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Bishop Hill May 3, 2017 Climate: Sceptics Josh Chris Essex was at GWPF last night to lecture on "The Great Climate Change Fervour". Josh sends his cartoon notes.
;)
Bishop Hill Feb 2, 2016 Climate: Sceptics FOI Science Media Centre 
As many readers are aware, our old friend Stephan Lewandowsky has recently published a paper in Nature that sets out his views on the circumstances in which scientists should release their data to others - the thrust of the piece being that he thinks that a favourable answer need only be given to his mates.
I had rather rolled my eyes at this and wondered if I actually wanted to give him the attention that a rebuttal might bring, so I had resolved to ignore it. However, a post by Professor James Coyne, a psychologist who works in Groningen in the Netherlands, suggests that Lewandowsky's article is just part of a wider trend in academia.
Bishop Hill Jan 25, 2016 Climate: Sceptics ;)
This is a guest post by Professor David Henderson.
I became involved with climate change issues, entirely by accident, at the end of 2002. A year or so after this event, as my acquaintance with the subject broadened, I became aware of Bob Carter’s writings, and I was impressed. I marked him down as an author to be followed.
It was not until 2006 that we met, through an initiative on my part. At the end of 2005 the Stern Review was published. I felt that it deserved a comprehensive critique, and so far as the economic aspects were concerned a team of potential authors was already to hand. Well before the Review appeared, Sir Nicholas Stern (as he then was) had given a public lecture the text of which was published (together with an annex on climate science). I put together a team of nine economists, and we published in the journal World Economics (June 2006} a short critical article entitled ‘Climate Change: The Stern Review “Oxonia Papers”’. Alongside our piece there also appeared a reply by Stern.
Bishop Hill Jan 20, 2016 Climate: Sceptics 
I awake this morning to the sad news of the passing of Bob Carter.
I never met Bob, but we exchanged emails from time to time, particularly when I was providing editorial input to his paper on sea-level rise, which I still rate as one of the best things GWPF has published. He had a very sharp mind, but was great fun to work with. His strength of character in the face of years of personal attacks is an example to us all.
Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts both have more personal recollections.
Bishop Hill Jan 13, 2016 Climate: Sceptics 
https://www.flickr.com/photos/pperinik/171198564Nearly a week after Nic Lewis pubished his rather devastating critique of the Marvel et al paper, Dana Nuccitelli has decided it's time to tell the Graun readers about...the Marvel et al paper. Readers might be interested to compare excerpts from Dana's piece and Nic Lewis's one.
...even had Marvel et al.’s efficacy estimates and calculations been valid, they would have had no material implications for the Otto et al 2013 TCR and ECR estimates. That is because the underlying forcing estimates used in that study already reflect efficacies, contrary to what Marvel et al. imply.
Nic Lewis, in his article about the Marvel et al paper, 8 January 2016
Let's be fair, Otto et al. didn't account for forcing efficacies either, and most of the co-authors on that paper were top notch scientists.
Dana Nuccitelli today.
It's remarkable that Lewis has managed to refute Nuccitelli even before Nuccitelli started to write. I imagine this happens to Dana quite a lot though.
Bishop Hill Dec 23, 2015 Climate: Sceptics 
Take a look at this 1990 article by Russell Seitz, placed online recently here. It's colourfully written, but ironically it sets out a sceptic position rather well. Does this sound like something that you might have written?
A disturbing reality confronts us: the deliberate creation of a double standard, with one set of facts for internal scientific discourse and another for public consumption.
On whether CO2 is a "big" problem:
Clearly, a sharp-toothed carnivore is on the prowl. But we've yet to see a full-grown specimen. Are we dealing with Snoopy or Cerberus? It's hard to tell- it's only just a foundling pup, and the question of its diet remains to he wrestled with-it might grow into either. But grow it will-slowly, and for a long while undetectably. One of these centuries, we're going to have a real dog in our front yard. But what kind? And when? An interdisciplinary consensus on the magnitude of the "greenhouse effect" and its impact on sea levels in the next century won't come cheap-or soon.
Bishop Hill Dec 9, 2015 Civil liberties Climate: Sceptics Mark Steyn was breathtakingly good in his Congressional Testimony today.
Bishop Hill Dec 8, 2015 Climate: Sceptics GWPF Greenpeace are getting very excited about some of their latest "undercover" reporting. It seems that some of their staff posed as representatives of a coal-mining company and asked Will Happer to write them a report. Happer seems to have said yes, but said that the proceeds should go to his sceptic organisation, the CO2 Alliance.
I think their case is that Happer doesn't actually believe any of the things he says, but that in return for large quantities of money he is willing to say anything required. I'm not sure this is going to fly.
There is also a fairly feeble attempt to involve GWPF in the story, insinuating that Indur Goklany's report was reviewed only by people internal to GWPF. Benny Peiser has said in no uncertain terms that this is not true.
Professor Happer made his scientific views clear from the outset, including the need to address pollution problems arising from fossil fuel consumption. Any insinuation against his integrity as a scientist is outrageous and is clearly refuted by the correspondence.
Nor did Professor Happer offer to put a report "commissioned by a fossil fuel company" through the GWPF peer review process. This is a sheer fabrication by Greenpeace.The GWPF does not undertake externally-commissioned research and does not accept support of any kind from fossil fuel companies or anyone with a significant interest in the energy industry. The correspondence shows that Professor Happer explained to the undercover "journalist" that there were several different forms of peer review and that the peer review process used by the GWPF is as rigorous as that for most journals.
Greenpeace claims with no supporting evidence that the report by Dr Indur Goklany was reviewed exclusively by 25 scientists who are members of the GWPF's Academic Advisory Council (AAC). This is false. Dr Goklany's report, like most of our reports, was also reviewed by outside experts who are not scientific advisers to the GWPF.
The quality of Dr Goklany's report is self-evident to any open-minded reader. As Professor Freeman Dyson said in the foreword, "To any unprejudiced person reading this account, the facts should be obvious: that the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide as a sustainer of wildlife and crop plants are enormously beneficial, that the possibly harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been greatly exaggerated, and that the benefits clearly outweigh the possible damage."
Professor Colin Prentice of the Grantham Institute concurred even while claiming to be dismayed by the report's publication: "Much of it is quite correct and moreover, well-established in the scientific literature...the various benefits of rising CO2 are actually well established in the scientific literature, even if sometime ignored. They are indeed 'good news'."
The cack-handed attempt by Greenpeace to manufacture a scandal around Dr Goklany's report, and to smear Professor Happer's reputation, only points to the need for the Global Warming Policy Foundation to redouble its efforts to bring balanced, rigorous and apolitical research on climate and energy policy issues to the public's attention, as counter to the misleading noise and activist rhetoric from groups like Greenpeace.
Bishop Hill
In my absence last night, Patrick Moore has reported Greenpeace to the FBI:
I have reported Greenpeace to the FBI under 18 USC 96 (RICO statute); 18 USC 1343 (wire fraud); 18 USC 1512 (tampering with a witness due to appear at a Congressional hearing); and 18 USC 1505 (obstruction of proceedings before committees).
I shall also be asking the Bureau to investigate Greenpeace’s sources of funding. It is now an enemy of the State, an enemy of humanity and, indeed, an enemy of all species on Earth.
Bishop Hill Dec 5, 2015 Climate: Sceptics Climate: other Ethics [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
Bishop Hill Dec 4, 2015 BBC Climate: MetOffice Climate: Sceptics ;)
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.
Bishop Hill Dec 2, 2015 Climate: Sceptics Climate: Surface 
Here's an excerpt from Matt Ridley's article in the Times a few days ago.
How unusual is today’s temperature? As I did this weekend, you have no doubt had conversations along the following lines recently: “Hasn’t it been mild? End of November and we’ve hardly had a frost yet!” All true. But then be honest: can you not recall such conversations throughout your life? I can. And here’s what the Met Office had to say about November 1938, long before I was born: “The weather of the month was distinguished by exceptional mildness: at numerous places it was the mildest November on record.” In 1953, November was even milder and there was no air frost recorded in Oxford in the last four months of the year at all.
I am not saying it has not generally become warmer, but that the variation dwarfs the trend. Let’s go back a little further, to the Middle Ages. It used to be argued by some that the “Medieval Warm Period” of about a thousand years ago, when mountain glaciers retreated, vines grew further north and Iceland was widely cultivated, was confined to Europe. We now know from multiple sources of evidence that it was global. Tree lines were higher than today in many mountain ranges, for example. Both North Pacific and Antarctic Ocean water temperatures were 0.65C warmer than today.
And here is a letter from Professor Joanna Haigh in response:
Sir, A quarter of a century after Margaret Thatcher first warned of the perils of climate change, it is disheartening to find columnists in the UK media still confusing weather with climate and anecdote with evidence...
Personal conversations about British November weather cannot be a substitute for global observations of climate change — not only increasing temperatures but ice melt, the migration of wildlife, the acidification of the ocean, and so on. These observations confirm that man-made climate change presents real and increasing risks for the future.
The green establishment is not exactly covering themselves in glory on the integrity front at the moment are they?
Bishop Hill Nov 27, 2015 Climate: Sceptics This is a guest post by Ralf Bodelier, translated from an original in Dutch.
Indur M. Goklany is one of the most influential climate analysts in the world. 'If we want a better world, we must continue using the cheapest form of energy. For the time being that is the burning of oil, coal and gas'. Last month he published ‘Carbon Dioxide. The Good News’.
He was part of the climate negotiations for the United States in the run-up to the UNFCCC, and he was there at the birth of the mighty IPCC - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He participated in several of the five assessment reports of the same IPCC. But two decades ago, Goklany (70) distanced himself from the 'climate alarmists'. He was one of the earliest champions of adaptation, arguing that it made more sense than mitigation (or emissions reduction). He developed the notion of “focused adaptation”, whereby you address current day problems that would/could be exacerbated by climate change. Early this October he published "Carbon Dioxide. The Good News', a long article about the benefits of more CO2 in our atmosphere, including a plea to the world to not decarbonize too fast. ‘Since the 1980s, we’ve been hoping that clean solar and wind energy will break through', Goklany says. ‘However, their share of energy worldwide still doesn’t exceed one and a half percent.’
Bishop Hill Nov 17, 2015 Books Climate: Sceptics 
Susan Crockford has written a novel about people being eaten by polar bears. Here's what she has to say about it.
This is a polar bear attack thriller. What Jaws did for the beaches of New England, Eaten does for northern Newfoundland. Terror and carnage abound as hungry polar bears come ashore in droves seeking any food available, including human prey.
Set in the year 2025 at the edge of the Arctic, the story considers future possibilities no one has yet contemplated. In this tale, the occupants of hundreds of small towns and isolated outports spread across northern Newfoundland are quite unprepared for an early spring onslaught of hungry polar bears. People haven’t just been killed, they’ve been eaten. As the attacks multiply, people find they are not safe even in their own homes.
Local residents, Mounties, and biologists struggle with a disturbing new reality: they have a huge polar bear problem on their hands, and if they don’t find a solution quickly, dozens more people will die gruesome deaths, and hundreds more polar bears will be shot.
A Newfoundland seal biologist gets help from an expat Alaskan carnivore specialist as they team up with officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to address the threat. Stopping the carnage and the relentless terror will be the biggest challenge they’ve ever faced as they struggle to prevent this from being the most horrifying disaster in Newfoundland's history.
I'm a scientist but I grew up in a family of storytellers and avid fiction readers. When it was clear the time had come to try my hand at writing a novel, it felt like a logical progression from science writing, not a leap. Starting with polar bears just felt right.
And here’s why: for years, polar bear specialists have being playing “what-if”. They’ve used computer models to predict polar bear responses to computer-predicted sea ice conditions 25-90 years into the future and insist their prophecies will become reality unless human behaviour changes. They like to call their "what-if" science.
I decided to play too – except I call my “what-if” a novel.
Arguably climate science fiction with a twist, some call this genre “speculative fiction” or “technothriller.” I’ve included a “recommended reading” list at the end of the book for those who want to follow up on the science background but the book is primarily for readers who prefer their science “lite” and those who love a good story.
See the YouTube book trailer.
More detail and links here.
The paperback is ready to order and will ship as soon as the books are printed; the ebooks are available for pre-order and will download November 30, 2015. Price for the paperback is US$14.49; for the ebooks US$6.99
Here's where to buy it:
(Temporary Kindle links, until Amazon gets it linked to the paperback)
LIMITED TIME OFFER for the ePub version: November 30, 2015 until December 3, 2015 only
FREE with promotion code GW98Q (not case-sensitive)
Bishop Hill Nov 16, 2015 Climate: Sceptics The RICO affair, in which a group of green-minded academics tried to get the full force of the law used against those who disagree with them, continues to have repercussions. This is the latest.
CEI Files FOIA Lawsuit Against George Mason University for Denying Existence of Records Related to RICO-20 Letter
George Mason University (GMU) faculty claimed "no records" existed in response to a Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) FOIA request regarding the involvement of Professor Ed Maibach in the RICO-20 campaign seeking prosecution of opponents of his view of climate policy. Yet, CEI has evidence of such records. This prompted CEI to sue GMU over the FOIA dispute, which aims to inform the public about the role of Maibach in organizing the campaign led by GMU Professor Jagadish Shukla calling for prosecution of their political opponents.
Emails the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) obtained under the Washington State and Florida open records acts show Professor Maibach, a taxpayer-funded instructor of “how to mobilize populations to adopt behaviors and support public policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” used his University title, position and email account in the RICO-20 effort. Numerous records provided by other state universities notwithstanding, GMU informed CEI that Prof. Maibach insisted he had no records responsive to the same request to that school.
The full press release is here.
Bishop Hill Nov 2, 2015 Climate: Sceptics Greens ;)
Over the weekend, news emerged that the decision by French weatherman Philippe Verdier to come out as a sceptic has resulted in swift retribution.
The Head of Weather France 2, away from the antenna to its challenges to the consequences of global warming, aired Saturday night, a video claiming he was fired by the public channel.
Last year, Roy Spencer was widely criticised for referring to global warming Nazis. But as the list of those who have lost their jobs for questioning the orthodoxy grows, you have to ask yourself, was Spencer wrong?
In related news another weatherman has announced that he is not a sceptic any longer.
Greg Fishel was once a Limbaugh-loving climate skeptic. Now he’s fighting global warming.
You can see why that might be an attractive option.
