What Julia told Dave

In the wake of the publication of the Fifth Assessment Report, the Met Office issued various briefings for the political classes. These have just been released to me under FOI and the results can be seen here.

Many of the papers are extraordinarily short, and to tell the truth the only one of any major interest is a collection of powerpoint slides from which it seems that Met Office staff can draw to illustrate oral briefings. As the nearest thing to a comprehensive official view of AR5 this is fascinating. Suffice it to say that it's not what you'd call a balanced view. There remains a real possibility - a probability even - that the climate models are badly wrong and greatly overstate future warming - see for example the issues with the energy budget vs GCM estimates of climate sensitivity and the observational/GCM estimates of aerosol forcing, or the implications of the new claims that the missing heat is in the deep oceans, which presumably implies that such deep-ocean heat transport is an important climatic process that is not incorporated in the models.

See if you can find any hint of such concerns in the briefing. In fact see if you can find any caveats or examples of evidence running against the "we're all going to fry" narrative. I noticed just one. See if you can see it too.

The Unprofessional Panel on Climate Change

This is a guest post by David Holland.

After suggesting that they would not be released, WGI have now released some of the AR5 WG1 review editors’ reports. I say ‘some’ because I have also obtained from the University of Reading copies of the review editor reports by Keith Shine and Tim Palmer. Among the materials released by the university were the equally interesting interim review editor reports. These suggest that Shine and Palmer did their job properly.

It is noteworthy that the university appears to have learnt from their Climategate experiences, responding to my FOI request without any argument. The same cannot be said for DECC, which once again made sure of not physically holding any review editors’ reports, perhaps to ensure that they could not be obliged to release them. The University of Cambridge used the discreditable Met Office ‘Mitchell’ defence, claiming that Peter Wadhams worked for the IPCC as a review editor on a personal basis. I have appealed this decision.

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Diary date: IPCC edition

On 5 February next year, the Royal Meteorological Society is having a meeting in London to discuss the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report.

Lead Authors of the report will present key new findings of the AR5, and the associated evidence base, also highlighting outstanding research challenges.  The target audience is the UK climate science community and other interested scientists. The meeting is being organised by the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, the Met Office, the Royal Meteorological Society and the Environmental Physics Group of the Institute of Physics.

Details here.

AR5 - the Synthesis Report

Tallbloke has got hold of the pre-first order draft of the AR5 WGI Synthesis Report.

Read it here.

FOI fighters

The Met Office has refused to release the Zero Order Drafts of the Fourth Assessment Report (yes, that's Fourth, not Fifth). This is quite interesting, because a the Information Commissioners have recently suggested that once the assessments have passed into history, the related drafts should be published.

Andrew Orlowski has the full story at El Reg.

Ted Nield gets it wrong

I think the big talking point this morning is going to be Ted Nield's article in the Telegraph. Nield is the editor of Geoscientist magazine and is very green, so it's no surprise to see that his article this morning, bemoaning Bob Carter's appearance on the BBC a few weeks ago and trying to dissociate the geological profession from this upstart dissenter, gets pretty much everything wrong.

We learn for example that the ice caps are melting (both of them?) and that the IPCC is 95% certain that the science is right (what, all of it?). We are told that the BBC couldn't find a British scientist to challenge the IPCC's conclusions, when of course we know that the actual criterion the BBC applied was "actively publishing climatologist working in the UK university sector". So a statistician saying that the studies cited by the IPCC are statistical junk (which in places they are) would not have been considered acceptable. We know for a fact that they spurned the chance to talk to Nic Lewis, who has published in the key area of climate sensitivity and who had expressed a willingness to explain his concerns to the BBC. So Nield's statement is not true.

Nield then descends into name-calling (deniers!) and smears (tobacco!), before an extended riff about how geology is right behind the IPCC.

Readers will no doubt draw their own conclusions.

On advice to government

Updated on Oct 15, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Dec 11, 2013 by Bishop Hill

In the email this morning I find a copy of the presentation Sir Mark Walport will give to the cabinet today, purportedly on the subject of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report. It's a pretty interesting read (see bottom of post for link), although in fact when you get into it there is very little about what the IPCC had to say.

It starts unexceptionably enough, with a slide about surface temperature warming, including not only the IPCC's "Let's hide the pause behind decadal averages" graph, but also the annual averages. 

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Deben before the ECC

Lord Deben appeared before the Science and Technology Committee this morning, in a hearing that was frankly a waste of everyone's time. His later appearance before the Energy and CLimate Change Committee was much better, particularly the early exchanges in which Peter Lilley asked Lord D about climate sensitivity. There was some pretty amusing wriggling by the witness

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Climate fairy tales

Climatologists have achieved a remarkable consensusThere's a really sensible article in the Guardian by Ehsan Masood, which is a complete antidote to all the nonsense being spouted in Parliament this morning by all and sundry. It effortlessly knocks down the fairy tale constructed by the mainstream media, with its invocation of bad oil-funded deniers prowling threateningly around the peace and harmony of the scientific endeavour:

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AR5 - Lindzen's thoughts

Richard Lindzen has published his conclusions on the Fifth Assessment Report. His statement is reproduced over at GWPF and it's fair to say that it's pretty scathing.  I liked this bit, which is along similar lines to my own ones in the Consensus? What Consensus? report.

In attempting to convince the public to accept the need to for the environmental movement’s agenda, continual reference is made to consensus. This is dishonest not because of the absence of a consensus, but because the consensus concerning such things as the existence of irregular (and small compared to normal regional variability) net warming since about 1850, the existence of climate change (which has occurred over the earths entire existence), the fact that added greenhouse gases should have some impact (though small unless the climate system acts so as to greatly amplify this effect)over the past 60 years with little impact before then, and the fact that greenhouse gases have increased over the past 200 years or so, and that their greenhouse impact is already about 80% of what one expects from a doubling of CO2 are all perfectly consistent with there being no serious problem. Even the text of the IPCC Scientific Assessment agrees that catastrophic consequences are highly unlikely, and that connections of warming to extreme weather have not been found. The IPCC iconic statement that there is a high degree of certainty that most of the warming of the past 50 years is due to man’s emissions is, whether true or not, completely consistent with there being no problem. To say that most of a small change is due to man is hardly an argument for the likelihood of large changes.

Speed reviewing

The IPCC report is, famously, the most-reviewed document in human history or something like that. Which is why I was so intrigued by this graph sent to me by a BH correspondent. It shows the number of review comments received on each page of the Second Order Draft of the Working Group II report, leaked to this blog just a few days ago.

The labels on the x-axis appear at the start of each chapter, and you can see that after an initial flurry of activity on the first page or so interest tails off rapidly.

I think we can say then that this is the report with the most thoroughly reviewed chapter title pages in history.

SOD comment stats

Delingpole bashes the IPCC

James Delingpole has struck a well-aimed blow at the Fifth Assessment Report, providing a very useful summary of the issues to date and summarising thus:

As I argued here the other week, there is more than enough solid evidence now to demonstrate to any neutral party prepared to cast half an eye over it that the doomsday prognostications the warmist establishment has been trying to frighten us with these last two decades are a nonsense. The man-made global warming scare story has not a shred of scientific credibility. It's over. And while I don't expect the alarmists to admit this any time soon, I do think the rest of us should stop indulging them in their poisonous fantasy.

Also in the Telegraph, Booker's comment is quite closely related to the discussion on Clive James, with the case being made that scientists are a pressure group:

In years to come this will be looked back on as the most astonishing example in history of how the prestige of “science” can be used to promote a particular belief system, in this case with the aid of those skewed computer models that can be seen ever more clearly not to accord with the observed evidence.

All this would not be so serious if the IPCC had not been so successfully sold to the world as an objective scientific body rather than as just a political pressure group, because this has taken in no one more damagingly than all those credulous politicians who use the IPCC’s bogus prestige to justify landing us with some of the most disastrously misconceived policies the world has ever seen.

Next Steps in Climate Science - Cartoon notes

Updated on Oct 4, 2013 by Josh

Following Katabasis report here are the first of my cartoon notes from the 'Next steps in climate science' meeting at the Royal Society today. I will add to this page and update with colour as and when I can. I am already looking forward to tomorrow - today was a blast!

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A report from the Royal

The Royal Society is holding a two-day meeting to discuss the Working Group I report of the IPCC. Reader Katabasis was there and send this report.

So the first day of the meeting at the Royal Society to discuss the IPCC AR5 report was quite an eye-opener.

The tone was set from the start with the first two speakers wringing their hands over the issue of "communicating the message", pointing out that sceptics were apparently "very good" at it.  According to Mark Walport, chief scientific adviser to the Government, we sceptics (sorry, those who "deny the science") are "single issue, great communicators." Thomas Stocker followed in the second talk emphasising the "Key 19 messages" in the SPM report.

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Working Group II leaked

An anonymous correspondent has sent me the IPPC WGII Second Order Draft and the reviewer comments, together with a few other related documents.

I've uploaded them here.