A very bad boy

It seems that Lord Stern is a very bad boy.

Very bad indeed.

Take a look at this.

Outlook bad for Shukla

Remember Jagadish Shukla, the American professor who called for racketeering laws to be used against sceptics? There was considerable interest when it was revealed that Prof Shukla appeared to be working full time for a charity he ran, as well as taking his university salary. This "double dipping" seems to have been brought to the attention of US lawmakers, who have asked auditors to investigate. It's not looking good for Prof Shukla:

According to [House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith]’s letter, the audit “appears to reveal that Dr. Shukla engaged in what is referred to as ‘double dipping.’ In other words, he received his full salary at GMU, while working full time at IGES and receiving a full salary there.”

Mr. Smith cites a memo from the school’s internal auditor in claiming that Mr. Shukla appeared to violate the university’s policy on outside employment and paid consulting. The professor received $511,410 in combined compensation from the school and IGES in 2014, according to Mr. Smith, “without ever receiving the appropriate permission from GMU officials.”

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Climate physician, heal thyself!

A reader sent me this breakdown of a climate scientist's carbon footprint. We should not even consider listening to them until they have dealt with their own excesses.

Teaching values

There is a rather interesting article in Times Higher Education about Joanna Williams, an academic who has taken it upon herself to criticise the close-mindedness of the academy. She has this to say about global warming and environmentalism.

I am not a climate-change denier, but I think it should be discussed and not placed beyond discussion – and I certainly don’t think that the response we have as a society is beyond discussion,” she says. “Sustainability is one solution, but there might also be more technological solutions. But, within higher education, sustainability has become a major topic and is taught as a moral value. You assess ‘Are your students demonstrating sustainability?’ rather than ‘Is sustainability the only response?’…You can see even in the titles of some courses that sustainability is the answer…As soon as you present something as a value and assess students on that value, you are putting things beyond debate.

Yup.

The inner Duce

My review of Liberal Fascism the other day provoked a very long comments thread and lots of strong views. I was therefore interested to see this article by Joel Kotkin - a Democrat, albeit a conservative one.

Today climate change has become the killer app for expanding state control, for example, helping Jerry Brown find his inner Duce. But the authoritarian urge is hardly limited to climate-related issues. It can be seen on college campuses, where uniformity of belief is increasingly mandated. In Europe, the other democratic bastion, the continental bureaucracy now controls ever more of daily life on the continent. You don’t want thousands of Syrian refugees in your town, but the EU knows better. You will take them and like it, or be labeled a racist.

Quote of the day, El Nino edition

In the UK, [El Nino's] impact is likely to be subdued, although past experience suggests that a colder winter could result.

Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus in Geophysical & Climate Hazards at UCL

Gong with the wind

The New Year's honours list was published last night and as usual I have scanned it looking for familiar names. Strangely, yours truly has been overlooked again.

The sense of shock is almost palpable. 

Still, it has been suggested that the majority of gongs go to failed politicians, to celebs and to civil servants who have merely been doing their jobs. So a knighthood for David Mackay was probably inevitable, although I don't suppose anyone will begrudge him: he was certainly the most level-headed occupant of the chief scientist's office at DECC for many a year. Ed Davey's knighthood was just a case of the normal gongs for failure that politicians expect.

More interesting was the award of an OBE to Emily Shuckburgh for services to science communication. I must say this rather took me aback. I've met Emily and she's bright and charming, but I watch the climate scene as closely as anyone and she has only attracted my notice on a handful of occasions. I can think of at least a dozen people who have been more active in the area and who have done more to advance public understanding of climate science. Perhaps Emily's contribution has been more behind the scenes than front of stage, or perhaps it's just that her work has been done in Whitehall rather than out there in the wild west of England, like Richard or Tamsin.

Congratulations to both though.

Saudi snow

A reader in Saudi Arabia send this picture which was taken recently in the north of that country.

The naughty thing doesn't seem to be conforming to the local sumptuary laws.

Quote of the day, Lewandowsky edition

[T]he level of obfuscation the authors went to, in order to disguise their actual data, was intense. Statistical techniques appeared to have been chosen that would hide the study’s true results. And it appeared that no peer reviewers, or journal editors, took the time, or went to the effort of scrutinizing the study in a way that was sufficient to identify the bold misrepresentations.

A psychologist considers the work of Stefan Lewandowsky

Precipitation - steady as she goes

A new paper by van Wijngaarden and Syed in the Journal of Hydrology notes a claim by the IPCC:

...the IPCC has reported that precipitation increased in some regions by as much as 1% in each decade of the 20th century.

The paper's authors then set about testing this claim.

The percentage annual precipitation change relative to 1961–90 was plotted for 6 continents; as well as for stations at different latitudes and those experiencing low, moderate and high annual precipitation totals. The trends for precipitation change together with their 95% confidence intervals were found for various periods of time. Most trends exhibited no clear precipitation change. The global changes in precipitation over the Earth’s land mass excluding Antarctica relative to 1961–90 were estimated to be:
1.2 ± 1.7, 2.6 ± 2.5 and
5.4 ± 8.1% per century for the periods 1850–2000, 1900–2000 and 1950–2000, respectively. A change of 1% per century corresponds to a precipitation change of 0.09 mm/year.

So if my maths is correct, the IPCC is out by as much as an order of magnitude. Perhaps the regions they were testing were smaller.

More on the ice age scare

In Quadrant magazine, Tony Thomas has been doing some fascinating research on the 1970s ice age scare.

A great embarrassment to the warming-catastrophic community is that 40 years ago the climatology scare was about cooling and onset of an ice age. Warmists today go, “Pooh! That cooling stuff  then was just a few hyped-up articles in magazines. Cooling never got any traction in the real science community!”

Really? Then explain this away

Read the whole thing.

Oz Met Office hacked

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has apparently been hacked.

China blamed for 'massive' cyber attack on Bureau of Meteorology computer

China is being blamed for a major cyber attack on the computers at the Bureau of Meteorology, which has compromised sensitive systems across the Federal Government.

Key points:

• ABC told there is little doubt the "massive" breach came from China
• Motivation for attack could be commercial, strategic or both
• Bureau provides critical information to a host of agencies, including link to Defence Department
• Could "take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fix"

This seems like a bit of an odd target, doesn't it?

Misconceptions and mislabellings

So, some minor brouhaha this morning over Roger Harrabin's piece about Richard Tol this morning. In it, Richard is quoted as follows:

Prof Richard Tol predicts the downsides of warming will outweigh the advantages with a global warming of 1.1C - which has nearly been reached already.

This is contrasted with Matt Ridley, quoted as follows:

Matt Ridley, the influential Conservative science writer, said he believed the world would probably benefit from a temperature rise of up to 2C.

And if you refer to the transcript, which Roger has helpfully made available at Joe Smith's Climate Creativity site (!) you can read this:

Click to read more ...

Science (it says here)

Roger Harrabin has a new three part series on the science of climate change starting next week on Radio 4.

Climate talks typically end in disenchantment and disarray, so will this year's summit in Paris be any different? In this three part series Roger Harrabin examines the science, politics and solutions of climate. In the first of this series he looks at the science behind climate change. Predicting the future climate is a pretty tricky business and over the last twenty five years or so its had a chequered history. Roger talks to the scientists about their models and asks if they are accurate enough or should they just be consigned to the dustbin. He takes tea with the leading US politician who simply won't be convinced of man-made climate change. He meets the "luke-warmers" who believe in climate change but don't think the planet will warm as much as predicted. He will also examine the current predictions and how confident we should be.

Expectations are set to low.

Climate change and academic oversell

It's not often an article in Times Higher Education can make you laugh out loud, but Helga Nowotny's piece this week managed to reach those heights. Nowotny, from ETZ in Zurich, is writing about overselling of research results and the deleterious effects that this might have on trust in the academy. Her suggestion is that a bit more "we don't know that yet" might be a better approach.

Inevitably talk turns to climate change:

Asked if such an approach may have pitfalls – such as those detailed in the 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, when vested interests sow the seeds of scientific doubt as a way of forestalling action on issues like the harm caused by cigarettes or, more recently, climate change – she responded: “You cannot deny climate change; it’s happening. The scientific evidence is overwhelming.”

But she pointed out that modelling future changes to the climate is fraught with uncertainty, with climate forecasting broadly as accurate as weather forecasting was 100 years ago – although none of this should be used as an excuse for inaction.

I'm not sure that she understands that "evidence" for climate change is the output of those uncertain climate models. She seems to be a victim of the very overselling that she is complaining about.