Diary dates, short commons edition

It's very late notice, but Sir John Beddington is speaking in Edinburgh tonight.

Legacies of the 20th century and challenges for the 21st: our changing world enlightenment lecture.

Professor Sir John Beddington will discuss Climate Change and Food Security.  6.30 (doors open 6.15) – 8pm, McEwan Hall, Teviot Place, University of Edinburgh. Free tickets can be booked via eventbrite.

Beddington honoured

BH favourite Sir John Beddington has been awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon. I kid you not.

Sir John Beddington, the former UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA), has been awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon (Kyokujitsu Chu-Jusho) from the Emperor of Japan.

The award was apparently prompted by Sir John's advice to the British Embassy and UK expats in Japan after the Fukishima incident.

Click to read more ...

Calculated ambiguity

Take a look at the transcript of John Beddington's appearance on the Today programme a couple of days ago. It a masterful performance, replete with insinuation and devoid of explicit statements.

But what we have - what we can expect to see is an increasing frequency of extreme events.

That was neat wasn't it? Are we seeing an increased frequency of extreme events or is this just something that is seen in at the bottom of the climate teapot?

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Let them eat equality

The Oxford Martin School has appointed a "commission" of environmentalists to gaze at the future and come up with all sorts of plans to deal with it.

Deja vu.

The results were presented in a joint lecture by Martin Rees and Sir John Beddington last week and a video of the event is now available here. In it, we learn that the commissioners are proposing a cornucopia of new international bureaucracies, that some of them have a bit of a soft spot for totalitarian regimes (no short-termism, you see) and that they have decided that Lord Stern was right about low discount rates. This last one is not a surprise given that Lord Stern was in fact one of the commissioners.

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SJB's last hurrah

It is Sir John Beddington's last week in the job, and he has chosen to take one last opportunity to speak out on climate change. He is making a raft of media appearances today, having been on the Today Programme on Radio 4 and BBC Breakfast telly already. There will be more on Radio 5 later on. I gather that the TV and Radio 5 will be speaking to Benny Peiser after 8am.

I'll post links and reaction as I get them.

Update on Mar 25, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Olive Heffernan (formerly?) of Nature Climate Change is shocked (shocked!) that the BBC might mention the views of a climatologist about climate. She presumably feels that a population biologist turned adminstrator has views that are simply unassailable:

John Beddington on BBC Breakfast talking on #climate change. Presenter wheeling out arguments by Richard Lindzen. Oy vey. Hard to believe.

Update on Mar 25, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Beddington's TV appearance is currently available here at around 7:12.

Update on Mar 25, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Pallab Ghosh's report is here.

Update on Mar 25, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Audio of Beddington on Today is here.

Update on Mar 25, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Benny Peiser's response on FiveLive breakfast is here.

Avoid like the plague

Sir John Beddington's speech to the AVOID symposium is quite interesting. He takes a pop at GWPF's Lord Turnbull, in particular with what he says is a claim that temperatures haven't gone up for a decade. Beddington seeks to refute this claim with a graph of decadal averages temperatures.

How one would know what has happened to temperatures in the last decade from a figure for the average temperature over 2001-2010 is anybody's guess. This is probably a form of mathematics to which only the Government Chief Scientific Adviser is privy.

The arguments over sea ice are more interesting. I see the decline in Arctic sea ice and, like Lord Turnbull, am surprised that the extent seems to return to normal over the winter. One would have thought that since the poles are warming as rapidly as we are told, the winter ice recovery would be less each year. I should also mention that I always view discussion of the Arctic without mention of the Antarctic as fairly naked cherrypicking. As we know, the IPCC says Antarctic ice should be in decline too.

Retirement is opportunity

Sir John Beddington's retirement is now only a few weeks away and he is taking the opportunity to warn everyone, just one more time, that the end of the world is nigh. On about three or four dozen different fronts.

In his speech to the Royal Academy of Engineering a few days ago he had this to say.

Sir John warned that low probability, high impact events are becoming increasingly frequent, and highlighted other concerns such as space weather events and unexpected effects from computer trading in financial markets.

Is there any empirical evidence to support this claim? Any at all?

GCSA can't tell weather from climate

Sir John Beddington is heading for retirement and has taken the opportunity of an an interview with Civil Service World to remind everyone how shaky his grasp of climate science has been.

On climate change, he admits that government investment in renewable and alternative technologies is likely to be constrained by economic circumstances. But he is adamant there is no suggestion that climate scepticism – which some detect in some of the Treasury’s activities – is infecting the policymaking process. He says: “The data is showing not just that climate change is happening, but that we are getting an increase in extreme weather. 2012 had average rainfall, but almost none in the first quarter and enormous amounts in the second half of the year.”

Let's hope the next guy is better.

On food and fearless advisers

Sir John Beddington was back in the news a couple of weeks ago, warning that food prices are going to get higher and higher:

During a radio discussion about food prices, he said much of world’s agriculture was dependent on stable weather patterns, which have undergone “major changes” in recent years.

This, he warned, meant that food supplies were “extremely fragile” and that reserves were subjected to extremes in conditions caused by climate change.

Ah, it's climate change. No mention of the insane policies on biofuels. If you haven't read it already, take a look at Matt Ridley's article about peak farmland, in which he reports new findings that suggest that the world's demand will soon be falling and, even more remarkably:

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Political bias in the academy

It has long been known that universities are overwhelmingly staffed by people of a left-wing persuasion, this having been shown by many surveys. According to a report in Inside Higher Ed, a significant proportion of these collectivist professors are happy to use their positions to keep down people of dissenting views.

Just over 37 percent of those surveyed said that, given equally qualified candidates for a job, they would support the hiring of a liberal candidate over a conservative candidate. Smaller percentages agreed that a "conservative perspective" would negatively influence their odds of supporting a paper for inclusion in a journal or a proposal for a grant. (The final version of the paper is not yet available, but an early version may be found on the website of the Social Science Research Network.)

To some on the right, such findings are hardly surprising. But to the authors, who expected to find lopsided political leanings, but not bias, the results were not what they expected.

"The questions were pretty blatant. We didn't expect people would give those answers," said Yoel Inbar, a co-author, who is a visiting assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and an assistant professor of social psychology at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands.

He said that the findings should concern academics. Of the bias he and a co-author found, he said, "I don't think it's O.K."

Politicians need to remember this, next time their chief scientific advisers tell them what they should be doing.

Beddington whips science five-nil

Sir John Beddington, the government's chief scientific adviser, writes in Farmers Weekly.

There is much to prompt comment. For example, you might have hoped that a credible chief scientific adviser would not make statements like

the first decade of the 21st century was the warmest on record"

without commenting on whether this meant anything in the context of the remainder of the record. Advocacy 1, Science 0.

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Beddington going

The Cabinet Office is advertising for a replacement for Sir John Beddington, the government chief scientific adviser.

The last three occupants of the post - May, King and Beddington himself - have been, to say the least, eccentric old coves. All of them have specialised in computer modelling and they have all seemed guilty of an unquestioning belief in the pronouncements of in-silico sybils, occasionally with disastrous consequences. Beddington has compounded these failings by appearing to work as a tax-funded lobbyist on behalf of the scientific civil service rather than someone who toiled for the public benefit.

It would therefore be nice if Beddington's replacement was:

• someone grounded in the empirical sciences
• someone who saw himself as a public servant.

I'm not holding my breath.

Beddington hearing

Sir John Beddington is about to be grilled by the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on the role of chief scientific advisers.

The video will be here from 11:30am UK time.

The two cultures of science

Sir John Beddington has responded to readers' comments on his report "Preparing for the Future", which was much criticised by BH readers for its failure to quantify any of the alleged risks with which it claimed we are beset.

The response, as expected, does little to address criticisms in a meaningful way. Here's what he has to say about the failure to quantify the risks:

It was not in its scope to provide a formal or quantitative risk assessment but to identify a range of threats and opportunities that should be considered as signposts for action by policymakers, and a basis for further, more detailed analysis and assessment.

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Speccy on Beddington

The Spectator has picked up on one of the aspects of Sir John Beddington's activities that has been bothering me.

Sir John Beddington’s job is to advise on science. Instead, he appears to have appointed himself minister for propaganda.

There is of course also his role as internal lobbyist to worry about, but it's good to see someone else noticing what's going wrong.