Saturday open thread

In my absence, here is an open thread for any climate and energy news today.

Friday open thread

In my absence, here is an open thread for any climate and energy news today.

Thursday open thread

In my absence, here is an open thread for any climate and energy news today.

Wednesday open thread

In my absence, here is an open thread for any climate and energy news today.

Monday open thread

In my absence, here is an open thread for any climate and energy news today.

AR5 press cuttings

Marcel Crok says that the good news in AR5 is being hidden.

Bob Tisdale says that the way the pause is being shown is comical.

Matt Ridley was on the Daily Politics, up against some of the slimiest creatures in British public life.

Judith Curry has fun explaining to a journalist how the IPCC gets to that 95% certain figure. She also gets a mention in the WSJ coverage.

The Today programme featured a piece with Chris Rapley and Lord Stern and another with Chief Scientist Sir Mark Walport, who thinks (believe it or not) that climate science needs new communication strategies. I kid you not. In a later section, John Ashton (former Foreign Office climate bod) and Connie St Louis (sci journalism person) discussed a range of issues on the periphery of the climate debate. Mostly this was a case of publicly funded officials trying to silence dissenting voices.

Update on Sep 28, 2013 by Bishop Hill

More links added:

The Shelagh Fogerty show on Five Live featured Emily Shuckburgh, Peter Stott of the Met Office and yours truly.

Benny Peiser was on BBC World News Today (from 9mins), up against Jeremy Leggett.

Meanwhile I was on Good Morning Scotland, up against Richard Dixon of Friends of the Earth.

FiveLive Drive had two slots, one with Jo Haigh and another featuring Ed Hawkins and Tamsin Edwards.

Tamsin E. has posted a page of all her media appearances here.

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The problem with being away from your desk for a day is that there is so much to write about when you get back, as well as a backlog of real work. Here are a few of the things I might spend time on if I had more of it.

Nigel Calder reports the latest findings of Henrik Svensmark and his team. They now have experimental support for the idea that the molecular clusters formed by cosmic rays keep growing to a size where they can become condensation nuclei - something that some people said was impossible. The findings need to be caveated though as they are submitted to a journal but not yet published.

Lubchenko and Karl have a paper in Physics Today on extreme weather events. Roger Pielke Jr is unimpressed, tweeting as follows: "Even more nonsense, an embarrassment of riches". We'll have to wait for details of his critique.

Citizen Joe Smith writes in the Huffington Post about presentation of the climate change argument, noting that the public "know that over-hasty phrases like 'the science is finished' misrepresent the work". This appears to be a toned-down version of his description of it the other day as a "tactical lie". Now I come to think of it, wasn't "the science is settled" at the core of the BBC seminar on climate he ran with Roger Harrabin?

The Columbia Journalism Review looks at Gleick's misdeeds and considers the legal implications.

More links

I'm still suffering, although the medicine is starting to kick in. In the meantime, here are a couple more links to keep you all going.

Ben Pile has a really good summary of the Fakegate affair up at Spiked.

The myth of the climate change denier exists in the heads of environmentalists, and seems to prevent them entering into conversation with anyone that dares to criticise environmentalism. The crusade of ‘communicating’ climate change is not a project that involves an exchange of views. To criticise environmentalism is to ‘deny The Science’, no matter how incoherent the environmentalist’s grasp of science or how lacking his or her sense of proportion.

Sometimes you wonder if GuardianEco is taking the mickey. Look at Damian Carrington's article about what he calls "fossil fuel subsidies". He is actually referring to the 5% lower VAT rate for energy. Having called this a fossil fuel subsidy, he goes on to note that it applies to energy from "renewables" too, and then seems to attempt a justification by noting that most of the energy supply comes from fossil fuels.

The Justice Committee today heard from the universities on the subject of FOI. Audio is here.

Judith Curry's take on Lindzen's talk at Westminster last week is here. I liked this quote of Lindzen's

Unfortunately, denial of the facts on the left, has made the public presentation of the science by those promoting alarm much easier. They merely have to defend the trivially true points on the left; declare that it is only a matter of well- known physics; and relegate the real basis for alarm to a peripheral footnote – even as they slyly acknowledge that this basis is subject to great uncertainty.

Climate Realists has the videos of the talk.

Off colour

Blogging will be slow, I think. I'm a bit off colour, the new boiler is arriving today and there's work to be done.

In the meantime here are some bits and pieces:

James Delingpole was on the BBC Big Questions show. This was the programme that I was considered to appear on (James suggested me, I gather, for which thanks are due). The climate bit starts from 45 mins.

Congratulations are due to Steve M, Anthony W, Jo Nova and Tallbloke for their clean sweep in the Bloggies.

I've also had this transcript from Hansard sent to me. The noble lords are considering smart electricity meters. Their discussion may well be worthy of some analysis, although I am not going to get time to look at it myself for a while.

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There's a lot of material floating round the climate blogosphere at the moment, none of which I really have time to do justice to, so here's a round up of what you are missing.

Katharine Hayhoe has posted up some of the emails she has received. One or two of them are very ugly, the rest still rude in a way that we can really do without. Given that Prof Hayhoe has been known to use the 'd' word I'm less sympathetic than I might be, but this is not to condone the messages she has been sent. I hope she eschews name-calling in future though.

Click to read more ...

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There has been a sudden flurry of articles on climate today, which I dutifully round up for you now.

Concerned scientists writing to protest at the various attempts to get hold of Michael Mann's emails is a story we have heard before, but another missive has been made public today, with the AGU and others telling the university of Virginia that they are worried that personal letters may be disclosed unnecessarily. UVa is due to respond to the American Tradition Institute's FOI request on 20 August.

Fans of the use and abuse of statistical significance in the temperature records will want to read the latest paper by Mahlstein et al, (co-authors include the IPCC's own Susan Solomon). It is claimed that significant warming of the Earth will be seen first in the tropics.

The Grantham Institute has published a paper on uncertainty in science, with the focus on climate.

Renewables are booming according to the TPM website. In England glazing businesses are doing well too.

Ars Technica takes a pop at Roy Spencer and his recent, much-discussed paper.

A new paper examines what might happen if aerosols are pumped into clouds. The conclusion is that they will reflect more light apparently.

And lastly, Jeremy Grantham says we're in trouble. Big trouble. Surprising, eh?

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It's all a bit quiet on the climate front at the moment, but there are one or two little snippets that might interest readers.

Interest in the last couple of days has focused on the Guardian's involvement in phone hacking. David Leigh tweets that he didn't make a habit of it. I've asked him how often he did so.

Green grandstanding by European politicians looks as if is going to have consequences. Bayer are telling the German government that they are feeling the strain and hinting that they may make investments elsewhere.

Twelve protected golden eagles were killed by a windfarm in California:

"Wind farms have been killing birds for decades and law enforcement has done nothing about it, so this investigation is long overdue," said Shawn Smallwood, an expert on raptor ecology and wind farms. "It's going to ruffle wind industry feathers across the country."

No doubt government subsidies to the windfarms will be increased to cover the government fines that will now be levied.

Uber-warmist Tim Flannery's calls for owners of seafront property to be worried about sea-level rise are looking fairly hollow with the revelation that Flannery has bought not one but two properties in the tidal reaches of the Hawkesbury river.

The disgraced former minister David Laws is being tipped for a return to politics, replacing Chris Huhne as Energy and Climate Change minister. The latter is facing the possibility of serving jail time for (alleged) perversion of the course of justice.

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Here are a few bits and pieces that you may not have seen from the last few days.

Two years on, BH reader Jonathan Jones has managed to extract the CRUTEM data from UEA, with the Information Commissioner coming down almost completely against UEA's stonewalling. Huge kudos is due. Lucia is much amused by the commissioner's wording.

Click to read more ...

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L'affaire Greenpeace rumbles on. Richard Tol has posted some thoughts here:

That study also assumes rapid technological progress in renewables and none in fossil fuels. That is a silly assumption.

Meanwhile Joe Romm is on Mark Lynas's case. I expect to hear about Lynas's links to big oil very shortly.

Click to read more ...

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There's some really interesting stuff around the blogs at the moment, which I don't have time to write up in full, so here's a collection of links.

Judith Curry's article on overconfidence in the IPCC's detection and attribution studies is a must-read.

Meanwhile Steve McIntyre takes a break from tree rings to look at the IPCC's recent report on renewables. The headline figure seems to be an extreme scenario and one, moreover, that has been snitched straight from a report by Greenpeace. Author conflict of interest raises its ugly head again.

But the story that is getting all the attention at the moment is the news that we are about to go into a period of solar quiescence accompanied by global cooling. Anthony Watts has the story, as does El Reg and there is lots of MSM coverage for those that are interested.