The closed archive

While looking for something else I chanced upon the Royal Society's webpage documenting its official records. On a whim I looked at the record for the minutes of the Science Policy Advisory Group and was surprised to see this:

Although the society's archives are not public - it is a private organisation, at least in form - the statutes give the Fellows a right of access.

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Crossroads

I've gone on record in the past as saying that the Royal Society is little more than a political campaigning body, a criticism that I understand has not gone down too well at Carlton House Gardens. I was therefore interested to see the SciTech Committee's reminder that the Royal benefits from considerable quantities of public funding, and a suggestion that it might like to pull its weight on the public relations front (although Sir Paul Nurse's considerable campaigning efforts are noted approvingly):

89. The Royal Society receives the majority of its funding, £47.1 million a year, from the Government. Block 2 of its delivery plan up to 2015 is for Science Communication and  Education but, of the £515,000 a year allocated to science communication since 2011, very little appears to have been spent on communicating on climate science. The public profile the Society has on this issue is due to the ongoing debate about climate science taking place directly between Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, and Lord Lawson from the Global Warming Policy foundation. This debate has been widely reported in the press.

90. Sir Paul Nurse has very publicly engaged with prominent climate sceptics in the past. But the same is not true of the Royal Society as a whole. The launch of its joint report with the US National Academy of Sciences could have been used better to promote and communicate accurately the most up-to-date science to a non-specialist audience.

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Some comments on the Royal Society report

Reader Alex Henney sends some comments on The Royal Society/National Academy of Sciences Report on Climate Change that he sent to the President of the Royal Society and the British authors of the report.¹

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, if it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.

Richard Feynman

1. The document continues to espouse models which are flawed, see p. 5, even though the final draft of the 2013 SPM commented “Models do not generally reproduce the observed reduction in surface warming trend over the last 10-15 years”.  John Christy² compared the performance of 39 climate model that were used in AR5 over the period 1975 to 2012 with measured temperature data.  The models over back-cast temperature significantly in a range 0-0.7^oC. 

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Nurse flounders

Paul Nurse has taken to the pages of the Telegraph, although I have no idea why. He appears to have nothing to say of any importance and his analysis, such as it is, consists of platitudes. I relay the article's existence, dear reader, out of a sense of duty rather than because I think it's worth your time.

The evidence is becoming increasingly clear. However, not every question has yet been answered or every detail defined – for example, there are debates concerning the models used to predict the exact extent of global warming.

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.

Lord May under the cosh

Lord May was on the Daily Politics today, being grilled by Andrew Neil on the floods and the evidence - or the lack of it - that they are going to get worse. Cue much wriggling and discomfort from the noble lord. There was also a session on science in the media, with May joined by Steve Jones and Geoffrey Lean.

This is generally good stuff. I was bemused by May and Lean agreeing that science reporting is generally good. This is not my impression at all. May says that An Inconvenient Truth was "maybe a bit over the top" and describes Bjorn Lomborg as a "complete charlatan".

The video should be here in due course.

Defence of the realm

Paul Nurse has written to the Times to try to defend the idea that the Royal Society speaks with a united voice on global warming.

Sir, It is possible to think from the letter of Michael Kelly, FRS, (Jan 29) that the Royal Society might not be fully supportive of the views of the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser and the IPCC on the science of climate change. That would be wrong.

In 2010 the Royal Society produced a guide that set out what climate science was well established, where there was wide consensus but still debate and where there remains substantial uncertainty.

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For a few details more

This is filched from the comments at WUWT and contains, at one remove, a few thoughts from one of the attendees at the Royal Society meeting with GWPF.

Before Christmas I attended an area joint Mech E/IET lecture on Climate Change, given by Professor John Shepherd CBE FRS, a Professorial Research Fellow at the National Oceanographic Centre, University of Southampton, and a leading member of the Royal Society Climate Change Committee. I was quite staggered at what he had to say, and if he is part of the group of people advising Ed Davey I can quite understand why Davy is so convinced that disaster will befall us all if we fail to limit CO2 emissions. In his introduction he told us that he had been one of the six Royal Society “climate scientists” that had met Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation in the House of Lords at the end of November. According to Lawson, although the RS had insisted that would not participate unless journalists were kept away, Shepherd went out of his way to tell us that the meeting was not secret; its purpose apparently was to convince the Global Warming Foundation principals of the seriousness of increasing CO2 emissions. He admitted there had not been a meeting of minds!

Almost at once Shepherd told the audience to take no notice of “sceptics” as they didn’t know what they were talking about, which as far as I was concerned set the tone for his lecture! He began with a graph showing the relationship between CO2 and temperature that was identical to the one in the Al Gore film that purported to show how very high levels of CO2 had caused very high global temperatures on four occasions in history, showing the two to be co-incident, when of course an expanded timescale shows CO2 levels lagging the temperature rise. He then showed the infamous Jones/Mann/Biffa hockey stick that had been the subject of the “hide the decline” emails and which they concocted by being very selective in which tree samples they, and particularly Biffa, had used. The current pause he dismissed as just a little blip; such blips had happened in the past and inexorable warming would start again very soon he said. And so it went on, and I cannot see him ever rowing back from the position he has taken. Further, if his five colleagues are as bad, then heaven help us. I must say I expected a little more integrity from an FRS. Another illusion shattered!

A difference of opinion

Image via Albion Prints. Click for link.There has been some interesting correspondence in the Spectator regarding the meeting between GWPF and a group of FRSs nominated by Paul Nurse. This was sparked by Nigel Lawson's report on the events, which was discussed here the other day.

The FRSs seem to have been a bit upset by Lawson's take on the affair:

Sir: Lord Lawson has written in his diary (30 November) under the online summary headline ‘my secret showdown with the Royal Society on global warming’, but the reality is rather different. As he is aware, the purpose of the meeting on 19 November was not to put on a public performance, but to provide Lord Lawson with expert advice on climate science. The science summarised by the climate scientists was generally agreed to by all present.

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Let them eat equality

The Oxford Martin School has appointed a "commission" of environmentalists to gaze at the future and come up with all sorts of plans to deal with it.

Deja vu.

The results were presented in a joint lecture by Martin Rees and Sir John Beddington last week and a video of the event is now available here. In it, we learn that the commissioners are proposing a cornucopia of new international bureaucracies, that some of them have a bit of a soft spot for totalitarian regimes (no short-termism, you see) and that they have decided that Lord Stern was right about low discount rates. This last one is not a surprise given that Lord Stern was in fact one of the commissioners.

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Unpresidential address

Image: Somerset House: a meeting of the Royal Society. Via albionprints.com (click for link)Each year, the president of the Royal Society gives an address to the fellows at their annual meeting and Paul Nurse's speech last year is now available online. It's mostly fairly unremarkable stuff - extolling the virtues of the society itself; making the oft-repeated but scarcely credible claim that the society is independent of government; criticising those who reach different conclusions to Nurse's preferred scientific cliques. Most of this is in the first five minutes of the talk, and much of the rest is about the internal machinations of the society, which is probably important but frankly too dull for words. However, there's an interesting bit at the end.

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From the Top. It's Secret - Josh 246

And this isn't a cartoon about this story which Nigel Lawson never talked about in the Spectator.

Glad that's settled.

Cartoons by Josh

A right royal showdown

The long-awaited meeting between representatives of GWPF and the Royal Society has at last taken place. Nigel Lawson has a brief report on the meeting at the Spectator, revealing little about the content, except for the fact that he is prevented from telling more by a demand for secrecy imposed by the Royal Society fellows themselves.

This is, to say the least, monumentally pathetic of them. Lawson sounds as though he found the experience slightly frustrating:

But what did emerge was that, if anyone needed educating, it was them. Despite the fact that they were headed by Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, the Director of the Grantham Institute, which has pronounced views on climate policy, and a member of the Climate Change Committee, which is concerned with the implementation of the Climate Change Act, they were very reluctant to engage on the crucial issue of climate change policy at all.

I have heard a few other details on the grapevine and I gather that the Royal Society fellows are more inclined to believe computer models than empirical data. So I wonder if some revision on that whole "scientific method" thingy might be in order too.

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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A report from the Royal

The Royal Society is holding a two-day meeting to discuss the Working Group I report of the IPCC. Reader Katabasis was there and send this report.

So the first day of the meeting at the Royal Society to discuss the IPCC AR5 report was quite an eye-opener.

The tone was set from the start with the first two speakers wringing their hands over the issue of "communicating the message", pointing out that sceptics were apparently "very good" at it.  According to Mark Walport, chief scientific adviser to the Government, we sceptics (sorry, those who "deny the science") are "single issue, great communicators." Thomas Stocker followed in the second talk emphasising the "Key 19 messages" in the SPM report.

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