Josh 23 - the battle of Amazongate

More cartoons by Josh here.

Sea-ice modellers open up?

An article in Wired magazine recounts how sea-ice modellers are sharing data and methods and are learning from each other in the process. It's not obvious whether the sea-ice community have actually made their data and code open to the world or whether this is just a case of sharing within the community, but it's a step forwards at least.

It's also nice to see Mark Serreze apologising for his role in stirring up scare stories in 2007:

"In hindsight, probably too much was read into 2007, and I would take some blame for that,” Serreze said. “There were so many of us that were astounded by what happened, and maybe we read too much into it.”

If climatologists are now going to eschew scaremongering then that is certainly welcome. It's therefore a pity that the Wired reporter, Alexis Madrigal, begins the piece with the obligatory reference to "record low levels of sea ice in the Arctic". It's not that she's wrong, but just a few months ago sea ice levels were higher than they have been for years, and the more representative global sea ice levels are actually currently above their long-term average.

Climate panel in crisis

This is a translation of an article in the Norwegian newspaper Forskning. The original article was by Bjørnar Kjensli and the machine translation was tidied and corrected by readers Messenger and Geir Hasnes.


A German climate researcher says that people are beginning to lose faith in climate research, pointing to the IPPC as one of the main causes. Norwegian IPCC veterans disagree about what the organization should do about it.

Click to read more ...

IPCC in trouble again

Donna Laframboise has discovered that the IPCC cited the Stern report no less than 26 times, even though the report had missed the cut off date for inclusion by some distance. In fact pretty much every rule in the book seems to have been trampled in the IPCC's haste to get Lord Stern's parvum opus included.

The conclusion here isn't pretty: by citing the Stern Review, the IPPC broke not one, not two, but three of its own rules. First, it had to deliberately overlook the fact that this document is not peer-reviewed...

Second, it had to violate the published-before-January-2006 rule about which Pachauri recently reminded us.

Third, it had to subvert its own requirement that text in the IPCC report be subject to two rounds of expert review.

Are we impressed yet?

The IPCC might have been breathing easy after the lack of any new 'gates for them to be criticised over. Looks like there may be a whole new wave of criticism coming.

It's the climate, innit?

Matt Ridley:

A scientist does a study of how Arctic seabirds die. It's not a bad idea: die they do, but not from the usual diseases and predators that kill birds in more temperate zones. So what does kill them?

He pores over thousands of records from birdwatchers in the Arctic and concludes that weather-related events kill a lot of them. Fulmars run into cliffs in fog, Murres get buried in landslides when cliffs collapse. Birds get swept away in storms. And so on.

Now the scientist has two options. He can say in a paper that a lot of Arctic birds die due to `factors related to weather' and bask in perpetual obscurity. Or he can slip in, just before the word `weather', the phrase `climate and'...

Read the whole thing.

Lovelock, AGW and democracy

James Lovelock in the Guardian

One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is "modern democracy", he added. "Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while."

Update on Mar 29, 2010 by Bishop Hill

The full transcript is here. It will make painful reading for AGW proponents.

On rainforest sensitivity

A couple of days ago, I posted on the news that Dr Simon Lewis, a rainforest expert from the University of Leeds, has filed a complaint about an article written by Jonathan Leake at the Sunday Times. Leake's article concerned the IPCC's use of "grey" literature to support a claim that the Amazon is very sensitive to drops in rainfall and that as much as 40% was in danger of being wiped out by small reductions in precipitation.

Click to read more ...

Climategate and storms

TonyN at Harmless Sky has a new story based on the Climategate emails. He shows how IPCC authors struggled to give the impression that storms were becoming more severe when the evidence showed that the opposite was true.

Take a look.

Simon Lewis and the PCC

The Guardian reports that Dr Simon Lewis, an expert in tropical rain forests from the University of Leeds, has made a formal complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about Jonathan Leake's Amazongate article in the Sunday Times.

Leake's article said that the IPCC had reported that 40% of the Amazonian rainforest was very sensitive to changes in rainfall and might therefore be wiped out by global warming. Leake observed that this claim was based on a WWF report that cited in turn a Nature paper that had nothing to do with rainfall.

Click to read more ...

Myles Allen's ad hominem

Reader DR sends these notes from A Meeting on Sustainability at the University of Oxford

'What can be said about future climate? Using observations to constrain the forecast and the implications for climate policy.'

Myles Allen introduced himself as a member of an endangered species, a climate scientist. He agreed that energy measures will be needed regardless of climate change, but wanted to argue that climate change is important. He said that climate scientists have recently been faced by many questions, both from sceptics and from the policy community, and said that most people are asking the wrong questions. It is clear, he said, that CO₂ is rising and temperatures are trending upwards.

Click to read more ...

Sir John Houghton in the Times

Sir John Houghton is the former head of IPCC WG1 and also key figure in the story of the Hockey Stick's use as a promotional tool. He has been given some space in the Times today, in which he seeks to defend the integrity of his creation and the honour of climalogists in general.

It's well worth a read, but it's amusing to note that he accepts the glaciergate errors, which you will remember involved the use of claims from a WWF report. At the same time Sir John also claims that:

...a report from Greenpeace or any other campaigning body would not be included because the science would not be considered robust enough.

Whoops.

There are also some interesting claims about the recent lack of warming being a function of El Nino and natural variation. Lucia might have something to say aon thios subject.

The Register on hurricanes

The Register covers an interesting piece in which a researcher analyses the IPCC's claims on hurricanes and compares them to the data. They don't seem to match up.

Well worth a read.

Lacis at Dot Earth

Andrew Lacis has thoughts on the wisdom or otherwise of his comments on IPCC WG2 Ch9 FOD (must be precise about what I'm talking about!) over at Dot Earth.

More IPCC findings

Fact checking the IPCC, particularly WG2 is providing a rich source of material for climate bloggers. Jeff ID has been looking at some claims made about wildfires in British Columbia and finds that the citations are to two newspaper articles and a tourism newsletter. There is also some doubt as to whether the citations actually support the claims made.

Meanwhile Climategate.com reports on some interesting findings about NASA/GISS's adjustments to temperatures in Australia. The "f" word is used.

Calls for Pachauri to go are growing.

Climate Resistance on catastrophism

The Climate Resistance blog has a brilliant analysis of the mess that climate catastrophists, particularly those at the Guardian, have got themselves into.

But now we see that WGII has – much as Adam has – credulously taken ‘the science’ from wherever it could be found to support the presupposition of catastrophe. The WGII report had taken it from Fred Pearce’s New Scientist article, via a WWF report. Adam had taken his headlines from the scariest of the hundreds of posters presented at the Copenhagen meeting that had worked from assumptions about ‘emissions scenarios’ – projections – towards catastrophic stories about possible outcomes. And he had used it to make a political argument for ‘action’, seemingly in the voice of ’science’. Science spoke with one voice to Adam last March. This February it is fractured, and Adam cannot make sense of it.