ECCO chamber

Last month, climate-concerned communicators from across Europe jetted off to Norway (#greensgobyair) to discuss, yet again, how better to construct a message that will convince the public that they are not simply a bunch of spin doctors and publicly funded propagandists. ECCO, the organisers of the conference, describe themselves as follows:

ECCO is an informal network with the broad aim of information-sharing and capacity-building among communicators. It strives for increased uptake of climate science and climate communication in Europe. Communicators and communication advisors of climate research centres and associated institutions across Europe are the prime targets of the network. ECCO membership is personal and by invitation only. ECCO will aim to improve its members’ communication capacity through the sharing of ideas, best practices and knowledge, and by providing a forum for discussion and support.

The conference was described as a kick-off-conference "as part of the network’s efforts to prepare the scientific community in Europe, and in particular communications officers working for the home institutions of IPCC authors, for the launch of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report".

Familiar names abounded: Bob Ward, James Painter, Asher Minns, and the Antarctic fox herself, Emily Shuckburgh. Dan Kahan flew in from the USA.

Amazing to think that all those airmiles were clocked up for a chat about a report. They must be really worried by the fate of the planet.

(H/t Bebben)

This house would stop the annual UN climate summits

The Oxford Energy Society is to hold a rather interesting debate on 28 May. The motion, 'This house would stop the annual UN climate summits' is interesting enough, but take a look at the two teams:

Proposition

Dr Benny Peiser
Director, Global Warming Policy Foundation

David Rose
Writer, The Mail on Sunday

Prof Myles Allen
Leader, ECI Climate Research Programme

Opposition

David Symons
Director, WSP Environment and Energy

Fiona Harvey
Environmental Journalist, The Guardian

Dr Chukwumerije Okereke
Reader in Environment & Development, University of Reading

That should set the cat among the pigeons.

Orlowski at the IT

Andrew Orlowski has reported on David Holland's most recent visit to the Information Tribunal, this time in an attempt to get details of the IPCC's zero-order draft from the Met Office. Interestingly, DECC appear to have refused to allow their representative on the IPCC to appear:

I actually felt a bit of human sympathy for Stott; you can bet he would have rather been somewhere else, and it transpires that Holland didn't actually want him there at all. Holland had wanted to cross-examine the head of the UK delegation to the IPCC, a Department of Environment and Climate Change official called David Warrilow, head of climate science and international evidence.

The procedural questions under the spotlight are Warrilow's bailiwick, not Stott's, but Holland was refused his man. Stott, we learned, had been pressganged into appearing by the Met Office's lawyers. Stott also had to defend his and allied organisations' refusal to disclose material on a basis - as we shall see - that's highly questionable. No intelligent person should have to waste his own time, or anyone else's time, defending the indefensible.

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.

Secret Santa searchable

Reader Simon Barnett has made the Secret Santa data searchable online. See here.

Cheating at the IPCC

Donna Laframboise has a must-read article about the IPCC creating made-to-order journal articles:

IPCC officials know that the papers to be published in that issue of the PNAS have not been written yet. Their own document says the submission deadline isn’t until January 31, 2013.

So why is the IPCC giving its authors this kind of heads-up? Is it clairvoyant? Does it already know that these papers will be so ground-breaking the IPCC won’t be able to ignore them?

Perhaps. Or perhaps IPCC officials are telling authors where to look for material that fills inconvenient gaps in their narrative.

AR5 Second Order Draft leaked

A website called Stop Green Suicide has just published the full second order draft of the Fifth Assessment Report. The big news, it seems, is that solar has been given an increased focus as a climate forcing.

Compared to the First Order Draft, the SOD now adds the following sentence, indicated in bold (page 7-43, lines 1-5, emphasis added):

Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system (e.g., Bond et al., 2001; Dengel et al., 2009; Ram and Stolz, 1999). The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link.

Read the whole thing. If it's unavailable, try Anthony.

[Updated to link to original source of the leak]

An error too embarrassing to correct

In the comments to the earlier thread, Nic Lewis left this comment about what happened when he discovered that the IPCC had altered the Forster and Gregory climate sensitivity findings. I thought it striking enough to warrant a posting of its own.

A recap for those unfamiliar with the story. My complaint about the alteration of the Forster & Gregory 2006 results was rejected on the grounds that it was done to put all the climate sensitivity probability density graphs on the same, uniform prior in sensitivity, basis. Justifying changing a result from a correct to an incorrect basis on the grounds that all the other results were given on that basis seems very dubious to me. But I knew that at least one of the other studies, Gregory 2002, actually had its results shown on the same basis as the original Forster & Gregory 2006 results, being a uniform prior in the climate feedback parameter - that is, a prior inversely proportional to the square of sensitivity. So my letter to Gabi Hegerl complained that the statement that the Gregory 2002 results were stated on a uniform prior in sensitivity basis was incorrect.

Click to read more ...

NOAA slips up?

Chris Horner sends details of a FOIA request he made earlier in the year. He was seeking details of correspondence between NOAA's Tom Peterson and Thomas Stocker, the head of IPCC WGI. It is hoped that this correspondence might throw some light on the mysterious email sent by Stocker to IPCC lead authors in the wake of Climategate.

Surprisingly, NOAA seemed to have slipped up rather, failing even to acknowledge Horner's request. Apparently, under US law this amounts to constructive refusal, and Horner can now move to seek an immediate judicial remedy.

As Horner comments in his email:

We will soon learn out how badly the global warming establishment wants to fight to keep this, and similar public records, from the public. Will NOAA disregard the caviling from usual suspects and promptly move to produce the record, which should take mere minutes? Or will it heed the calls and hunker down, risking a certain judicial order affirming what an inspector general has already concluded.

IPCC-related records in the possession of government employees (or accessible by them, now that we know about third-party servers established to dodge FOI laws), are indeed agency records subject to release to the taxpayers who underwrite the IPCC enterprise.

Update on Sep 6, 2012 by Bishop Hill

The complaint has now been lodged and can be seen here.

Fighting mad

Another interesting set of emails from the University of Arizona release. These ones date back to 2001, eight or nine months after the publication of the Third Assessment Report. The thread starts on 7 September, just days before 9/11, and reference is made to those attacks in the thread.

The emails show how the Hockey Team came together to attempt to thwart criticism of their field from a German geological institute. The message is from Stefan Rahmstorf to Overpeck:

Subject: Sceptics attack! [Title inferred from later emails in thread]

Hi Jonathan,

I thought the subject line might capture your attention ... but seriously, we're facing a concerted action here at the moment, a German geological institute has launched a well-orchestrated challenge to IPCC including a book launch, cover articles in major newspapers, a simultaneous official request in the Bundestag, etc. They have the coal industry on their side. Not surprising to you in the US I'm sure but a novelty for germany, where so far the sceptics had no ground to stand on.

Click to read more ...

Madrid ’95: What went wrong?

This is a guest post by Bernie Lewin.

I have noticed around the blogs some patient and kindly folks attempting to summarise my overly verbose account of investigations into the background of the Chapter 8 controversy. I welcome these. And I welcome various interpretations. I am purposely inconclusive. However, I may have confused some folks as to what I am suggesting it was that went wrong in Madrid. Therefore, I thought it might be useful at this stage to explicitly clarify my current understanding of how the Scientific Assessment of the IPCC was first corrupted in its first positive human attribution claim.

Click to read more ...

Madrid 1995 - the last day of climate science

Bernie Lewin has posted the final part of his long history of the 1995 IPCC conference, at which activist scientists managed to fashion a summary for policymakers that told a different story to the scientific report.

Houghton’s ruling means that the integrity of the scientific process would be abandoned and its hard-won authority traded so as to expedite a political end – however virtuous that end might be. If there were others also alarmed by the treatment of the Saudi’s objections, then they must be holding their breath, for their voice is not heard.

Rougier on trust and the IPCC

Commenters on the Rougier thread have been pointing to another very interesting discussion paper by the same author. In essence it's a call for the scientific establishment to move away from their current focus on massive and progressively more detailed climate models. The alternative proposed is simpler models, which can be run more often hence helping policymakers to get a handle on the total uncertainties.

This quote in particular was relevant to recent discussions of trust and the IPCC:

The IPCC reports are valuable sources of information, but no one owns the judgements in them. Only a very naıve risk manager would take the IPCC assessment reports as their expert, rather than consulting a climate scientist, who had read the reports, and also knew about the culture of climate science, and about the IPCC process. This is not to denigrate the IPCC, but simply to be appropriately realistic about its sociological and political complexities, in the face of the very practical needs of the risk manager.

Pielke Jr says Field has misled Congress

Roger Pielke Jr's latest post is very important. It concerns IPCC lead author Chris Field, who is a professor at Stanford and  head of Working Group II. RP Jr accuses him of misleading the US Congress over the IPCC report:

What Field says the IPCC says is blantantly wrong, often 180 degrees wrong. It is one thing to disagree about scientific questions, but it is altogether different to fundamentally misrepresent an IPCC report to the US Congress. Below are five instances in which Field's testimony today completely and unambiguously misrepresented IPCC findings to the Senate. Field's testimony is here in PDF.

[Corrected misdirection of Pielke's comments]

Tom Chivers on trust

Updated on Aug 1, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Aug 1, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Tom Chivers, the Telegraph's science blogger, has written his take on the Muller paper. Coming a day after the initial furore it's somewhat more considered than many of the initial reactions, although not so considered that he has noticed all the argy-bargy going on as to just how sceptical Muller really was in the past. But that aside, there are some interesting questions raised, not least on the questions of authority and trust:

As a non-climate scientist, I have to accept certain things on authority, as I do with all expert knowledge. This is an argument from authority, but we all do it, and it's vital: if I had cancer, I'd accept the authority of the oncologist and the body of knowledge of the oncology community, rather than try to guide my own treatment with information I'd found on the internet. As Ben Goldacre said long ago in a different context: "you have only two choices: you can either learn to interpret data yourself and come to your own informed conclusions; or you decide who to trust".

Click to read more ...