Beng on the money

The GWPF has made a new appointment to its Academic Advisory Council. Alongside luminaries like Dick Lindzen we will now also see Lennart Bengtsson, former head of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting and director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology.

A very eminent guy, in other words.

This is a big deal in my opinion, and will make it increasingly hard for critics to try to brush GWPF aside.

Marcel Crok has been quick off the mark and has published a short interview with Bengtsson, looking at why he decided to sign up with GWPF and his position on scepticism.

I know some of the scientists in GWPF and they have made fine contributions to science. I also respect individuals that speak their mind as they consider scientific truth (to that extent we can determine it) more important than to be politically correct. I believe it is important to express different views in an area that is potentially so important and complex and still insufficiently known as climate change.

Order of battle

Anthony has a interesting discussion thread, asking whether sceptics in the US need an organisation - like GWPF here in the UK - that can be the first port of call for those looking for a sceptic point of view.

People like Lewandowsky were able to make their claims stick because with climate skepticsm, it is all about that personal journey, there’s no organization, no policy statement, no cohesiveness of opinion that anyone can point to and say “this is what climate skeptics endorse”. While there’s strength in that heterogeneity, there’s also a weakness in that it allows people like Lewandowsky to brand climate skeptics as he sees fit.

So after some years of thinking about this, I’d like to ask this simple question:

Is it time for an “official” climate skeptics organization, one that produces a policy statement, issues press releases, and provides educational guidance?

Do we need a proper order of battle, or should we persist with guerilla warfare?

Climate Control in the Scottish Express

The Climate Control report was covered in the Scottish Sunday Express last weekend, and I have now got my hands on a copy of the article.

Although there are a few nuances that are not quite right, and they have misunderstood the relationship between GWPF and the greenhouse effect, it's excellent stuff overall.

A LEADING climate sceptic has called for an urgent government inquiry into the way pupils are brainwashed over climate change. Andrew Montford co-wrote a critical report on environmentalism in education for the think tank Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) saying the alarmist approach adopted at schools is affecting “almost every area of curriculum”. He called for the Scottish Government to take “urgent notice” of what goes on in classrooms and carry out a probe into the “disturbing way” incorrect information is force fed to pupils. The document highlights “how eco-activism appears to have captured schools’ curricula” in the UK. It suggests there are “serious errors, misleading claims and bias through inadequate treatment of climate issues in teaching materials” with the slant “on scares and on raising fears” and urges parents to question the way sustainability and climate change are taught.

Click to read more ...

Booker on Climate Control

Christopher Booker covers the Climate Control report in the Sunday Telegraph, recounting a story from his column a few years back that is a stunning indictment of what is going on.

In 2012, I described an A-level general studies paper set by our leading exam board, AQA, asking for comment on 11 pages of propagandist “source materials”, riddled with basic errors. A mother wrote to tell me how her intelligent son, after getting straight As on all his science papers, used his extensive knowledge of climate science to point out all their absurd distortions.

In related news, Richard Betts tweets his conclusions on the report:

...GWPF have form on distorting the science - which makes me sceptical of their school report.

Some more responses

A couple more responses to the Climate Control report have appeared, of decidedly variable quality.

Left Foot Forward's take is, as you might expect the kind of thing you would expect from that less than august organ, mostly written without reference to the report at all and not really addressing anything we said in it. Author James Bloodworth has this to say for example

According to the GWPF, telling kids to “avoid polluting the world”, “recycle” and “reduce their carbon footprint” is “brainwashing” carried out with the express intention of turning children into “foot soldiers of the green movement”.

But hang on a minute. What exactly is objectionable about teaching children to safeguard the environment? If you can avoid doing so, don’t go around polluting the world – it’s hardly revolutionary advice.

Click to read more ...

Climate Control in the Mail

I'm a bit busy with Easter hols at the moment, but this is a thread to record the Mail's coverage of the Climate Control report, which can be seen here.

I'm aware of one very feeble critique of the report here and there have been tweets from Doug McNeall, who seems to think some things that I objected to are "hilariously neutral" (although I haven't quite worked out what yet) and Alice Bell who found it "badly researched".

Climate Control coverage

The Voice of Russia has covered the Montford/Shade report on climate change education in schools...

Andrew Montford, blogger and author of a new report on climate change in education, says children in England and Scotland are being brainwashed over climate change. He blames the United Nations for setting an agenda which has been blindly adopted in schools. VoR's Scott Craig asked him to explain

as has James Delingpole at Breitbart.

British schoolchildren are being brainwashed by a deep green environmental curriculum which fills their heads with "confusion, ignorance and fear", says a new study by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Update on Apr 9, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Here's Tony Thomas in Quadrant.

The affair suggests a similar independent inquiry into “climate teaching” in Australian schools would be worthwhile. Anecdotal accounts of brainwashing by activists masquerading as teachers in our primary and secondary schools are legion.

Kelly on engineering reality

Mike Kelly has a new briefing paper out, looking at decarbonisation in the context of previous technology changes.

A paper published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation and written by Professor Michael Kelly (University of Cambridge) shows that most of the ambitions to decarbonise the UK and global economy have not been put through an engineering reality test.

The paper reveals that the scale, scope, feasibility, cost, resources and other requirements of the decarbonisation agenda have never been tested against other calls on human and physical resources of the planet.

The fact that carbon emissions are going up inexorably in spite of many projects across the globe already raises a simple question ‘What are we getting for our money?’

Professor Kelly’s paper discusses the role of technology changes in helping meet the global decarbonisation agenda: success in the UK and failure elsewhere still represents failure.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that some of the more calamitous projects are rather less likely, raising the question of how much of this agenda is really necessary in short order.

The new paper is intended to bring out some key lessons from the realities of successful technology changes in the recent past as they bear on the global challenge of climate change.

It finds that the gap between rhetoric and reality is dangerously wide, on the basis of some of the simplest premises of engineering and technology.

The paper is here.

Causes for the pause

David Whitehouse has a new GWPF note out, examining all the different post-hoc explanations for the hiatus in global warming. To introduce it, there's a short film which can be seen here.

Peiser without

RTE's Prime Time show, featuring Benny Peiser and not featuring An Taisce president John Sweeney, was broadcast yesterday and the video can seen for the next few days here (from 18 mins).

It's rather good.

What is the Gaelic for "integrity"?

Benny Peiser email to tell me that there is a bit of a kerfuffle over the Irish Sea. Benny has been invited to appear on a TV show called 'Prime Time', opposite Professor John Sweeney, a geographer at the National University of Ireland who doubles as the President of An Taisce, the Irish National Trust.

However, it seems that Professor Sweeney is not sufficiently confident in the strength of his case to want to argue it in public, and An Taisce has issued the following press release.

Prime Time invited John Sweeney, Ireland’s leading Climate Scientist, onto the Panel and some members of An Taisce into the audience for next Tuesday’s show on ‘Climate Change’.  We looked forward to contributing to the debate on how we should deal with the serious problems that ‘Climate Change’ will present to our children and grandchildren.

Click to read more ...

GWPF TV on the floods

GWPF have put out an excellent short film about the floods and the alleged link to climate change.

Lawson vs Hoskins

Nigel Lawson was on the Today programme this morning, up against Brian Hoskins of the Grantham Institute.

Hoskins was reasonably circumspect about the link between global warming and the recent floods. However, some of his peripheral insinuations were seriously dodgy - sea level rise (trend began before global warming), Arctic sea ice (claimed that last year's minimum hadn't been seen for a very, very, long time; and what about the Antarctic?), insinuations that we can detect a changing climate here in the UK.

Good that Lawson got in a pop at renewables.

Here's the audio.

listen to ‘Is climate change a factor in the recent extreme weather?’ on Audioboo

Update on Feb 13, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Re the Arctic sea ice, Doug McNeall points out that when he said "in the summer" he may not have meant last summer, but something more like "in summers". This is a reasonable interpretation.

Still a standstill

David Whitehouse, writing at the GWPF, notes the release of 2013 surface temperature data from NOAA and NASA. Depending on your predelictions this can be headlined as "Fourth hottest ever!!!" or, as I have done "Still a standstill".

When asked for an explanation for the ‘pause’ by reporters Dr Gavin Schmidt of NASA and Dr Thomas Karl of NOAA spoke of contributions from volcanoes, pollution, a quiet Sun and natural variability. In other words, they don’t know...

Given that the IPCC estimates that the average decadal increase in global surface temperature is 0.2 deg C, the world is now 0.3 deg C cooler than it should have been.

CCC - the write-up

Ed Davey has just issued the triennial report into the performance of the Committee on Climate Change.

"Conflict of interest" might be expected to be an important issue in the report. However in terms of the conducts of the current members we learn only that the committee has been compliant with the "specified conduct and behaviour requirements". One can only assume that avoidance of conflicts of interest has not actually been specified. That said among the recommendations are the suggestion that the committee's register of interests, previously only available on request, be published on their website.

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