Upper Tribunal Decision

Guest post by David Holland

I have temporarily put on the Internet a scanned copy of the decision of the Upper Tribunal to refuse my appeal in regard to my request to the University of Cambridge.   I have also posted my oral arguments to that Tribunal.   Naturally I entirely disagree with this decision as well as the First Tier Tribunal refusal in regard to the ZODs held by the Met Office, which was discussed at CLB.   The Upper Tribunal refused me permission to appeal it.   Taken together these two decisions largely if not wholly exempt climate change information from the EIR.

I am not inclined to pursue either judgement and shall leave it to readers to make their own judgment as to why the climate scientists involved in these two cases do not want to disclose the environmental information they hold.

Less science, more comms

Barry Woods points us to today's webcast of the IPCC discussing its future communications strategy. I've just heard someone say that the IPCC reports need to have less of that complicated and very dull science stuff and much more simple messaging. Apparently science writers need to be involved from the front.

Unfortunately I can't spend all day watching this, but if anyone can bear it do let us know if they say anything new.

Quote of the day, sound science edition

...can you guys fill in the "look at the impacts we're already seeing" part with a bunch of examples? In addition to the scientifically sound examples you'll give it would also be good for me to get an updated list of extreme events that are plausibly climate related.

US climate envoy Todd Stern reaches out beyond the scientifically sound

Via Chris Horner.

The COP ritual

GWPF's campaigning arm has just released a completely brilliant paper reviewing the COPs. I say this with some authority, since I compiled the text, although to be fair most of the brilliance is provided by Josh.

Do take a look.

UN body: IPCC talking out of hat

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation has made an announcement on extreme weather this morning, which is sure to attract a lot of attention:

Drought, floods and other extremes of weather have become more frequent and severe in the past 30 years and pose a rising threat to food security in developing countries, the United Nations food agency said on Thursday...It said they were occurring almost twice as often as in the 1980s, hampering efforts to eradicate hunger and poverty.

This is a pretty major leap for the FAO, because it directly contradicts the IPCC, which says there is low confidence in there being any global change in droughts and hurricanes and makes only the mildest statements about extreme rainfall (it is silent on floods). The alleged doubling in extreme weather events is nowhere to be found in the IPCC report.

It's rather remarkable to see one arm of the United Nations effectively saying that another one is talking out of its collective hat, particularly just before the Paris Summit begins.

The last chance saloons

https://www.flickr.com/photos/spendadaytouring/3627047294Ahead of the Paris climate conference, Climate Change Predictions is having a lovely time reviewing all the previous "last chances" we have faced.

Just how many last chance saloons are there in Climateville?

Patchi is history, Lee for IPCC

Last night the IPCC announced its replacement for its troubled head, Rajendra Pachauri, currently the centre of a sexual harassment case in his native India.

The new man is a hitherto somewhat obscure Korean economist named Hoesung Lee. Carbon Brief did an interview with him last month, if you want to know more. I think "technocrat" may be the apposite term.

The FCO misleads

Sir David King, the Foreign Office's adviser on climate change, has commissioned a report into the effects of climate change on food security. There's a monster team of authors featuring among others Tim Benton, a population ecologist and the "UK Champion for Global Food Security", and Rob Bailey, a former executive at Oxfam who now works at Chatham House.

The underlying study is a mega-hypothesis of course - it's computer models all the way down, you might say - so it's of no practical use, but with the project led by someone like Sir David, one can be reasonably sure that it will at least provide some entertainment.

Click to read more ...

Birthday honours?

The Queen's birthday honours list was out a couple of days ago and as I always I have scanned it looking for familiar names. There are no climatologists this year, but two names in particular stood out.

David Warrilow is the UK's long-term representative on the IPCC and has come to the attention of BH from time to time, although as I have noted in the past he is someone who operates very much in the shadows. BH readers did some research on him in the comments here, including Doug Keenan's recollection of a meeting between the two of them. Warrilow gets himself an OBE.

The other was Anne Glover, the former chief scientist at the EU, whose gradual descent into climate alarmism I have followed with interest. She becomes Dame Anne.

The only other one that struck me as being of interest was someone called David Surplus, the director of a renewable energy group in Northern Ireland, who is awarded an OBE. What a strange world, I thought, where it is considered honourable to achieve success through vigorous sucking at the taxpayer's teat.

Update on Jun 15, 2015 by Bishop Hill

In the comments, it is pointed out that David Kennedy, Lord Deben's former sidekick at the Committee on Climate Change, is also honoured.

Le spin! Cartoon notes by Josh

Click the image for a larger version

Last night some of us attended the Walker Institute Annual Lecture given by Sir David King and which was titled "The Paris Climate Summit - hopes and expectations". I must thank the Walker Institute for the opportunity to be there and for the excellent refreshments afterwards.

The lecture itself was something of a gruelling series of alarmist doom and gloom factoids followed by an upbeat assessment of what will actually happen at the Paris summit - and the answer is... well, you can read for yourself and, if you were there, please do add your own recollections.

Cartoons by Josh

Update on Jun 11, 2015 by Josh

Here is the link to listen to the event and download Sir David King’s slides H/t Robin Guenier in the comments.

IPCC: climate misinformers

Warren Pearce has a new paper out in Nature Climate Change that looks at the 2013 WGI press conference and the pickle that Thomas Stocker got into in trying to rebut questions about the pause.

Here we demonstrate that speakers at the press conference for the publication of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (Working Group 1; ref. 1) attempted to make the documented level of certainty of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) more meaningful to the public. Speakers attempted to communicate this through reference to short-term temperature increases. However, when journalists enquired about the similarly short ‘pause’2 in global temperature increase, the speakers dismissed the relevance of such timescales, thus becoming incoherent as to ‘what counts’ as scientific evidence for AGW. We call this the ‘IPCC’s certainty trap’. This incoherence led to confusion within the press conference and subsequent condemnation in the media3. The speakers were well intentioned in their attempts to communicate the public implications of the report, but these attempts threatened to erode their scientific credibility. In this instance, the certainty trap was the result of the speakers’ failure to acknowledge the tensions between scientific and public meanings. Avoiding the certainty trap in the future will require a nuanced accommodation of uncertainties and a recognition that rightful demands for scientific credibility need to be balanced with public and political dialogue about the things we value and the actions we take to protect those things.

Click to read more ...

Pachauri guilty

From the Deccan Chronicle

An internal committee of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) found its director general RK Pachauri guilty in a sexual harassment case.

Reportedly, the three-member panel of Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) found that Pachauri made repeated attempts at establishing a personal bond with the young woman colleague, which caused her “harassment”.

The causes of big climate

Judith Curry points us to the draft of a paper soon to be published in the Independent Review, the journal of the Independent Institute. Written by two economists, it takes the idea of the big player - a well-established concept among economic thinkers - and uses it to try to explain the groupthink that plagues the climate debate. As the authors explain:

In markets, prototypical Big Players are central banks and government agencies empowered with discretionary policymaking... [M]arkets dominated by Big Players are prone to herding, where market participants, with little reliable information as to the Big Player’s next move, look to what others are thinking and doing.

As far as scientific endeavour goes, the authors suggest that big players can prevent the feedback mechanisms that provide a wide variety of information to "market" participants. And when it comes to the IPCC the situation is even worse:

Professional success in climate science has become more tied to the acceptance of the IPCC’s pronouncements than with the exploration of contrary possibilities; in fact, scientists who profess competing hypotheses are routinely castigated as “deniers” and some have reported unusual difficulties in negotiating the publishing process.

While a large majority of climate scientists are reported as being in general agreement with the AGW hypothesis and with the IPCC’s pronouncements, the accuracy and extent of this consensus has been questioned. The oft-quoted 97% number may be unrealistic and unsupportable, but the general acceptance by the majority of scientists having any connection to climate science seems real enough. This herding is a predictable result of the IPCC’s Big Player presence.

This all seems spot on to me.

Patchy resigns

News is breaking that Rajendra Pachauri has resigned as head of the IPCC.

The head of the United Nations climate change panel (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri, has stepped down amid sexual harassment allegations.

A spokesman for Mr Pachauri informed the IPCC that he resigned from his position with immediate effect.

Breaking...

I am hearing on the grapevine that a senior IPCC official has been accused of sexual harassment and that a police investigation has been commenced. The official denies everything and has also issued a complaint to police, alleging a hacking attack.