Hoorah for the GWPF

Following on from jamesp's suggestion in the comments yesterday on the GWPF-Roger Harrabin post that we should have an identifying badge supporting the GWPF, suggestions are welcome for the symbol - just for fun, while the Bishop is away. Surely one of Josh's cartoons would be ideal.

I'll weigh in as a start - how about  this one, with "Support the GWPF" included somewhere? TM.

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/6/2/ecocide-josh-101.html

Stiffen the sinews

Pierre Gosselin at NoTricksZone  reports some remarks by Professor Fritz Vahrenholt, who has recently joined the academic advisers to the GWPF. Let's hope that the good prof. is not meted out the same treatment from the opposition that Lennart Bengtsson received, which led to his stepping down from his appointment after a couple of weeks.

Updated 9.20am 18.7.2014. TM

John Christie points out

“There’s a climate establishment, and I’m not in it

More divisions reported here. 

H/T Paul Homewood.

GWPF- Harrabin late with the news

I missed this yesterday. As someone pointed out in the Breitbart comments, why are campaigns from Greenpeace WWF and FoE not similarly targeted for spending charitable money on political causes? 

H/T Biased BBC.

[Link fixed]

Royal Society has lost the argument, cannot be trusted

Readers will remember Paul Nurse's infamous speech in Melbourne, in which he issued a fairly spectacular attack at Nigel Lawson:

We saw that, for example, in Britain with a politician, Nigel Lawson, who would go on the television and talk about the scientific case, and he was trained as a politician; you made whatever case you can to convince the audience. So he would choose two points and say, look, no warming is taking place, knowing that all the other points you chose in the 20 years around it would not support his case, but he was just wanting to win that debate on television. And that is of course over-spilling political views into your science.

As Lawson pointed out in a subsequent letter this statement was entirely untrue:

Click to read more ...

Mischief making at the Graun

Next week metropolitan bigwigs are off to the Foundation for Science and Technology for a debate on the correct level of response to manmade global warming. Speakers include Mark Walport and sceptic MPs Peter Lilley and David Davies and it's sure to be an interesting occasion. With an influential audience, the debate could prove quite important. 

One can't help but wonder, therefore, if a wish to set the tone of Monday's debate is not a factor behind some rather disreputable journalism at the Guardian today. The article in question considers Walport's views on the subject of responses to climate change, which is fair enough, but bizarrely goes on to suggest that Benny Peiser, of all people, is right behind he chief scientist's views.

Click to read more ...

Climate policy and the poor

Tony Kelly's final paper, a GWPF briefing note entitled "Climate Policy and the Poor" has just been published.

The changes imposed thus far have not dealt with the risks of climate change through a sensible, steady and sustained improvement in energy and other technologies and have therefore failed to address the problems of the here and now, of which the abject poverty of large numbers of people is perhaps the most pressing. In this, the consequences of the Kyoto Protocol have been immoral.

Anthony Kelly

Tony Kelly, an stalwart member of GWPF's Academic Advisory Council, has passed away. This is the notice posted at GWPF.

Professor Anthony Kelly CBE FREng FRS died on 3 June 2014 aged 85. He is regarded by many as the father of composite materials in the UK.

In 2011 he was honoured for his distinguished career, spanning more than 60 years, with the President’s Medal of the Royal Academy of Engineering for contributing significantly to the Academy’s aims and work through excellence in engineering.

After an early career in Cambridge, where he was a founding Fellow of Churchill College, he was director of the National Physical Laboratory and subsequently Vice-Chancellor of Surrey University before returning to Cambridge and Churchill College on his retirement in 1996.

He was a scientist of the old school, who took ‘Nullius in verba’ as a matter of daily practice. He was properly sceptical until the real world data confirmed his or others’ ideas. He was not impressed by the modern tendency to use incomplete data to weave elaborate stories that could be undone by hard data, or worse, were not capable of falsification. He led the successful effort to get 43 Fellows to petition the Council of the Royal Society to modify its public stance on climate science in 2010, and was unhappy with the most recent announcements of that body. He played a key role in helping the Global Warming Policy Foundation get set up and was a founding and active member of its Academic Advisory Council. He spent his later years as a critic of some aspects of climate science where the consequential actions seemed to him to be doing more harm than good to humanity.

I met Professor Kelly on a number of occasions and interviewed him about the Rebellion of the 43 as part of my research for the Nullius in Verba report. He was someone who cared deeply about where climate science was going wrong and the effect this was having on ordinary people around the world.

A great loss.

Risky renewables

A briefing paper published by GWPF today points out the enormous risks that renewables represent to UK energy security. Here's the press release:

London, 2 June: A new paper published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation warns that intermittent wind and solar energy pose a serious energy security risk and threaten to undermine the reliability of UK electricity generation.

Many people – including ministers, officials and journalists – believe that renewable energy enhances Britain’s energy security by reducing the dependency on fossil fuel imports. The ongoing crisis over the Ukraine and Crimea between Russia and the West has given much attention to this argument.

Written by Philipp Mueller, the paper (UK Energy Security: Myth and Reality) concludes that domestic and global fossil fuel reserves are growing in abundance while open energy markets, despite the conflict in the Ukraine, are enhancing Britain’s energy security significantly.

In contrast, the ability of the grid to absorb intermittent renewable energy becomes increasingly more hazardous with scale.

Germany provides a warning example of its growing green energy insecurity. Last December, both wind and solar power came to an almost complete halt for more than a week. More than 23,000 wind turbines stood still while one million photovoltaic systems failed to generate energy due to a lack of sunshine. For a whole week, conventional power plants had to provide almost all of Germany’s electricity supply.

Germans woke up to the fact that it was the complete failure of renewable energy to deliver that undermined the stability and security of Germany’s electricity system.

“Open energy markets are a much better way to ensure energy security than intermittent generation systems like wind and solar. It would be a huge risk in itself for Britain to go down the same route as Germany and destabilise what is still a reliable UK electricity grid,” said Philipp Mueller.

Full paper (PDF)

The Bengtsson affair and the GWPF

This posting is by David Henderson, the chairman of the Academic Advisory Council at GWPF, and is crossposted from the GWPF website

Prologue: a resignation under duress

On 24 April 2014 I sent an email to an eminent meteorologist, Professor Lennart Bengtsson,[1] inviting him to become a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), and three days later I was happy to receive a letter of acceptance; I duly added Bengtsson’s name to our list of Council members, and his acceptance was announced on the GWPF website.

On 1 May the Dutch journalist Marcel Crok published on his blog an interview with Bengtsson. He began by posing the question: Why did you join the GWPF Academic Council? Bengtsson’s response was as follows:

Click to read more ...

The anger of the climate community

Whenever I hear Thomas Stocker speak I am reminded of Tony Blair or David Cameron: too slick, too polished, too insincere. So when I see that he has been expounding his thoughts on the climate debate in the Irish Times I am not exactly inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

He has, however, something of a point:

Prof Stocker, who has avoided using social media, agreed that several colleagues such as Phil Jones and Michael Mann had been “vilified” on Twitter and other forums, and some of them had even received death threats for daring to speak out.

Click to read more ...

Bengtsson speaks

Swedish website Uppsalainitiativet has managed to get a guest post from Lennart Bengtsson in which he examines the recent furore over his brief involvement with GWPF and explains his views on climate science.

What is perhaps most worrying is the increased tendency of pseudo-science in climate research. This is revealed through the bias in publication records towards only reporting results that support one climate hypothesis, while refraining from publishing results that deviate. Even extremely cold weather, as this year’s winter in north Eastern USA and Canada, is regarded as a consequence of the greenhouse effect.

Were Karl Popper alive today we would certainly have met with fierce critique of this behavior. It is also demonstrated in journals’ reluctance to address issues contradicting simplified climate assessments, such as the long period during the last 17 years with insignificant or no warming over the oceans, and the increase in sea-ice cover around the Antarctic. My colleagues and I have been met with scant understanding when trying to point out that observations indicate lower climate sensitivity than model calculations indicate. Such behavior may not even be intentional but rather attributed to an effect that my colleague Hans von Storch calls a social construct.

The community strikes back

This has just been posted at Klimazwiebel:

In an e-mail to GWPF, Lennart Bengtsson has declared his resignation of the advisory hoard of GWPF. His letter reads :

"I have  been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days  from all over the world that  has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore  than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life.  Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc.  I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy.  I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years.

Under these situation I will be unable to contribute positively to the work of GWPF and consequently therefore I believe it is the best for me to reverse my decision to join  its Board at the earliest possible time."

Update on May 14, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Marcel Crok's thoughts here.

Steve McIntyre's here.

WUWT here.

Update on May 14, 2014 by Bishop Hill

GWPF has published the response of Professor David Henderson, the chairman of its Academic Advisory Council, to Bengtsson.

Dear Professor Bengtsson,

I have just seen your letter to me, resigning from the position which you had accepted just three weeks ago, as a member of the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Academic Advisory Council.

Your letter came as a surprise and a shock. I greatly regret your decision, and I know that my regret will be shared by all my colleagues on the Council.

Your resignation is not only a sad event for us in the Foundation:  it is also a matter of profound and much wider concern. The reactions that you speak of, and which have forced you to reconsider the decision to join us, reveal a degree of intolerance, and a rejection of the principle of open scientific inquiry, which are truly shocking. They are evidence of a situation which the Global Warming Policy Foundation was created to remedy.

In your recent published interview with Marcel Crok, you said that ‘if I cannot stand my own opinions, life will become completely unbearable’. All of us on the Council will feel deep sympathy with you in an ordeal which you should never have had to endure.

With great regret, and all good wishes for the future.

David Henderson, Chairman, GWPF’s Academic Advisory Council

A new forum

This just in from GWPF:

London, 9 May: The Global Warming Policy Foundation has decided to form a new non-charitable company which will be able to conduct campaigns and activities which do not fall squarely within the educational remit of the charity.

This arrangement reflects those used by other organisations with dual structures, such as Amnesty International UK and Greenpeace UK.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation will continue to advance its charitable objects by commissioning and publishing reports and papers and by organising lectures and debates on key matters relating to climate science and policy.

Some elements of its website, in particular its news articles and opinion pieces, will henceforth be covered by the new organisation.

The Trustees intend to establish this new organisation under the name “Global Warming Policy Forum”.

Subject to ongoing discussions with the Charity Commission, we expect the new structure to be up and running by the end of July.

Does not compute

This is going to confuse our environmentalist friends. Readers will recall that the only one of GWPF's funders identified to date turned out to be, not a representative of big oil from Dallas or Houston, but an obscure hedge fund guy from Australia, Sir Michael Hintze. Across the world, big-oil-conspiracy theorists scratched their heads in confusion.

Hintze has now upped the ante by giving a £5m donation to the Natural History Museum.

[Hintze] said that museum director Dr Michael Dixon, who said some of the money would be spent on climate change research, was free to spend it as he wished.

Click to read more ...

Diary date: Happy Thursdays

The House of Lords is releasing its report on shale gas tomorrow and to mark the occasion Benny Peiser is going to be debating unconvential gas on a new subscription radio service called Fubar. He's up against a gentleman known only as "Bez", who apparently used to be in a famous beat combo called the Happy Mondays (who came after Duran Duran and are therefore beyond my ken).

Fubar comes to you via a mobile app, but there is a free 30-day trial, so everyone can listen if they like.

The show is between 10am and 1pm, but there is no indication of when the shale segment will be.

Update on May 7, 2014 by Bishop Hill

In related news, Ed Davey has taken to the pages of the Sun (£) to emphasise the energy security benefits of shale gas in the light of the Ukraine crisis.

Update on May 7, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Benny emails to say that the debate is at 10:30 or thereabouts.