Hansen the hysterical

Hansen the hysterical is at it again, his latest pronouncement of doom getting full play on the pages of the Guardian.

One of the world's leading climate scientists warns today that the EU and its international partners must urgently rethink targets for cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of fears they have grossly underestimated the scale of the problem.

There is nothing new here, just a need to counter recent stories about global temperatures flatlining and a growing public awareness that the facts and the rhetoric are out of kilter with each other.

The only useful bit of apocalyptic news for the alarmists in recent weeks has been a bit of the West Antarctic peninsula breaking off, so the story is wheeled out, yet again.

Satellite technology available over the past three years has shown that the ice sheets are melting much faster than expected, with Greenland and west Antarctica both losing mass.

As many people now realise, West Antarctica is a pensinsula which sticks out from the continent - it's not representative of the region as a whole. In fact the continent as a whole has been cooling for years, and it has been putting on mass rather than losing it. This NASA picture shows the cooling trend for 1982 to 2003 over the continent. Blue is cooling:

 

I do wonder when they are going to start being straight with us.

A Dunning resolution

John Redwood is inviting readers to suggest the wording for a new Dunning resolution. And if, like me, you'd never heard of one of these before it's probably worth your reading it on those grounds alone.

First victims of the greens

Media attention is finally starting to focus on the implications of the drive for biofuels.

The Observer worries if food riots will be sparked by the continuing rises in rice prices.

Food riots fear after rice price hits a high

Shortages of the staple crop of half the world's people could bring unrest across Asia and Africa, reports foreign affairs editor Peter Beaumont

Mr Beaumont clearly has his finger somewhere other than on the pulse because AFP is reporting that the trouble has already started:

Forty people died during price riots in Cameroon in February, there has also been deadly troubles in Ivory Coast and Mauritania and other violent demonstrations in Senegal and Burkina Faso -- where a nationwide strike against price rises is to start Tuesday.

The trouble is not limited to these countries either. In Egypt, there have been outbreaks of violence in bread queues, with as many as seven people dying. We've also seen unrest in Mexico and Argentina.

The deaths of so many poor people is sad enough, but when it's all so unnecessary it's doubly depressing. Whatever your views on global warming, grain-based ethanol was never going to be part of the answer. Using all of your agricultural land to provide a fraction of your fuel needs is so plainly barmy that anyone except an green or a politician would reject it out of hand.

It's unforgiveable. The fact of the deaths caused by their religion should be rammed down the throats of green activists and politicians every time they dare to put their heads above the parapet.     

Freedom of expression

There's a rather important article at the International Humanist and Ethical Union.

For the past eleven years the organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), representing the 57 Islamic States, has been tightening its grip on the throat of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yesterday, 28 March 2008, they finally killed it.

Found via the UK Libertarian Party Forums. 

More fun at the schools ministry

Apropos of the last-but one posting on the new logo for the Department for Children, Schools and Families, some readers may have thought that the picture of a paint-bespattered Ed Balls was a crudely photoshopped fraud. I present below further recent evidence of activities in Mr Balls' department.

 

Ellee on biofuels

Via Peter Risdon, Ellee Seymour's latest venture into the world of climate science is a shocker.

Ellee links approvingly to Conservative MEP Robert Sturdy's letter extolling the (alleged) virtues of biofuels.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, quite mad and possibly evil too. The lemming-like dash towards biofuels has driven world grain prices inexorably upwards, leading to price inflation and all the suffering that brings. The reaction of governments in many producer countries has been to slap export taxes on grain exports - for example China, Argentina - or imposing export quotas like Vietnam. This has made things even worse. Unrest is becoming widespread -

Clashes over bread in Egypt killed at least two people last week, and similar food riots broke out in Burkina Faso and Cameroon this month.

Farmers in Argentina have pledged to continue a nationwide protest after the government refused to back down on tax rises on agricultural exports.

See also Mexico, Italy (!), etc.

Everybody with the slightest bit of sense is jumping off the biofuels bandwagon post-haste:

The government's chief environmental scientist has called for a halt to their deployment. 

A UN specialist on food availability says that biofuels are a crime against humanity. 

Even the not-very-bright people in the government are starting to backtrack. 

Everyone who gives a damn is against biofuels, so why on earth is Robert Sturdy for them? Can he really not have heard that  they're a disaster. Or could it possibly be because he is a big arable farmer who will derive huge benefits from high grain prices? Tell me it ain't so.

So when I say everyone who gives a damn, what I should have said was "everyone who gives a damn about people other than themselves".

Whose logo is this?

It's your local nursery isn't it?

So whose logo is it really? Well actually, it's the new logo for the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

Is this meant to be reassuring? Have you ever been inside a nursery school? It's a great place to be if you're under the age of five. There's lots of yelling and screaming and chucking of drinks and wiping of bottoms and mewling and puking and running round like nutters. But no decisiveness or cerebration or anything like that.

So doesn't this logo conjure up completely the wrong mental images? 

 

Oh, and the logo cost a cool £5k. Cheap by government standards, but I reckon you could have got it done by Logoworks for a couple of hundred. Still, better twenty times too expensive than the usual hundred or so times.

Any economists out there?

The other day I was flicking idly through the channels on the telly when I chanced upon BBC Parliament, which was showing recorded coverage of Adair Turner's evidence to the Environment Food and Rural Affairs Committee. This is not something any self-respecting citizen should be watching, of course, but  it represented a welcome respite from the children.

During his evidence, Lord Turner said something which appeared to my untutored ear to be a load of old codswallop. He seemed to be saying that the Stern review had stated that reducing carbon emissions by 60 - 80 % would only reduce GDP by 2.5% - ie a one-off hit of 2.5%. On the face of it, this is highly implausible, but it none of the MPs picked him up on it. I made a note to look into it when I got the chance.

I've now located the transcript. While it's uncorrected, what I read there is pretty much as I recall from the television. This is what he said:

I think there is a very compelling case which is set out in Lord Stern's report and other reports that the developed, rich economies, and ultimately the whole world, can run on a fraction of the carbon emissions that they have at the moment. They can reduce it by 60 or 80 per cent from present per capita levels in, for instance, Europe, and the estimates that he produced are that the cost of that might be between minus 0.5 per cent, ie you do a set of things and we are actually better off at the end of the day, through to plus 2.5 per cent, ie we do all these things and the GDP in 2050 and ever thereafter is 2.5 per cent below what it would otherwise be but, as I made the point earlier, that simply means that you have slipped by a year the rate of increase.

[Emphasis mine] Can this possibly be right? Doesn't he mean that the rate of growth in GDP will be 2.5% less than it would have been otherwise?

Here is an excerpt from the conclusions of the Stern Review:

This is a major challenge, but sustained long-term action can achieve it at costs that are low in comparison to the risks of inaction. Central estimates of the annual costs of achieving stabilisation between 500 and 550ppm CO2e are around 1% of global GDP, if we start to take strong action now.

[Again, emphasis added]. This looks pretty damning to me, but I'd prefer a trained economist to confirm that I'm understanding this correctly.

Mind you, Lord Turner is a trained economist too (as he states elsewhere in his evidence). If he has got it wrong, I'm not sure what excuses might be available to him.

Sir David King flounces out

There's a lovely anecdote doing the rounds of climate sceptic blogs about Sir David King, the climate alarmist and former chief scientific adviser to the British government.

It seems that President Putin asked some of his leading scientists to meet Sir David when he went to Moscow as part of the entourage of the foreign secretary. King apparently launched into his standard spiel about how we're all going to fry, but was a bit taken aback when the assembled scientists told him he was talking rubbish. When they had the temerity to list all the scientific evidence which refuted his claims of impending armageddon, our man was left looking a bit of a ninny and turned on his heels and stormed out of the room.

The story is doubly interesting because it's related by someone called RCE Wyndham in a letter in which he tells Robin Butler, the master of University College, Oxford, that the college can expect no donations from him this year because the appointment of King to head Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

The letter can be read here.  

Hadley numbers

One of the most annoying things about the Hadley numbers is that if it was, contrary to appearances, an honest oversight then it was all completely avoidable. Hadley is famously secretive about the data behind the HADCRUT index, only releasing the raw data to carefully selected people. They even have even stood firm in the face of Freedom of Information requests.

To that end I've written to Derek Twigg, the minister responsible for the Met Office and Hadley to ask him to do something about it. I wonder if he will try to convince me that it's something to do with national security.

Dear Mr Twigg

I am writing to you in your capacity as minister responsible for the Met Office.

I note that the Met Office’s Hadley Centre has today announced that it has found an error in the way it calculates its important HADCRUT3 global temperature index. I’m sure it will have been very embarrassing to everyone at the Met Office, and to yourself, to find that the figures reported to the public for so long have been erroneous.

For many years now, many members of the public have tried unsuccessfully to obtain the raw data and computer code used in the calculation of the HADCRUT index. As I understand it, all such requests are refused, even when via a FoI request.

I would therefore like to know the answer to three questions:

1. Do you agree that climate change is an issue of overwhelming public importance?
2. Do you agree that making the raw data and code widely available is the best defence against the propagation of errors such as those reported by Hadley?
3. Will you now be telling the Hadley Centre to publish the raw data and code on their website?

I will publish your response on my own website at bishophill.squarespace.com, unless you request otherwise.

Yours sincerely

Bishop Hill 

Update: Thanks to the Adam Smith Insitute for linking to this story. If any readers feel like contacting Mr Twigg too, I'm sure it would help to keep the pressure on. 

The Hadley Agenda

The scientists at the Met Office's Hadley Centre, have discovered an error in the way they calculate the global temperature. Up until now, the smoothed data for a given year has been based upon those months' data which is available - so the 2007 trend, as reported in February 2007, was based on data for January and February of that year. At the time, this gave an sharply rising temperature trend, which was rather convenient for the IPCC Working Group I which was meeting at the time, enabling all and sundry to conclude that we were all doomed.

Roll forward to 2008 and the data for January and February 2008 show temperatures falling at an equally startling rate.

And guess what? Suddenly the disinterested scientists at Hadley have discovered that their methodology is all wrong! They're going to change things to eliminate the bias. Well, bully for them!

Isn't it amazing that this indavertent error has gone unnoticed for all these years? Isn't it more amazing still how it only got noticed when temperatures were falling? Someone with a more suspicious mind than me might think these guys had an agenda!

It's amusing also to note that Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Hadley Centre (update: CRU) is a man with an extraordinary reluctance to release his data and code to outsiders, even refusing to acquiesce to requests under the Freedom of Information Act. We can reach our own conclusions as to why he might do this, but for the moment it's salutory to note that, had he adopted a position of openness, this embarrassing error, which surely calls into question his competence to occupy the position of trust he does, might never have happened.

(Updated to fix Jones' affiliation)

Property law

Much fun at the Volokh Conspiracy this morning, where you can find out more than normal people should want to know about property law as manifested in the Lord of the Rings. Apparently all that fighting and questing and general nastiness could have been avoided if all parties to the dispute had properly followed the law of acquisition.

Apparently Pride and Prejudice is actually a treatise on property law too. 

Muslim weather

The Archbishop of Canterbury has partially got his way. British weather has been declared Muslim.

It's either Sunni or Shiite.

(Pinched wholesale from Vindico Vindico )

More scientists speak out against global warming hysteria

Professor Mike Hulme is a climatologist who heads the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia. He seems to have been starting to speak out against climate change hysteria, and he's put a personal statement up on his website outlining his views.

In recent months I have been chastised for some of my pronouncements on climate change. I have spoken out against the use of exaggerated language in the description of climate change risks; I have spoken about the limits and fragility of scientific knowledge; I have suggested that we should focus on nearer-term policy goals to improve human welfare rather than be so pre-occupied with one large longer-term goal of global climate management. As a consequence I have been accused of burying my head ostrich like in the sand; of undermining the power of science; of lacking passion about ‘solving’ the ‘problem’ of climate change.

This treatment, as anyone who has ever questioned the "consensus" knows, is actually rather reasonable compared to what some have had to put up with.

The rest of the statement sets out his views in more detail - the subheadings give a flavour of where he stands:

• Climate change is a relative risk, not an absolute one
• Climate risks are serious, and we should seek to minimise them
• Our world has huge unmet development needs
• Our current energy portfolio is not sustainable
• Massive and deliberate geo-engineering of the planet is a dubious practice

OK, so there's things to disagree with here, but it's a much more reasonable starting position than the standard "We're aaaall doooomed!!!" which most other commentators adopt. It's also amazing to note how similar this position is to that of Bjorn Lomborg who has been regularly smeared because of his views.

Hulme and some other scientists also have a paper published in Natural Hazards Review (subscription only, so no link) advocating adaptation rather than the economic lunacy that governments around the world have opted for. Predictably this is getting little or no coverage from the mainstream media - the only UK outfit to pick up on it so far is the Telegraph.

The world would be better off adapting to the consequences of climate change rather than trying to fight the causes, according to scientists.[...]

Their controversial view, which they accept will lead to them being branded as "the new pariahs of global warming", is that the world would be better off fighting the consequences of climate change - hunger, storm damage and disease - rather than spending billions of pounds trying to stabilise CO2 emissions across the planet.

Is the tide turning, I wonder?

The end of the enlightenment

Our European colleagues have been demonstrating the meaning of the European Convention on Human Rights, and in particular Article 9, which is on the subject of freedom of speech.

Article 9 – Freedom of thought, conscience and religion

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.
2. Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Note particularly the second point above. What we have is freedom of speech subject to whether the state thinks what you are saying is acceptable. Don't believe me? Take a look at this:

So it has happened: thoughtcrime is now officially a crime in Finland. Stating your opinion, moreover stating your opinions based of government statistics, is illegal. Finns may now only express a politically sanctioned range of opinions subject to supervision by official Gauleiters like Mikko Puumalainen. The fine is small but so what? The message is clear. Dissent will not be tolerated by the Finnish state. It should not matter a damn if you agree with what Mikko Ellilä says, it is outrageous that he is not being allowed to say what he thinks.

Can we leave yet?