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Entries in GWPF (94)

Tuesday
Oct102017

'Daring to Doubt' Tony Abbot GWPF Annual Lecture 2017 - Cartoon notes by Josh

Click image for larger version

Tony Abbott, former Prime Minister of Australia, gave an excellent GWPF annual lecture last night. 

The text of the lecture is on the GWPF website here and the video is below.

Cartoons by Josh

Friday
Jul212017

Climate Politics as Manichean Paranoia by Roger Pielke Jr

Last night Roger Peilke Jr gave a superb talk, hosted by The Global Warming Policy Foundation, on Climate change politics. It was timely, challenging and positive. I will post the video links when they are available but you can read a Twitter version of the talk here. My cartoon notes are below and click the image for a larger version.

The GWPF video of the talk

Posted by Josh

Cartoons by Josh

 

 

 

Monday
Feb062017

ClimateGate 2.0?

Just about everywhere.

Story at Judy Curry's, Mail on Sunday, GWPF, WUWT,and Twitter of course.

Cartoons by Josh

Monday
Jan302017

Myron Ebell in transit - Cartoon notes by Josh

Myron Ebell, who led President Trump's transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency, gave a fascinating talk at the House of Commons today on Trump's approach to environmental policy.

There are plenty of stories in the media (Guardian, Daily Mail and Independent, for example) from the press conference held earlier in the day and he covered similar ground in the HoC talk. Here are some cartoon notes - it was a lot of fun.

Click to enlarge

Cartoons by Josh

Wednesday
Jan182017

The Crisis of Germany's 'Energiewende' - Cartoon notes by Josh

Updated on Jan 25, 2017 by Registered CommenterJosh

 

Last night Professor Fritz Vahrenholt gave a hugely interesting talk on Germany's experiment with renewable energy. I will add a link to the talk when it is posted up by the GWPF, who sponsored the event. In the meantime here are some cartoon notes.

Click to read more ...

Friday
Oct282016

Madhouse Mann - Josh 384

Michael Mann has a book out called "The Madhouse Effect' with cartoons by Tom Toles. 

Click to read more ...

Wednesday
Oct052016

Dark down under - Josh 382

In the news this week:

A dramatic, sudden loss of wind power generation was the root cause of South Australia’s state wide blackout last week.

Read about it at The Global Warming Policy Forum

Cartoons by Josh

Wednesday
Apr062016

Putting the boot in - Josh 365

From the GWPF site:

To reduce CO2 emissions, the EU plans to cut emissions rights for the steel industry. According to the industry, this policy threatens its very existence.

Cartoons by Josh

Friday
Feb262016

A retwardian precis

At the Royal Society on Tuesday night there was a meeting about the Paris climate agreement. It was chaired by Lord Stern. During the Q&A session afterwards, Benny Peiser asked a question as follows:

Given that the Paris deal isn't legally binding and given that the Republicans have repeatedly declared that they are not bound by the Obama administration's pledges, what would happen to the Paris deal if a Republican candidate were to win the Presidential elections?

Bob Ward decided to precis this in a tweet:

 

 

...an extraordinary statement for a normal human being but not, alas, for our Bob, a point made quite forcefully a few moments later:

 

 

Tuesday
Feb232016

Two worlds collide

GWPF have release a very interesting report about stochastic modelling by Terence Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University. This is a bit of a new venture for Benny and the team because it's written with a technical audience in mind and there is lots of maths to wade through. But even from the introduction, you can see that Mills is making a very interesting point:

 

The analysis and interpretation of temperature data is clearly of central importance to debates about anthropogenic globalwarming (AGW). Climatologists currently rely on large-scale general circulation models to project temperature trends over the coming years and decades. Economists used to rely on large-scale macroeconomic models for forecasting, but in the 1970s an increasing divergence between models and reality led practitioners to move away from such macro modelling in favour of relatively simple statistical time-series forecasting tools, which were proving to be more accurate.
In a possible parallel, recent years have seen growing interest in the application of statistical and econometric methods to climatology. This report provides an explanation of the fundamental building blocks of so-called ‘ARIMA’ models, which are widely used for forecasting economic and financial time series. It then shows how they, and various extensions, can be applied to climatological data. An emphasis throughout is that many different forms of a model might be fitted to the same data set, with each one implying different forecasts or uncertainty levels, so readers should understand the intuition behind the modelling methods. Model selection by the researcher needs to be based on objective grounds.

There is an article (£) in the Times about the paper.

I think it's fair to say that the climatological community is not going to take kindly to these ideas. Even the normally mild-mannered Richard Betts seems to have got a bit hot under the collar.

 

 

 

Tuesday
Dec082015

Happer days

Greenpeace are getting very excited about some of their latest "undercover" reporting. It seems that some of their staff posed as representatives of a coal-mining company and asked Will Happer to write them a report. Happer seems to have said yes, but said that the proceeds should go to his sceptic organisation, the CO2 Alliance.

I think their case is that Happer doesn't actually believe any of the things he says, but that in return for large quantities of money he is willing to say anything required. I'm not sure this is going to fly.

There is also a fairly feeble attempt to involve GWPF in the story, insinuating that Indur Goklany's report was reviewed only by people internal to GWPF. Benny Peiser has said in no uncertain terms that this is not true.

 

Professor Happer made his scientific views clear from the outset, including the need to address pollution problems arising from fossil fuel consumption. Any insinuation against his integrity as a scientist is outrageous and is clearly refuted by the correspondence.

Nor did Professor Happer offer to put a report "commissioned by a fossil fuel company" through the GWPF peer review process. This is a sheer fabrication by Greenpeace. 

The GWPF does not undertake externally-commissioned research and does not accept support of any kind from fossil fuel companies or anyone with a significant interest in the energy industry. The correspondence shows that Professor  Happer explained to the undercover "journalist" that there were several different forms of peer review and that the peer review process used by the GWPF is as rigorous as that for most journals. 

Greenpeace claims with no supporting evidence that the report by Dr Indur Goklany was reviewed exclusively by 25 scientists who are members of the GWPF's Academic Advisory Council (AAC). This is false. Dr Goklany's report, like most of our reports, was also reviewed by outside experts who are not scientific advisers to the GWPF.

The quality of Dr Goklany's report is self-evident to any open-minded reader. As Professor Freeman Dyson said in the foreword, "To any unprejudiced person reading this account, the facts should be obvious: that the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide as a sustainer of wildlife and crop plants are enormously beneficial, that the possibly harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been greatly exaggerated, and that the benefits clearly outweigh the possible damage."

Professor Colin Prentice of the Grantham Institute concurred even while claiming to be dismayed by the report's publication: "Much of it is quite correct and moreover, well-established in the scientific literature...the various benefits of rising CO2 are actually well established in the scientific literature, even if sometime ignored. They are indeed 'good news'."

The cack-handed attempt by Greenpeace to manufacture a scandal around Dr Goklany's report, and to smear Professor Happer's reputation, only points to the need for the Global Warming Policy Foundation to redouble its efforts to bring balanced, rigorous and apolitical research on climate and energy policy issues to the public's attention, as counter to the misleading noise and activist rhetoric from groups like Greenpeace.

 

 

 

 

Thursday
Oct152015

"Should we celebrate CO2?" - Cartoon notes by Josh

 

Click image for larger version

Here are last night's cartoon notes from a superb GWPF Annual Lecture by Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace. You can read the lecture here.

The answer is, unequivocally, yes!

Cartoons by Josh

Monday
Oct122015

Is good news actually news at all?

Over the weekend there was a minor kerfuffle when the Sunday Times' Jonathan Leake breached the embargo on a press release about the latest GWPF report. Ho hum.

The report itself is by Indur Goklany and is about the benefits of higher carbon dioxide levels - increased crop yields and a general greening of the planet being the principal ones. Richard Betts has been taking a look and has come up with some interesting and some not so interesting points.

For example, he reckons that Goklany is inconsistent, accepting climate model predictions of a reduced threat from water shortages but pointing to the failures of climate models in general. This doesn't seem an unreasonable point to make, although neither do I think it unreasonable of Goklany to point out that even the models, flawed though they may be, are predicting benefits from global warming.

Richard also notes that the IPCC discusses carbon dioxide fertilisation in its reports and reckons Goklany's contribution is therefore not newsworthy.

 

 

This is true, but I'm not sure that represents a criticism of Goklany's report. I'm struggling to recall an occasion on which the IPCC has proclaimed the benefits of higher carbon dioxide levels to the general public, so the new report represents a valuable contribution to the public debate, filling in the bits the IPCC didn't want to discuss in public.

I hope Richard welcomes the public gaining a deeper understanding of climate science, both the bad news and the good news.

Wednesday
Sep162015

The Monsoon, variability & climate change - Cartoon sketchnotes by Josh

Click image for a larger version

Last night Dr Madhav Khandekar, a former Environment Canada scientist and expert reviewer for the 2007 IPCC Report, gave a talk on the Indian monsoon, variability and climate change. The talk was organised by the GWPF and held at the House of Commons in London.  Madhav is also the author of the GWPF report on 'Global Warming - Extreme Weather Link'.

The main message seemed to be that the monsoon impacts 4 billion people and yet is the biggest climate anomaly on the planet. The variability of the monsoon is not well understood and the current climate models are not as useful as the older statistical-empirical model which uses large-scale atmosphere-ocean circulation patterns.

You can download the Powerpoint slides here

Please do let me know if I got something wrong on the sketchnotes above and I will amend - it was a challenge to keep up!

Cartoons by Josh

 

 

Tuesday
Jul142015

Quote of the day, unimpressed edition

Pope Francis should certainly be commended for his desire to deal with poverty in the developing world, but it is hard to see how he hopes to do so without economic growth and fossil fuels, both of which he thinks are unnecessary evils.

The Bishop of Chester is unimpressed with the papal encyclical