Delta farce

I awoke this morning to find notification of a tweet from Jan Pascal van Ypersele, the vice chairman of the IPCC. He had tweeted the image of a new graph from the Japanese Met Office suggesting something of a leap in global temperatures in 2014. I had pointed out that the long-term trend marked on the graph was, at just 0.7°C, hardly the stuff of nightmares.

At this point, our exchange was interrupted from a environmentalist who pointed to the current wildfires in South Australia and one to problems in the delta of Bangladesh. His point was somewhat obscure in relation to what van Ypersele and I had been discussing, so I ignored these contributions, but it seems that the great man felt that the Bangladesh point was worth a wider audience and he retweeted to his followers:

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Celebrating Hurst

Readers may be interested in this presentation by Cohn, Lins, Koutsoyiannis and Montanari about the life and work of Harold Hurst, the scientist who discovered the phenomenon of long-term persistence (LTP) while examining records of the flooding of the Nile. The presentation seems to date from the end of last year.

Many of you will know that LTP is pervasive in geoscience datasets, so you will no doubt be amused by this bit about the IPCC's consideration of the phenomenon:

...the SPM does not mention LTP, although it speaks about the internal climate variability, e.g.: “Internal variability will continue to be a major influence on climate, particularly in the near-term and at the regional scale.”

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Debating the IPCC

Last week MPs were given the chance to debate the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee report on the Fifth Assessment. I haven't the time to read the whole thing at the moment , but it looks at least as if some pertinent points were made, with Yeo furiously stoking the engine of the gravy train and Graham Stringer and Peter Lilley briskly hosing it down with a few facts.

Read it here.

(H/T Barry Woods)

Irreversible - Josh 301

Click image for a larger version

Following the IPCC Synthesis Report we have had many catastrophists describing the impacts of climate change as 'Irreversible' and using the phrase 'Immorality of inaction' - I can certainly think of some irreversible impacts that require more immediate action.

Cartoons by Josh

Worse than they thought

Europe's leaders are meeting this week and they'll be talking about climate change and cutting carbon emissions. They've agreed they have to be cut by 80% by the middle of the century and 40% over the next 15 years. But one senior figure on the UN's panel for climate change, Prof Jim Skea - vice chair of the UN's panel on coping with climate change - says that 40% figure is not high enough. Roger Harrabin, BBC Environment Analyst.

This gem was reported on BBC Radio 4's Today programme at 6.52am. Skea appears to think we will have to have even larger CO2 cuts accompanied by ever more drastic action and changes to our lives to reach extended IPPC targets, while RH was hand -wringing over the fact that having made us all incredibly energy efficient and put all the renewables in place we will have nowhere else to turn in order to achieve them.

This  is the link to an article Professor Skea wrote earlier this year.

It's all rather depressing- perhaps they could speak to a rational optimist?

TM.

Informality in the ICO

This is a guest post by David Holland.

When the Information Commissioner's Office investigate a complaint its recent practice is for the case officer to outline what he or she proposes to do, beginning with,

Where possible the Information Commissioner prefers complaints to be resolved informally and we ask both parties to be open to compromise. With this in mind, I will write to the public authority and ask it to revisit your request. It may wish to reverse or amend its position. If it does, it will contact you again directly about this.

However, in the case of Peter Wadhams' Review Editor's reports as discussed here in April, the next thing that happened was a Decision Notice arriving by post. The key paragraph 11 of the Decision Notice reported that the University of Cambridge...

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Climate's parliamentary cheerleaders

The House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee has released its report into the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report. This is fascinating stuff, if only to see all the intellectual contortions that have been adopted by committee staffers in arriving at the required answer, namely that everything is hunky dory with climate science and the IPCC.

The press release is here and consists of standard parliamentary cheerleading of the kind that has "sod the constituents" written all over it (Tim Yeo is quoted extensively, so I guess that follows).

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Help needed

This is a guest post by David Holland

Readers may be aware that after WGI’s AR5 Report was released last year, I requested the Review Editors’ Reports from DECC, and from the Universities of Reading and Cambridge. The officials at DECC, who had moved across from Defra, followed their custom of making sure they do not to hold anything they might have to disclose. They took no steps to possess them and denied holding them. Reading appeared to have learnt from its AR4 experience and released the ones it held without a fuss. But Cambridge refused. I did not choose the title, “Regulator Capture”, in the Bishop Hill post on this matter, but now as I deal with my Tribunal written submission on Cambridge, it looks appropriate. The University of Cambridge claim that Professor Peter Wadhams’ records were not held to any extent for its own purposes because he had served the IPCC in a private capacity - just as Met Office Chief Scientist, John Mitchell, and others had claimed, unsuccessfully, in 2008. For this excuse Cambridge are relying on a relatively new Advice Note that I hope to convince the Tribunal has no basis in law.

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Reminder: Donna in Edinburgh

Just a reminder to readers in central Scotland that Donna Laframboise is speaking at the City Chambers in Edinburgh tonight. It's free!

Details here.

Celebrating bad science

When the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee considered the Fifth Assessment Report a few months ago I was surprised when chairman Tim Yeo asked witnesses about the Hockey Stick. Although central to the Third Assessment and still relevant to the Fourth, I was of the view that its importance had now waned as all but the activist parts of the climatological community seem to have quietly accepted its methodological...ahem...peculiarities.

Like so many of his colleagues, Brian Hoskins seemed unable to say clearly that the Hockey Stick was wrong but, with a wonderful sirhumphreyish circumlocution, allowed the committee to understand that this was in fact the case:

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Regulator capture

This is a guest post by David Holland.

BH readers may recall my reporting of Peter Wadhams' unprofessional IPCC Review Editor's report, which featured his spat with MP Peter Lilley. At the time I had received in confidence, from outside the UK, a copy of his then unpublished report. I had also been reliably advised that Thomas Stocker had no intention of releasing any of the Working Group One Review Editors’ reports. For this reason I had made FOI requests at the Universities of Reading and Cambridge.

Reading promptly and fully disclosed the reports of the two Review Editors affiliated to it. Wadhams' university, however, deployed the 'Mitchell' defense, namely that he worked for the IPCC on a personal basis. Stocker did eventually release some, but not all, of the RE reports but the names of Lilley and Paxman which had been shown to government representatives were redacted from Wadhams'.

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Working Group II

Updated on Mar 31, 2014 by Bishop Hill

The Working Group II report is out today and should be available here, although the site appears to be down at the moment.

YOKOHAMA, Japan, 31 March – The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report today that says the effects of climate change are already occurring on all continents and across the oceans. The world, in many cases, is ill-prepared for risks from a changing climate. The report also concludes that there are opportunities to respond to such risks, though the risks will be difficult to manage with high levels of warming.

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Some comments on the Royal Society report

Reader Alex Henney sends some comments on The Royal Society/National Academy of Sciences Report on Climate Change that he sent to the President of the Royal Society and the British authors of the report.¹

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, if it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.

Richard Feynman

1. The document continues to espouse models which are flawed, see p. 5, even though the final draft of the 2013 SPM commented “Models do not generally reproduce the observed reduction in surface warming trend over the last 10-15 years”.  John Christy² compared the performance of 39 climate model that were used in AR5 over the period 1975 to 2012 with measured temperature data.  The models over back-cast temperature significantly in a range 0-0.7^oC. 

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More AR5 hearings

The next batch of hearings for the Energy and Climate Change Committee's inquiry into the Fifth Assessment Report will take place next Tuesday:

9:30 am; The Wilson Room, Portcullis House

Witnesses:

• Sir Peter Williams, Royal Society
• Dr Emily Shuckburgh, Royal Meteorological Society

Followed by

• Guy Newey, Policy Exchange
• Jonathan Grant, PricewaterHouse Coopers
• James Painter, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford

I wonder what they are going to ask this lot about?

Royal Met Soc on AR5

Audio recordings of this week's Royal Meteorological Society Conference on the Fifth Assessment Report are now available here. Featuring a bevy of top climatological names, this should make for interesting listening.