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Josh Nov 22, 2014 BBC Climate: Ward Josh 
As was noted here in the comments, by our host, maybe we should be
referring to Roger Harrabin as "Green blob spokesman Harrabin"
I think we can include Bob Ward too.
Bishop Hill Sep 9, 2014 Climate: Ward Matt Ridley Back in August, Bob Ward took a pop at Matt Ridley, berating him among other things for an alleged misrepresentation of the global record on drought. Matt's argument was, he claimed "grossly misleading". Much amusement was had when I flagged up the evidence that Matt had cited and Bob mumbled and shuffled before suggesting that the decline wasn't statistically significant. We determined that "grossly misleading" means "correct" in retwardian.
Today Bob is on the case again, spending his tax-funded time to berate...Matt Ridley. This time he is arguing about Matt's case that transient climate response - the amount of warming we will get in the short-term - might be as low as 1.35°C per doubling of carbon dioxide. This figure is sourced from the Lewis and Crok report on climate sensitivity.
Bishop Hill Aug 21, 2014 Climate: WG2 Climate: Ward Matt Ridley Further to this morning's post about Bob Ward's New Statesman attack piece against Matt Ridley, take a look at this. In his article, Ward said the following:
...Ridley's article suggested that “there is no global increase in floods”, and “there has been a decline in the severity of droughts”. Both statements were grossly misleading. Climate change is increasing global average temperature, but its impact on extreme weather differs across the world. Some regions are becoming wetter while others are becoming drier.
Ridley's claim about drought was based on a paper that did the rounds of the internet a few months back. The key graph is this one:
Bishop Hill Aug 21, 2014 Climate: WG2 Climate: Ward Matt Ridley Bob Ward has one of his tedious disinformation pieces at the New Statesman blog, yet again attacking Matt Ridley.
Bob is getting something of a pasting in the comments.
Bishop Hill May 17, 2014 Climate: Sceptics Climate: Ward
Updated on May 17, 2014 by
Bishop Hill
Updated on May 17, 2014 by
Bishop Hill
Simon Buckle of the Grantham Institute at Imperial has penned some nice thoughts about the Bengtsson affair:
Professor Lennart Bengtsson’s resignation from the GWPF Academic Advisory Council has received wide coverage and raises important issues.
Whatever anyone’s views are on the role, motivation and integrity of the GWPF in this matter, it is up to individual academics whether or not to associate themselves with it in an advisory role.
Bishop Hill May 13, 2014 Climate: Ward Bob Ward continues to dig himself into an ever deeper hole. This morning, as I mentioned in my earlier post, he claimed that:
[GWPF] denies the risks indicated by the scientific evidence in order to justify its ideological opposition to GHG cuts.
In response, I enquired what evidence there was that it denied the existence of a risk.
Bob's response was that it was all to do with extreme weather events:
Lawson denies that there is evidence of a change in extreme weather, etc
Josh May 13, 2014 Climate: Ward Josh
;)
Click for a larger image
Bob Ward's tweets today have been a revelation - historic even - see the Bish's post here. Happily they have coincided with a couple of Antarctic stories that deserve cartooning. Thanks, Bob!
Update: Tiny tweek to cartoon
Bishop Hill May 13, 2014 Climate: Sceptics Climate: Ward In an interesting development, Bob Ward has explained on Twitter what he means when he calls someone a "denier". In response to a question from David Rose he explained that he used the terms with respect to GWPF because:
It denies the risks indicated by the scientific evidence in order to justify its ideological opposition to GHG cuts.
So interestingly, denial now seems not to refer to anything to do with radiative physics or climate sensitivity or any of the nitty gritty that so preoccupies us here in the climate blogosphere. It's something to do with risks and perhaps their perception.
Bishop Hill Apr 6, 2014 Climate: Sceptics Climate: WG2 Climate: Ward David Rose has another stunning piece in the Mail on Sunday, this time describing the smear campaign against Richard Tol, whose temerity in trying to distance himself from the sexing up of the WGII Summary for Policymakers has incurred the wrath of the climate mob.
The spread also features a useful analysis of the changes wrought by the political intervention into the SPM drafting process and documents some cynical and entirely predictable dishonesty from Bob Ward.
Read it here.
Bishop Hill
Also worth a read this morning is Christopher Booker (extracts at GWPF), who has been looking at the IPCC's history of alarmism.
Five times between 1990 and 2014 the IPCC published three massive volumes of technical reports – another emerged last week – and each time we saw the same pattern. Each was supposedly based on thousands of scientific studies, many funded to find evidence to support the received view that man-made climate change was threatening the world with disaster – hurricanes, floods, droughts, melting ice, rising sea levels and the rest. But each time what caught the headlines was a brief “Summary for Policymakers”, carefully crafted by governments and a few committed scientists to hype up the scare by going much further than was justified by the thousands of pages in the technical reports themselves.
Each time it would emerge just how shamelessly these Summaries had distorted the actual evidence, picking out the scary bits, which themselves often turned out not to have been based on proper science at all.
Bishop Hill Apr 3, 2014 Climate: Sceptics Climate: WG2 Climate: Ward Media I am somewhat in awe of Channel Four news. I mean, Bob Ward writes a post criticising Richard Tol on an obscure page on the LSE website and Jon Snow, Cathy Newman et al leap into action to interrogate Tol on air. Not only that, but Ward is invited on to put his own case to Tol and Newman repeatedly accuses Tol of "having an agenda" because he is an unpaid adviser to GWPF while Ward, the paid mouthpiece for a wealthy environmentalist, is given a free ride. All that from a blog post!
I must say, the interview was distinctly uninformative, with Newman and Ward apparently trying to suggest that because Tol's paper is the only one showing benefits from warming (there are only two that have examined the case of warming of 1°C), his allegation of scaremongering by the IPCC is wrong. If ever there was a non-sequitur this is it. As Tol points out, the other studies for warming of a few degrees show net harm that is indistinguishable from zero. Calls for panic are indeed over the top.
Bishop Hill Mar 5, 2014 Climate: Parliament Climate: Sceptics Climate: Ward Anthony Watts is covering Bob Ward's latest attempt to enliven the global warming debate. Bob's main problem is that he has only one card to play, namely to accuse his opponents of dishonesty, usually at the top of his voice. In this case, he has accused no less than three people: Nic Lewis, Donna Laframboise and Richard Lindzen.
As you can tell, this rather betrays Bob's other problems, namely an almost complete lack of a sense of proportion and and almost unerring ability to overplay his hand. People don't generally lie very much, particularly when they are giving evidence to Parliament. So to accuse three witnesses on the same panel of dishonesty smacks of a desperation rather than meaningful criticism. The committee are going to find themselves thinking that he is a bit of a wally. Or a lot of a wally.
They wouldn't be the first.
Bishop Hill
Donna's post on the subject is here.
Bishop Hill Feb 3, 2014 Climate: WG2 Climate: Ward
Updated on Feb 3, 2014 by
Bishop Hill
Lord Stern's squawk box has made one of his grubby sallies into the media today, sounding off in the letters page of the FT in response to an earlier missive from Lord Turnbull. Ward has several gripes - hasn't he always? - one of which is the trend in Arctic sea ice since its minimum a couple of years ago:
The Arctic sea ice has not been recovering since its record minimum in September 2012, and is still on a clear downward trend.
Josh Sep 3, 2013 Climate: Oceans Climate: Ward Josh It's been a funny old week. Leo Hickman announced his departure from the Guardian - another Eco-journalist biting the dust - then rumours that Bob Ward used to be a punk swirled round Twitter.
But of course the big news is that Climate Scientists have discovered that the oceans have a big influence on Global Temperatures. Who knew? Oh, yes, that's right. You lot did ;-)
First up, we say 'Bye' to Leo and wish him well in his new job.
Bishop Hill Sep 1, 2013 Climate: Ward From David Rose's Twitter feed we learn the hilarious news that Bob Ward used to be a punk rocker. Ward had been trying to head off any publicity for Judith Curry's recent revelations about attribution of global warming and in response Rose tweeted this:
I'm on holiday and not working on anything, you barmy, obsessive weirdo. Okay?
Rude, but it could have been worse. I guess the truth sometimes hurts. But then Rose went on to add this delectable snippet:
Bishop Hill Jun 14, 2013 Climate: Ward GWPF The Grantham Institute for Climate Change continues to spend its time pursuing GWPF rather than doing anything constructive with the money it receives from Mr Grantham and the Global Green Growth Institute. Bob Ward has issued a complaint to the Charities Commissioners about something or other.
It feels a bit desperate to me.
As an aside, the GGGI looks interesting, apparently having morphed from a Korean non-profit organisation into a fully fledged transnational organisation. The relevant order for legal immunities is apparently being rubber-stamped in Westminster.
