Simon Singh's fairy tale

Simon Singh has issued the next installment in his blog series about Fraser Nelson's position on climate change. I am somewhat in awe of this latest display, which is based around the idea that we should make policy decisions assuming a warming of 4°C/century.

Now, as readers here know, the IPCC's last forecasts of a 2°C/century warming are on the cusp of falsification (or even over it, depending how you calculate things), just over ten years since they were issued. Yet here is Dr Singh saying that we should base public policy decisions on the presumption of a warming twice as large!

One doesn't like to be rude, but who on earth bases public policy decisions on hypotheses that are already falsified? 

Who bases life and death decisions on a fairy story?

Update on May 8, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Simon Singh tweets to say he and Fraser agree on the science and have moved on (!) Bob Ward says hi too.

See my Twitter page.

Update on May 8, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Doug Keenan's comment at Dr Singh's blog is interesting. He picks up on Singh's claim that "allowing for uncertainties in the observations, that last three decades have each been significantly warmer than the previous one."

Doug replies:

The quoted statement is false. I had a full-page op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal last month which explained the statistics in layman's terms; see
http://www.informath.org/media/a42.htm
We do not know if there has been a significant warming. And that is regardless of the time span.

I e-mailed Simon Singh about the piece on April 28th. Hence he is presumably aware that what he is stating is false.

The ending is a bit strong, I think. I'm sure Dr Singh gets a lot of fan mail and he has also been on a UK tour for much of the intervening period.  That said, Doug has set out the reasons why he thinks the warming cannot be said to be significant and they certainly seem valid to me. It would be interesting to know if Dr Singh has anything to back up his opposite opinion. I fancy not.

Climate catastrophe deja vu

Sir John Houghton once famously said:

Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.

Except actually he didn't say that. His real words were:

“If we want a good environmental policy in the future we’ll have to have a disaster.”

Now, in an eerie echo of the learned Sir John, we have the words of Robert Stavins, the head of Harvard's Environmental Economics program

It’s unlikely that the U.S. is going to take serious action on climate change until there are observable, dramatic events, almost catastrophic in nature, that drive public opinion and drive the political process in that direction

Cloud of obscurity

Richard Black reports that scientists have got themselves into a bit of a pickle over whether one of their ideas for geoengineering the earth is a good one or not. The proposal being considered is to spray clouds with seawater, which scientists hope will reflect more sunlight back into space cooling our overheated planet.

Well, some scientists anyway. Some think it will actually warm the planet.

Oh dear.

Flannery's admission

Another remarkable interview from Andrew Bolt, this time with top CAGW guy, Tim Flannery. Bolt manages to extract the remarkable admission that nobody will know the effects of emissions cuts for a thousand years.

Flannery: Just let me finish and say this. If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years because the system is overburdened with CO2 that has to be absorbed and that only happens slowly.

Mad? Drugged? Or just civil servants?

Also in the Independent, the simply flabbergasting story that the Environment Agency is proposing airlifting fish from the Lake District up to Scotland, in order to mitigate the effects of global warming.

Fish from the Lake District will be moved to cooler waters in Scotland under radical plans – which will be unveiled this week – aimed at coping with climate change.

Haunting the Library (to whom a hattip is due) wonders if the government are on LSD. It's possible, but I wonder if this is just one of those bureaucratic documents that the minister signs off without reading. The explanation is more likely to just be bureaucrats wanting to expand their empires, and grubbing about for a way of doing so.

Fixing the sky

For centuries, farmers in Austria shot consecrated guns at storms in attempts to dispel them.  Some guns were loaded with nails, ostensibly to kill the witches riding in the clouds; others were fired with powder alone through open empty barrels to make a great noise -- perhaps, some said, to disrupt the electrical balance of the storm.  In 1896, Albert Stiger, a vine rower in southeastern Austria and burgomaster of Windisch-Feistritz, revived the ancient tradition of hagelschiessen (hail shooting)  -- basically declaring "war on the clouds" by firing cannon when storms threatened.  Faced with mounting losses from summer hailstorms that threatened his grapes, he attempted to disrupt, with mortar fire, the "calm before the storm," or what he observed as a strange stillness in the air moments before the onset of heavy summer precipitation.

From the new book, Fixing the Sky, a history of attempts to control weather and climate. H/T Marginal Revolution.

Telegraph letters

Two letters to the Telegraph from familiar faces today. First Bob Ward takes a pot-shot at Booker for questioning the integrity of the Climatic Research Unit.

SIR – Christopher Booker (December 26) claims that emails from the University of East Anglia “showed how the little group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC had been prepared to bend their data and to suppress any dissent from warming orthodoxy”.

Independent inquiries led by the Commons Science and Technology Committee, Sir Muir Russell, Lord Oxburgh, and the US Environmental Protection Agency found such allegations to be untrue.

Mr Booker stated that “much of the northern hemisphere” in 2007 suffered “the winter from hell”. In fact, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the average temperature in the northern hemisphere for the boreal winter in 2007-8 was the 14th highest since records began, and 0.36C above the standard reference average for 1961-90.

He also claimed that the boreal winters in the northern hemisphere in 2008-9 and 2009-10 were “colder still”, when they were, respectively, the 8th and 9th warmest on record.

Bob Ward
Grantham Research Institute
London School of Economics
London WC2

Then Tim Worstall considers yet another piece of government lunacy, this time centred around the recommendations of the Stern report.

SIR – Having read the Stern Review, the various IPCC reports and multitudes of economic papers on what to do about the entire problem, assuming we accept that there is such a problem, it is clear that the policies being recommended by those experts are: a carbon tax, or a cap-and-trade system, or subsidies to new technologies.

All of the economists say the same thing. Any one of the three are viable and whole solutions.

Cap-and-trade limits emissions; a carbon tax provides the incentive to reduce them to the needed level; and subsidies will replace emitting with non-emitting sources of energy.

So now my question: having hired Lord Stern at some expense, having analysed his recommendations at presumably greater, why is the Government now insisting at gargantuan expense in doing what Lord Stern said we should not do?

We only need to choose one of the three – rather than be charged thrice to do all of them.

Tim Worstall
Messines, Portugal

David Henderson on Deutsche Bank

I'd forgotten to post this up a week or so back - David Henderson's article in the Financial Post about Deutsche Bank getting into the political activism game and the questions this should raise for their investors.

For any organization of standing, not least a leading multinational company such as Deutsche Bank, an obvious aspect of responsible conduct is a demonstrated concern for accuracy and the truth. The bank’s management board could now manifest such a concern, first, by commissioning an independent and informed review of this report, and second, by withdrawing and repudiating the report if the review supports McKitrick’s analysis.

There is also Terence Corcoran's take on the same affair.

As Mr. Henderson puts it, the Deutsche report on climate skeptics has been rendered worthless as a guide to the science and for investors. It also betrays a larger issue, which is a corporate role on the part of Deutsche Bank that makes Exxon look like a Boy Scout.

Cancun deal

A number of people have asked for a dedicated thread for discussing the deal at Cancun. I'm out tonight, so behave yourselves while I'm away.

Josh 60

SCOTUS to hear climate case

Via the blog of the Supreme Court of the United States comes the news that the court will hear the appeal by five businesses that have been sued under the law of common nuisance for emitting carbon.

five entities that were claimed to be the largest sources of greenhouse gases — four electric power companies and the Tennessee Valley Authority — were sued by eight states, New York City, and three land conservation groups.  Their lawsuits were filed under the federal common law of nuisance, a judge-made theory.  The Second Circuit agreed that the lawsuit could proceed on that theory.  The case, however, has not yet gone to trial.

When the electric generating companies appealed to the Supreme Court, the Justice Department, speaking for TVA, urged the Supreme Court to send the case back to the Circuit Court for another look instead of ruling on it now.  The Department argued that the EPA was now moving on several fronts to regulate greenhouses gases under the Clean Air Act, so this activity might displace any claims made under common-law theories.  The Court, however, chose on Monday to take on the case itself at this point, presumably with the aim of deciding whether such a nuisance lawsuit may now go forward as a way of attacking global warming.

Nature's take on the story here.

Why four degrees?

There was some interesting engagement between commenters on the Kevin Anderson thread and the good professor himself. Hat tips to all concerned.

My own contribution to the comments was limited - having been snowbound since the weekend, there was a certain amount of merrymaking in the village last night by way of cheering ourselves up. The one comment I did make was to note that a temperature rise of four degrees by 2060 is extremely high in the light of the temperatures observed since the millennium. Prof Anderson's response was to refer commenters to the Phil Trans A special edition that started the thread off.

If we look at the introductory article, by New et al., there is indeed some explanation of why four degrees is considered a number that should be discussed.

The 2009 Copenhagen Accord recognized the scientific view ‘that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius’ despite growing views that this might be too high. At the same time, the continued rise in greenhouse gas emissions in the past decade and the delays in a comprehensive global emissions reduction agreement have made achieving this target extremely difficult, arguably impossible, raising the likelihood of global temperature rises of 3◦C or 4◦C within this century. Yet, there are few studies that assess the potential impacts and consequences of a warming of 4◦C or greater in a systematic manner. Papers in this themed issue provide an initial picture of the challenges facing a world that warms by 4◦C or more...

In other words, we think that CO2 emissions are going to be higher than expected therefore we need to look at higher temperature rises.

But hold on, my point was that 4 degrees by 2060 (perhaps 5 or 6 degrees per century) is high in the light of recent temperature trends. As readers of Lucia's blog know, even a trend of 2 degrees per century is on the cusp of falsification, so 5 or 6 is surely falsified at a very level of confidence.

If the trend is already falsified what is the point of looking at it, other than as part of a PR campaign?

Competing interest?

Updated on Dec 1, 2010 by Bishop Hill

There has been quite a degree of interest in the Louise Gray article in the Telegraph the other day - the one in which we were led to believe that a variety of scientists were calling for a halt to economic growth and the introduction of rationing.

Donna Laframboise is one person who has been taking a look at this story. She notes that Louise Gray is not presenting an accurate picture to her readers:

Click to read more ...

Advancing hard astern

Congratulations to Nicholas Stern who has been awarded the Leontief Prize for "Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought".

Is it just me that thinks that this award is a pretty damning indictment of the corruption of academia?

Report here.

That SciAm survey

The recent Scientific American survey on climatology issues has been widely criticised, and the powers that be at the magazine must be regretting ever launching it now that the results are out. As Climate Change Dispatch reports, 81% think that the IPCC is corrupt and 65% think we should take no action over climate change.