Nature notices Bolivia

Nature magazine has finally noticed the ecological disaster in Bolivia - the deaths of millions of fish caused by biting cold weather in tropical areas of the country. The ecological disaster that readers of this humble blog read about on August 7.

According to Nature, the problem has been brought on by "climate change".

I kid you not.

Donna's back

Donna Laframboise has moved to a shiny new Wordpress blog, and is straight back into the groove with a rather damning look at Alistair Woodward, the man who is in charge of the health chapter of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report. Some of his publications look, ahem, interesting.

Doctors are told they must “mobilise society” and that they “cannot be inactive observers” because they have a “responsibility to lead.” Inaction, they are advised, would amount to “negligence and malpractice on a global scale.” This is followed by a list of 13 things they should do – sorted into three categories.

The majority of these suggestions (seven) fall into the political category, two more are in the personal category, while another four are categorized as professional. The evidence could not be clearer. This is not a paper about medicine. By the authors’ own admission, nine of their 13 suggested measures are unrelated to doctors’ professional lives.

Business as usual by the looks of it. Read the whole thing.

Newsnight reactions

Mixed reactions to my performance last night, and I guess from a sceptic point of view I was probably slightly off-message. A few thoughts though. Firstly my main objective last night was not to cock up. Ahead of the GWPF report that would have been a disaster. So to that extent I was successful.

In terms of the content of the Newsnight report, the whole thing was covered in what I thought was a reasonably nuanced way that was difficult to take umbrage with. In terms of getting the message over - that you can't point to the Pakistan floods and say they were caused by climate change, I think commenters here agree that everyone on Newsnight seemed to concur that you can't say this, so to that extent it went well. If the BBC and other media outlets are now going to eschew climate porn because everyone is saying it can't be attributed then that's quite an important victory. I would have liked to take a pot-shot at the "consistent with global warming" argument but they moved on so quickly I didn't get a chance.

The second question, on what to do about it was slightly odd - a bit of a no-brainer really. If you are prone to flooding, then, yes, take mitigation steps - provided they are economically sensible of course.

And finally the inevitable sceptic/denier question. I'd growled at the BBC researcher earlier in the day when he was doing the rehearsal. Then, he put the question in terms of something like "it must be hard being a denier". I think he was slightly taken aback when I (very gently) put him right on his terminology. So when it came to the question at the end, they had everything fixed and just asked whether I acknowledged that mankind was affecting the climate. This again is a pretty easy question, because of course mankind has always affected the climate. If I had my time over again, I would have made this point more clearly. I don't think you can get away from the radiative physics arguments for AGW. It seems likely to me that it has some effect, but as I tried to make clear in my 10 secs, we just don't know how big.

Newsnight

I've been invited to appear on Newsnight tonight to talk about the Pakistani floods and climate change. Should be interesting.

Update on Aug 23, 2010 by Bishop Hill

Well that was OK, I think. I'm pretty sure it was cut short - there was a delay on the line to Seattle which made things quite difficult for everyone. I did half wonder if the lack of hyperbole didn't make for very good telly, but in terms of the science I agree with commenters that the whole thing portrayed a pretty good balance.

Helmer withdraws apology to Houghton

Roger Helmer MEP writes to the Telegraph today.

An apology withdrawn

SIR – Sir John Houghton (Letters, August 15), the former IPCC Chairman, challenges the use of the quote, widely attributed to him that: “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.” He insists he said (and the record confirms this) that: “If we want a good environmental policy, we’ll have to have a disaster.”

This is a distinction without a difference. Either way, he is saying that the IPCC needs disasters to convince the public of the need for climate mitigation.

As someone who used the slightly incorrect quotation (in my Bruges Group book Cool Thinking on Climate Change), I now feel vindicated, and I withdraw an apology I made to Sir John for misquoting him.

Roger Helmer MEP (Con)
Market Harborough, Leicestershire

I think there is actually room for doubt over what precisely Houghton meant in his original statement. People's opinions will depend on whether they feel he deserves the benefit of that doubt.

The climate Cassandra

Climatologist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute is interviewed in Spiegel. The interviewer even tries a few challenging questions:

SPIEGEL: As climate adviser to the chancellor, you have a particularly high profile. Because of your frequently ominous predictions, critics have dubbed you the "Cassandra of Potsdam," after the figure in Greek mythology whose predictions always went unheard. Why do you always have to scare people?

Schellnhuber: Let me answer your provocative question in an objective way. As an expert, it's possible that I tend to point to dangers and risks more than to opportunities and possibilities -- similarly to an engineer who builds a bridge and has to make people aware of everything that could cause it to collapse. Warning against a possible accident is in fact intended to reduce the likelihood of an accident. And a sudden shift in the climate could have truly catastrophic consequences. Besides, in Greek mythology Cassandra was always right -- unfortunately.

SPIEGEL: Does that justify constantly predicting the end of the world?

Schellnhuber: Naturally, we have to be careful not to dramatize things. After all, scientific credibility is our unique selling point. But I do confess that when you have the feeling that people just aren't listening, it becomes very tempting to turn up the volume. Naturally, we have to resist this temptation. 

Another cold winter?

Bob Ward has a letter in the Telegraph bemoaning (quite correctly) attempts to link the hot weather in Russia and the Pakistan floods to climate change.

SIR – The recent extreme weather in Pakistan, Russia and China is not “proof of climate change” (report, August 11).

While increases in the intensity and frequency of heatwaves, droughts and heavy rainfall in some parts of the world are consistent with the expected impacts of the rise in average temperature, it is long-term trends in extreme weather that provide evidence for a changing climate.

Researchers must be careful about presenting the evidence for global warming. Every warm or wet event cited as proof may legitimise the erroneous portrayal of outbreaks of cold weather, such as those in northern Europe and eastern North America last winter, as evidence that global warming has stopped or does not exist. Such apparent contradictions increase public confusion.

I read somewhere that we're going to have another cold winter, at least according to some forecasters. I wonder if Bob read the same article.

More on the Bolivian fish

Bolivia Bella has some more on the "millions of dead fish" story. Apparently there has been some speculation that the deaths may have been caused by chemicals, but this idea looks as though it is a non-starter.

Bolivian cold snap

Severe cold in Bolivia has killed millions of fish in tropical Bolivian rivers.

There's a text report here.

Has the Graun backed down?

Richard North is given space at Comment is Free to vent his spleen at George Monbiot.

An honest commentator would be joining us to ensure that the unsubstantiated claim by the IPCC is removed. But Mr Monbiot has instead resorted to ad hominem abuse which he – or his employers – justify as "fair comment".

Rather, he should be concerned, even if for entirely different reasons, that the response of the IPCC to a proven and egregious error has not been healthy. And an organisation which cannot admit error and deal with it is one that cannot be trusted.

The same might also be said of its supporters who, instead of dealing with the entirely justified criticisms, seek to attack the critics. By their deeds shall we know them and, in respect of his particular deeds in relation to "Amazongate", we have come to know Monbiot quite well.

Do we gather that Dr North's complaint to the PCC has been successful?

They're all a comin'!

Pielke Jnr takes aim at an absurd article in PNAS (the journal that famously published the upside-down Mann paper and Anderegg's blacklist paper too).

Oppenheimer: "They're all a comin' !"Princeton' professor Michael Oppenheimer predicts that climate change will cause between 1.4 and 6.7 million Mexicans to move to the US, a finding that Pielke lucidly describes as "guesswork piled on top of "what ifs" built on a foundation of tenuous assumptions".

Even more damningly, one of Pielke's commenters points out that there are only 6.3m agricultural workers in Mexico. For Oppenheimer to predict that they will all move north seems preposterous.

More Amazongate

Richard North has managed to get hold of two different versions of the IPAM report, which, you may remember, is the one the WWF says contains the scientific evidence for the claim that 40% of the Amazon is sensitive to slight changes in rainfall.

Neither of the two documents even mention the subject of the Amazon's sensitivity to rainfall.

This appears to be problematic for many people party to the row - Nepstad the scientist-cum-activist responsible for the claims, the WWF and of course dear old George Monbiot.

Read the whole thing.

Nepstad enters the fray

Much fun in the comments to Monbiot's Amazongate posting, with Daniel Nepstad, the activist-scientist behind some of the IPCC claims, having his say:

As the lead scientist on the research that underlies the IPCC statements about the sensitivity of the Amazon forest to reductions in rainfall, and after 25 years studying this question, I can say that the evidence has only grown stronger in support of this statement. I ran an enormous rainfall exclusion experiment in an Amazon forest that identified the rainfall threshold beyond which giant forest trees die quite suddenly (published in the journal Ecology in 2007). During the 2005 Amazon drought, tree mortality spiked up in permanent forest plots across the region (Philips et al. 2009 Science), providing further evidence of the drought threshold. The critics have latched onto two papers that seem to contradict our results, both using the same satellite sensor (MODIS). The forest canopy appears to get a bit greener in some Amazon regions during the dry season. Deeper analyses of the same data have found that these studies probably were seeing leaf-changing episodes and changes in cloudiness (which declines in the dry season) which are not evidence that the forests were not drought stressed. In a recent letter signed by 18 scientists including many of the world's authorities on tropical forest response to climate change, we found the IPCC statement to be sound and the NASA study involving MODIS data to be irrelevent to the IPCC statement. I would be happy to explain the science behind the IPCC statement.

Which is fascinating but still leaves us none the wiser as to where the idea that 40% of the Amazon is at risk from slight changes in rainfall comes from.  Several commenters on the thread call Dr Nepstad on this evasion and demand to know in which paper it can be found.

No reply last time I looked.

North threatens to sue Monbiot

From EU Referendum

Dear Mr Monbiot

Following the publication of your post here, I have written to your newspaper by e-mail, expressing my concerns about the piece, and inviting the newspaper to contact me to discuss it informally, to avoid the need to take expensive and (to you) potentially damaging action in order to protect my professional reputation.

Since your newspaper has not troubled itself to contact me, I am forced to take the step of contacting you and the newspaper more formally, which I am in the process of so doing.

In the meantime, however, I am writing here as the most direct means of contacting you, to ask you to remove from this post all references to myself, as being libellous and highly damaging – the precise details of which will be passed to your newspaper shortly.

You may, of course, leave this message visible or remove it, but you may wish to note that the addition of further comments arising as a result of references to me remaining in your post, and which are also of a libellous or denigratory nature, may form part of any subsequent action which I choose to take.

Commentators who choose to comment on this post may also wish to note that I would be happy to enjoin them in any legal action taken against Mr Monbiot or The Guardian newspaper if they too are of a libellous or denigratory nature. You have been warned.

Yours sincerely,

Richard North (Dr)

More Amazonian knockabout

The Amazongate story looks as though it may run for a considerable time. We have had, in rapid succession, a crowing article from George Monbiot, a fighting response from Delingpole and now articles from Booker in the Telegraph and North on EU Referendum.

It seems clear that the Sunday Times withdrew its article without a adjudication being made - it's not on the PCC's list of cases adjudicated and Monbiot says that the ST withdrew the article in order to avoid an adverse ruling. Strangely though, the case doesn't appear in the list of cases resolved - i.e. negotiated settlements - either.

The more interesting questions are the ones raised by Booker and North though. Just where did the IPCC's claim that 40% of the Amazon was at risk from climate change come from? The original source was a WWF report, which both Monbiot and Booker/North agree shouldn't have been used. Monbiot says however that the claim was indeed based on the peer-reviewed literature:

The projection was drawn from a series of scientific papers by specialists in this field, published in peer-reviewed journals, some of which are referenced in the first section of the IPCC's 2007 report (pdf).

Now this should be enough to set the alarm bells ringing - Monbiot appears to be saying, in essence, that the correct citations are in the WG1 report somewhere. But where? He links to one chapter of WG1, when the dispute is about a statement made in the WG2 report. And which paper or papers is he actually citing?

This skirting round the question of the actual papers that support the allegation that 40% of the Amazon is at risk from climate change suggests strongly that there are none. What is more one is tempted to conclude that George Monbiot knows it.

Update on Jun 27, 2010 by Bishop Hill

Shub Niggurath examines the evolution of the 40% claim through the different drafts of the IPCC report. This is very interesting, showing how the words "react sensibly" became "react drastically", apparently at the instigation of a reviewer from...wait for it...UEA. The problem is that "react sensibly" referred to precipitation-led change, while the reviewer's comments referred to fire-driven change.

Willis Eschenbach has an interesting piece at WUWT as well.