There's the science and there's the Vatican science

I was sent a link to this statement by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on the subject of climate change. It's gloriously over the top, as you would expect from something authored by Schellnhuber and Sachs, among others.

This century is on course to witness unprecedented environmental changes. In particular, the projected climate changes or, more appropriately, climate disruptions, when coupled with ongoing massive species extinctions and the destruction of ecosystems, will doubtless leave their indelible marks on both humanity and nature.

Click to read more ...

Silliest climate paper ever?

In what looks to be one of the silliest climate papers known to man, researchers at the University of St Andrews are claiming that the 0.1°C warming in ocean temperatures that is alleged to have been caused by human activity has caused whales to migrate one month earlier than they did 30 years ago.

A long-term study conducted between 1984 and 2010, now published in scientific journal PLoS-ONE, has documented for the first time how whales have adapted to increases in sea surface temperature over recent decades.

The research, conducted with Canadian research body the Mingan Island Cetacean Study, has found that over the 27-year period the whales arrived at feeding grounds on average one day earlier each year, suggesting a remarkable ability to react to small fluctuations in sea temperature.

Remarkable indeed. But not so remarkable as the idea that anyone would take this nonsense seriously.

Diary dates, sea ice edition

The BBC's Costing the Earth show is going to look at the sea ice next week in show that will feature Mike Hulme, Helen Czerski and Mark Lynas. I'm not entirely sure that this is a group of people that will shed a lot of light on the matter. Expect lots of hypothesis dressed up as "fact" and speculation flouncing around the place pretending to be probability.

I'm sure it will be entertaining though.

With arctic sea ice shrinking and Antarctic sea ice growing, Tom Heap asks what is happening to the climate.

Click to read more ...

Did Catherine duck?

Today's New Scientist article by Catherine Brahic on the subject of climate change and healthcare is a bit odd. Under a headline about "the rising threat of climate change", Brahic begins by describing the single-degree rise in temperatures since the 1960s....

Average UK temperatures have been rising by about 0.25 °C a decade since the 1960s

...although skipping over the fall in the average since the end of the last century. She then elides straight into the obligatory, uncaveated scaremongering about what GCMs say is going to happen in the future before moving swiftly on to "death rates go up in heatwaves" and the obligatory failure to mention what happens to cold-related deaths.

Click to read more ...

The climate scare overturning circulation

Anthony is having lots of fun with the latest scare paper that is doing the rounds of the media, which tries to breathe life into the somewhat hackneyed "ocean currents are about to halt" scare.

Published by Nature and with a team including Mann and Rutherford, you know the paper's entertainment value is going to be high and the authors certainly don't let us down, declaring on the basis of a proxy study (!) that ocean currents in the Atlantic are slowing down and everything is worse than we thought. But as Anthony points out, this is a stark contrast with an earlier observational paper by Rossby et al that found no evidence of any slowing at all. In fact there's a bit of a mystery here:

Click to read more ...

National Trust wants to clearcut North American forests

Dame Helen Ghosh, the former Whitehall bureaucrat who now runs the National Trust, was on the Today programme this morning explaining why climate change is the biggest threat to the Trust's work.

Pressed to explain herself, Dame Helen had almost nothing to justify her position, apart from a suggestion that the Trust likes to address the issues of the day. This came across to me as saying "we just jump on any passing bandwagon, it's good for business".

She did mumble something about declines in house sparrow and hedgehog populations. Unfortunately for this case, the fall in sparrow numbers appears to be due to changes in farming practices, to cats, and to pesticides, and in hedgehog numbers because of habitat loss. Dame Helen is therefore engaging in some pretty misleading scaremongering on the climate front.

When pressed on whether people should stop burning fossil fuels she again waffled, before saying that the Trust was going to be getting most of its energy from renewables. Interestingly, she didn't mention windfarms, no doubt because she might have been hammered on the "desecration of the uplands" front (although on the BBC she would presumably have been safe enough). Instead she spoke of hydro schemes and biomass boilers.

Given that wood pellets are being imported from North American forests that are clearcut for the purpose, this does seem quite a strange policy for the National Trust to adopt. Is this really what the National Trust wants to see happening?

Words and deeds

The Daily Caller is reporting that President Obama may just have bought himself a beachfront mansion in Hawaii. This is very nice for him, but a bit unfortunate since for several years the great man has been warning  that the USA is in imminent danger from sea-level rises.

In his 2015 State of the Union speech, Obama said “we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods.”

In 2013, Obama said that “seas will slowly keep rising and storms will get more severe, based on the science” — one of the reasons why he’s imposing regulations on carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants.

It's like Al Gore all over again. The words says one thing and the deeds say something else entirely.

Lock up your daughters

A new entry for the now-legendary warmlist is brought to us today. You may have thought that climate change was just going to make the weather warmer, but according to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the world is going to be awash with teenage prostitutes if we carry on the way we are:

While recent research shows that women and children deserve special attention in climate change legislation, “girls often fall out between both camps,” according to Kanwal Ahluwalia, a co-author of the study and an expert in gender-equality policy with Plan UK, a children’s charity.

In many countries, women’s relatively stifled freedoms put them in harm’s way when it comes to climate change, she said.

Climate change “very clearly exacerbates those inequalities,” Ahluwalia said. “We’ve seen time after time how women and girls are affected disproportionately.”

Lock up your daughters, here comes the climate change.

Royal extremism

The Royal Society's policy people are working hard on their carbon footprints, jetting off to a conference in Sendai, Japan on the subject of disaster risk reduction, with particular reference to weather events.

Weather disasters are a bit of a theme in Carlton House Gardens at the moment. In the last few days the society has also produced a policy statement on the subject, which called for a top-down approach based on central planning and target-setting. Vorsprung durch Sozialismus! There was also a report at the end of last year.

Throughout all of these documents there is a sly elision of weather and climate. If you go back to the announcement of last year's report you will read:

Click to read more ...

The BBC: an advertising agency for greens

Once again demonstrating the curious ability of environmental NGOs to get their press releases reported by the BBC, the corporation has today decided that the big news on the science front are claims issued by a US green group called the World Resources Institute. According to the BBC:

The number of people affected by river flooding worldwide could nearly triple in the next 15 years, analysis shows.

Climate change and population growth are driving the increase, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI).

In the UK, about 76,000 people a year could be at risk of being affected by flooding if defences aren't improved, it says.

Click to read more ...

How wrong can the Guardian be?

Less food for more people on a hotter, drier Earth. How can we work to avoid this future?

That's the standfirst on the Guardian's editorial on food security this morning, introducing a more-than-usually daft dose of apocalytic predictions from the once-great journal. You know the kind of thing:

The big heat has yet to arrive. It will be catastrophic.

I'm struggling with their idea that the world is going to get drier. I thought it was supposed to be basic thermodynamics that greenhouse warming is going to produce more water vapour and therefore more rain? Anyone would think that the Guardian was just making up fairy stories for the entertainment of their readers.

This impression is confirmed elsewhere in the editorial, which makes it fairly clear that it is written as a trailer for the Paris climate conference. Also as part of the apparent push is a new paper cited by the Graun that claims to find a link between recent temperatures in Europe and stagnation of grain yields. Doug Keenan will no doubt be interested in its claim that there has been statistically significant warming in Europe in recent years. Watchers of the scientivist movement will be intrigued to see that the paper is edited by Ben Santer. Quite what a climate modeller is doing involved in a statistical analysis of crop yields is anyone's guess.

I also noted the use of "business as usual" with respect to the concentration pathways underlying the predictions of 4 degree warming. This is of course not true, but that has rarely concerned the Guardian.  Tim Worstall is similarly unimpressed with the treatment of emissions and CO2 concentrations, but for different reasons.

So in summary, Guardian editorial is drivel.

It's not really news is it?

International Polar Bear Day

Today is International Polar Bear Day 2015 and, according to a new GWPF briefing paper, this should be the occasion for considerable quantities of champagne being consumed. This is because polar bears are doing just fine:

On almost every measure, things are looking good for polar bears. Scientists are finding that they are well distributed throughout their range and adapting well to changes in sea ice. Health indicators are good and they are benefiting from abundant prey. It really is time for the doom and gloom about polar bears to stop.

Of course in green circles this success story is brushed under the carpet and what should be a day of celebration becomes a day for morbid calls for action on climate change and, no doubt, the remodelling of the capitalist economy.

But at the end of the day, I think people are going to notice that the bears seem to be doing rather well, and that this represents another failed prediction of the scientivist community.

The Oz guide to climate change

In the wake of the Royal Society's recent quick guide to climate change, the Australian Academy has produced their own newbies' guide which can be seen here.

It contains some interesting bits and bobs, for example this bit on extreme rainfall.

Heavy rainfall events have intensified over most land areas and will likely continue to do so, but changes are expected to vary by region.

Click to read more ...

A shameful lecture in St Andrews

Anthony leads this morning with a report about a new study from the University of Minnesota, which shows that a third of crop yield variability is down to changes in climate, although it's not clear to me if they really mean climate or if they actually mean weather.

By coincidence I was in St Andrews last night for a lecture on the subject of climate change and food security given by David Battisti of the University of Washington, currently on a sabbatical in Scotland funded by the Carnegie Trust. A part of his duties appears to be to travel around Scottish universities doing public relations for the green movement by talking about food security. As far as I can see from his publications, this is not actually Prof Battisti's specialism, so the description as PR is not unwarranted.

There was a good turnout for the event last night - with the lecture theatre almost all full with a mixture of green-minded students and green-minded townsfolk. The principal did the introduction, suggesting a degree of importance was attached to the occasion.

Click to read more ...

The unintended consequences of climate change policy

I have a new paper out at GWPF, looking at the unintended consequences of climate change policy. This has been a long time in gestation, but I have to say I'm pretty pleased with the results. Those promoting climate change alarm should really be ashamed of themselves.

London, 19 January: A new paper by Andrew Montford and published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation examines the unintended consequences of climate change policy around the world.

We are constantly told about the risks of what climate change might bring in the distant future. In response, governments have adopted a series of policy measures that have been largely ineffective but have brought with them a bewildering array of unintended consequences.

From the destruction of the landscape wrought by windfarms, to the graft and corruption that has been introduced by the carbon markets, to the disastrous promotion of biofuels, carbon mitigation policies have brought chaos in their wake.

The new paper surveys some of the key policy measures, reviewing the unintended consequences for both the UK and the rest of the world. Mr Montford is a prominent writer on climate change and energy policy and has appeared many times in the media.

“The most shameful aspect of the developed world’s rush to implement climate change mitigation policies is that they have often been justified by reference to ethics. Yet the results have been the very opposite of ethical.” said Mr Montford.

“Andrew Montford has reviewed the sad truth about various schemes to ‘save the planet’ from the demonized but life-giving gas CO2: from bird-killing windmills, native peoples expelled from their ancestral lands, to fraud in the trading of carbon credits. Every thinking citizen of the planet should read this,” said William Happer, Professor of Physics at Princeton University.