Bishop Hill Lord Stern was on the Today programme this morning, for a chat about his views on saving the planet. The rottweiler John Humphrys suddenly came over all lapdog.
Strictly for the dedicated.
Bishop Hill May 4, 2015 Climate: Parliament Media Channel Four's Jon Snow wonders why climate change is off the political agenda.
Having seen his video, I think I know why.
Bishop Hill On the previous thread, Richard Betts argued that nobody was arguing for shifting resources from dealing with the problems of the present and towards the (hypothetical) problems of the distant future.
As evidence to the contrary, I give you firstly the reaction to Bjorn Lomborg's arguments - namely that we should focus on problems like clean water, malaria and access to energy in the developing world today. For this he has been subject to what can reasonably be characterised as a hate campaign by environmentalists.
Secondly I give you Bob Ward, who described a Matt Ridley article calling for a focus on energy access for Africa as "extreme nonsense":
Bishop Hill May 3, 2015 Climate: Sceptics Climate: WG3 Climate: sensitivity As a pearl in the dunghill of the Guardian's climate change coverage, Tamsin Edward's wise article today is going to take quite a lot of beating. It attempts to sideline the namecallers, pointing to the areas of agreement and sensible disagreement in the climate debate, particularly over climate sensitivity, and ends on these very pertinent questions.
But whether we are in denial, lukewarm or concerned about global warming, the question really boils down to how we view uncertainty. If you agree with mainstream scientists, what would you be willing to do to reduce the predicted risks of substantial warming? And if you’re a lukewarmer, confident the Earth is not very sensitive, what would be at risk if you were wrong?
For a mainstream scientist, are you confident enough in your computer simulations to argue that they support the need for the shifting of resources away from dealing with the problems of today - clean water and energy for developing countries are obvious candidates - and towards the problems of the next century?
Bishop Hill May 2, 2015 Media A conference at the University of the West of England in July is going to hear from Felicity Mellor - a frequent subject of BH posts - about science journalism. Here's her abstract:
Conventionally, academics studying science journalism, as well as practising science journalists, claim that science reporting follows the same news values as other forms of news. Whilst this is true in many respects, it fails to account for how science journalism differs from many other beats in its failure to adopt a critical stance. This paper explores the extent to which an additional set of 'non-news values' also operates, and suggests that it is here that the science beat differs from other beats. Taking the news coverage of invisibility research in the field of transformative optics as an example, I show that sources of funding, uncertainties, and limitations are routinely excluded from science news, suggesting that an implicit set of normative values structures what is omitted from news reports. These non-news values draw on a naïve, idealist philosophy of science which construes questions of interests and fallibility as a non-concern for news discourse about science.
It looks as if one person has worked it out, at least.
Bishop Hill May 1, 2015 Civil liberties Greens Tony Thomas points me to this remarkable video of University of Melbourne professor Peter Christoff talking at a conference on "Law and Desire". Professor Christoff is
...a member of the Victorian Ministerial Reference Council on Climate Change Adaptation, and member of the Board of the Australian Conservation Foundation. He was formerly a member of the (Victoria) Premier's Climate Change Reference Group, the Vice President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, and the Assistant Commissioner for the Environment (Victoria).
From about 20 mins, Prof Christoff makes a remarkable call for "climate denial legislation" to criminalise dissent on the issue.
Bishop Hill May 1, 2015 Climate: WG2 Greens Another polar climate change expedition has come to grief. Previous adventures have ended in farce. Unfortunately this time the story is a tragedy.
The Coldfacts organisation, funded by the Dutch arm of WWF, has sent two men to the high Canadian Arctic, to look at sea ice:
Polar explorers Marc Cornelissen and Philip de Roo (The Netherlands) will head for the Canadian High Arctic / Nunavut to gather valuable datasets for scientific research on sea ice in the heart of the so-called "Last Ice Area". This is the area where summer sea ice cover is expected to be most resilient to warming and to remain for decades to come. Anticipating on this resilience, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has identified this region as an area for which special stewardship should be sought through consultation of and cooperation with stakeholders. A solid science base is needed to do this.
However an emergency message has been received and all contact has been lost. The two are presumed drowned.
Bishop Hill May 1, 2015 Climate: MetOffice Royal Society Congratulations are due to Dame Julia Slingo, who has been elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Here is the citation:
Julia Slingo is a world-leading figure in the area of tropical climate processes and climate modelling. In her tropical research she has produced seminal work on the interaction between cumulus convection, weather systems, larger scale variability and the mean state of the atmosphere, and also on the interaction with the upper layers of the ocean. The Madden Julian Oscillation and the Asian Summer Monsoon have been two particular foci for her. She has led Met Office science and University climate modelling with great success and had major international influence, particularly in the move to much higher resolution climate models.
Bishop Hill May 1, 2015 Climate: WG3 Greens Some delicious weasel words from Lord Stern over at the Guardian this morning. The great man purports to be explaining the state of the climate debate, and invites us all to believe that extreme weather is getting worse.
More frequent and severe extreme weather, rising sea levels and acidifying oceans are already posing threats to homes and businesses across the world...
But read that again. It's a sentence of striking ambiguity. Is he saying that extreme weather has become worse? That would be untrue, of course. But perhaps he is saying that there is the threat of increased extreme weather. The question that one would then have to ask is why, if the threat of extreme weather has gone up, hasn't the number or intensity of extreme weather events gone up too.
As for the suggestion that a marginal decrease in alkalinity in the oceans is "already posing a threat to homes and businesses", you have to wonder what threat precisely he is thinking of?
Josh Apr 30, 2015 Josh ;)
Apparently there is a General Election on. Good luck everyone!
Click the image for a larger version
Update: Hilarious!
Bishop Hill Apr 30, 2015 Quotes A genuine expert can always foretell a thing that is 500 years away easier than he can a thing that's only 500 seconds off.
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Bishop Hill Apr 30, 2015 Recycling For anybody who thinks about these things for longer than a couple of seconds, it's pretty much clear that recycling is something that should happen to scarce, valuable resources rather than cheap and readily available ones. This is because recycling itself uses resources, so you don't want to expend a load of time, money, effort and materials in order to get something that is not worth very much.
In the FT today, Pillita Clark notes that the collapse of oil prices has put plastic recyclers under a great deal of pressure, as container makers have started to prefer virgin material to recycled. Some companies in the trade have collapsed as a result. This is as it should be. The effort of collecting, sorting and then grinding up old plastic bottles is clearly too high when the product has a low value.
Bishop Hill Apr 30, 2015 Climate: Models Climate: WG2 It's a slow news day so far today, so I'll go with a Guardian-talking-drivel-on-climate story, which is a bit like a Pope-is-Roman-Catholic story, but can occasionally provide some light relief. Today's headline from the fount of foolishness is
Extreme weather already on increase due to climate change, study finds.
Unfortunately for the Guardian, the study in question, by Fischer and Knutti, is actually nothing to do with observations of extreme weather at all. Instead it is about their attribution to humankind. You have to wonder whether the headline writers even read the paper.
And if you look at the study, it turns out to be just an extension of the use-shonky-GCMs-to-blame-humankind approach adopted by others in the past. I'm hugely amused by its suggestion that GCMs, which have precisely zero ability to predict precipitation, can be used to show that "18% of moderate daily precipitation extremes over land are attributable to the observed temperature increase since preindustrial times". Particularly since in the IPCC's view it's hard to find any evidence of changes in extreme weather anyway.
It's like...magic.
Josh Apr 29, 2015 Josh 
I don't think this cartoon needs any words but many thanks to Cumbrian Lad for an inspiring post. Matt Ridley's excellent article on Electricity for Africa is also worth reading - let's hope Pope Francis reads this blog.
Bishop Hill Apr 29, 2015 BBC Diary dates Energy: gas Greens The BBC is going to look at fracking again today, with a programme by Scotland Environment Correspondent David Miller.
Scotland has a decision to make: to frack, or not to frack. The controversial technique could be used to release gas and oil from the shale rock which lies beneath central Scotland. Large energy companies are keen to do this, and say it is important for both our economic growth, and energy supply needs. But fracking has a bad reputation. Its opponents believe it is dangerous, with the potential to cause pollution and even earthquakes. The Scottish Government has announced a temporary ban, but for some that is just not enough. David Miller reports from the front line in the war over fracking, where the two sides are locked in a fierce battle for the hearts and minds of the nation. He sets out to find out whether shale gas extraction can be safe, and whether Scots can be convinced to give it the go ahead.
What's the betting we see the "flaming faucets" on screen again? There are some clips here to whet your appetites.
