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Bishop Hill Feb 7, 2014 Climate: IPCC Royal Met Soc Audio recordings of this week's Royal Meteorological Society Conference on the Fifth Assessment Report are now available here. Featuring a bevy of top climatological names, this should make for interesting listening.
Bishop Hill Feb 7, 2014 Climate: IPCC Climate: MetOffice In the wake of the publication of the Fifth Assessment Report, the Met Office issued various briefings for the political classes. These have just been released to me under FOI and the results can be seen here.
Many of the papers are extraordinarily short, and to tell the truth the only one of any major interest is a collection of powerpoint slides from which it seems that Met Office staff can draw to illustrate oral briefings. As the nearest thing to a comprehensive official view of AR5 this is fascinating. Suffice it to say that it's not what you'd call a balanced view. There remains a real possibility - a probability even - that the climate models are badly wrong and greatly overstate future warming - see for example the issues with the energy budget vs GCM estimates of climate sensitivity and the observational/GCM estimates of aerosol forcing, or the implications of the new claims that the missing heat is in the deep oceans, which presumably implies that such deep-ocean heat transport is an important climatic process that is not incorporated in the models.
See if you can find any hint of such concerns in the briefing. In fact see if you can find any caveats or examples of evidence running against the "we're all going to fry" narrative. I noticed just one. See if you can see it too.
Josh Hooray! Are we now 95% certain? Yes, we are! Yesterday we heard from UK climate science community about their work on AR5. The event was called "Climate Change 2013 - The Physical Science Basis. The Working Group 1 contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change." Josh was there to draw some cartoon notes.
Bishop Hill Feb 6, 2014 BBC Climate: Sceptics Climate: WG2 Royal Society Lord May was on the Daily Politics today, being grilled by Andrew Neil on the floods and the evidence - or the lack of it - that they are going to get worse. Cue much wriggling and discomfort from the noble lord. There was also a session on science in the media, with May joined by Steve Jones and Geoffrey Lean.
This is generally good stuff. I was bemused by May and Lean agreeing that science reporting is generally good. This is not my impression at all. May says that An Inconvenient Truth was "maybe a bit over the top" and describes Bjorn Lomborg as a "complete charlatan".
The video should be here in due course.
Bishop Hill Feb 6, 2014 Climate: Parliament Climate: Statistics Climate: Surface Further to yesterday's revelation that the government has abandoned the global temperature record as evidence of manmade climate change comes this new exchange between our two ennobled gladiators:
Lord Donoughue (Labour): To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Verma on 8 November 2012 (WA 224–5) stating that “the temperature rise since about 1880 is statistically significant” and the Written Answer by Baroness Verma on 21 January (WA 99) stating that the Government do not use “purely statistical models” to analyse global temperatures, whether they will reconsider the earlier assertion that the rise in global temperatures since 1880 is “statistically significant”.
Baroness Verma (Conservative): With regards to the Written Answer I gave the Noble Lord on 8 November 2012 (Official Report, Column WA 224-5), I have nothing further to add beyond my previous answers on this subject.
Bishop Hill Feb 6, 2014 Energy: gas Via James Verdon comes a link to Cuadrilla's fancy new toy to demonstrate the landscape effect of their proposed new exploration sites in Lancashire. This enables web users to see what the site will look like before, during and after the drilling work, panning and zooming to see what it looks like from different directions and at different distances.
There's one for the Roseacre site and one for Preston New Road/Little Plumpton.
This is rather swanky and should kill off any idea that there is a significant landscape impact from shale gas drilling.
Bishop Hill Feb 6, 2014 Biofuels The Mail reports that EU demands for ever increasing proportions of "renewables" in liquid transport fuels mean that consumers are soon going to be using a new blend of fuel called E10. This has a higher ethanol content and therefore significantly lower energy density, which means that the motorist is going to be hit with a double whammy of fuel that is both more expensive and less efficient.
In response, the LibDem transport minister Baroness Kramer pretends that retailers have some sort of a choice about the new fuels:
Bishop Hill Feb 6, 2014 Climate: WG2 Climate: WG3 The weather is still coming thick and fast, as it tends to do at this time of year. The storms in the south-west have been providing the wow factor for lots of TV viewers and the scientific establishment have been thick on the ground trying to reap what benefits they can from the chaos.
Lord Krebs, the zoologist who sits on the adapatation subcommittee of the Climate Change Committee, was on the Today programme yesterday (audio below) telling us that:
"What we are experiencing now in terms of flooding and extreme weather is likely to become more common in the future due to climate change".
The conversation moved onto what should be done, with Lord Krebs clearly much exercised by what "we" should do. He is clearly a man who has much faith in bureaucratic action, and from my admitted jaundiced point of view it came over as an extended demand for lots more public spending. In his defence, he did at least recognise that there was a role for individual action too - a radical view for the BBC to be putting out.
Bishop Hill Feb 5, 2014 Climate: Parliament The draft transcript of the AR5 inquiry hearings is now available.
Bishop Hill Feb 4, 2014 Climate: Parliament Climate: Statistics Climate: Surface Doug Keenan has just pointed me to a very interesting parliamentary question and answer. As ever the protagonists are our old friends Lord Donoughue and Baroness Verma, and once again the subject is statistical models. I've inserted some clarification suggested by Doug in brackets. This has no bearing upon the answer.
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Verma on 25 May 2013 (WA 44–5) which stated a linear trend model with first-order autoregressive noise [is very unlikely to be an appropriate model] in representing the evolution of global annual average surface temperature anomalies, and in the light of the Working Group I Contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report which states that statistical analyses of climatic time series “have to assume some kind of model, or restricted class of models”, what models they rely upon for statistical analyses of global temperature series; and why they chose those models.[HL4497]
Bishop Hill Feb 4, 2014 Climate: WG3 Greens Mike Hulme is going to find himself given "the big cutoff" if he carries on like this.
The now infamous paper by John Cook and colleagues published in May 2013 claimed that of the 4,000 peer-reviewed papers they surveyed expressing a position on anthropogenic global warming, “97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming”. But merely enumerating the strength of consensus around the fact that humans cause climate change is largely irrelevant to the more important business of deciding what to do about it. By putting climate science in the dock, politicians are missing the point.
"Infamous" eh? Perhaps word is getting round that John Cook and his acolytes at Skeptical Science are a bit of a liability. With quote fabrication now added to the list of misdeeds of which he stands accused, and with nobody at Sks even offering up a defence, it is going to be hard for anyone who seeks credibility to stand by the treehouse crew.
Bishop Hill Feb 4, 2014 Climate: Parliament Energy: gas The Telegraph reckons that things are about to get heated on the shale gas front, with protestors threatening to sue anyone who tries to drill under their homes. Their hope is that the law of trespass will prove equal to the task, and it seems that David Cameron is sufficiently worried that he is considering a change to that law in order to ensure that the nascent shale gas revolution is not crushed before it gets going.
In some ways I sympathise with the homeowners who are objecting, however ephemeral any problems may may prove to be in practice. Drilling under someone's home seems like an imposition, even if it is th
Bishop Hill Feb 3, 2014 Climate: Parliament Yeo Guido is reporting that Tim Yeo has been deselected.
The South Suffolk Conservative Association have voted not to re-adopt Tim Yeo MP as their candidate for the next General Election. Selection for the South Suffolk constituency will be opened in due course.
My guess is that Cameron will elevate him to the House of Lords.
Bishop Hill Feb 3, 2014 Climate: WG2 Climate: Ward
Updated on Feb 3, 2014 by
Bishop Hill
Lord Stern's squawk box has made one of his grubby sallies into the media today, sounding off in the letters page of the FT in response to an earlier missive from Lord Turnbull. Ward has several gripes - hasn't he always? - one of which is the trend in Arctic sea ice since its minimum a couple of years ago:
The Arctic sea ice has not been recovering since its record minimum in September 2012, and is still on a clear downward trend.
Bishop Hill Feb 3, 2014 Climate: Models Climate: Parliament Greens The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) has come to the attention of this blog from time to time, most notably when it was noticed that it was chaired by Lord Oxburgh and included a member of the Russell panel. Lord O has now stood down as chairman and has been replaced by Adam Afriyie MP, but remains on the board.
POST has just issued a briefing on climate feedbacks and this is interesting reading. It was written by a POST staffer, but the research was done by a secondee called Danny Heptinstall, who seems to be an ecology PhD student at the Aberdeen Centre for Environmental Sustainability (and whose secondment is being paid for by the British Ecological Society). Hmm.
