What's wrong with the IPCC - a guide for the layman

This is an attempt to summarise some of my previous postings on the IPCC process into a single article. What I'm trying to do is to make the case that there are signficant problems with the science that can be readily understood by the average reader. Even for a layman, these issues should give pause for thought.

The posting was inspired by this article by the Lazy Environmentalist - a blog I chanced upon while idly surfing my way around Technorati.com. The author seems to be, shall we say, an enthusiastic and unquestioning believer. 

Temperatures are going up

Temperature records are derived from surface stations, satellites and radiosondes (weather balloons).

There are many problems with the surface temperature record. Firstly, it's not really a record of the temperature, but a theory of what the temperature record would have looked like if it had been measured correctly. The records from many stations are subject to significant adjustments to deal with issues like station moves, creeping urbanisation and so on. These adjustments are often larger than the trend which comes out at the end of the process. In other words the raw data shows cooling, but by the time they've adjusted it, it shows warming. The adjustments are largely shrouded in mystery, so it's not possible to say if they are reasonable or not. One surprising artifact of these adjustments is that the historic temperature record keeps changing - the past keeps being made to look colder so the warming seems ever greater.

A new website, surfacestations.org, has started to uncover a worrying failure of many temperature stations to site their instruments correctly - including several next to airconditioning units and carparks, and more than one next to a barbeque.

The weather stations are mostly on land, but most of the earth is ocean. While the sea surface record carries a greater weight in assessing the global temperature, the accuracy of that temperature is questionable because of this unevenness in the spread of the stations. The sea surface record, like the land record, is also subject to large adjustments which dwarf the warming which it is claimed has been detected. Here is an example of very shaky reasoning for a major adjustment.

The satellite and weather balloon records are much less convincing if you are looking for evidence of warming.

Temperatures in the past

The estimates of temperatures before widespread instrumental records became available are created from proxies - the temperatures are estimated from tree-ring widths and densities, and from ice cores. There are particular problems with the tree rings. Trees can grow faster or slower when temperatures rise, and it is not clear that the attempts by scientists to deal with this issue - by measuring trees at the upper tree line  - have been successful. One scientist has found treeline samples from the same site showing both responses.

Another problem is that some temperature reconstructions have been suggesting declining temperatures in the second half of the twentieth century when, of course, things are meant to have warmed up rapidly. This embarrassing problem ("the divergence issue") has been quietly brushed aside by the IPCC, and in their report the offending records have been truncated at the point at which they start to fall away, so that the remaining records all show a rising trend. It is hard to see this as anything other than dishonesty.

The reconstructions with rising trends all use include a couple of particular species of trees - bristlecone pines and foxtails. These have both shown rapidly increasing growth rates in the twentieth century, something which is believed to be caused by non-climatic factors. Despite this being widely understood, the reconstructions have still been put forward by the IPCC as valid.

Most of the reconstructions stop in the 1990s. One simple test of whether they are reasonable or not would be to measure recent tree ring widths and to use this to derive a temperature. This could be compared to the actual temperature from the instrumental records. Despite all the money poured in to climate research, this has not been done and so questions over the accuracy of the reconstructions remain. And since we don't know if the reconstructions are valid, we can't say whether current temperatures are above, below or the same as, temperatures in warm periods in the past (eg "The Medieval Warm Period"). This extraordinary failure means that in essence we don't know if the problem is a problem we should worry about or not.

Data and code

One of the basic tenets of the scientific method is that work should be reproducible by other scientists. In order for climate scientists' work to be reproduced it is necessary for their data and the computer programs which transform it into results to be freely available. There are many instances of climate scientists refusing to release data, or "losing" it. This has happened with prominent scientists and key scientific papers. So some of the most important scientific work of recent years - work which underpins the IPCC process and the doom-laden results which it announces to the world - is not capable of being replicated. A reputable scientific body would disassociate itself from suspect papers of this kind. The IPCC embraces them.

The consensus

The IPCC's assessment report is said to represent the consensus view of 2500 scientists. Who these scientists are and how they made their happiness with this alleged consensus clear is not known. The comments of reviewers on the draft IPCC reports cannot be reproduced, despite this contravening the IPCC's own rules. The public have to accept the existence of a consensus on trust.

BBC officially biased

The Sunday Times is reporting that an internal BBC report to be published next week will conclude that the corporation is institutionally biased in favour of the left wing causes held dear by most of its staff and journalists. While it is nice to have confirmation of what most of the dextrospere has long known, we have no idea of whether the report will actually have any effect in practive. It's much more likely that it will be paraded as evidence that the Beeb has changed while actually leaving everything just as it is.

If the BBC is sincere about wanting to correct the imbalance we might expect to see a number of actions.

Firstly, heads would have to roll. The requirement to be balanced is a key part of the BBC's charter - such a flagrant breach surely demands a major clear out of the senior staff who have allowed this state of affairs to continue unaddressed for so many years.

The placing of BBC job advertisements in the Guardian, to the virtual exclusion of any other newspapers, should be ended. There should be a defined period - say ten years - in which all BBC jobs are only advertised in the Telegraph. This should help redress the balance in the staffing.

The BBC's disinformation campaigns on behalf of environmentalists and socialists need to be reversed. There needs to be an sustained series of programmes to question global warming, recycling, UK membership of the EU, and all the other myriad causes for which the corporation acts as an unpaid cheerleader. The BBC has told one side of the story for many years. In order to redress the balance it needs to tell the other side, and the other side only, for many more years to come.

Of course there's not a cat's chance of any of this actually happening. There will be a fuss this week when the report comes out. Then when it's all died down again, the red flag will be raised again over Television Centre and normal service will be resumed. 

Predictions for Blair's resignation honours list

Alistair Campbell surely. Michael White of the Graun is a shoo-in too.

More suggestions in the comments please. 

Illiberalism breeds illiberalism (again)

Guido and Iain Dale both stick the boot in to the senile old git leader of the (allegedly) Liberal Democrats. Once again, they've seen a problem caused by illiberalism and have adopted a policy of further illiberalism to deal with it. One really does wonder whether they can mention their own party's name without putting their tongues in their cheeks. (Perhaps they should rename themselves the "Liberal" Democrats or even the LiberalDemocrats).

The latest wheeze is to only permit farmers to sell development land to the council. It will be for a "fair" price, of course - apparently ten times the agricultural value is what the Commisar party feels it's worth. It's so illiberal I don't know where to start. Do the People's Revolutionary Liberal Democrats not understand the point of private property? That it underpins free societies? Can they not see that they are simply proposing an extension of the corruption that already engulfs the planning process - the land will simply be sold on to the developer who pays the largest bribes. (Hmm, the Liberal Revolutionary Democrat Fraction are big in local government aren't they?- perhaps I'm beginning to understand their thinking. No doubt it has also crossed their minds that the price of agricultural land is falling while development land is rising in price, so the politicians' cut should grow quite nicely in future).

Jock Coats reckons that farmers are currently engaging in rent seeking (see comment at 1.22, here). This is utterly bizarre. The state removes people's ability to do what they want with their own land, and if they try to get that right back again they are rent-seeking? Whose land is it anyway, Trotsky?

Someone called Tim Leunig (apparently from the LSE) describes the policy as "liberal and localist" (comment at 4.44 here). This is quite frankly, crap. It is simply an abomination of the language to describe price fixing as "liberal". It's liberal in the same way as incomes policies were liberal and look at the damage they did. (And don't try to impress me with Michael Gove thinking they're a good idea either - pointing me at another bunch of statists makes my case better than it does yours, Mr Leunig).

Let me spell it out. Scrap the bloody planning laws and let people build where houses are needed. (And I say this as someone who has just bought a house next to a field which may well get planning permission for the local landowner to build a load of houses on). 

Liberal Democrats - pah! The Labour party with jaundice, more like.

Toxic waste is good for birds

Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth fame has one of his usual "whip up a scare" stories on Comment is Free today. The latest impending disaster is the decision of nPower to dump ash from one of its coal-burning power stations into some lakes in Oxfordshire.

Some years ago, RWE npower started to fill in the lakes with PVA [Ash], killing the wildlife and transforming a thriving ecosystem to a polluted wasteland. I saw this progressive strangulation of nature take place as I passed by on the train on journeys between Oxford and London. The lakes gradually disappeared to be replaced by toxic deserts dotted with a few hardy weeds.

Only a couple of the original dozen or so lakes now remain. One of them, Thrupp Lake, is set soon to suffer the same fate as the others, as RWE npower pipes in its waste from Didcot. The terns, the otters and everything will disappear from there, and not only will the land around Oxford have less wildlife, but people will also have been robbed of a source of inspiration as well.

Some years ago, my wife and I used to visit Musselburgh Lagoons for the birdwatching. The lagoons were something of a legend among twitchers because of the way rare species that were often seen there. Everyone who went knew exactly where the lagoons came from - they were formed and then filled in with the ash from Cockenzie Power station which is just adjacent to the site.

There's an web page about the lagoons here. And here are some excerpts from it:

Typical numbers [of birds] roosting in midwinter are:- 1600 Oystercatcher; 150 Curlew; 900 Bar-tailed Godwit; 400 Redshank; 2000 Knot; 2000 Dunlin; 80 Turnstone; 30 Ringed Plover; and the occasional Grey Plover, Black-tailed Godwit and Purple Sandpiper. Most of these roost at the lagoons...

Many gulls roost at the lagoons, with about 100 Great Black-backed Gulls and sometimes thousands of Herring, Common and Black-headed Gulls present.

The Ringed Plover breed on the old shore-line in the west and central lagoons and, despite the human disturbance of the area, 2 or 3 pairs succeed in raising a few young each year. The only other species that breed in the lagoons are Skylark, Shelduck and Wheatears, which bred for the first time in 1975.

The list of passage migrant species that visit is amazing too, and is far too long to list here. All in all, the situation at Musselburgh doesn't sound very similar to the eco-catastrophe Mr Juniper is predicting does it?  Perhaps he's mistaken?

The missing right?

Harry Haddock has piece today about the firearms ban, which includes a wonderful quote from George Orwell

The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer’s cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

Coincidentally, 18 Doughty Street had a studio discussion featuring Chris Atkins, the director of the new documentary "Taking Liberties" and Peter Whittle of the New Culture Forum. Atkins was given a pretty hard time by Whittle who seemed to think that Atkins should have made another film altogether - he would have preferred something about the fear of artists that any output seen as being critical of certain eastern religions would "have consequences".

While this did seem a bit unfair to criticise Atkins for making "the wrong film", Whittle's concerns are certainly ones that I share. Unfortunately the two of them were at complete loggerheads, with Whittle believing the threat to society was from extremists, and Atkins believing it came from the state. Poor old Iain Dale was left trying to prevent an outbreak of fisticuffs - he seems to be suffering a lot from this kind of thing recently now that Yazzer is appearing regularly.

Now, you may be wondering what the connection is between a studio dust-up and the Haddock piece on guns with which I started this posting. It's this: if we were to enforce the right to bear arms guaranteed by the Bill of RIghts, both Whittle's artists and Atkins citizens would be much, much harder to oppress. People are only forced to choose betwen liberty and security because they cannot defend themselves.

One of our rights is missing. 

Nearly a good story

Israeli physicist Nir Shaviv wonders if Ramadan's requirement to fast during the hours of daylight would prevent moslems from surviving a polar summer.

This interesting conundrum is rather spoilt by a commenter who points out that the requirement is waived if it would affect the health of the faster. 

Bluff calling

I'm just off out to the school board meeting, but before I go here's an ingenious solution to global warming, penned by Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph. 

Both warmers and skeptics agree that if there is going to be any warming it will be seen first in the troposphere. Because of this consensus (a real consensus this time) a tax on carbon, linked to the temperature of the troposphere should be supported by both sides of the debate. The tax would initially be quite low. But if the temperature rises, as predicted by the warmers, then the tax goes up. If it falls, or is stable, which is what the skeptics think might happen, then the tax remains relatively trivial.

A rather neat idea, in that it calls the bluff of both sides.  

Bizarre BBC bias

A jaw-dropping piece of BBC leftism: at the end of an article describing the festivities surrounding the reopening of the Festival Hall, readers are asked to comment as follows:

Should City bankers donate a proportion of their fortunes to causes like the Royal Festival Hall? Let us know what you think using the form below.

Just remember folks, it's not a party political bias - the BBC promulgates a wide variety of left wing views.

(Via Biased BBC) 

Global warming in a frontier society

Via The Volokh Conspiracy, an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal Article (subscribers only).

The story according to which politically connected industries block economic developments that would be beneficial overall but redound to the detriment of the big players is one expounded mostly by cranks in the U.S., but is commonly accepted in Europe. This results from the fact that in Europe, this kind of thing happens. Market signals on employment, wages and production are all attenuated by government's heavy hand to a much greater extent than they are in the U.S. Stagnation in Europe has many faces, but one of the most important is the stasis of the corporate constellation: Most European economies are dominated by the same large companies that ruled the roost decades ago, while in the U.S., many of our largest and most successful companies didn't exist a generation ago.

This comparison is not new. But its relevance to the global warming debate is not well-understood. As a former Carter administration official at the conference put it, "America is, psychologically, an open-frontier society. Europe's frontier closed a millennium ago." In other words, the characteristic American response to, say, climate change, is to believe that technologies— and even companies—that do not now exist will crop up to solve the problem, assuming there is a problem. The characteristic European response, as exemplified by the German conspiracy theorist in Venice, is to focus on how to get the businesses to behave "better."

The open frontier view was captured by a Silicon Valley representative in the room. He stood up to announce that "clean tech" would be to this decade what high-tech was to the 1990s. The companies that would revolutionize our energy usage, he claimed, were now being funded by venture capitalists, and the Ciscos, Microsofts and Googles of the next decade would be the companies that solved the energy puzzle. We hadn't heard of any of them now, he insisted, but they would be huge. Is he right? Maybe. Who cares? It's his money, and the money of his colleagues in the Valley. The point is, if there's a conspiracy to keep revolutionary clean technology down, he didn't get the memo. The notion that this is simply a trans-Atlantic divide can easily be overstated. There are statist Americans and entrepreneurial Europeans. But the divide between the open-frontier camp and the closed-frontier camp is very real, and of the utmost importance to the global warming debate.

I can't help feeling that Mr Brown will shortly be appointing a "Clean-tech Czar", to be accompanied by a "Clean-tech levy" on bottles of wine, or something equally unconnected with the problem. It's coming, I tell you.

Quote of the day

Jeff Norman, in a comment in this thread. 

Dead-tree press is dead

Michael Yon has written another post about Iraq, of a quality and detail that you will never get from the MSM. This time he's on patrol with the Queen's Royal Lancers when they are caught up in an IED attack, and it's a gripping tale he has to tell. He also makes some interesting points about the lack of armour for British forces, and asks whether this is necessarily a bad thing. EU Referendum has written at length about this issue so it's good to have a different perspective.

Campaign for legal government

There seems to be some interest in the idea for a Campaign for Legal Government over in the comments at Guido's place. The idea is that it will take the buggers to court every time they do something dodgy.

They'll be busy then. 

In favour of teenage drinking

There's a small park, just over the road from the episcopal palace. We use it as a kind of extension to the garden whenever we can, since our own back yard is a bit small for the kids now.

Mostly it's fine, but on all too many weekends the ground around one or more of the pieces of play apparatus are a sea of broken glass, the result of some of the local yoof relieving their boredom. Strangely enough I sympathise with them in some ways. This is a rural village, and there's literally nothing for teenagers to do on a Saturday night. Even town, which is a half-hour walk away, has nothing. Living in the country is great for small children, but for disaffected teens it is probably a nightmare that they can't wait to end.

My own childhood was in suburbia, but in many ways we had the same problems; no money, and precious few facilities. It only got better at around the age of sixteen when I was taken aback when my father suggested, in response to my regular whine about being bored, that I get myself down to the pub for a drink.

And how right he was. Suddenly we were able to join the adult world, and once you knew which pubs wouldn't ask too many questions you could be pretty sure of a night's fun whenever you wanted it.  It's a way of doing things which just doesn't exist any longer, now that the police are in and out of the pubs checking for underage drinkers. Back in my day, teenagers went off to grown-up pubs and had a few pints and nobody batted an eyelid. The bars were full of adults, and if you were misbehaving you would be thrown out. Essentially you were an adult until you stepped out of line, at which point you suddenly became an child under adult supervision. It was a civil society way of dealing with the problem. You soon learned that keeping your head down and drinking quietly was the best way not to attract attention - you were taught to drink in a (relatively) civilised fashion, .

I don't mean to suggest that it was a perfect arrangement - some people are always going to step out of line - but I sometimes wonder if it was better than the current arrangement, where teenagers sup buckfast on the park benches and end the evening by smashing the bottles against the baby swings. 

Climbing trees

This weekend, Mrs Bishop escaped to England for a girly shopping weekend, leaving Mr Bishop with three baby bishops. Since Granny Bishop was on holiday too, this could have been a struggle, but the possibility of having to entertain the nippers single-handed was averted by dint of inviting lots of schoolfriends and their parents round.

Amazing fact though - both of the families invited were surprised, nay shocked, that Mr and Mrs Bishop allowed their children to climb trees, and freely admitted that they were far too fearful to allow such dangerous behaviour. I wasn't aware of any other uses for trees, myself. I didn't tempt fate by letting on that one of the baby Bishops rides his bicycle without a helmet, and once managed to ride at high speed into a brick wall in the process. I will probably be reported to social services any day now.

On a similar theme, Instapundit has been blogging regularly about the Dangerous Book for Boys, which looks set to be  a bestseller over on that side of the pond, and if Glenn Reynolds has it right, the start of a pardigm shift in the way boys are raised.