Booker on Thatcher on climate change

Christopher Booker's guest post at EU Referendum is well worth a read. He discusses Margaret Thatcher's personal climate change journey from fearmonger to sceptic and the attempts by establishment figures such as William Waldegrave to draw a veil over her awakening.

I don't know whether Lord Waldegrave ever read the nine pages of her book, headed "Hot air and global warming", and I very much doubt whether he has ever read anything written by Prof. Lindzen - let alone much else written in recent years by those scores of other eminent scientists and other experts who have questioned every one of the a priori assumptions used to promote the belief in CO2-induced global warming.

Much easier, in deference to the fashionable orthodoxy, just to imply that Lady Thatcher's later views were no more than the senile ravings of an old woman in her retirement, and to place against them the ex cathedra pronouncements of his fellow-pillars of the establishment such as Lord May and Lord Rees, each carrying with him all the unimpeachable authority which goes with being a President of the Royal Society.

Science advice and democracy

James Wilsdon and Robert Doubleday have edited a collection of essays on scientific advice in government. There are contributions from Pielke Jr, Beddington, Hulme and Alice Bell, among others.

The document is here.

Climate, ethics and democracy

The MIT Technology Review has a very interesting article about ethics and climate change and the knotty problem of discounting future costs:

Typically, economists calculate the discount rate by using money markets to determine the expected return on capital. The reasoning is that the market is the most democratic means of assigning value. But while that practice might work well to account for the value of commodities, Broome argues that calculating the discount rate for action on climate change is far more complex. For one thing, the conventional method doesn’t fully account for the possibility that even if people are richer in the future, climate change might reduce the quality of their lives in other important ways—and thus it underestimates the value of current investments. Broome ends up supporting a rate similar to Stern’s.

But his larger point is, more simply, that even such quantitative economic evaluations need to fully incorporate moral principles.

You can see where this is leading. Market discount rates - the ones that people choose of their own volition - are wrong. The answer is not that the public should be persuaded to adopt a different approach to discounting the future but that a different discount rate must be imposed by unelected "experts".

Models vs observations: the troposphere

Roy Spencer has posted up a very useful comparison of lower tropospheric temperatures against model predictions so that we can assess if the models are doing any better in the upper atmosphere.

They aren't.

The ASI wants a royal commission on climate

Miles Saltiel, writing at the Adam Smith Institute blog, has called for a royal commission on climate. In a post discussing Ed Hawkins' now famous graph of model predictions and observations, he suggests that climatologists' predictions are now falling apart.

So let the Prime Minister launch a Royal Commission to revisit the evidence, modelling and consequent policy. The composition of such a Commission would have to be carefully chosen to ensure balance. The public interest needs statisticians and scientists from outside the hermetic world of “climate science” to challenge insiders robustly and in full view. Also in the interests of transparency, the DPP should seize data such as papers from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia for examination by forensic statisticians. The Commission should be given ample time to get it right - five years at least.

Not answering the question

Graham Stringer's question to the department of Business Innovation and Skills has received a response, but not an answer. This from Hansard:

Graham Stringer: To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills whether the claim that (a) every year since 1998 has been significantly warmer than the temperatures you would expect if there was no warming and (b) for the last three decades the rate of temperature increase is significant made by the Met Office in a climate science briefing sent to the chief scientific adviser on 8 February 2010 was supported by any statistical time-series analysis. [150533]

Michael Fallon: The full statements sent by the Met Office to the chief scientific adviser on 8 February 2010 are (a) every year since 1998 has been significantly warmer than the temperatures you would expect if there was no warming (baseline of 1861-1900) and (b) for the last three decades, the rate of temperature increase is significant even when uncertainties in the observations are factored in.

These statements are based on analysis of HadCRUT3, the global temperature dataset compiled by the Met Office and the university of East Anglia’s climatic research unit.

Reading between the lines I think we can probably say that the advice Julia Slingo has been providing to central government is not based on time series analysis.

Oh dear.

Doubt and assumptions

James Hansen is also getting back into the climate sensitivity fray, posting up an Arxiv preprint that (surprise, surprise) comes up with a much more alarming figure than Lewis or Masters. The estimate is based on paleoclimate data, specifically δ¹⁸O data for foraminifera (a class of microscopic animals that got a mention in the Hockey Stick Illusion). However, as has often been noted in the past, these paleoestimates of climate sensitivity are fraught with difficulty as the quality of data on temperatures and forcings in the distant past is shaky indeed. Hansen alludes to these difficulties in his abstract, although his position seems to be that his new approach represents an improvement:

Click to read more ...

And another!

Troy Masters is reporting that he, like Nic Lewis, has a climate sensitivity paper about to be published. And he too finds that climate sensitivity is low (but slightly higher than Lewis), although the result is not particularly well constrained:

Climate sensitivity is estimated based on 0–2,000 m ocean heat content and surface temperature observations from the second half of the 20th century and first decade of the 21st century, using a simple energy balance model and the change in the rate of ocean heat uptake to determine the radiative restoration strength over this time period. The relationship between this 30–50 year radiative restoration strength and longer term effective sensitivity is investigated using an ensemble of 32 model configurations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5), suggesting a strong correlation between the two. The mean radiative restoration strength over this period for the CMIP5 members examined is 1.16 Wm⁻²K⁻¹, compared to 2.05 Wm⁻²K⁻¹ from the observations. This suggests that temperature in these CMIP5 models may be too sensitive to perturbations in radiative forcing, although this depends on the actual magnitude of the anthropogenic aerosol forcing in the modern period. The potential change in the radiative restoration strength over longer timescales is also considered, resulting in a likely (67 %) range of 1.5–2.9 K for equilibrium climate sensitivity, and a 90 % confidence interval of 1.2–5.1 K.

Troy's blog post is here.

An objective Bayesian estimate of climate sensitivity

This is a guest post by Nic Lewis.

Many readers will know that I have analysed the Forest et al., 2006, (F06) study in some depth. I'm pleased to report that my paper reanalysing F06 using an improved, objective Bayesian method was accepted by Journal of Climate last month, just before the IPCC deadline for papers to be cited in AR5 WG1, and has now been posted as an Early Online Release, here. The paper is long (8,400 words) and technical, with quite a lot of statistical mathematics, so in this article I'll just give a flavour of it and summarize its results.

Click to read more ...

Another paper finds that climate sensitivity is low

Nic Lewis has had a paper published in Journal of Climate. It's a reworking of the Forest et al 2006 paper on climate sensitivity, but removing the warm bias of Forest's uniform prior, as well as dealing with some data issues.

A detailed reanalysis is presented of a ‘Bayesian’ climate parameter study (Forest et al., 2006) that estimates climate sensitivity (ECS) jointly with effective ocean diffusivity and aerosol forcing, using optimal fingerprints to compare multi-decadal observations with simulations by the MIT 2D climate model at varying settings of the three climate parameters. Use of improved methodology primarily accounts for the 90% confidence bounds for ECS reducing from 2.1–8.9 K to 2.0–3.6 K. The revised methodology uses Bayes’ theorem to derive a probability density function (PDF) for the whitened (made independent using an optimal fingerprint transformation) observations, for which a uniform prior is known to be noninformative. A dimensionally-reducing change of variables onto the parameter surface is then made, deriving an objective joint PDF for the climate parameters. The PDF conversion factor from the whitened variables space to the parameter surface represents a noninformative joint parameter prior, which is far from uniform. The noninformative prior prevents more probability than data uncertainty distributions warrant being assigned to regions where data responds little to parameter changes, producing better-constrained PDFs. Incorporating six years of unused model-simulation data and revising the experimental design to improve diagnostic power reduces the best-fit climate sensitivity. Employing the improved methodology, preferred 90% bounds of 1.2–2.2 K for ECS are then derived (mode and median 1.6 K). The mode is identical to those from Aldrin et al. (2012) and (using the same, HadCRUT4, observational dataset) Ring et al. (2012). Incorporating forcing and observational surface temperature uncertainties, unlike in the original study, widens the 90% range to 1.0–3.0 K.

1.6°C, again and again  - there really is quite a lot of evidence for low climate sensitivity now, isn't there?

[Full disclosure - I made some (relatively minor) editorial suggestions in the drafts.]

Grantham style

Superrich environmentalist Jeremy Grantham has graciously allowed the Guardian to publish his most profound thoughts on pretty much everything. The whole thing is rather fun, particularly when the great man reveals just how eccentric he is. Take this on sceptics, for example:

The misinformation machine is brilliant. As a propagandist myself [he has previously described himself as GMO's "chief of propaganda" in reference to his official title of "chief investment strategist"], I have nothing but admiration for their propaganda. [Laughs.] But the difference is that we have the facts behind our propaganda. They're in the "screaming loudly" rather than the "fact based" part of the exercise, because they don't have the facts. They are masters at manufacturing doubt. What I have noticed on the blogs and in the comments section under articles is that over several years, as the scientific evidence for climate change gets stronger, the tone of the sceptics is getting shriller and more vicious and nastier all the time. The equivalent on the other side is a weary resignation, sorrow and frustration and amazement that people on the other side can't look at the facts. The sceptics are getting angrier and more vicious every year despite the more storms we have, and the more mad crazy weather we have…

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Chatham House on biofuels

A new report from the Royal Institute of International Affairs has found that biofuels are pretty much a disaster. Author Rob Bailey declares that they are not sustainable, they are hugely expensive, they are not a cost-efficient way of reducing emissions, and that the EU is going to insist that production is ramped up anyway.

Since the biofuels mandate comes from the EU Commission (which was subverted by the farm lobby), it is, of course, impossible for national governments to do much about this appalling situation. Roger Harrabin tweets that governments will not want to do anything about biofuels anyway because they fear that if they do business will not support future government initiatives.

One wants to weep at the corruption of it all.

Speak truth to power

The EU has launched a consultation into the 2015 International Climate Change agreement (H/T Pat Swords).

The purpose of this consultation is to initiate a debate with Member States, EU institutions and stakeholders on how best to shape the international climate regime between 2020 and 2030. The Consultative Communication sets out a context and poses a set of questions to frame this debate.

Details here.

The EU apparently tries to avoid speaking just to itself, although the terms of the consultation seem to have been worded so as to exclude dissenting voices. Nevertheless, it is always helpful to place these views on the record.

DIY integrated assessment model

For anyone who has ever longed to write their own economic assessment of climate change, now you can!

Richard Tol has set up an integrated assessment model in Excel, which can be downloaded here.

Potsdam and the scientific method

The Potsdam Institute has something of a reputation for being a research unit of loose morals. The letter written by one of their star scientists in the Economist suggests that their grasp of the scientific method is even looser.

Prof Anders Levermann's missive responds to the Economist's article on climate sensitivity and is pretty jaw-dropping:

SIR – The reduced warming of the past decade is brief and can be understood in terms of natural fluctuations from the El Niño phenomenon, the effects of volcanoes, the solar cycle and the uptake of heat from the oceans, which continues, in contrast to your statement. There are and will always be fluctuations in global temperature, but the underlying trend is robust, man-made and consistent with a climate sensitivity of around 3°C.

Click to read more ...