More Briffa vs Ridley

There has been another exchange between Keith Briffa and Matt Ridley in the pages of the Times. Briffa's new letter was as follows:

Sir, Matt Ridley’s response (Jan 17) to my letter further confuses and misrepresents the issues.

He says that I said I reprocessed a tree-ring data set “rather than ignoring it because it gave less of an uptick in temperatures in later decades than the small sample of Siberian larch trees” that I published.

What I in fact said was that I reprocessed the same data set used by different researchers in their version of this chronology. This was in order to improve the representation of long-timescale information in these data. Ridley persists in the repeated claim that a “larger tree-ring chronology from the same region did not have a hockey stick shape”, implying that a chronology based on more tree-ring data would invalidate our conclusions and insinuating that just such an “adverse” chronology had been concealed by us and would not have come to light without a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. He is wrong on both counts. An FOI request was made to the University of East Anglia for a chronology whose existence was revealed as a result of the theft of emails from the Climatic Research Unit. The Information Commissioner’s Office and the Information Tribunal rejected this request, accepting our explanation that the chronology in question was produced as part of ongoing research intended for publication. This chronology was subsequently published, but as a demonstration of how a failure to recognise and account for inhomogeneities in the underlying measurement sets can produce an unreliable indication of tree growth and inferred summer temperature changes.

Ridley quotes me as saying my “research was validated by the inquiry chaired by Sir Muir Russell.” I said no such thing. The Independent Climate Change Email Review had no remit to “validate” any research. What I actually said was that I had not “cherry-picked” my data to produce a desired result, which was the specific accusation levelled at me in Ridley’s piece (Opinion, Jan 6). Sir Muir Russell’s team examined this specific accusation and found that I had not.

Professor Keith R. Briffa

Matt has sent  me a copy of his response which is as follows:

Click to read more ...

Walport and Ridley

Mark Walport has a letter in the Times, taking issue with an article that Matt Ridley wrote a few days before. Matt's article was about cherrypicking in science, and mentioned Briffa's Yamal series.

Sir,

Matt Ridley falls into his own trap in his Opinion column (Jan 6), though the title “Roll up: cherry pick your research results here” is apposite, because that is exactly what Ridley does with respect to the research evidence for global warming.

Click to read more ...

The Lords do battle

Updated on Jul 26, 2013 by Bishop Hill

After the House of Lords debate on the Energy Bill, Lord Deben wrote to a group of peers attacking the statements made by Matt Ridley in the debate. The letter and the ensuing correspondence was as follows:

Deben's first letter was sent on 4 July 2013:

My Lords,

During the debate on July 2, on the Energy Bill, I stated that the arguments on the science presented by my noble friend Lord Ridley were at variance with the views of the overwhelming majority of scientists whose expertise bears on these issues. I owe it to Lord Lawson, upon whom I intervened, and the noble Viscount to justify that statement. I therefore list the basis for that assertion and append two recent articles which address the points that he raised.

Click to read more ...

A whiff of the Sunday Sport

Having failed to reply to Matt Ridley's request to respond to Myles Allen's critique, Damian Carrington and his band of merry men have responded with another, but rather grubbier, attack in the same direction, this time from Nuccitelli.

Given that even Nuccitelli's co-authors at Skeptical Science have pointed to his misrepresenting those who disagree with him, and given the car crash of his article about Nic Lewis the other day, a reputable newspaper would steer clear. But when you haemorrhaging money, I guess the priorities are different.

Here's a paragraph from Nuccitelli's article:

Click to read more ...

Oxford professors and the poor

Yesterday Myles Allen posted a highly personal attack on Matt Ridley. The Guardian has apparently failed to respond to Matt's requests to allow him to respond (I am reminded of their publication of Bob Ward's hit piece on me back in 2009, when it took days to get them to reply to me and weeks before the response was published). This being the case Matt has asked me to post the following:

Dear Professor Allen,

In your polemical Guardian article on Tuesday you produce no counter-arguments to my Times article. For example, you ask: "Is Ridley right that there is no actual evidence of harm as long as droughts, floods and storms are within historic variability?" You then do not answer that question. Well, am I right or not?

Click to read more ...

Good lord

This just in:

Just minutes ago it was announced that Viscount Ridley was elected to a sit in the House of Lords, taking the seat vacated by the death of Earl Ferrers.

Congratulations to Matt from everyone at BH.

Matt Ridley on the IPCC

Matt Ridley: The Perils Of Confirmation Bias. Read it at GWPF [updated at 12.25pm to prevent confusion]

The modus operandi of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) has been to accumulate evidence to champion rather than challenge a hypothesis, namely that rising carbon dioxide levels will in future cause dangerous climate change.

A good example is the IPCC’s claim that only models that incorporate high-sensitivity carbon dioxide-induced warming countered by aerosol induced cooling can match (or “hindcast”) the recent upward progress of global average temperatures. The problem with this is that different models use different values of assumed cooling from aerosols. That is to say, the cooling effect of aerosols has been picked so that it fills the gap between observed and expected warming. The modellers are therefore in effect saying: we observe warming of X, we predicted warming of X+5, so there must have been cooling of 5, therefore our prediction is correct.

Read more here

http://www.thegwpf.org/matt-ridley-the-perils-of-confirmation-bias/

Ridley prize winner

The Spectator has announced the winner of the inaugural Matt Ridley prize for environmental heresy (on which I was one of the judges). The winner is Pippa Cuckson, whose uncovering of the environmental disaster of in-river hydro power was an eye-opener to all of the judging panel. Fraser Nelson's eulogy is here.

Unfortunately the essay itself is paywalled, but was undoubtedly a worthy winner.

Optimistography - Josh 159

Click image for larger version

Matt Ridley's wonderful book The Rational Optimist provided some upbeat fodder for Reader's Digest which Matt has posted on his blog.

As it has been 'Planet under pressure' week I thought I would join in.

Cartoons by Josh

Wind Energy: to the nearest whole number - Josh 156

I thought a handy illustration of a few facts about Wind Turbines and Wind Energy might be helpful.
(Higher res version for printing here)

Especially as there has been a bit of a Twitter storm over Matt Ridley's superb piece in The Spectator on Wind Energy, see at his blog here.  

Mark Lynas claimed that the article had no facts in it. Mark then asked for references, which Matt duly provided (all in the blog article). Mark either didn't like the references or is still busy reading them. We are still waiting for an apology from Mark for his completely unfounded Tweet.

Could be any time soon...

Cartoons by Josh

Matt Ridley on wind

Matt Ridley's essay in the Spectator is a nice summary of the arguments against wind power. I wasn't aware of this point:

I have it on good authority from a marine engineer that keeping wind turbines upright in the gravel, tides and storms of the North Sea for 25 years is a near hopeless quest, so the repair bill is going to be horrific and the output disappointing. Already the grouting in the foundations of hundreds of turbines off Kent, Denmark and the Dogger Bank has failed, necessitating costly repairs.

Booker in the Telegraph is ploughing a similiar furrow.

Matt on discriminatory laws

A few months ago the Obama Justice Department brought charges against Continental and six other oil companies in North Dakota for causing the death of 28 migratory birds, in violation of the Migratory Bird Act. Continental's crime was killing one bird "the size of a sparrow" in its oil pits. The charges carry criminal penalties of up to six months in jail. "It's not even a rare bird. There're jillions of them," he explains. He says that "people in North Dakota are really outraged by these legal actions," which he views as "completely discriminatory" because the feds have rarely if ever prosecuted the Obama administration's beloved wind industry, which kills hundreds of thousands of birds each year.

Read the whole thing