Letts laugh at the BBC

Quentin Letts account of the way the BBC handled the complaint over his letting sceptics appear on his radio programme about the Met Office is very funny.

First, an apology. Thanks to me, all journalists at BBC Radio’s ethics and religion division are being sent for indoctrination in climate change. Sorry. In July I made a short Radio 4 programme with them called What’s the Point of the Met Office?, which accidentally sent orthodox warmists into a boiling tizzy.

Read the whole thing.

Naughty Slingo

The Mail reports that the Met Office created a post for the daughter of its chief scientist Julia Slingo. It seems that the position was not advertised but was merely handed over to Dame Julia's sprog, a newly qualified graduate.

What is it with senior civil servants and integrity?

What's in a name?

One of the ideas that has been kicked around the green community for a while is to persuade the WMO and national met offices to name storms after prominent global warming sceptics.

As climate change continues to create more frequent and devastating storms, we propose a new naming system. One that names extreme storms after policymakers who deny climate change.

Now, with a certain air of innocence, the Met Office is suggesting that the public might like to suggest names for major storms that head our way this winter.

Hmm.

The point of the Met Office

The BBC has a programme on at the moment entitled "What's the point of the Met Office", a light-hearted, but critical look at this august institution. Apparently Peter Lilley and Piers Corbyn are featured at one point.

Update on Aug 5, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Interestingly, the Met Office's Helen Chivers agrees with host Quentin Letts that some of the Met Office's utterances on climate are "biblical" in their alarmism.

Update on Aug 5, 2015 by Bishop Hill

The vested interests are unamused:

Lord Deben: "UK Meteorological Office universally respected used by USA on its most sensitive missions. BBC broadcasts unfounded attacks. Right of reply?"

Tom Burke: "#BBC at it again giving wholly unjustified airtime to climate deniers on Radio4 right now. Egregious attack on the Met Office. Complain now"

Update on Aug 5, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Roger Harrabin has this to say: #Climate sceptics have demanded "their" programme. They just got it. Radio 4. 10.00. @QuentinLetts_ on @metoffice. @ECIU_UK @CarbonBrief

I think he's pulling our legs.

Update on Aug 5, 2015 by Bishop Hill

For overseas readers who want to listen to the show, it can be heard here.

Hot spot or not - Josh 335

It is good to see Christopher Booker writing about the 'hottest day of the year' in the Telegraph again. Paul Homewood's excellent posts, on which his article is based, are well worth reading.

The story starts here, with more here, and Booker's first article, followed by more doubts, some Met Office spin, then a belated response, comment moderation, and finally more Met Office spin. It's quite a saga.

Anyone would think they are trying to hype every possible weather event they can. I wonder why?

Cartoons by Josh

Met Office still brazen

Readers may recall the paper I wrote for GWPF on the problems with the UKCP09 climate projections. These were demonstrably unreliable: the predictions were formulated as a weighted average of possible future climates, but it was discovered that only unrealistic future climates were taken into account. Readers may also recall that this has all been acknowledged by the Met Office, but that they are refusing to acknowledge that it is a problem.

Astonishing then to see that the Met Office is still pushing UKCP09, with a new paper in Nature Climate Change, dutifully (and inevitably) picked up by the BBC:

Click to read more ...

A strange fellow

Congratulations are due to Dame Julia Slingo, who has been elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Here is the citation:

Julia Slingo is a world-leading figure in the area of tropical climate processes and climate modelling. In her tropical research she has produced seminal work on the interaction between cumulus convection, weather systems, larger scale variability and the mean state of the atmosphere, and also on the interaction with the upper layers of the ocean. The Madden Julian Oscillation and the Asian Summer Monsoon have been two particular foci for her. She has led Met Office science and University climate modelling with great success and had major international influence, particularly in the move to much higher resolution climate models.

Diary date - FOI tribunal edition

This is a guest post by David Holland

At 10 am On Friday 17 April, in Northampton, I have the dubious pleasure of squaring up for the second time against the Met Office over Zero Order Drafts of an IPCC Assessment Report. I am no Perry Mason and the hearing was not my idea, so I am not recommending that anyone turn up for a stellar performance from me. But if anyone in the area is contemplating an appeal of an FOI decision, it is an opportunity to see an oral hearing.

As you may know at the first oral contest with the Met Office, over the seven AR5 ZODs that had not been leaked, I lost.

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An also-ran in the climate prediction stakes

Back in 2013 I wrote a report for GWPF about the official UKCP09 climate projections and Nic Lewis's discovery that the underlying model was incapable of simulating a climate that was matched the real one as regards certain key features of the climate system. The final predictions in UKCP09 were based on a perturbed physics ensemble: a weighted average of a series of climate model runs, each with different key parameters tweaked, with the weighting in the final reckoning determined by how well the virtual climate produced matched the real one. As Lewis revealed, since the climate model output couldn't match the real one, we were effectively being asked to believe that a weighted average of unrealistic virtual climates would nevertheless produce realistic predictions.

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Diary dates, moving on edition

Julia Slingo is to give the Cabot lecture in Bristol on 4 February (details here). Here's the trailer:

The impact of human activity on our climate has become increasingly clear: with the IPCC stating that “Human influence on the climate system is unequivocal”. It has become clear that we are taking the planet into uncharted territory and changing the risk of extreme weather and climate events. Our exposure to these risks is also changing as a result of changes in how we live and a rapidly growing global population.

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Betts off

Richard Betts has kicked off a small Twitter kerfuffle today, taking umbrage at Matt Ridley's Times piece yesterday.

@ProfMarkMaslin Exactly. If @mattwridley wants to criticise climate policy then he's got every right, but attacking scientists is wrong.

— Richard Betts (@richardabetts) December 10, 2014

Matt has responded on his own blog today and I'm taking the liberty of reproducing his comment here.

After this article was published an extraordinary series of tweets appeared under the name of Richard Betts, a scientist at the UK Met Office and somebody who is normally polite even when critical. He called me “paranoid and rude” and made a series of assertions about what I had written that were either inaccurate or stretched interpretations to say the least. He then advanced the doctrine that politicians should not criticize civil servants. The particular sentence he objected to was:

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Science or public relations?

I was amused by this new paper out of the Met Office which describes a computer model study of the likelihood of future heatwaves. The title reads like something out of the Daily Mirror rather than a learned scientific paper:

Dramatically increasing chance of extremely hot summers since the 2003 European heatwave

The abstract that follows is equally odd. Take the first sentence:

Socio-economic stress from the unequivocal warming of the global climate system could be mostly felt by societies through weather and climate extremes.

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Richard B on the two-degree

A reader points me to this long tweet from Richard Betts, which I missed while I was away last week. It's certainly worth of reposting:

I see the '2 degree limit' as rather like a speed limit on a road - both are set by policymakers on the basis of a number of considerations.

On the roads, the main issues are safety, fuel economy and journey time. Regarding safety, driving at 5mph under the speed limit does not automatically make the journey 'safe', and exceeding the limit by 5mph does not automatically make it 'dangerous'. Clearly, all other rings being equal, the faster one travels the greater the danger from an accident - but you also want to go fast enough to get to your destination in a reasonable time. The level of danger at any particular speed depends on many factors, such as the nature of the particular road, the condition of the car and the skill of the driver. It would be too complicated and unworkable to set individual speed limits for individual circumstances taking into account all these factors, so clear and simple general speed limits are set using judgement and experience to try to get an overall balance between advantages and disadvantages of higher speeds for the community of road users as a whole. Basically, a simple limit is practical and workable.

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A marvel and a mystery

Updated on Sep 11, 2014 by Bishop Hill

A warm welcome to the climate blogosphere for Kate Marvel, a theoretical-turned-climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory.

Dr Marvel's new blog can be seen here, and the first couple of posts make fascinating reading. Today's effort is right up my street, considering the empirical evidence for global warming.

[I]ncreased carbon dioxide warms the lower atmosphere (closer to Earth), but cools the upper atmosphere (closer to space).  I will probably write more about this later but for right now you'll have to take my word for it (or go here).

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Slingo at the IoP

This report of Julia Slingo's recent lecture at the Institute of Physics was originally posted in the discussion forum by a reader. I thought it worthy of elevation to the main blog. My thanks to "Colonel Shotover" for his efforts.

Frances Saunders, president of the Institute of Physics, introduced the lecture, telling us she was particularly delighted to welcome JS, first because her work on climate models showed the importance of physics to everyday life, and second because she was a woman, and so critical in supporting the objective of getting more women into physics. A cynic might suggest that these represented the twin pillars of government science: obtaining funding by demonstrating ‘relevance’ and supporting government policy objectives in return.

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