AR5: A Progress report - Josh 221

Steve McIntyre has a hilarious post on the desperate measures needed to get some non peer reviewed papers into the IPCC's AR5. I am not sure where the phrase 'Frankenscience' comes from but it seems appropriate for AR5 which already looks DOA.

Cartoons by Josh

You cant keep some things down - Josh 215

Over at Climate Audit, Steve has been looking at the resurfacing of some Hockey Stick science papers, and the fun continues here and here.

Cartoons by Josh

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Tamino does Climate Audit Covers - Josh 214

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Tamino's recent posts on Marcott et al bear an uncanny similarity to Steve McIntyre's work at Climate Audit. Dave Burton noticed and commented:

Grant, I find it just plain bizarre that you wrote all this and never even mentioned Steve McIntyre, who first figured out what Marcott had done wrong, and whose excellent work is the whole reason you wrote this.

H/t WUWT 

This cartoon imagines Tamino, aka statistician and folk singer Grant Foster, putting things right. Do suggest some more songs that Tamino might like to try. I am sure he will be very grateful.

Cartoons by Josh

OMG

McIntyre's latest post on the Marcott hockey stick is simply astonishing.

Mann says "McIntyre"

Readers are no doubt aware that Steve McIntyre is back in the blogging saddle, taking a look at Mann's AGU talk from before Christmas and noting that its rhetorical effect relied upon some amusing presentational choices:

There were two components to Mann’s AGU trick. First...Mann compared model projections for land-and-ocean to observations for land-only. In addition...Mann failed to incorporate up-to-date data for his comparison. The staleness of Mann’s temperature data in his AGU presentation was really quite remarkable: the temperature data in Mann’s presentation (December 2012) ended in 2005! Obviously, in the past (notably MBH98 and MBH99), Mann used the most recent (even monthly data) when it was to his advantage. So the failure to use up-to-date data in his AGU presentation is really quite conspicuous.

Interestingly, Mann has now responded in person (rather than via say RealClimate). Intriguingly, he had decided to mention McIntyre by name, a rare and perhaps significant event I would say. One has to say, it did appear rather silly to refuse to do this.

Mann's response features a lot of huffing and puffing and conjuring up of unidentified "falsehoods", but through all the verbiage he seems to admit the point about the data stopping at 2005:

I will be updating my lecture slides, many of which are indeed somewhat out of date.

...although he is silent on the use of a land-only dataset to compare to land-ocean predictions.

Update on Mar 4, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Brandon Schollenberger has more at WUWT.

Climate Audit is down

Lots of people have been getting in touch about Climate Audit. Anthony reports that it was a simple matter of the domain not having been renewed, a situation that will soon be remedied.

In the comments to that thread we learn that Steve is in New Zealand due to a family medical emergency.

The thoughts and best wishes of everyone here at BH go out to the McIntyres.

McIntyre for Maddox

BH reader Paul Matthews has nominated Steve McIntyre for the Maddox Prize, an award for someone who has stood up for science in the face of adversity.

I nominate Stephen McIntyre for the John Maddox Prize for standing up for science. He meets the requirements of the prize – he has raised concerns about misleading information about climate change, spoken up for rigorous evidence backed up by publicly available data, aided understanding of this complex issue through his papers, blog and talks, and faced difficulty and hostility with admirable equanimity.

The full nomination paper is here.

McIntyre in London

Andrew Orlowski has published a report on Steve McIntyre's recent talk at GWPF. It's good, strong and clear stuff:

The entire rationale of policy in US and Europe has been to ignore what's happening in China and India and hope that petty acts of virtuous behaviour in both countries will cure the problem," he said. "Even if you install windmills you're not going to change the trend of overall CO2 emissions."

Trip report

As readers have probably gathered, I have been in London for the last couple of days. The main purpose of the trip was to visit the Spectator, for the Ridley Prize for Environmental Heresy of which I'm one of the judges. The Spectator offices overlook St James' Park, so there was a certain aura of grandeur about the whole place and editor Fraser Nelson is an excellent host. Some really good essays have been submitted, and there were some very interesting discussions over an eventual winner. We didn't actually manage to reach a final conclusion but have narrowed it down to four.

The other purpose of the trip was to meet Steve McIntyre. By a stroke of good fortune he was arriving on Tuesday morning so I was able to extend my trip so we could meet. It was strange to finally meet the guy I had written a book about so long ago - we missed each other when Steve was over in 2010 because I was on holiday at the time. There was a lot to talk about though - we covered pretty much all of the IPCC reports, both Climategates, work, blogging and family. Intense, but great fun. I had suggested to Steve that a couple of hours would be enough as he was just getting off a trans-Atlantic flight. In the event we talked for well over four hours and it was only my own flight back to Edinburgh that forced us to go our separate ways.

Science by Lucia, cartoon by Josh - 173

Posted by Josh

Yesterday Lucia sent me an email about the recent Gergis et al 'on hold' paper with the subject title "Do you understand the math enough to do a cartoon?".

My response was, of course, to nervously read the email to gauge just how embarrassing my assured 'fail' would be.

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Bury before publishing - Josh 172

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Cartoons by Josh

Poisoning the well

As Mosher and Fuller noted in The CRUTape Letters, in the first years of the twenty-first century relations between Phil Jones and Steve McIntyre were relatively collegial. However, something changed during 2003 and thereafter Jones adopted an approach of blocking all McIntyre's requests for data.

It's hard to tell exactly what prompted this change of heart - the two major events of 2003 were the Soon and Baliunas affair and publication of MM03. Since both of these were critiques directed at Mann, it's not obvious why they would affect Jones

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Somehow

Updated on Dec 27, 2011 by Bishop Hill

An amusing paper in which the great and good of the climate narrative sit around and mull over what they have achieved and what they would like to achieve. This appears to have been recorded at a series of panels in front of an invited audience a few months back. There are several panels, but the interesting one involves Mike Hulme, Roger Harrabin and Oliver Morton:

I was amused by some of Harrabin's contributions, in particular this one:

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Fred Pearce on scientific data

Fred Pearce has written an article about availability of scientific data for Index on Censorship magazine. A Mr McIntyre is mentioned frequently.

The fuss over climategate showed that the world is increasingly unwilling to accept the message that “we are scientists; trust us”. Other people want to join the scientific conversation. Good scientists, interested in finding truth, should want to encourage them, not put up the shutters. The wider world instinctively knows to distrust those in all walks of life who reject openness. As McIntyre put it recently, “probably no single issue damages the reputation of the climate science community more than the refusal to show the data that supports their work”. There should, for the good of science as well as public discourse, be a presumption in favour of open access.

This is very definitely a read the whole thing article.

Update on Dec 1, 2011 by Bishop Hill

There is a related debate here.

Join Index on Censorship for ‘Data Debate: is transparency bad for science?’, a panel debate to launch the new issue of Index on Censorship magazine, ‘Dark Matter: what’s science got to hide?’

Scientific data is more freely available than ever. But does the push for openness help or hinder science?

Speakers include Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, George Monbiot, Guardian columnist and Baroness Onora O’Neill. Jo Glanville, Editor of Index on Censorship, will chair.

The special contribution of Vaclav Klaus

David Henderson writes:

Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic, recently passed his  70th birthday. To mark the occasion a Festschrift volume has been put  together, with a wide range of contributors. I understand that the main  topics in the book are: capitalism and the free market; European  integration; the euro; climate change issues; and the Czech  transformation after 1989.

 The English version of the volume has been sent for publication. Meanwhile I have been given clearance to circulate my own contribution,  which is herewith attached. It is entitled ‘Climate Change Issues: The  Special Contribution of Vaclav Klaus’.

Climate Change Issues: The Special Contribution of Vaclav Klaus

David Henderson

1 An established policy consensus

In relation to climate change issues, there is an official policy consensus. That consensus has been firmly in place for over twenty years, and virtually all governments subscribe to it. By way of recent example, paragraph 66 of last year’s G20 Summit Document year, begins as follows:

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