Dealing with dissentients

Hot on the heels of the news that global warming activists have been writing articles for the BBC comes the news that uber-global-warming-monger James Hansen of NASA has been trying to pressurise a publisher into making changes to a textbook to bring it into line with his own opinions.

He's been using his official position and official notepaper to do this, so he's opened himself up to accusations that he's abusing his position. It's not the first time either. 

Cold weather due to global warming

Economist Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, has a bizarre position on the recent cold weather around the world.

[B]ad weather, especially the Australian drought, is probably related to climate change. So politicians and governments that have stood in the way of action on greenhouse gases bear some responsibility for food shortages.

Except that a lot of the crop failures have been due to cold weather. And anybody who has looked at the climate change issue for longer than thirty seconds knows you can't blame short-term weather fluctuations on climate change anyway. He's really just showing that he's a talking head rather than someone who has looked at the issues.

Jeepers. This is supposed to be one of the great American eminences grises.
 

Hansen the hysterical

Hansen the hysterical is at it again, his latest pronouncement of doom getting full play on the pages of the Guardian.

One of the world's leading climate scientists warns today that the EU and its international partners must urgently rethink targets for cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of fears they have grossly underestimated the scale of the problem.

There is nothing new here, just a need to counter recent stories about global temperatures flatlining and a growing public awareness that the facts and the rhetoric are out of kilter with each other.

The only useful bit of apocalyptic news for the alarmists in recent weeks has been a bit of the West Antarctic peninsula breaking off, so the story is wheeled out, yet again.

Satellite technology available over the past three years has shown that the ice sheets are melting much faster than expected, with Greenland and west Antarctica both losing mass.

As many people now realise, West Antarctica is a pensinsula which sticks out from the continent - it's not representative of the region as a whole. In fact the continent as a whole has been cooling for years, and it has been putting on mass rather than losing it. This NASA picture shows the cooling trend for 1982 to 2003 over the continent. Blue is cooling:

 

I do wonder when they are going to start being straight with us.

Any economists out there?

The other day I was flicking idly through the channels on the telly when I chanced upon BBC Parliament, which was showing recorded coverage of Adair Turner's evidence to the Environment Food and Rural Affairs Committee. This is not something any self-respecting citizen should be watching, of course, but  it represented a welcome respite from the children.

During his evidence, Lord Turner said something which appeared to my untutored ear to be a load of old codswallop. He seemed to be saying that the Stern review had stated that reducing carbon emissions by 60 - 80 % would only reduce GDP by 2.5% - ie a one-off hit of 2.5%. On the face of it, this is highly implausible, but it none of the MPs picked him up on it. I made a note to look into it when I got the chance.

I've now located the transcript. While it's uncorrected, what I read there is pretty much as I recall from the television. This is what he said:

I think there is a very compelling case which is set out in Lord Stern's report and other reports that the developed, rich economies, and ultimately the whole world, can run on a fraction of the carbon emissions that they have at the moment. They can reduce it by 60 or 80 per cent from present per capita levels in, for instance, Europe, and the estimates that he produced are that the cost of that might be between minus 0.5 per cent, ie you do a set of things and we are actually better off at the end of the day, through to plus 2.5 per cent, ie we do all these things and the GDP in 2050 and ever thereafter is 2.5 per cent below what it would otherwise be but, as I made the point earlier, that simply means that you have slipped by a year the rate of increase.

[Emphasis mine] Can this possibly be right? Doesn't he mean that the rate of growth in GDP will be 2.5% less than it would have been otherwise?

Here is an excerpt from the conclusions of the Stern Review:

This is a major challenge, but sustained long-term action can achieve it at costs that are low in comparison to the risks of inaction. Central estimates of the annual costs of achieving stabilisation between 500 and 550ppm CO2e are around 1% of global GDP, if we start to take strong action now.

[Again, emphasis added]. This looks pretty damning to me, but I'd prefer a trained economist to confirm that I'm understanding this correctly.

Mind you, Lord Turner is a trained economist too (as he states elsewhere in his evidence). If he has got it wrong, I'm not sure what excuses might be available to him.

Sir David King flounces out

There's a lovely anecdote doing the rounds of climate sceptic blogs about Sir David King, the climate alarmist and former chief scientific adviser to the British government.

It seems that President Putin asked some of his leading scientists to meet Sir David when he went to Moscow as part of the entourage of the foreign secretary. King apparently launched into his standard spiel about how we're all going to fry, but was a bit taken aback when the assembled scientists told him he was talking rubbish. When they had the temerity to list all the scientific evidence which refuted his claims of impending armageddon, our man was left looking a bit of a ninny and turned on his heels and stormed out of the room.

The story is doubly interesting because it's related by someone called RCE Wyndham in a letter in which he tells Robin Butler, the master of University College, Oxford, that the college can expect no donations from him this year because the appointment of King to head Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

The letter can be read here.  

More recognition for Climate Audit

The environmental activists at Nature may refuse to link to Climate Audit but this sort of silliness is not universal. As a reader points out to me via email, the University College London Environmental Change Institute not only links to CA from its blogroll, but also carries the full blog as a feed direct to its own pages. Following Steve McIntyre's invitation to address faculty and students at Georgia Tech, this looks like further evidence that the right for sceptical views to be heard is being won.

This recognition is well-deserved, of course, and makes the Climate Audit denialist position of Nature look even sillier than it did before. This will not change their position, of course.

("Climate Audit denialism". I like that.)

H/T to Frederick Colbourne via email. 

A change in the weather?

Maybe it's just me, but I wonder if I sense a change in the global warming debate. Perhaps this has been prompted by the sudden dramatic fall in the global temperature - a drop in the last month big enough to wipe out the putative warming of the last century.

A few things have brought this idea to the fore. A survey conducted by a warmist and a skeptic found that 25 percent of bona-fide climate scientists reckon global warming is overdone. A giant of climatology came out of the closet and said she was sceptical of much of the science. A conference of sceptics wasn't ignored by some of the mainstream media. E-day was a flop. A report found that more informed people were more sceptical of global warming. A prominent warmist blogger agreed that the temperature record contained flaws. McIntyre was invited to speak by climatologists at Georgia Tech.

Of course, I could be deluding myself, but something feels different right now. Maybe it's just spring in the air. 

More on Climate Feedback

The greenies at Nature Climate Feedback are still at it. A little while back a warm snap in the Chinese City of Harbin elicited a breathless article entitled

Ice festival wilts in global warming heat.[We're all doomed!!!!]

Today the news carries reports of major snowfalls in China, large enough to damage crops and affect the food supply. 

And Nature Climate Feedback has a report entitled....

"Largest teach-in ever" focuses US on climate change

Ho hum. 

 

Peter Horrocks and the truth

Some weeks ago I mentioned a posting on the BBC editors blog by Peter Horrocks, the head of BBC news in which he claimed that the BBC did not have a line on "climate change".

BBC News certainly does not have a line on climate change, however the weight of our coverage reflects the fact that there is an increasingly strong (although not overwhelming) weight of scientific opinion in favour of the proposition that climate change is happening and is being largely caused by man.

He also said this:

It is not the BBC's job to lead opinion or proselytise on this or any other subject. However we can make informed judgements and that is what we will continue to do.

This was all said in the context of a proposed "Planet Relief" special - a weekend in which the whole network would be devoted to programmes on global warming. Eventually Planet Relief was pulled from the schedules, as even the BBC thought it would be unable to brush off questions about its partiality.

Now, however, it seems that the corporation are trying to do exactly what Horrocks said they wouldn't do. According to Rifait Jawaid, again on the BBC editors blog, there is to be a new special about the impact of climate change in Bangladesh.

I think James Sales, who I know from my World Service days, has done a great job by single-handedly taking this project to fruition. I'm told that it was James who first mooted the idea of this [...] show to create awareness on climate change amongst the poverty stricken Bangladeshis.

 [My emphasis]

So here we have a programme which seeks to lead opinion among its audience, something which directly contradicts the claims of Peter Horrocks from just a few months ago. Could someone be telling fibs, we wonder?

I've left a comment on Jawaid's blog post, pointing out this apparent anomoly. I wonder if it will be published? 

Fallacio

There is a rather remarkable comment thread over at Real Climate right now. Invited to post rebuttals to a scientific paper which is sceptical of global warming, the commenters have unleashed a vertiable orgy of logical fallacy. They may well have broken the record for the highest number of uses of the genetic fallacy on a single thread.

Don't real scientists do logic any longer? 

More brainwashing

Just last week, news consumers were engulfed in a tsunami of reports about the record minimum in the Artic Sea Ice extent. At around the same time, it was noted firstly that a record maximum extent in Antartic sea ice had also been acheived, but also shortly afterwards, and following a "surprise" adjustment to the figures, that actually the Antarctic maximum hadn't actually been beaten.

So far, so climate science.

Now, and with the lack of explanation familiar to those following the Alice in Wonderland world of climate scientce, all record of the adjustment has been removed from the Cryosphere Today website and, as of Monday, the record appears to have been reinstated.

The MSM have managed not to notice though, so it probably didn't happen.

Brainwashing guidelines

The Government has offered to rewrite the guidance sent to schools with Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth DVD, in order to head off an expected court ruling that the film is politically biased and/or scientifically suspect. It's interesting that they think that this will do the trick for them. They may even be correct. But if the film is genuinely biased or is based on incorrect science, it's surely going to take a bit of explaining as to why it is so vital that every secondary school child in the country sees it.

"This is a pack of lies and propaganda. But it's imperative that you study it carefully".

State education. Gotta love it. 

Welcome, readers from Wilmott.com

To everyone who is visiting from the forums at Wilmott.com, welcome. Please feel free to take a look around. There's a link to the category archives on the right hand side so you can get to all the climate related posts.

If I had to pick a few highlights for you, I'd suggest you try these. They are all written for non-technical readers. As financial readers, you might want to ask yourself whether you'd trust a business with the standards of openness adopted by climate scientists.

What's wrong with the IPCC - a guide for the layman

It's all in the adjustments 

Climate science is not sound science 

The hitchhikers guide to the IPCC 

How to create global warming 

Rejoice! Global warming over!

It was the 85th coldest July since records began! (Out of 349)

The BBC forgot to tell us though. (In fact, just a week ago they were telling us that temperatures are above average)

Should we panic that we're on the threshold of a new ice age yet? 

Update:

I notice that the BBC article claims that the poor weather is due in part to La Niña. Compare to this article: No La Niña this summer, NOAA says.

Keifer Sutherland

Via A Blogassault of Global Warming we learn that...

Keifer Sutherland, a.k.a Jack Bauer, blames all of us for global warming.

Star Kiefer Sutherland has already filmed a public service annoucement which begins: "Global warming is a crime for which we are all guilty!"  While on the set of "24" they plan on being carbon neutral by the end of the season.

Rumours that Sutherland is also going to offset rising sea levels by drinking every bar in Los Angeles dry are apparently without foundation.