, or who are afraid to say anything. They're not free agents.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock?
Freeman Dyson - Independent newspaper interview
First, the computer models are very good at solving the equations of fluid dynamics but very bad at describing the real world. The real world is full of things like clouds and vegetation and soil and dust which the models describe very poorly. Second, we do not know whether the recent changes in climate are on balance doing more harm than good. The strongest warming is in cold places like Greenland. More people die from cold in winter than die from heat in summer. Third, there are many other causes of climate change besides human activities, as we know from studying the past. Fourth, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is strongly coupled with other carbon reservoirs in the biosphere, vegetation and top-soil, which are as large or larger. It is misleading to consider only the atmosphere and ocean, as the climate models do, and ignore the other reservoirs. Fifth, the biological effects of CO2 in the atmosphere are beneficial, both to food crops and to natural vegetation. The biological effects are better known and probably more important than the climatic effects. Sixth, summing up the other five reasons, the climate of the earth is an immensely complicated system and nobody is close to understanding it.
I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain. On the other hand, the remedies proposed by the experts are enormously costly and damaging, especially to China and other developing countries. On a smaller scale, we have seen great harm done to poor people around the world by the conversion of maize from a food crop to an energy crop. This harm resulted directly from the political alliance between American farmers and global-warming politicians. Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science. If it happens that I am wrong and the climate experts are right, it is still true that the remedies are far worse than the disease that they claim to cure.
On the intolerance of Warmists:
You complain that people who are sceptical about the party line do not agree about other things. Why should we agree? The whole point of science is to encourage disagreement and keep an open mind. That is why I blame The Independent for seriously misleading your readers. You give them the party line and discourage them from disagreeing.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/letters-to-a-heretic-an-email-conversation-with-climate-change-sceptic-professor-freeman-dyson-2224912.html
"All three scientific consultants do research that focuses on the inadequacies of climate models."
Then all three must surely be fools, no such research is necessary. Clearly you can't run an iterative loop consisting of crude physics approximations at hopelessly inadequate resolution and pretend the compound error won't quickly tend to oblivion. But that's not the half of it. Pretending ensemble means magically add error bars and veracity to multiple bouts of extended fantasy is intellectually moribund in the extreme.
Faking it to avoid oblivion is fine for CGI purposes. But tweaking fantasy in support of alarm is grossly irresponsible. Fuelled by media need for sensation, it naturally mutates into plain old agendanomics beyond reason when the left/right click bait takes over. Stock in trade at the Guardian and for the BBC's army of chief under correspondents once removed incestuously interviewing each other ad nauseam. Sprinkle on a sachet or two of Roger's finest group-think chocolate powder and you soon have a trendy froth anyone can find an angle in - a latte black hole sucking in trillions worldwide. Still stuck to top lips, while paused a PR refresh en route to yet another fantasy event horizon was obviously on the menu.
Any convincing starter needs discernible causality in physical context. Not marinated in virtual reality with a zest of confidence intervals masking acid gross assumption. Like water vapour being a large feedback, despite the sign being unclear. Risk assessment can only be applied to credible threat. The most prominent being the continued distortion of a bandwagon kept on the road by a green blob after failing its MOT. The reach and potential long term effects of that really are profound.
By the looks of the clip the main course will include a segment of regresso-chaotica. Mundane statistical numerology steeped in linearity, liberally (if inappropriately) applied to select parts of a wildly chaotic bird of unknown complexity to instil a strong flavour of foul. Those with a nut allergy beware; the major feedstuff for this hybrid turkey is 95% catastrophe corn. Brand names include "SKS Climastrology Mix" and "Guardian's Blue Cloud Extreme".
For dessert big numbers out of context topped with a non-incisive isotopic anecdote, sprinkled with chopped BBC pronunciation au téléprompteur and gesticulation anormal. Optionally to follow: cheese board washed down with lashings of hot latte served by the outer lobby; Huw Edwards lip-curling karaoke in the lounge to top off a delightful evening of froth congealment.
In summary the usual numbers on the usual numbers, hardly a three-course to excite Greg Wallace. But we shouldn't expect three stooges exposing themselves with some "No Science, No Squealing" trifle, pre-watershed anyway. Or a celebrity bake-off without self-raising and bi-carb quips. I dare say it'll be worth watching for the "BBC graphics as an art form" content but precious little else.
"[Y]ou can't run an iterative loop consisting of crude physics approximations at hopelessly inadequate resolution and pretend the compound error won't quickly tend to oblivion."
- Anon
That would be an intriguing T-shirt slogan...
Probably a "team circle the wagons" production
- A proper prog could be made with true high integrity people like Bob Carter, Patrick Moore and Steve McIntyre.
- Spiegelhalter did make a good debunk of a Summer heatwave deaths paper in 2014, but chose to end with
Jeez, he must be aware of the 97% flaws, the Cook 97% flaws, major statistical misleadings in the way renewables are discussed and that we find major climate statistical misleading every month, yet portrays that study as if it's a one off example.- Tamsin Edward's performance on Newsnight was rather "weak"
and then as @NBY mentioned said "We’re confident the climate is still changing, because the ocean is still warming"
(confident ? when the ocean is even not properly measured)
and then as @ATheoK mentioned said
"in part quoting from the statements that were assigned highest confidence by the IPCC" (without mentioning those confidence levels are feelings rather than statistical calculations .. ironically the subject of DS's 2010 post)
- Yep sounds like a "circle the wagons team" so I am not expecting much. ...go on surprise us BBC
- People warn us against speculating, but I bet you other forces are at work to ensure no "off message" material is in the prog.
... 3rd (or secret 4th) consultant is probably Greenblob Bob.
"BBC Climate Change by Numbness" a procedure to numb the public into submission to CC Religion by BBC-Eco-Warriors scanning the news-wires everyday for every piece of Confirmation Bias they can find. And then producing lurid reports to hype that whilst at the same time excluding any scepticsm.
Clunk, "Faking it to avoid oblivion" might sell better.
Tamsin,
Soumds like agood idea. I just hope the mathematicians know that co2 is released to the atmosphere by warming seas so you'd expect to find a correlation there. And warn that stats don't ever show causation; plus that time-series stats are very unreliable. And also pay attention to the stats used in producing the GMST temps which may vastly underestimate true error margins.
And that's there at least one with a very good grounding in chaos theory so that he can explain that (1) even very tiny changes can cause abrupt climate shifts (making some of the IPCC statements of "too small to be considered" invalid) (2)the GCM computer models are only approximately implementing the actual atmospheric circulation because the maths functions are essentislly unsolvable
There's also the fundamental physics of things like clouds and the fact that Earth is not an isolated system as far as energy is concerned.
If they touch on those points i'd say they did a good job.
Please come back so that we can let you know.
Regards,
Ann.