Slow learner

David Shukman's "how to report climate change" video over at the BBC academy website is actually good in parts. But in parts it's not.

He first sets out what is agreed - carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, its concentration in the atmosphere has risen as have global temperatures. So far so good, although I think it would be fair to point out that the temperature rise is indistinguishable (in statistical terms) from business as normal and also that temperatures haven't risen for more than fifteen years.

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Emitting nonsense

The IPCC reports are all based upon emissions scenarios, which are, in turn, based upon economics. Now according to Timmy, that's all about to change.

The next IPCC report will be based upon the updates to the SRES. Great, that’s fine. But note how they’re updating the SRES. They’re not starting with the economics. Ooooooh no, that would be far too sensible. What they’ve actually done is made up some emissions levels.

This really is getting beyond a joke, isn't it?

Climate sensitivity and the Stern report

From time to time I have been taking a look at the Stern Review. It seems so central to the cause of global warming alarmism, and while there's a lot to plough through this does at least mean that one may come across something new.

As part of my learning process, I have been enjoying some interesting exchanges with Chris Hope of the Judge Business School at OxfordCambridge. Chris was responsible for the PAGE economic model, which underpinned Stern's work. The review was based on the 2002 version of the model, but a newer update - PAGE 2009 -  has now appeared and I have been reading up about this from Chris's working papers, in particular this one, which looks at the social cost of carbon.

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Material World on gas and climate models

The  BBC's  Material World programme today looked at the climate models. The show featured Brian Hoskins and Corinne Le Quere. An excerpt of the show is below.

There are some interesting comments from these climate scientists about the credibility of economic models as well as on the impact of slow warming (not much) as opposed to extreme events (much more).

Material World excerpt

Mann makes friends

New York Times blogger Nate Silver has a book on forecasting riding high in the Amazon US charts at the moment. The Signal and the Noise is a survey of forecasting, and looks to be thoroughly entertaining. I've asked the publisher for a review copy.

Unfortunately, Silver has stumbled into the murky world of climate prediction, and has incurred the wrath of Michael E Mann, who has printed a lengthy critique at Think Progress. It's a lot milder than your normal Mannian critique, but includes many of the normal tactics. His invoking Silver's training at the University of Chicago as a cause for concern almost defies belief:

Nate Silver was trained in the Chicago school of Economics, famously characterized by its philosophy of free market fundamentalism. In addition to courses from Milton Friedman, Nate might very well have taken a course from University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt, known largely for his provocative 2005 book Freakonomics and its even more audacious 2009 sequel Super Freakonomics.

Silver sounds deeply frustrated, saying that Mann's piece is not a fair critique of what he wrote. I guess he should have read The Hockey Stick Illusion before deciding that Mann was the go-to guy.

The Signal and the Noise can be bought at Amazon US. It will be published in the UK in a couple of days, but they are letting you preorder the Kindle version.

My speech from the Spectator debate

A slightly adapted version of my speech from the Spectator debate has been posted at the magazine's Coffee House blog.

Read it here.

Tamsin on the jet stream

Tamsin Edwards has posted a link to a recent interview she gave BBC radio on the subject of the jetstream, among other things. Paul Matthews comments:

If most climate scientists were like @flimsin, there'd be hardly any sceptics.

I've only managed to listen to the first five minutes or so, but I can see what he means.

DECC 3 - the Marland briefing

This briefing prepared for Lord Marland is, if anything, even worse than the last. It is perfectly acceptable for DECC to discuss a claim about the possibility that recent temperature changes are natural. I find it extraordinary that they would try to do so with a graph of changes in various atmospheric constituents.

More diary dates

Here are a couple more dates that may interest readers here. I'm sure all my readers in the Northern Isles will be interested in this courtroom-style confrontation on 10 September between upholders of and dissentients from the IPCC consensus, and featuring Benny Peiser and BH regular, John Shade:

A courtroom format in Orkney next week will tackle the question of climate change.

For many years the debate has raged in newspaper columns and internet blogs – Is the climate really changing? And are we the cause?

Now as part of the Orkney International Science Festival the courtroom method is bring applied. The aim is to get at the truth by bringing the two sides together, gathering the evidence from each, and subjecting it to examination and cross-examination.

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Ten Billion

The Guardian's science editor, Robin McKie, has been to the theatre. He went to see Ten Billion, a one-man show by computer scientist Stephen Emmott. This is slightly odd. The Guardian is losing tens of millions of pounds every year and yet this is their second review of the show. I wonder why they would be plugging it so much?

The answer, of course, is that it's a show about man's impact on the planet - it is in essence a lecture by a somewhat millenarian academic with no particular expertise in the area.

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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.

Madrid, 1995 - the story continues

A few months ago I linked to the first part of Bernie Lewin's history of the shenanigans around the IPCC's second assessment report. Bernie has now published a long, two-part post examining the science behind the controversial detection and attribution sections of the report: Part one and Part two.

Could this really be it? The first faint image of man in the sky?

Ben Santer had just placed a transparency under the lens to project this colour pattern high upon the conference wall. It was the first afternoon of the Working Group 1 Plenary in Madrid, and this great council of nations from across the entire globe was persuaded to study the significance of its strange contours before getting down to their principle task. And so they should study it, for this is a game-changer striking at the nub of what the IPCC is all about. Although obscure, here is an image of the impact of human industry on the atmosphere above. At least part of the recent warming had at last been attributed to industrial emissions. If not for this, then why these near one hundred delegations flown in from all corners of the globe? There they were carefully positioned at arched rows of labelled bureaus across this cavernous auditorium. As they listened to live translations of Santer’s explanation, not a few of them must have gazed up in wonder: Could this really be what man hath wrought?

The fall of Forest 2006?

Nic Lewis is best known to the sceptic blogosphere as one of the co-authors of the O'Donnell et al paper, which found significant flaws in Steig's paper on Antarctic warming. Lewis has just published an extremely important article about Forest et al 2006, one of the key climate sensitivity papers shown in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report. Forest et al found a climate sensitivity of 3°C/doubling, rather higher than many other studies. However, although his research has been hampered by the fact that Forest appears to have lost the raw data (!), Lewis has concluded that there must have been a misprocessing of the figures and that the correct figure for climate sensitivity would be only 1°C/doubling.

If I am right, then correct processing of the data used in Forest 2006 would lead to the conclusion that equilibrium climate sensitivity (to a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere) is close to 1°C, not 3°C, implying that likely future warming has been grossly overestimated by the IPCC.

It is hard to overstate how important this finding is, if correct.

Read the whole thing.

McKitrick's new paper

Ross McKitrick writes:

Lise Tole and I have published a paper in Climate Dynamics testing the ability of climate models to reproduce the spatial pattern of temperature trends over land. This builds on previous work of mine looking at the correlation between indicators of industrial development over land and the spatial pattern of warming trends, a relationship that is not predicted by models and is supposed to have been filtered out of the surface climate record.

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Dave Roberts at TED

Dave Roberts is the resident upholder of the CAGW consensus at Grist. Here he is lecturing on climate change at TED, and boy is he worried about the future - "Hell on Earth" is one of his more optimistic predictions.

I was struck by Roberts' comments about climate sensitivity. It seems to me that he gets completely confused over the difference between climate sensitivity and climate impacts. Having discussed the ad-hoc nature of the 2 degree target that is often cited as the threshold above which climate change becomes dangerous he says this:

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