On John Timmer

John Timmer is someone I come across from time to time on Twitter. He describes himself as the "Chief science wrangler for Ars Technica" which is a publication you can find here. Timmer has a fairly yawnworthy post up here, in which he seeks to justify use of the term "denier". It's not really worth much of your time, except for one paragraph. This one:

For example, atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen has been a prominent figure trotted out to suggest that climate scientists have gotten it wrong; but he also seems to think health authorities got it wrong with smoking. 

The link is to a Newsweek article, the relevant sentence of which is this:

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Mark Maslin does fallacy

Updated on Dec 17, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Mark Maslin, the head of geography at UCL, has written another of those "I won't discuss the science with bad denier people" articles that adorn the left-wing press from time to time. His hypothesis is that we are simply arguing the toss because we oppose the inevitable consequence of avoiding manmade global warming, namely the introduction of international Marxism:

So in many cases the discussion of the science of climate change has nothing to do with the science and is all about the political views of the objectors. Many perceive climate change as a challenge to the very theories that have dominated global economics for the last 35 years, and the lifestyles that it has provided in developed, Anglophone countries. Hence, is it any wonder that many people prefer climate change denial to having to face the prospect of building a new political (and socio-economic) system, which allows collective action and greater equality?

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Myles, Roger, and Chris hit Rotterdam

Readers may be interesting in this report of the proceedings of a climate change conference in Rotterdam back in September. One of the sessions was chaired by a familiar face

BBC correspondent and conference moderator Roger Harrabin took a moment between speeches to remind all those gathered that “politics is creeping along, whereas scientists say, we need to be racing forward in order to adapt to and mitigate climate change.”

And there was a fairly vacuous contribution from Chris Rapley:

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Climate change...ethics?

The GWPF has a new and, in my opinion, very important paper out on the subject of climate change and ethics. Here's the press release:

London, 16 December: A new paper by Dr Peter Lee and published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation explores many of the ethical disputes that characterise climate science and policy in the twenty-first century.
 
“Science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in their message… Leaders must act.” These words by Ban Ki-moon, United Nations Secretary-General, welcomed the latest IPCC Report as certain and indisputable.

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Academic science: not fit for purpose

Richard Smith has another fascinating article about the way science has been practised in universities in recent decades, focusing particularly on The Big Fat Surprise, a book about the purported links between diet and health. It's full of quotable stuff; so much so that I barely know where to begin, but this, almost at random, gives a flavour of the thing.

[Ancel Benjamin Keys, a biologist at the University of Minnesota] studied few men and did not have a reliable way of measuring diets, and in the case of the Japanese and Italians he studied them soon after the second world war, when there were food shortages. Keys could have gathered data from many more countries and people (women as well as men) and used more careful methods, but, suggests Teicholz, he found what he wanted to find. A subsequent study by other researchers of 22 countries found little correlation between death rates from heart disease and fat consumption, and these authors suggested that there could be other causes, including tobacco and sugar consumption

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Unprecedented boing - Josh 305

Talking of Climate Models, there is another great Climate Audit post titled "Unprecedented" Model Discrepancy where Richard Betts, once again, provides cartoon inspiration in the comments.

It’s a bit like watching a ball bouncing down a rocky hillside. You can predict some aspects of it behaviour but not others. You can predict it will generally go downhill, and if you see a big rock in it’s path you can be reasonably confident that it will hit it and bounce off, but you can’t predict the size and direction of all the little bounces in between.

Cartoons by Josh

Overpeck notes the problems with attribution statements

FiveThirtyEight has an amusing article about the competing explanations for the California drought. A bunch of NOAA scientists have reported that it's all down to natural variability, noting that they are pretty sure of their results:

This is the first study to show that a West Coast dry pattern could be triggered by warmer water anomalies in the tropical western Pacific. Seager said researchers feel “pretty confident” about the association because it shows up in all their models. (One objective of the study was to look for factors that could help predict future droughts.)

This seems to me to be a fairly hilarious example of the fallacy I lampooned in this posting a few months back.

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Ross McKitrick succeeds Henderson

GWPF have announced that Ross McKitrick is to take over from David Henderson as chairman of the GWPF Academic Advisory Council.

Dr McKitrick is Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, specialising in environmental economics, and has been a foundation member of the Council since November 2009. He succeeds Professor David Henderson, who has held the chairmanship with great distinction since its inception in 2009. Professor Henderson is stepping down from the chairmanship at his own request, but will remain an active member of the Council. Nigel Lawson, Chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said:

“I am extremely grateful to David, whose contribution to the work of the AAC and the success of the GWPF over the past five years has been immeasurable”.

BH endorsed by Skeptical Science

Barry Woods points me to this Skeptical Science thread (reproduced at Brandon's site), in which yours truly is discussed.

Dana: The Bishop Hill crowd is interesting. A few reasonably intelligent commenters. Several who attack John, SkS, and myself. Bishop Hill has now twice asked people to stay on topic.

John Cook: Thanks Dana for stepping in - deflected some of the hate :-)

I don't read the site (apart from posts where he criticises SkS) but my impression is he's a pretty reasonable, civil guy. His critiques of SkS were all civil and some of the criticisms were reasonable. What's his story?

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Celebrating Hurst

Readers may be interested in this presentation by Cohn, Lins, Koutsoyiannis and Montanari about the life and work of Harold Hurst, the scientist who discovered the phenomenon of long-term persistence (LTP) while examining records of the flooding of the Nile. The presentation seems to date from the end of last year.

Many of you will know that LTP is pervasive in geoscience datasets, so you will no doubt be amused by this bit about the IPCC's consideration of the phenomenon:

...the SPM does not mention LTP, although it speaks about the internal climate variability, e.g.: “Internal variability will continue to be a major influence on climate, particularly in the near-term and at the regional scale.”

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The ice holds up

Perhaps it's because it's the season of goodwill. Or perhaps because Greenpeace's vandalism of the Nazca lines has put Corporation noses out of joint. Whatever the reason, the BBC's decision to highlight the recovery in Arctic sea ice levels in the last few years represents a rare excursion out of its "OMG we're all about to fry" comfort zone.

Yes, the sea ice is going to disappear, we are told, but on much longer timescales than previously advised.

While global warming seems to have set the polar north on a path to floe-free summers, the latest data from Europe's Cryosat mission suggests it may take a while yet to reach those conditions.

The spacecraft observed 7,500 cu km of ice cover in October when the Arctic traditionally starts its post-summer freeze-up.

This was only slightly down on 2013 when 8,800 cu km were recorded.

Two cool summers in a row have now allowed the pack to increase and then hold on to a good deal of its volume.

Climate elevations - Josh 304

There's an excellent post over at Climate Audit on Sheep Mountain, mentioned here too.

Regular readers will recognise the familiar outline of the landscape (in the IPCC's First Assessment Report) and there's a great 2009 post to fill in the details at WUWT

Cartoons by Josh

H/t Messenger for the helpful comma

A prices and income policy

Douglas Carswell, fresh from his defection from the Conservatives to UKIP, recently won time to debate energy costs in Parliament yesterday. The transcript is here. It's not terribly exciting, but there was one rather delicious moment where the minister, Matthew Hancock felt obliged to respond to Carwell's taunts about Conservative policy on energy, namely that it was a "prices and incomes" policy:

...a prices and incomes policy for energy in 2015 will no more work than a prices and incomes policy has worked for anything in the past. Prices and incomes policies do not work.

As Hancock put it

By switching from a regime in which...subsidy is given out to whatever renewable technology was brought forward to a regime in which a controlled pot of subsidy is auctioned to ensure that we get the best possible value for money, we have made a change towards a market-oriented system.

So it's still a prices and income policy, but a different one.

Hide the incline

The Royal Society has issued a new guide called A Short Guide to Climate Science, the latest in a long series of publications, beginning with Bob Ward's magnum opus, Facts and Fictions About Climate Change, that attempt to guide the public away from any awkward questions on the subject of global warming. It's a slim tome - just 8 pages long - but the Royal has managed to pack a great deal of public relations effort into it.

As one would expect, there is barely a caveat in sight, with the credibility of the models not mentioned at all and all kinds of tricks on display. For example, the "2000s were warmer than 1990s" line is dusted off and given an airing once again, as if this somehow contradicted the pause. The rise in Antarctic sea ice is tiptoed round in brilliant fashion, with an insinuation that scientists understand why their models are wrong in this area. I was also amused to see the dry areas becoming drier thing being aired again. I thought this had been thoroughly debunked?

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Betts off

Richard Betts has kicked off a small Twitter kerfuffle today, taking umbrage at Matt Ridley's Times piece yesterday.

@ProfMarkMaslin Exactly. If @mattwridley wants to criticise climate policy then he's got every right, but attacking scientists is wrong.

— Richard Betts (@richardabetts) December 10, 2014

Matt has responded on his own blog today and I'm taking the liberty of reproducing his comment here.

After this article was published an extraordinary series of tweets appeared under the name of Richard Betts, a scientist at the UK Met Office and somebody who is normally polite even when critical. He called me “paranoid and rude” and made a series of assertions about what I had written that were either inaccurate or stretched interpretations to say the least. He then advanced the doctrine that politicians should not criticize civil servants. The particular sentence he objected to was:

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