Caspar - the PDF

A couple of readers have asked to use the Caspar paper. With this in mind, I've prepared a PDF version of Caspar & the Jesus Paper. At the same time I've corrected some typos and made a change to the final section just to clarify some of the issues around RE benchmarking.

The PDF doesn't include the pictures from the original posting, because I haven't got that far with LaTex yet(!), but I hope people find it useful. You can download it here.

Lack of posting

Apologies for the lack of posts, I am busy with work and family commitments, together with a certain amount of follow up on the Caspar post.

One little titbit that might interest readers. Nature Climate Feedback reveals in an aside to one of its recent postings that there is still debate over whether the medieval warm period was warmer than the late twentieth century. The existence of this debate may surprise some people, who have been led to believe that there was consensus over such matters, not least by Nature itself.

The admission is welcome.

And still they come

Well, two days on and the visitor numbers are still heading upwards. I've been enjoying seeing how people are reacting, and mostly it's been very positive. There have been visitors from all parts of the world, with a current surge from Australia, where the story has been picked up by Andrew Bolt of the Courier Mail Herald Sun, which is the first MSM link for the story. I also note with amusement that people are discussing my article in a bondage forum - when you're bored with talking dirty you can always have a chat about statistics, I suppose.

One interesting reaction was from Professor Barry Brook, the biologist who heads the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability at the University of Adelaide. Prof Brook responded to a commenter who had pointed him at my hockey stick article saying:

[T]here’s really no need, as this hoary old chestnut has already been gathered, roasted and eaten. If the folks at Climate Audit choose not to keep up to date, or to ignore any refutation, that’s their limitation.

Which is peculiar because if you follow those links, the scientific argument presented is all about principal components analysis (how the temperature reconstruction was extracted from the tree rings) which is something that I didn't mention at all in my article. The scientific part of my posting was about verification using the RE statistic (how well did the temperature reconstruction they extracted matched up against known temperatures in the past) , and isn't mentioned in any of Professor Brook's "refutations". I've asked him to explain, and also to give us the benefit of his opinions of Wahl and Amman's benchmarking procedures. It will be interesting to hear what he has to say.

If you are interested in the earlier story of the creation of the hockey stick, there's a popular science article here (h/t Steve McIntyre) which covers this earlier tale. It's just as scandalous, but equally mathematical.

Another interesting discussion has been the Prometheus blog where Roger Pielke Jnr discusses the "corruption of science" angle.

On writing popular blog posts

Thanks to everyone who has linked to the last post, which has given me record visitor numbers. There is an irresistable urge to spend your whole day refreshing your visitor number figures when this happens, isn't there?

The counter is still heading upwards as I write. Welcome to everyone who is visiting for the first time and thanks for all your comments.

Caspar and the Jesus paper

There has been the most extraordinary series of postings at Climate Audit over the last week. As is usual at CA, there is a heavy mathematics burden for the casual reader, which, with a bit of research I think I can now just about follow. The story is a remarkable indictment of the corruption and cyncism that is rife among climate scientists, and I'm going to try to tell it in layman's language so that the average blog reader can understand it. As far as I know it's the first time the whole story has been set out in one place. It's a long tale - and the longest posting I think I've ever written. You may want to get a long drink before starting, and those who suffer from heart disorders may wish to take their beta blockers first.

Click to read more ...

BBC backing climate change alarmism - official

The Harmless Sky blog has discovered that support for the catastrophic global warming case is official BBC policy. Tony quotes a BBC report as follows:

The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change].

The details of the seminar are, as one might expect from an organisation like the BBC which holds the public in such contempt, a secret. An FoI request has revealed that uber-warmer, Lord May, was the driver behind the decision, but the rest of the details are only going to be revealed if the Information Commissioner can force them to toe the line.

Update: Interesting also to remind ourselves that as recently as a year ago, the head of BBC news was claiming that the Corporation had no line on climate change. Well, what did you expect from a BBC man? The truth?

These ones are blunt too!

Iain Dale says that Boris has appointed Rosie Boycott as London's food czar. Rosie, the former editor of the Independent on Sunday, has her own small organic farm it seems, and reckons that if everyone had their own small organic farm then we'd all be much healthier and we'd be helping climate change too. (As Iain points out, we don't exactly want to help climate change, but leave that aside for the moment.)

You have to wonder about the collective intelligence of the journalistic classes don't you? You can tell them till you're blue in the face that small farms are more inefficient than big ones; that this means that they use more resources than small ones, and that this is bad for the environment; and that all of this goes doubly for organic farms.

And no matter how hard you try to ram this simple fact into their dull heads, they just don't get it.

It's amazing. These people - Boris and Rosie - have reached the very peaks of the journalistic profession, with the six figure salaries and the small organic farms that go to those in these exalted positions, and yet to any mildly educated outside observer they appear to be semi-educated half-wits. I'm left wondering who is worse: the dumb journalist who can't understand simple economics or the dumb journalist who appoints her to run a department in London's government.

Not the sharpest tool in the box

Everybody's piling in on Alex Lockwood, who seems to be one of those "academics" who earn their daily bread by campaigning for left wing causes. And seeing as everyone's having such fun, it seems a pity not to contribute something to the metaphorical kicking too.

Rather than throw brickbats at his current article (calling for censorship of people who don't toe the line on climate change) I thought I'd look through his recent oeuvre to see what else he has had to say.

Here's a goody, in which he takes umbrage at an article of Brendan O'Neill's in which the Spiked man accuses greens of wanting to curb our freedoms. This has got Mr Lockwood riled, and, all flustered, he girds his loins, summons up all his intellectual firepower and unleashes the following salvoes of pure illogic, the like of which can only be launched by journalism lecturers at the University of Sunderland. O'Neill is wrong to say greens want to curb freedoms because....

• There's nothing new here
• O Neill doesn't mention the science
• The argument has moved on
• O'Neill links to his own articles too much
• Well, yes, only the rich will be able to afford free movement when I'm running the country

I make that four logical fallacies and one admission that O'Neill is correct.

God help his students.

Overheating

Tim W is astounded at the temperature to which poverty campaigners think that it is necessary to heat one's home, namely 21^oC.  Well, I've news for him. 21^oC may be adequate for the poor, but for the political classes, only a steamy 23^oC will do.

The temperature in Cabinet Office buildings is normally set at 23 degrees where it can be centrally controlled.

Climate cuttings 21

We spoke too soon! Having thought that Ozzy scientific body CSIRO had released their drought data, it turned out that they had actually only released summaries of the numbers. Are they hiding something?

Roy Spencer went to Washington and gave a presentation in which he said that previous estimates of the sensitivity of the climate to CO₂ were too high. For his troubles he received much support and a certain amount of abuse.

Climate models were the flavour of the week. Professor Demetris Koutsoyiannis of the National Technical University of Athens published a paper in which he demonstrated that climate models have no predictive skill at regional levels, and there is no evidence that they work at larger scales either. This is a pity, as we are currently destroying our economies on the basis of the output of climate models. Meanwhile Lucia looked at weather noise as produced by climate models and started an assessment of how this compared to real weather. First results were for a model called EchoG, which produced weather with twice as much variability as what we observe around us. Not very realistic then.

Anthony Watts discovered a NASA server had been left accessible to outside users. The AIRS satellite takes infrared soundings of the Earth. Watts took a tour of the server and found some interesting stuff, including a chart showing cooling of the tropical oceans since 2002. The tropics are meant to warm the most in a global warming scenario. They also seem to have some results in the offing which are at variance with one of the key inputs to climate models - namely that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is well-mixed.

The rumpus over Lord Monckton's article for the American Physical Society grumbled on. Real Climate tried to take it apart. The noble lord fired back. Notable in his response is a list of the areas which Real Climate didn't even try to critique - the failure of computer models to predict the climate is one; that the IPCC's method of evaluating climate sensitivity is weak and relies on only four scientific papers, another. That's F-O-U-R articles. Sheesh!

This is not snow

In yet more evidence of dangerous heating of the planet....there was snow in Sydney, Australia. In a remarkable piece of spin, this was reclassified by the Bureau of Meterology as "soft hail".

Without batting an eyelid, the BBC changed its tune on Arctic ice melt. Just six weeks ago scientists were reporting that there was going to be a record melt this year. Now, they are saying that there won't.

And finally, Steve McIntyre wonders if Keith Briffa has just been caught out. As we noted last time round, Briffa has consistently stonewalled requests to see his data. But the Royal Society has recently told McIntyre that it takes the data issue very seriously, strongly suggesting that they, unlike the journals Nature and Science, are going to insist that Briffa toes the line regarding the numbers behind his recent paper.

Photo credits: Storm Afar by WUJI9981

The language of the left

The problem with trying to alter the meaning of words to suit your political programme is twofold. Firstly, ordinary people don't have a flaming clue what you're talking about. Secondly, you can get yourself in a right pickle.

You remember that there was a bit of a kerfuffle some months back when an opinion poll of published climate scientists found that a quarter of them reckoned the whole global warming thing was being overstated. Lots of people on the sceptical side of the debate then started jumping up and down and hooting like lovelorn monkeys (I include myself in this), and asking "where's your consensus now, greenies?"

To which the inevitable response was that, although the greens had for years been talking as if there were only two or three scientists on the whole planet who disagreed with the AGW theory and that they had been sectioned in 1968, the word consensus actually didn't in any way imply anything like unanimity and so their new position (that some scientists disagreed) was entirely consistent with the old one (there's a consensus).

Got that? It's nonsense of course. But wait for this: they're at it again!

Today's linguistic gymnastics revolves around the meaning of the word "most". A pretty simple word, you might think; one that a moderately literate schoolchild could use with ease? You'd be wrong. According to our green friends, "most" is a (ahem) most interesting word, full of subtlety and nuance.

First a little background. In the last edition of Climate Cuttings, I wrote about the shenanigans around the American Physical Society's invitation to Lord Monckton to write a piece supporting the sceptical position on AGW. Today, a chap called Arthur Smith has written a rebuttal of the Monckton piece which he has posted at his website here. He has many criticisms of Monckton, but the one that concerns us relates to Monckton's statement that:

[IPCC, 2007] concluded that anthropogenic CO2 emissions probably caused more than half of the global warming of the past 50 years

His objections to this statement are as follows:

The relevant statement from the IPCC AR4 WG1 SPM is "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations." (p. 10). Note Monckton has substituted "more than half" for "most" (English language implication is a lesser amount), "CO2" for "greenhouse gas" (incorrect but irrelevant), "probably" for "very likely" (strong reduction in implied certainty), "past 50 years" for "since the mid-20th century" (inconsequential) and "global warming" in scare-quotes for "observed increased in global average temperatures" (appears to discredit the observations of warming).

(My emphasis)

The statement I've bolded is simply not correct. "Most" can mean less than half, but when it is used in this alternate sense, the usage is quite different to the way the IPCC have used it.

By way of a non-climate example, we might say,

Tony Blair won the most votes in the 2005 election.

a statement which is true, and psephological nerds will also know that TB secured a share of the vote which was well short of half. But we'd also say of the same election (and again, quite correctly) that,

Most people didn't vote for Tony Blair.

The difference in usage is quite different. When used as a pronoun at the start of a sentence, the word "most" only ever implies more than half. The implications of a contrary view are amusing. Let's look at Arthur Smith's own rebuttal of Lord Monckton. He criticises Monckton's statement that climate models don't predict El Nino, La Nina, and so on, saying.

most of the models used by the IPCC exhibit significant oceanic oscillations of these sorts

[Not that many of them, eh? Less than half?]

He also tells us along the way that

I have recently been closely involved in several email and online discussions on climate and thus have become quite familiar with most of the issues involved.

[Doesn't he think he should be familiar with more than half of the issues before launching his rebuttal?]

Really, guys - with the best will in the world, you'll find life so much easier if you just stick to the everyday meaning of words.

Tagging bank notes

There is an interesting FoI response up on WhatDoTheyKnow? The request was to see what documents there were relating to plans to put RFID tags in bank notes. The response is that there is too much to give within the prescribed cost limits for a request, from which we can presumably conclude that plans are at a relatively advanced stage.

The civil liberties implications of this will very much depend on the range of the particular tags used. Could we have government detector vans driving round the streets looking for stashes of cash? Will the police know how much cash I have in my pocket?

We need to know.