A private communiqué

The hijacking of learned institutions by political activists is something of a theme at BH, and today's news brings further depressing evidence that the situation has not changed. It seems that the managers of a group of UK learned societies have decided to try to influence the political agenda ahead of the Paris conference, issuing a joint call to arms (another one!), no doubt without consulting a single one of their members.

The communiqué opens with a decidedly shonky statement about the scientific evidence:

The scientific evidence is now overwhelming that the climate is warming and that human activity is largely responsible for this change through emissions of greenhouse gases.

Click to read more ...

APS shows the way

Judith Curry is recounting her experiences with the American Physical Society, which has decided to update its public position statement on climate change. This last happened in 2007, so one assumes that the move is prompted by the publication of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report.

It's fascinating to see that the APS seems to have taken on board the criticisms of outsiders and has gone out of its way to put the process in under the control of people who are "above the fray". They have also adopted a policy of transparency in reaching their conclusions, a process that is ongoing. This even extends to holding hearings and publishing the transcripts.

Learned societies in the UK would do well to follow suit.

Royal Met Soc on AR5

Audio recordings of this week's Royal Meteorological Society Conference on the Fifth Assessment Report are now available here. Featuring a bevy of top climatological names, this should make for interesting listening.

Unqualified evidence

Following my post on the Royal Meteorological Society's evidence to the AR5 inquiry, Doug McNeall and I had a long and interesting exchange on Twitter. Although he arrived at his point somewhat elliptically, Doug appeared to want to suggest that although in Ed Hawkins' graph the observations are on the cusp of falling outside the envelope described by 90% of model runs, this did not actually represent falsification. In his view, the test was too harsh.

The precise determination of when the observations should be seen as inconsistent with the models is one for the statisticians, and I know that Lucia, for one, disagrees with Doug's view (and I feel pretty sure that Doug Keenan will say that they are both wrong). However, this is not actually germane to my original point, which is that the poor performance of the models to date - as represented by Ed's graph - needs to be communicated to policymakers. We are without doubt less confident than we were that the model ensemble captures the true behaviour of the Earth, even if we are not (in Doug M's view at least) absolutely certain that it does not.

Click to read more ...