A load of gobbledegook?

Splendid little item on Inside Science last night on BBC Radio 4 9.21pm or so which made me laugh, in which Adam Rutherford interviewed Ralf Barkemeyer, Associate Professor of Corporate Social Responsibility at the Kedge Business School. Being interested in the interface between science and policy, he has made an analysis of the ”linguistic readability” of the IPPC summaries, which are, of course, intended for policy makers. He was looking at such things as the length of words and sentences used and the overall comprehensibility expressed as a percentage, for a non-specialist reader.

In comparison, the linguistic readability of a theoretical physics paper was 30-35% for a layman to read, while the IPPC summaries received the very low score of 20% comprehensibility.

Is anyone surprised, and is it deliberate obfuscation or just a badly thought out mess?  TM

IPCC runners and riders

With the election of a new chairman of the IPCC to take place shortly, I was interested to be reminded of this article at American Thinker about one of the candidates for the role, Jan-Pascal van Ypersele.

Back in 2011, it seems that Dr van Ypersele was being commissioned to write papers by Greenpeace. Not to mention trying to blacklist dissenting scientists. I imagine from an environmental activist point of view he's the ideal candidate.

That said, the competition to be the green's guy at the helm of the IPCC is very hot. Chris "The world is staring down the barrel of climate change" Field and Thomas "the international community has to act now" Stocker are among the leading candidates and Ottmar "climate policy is about distribution of the world’s resources" Edenhofer waiting in the wings.

Oh yes, you see, the IPCC is about scientific advice, not policy prescriptions.

Made up science - Josh 300

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Update on Nov 3, 2014 by Josh

Thanks for the requests - you can buy a T-shirt here

Catastrophe avoided

Matt Ridley has an excellent article in the Financial Post, looking at the IPCC's greenhouse gas concentration pathways. He finds that some of them are a trifle odd and that it's rather hard to produce predictions of catastrophe from them:

...even if you pile crazy assumption upon crazy assumption till you have an edifice of vanishingly small probability, you cannot even manage to make climate change cause minor damage in the time of our grandchildren, let alone catastrophe. That’s not me saying this – it’s the IPCC itself.

This video, of Matt speaking in Canada is also well worth a look.

Some like it not - Josh 270

H/t The GWPF story summary and link here

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The Alarmists return - Josh 268

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H/t John Whitman for the typo

95% Certain? Yes, we are! - Josh 256

Hooray! Are we now 95% certain? Yes, we are! Yesterday we heard from UK climate science community about their work on AR5. The event was called "Climate Change 2013 - The Physical Science Basis. The Working Group 1 contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change." Josh was there to draw some cartoon notes.

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Next Steps in Climate Science - Cartoon notes

Updated on Oct 4, 2013 by Josh

Following Katabasis report here are the first of my cartoon notes from the 'Next steps in climate science' meeting at the Royal Society today. I will add to this page and update with colour as and when I can. I am already looking forward to tomorrow - today was a blast!

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Intergovernmental AR5 patch up - Josh 240

AR5 has landed and the press conference didn't disappoint, it was laugh out loud at times. 

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BREAKING! IPCC responds - Josh 239

We are all very excited about the IPCC Summary for Policymakers coming tomorrow, Friday 27th September, but today we can reveal an exclusive pre-press conference handy crib sheet to all your questions. Yes, all of them. Thanks to all those who asked 5 questions - here are the 5 answers...

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The 'D' Notice - Josh 238

Every other Alarmist tweet these days seems to have the 'D' word in it - is there something happening soon that they are getting excited about?

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AR5: A Progress report - Josh 221

Steve McIntyre has a hilarious post on the desperate measures needed to get some non peer reviewed papers into the IPCC's AR5. I am not sure where the phrase 'Frankenscience' comes from but it seems appropriate for AR5 which already looks DOA.

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The Royal Society: the UK's independent voice on science

Updated on May 1, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Readers may remember the mysterious Murphy et al paper on climate sensitivity, which used the same data as Forster and Gregory but came up with a much higher estimate of sensitivity. The paper did not attempts to explain the difference and Murphy subsequently failed to respond to requests for information.

Chris Horner has been doing sterling work trying to obtain any data and code and correspondence relating to the paper from NOAA, where Murphy works and one of his co-authors Susan Solomon worked at the time. This recently led to the release of a whole batch of Solomon correspondence, although little of it appeared to have any relevance to the paper. However, there were a few bits and pieces of interest.

One of these was a series of drafts of a Royal Society statement on the COP15 negotiations in Copenhagen around the time of of Climategate. I have compiled these into a single PDF which you can see at the link at the bottom of the post. What is interesting about them is that the drafts are annotated with what I assume must be Solomon's thoughts.

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IPCC statistics ruled illegal

Bayesian statistics, the approach favoured by the IPCC in its assessments of the world's climate, has been ruled illegal by the Appeal Court in London. As the judge explained in a case revolving around possible causes of a fire:

Sometimes the "balance of probability" standard is expressed mathematically as "50 + % probability", but this can carry with it a danger of pseudo-mathematics, as the argument in this case demonstrated. When judging whether a case for believing that an event was caused in a particular way is stronger that the case for not so believing, the process is not scientific (although it may obviously include evaluation of scientific evidence) and to express the probability of some event having happened in percentage terms is illusory.

David Spiegelhalter notes that "[to] assign probabilities to events that have already occurred, but where we are ignorant of the result, forms the basis for the Bayesian view of probability". That being the case, one wonders whether this opens up the possibility of legal challenges to the IPCC assessment reports.

For once, however, I find myself on the IPCC's side. I imagine a higher court will set the ruling aside.

Secret Santa releases IPCC Draft - Josh 193

Donna Laframboise received three USB sticks with draft versions of most chapters of the IPCC's AR5. You can access them at Donna's site here.

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