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Bishop Hill Dec 31, 2010 Climate: CRU Now available for 2011, the University of East Anglia Naked Calendar.
Whether any residents of CRU have volunteered to appear is regrettably unclear. However, information on getting a copy here, although it looks like it may be unavailable except in person. Proceeds are for the St John Ambulance Society.
Bishop Hill Dec 31, 2010 Blogs According to a commenter on the Skeptical Science website, I permit veiled threats of violence by my commenters.
Anyone know what they're talking about?
Bishop Hill Dec 31, 2010 Climate: Surface Haunting the Library has dug out a wonderful statement from NASA back in 1999:
Why are winters warming up so much faster over Northern Hemisphere continents than over the rest of the globe? A new study by NASA researchers in the June 3 issue of the journal Nature is the first to link the well-documented large degree of North America and Eurasia winter warming and the associated wind changes to rising greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.
Do read the whole thing. And when you are done, take a look at this rather wonderful article on the Fox News website, which revisits a number of alarmist claims from the past. I particularly liked this one:
By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people ... If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."
Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971.
Bishop Hill Dec 31, 2010 Climate: Surface Journals Andy Revkin looks at O'Donnell et al's recent improvement on/rebuttal of Steig et al, the 2009 paper that suggested that the whole of the Antarctic was warming. Revkin sees the appearance of the rebuttal as reinforcing his faith in the peer review process, a marked contrast to the views of Richard Smith, which were discussed here a couple of days back.
Bishop Hill Dec 30, 2010 Climate: Surface Professor Mike Lockwood says that even in a warming world we could have one or two centuries of frigid winters to come here in the UK. He even says it with a straight face.
Bishop Hill Dec 30, 2010 Climate: Surface Climate: WG2 Ross Clark has an interesting article in the Express about planning for winter in the UK. While I'm unconvinced by his idea of using wholesale gas prices as a proxy for global temperature, some of his other points are much better. Take this for example:
So why is government policy so obsessed with the prospect of hotter summers and so complacent about that of cold winters? A fortune has been spent establishing a Committee on Climate Change which last September came up with its emergency plan for adapting to higher temperatures – by fixing shutters to British homes and planting trees in the streets so we can walk in the shade.
Yet planning for cold winters has been woefully deficient. An official report into transport failures last winter concluded that, beyond building a bigger stockpile of grit, we didn’t really need to do much to cope with cold winters because they would become much rarer in future. It has taken just five months to expose the folly of basing transport policy on predictions for climate change.
Bishop Hill Dec 30, 2010 Blogs One of my regular email correspondents has started a blog. If the quality of the stories I've been fed in the past is anything to go by, Haunting the Library may well be one to watch.
I enjoyed this look back to an extraordinarily precise Hadley Centre prediction from 2003 that Scotland was going to suffer from [up to] 89% less snowfall. Even funnier is WWF's conclusion that this would make Scotland uninhabitable.
Bishop Hill
Barry Woods points out that I still haven't linked to his new RealClimateGate blog. Fixed now.
Bishop Hill Dec 29, 2010 Journals I cite Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal, a couple of times in The Hockey Stick Illusion. Smith was a pioneer of the formal study of peer review and his work has led him to believe that the technique is well past its sell-by date. He has recently published a very cogent summary of his views. Although Smith speaks naturally of the medical sciences, `Classical peer review: an empty gun' applies equally to other fields.
The article is full of good quotes. Take this for example:
Doug Altman, perhaps the leading expert on statistics in medical journals, sums it up thus: 'What should we think about researchers who use the wrong techniques (either wilfully or in ignorance), use the right techniques wrongly, misinterpret their results, report their results selectively, cite the literature selectively, and draw unjustified conclusions? We should be appalled. Yet numerous studies of the medical literature have shown that all of the above phenomena are common. This is surely a scandal'
Bishop Hill Dec 29, 2010 Climate: HSI A couple more citations of The Hockey Stick Illusion have appeared in the academic literature.
'Science at the Crossroads: Fact or Fiction?' is a review article in the Journal of Medical Biochemistry by David Goldberg of the University of Toronto. Goldberg looks at the pressures of modern science and how these can sometimes lead to misconduct.
The second citation is from Jörg Friedrichs of the University of Oxford. Entitled 'Peak energy and climate change: the double bind of post-normal science' it is in press at the journal, Futures. The abstract can be seen here.
Bishop Hill Dec 28, 2010 Energy George Monbiot is bemoaning the wicked energy companies who are keeping energy prices high:
In 2002 the regulator, Ofgem, decided it would stop regulating consumer prices. The energy companies immediately increased their profit margins: tenfold in one case. When world energy prices rise, the companies raise their tariffs, often far more steeply than the wholesale price justifies. When they fall, domestic prices often stay where they are.
As several commenters note, this is an odd argument for someone who has been campaigning to increase energy prices in the name of saving the planet.
It's interesting to note from the Household Energy Price Index, however, that energy prices in the UK appear rather low compared to prices elsewhere.
Natural gas household customers in Stockholm pay by far the highest prices within the capital cities of the EU15. Prices in Stockholm are almost 70% higher than in the second most expensive city Copenhagen, and over 4 times more than Londoners who enjoy the cheapest prices.
I think the conclusion that we have to draw from this is that the wicked capitalists in the UK are stinging poor consumers far less than their counterparts elsewhere - (state monopolies?).
Bishop Hill Dec 28, 2010 Climate: Oxburgh Climate: Parliament Climate: Russell The New American has been taken to task by Simon Dunford, the press officer of UEA. New American had been discussing the relationship between CRU and the Met Office
The Met Office works closely with the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which made headlines last year at the center of "Climategate." That scandal involved a number of forecasters in Britain involved in fraudulent reporting of data to forward their own climate-change agenda.
I think it may be reasonable of UEA to take issue with the word "fraudulent", which is not really a particularly accurate summary of the allegations. However, Dunford chose to respond as follows:
We are extremely surprised at the inaccurate and defamatory claim in the final paragrah [sic].... Our scientists were exonerated of any dishonesty or malpractice by a series of independent reviews.... Readers of your article would not know that they had been cleared of any such accusations.
Dunford's response seems a mistake to me, opening up the question of the credibiliity of the inquiries, when concentrating on the question of "fraudulent reporting of data" would have done the job just as well. New American has now been able to responsd in turn with a further article looking at the work of Russell and Oxburgh. Your truly is cited in the process.
Bishop Hill Dec 27, 2010 Climate: CRU Media I've been struck by a couple of the environment correspondents' reviews of 2010, particularly as regards Climategate and the impact of my own GWPF report on the inquiries.
For example, when the report was issued, the contents, which to my mind show pretty conclusively that the Oxburgh and Russell reviews were whitewashes, were reported by the Telegraph's Louise Gray without disputing either the facts or my analysis. One could see her article as an attempt to divert attention away from my principal evidence, but there was no case that the facts were contested.
Bishop Hill Dec 27, 2010 Climate: IPCC The IPCC is looking for a new communications bod - a position that Nature describes as "the toughest job in the world". Time for Bob Ward to move on from the Grantham Institute?
Bishop Hill A few weeks back, I reported some snippets from the House of Lords debate on energy. The second reading of the bill took place just before Christmas and had many interesting points, several of which came from Lord Giddens, the sociologist and Labour party guru.
Last time round, I majored on the long-since refuted claims that "green" jobs were a benefit of government policy. I therefore read with some hope these words of Lord Giddens:
...job creation is often mentioned as an important outcome of investment in home insulation, renewable energy and wider energy innovation. However, there is an awful lot of loose talk around this, some of which appears in government documents,I am afraid.
Correct. However, the noble lord quickly demonstrates that his own take is remarkably deviod of substance...
Where it is said, for example, that wind power will create so many thousand jobs, what is important is not the jobs that are created by specific technologies or innovations but, because jobs will be lost in the older energy industries, the net new jobs that are created. Have the Government done a calculation of net job outcomes from the innovations in the Bill and the wider innovations that are proposed? Without that, you cannot say that these innovations will create net new employment. Most new technologies tend to reduce the need for labour rather than expand it. This is an important aspect of investment in new energy technologies and I feel that a lot more work must be done on it than I have seen. As I said, many statements on this topic are simply superficial.
They are indeed. As has been said ad nauseam, we want to generate the energy we need with as few people as possible. So Giddens would appear to be one of those people making superficial statements about green jobs.
Earlier in the debate, Lord Lawson had referred to the government's proposals as "dirigiste", a characterisation that seems quite apt. However, he was taken up on this by Giddens, who replied with a spectacular piece of circular logic:
The noble Lord, Lord Lawson, called them “dirigiste” proposals, essentially as a way of dumping on them. I would say the opposite. I think that it is right and proper in energy and climate change, where you are planning for a 20-year or 30-year cycle, to have a plan.
Bishop Hill Dec 24, 2010 Climate: CRU Climate Change Dispatch has extracted a statement on the progress of Norfolk Constabulary's investigation into the Climategate:
Following the publication of e-mails and other data prior to the COP15 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, the Norfolk Constabulary investigation into the data breach at the University of East Anglia continues.
With the many different lines of enquiry that officers identified, the workload has varied with specialist investigators/law enforcement partners used when needed.
Commenting on the investigation, Senior Investigating Officer (SIO), Detective Superintendent Julian Gregory said:
“This has been a complex investigation, undertaken in a global context and requiring detailed and time consuming lines of enquiry. Due to the sensitivity of the investigation it has not been possible to share details of enquiries with the media and the public and it would be inappropriate for us to comment any further at this time.”
Note to Editors:
It is acknowledged that interest in this case continues, given that the enquiry has now been running for approximately a year and that there is a desire for us to publish further detail. However, the circumstances of the case do not lend themselves to public comment at this time due to the sensitivities of the investigation and this is unlikely to change in the near future.”
