The madness of warming

Philosopher Martin Cohen finds an explanation for the global warming phenomenon in the madness of crowds.

Is belief in global-warming science another example of the "madness of crowds"? That strange but powerful social phenomenon, first described by Charles Mackay in 1841, turns a widely shared prejudice into an irresistible "authority". Could it indeed represent the final triumph of irrationality? After all, how rational is it to pass laws banning one kind of light bulb (and insisting on their replacement by ones filled with poisonous mercury vapour) in order to "save electricity", while ploughing money into schemes to run cars on ... electricity? How rational is it to pay the Russians once for fossil fuels, and a second time for permission (via carbon credits) to burn them...? And how rational is it to suppose that the effects of increased CO2 in the atmosphere take between 200 and 1,000 years to be felt, but that solutions can take effect almost instantaneously?

H/T Jonathan in the comments

No conspiracy

Tom Fuller writes an interesting piece in which he considers whether there is evidence of an international conspiracy to create a "global warming scam" in the CRU emails. He concludes, correctly in my opinion, that there isn't. There is, however, enough bad stuff in there that we should still be worried:

I think that they had an informal conspiracy going to pump each others' careers up, peer review each others' papers, and slam any skeptics or lukewarmers who wandered within punching range - and later, after they realised how badly they had acted, they conspired to evade the Freedom of Information Act.

Anyone who has had an honest review of the emails will find this very hard to argue with.

Click to read more ...

Faking it

From the emails

From: Tom Wigley <wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: Mike Hulme <m.hulme@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Re: New MAGICC/SCENGEN
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 1998 15:48:15 -0700 (MST)

It just happens that, in your version, I 'faked up' column 5 as the difference between column 6 and the sum of columns 2, 3 and 4. I did this simply to get the code working; but (as you now know) I never got around to fixing it up until now. In the latest version, column 6 is again equal to the sum of columns 2, 3, 4 and 5 because I scale columns 3, 4 and 5 to ensure that this is so. . . .
(3) Re HadCM2, again it is impossible to be consistent. What I said before is that the reason for adding these results is simply to make them readily available. I do *not* advocate using them in combination with any other model results.. . .

I wonder what the result of all this "faking" was?

NERC and climate change

There has been a great deal of interest in the posting I did on the apparent bias in funding for climatologists - the suggestion being that only studies to confirm the hypothesis will get money and the sceptics will be left hanging in the wind.

This idea is not a new one, and several commenters have said that they have heard similar stories. However, it is a testable hypothesis and to that end I've put a FoI request into NERC, the main UK funding body for the environmental sciences. I've asked for details of the eligibility criteria for funding programmes covering climate change, hopefully back to 2000.

In the meantime, take a look at the NERC Council, the body responsible for prioritising funding. Several of these are familiar names, and one or two have been ubiquitous in the media in recent weeks. For example:

• Bob Watson (of CRU fame)
• Andrew Watson (of CRU and "What an Asshole" fame)
• Julia Slingo (recently seen trying to drum up support for a pro-AGW letter signed by scientists)
• Mike Lockwood (well known to sceptics as the author of a rather questionable critique of Svensmark)

Political scientists or honest brokers? You decide.

Gavin says the uncertainties are huge

Apart from repeating the spin about "hiding the decline", the most interesting thing in this CNN interview of Gavin Schmidt and John Christy is that Gavin agrees with Christy that our uncertainties about the climate system are huge.

I'm struggling to equate this with the various IPCC statements about it being "very likely" that observed increases in temperatures are due to increases in carbon dioxide.  How can you speak with such certainty about a system you don't understand?

Follow the money

This is stolen from the comments at WUWT:

A reader commented as follows:

... it is possible that this is just a big conspiracy by climate scientist around the world to boost their cause and make themselves more important. Though I find it hard to believe that thousands of scientists...all agreed to promote bogus science ...Pretty hard to do without being discovered.

To which another reader, a scientist named Paul Vaughan, responded as follows:

Actually not so hard.

Personal anecdote:
Last spring when I was shopping around for a new source of funding, after having my funding slashed to zero 15 days after going public with a finding about natural climate variations, I kept running into funding application instructions of the following variety:

Successful candidates will:
1) Demonstrate AGW.
2) Demonstrate the catastrophic consequences of AGW.
3) Explore policy implications stemming from 1 & 2.

Follow the money — perhaps a conspiracy is unnecessary where a carrot will suffice.

This confirms the stories that I've been hearing over the last few years.

Bolt on Wigley

Andrew Bolt dissects some of Tom Wigley's recent pronouncements on Climategate. The warmist web becomes ever more tangled...

[Update - you really have to read Andrew's article, it's bloomin' marvellous]

The Copenhagen jolly

Reader Andrew K has helpfully provided a searchable list of the thousands of NGOs attending Copenhagen, including links to their websites. I feel certain that "Women in Europe for a Common Future" just had to attend, and the meeting could simply could not go ahead without someone from the Lincoln Theological Fund.

Download it here.

More cuttings

Francis at L'Ombre De L'Olivier looks at how climatologists come over all shifty and change the subject when asked a question.

Jo Nova digs a little deeper into the Australian temperature records. If adjacent stations are adjusting the warming trend in Darwin upwards (as Willis E noted this morning) which particular stations are involved? It's a mystery.

Willis says he's found it

OK everyone, grab a cup of coffee and go and read Willis Eschenbach's analysis of the temperature records for Darwin Australia. This is very important.

Unthreaded

Some of the comments threads are going way off topic, so I'm setting up an unthreaded post for people who want to point to interesting stories or put forward their own theories.

Canada's for turning

More Hockey Team misbehaviour

The following is a very rough, google-assisted translation of Marcel Crok's article about a dutch scientist being put under pressure by the Hockey Team. If there are any Dutch speakers reading this, I'm grateful for any corrections you can give me. I'm not convinced I have captured all the subtleties of what Crok is saying. [Update: here is Marcel's own translation]

Many researchers and journalists will have been curious to see if their own name was among the thousands of hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit.  

Click to read more ...

This made me sad

What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horribly cruel works of Nature.

Charles Darwin

Nature has said its piece on the Climategate story, in an editorial that would not have looked out of place in the in-house magazine of Greenpeace. My overwhelming emotion was of sadness at what environmentalism has done to a once-great publication.

See here.

Mann on BBC radio

A commenter alerts me to the fact that Michael Mann will be interviewed on the World Tonight on BBC Radio 4 tonight. There is no confirmation of this on the show's webpage, but it airs at 10pm.

Update on Dec 3, 2009 by Bishop Hill

The programme link is here, starting at about 18 minutes.