BBC range free - Josh 282

Another BBC meeting, same old story.

Cartoons by Josh

Diary dates: sceptic edition

Some interesting lectures upcoming at the University of Nottingham. I hope they stream these or otherwise make them more publicly available:

Thursday, February 6th: 1-2pm, Law & Social Sciences (West Wing), A100
Amelia Sharman (London School of Economics and Political Science) 
“Mapping the climate sceptical blogosphere”
Amelia highlights three key climate sceptic blogs’ focus on the scientific aspects of the climate change debate, their status as alternative sites of expertise, how they contribute to the contestation and delegitimisation of expert knowledge and how they engage members of the public previously unengaged by the mainstream knowledge process.

Click to read more ...

Hulme on the IPCC

Mike Hulme has done a podcast on the Fifth Assessment Report, which is published at the website of his new employer, King's College London and is embedded below. There is a measure of common ground, although in Hulme's view the difficulties with the science don't seem to obviate a demand for policy responses to it. This makes it hard to to determine if the science is leading to demands for policy responses or whether it is merely an excuse for them.

 (H/T Alan)

Quote of the day

The populist notion that all climate sceptics are either in the pay of oil barons or are right-wing ideologues, as is suggested for example by studies such as Oreskes and Conway (2011), cannot be sustained.

Mike Hulme, in his new book. An extract of the chapter is at his website.

H/T Tallbloke.

Hulme slams 97% paper

The prominent climatologist Mike Hulme has slammed the Cook et al 97% "nonsensus" paper in a comment at the Nottingham University Making Science Public blog.

The “97% consensus” article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country that the energy minister should cite it. It offers a similar depiction of the world into categories of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ to that adopted in Anderegg et al.’s 2010 equally poor study in PNAS: dividing publishing climate scientists into ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’. It seems to me that these people are still living (or wishing to live) in the pre-2009 world of climate change discourse. Haven’t they noticed that public understanding of the climate issue has moved on?

This is an interesting development since nobody is going to finger Hulme as any kind of a sceptic.

Steps videos

A week or so back, prominent sci-policy wonks spoke at a symposium run by the University of Sussex's STEPS centre. Videos have now been posted here. They including Pielke Jr on the science-policy interface. Mike Hulme on the IPCC and Climategate, and Bob Watson on designing an assessment process.

Hulme's new climate course

Times Higher Education reports on Mike Hulme's latest idea - a course combining environmental studies and the humanities:

"I have worked in the field for over 30 years," he said. "I started with a very numerical approach but became increasingly frustrated that science alone cannot motivate social change.

As a taxpayer, I must say I struggle with the idea that I should be forced to pay people to work on coming up with new tactics to get me to amend my ways. This seems to me to be political campaigning rather than academic research.

This bit made me laugh:

Professor Hulme - who also teaches an undergraduate class on scientific controversy - acknowledged that UEA had been at the centre of a political row over climate change.

"We have gone through a big controversy here with the 'Climate-gate' scandal, which raised questions about whether some scientists were trying to subvert the peer-review process and who counts as a legitimate expert."

He added that although his own emails were among the batch obtained by campaigners who cited them as evidence that scientists were manipulating climate data, he was "not in the spotlight".

As did this:

Insights from nature writing and eco-poetry will be considered alongside those of philosophy and science.

A letter from the future

This was provided to me by Phillip Bratby.

Letter from Bob Ward Junior (chief scientific advisor to the Department for Climate Change and Energy (DCCE)) to the Secretary of State for Climate Change and Energy, Ed Miliband Junior.

December 2031

Dear Ed,

First of all congratulations on being the youngest ever MP appointed at the age of 16 and, following your degree in political communication, being appointed the youngest ever Minister of State at the age of 19.

Click to read more ...

Hulme's Greenpeace and UN consultancies

Email 2099 is from Helen Wallace, a senior "scientist" at Greenpeace to Mike Hulme.

I am wondering whether you could help us with some urgent (paid) work we need doing for Kyoto. Or perhaps you can recommend someone else?

We want to produce a briefing that replies to all the usual climate 'sceptics' arguments, in the form of short questions and answers.

Later in email 2187, money gets discussed again. This time the questions come from Iain Reddish of Greenpeace, again to Hulme.

Click to read more ...

Hulme on Nurse

Mike Hulme has published some thoughts on the Horizon programme, little of which will be disputed by sceptics. Here's a snippet:

I do not recognise [Nurse's] claim that “climate science is reducing uncertainty all the time”. There remain intractable uncertainties about future predictions of climate change. Whilst Nurse distinguishes between uncertainty arising from incomplete understanding and that arising from irreducible stochastic uncertainty, he gives the impression that all probabilistic knowledge is of the latter kind (e.g. his quote of average rates of success for cancer treatments). In fact with climate change, most of the uncertainty about the future that is expressed in probabilistic terms (e.g. the IPCC) is Bayesian in nature. Bayesian probabilities are of a fundamentally different kind to those quoted in his example. And when defending consensus in climate science – which he clearly does - he should have explained clearly the role of Bayesian (subjective) expert knowledge in forming such consensus.

Climategate as a reality check

An interesting interview with Mike Hulme, looking at the changes in climate science and climate policy. (Look for episode 101205 from 5 December 2010).

Part 1 is mainly about the policy aspects of climate, focusing particularly on the change in the landscape in the last twelve months, which Hulme traces particularly back to the failure of Copenhagen with the ensuing disillusion opening the way to a less top-down approach to climate policy.

Click to read more ...

Hulme on Climategate anniversary

Mike Hulme is in the Guardian today, looking at the impact of Climategate, one year on. I'm not sure why everyone is doing their anniversary pieces today - isn't the anniversary tomorrow (or even Thursday)?

Hulme's piece is very thoughtful. I liked this bit particularly:

The simple linear frame of "here's the consensus science, now let's make climate policy" has lost out to the more ambiguous frame: "What combination of contested political values, diverse human ideals and emergent scientific evidence can drive climate policy?" The events of the past year have finally buried the notion that scientific predictions about future climate change can be certain or precise enough to force global policy-making.

I'm not sure that most people on the activist wing of the climate science community are in agreement with the last bit, but if true it's certainly welcome. Also worth saying that it's not obvious to me that the climate is something we really need a policy on at all.

Shade on Hulme

John Shade, who runs the Climate Lessons website left these thoughts on Mike Hulme's lecture as a comment. I thought they were worth pulling into a post of their own.

I must confess to having enjoyed the talk by Professor Hulme. He spoke clearly and in a structured way, presented lots of ideas, and generally came across to me as intelligent and thoughtful. I just wish I were bright enough or informed enough to follow all of them. As it is, I still got lots to think about from it, and the notes which follow are in part intended just to share my puzzlements and prejudices.

Click to read more ...

Mike Hulme on climate models

There is video available here of a lecture given by Professor Mike Hulme entitled "How do Climate Models Gain and Exercise Authority?". Hulme asks whether deference towards climate models is justified and whether we should have confidence in them. I think the answer is "We don't know".

BBC impartiality

The BBC's flagship Today programme featured an environmentalist presenter, John Humphrys, interviewing an environmentalist, Tony Juniper and an activist environmental scientist, Mike Hulme.

Nobody to put the sceptic point of view.

Again.