New Year's Eve Warmists' Party - Josh 254

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The Akademik Shokalskiy is much in the news, see here, here and at WUWT with an update here. So what better way to summarise the CAGW movement this year. And last year, and the year before that...

A Happy New Year to you all!

Cartoons by Josh

Winter jolly

The saga of the stricken Antarctic expedition continues to fascinate and intrigue. The news overnight is that all the passengers are to be evacuated by helicopter, leaving only the crew on board.

Meanwhile, Richard Tol has been noting the backgrounds of some of the researchers on board:

Ben Fisk

Ben is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Rural Emergency Medicine, Deakin University, researching rural and urban differences in traumatic brain injury outcomes.

James MacDiarmid

James trained as a Primary school teacher, with a Masters degree in Educational Leadership. He is currently completing his doctorate in educational sciences with a primary focus on the early years of both pre-school and primary students.

And so on. To be fair, there are some genuine climate scientists on board too, but with many of their fellow travellers clearly occupying the "free holiday" category the impression you get is of a carbon guzzling boondoggle rather than a research trip.

Slingong

Congratulations to Julia Slingo, who has been damed (if that's the right word) in the New Year's honours list.

Akademic shambles

The travails of the green climatologists on board the Akademik Shokalskiy have been providing us all with a lots of fun over the last few days. I've been a bit busy painting the office, so haven't been posting, but there's an excellent roundup over at WUWT.

With the latest rescue attempt having been postponed, prospects for the ship to escape the ice are not looking too good at present, although fortunately an air evacuation is available as a backup option. We will have to wait and see how things go. But in the meantime one can appreciate the sheer majesty of the propaganda failure that Prof Turney and his colleagues have achieved.

Friends

An interesting bit of intelligence from a correspondent: Steve Jones is a close friend of Chris Huhne's.

So when the BBC were casting around for someone to look at impartiality in the BBC's science output they picked a man whose wife worked for the BBC and who was pals with the deep-green climate change secretary of the time. I guess he ticked every box.

Interesting.

Steve Jones and his research

Felicity Mellor of Imperial College has been mentioned at BH from time to time, chiefly because of her view that media coverage of science is insufficiently balanced. At a lecture at the University of Nottingham last summer she discussed the even more radical idea that there is just too much science reporting in the media, along with many other aspects of science journalism. There was also much discussion of the Jones review of the BBC's coverage of science, for which she did the underlying research.

Along the way (12:00 or thereabouts) she reveals that BBC executives tried to get the output of the report changed to make it less critical of the corporation's reliance on press releases as the source of their stories.

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No challenge

Even in the season of goodwill to all men, the mispresentation of the climate debate continues apace. This morning we had Professor Steve Jones interviewed yet again on the subject of BBC coverage of science, with the great man once again given the opportunity to portray the climate debate as being between "science" and "deniers".

Once again I wonder whether the BBC has ever interviewed a denier, in the sense of someone who disputes the existence of the greenhouse effect. Once again I wonder why the BBC feels that we need to have this false representation of the debate put forward. And once again I wonder at the failure of the BBC's interviewers to challenge it.

The audio is below.

Jones Today Prog

Season's greetings

The celebrations are about to begin at the episcopal palace, so I'm now signing off for a couple of days.

Season's greetings to all BH readers.

Christmas cheer

There is more to life than conspicuous consumption, without a doubt, but take a look at this tweet from Richard Dixon of Friends of the Earth.

Mulled spice scented loo cleaner in Waitrose #christmasoverconsumptiongonemad

I'm at a loss to understand how buying bleach with a slightly different scent in it represents "overconsumption". Or to comprehend the sheer joylessness of the tweet.

Into reverse

Anthony reports that Michael Mann's libel suit against the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Review has suffered something of a setback. Last summer a judge blocked an attempt to have the case thrown out, but appeared to blunder by confusing the actions of the two defendant corporations and their writers. This decision has now been reversed by the appeal court.

Happy Christmas to all - Josh 253

I dont think S. Claus et al will have been too pleased with the 'Christmas in a Bunker' Greenpeace video so I suspect they are on the naughty list. What with our very own Yeo and Deben 'Troughers' and lots of Anti-frackers it has been rather a naughty year.

Wishing you all a very peaceful holiday.

Josh
Cartoons by Josh

Brian Hoskins, then and now

The question of how fair a representation the Royal Meteorological Society has given of the reliability of climate models has been discussed in a couple of posts now and readers seem to have concluded that if you wade through the obfuscation they are in fact only giving weak support to climate models. I don't think anyone has made the case that they have given a clear and balanced account though. In my opinion, by speaking of “a confidence in the models’ suitability for their application in detection and attribution studies and for quantitative future predictions and projections” the authors strongly imply that such a confidence in fact exists.

I thought it might be interesting to see what the Science-y Grantham Institute at Imperial (as opposed to the eco-warrior bit at LSE) had to say on the subject. The author team behind the submission was headed by Brian Hoskins, who has been quite vocal on the subject of climate models. Famously, he described them as "lousy" and "terrible" in an interview with the Economist in 2010.

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The professionals

The Telegraph has a good story this morning, looking at some of the protestors who have been arrested as part of the protests against fracking in Salford. They are very much in the professional protestor mould rather than concerned locals.

The Telegraph can reveal that the leading campaigners against “fracking” in the North West have no connection to the area.

An investigation has found that many of the group’s members are in fact veteran protesters who live hundreds of miles away, with one previously involved in demonstrations as far afield as Turkey and Gaza in support of Palestinian rights.

EU backs down on fracking

For a couple of days I've been meaning to mention Richard North's article about attempts within the EU to crush the onshore gas industry before it even gets off the ground. However, before I got round to doing so, the Commission seems to have backed down:

Fracking for cheap gas moved a step closer today after EU officials dropped proposals for new industry regulations.

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Unqualified evidence

Following my post on the Royal Meteorological Society's evidence to the AR5 inquiry, Doug McNeall and I had a long and interesting exchange on Twitter. Although he arrived at his point somewhat elliptically, Doug appeared to want to suggest that although in Ed Hawkins' graph the observations are on the cusp of falling outside the envelope described by 90% of model runs, this did not actually represent falsification. In his view, the test was too harsh.

The precise determination of when the observations should be seen as inconsistent with the models is one for the statisticians, and I know that Lucia, for one, disagrees with Doug's view (and I feel pretty sure that Doug Keenan will say that they are both wrong). However, this is not actually germane to my original point, which is that the poor performance of the models to date - as represented by Ed's graph - needs to be communicated to policymakers. We are without doubt less confident than we were that the model ensemble captures the true behaviour of the Earth, even if we are not (in Doug M's view at least) absolutely certain that it does not.

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