Pick a paragraph

This was a little experiment that turned up some interesting results. The idea was to pick a paragraph from the IPCC reports and look at its provenance, just to see if anything interesting turned up. It did.

Unfortunately it turned up so much, that I've decided only to analyse the first sentence of the paragraph. I've got a life you know.

Here's the paragraph. It's from WG2, Chapter 10, and its the start of section 10.2.4.1 which is about the effects of climate change on food production.

Click to read more ...

Has Global Warming increased the toll of disasters?

This report on the debate between Pielke Jnr, Ward and Muir-Wood at the Royal Institution is by Josh, the cartoonist whose work has been adorning this site recently.

The Royal Institution has all the academic grandeur you would expect but its decor is up to date and, in a word, posh. The RI website reassuringly says "..although this event is held on a Friday...there is no dress code". The discussion was held in their old lecture theatre, with its steep seats and kitted out with excellent sound, projectors, and very comfy seats. You could imagine the room hearing Michael Faraday 150 years ago - this time it was Roger Pielke Jr.

I am a scientific and medical artist and the notes I take are visual, usually in the form of cartoons, a few of which I include here. This post will just be some overall impressions of the evening as you can listen to all the finer points on the RI website.

James Renderson chaired what was billed as a 'debate'. He got off to a bad start.

Click to read more ...

Newsnight turns

BBC's flagship current affairs programme, Newsnight, had climate change as its headline news tonight, with an interesting piece about a largely unnamed group of scientists meeting in the UK to discuss what to do with climate science, an interview with Doug Keenan, and a television debate between Chris Field, head of IPCC WGII, and Roger Pielke Jnr.

Good stuff, but probably not viewable outside the UK.

Update on Feb 3, 2010 by Bishop Hill

Roger's take on the head to head with Field is here.

The IPCC's favourite source

Canadian blogger Donna Laframboise wondered just how many times the IPCC had cited the World Wildlife Fund in its report. The answer is quite a lot!

Pachauri says he's staying

IBN LIVE: Rajendra Pachauri, president of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on Saturday said he would not quit over the IPCC blunder of saying that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035.

IPCC and WWF statements on glaciers

In separate statements of regret and remorse, the IPCC and World Wildlife Fund have confessed to their parts in getting unsupported statements about disappearing glaciers into the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report.

The IPCC refer in their press release to "poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers" to which one might be tempted to add the words "not credible in the first place".

The reason for the lapse was, apparently, non-adherence to IPCC rules:

In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly. The Chair, Vice-Chairs, and Co-chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance. This episode demonstrates that the quality of the assessment depends on absolute adherence to the IPCC standards, including thorough review of “the quality and validity of each source before incorporating results from the source into an IPCC Report” 3. We reaffirm our strong commitment to ensuring this level of performance.

This is an interesting admission, particularly for me, having just written a book that touches on several issues of failings in IPCC procedures and unbalanced statements finding their way into IPCC reports.

Meanwhile, WWF are also very sorry:

At the time the WWF report was issued, we believed the source of the statement to be reliable and accurate. 

We regret any confusion caused by our role in repeating the erroneous quote in the 2005 report and in subsequent publications and statements. 

As the world’s leading science-based conservation organisation, WWF is strongly committed to ensuring the information we provide to the public is thoroughly reviewed to meet the highest standards of accuracy.

Update on Jan 20, 2010 by Bishop Hill

Oops! On the same lines, Roger Pielke Jnr has posted a particularly egregious example of IPCC authors simply making things up. When a reviewer thought that Pielke Jnr's views should be sought on a question of hurricane damage in the USA, instead of actually asking him, the chapter authors simply inserted a statement as follows:

I believe Pielke agrees that adding 2004 and 2005 has the potential to change his earlier conclusions – at least about the absence of a trend in US Cat losses.

What makes their error even worse was that Pielke had previously made it clear that he believed no such thing.

This looks very bad.

It wasn't me guv!

Courtesy of the Hindustan Times we learn that Syed Hasnain, the glaciologist who was said to have been the source of the "glaciers gone by 2035" story, is now denying ever having said those words.

The man blamed so far for the false alarm about the Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 surfaced on Tuesday to say he never made such an exact assertion and, worse, he had been misquoted.

“On the basis of our research in 1999 I must have said that glaciers in the Central and Eastern Himalayas will lose mass during the next 40/ 50 years at their present rate of decline,” Hasnain told Hindustan Times.

But a date was put to this “approximation”, Hasnain said, by a journalist, Fred Pearce, who quoted him in an article in New Scientist, a respected London-based magazine.

Was Hasnain aware that he had been misquoted? If yes, did he seek a clarification?

Yes, he was aware of the misreporting. And no, he didn’t seek a clarification. “It was not a scientific journal, just a news report. Therefore, I did not ask for a clarification.”

H/T Turning Tide in the comments

Fred Pearce and the glacier story

Climate Resistance has a fascinating post examining the role of New Scientist journalist Fred Pearce in the glacier story and wonders whether such a prolific writer of climate scare books can really have been unaware of the error for all these years.

It is inconceivable that as prolific a writer on the climate as Pearce can be unaware of the influence of his error. It is more than obvious that Pearce has a political agenda that exists prior to ‘the science’ he reports. This prior-ness is something we have emphasised here on Climate Resistance as fundamental to understanding the phenomenon of environmentalism: the disaster scenario is the premise of environmental politics, not the conclusion of environmental science. Once this premise is accepted, so to speak, a priori, the conclusion becomes a given; the ‘science’ is almost immaterial, it merely gives numbers to what is already given.

The plot thickens

Apparently the glacier mistake was known all along, but the IPCC thought it better to say nothing!

Pielke Jnr has the story.

Patchygate update

The momentum over Patchygate seems to be building and has now merged with the parallel furore over the IPCC's glacier story, with Richard North noting that the source of the original story about melting glaciers was a scientist who now works for Pachauri's TERI organisation.

Anthony Watts notes that Pachauri doesn't seem to separate his TERI and his IPCC roles in terms of his email communications either. Roger Pielke Jnr says the whole thing stinks. In the comments to Pielke Jnr's article, the economist Richard Tol makes the first of what is likely to be many calls for Pachauri to resign or be fired.

The furore has garnered huge attention in Pachauri's native India, with environment minister Ramesh claiming vindication of his argument that the IPCC was being alarmist. It's interesting too to read the author's observation that dodgy environmental claims about India seem to have been something of a theme of the past few years, with western governments and environmentalists using faulty evidence to try to push India around.

And Pachauri himself? He has just found another new role for himself, this time as romantic author (!), launching a novel entitled Return to Almora at what sounds like a suitably glittering occasion. I'm not joking by the way.

Intriguing new details on the glacier story

The Hindustan Times has picked up on the glacier story that is proving so embarrassing for Rajendra Pachauri and the IPCC. But as well as repeating the details from the New Scientist and Sunday Times stories, there are a couple of new details.

Firstly, Syed Hasnain, the scientist who made the original claims about the Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035, has gone to ground:

Attempts by Hindustan Times to reach Hasnain failed. His family said he was away and there was no telephone number at which he could be contacted.

I suppose it is a little embarrassing, but hiding from the press does seem like a bit of an overreaction. And surely he has a mobile phone?

The other interesting news is that the IPCC are going to make a statement on glaciers in the coming week:

Pachauri said IPCC would issue a statement on the glaciers “by the middle of this week”.

We will watch with interest.

IPCC glaciers - some explanation

Photo by RichDrogPa under Creative Commons. Hot on the heels of New Scientist's story about how the erroneous Himalayan glacier story found its way from the lips of an Indian Scientist called Syed Hasnain, via the World Wildlife Fund, to the pages of an IPCC report, comes this article from Jonathan Leake in the Sunday Times, which fills in much of the detail. Amazingly, the claim that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 was not even remotely credible in the first place

Professor Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, said: "Even a small glacier such as the Dokriani glacier is up to 120 metres [394ft] thick. A big one would be several hundred metres thick and tens of kilometres long. The average is 300 metres thick so to melt one even at 5 metres a year would take 60 years. That is a lot faster than anything we are seeing now so the idea of losing it all by 2035 is unrealistically high.”

This rather begs the question of how such a remarkable claim managed to pass through the allegedly bulletproof peer review process of the IPCC and the New Scientist journalist, Fred Pearce, is demanding answers. It will be interesting to see if the IPCC deigns to respond.

New Scientist on glaciers

Ten years after publishing some outrageous claims about disappearing glaciers, New Scientist comes clean:

This sudden burst of inquiry from Britain's premier science magazine is certainly welcome. We've had twenty-odd years of, at best dumb acquiescence and at worst dumber cheerleading. What have the New Scientists been thinking of these last two decades?

We are entitled to an explanation too.

Richard Tol on Stern

I'm very pleased to have had a comment by the eminent economist Richard Tol (even it is was to tell me that I was wrong about the Stern Report - the report was still flawed, but not for the reasons I had put forward).

Here's what he says:

Stern managed to focus the discussion about the Stern Review on the discount rate used. The issue is not that Stern argues for a particular discount rate. That is his right as a a citizen of a democratic country. The issue is that he used a single discount rate (without performing a sensitivity analysis) and that he used a discount rate that differs from the discount rate typically used by his own, democratically-elected government. And all without alerting the reader. Stern's use of the discount rate is a clear case of manipulation.

The sloppiness of the Stern Review is perhaps best illustrated with its assessment of an optimal climate policy. (By the way, the Stern Review concludes that the previously formulated long-term target of the UK government is exactly right.) Stern's "optimum" does not meet the first-order conditions. In the optimum, marginal costs should equal marginal benefits. Stern recommends that greenhouse gas concentrations be stabilized at 550 ppm CO2eq, but at that point his (faulty) estimates of marginal costs do not equal his (faulty) estimates of the marginal benefits.

When I pressed him over this, the paraphrased reply was that Newton and Leibnitz are so passe.

The subsequent discussion is very interesting too. In essence Stern is arguing that a philosopher king should tell us what is right, while Tol is making the libertarian case - that ordinary people should choose their own way. Global warming enthusiasts should be clear, both to themselves and to the public they seek to persuade, that this is their intention.

Which brings me back to my original point: Stern should be strongly criticised for not making this clear to his readers, and Ed Stourton, one of the most senior journalists at the BBC should hang his head in shame for precisely the same reason.

Urumqi and the Great Leap Forward

The Graun published a fairly bog-standard global warming scare story the other day. This time it's the melting of a glacier in Western China which is causing alarm, drought, despair and hyperactivity in small children.

The Urumqi No1 Glacier is so named because it was the first icefield to be measured in China. Since 1953, scientists have been monitoring its thickness and length, analysing traces of pollution and tracking changes in temperature at this 3,800-metre altitude. The results leave no room for doubt that this part of the Tian (Heaven) mountain range is melting.

According to the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, the glacier has lost more than 20% of its volume since 1962 as the temperature has increased by almost 1C. And the rate of shrinkage is accelerating. For the first time last year, it was so warm in the summer that rain rather than snow fell on the glacier. A lake formed on the top of the icefield, which is retreating at the rate of nine metres a year.

On a whim, your humble correspondent decided to surf on over to the NASA GISS and download the climate station record for Urumqi. Here it is:

Now, you don't have to look at this graph for very long to realise that what has happened in Urumqi is not the result of a gradual warming of the globe due to industrialisation, but a sudden change in the recorded temperature in 1961, whether caused by a change in station location or a some other factor. In fact, if you download the data, you can time the change in temperature even more precisely - to March 1961. This would suggest that it's a station move.

Secondly, Jonathan Watt's claim that the temperature in Urumqi has increased by 1^oC since 1962 appears incorrect, since the temperature in 2007 is clearly about the same as that in 1962. He may mean 1961, which was 0.8^oC cooler than 2007, but we should note that if you picked 1962 rather than 1961 you would say that current temperatures were lower than ones in the past. Someone who knows how to get the corrected data could perhaps put a trend line on the period 1961 to 2007 to get a more scientific take on what is happening. Using the eyeball method of analysis, you wouldn't say that there was a clear upward trend since 1961. If anything, the opposite.

Intriguingly though, the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s was the period of Mao's Great Leap Forward, the attempt to industrialise China over a single five year plan. So while the sudden jump in 1960 is probably to a station move rather than industrialisation, the thought occurs to me that study of  I wonder if closer study of Chinese temperature history might shed further light on the urban heat island adjustment. One for Anthony Watts to look at, perhaps.

Even more intriguingly, in the same Guardian article, we learn that the Chinese are looking to dismantle local smoke-belching factories.

There are few places in the world where the cause and effect of global warming are so closely juxtaposed. An hour's drive from the glacier, the road passes coal-fired power plants and factories that belch carbon and sulphur into the sky. They were built during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong ordered industry to be shifted into remote areas of the countryside so that it would be harder to target in the event of a war with the Soviet Union.

This "Third Front" policy is now viewed as an environmental disaster. A senior engineer at the Houxia concrete plant says the factory will close within three years because the government recognises the need to reduce emissions and pollution.

So, reading between the lines, could it be that the Chinese are recognising that the problem of glacier melt is caused by local industry rather than any alleged global warming?