The snail paper

Readers who have been following the saga of the extinction and resurrection of the Aldabra banded snail will be interested in this posting. As you no doubt recall, the snail was declared exctinct by researcher Justin Gerlach in 2007. His findings were hotly contested by another expert in the area, Oxford's Clive Hambler.

In their wisdom, the Royal Society, who had published Dr Gerlach's original paper decided that the rebuttal should not see the light of day, a decision that turned out to be a bit of a problem when the snail was rediscovered a few months ago. Dr Hambler has now published the rejected manuscript on his website and I have to say it makes rather interesting reading.

Click to read more ...

Climate models and rainfall

I have a new briefing paper out at GWPF looking at the question of rainfall, flood and global warming. Here's the press release:

London, 10 October: A new briefing paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation reviews the scientific literature on rainfall and floods and finds little evidence that there have been significant changes in recent years and little support for claims that they will become worse in future.

Despite claims to the contrary, there has been no significant change in rainfall trends in recent years both at global and UK levels. It remains very difficult to make strong claims about any changes there have been because of high natural variability in rainfall patterns, particularly in the UK.

Rainfall is a particularly difficult area for climate models, which have limited ability to recreate what is seen in the real world. Since these climate models are the main basis of claims that extreme rainfall and flooding events are being adversely affected by man-made global warming and that rainfall will become worse in the future, policymakers should treat such modelling with extreme caution.

Author Andrew Montford said, “We are constantly bombarded with insinuations that storms and floods are caused by or ‘linked to’ climate change.”

“In reality these claims are usually based on climate models, which have a demonstrable inability to tell us anything reliable about rainfall. The scientific evidence shows that a simple extrapolation of rainfall averages over time can give better rainfall predictions than climate models,” he added.

Here's the paper.

Ecoaudit does the sea ice

Karl Mathieson, the journalist who replaced Leo Hickman on the Guardian's ecoaudit thread seems to be doing a good job of raising interesting questions. I'm not sure the readership are quite living up to the premise of the thread, namely that they should provide scientific insights into the questions asked, but you can't say that Mathieson isn't trying.

Yesterday he raised the irritating - for climate modellers at least - question of the Antarctic sea ice and his article has several interesting points. Not least of which was this:

Dr Claire Parkinson, a senior scientist at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, says increasing Antarctic ice does not contradict the general warming trend. Overall the Earth is losing sea ice at a rate of 35,000 sq km per year (13,514 sq miles).

If one looks at the graph of global sea ice area, I can imagine that a straight line fit through the record might have a weeny bit of a downwards trend. A loss of 35000 km² out of something like 19 million km² is, however, only a loss of 0.1% per year; and given that sea ice is currently above its long term average, it would be presumptious to suggest that this is anything other than natural variability. I would say that therefore that it does contradict the general warming trend.

Walrus inconsistencies

Updated on Oct 3, 2014 by Bishop Hill

The story of the Point Lay walrus haulout continues to provoke a great deal of interest. Today the reins have been taken up by Climate Progress, who have got hold of walrus expert Tony Fischbach, who wants us all to know that what we are seeing is new:

Under historical conditions, there has always been sea ice over the Chukchi Sea over the summer...This is a real change that we see thousands and tens of thousands of animals coming to shore and resting together in these large haul-outs.

Click to read more ...

Oh Godlee

Fiona Godlee has an editorial in the British Medical Journal on the subject of climate change (£, but free trial is available). It begins with a defence of the journal's climate campaigner position and moves on to discuss some of the science. For example:

The IPCC reports that it is highly likely that global warming is causing climate change, characterised by more frequent and intense temperature extremes, heavier rainfall events, and other extreme weather events.

Click to read more ...

Off target

Anthony reproduces a Nature editorial that suggests that nations should abandon the 2°C target that has allegedly focused political responses to global warming in recent years.

Bold simplicity must now face reality. Politically and scientifically, the 2°C goal is wrong-headed. Politically, it has allowed some governments to pretend that they are taking serious action to mitigate global warming, when in reality they have achieved almost nothing. Scientifically, there are better ways to measure the stress that humans are placing on the climate system than the growth of average global surface temperature — which has stalled since 1998 and is poorly coupled to entities that governments and companies can control directly.

Click to read more ...

The credibility of the Royal

The Royal Society seems to have got itself into a bit of a pickle over an article it published back in 2007, which claimed that a rare snail in the Seychelles had been forced into extinction, a later paper claiming that this was due to climate change.

After the original claim was made, a rebuttal was issued, which the Royal Society refused to publish.

Now, it seems the snail in question has been rediscovered.

But the Royal Society is still refusing to publish the rebuttal because it is now seven years old.

Correcting the record is for wimps, it seems.

IPPR does climate and energy

A reader brought to my attention a new report on climate and energy policy by Labour's favourite thinktank, the IPPR.

The report was funded by the European Climate Foundation, with a steering group including represenatatives of green NGOs like Greenpeace and renewable energy investors like BNEF. With a background like that, nobody would expect that the report would make lots of dodgy claims and thinly veiled demands for transfers of money to those involved, would they? Readers can make up their own minds, but here are a few things that I noticed:

Click to read more ...

In retwardian, "grossly misleading" means "correct"

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:

Click to read more ...

Oi, Lord Stern! Your boy took one hell of a beating

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.

The science of flooding

Anthony has an interesting report about a new paper that finds that increased flooding is mostly due to increased exposure - in other words that we are building homes closer to rivers than before. Flooding is therefore yet another area in which an impact from the warming at the end of last century is yet to be demonstrated.

Is there any justification for the kind of ambulance chasing exhibited by the Committee on Climate Change, for example this little gem from Lord Deben?

I hope floods will cause pause among dismissers. Can't forget "some woman Slingo" It revealed contempt they have for science.

Click to read more ...

Heroic projections

Updated on Aug 18, 2014 by Bishop Hill

The Responding to Climate Change website has one of the perennial "climate change impacts on exotic south seas island" stories today. This time it's about the Solomon Islands.

A small community in the Solomon Islands is preparing to relocate entirely to a neighbouring island, as the pressures of climate change threaten to overwhelm the town and its inhabitants.

As usual, the link to climate change is a complete fabrication, as the author of the piece notes that the plan was prompted by the 2007 tsunami.

I particularly enjoyed this bit:

The Solomon Islands, along with other small island nations in the Pacific, are among the most vulnerable to climate change. Since 1993, the sea level around the islands has been rising by about 8mm every year – three times faster than the global average.

Click to read more ...

Another bind for Bob Bind

...all the projections of climate models are becoming observable facts.

So says Bob Bindschadler, a retired NASA ice sheet specialist. Stop sniggering at the back.

Readers may recall Dr Bindschadler from his 2011 appearance in Horizon, when he got himself into a bit of a pickle over the relative ratios of anthropogenic and natural carbon dioxide emissions.

This new quote, remarkable as it is, comes from a long interview in a publication called Truthout (a title that is vaguely reminiscent of 'Pravda' in my opinion). The whole article is worth a read, covering Dr Bindschadler's knicker-wetting over sea levels in the twenty-third century, his cruise to the Antarctic with James Hansen and Al Gore, and his excitement over changes to glaciers in Antarctica in recent years. In view of his problems during his Horizon appearance I was also amused by this photo caption:

Bindschadler believes one of the things scientists must learn to do better is communicate the information they produce.

Amen.

Glacier loss of plot

This morning's must-read scientific paper comes from Science, where a team from the University of Insbruck led by Ben Marzeion has been looking at glacier recession. The results seem to have pleased the green fraternity, and a glance at the abstract shows why:

The ongoing global glacier retreat is affecting human societies by causing sea-level rise, changing seasonal water availability, and increasing geohazards. Melting glaciers are an icon of anthropogenic climate change. However, glacier response times are typically decades or longer, which implies that the present-day glacier retreat is a mixed response to past and current natural climate variability and current anthropogenic forcing. Here we show that only 25 ± 35% of the global glacier mass loss during the period from 1851 to 2010 is attributable to anthropogenic causes. Nevertheless, the anthropogenic signal is detectable with high confidence in glacier mass balance observations during 1991 to 2010, and the anthropogenic fraction of global glacier mass loss during that period has increased to 69 ± 24%.

Click to read more ...

Reading climate articles backwards

Updated on Aug 12, 2014 by Bishop Hill

It's often said that canny users of financial accounts read them from back to front. Disreputable managers hide the problems away in the last few notes to the balance sheet, out of the view of anyone who chooses merely to glance at the profit and loss account.

This is probably a good approach to newspaper articles about climate change too, Steve Connor's latest offering in the Independent being a case in point. Were you to read only the headline you would come away with the impression that:

Rapid rise in Arctic temperatures to blame for world’s extreme weather

Click to read more ...