Books
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Bishop Hill Apr 8, 2015 Children Climate: solar To paraphrase Ignatius Loyola: Give me child while he is still at school and I can make him think the way I think he should.
TM [LInk repaired]
Update 8.40am 12 April 2015
It is alarming to see that the Australians schools are at it too, in what appears to be a more organised way
See the article from Quadrant on GWPF
Bishop Hill Apr 7, 2015 Academia Diary dates Ethics I recently became aware of a seminar taking place in London at the end of the month. Run by the Central London branch of the British Universities Industrial Relations Association, it looks as if it absolutely should not be missed.
Central London BUIRA Seminar
Climate Change, Work, Labour and Trade Unions, with Professor Fred Steward (Policy Studies Institute, University of Westminster) on Labour and the Green Economy and Dr Paul Hampton (Fire Brigades Union) on Trade unions and climate change in the UK: prisoners of neoliberalism or swords of climate justice?
Followed by round table discussion on what trade unions can do with Sarah Pearce (Unison), Graham Petersen (UCU), Igor Diaz and Jairo Quiroz from the Columbian coal miners’ union SINTRACARBON, and Christine Haigh from Global Justice.
Josh Apr 6, 2015 Freeman Dyson Josh 
Click the image to take you to wonderful video of Freeman Dyson in conversation with Stuart McNish - it's twenty minutes of refreshing brilliance.
H/t Hilary Ostrov.
Bishop Hill Apr 6, 2015 Verity Jones at Digging in the Clay has an interesting post on the hierarchy of disagreement (H/T WUWT) and the merits or otherwise of counterargument and refutation.
The trouble is there are those who aren't interested in listening to facts which refute their arguments and like to shout instead - the Bishop met some recently at the BBC.
Josh Apr 6, 2015 Gavin Schmidt Josh 
Following the correct use of a certain word on Twitter my guess is that Gavin Schmidt will go for a name change for his blog 'Realclimate'. Go for it, Gav.
Bishop Hill Apr 6, 2015 Climate This may well be the last straw for my family's long membership of the National Trust as Dame Helen Ghosh joins the CAGW activists with a vengeance. We drafted a letter of resignation last year because of the increasingly political stance being taken by the NT and NTS and then didn't send it. It's still on file though, now where did I put the stamps?
TM [Link repaired]
Bishop Hill Bishop Hill Apr 3, 2015 Journals Science Direct covers what looks like a very interesting paper by Arthur Caplan, which looks at science's "pollution problem", namely the ability of junk science to get published.
The pollution of science and medicine by plagiarism, fraud, and predatory publishing is corroding the reliability of research," writes Dr. Caplan. "Yet neither the leadership nor those who rely on the truth of science and medicine are sounding the alarm loudly or moving to fix the problem with appropriate energy.
Bishop Hill Apr 3, 2015 Climate: sensitivity When a mainstream climate scientist comes up with some findings that go against the narrative of impending catastrophe they usually feel obliged (or are obliged by others) to take steps to distance themselves from the implications - hiding them, issuing declarations of orthodoxy, or saying something rude about dissenters.
We saw something of this in Bjorn Stevens' recent paper on aerosol forcing, with the implications for climate sensitivity left to one side. Yesterday, however, Stevens went futher and issued a declaration of his absolute global warming faith.
Many scientists (myself included) believe that a warming of more than 2ºC from a doubling of the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide is consistent with both my new study and our best understanding. Some insight into our reasoning can be found in a number of excellent blogs reporting on a workshop on Earth’s Climate Sensitivities, which I co-organized just last week, e.g., http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/04/reflections-on-ringberg
Bishop Hill Apr 2, 2015 Climate: sensitivity April 1st is an interesting choice of date on which to release a new paper on climate sensitivity, but nevertheless that is the choice of Nature Climate Change. The new estimate has been produced by a team led a new name in this area: Daniel Johansen of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. The only member of the team who may be familiar to readers is Claudia Tebaldi.
The article's headline conclusion is that ECS cannot be lower than 2°C.
Here we analyse how estimates of ECS change as observations accumulate over time and estimate the contribution of potential causes to the hiatus. We find that including observations over the hiatus reduces the most likely value for ECS from 2.8 °C to 2.5 °C, but that the lower bound of the 90% range remains stable around 2 °C. We also find that the hiatus is primarily attributable to El Niño/Southern Oscillation-related variability and reduced solar forcing.
Bishop Hill I must say I am watching the behaviour of the Twitter management carefully, as it looks somewhat alarming. As Anthony reports, Tom Nelson has been suspended for asking if a Katharine Hayhoe graph was "crap". That's asking, not saying. Meanwhile Gavin Schmidt describes a different graph as crap (that's saying, not asking) and it's all fine and dandy.
Bishop Hill Apr 2, 2015 Energy: gas Greens Some interesting developments on the Mike Hill front. In this post I will discuss an email received from Hill's wife, saying that I have maligned her husband. I am happy to bring her points to readers' attention.
She raises a number of specific issues, which I will address one at a time.
1.Articles to which you refer do not indicate a job application to Cuadrilla.
Bishop Hill Apr 2, 2015 Diary dates Energy: grid In May, the Glasgow Science Centre is holding a debate which might be summarised as "OMG where is the energy going to come from?".
Join us and a highly-qualified guest panel, chaired by writer and broadcaster Iain Macwhirter, on Tuesday 5th of May to discuss the challenges we all face as the energy sector moves into an uncertain future.
Challenges include:
•Tackling the impact of climate change and responding to carbon-cutting legislation
•Finding new sources of conventional energy including oil and gas
•Developing new renewable energy sources such as offshore wind and marine
•The future of nuclear.The guest panel includes:
Peter McGregor, International Public Policy Institute, University of Strathclyde
Gordon Ballard, Chairman, Schlumberger UK
Ken Cronin, Chief Executive, UK Offshore Oil & Gas
Niall Stuart, Chief Executive, Scottish Renewables
Tickets are free and available here.
Bishop Hill Apr 2, 2015 Energy: gas Ben Webster in the Times is having a lot of fun at the expense of Greenpeace, whose poll on public attitudes to unconventional oil and gas rather rebounded when it emerged that more people were in favour of developing a shale gas industry than were against.
Paywalled here.
