Bellashambles

The debate at the Belladrum festival was a bit of a shambles to tell the truth. The festival itself looked as though it was going swimmingly, but the "Verb Garden", the bit where I was appearing, seemed to have been organised by the University of the Highlands and Islands and arrangements left more than a little to be desired in my opinion.

Having given up my day and driven three hours to the festival, I got my accreditation without any problems. However, I was then told that I could go and queue up with the other punters if I wanted a cup of coffee. No spliffs, no groupies, no nothing. Hmm. I hooked up with John Shade fairly soon afterwards and we had a nice chat and an expensive sandwich while awaiting our moment in the spotlight.

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Rank renewables - Josh 284

Another story about mad 'renewables', this time a scheme for burning rubbish (which presumably increases CO2 emissions). The company 'Waste4fuel' have piled up 20,000 tonnes of rubbish but neglected to burn any of it for energy, leaving it, for a number of years, to stink out the neighbourhood and spontaneously catch fire - read about it on the Mail or Express websites, even on the BBC website. 

Cartoons by Josh

Rock 'n' roll

Today I'm off to Inverness, to the Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival. This is a proper festival with a bill topped by Tom Jones and Razorlight and featuring those other rock 'n' roll giants, the Singing Kettle. Somewhere down near the bottom of the bill (and in a font so small as to be invisible) are John Shade and I. We are appearing in a panel debate about global warming, which takes place in the "Verb Garden" tent - a sort of festival within a festival, focusing on the spoken word.

We are up against a meteorologist and a green energy chap if I remember correctly, and I'm sure we will need our wits about us. John and I will therefore have to refrain from spliffs and groupies in the backstage area beforehand.

The things I do for the cause...

Protesting too much

Simon Jenkins has written in the Spectator about Owen Paterson's comments about the green blob. He claims that the National Trust, the organisation he chairs, is so diverse in its membership that nobody could possibly drive it to support a political agenda.

It is no self-appointed, let alone globe-trotting, lobby. It is four million members who are unlikely to agree on anything beyond a car park and a cup of tea. On badgers, foxes, turbines, fracking, high-speed rail or third runways, the trust embraces every view under the sun. On politics it is a many-headed hydra, not a blob.

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Lean outdoes himself

Even by his own high standards, Geoffrey Lean's latest piece in the Telegraph, is quite extraordinarily daft, a silly piece, from a silly journalist, for the silly season.

Global warming, climate sceptics keep saying, has stopped for the last 16 years or so...The sceptics base their claim on just one measurement of warming, the temperature of air near the earth's surface , whose increase has indeed slowed down recently, though it has not stopped growing.

This is of course drivel. Sceptics do not base this claim on only one measurement. Satellite measurements of the troposphere show the pause just as the surface temperatures do. Global sea ice levels remain above their long-term average. And the pause is clearly visible in the current graph from GISSTEMP, the only record that has been alleged to still show a positive trend this century.

Lean then goes on to say that sea surface temperatures around the UK have gone up by, erm, 1.6% (although I'm not sure if he is working in Kelvin or Centigrade!) and goes on to say that this is affecting fish ranges:

Cod and haddock, for example, are now rarely found wild in British waters. They are being replaced by warmer water species like sea bass, hake, gurnard, red mullet and anchovies, while John Dory – once only found off Cornwall – has spread through the North Sea up to Scotland. Diets, however, have yet to change to match.

Do you think the cod and haddock thing might be something to do with overfishing? And what about the warm-water species thing? This paper shows a considerable John Dory catch off the Hebrides in the mid-1990s (see Fig 2). Red mullet are found halfway to Iceland. And while we are about it, it's also worth pointing out that top-of-the-ocean temperatures are another climate series that shows a pause, whether you find such records convincing or not.

And newspaper owners wonder why they are going out of business.

Forecast = projection = scenario

Matt Briggs has a post addressing the argument that climatologists are not making forecasts, they are doing projections. This argument, which has always struck me as a master piece of obfuscation, seems not to hold up under scrutiny.

Perhaps afficionados of "projections" can explain why he is wrong.

The crony capitalism candidate?

Bloomberg New Energy Finance enjoys a certain reputation among watchers of the climate and energy scene, exhibiting a tendency to talk down the costs of wind energy by various nefarious means. They have also produced a report that talked up the cost of shale gas, without actually letting anyone see where their figures came from.

It's interesting then to see that the BNEF's founder Michael Liebreich is considering putting himself forward to be the Conservative candidate for mayor of London. Greg Barker, one of the leading lights of the Tories' crony capitalist wing, has already tweeted his support as have a motley selection of environmentalists and even a trade unionist.

Thingummydoodle noodle

Brandon Shollenberger has a lovely post up looking at some recent comments by Skeptical Science insider Tom Curtis and Anders Thingummydoodle from the "And Then There's Physics" blog. Readers will remember Anders as the chap who berated me about one of my posts on Doug Keenan's work, saying that it was a physical model you needed in order to understand what was causing global warming. This despite my having said almost precisely that in the blog post.

Anyway, Anders has been sounding off about the Hockey Stick, accusing McIntyre and McKitrick of all manner of sins and demonstrating in the process that he has absolutely no idea of how Mann got from his raw data through to his final reconstruction. His allegations are therefore completely and utterly wrong.

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Quote of the day

This was an awful thing to do. It was damaging to innocent participants. It is unethical to do this to your participants. It is wildly unethical to invite people to participate in a study, and then do this to them. They are helping us. They are volunteering to participate in scientific research. They've take time out of their lives to help us out. And in return, we slander them? We tell the world that they believe things that they do not believe? What Lewandowsky and colleagues did here was despicable and fraudulent. Why would anyone participate in a social psychology study if this is what we do to them? Why would anyone participate in research if our goal is to marginalize them in public life, to lie about them, to say that they think the moon landing was a hoax, to say they don't think HIV causes AIDS, to say they don't believe smoking causes lung cancer – when none of those things are true. Do we hate our participants?

Social psychologist Jose Duarte considers Lewandowsky's Moon Hoax paper.

Update on Aug 6, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Judith Curry has a must-read post looking at one of Joe Duarte's own papers.

If left unchecked, an academic field can become a cohesive moral community, creating a shared reality that subsequently blinds its members to morally or ideologically undesirable hypotheses and unanswered but important scientific questions.

Slow

Some people are experiencing positively glacial performance from the site. It's an issue with Squarespace, who are investigating.

Update on Aug 6, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Squarespace Help are asking for information from people suffering from slow performance. Here's the details. Answers in the comments [or by email] please:

I'll need to know your visitors IP address. To find it, visit this site:

http://www.whatismyip.com


I'll also need them to do a traceroute. If you're using a Mac, open Spotlight by pressing Command+Space and open the Terminal.

Then, type traceroute and a space followed by your domain name. Press Enter.

If you're on a PC, go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt.

Then, type tracert and a space followed by your domain name. Press Enter.

Once you've done that, you'll need to do two more traceroutes: one for CNAME and another for IP

Update the CNAME and IP for the customer's platform:

CNAME:
five.squarespace.com

IP
65.39.205.54

When all three traceroutes are done, copy everything in the Terminal or Command Prompt and paste it into your reply along with your IP address.

Thanks.

Bureaucrats are above the law

From the USA come further evidence that the bureaucracy there is out of control and above the law. I suspect the same is the case here in the UK. The story revolves around Chris Horner's ongoing attempts to get hold of correspondence of senior staff within the Environmental Protection Agency and in particular their text messages. The response of officials seems to have been wholesale deletion of the relevant records, directly flouting data retention legislation.

...they are destroying them, illegally. This isn't a "gaping open-records loophole," it is wanton lawbreaking because the law is quite clear.

The texts EPA produced on Friday prove that EPA's IT system does not automatically delete text messages; that is, for messages not to be there now, they had to be deleted from the system.

These texts also show that not everyone destroyed all of their messages, as McCarthy has admitted she did. Her behavior was deliberate, serial and flagrant.

Congress is doing nothing; the Justice Department is doing whatever it can to ensure the lawbreaking goes unpunished. It is therefore down to the courts to enforce the law.

I'm not holding my breath.

Windfarm critic fired by Danish university

Another day, another researcher on the receiving end of retribution from his green-minded colleagues. The story this time comes from Denmark, where a leading expert on infrasound, in particular infrasound generated from windfarms, has lost his job at Aalborg University. English translations of the coverage in the Danish newspapers is here:

He is not only known as the country's leading noise researcher, but also as a person who with his academic qualifications has repeatedly challenged and criticized both the EPA and the wind turbine industry for misinforming others about the low‐frequency noise that large wind turbines emit.

Now the 63‐year‐old professor Henrik Møller has been fired from Aalborg University after 38 years of service, and the reason is that the professor is no longer sufficient financially lucrative for its faculty.

The official explanation is that I do not earn enough money. Apparently I am not my money's worth, because I've spent my time on wind turbines. But I know there have been many years where my activities have resulted in quite a substantial income. Besides, statistically, it is probably about half of the faculty members who make a loss...

H/T John Droz.

Yong wrong

Science journo Ed Yong points us approvingly to an article in Grist magazine. It's about an oil refinery in Delaware which apparently is going cap in hand to the government to help it deal with the threat of rising sea levels.

The refinery has tried to get help, submitting an application with the Coastal Zone Management Act seeking shoreline protections due to “tidal encroachment” — which is one way of saying sea level rise.

Yong is not sympathetic.

Quick, fetch me my tiniest possible violin

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NRO's brief goes online

The National Review's opening gambit in the Mann libel case has been published. It's a useful reference document, presenting a very accessible summary of the case and the legal issues. It's not flawless - the "hide the decline" data truncation is ascribed directly to Mann, and while there is a case to be made that he played a part in the similar shenanigans prior to the Third Assessment Report, it was Phil Jones who prepared the cover of the WMO report.

Greens go violent

The BBC is reporting that an employee of an unconventional gas company in Northern Ireland has had his home petrol bombed.

The company exploring for shale gas in County Fermanagh has confirmed that the family home of one of its site workers has been attacked with petrol bombs.

Two petrol bombs were thrown at the house in Letterbreen during the early hours of Sunday, but no-one was hurt.

The fracking firm, Tamboran, said it followed a number of unlawful incidents and threats to its security staff.

Staff were threatened at a quarry in Belcoo, where Tamboran is intending to drill a gas exploration borehole.

Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth. They all sound so nice, don't they?