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Bishop Hill Jan 12, 2012 Climate: Parliament I'm currently live-tweeting the House of Lords debate on the Green Agenda (video here).
These guys (and girls) are seriously unhinged.
Bishop Hill Jan 12, 2012 Climate: Jones Media Overseas readers may or may not be aware of the Leveson inquiry into media ethics which is currently gripping the metropolitan elite in the UK. One submission of evidence to the inquiry is of interest - from the Science Media Centre, who were involved in PR efforts on behalf of the Oxburgh and Russell inquiries.
Their submission makes the extraordinary claim that the inquiries into CRU were "independent" and that Phil Jones was exonerated. Given that even Harrabin and Fred Pearce have said that the inquiries were inadequate, this claim seems to me to be more spin than truth. Fox also seems to want the Leveson inquiry to believe that Jones was cleared of misleading policymakers over climate change. Given that the Russell inquiry found the "hide the decline" graph to be misleading, this seems to me to be a case of spinning oneself into the realms of falsehood.
The Leveson Inquiry has heard much from big names whose reputation has been damaged by inaccurate reporting. But this problem does not just affect celebrities. While it is thankfully rare, there are scientists who have suffered serious damage to their scientific standing after being misreported in the press...
There is...the case of Professor Phil Jones from the University of East Anglia who was widely accused by the media of fraudulently doctoring data to mislead the public and policy makers about climate change. Even after four independent inquiries cleared Professor Jones of any scientific malpractice some journalists continue to make the same false allegations (see separate submission from UEA). The SMC recommends that Phil Jones be called to the Inquiry to provide evidence. His evidence would be every bit as harrowing as that given by many of those in the media spotlight and would serve as a reminder that scientists are human beings and can also suffer enormously.
I like the idea of Jones being called to give evidence though. I think yet another inquiry that heard from CRU but not their principal critics would rather prove the point.
Bishop Hill Jan 11, 2012 Climate: Models Richard Betts joined in the conversation about climate models today, making some interesting comments on validation:
As I've mentioned before, the earlier climate models used in the 1970s were used to make estimates of warming over the next 30 years which were fairly close to what happened ... BH asks for tests of the projections made 10 years ago, but the problem is that with internal variability in the system you need longer than that to test the models, unless you specifically initialise the models with the conditions of (say) 2001 using data assimilation techniques, and that kind of thing was not available then, we only started doing it 5 years ago.
So yes, out of sample testing on timescales relevant to GHG rise is an important point but by definition difficult with the latest models!
One minor point is that I had said I would have been more convinced had the story of model versus data in the last ten years been different - I agree with the 30 years figure for falsification. However, more interesting is a point made in a recent post by Nir Shaviv:
From the first IPCC report until the previous IPCC report, climate predictions for future temperature increase where based on a climate sensitivity of 1.5 to 4.5°C per CO2 doubling. This range, in fact, goes back to the 1979 Charney report published by the National Academy of Sciences. That is, after 33 years of climate research and many billions of dollars of research, the possible range of climate sensitivities is virtually the same! In the last (AR4) IPCC report the range was actually slightly narrowed down to 2 to 4.5°C increase per CO2 doubling (without any good reason if you ask me). In any case, this increase of the lower limit will only aggravate the point I make below, which is as follows.
Because the possible range of sensitivities has been virtually the same, it means that the predictions made in the first IPCC report in 1990 should still be valid. That is, according to the writers of all the IPCC reports, the temperature today should be within the range of predictions made 22 years ago. But they are not!
Go and take a look at the graph at Nir's site. This seems a reasonable point to me.
Bishop Hill Jan 11, 2012 Climate: Mann FOI The latest installment in the long-running legal battle over whether or not Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli can see Michael Mann's emails takes place tomorrow, according to a report in DailyPress.com.
Bishop Hill Jan 11, 2012 Climate: MWP Climate: Sceptics Further to yesterday's post on Wikipedia's Soon and Baliunas article, do go and take a look at the talk page for the article, where the usual suspects are going through agonising contortions over why the allegation - that Chris de Freitas accepted an article that had been rejected by four peer reviewers - should stand, despite the retraction of that claim that Fred Pearce sent me.
Much of this seems to centre around whether I am a reliable source under Wiki rules. This is not a question that bothers me hugely, but I must say, I thought that as a published author in the area, I might carry some weight.
Perhaps more importantly though, given the damaging nature of the allegations for de Freitas's reputation, I would have wanted quite a lot of documentary evidence to support them. If there was even a hint that they were wrong, I would be erring on the side of caution. Each to their own, I suppose.
(As always with Wikipedia, please don't get involved - there are rules against canvassing for support).
Bishop Hill
TerryS in the comments notes that the text of the article has now been changed, and also an ongoing discussion on Jimmy Wales' Wiki page.
Bishop Hill Jan 11, 2012 Climate: other
Updated on Jan 11, 2012 by
Bishop Hill
I had an interesting exchange of views on Twitter last night with the Guardian's Leo Hickman and the Met Office's Doug McNeall. I was pressing them on the issue of climate models and their reliability and more specifically the fact that their ability to predict temperature is unvalidated.
Leo rather ducked the issue, noting that he wasn't qualified to comment, but I think that Doug and I came to a meeting of minds. Doug draws some comfort from the fact that other aspects of the global climate can be validated - we mentioned tropospheric fingerprints and I'm assuming ENSO would be another one. We didn't go into the question of just how much of a model/data match there is in these areas and I realise the fingerprints are hotly disputed. Let's therefore park these questions for the minute.
Bishop Hill Jan 10, 2012 Civil liberties Energy: wind In an eerie echo of the use of anti-terrorist police to investigate Climategate, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change has apparently authorised the use of surveillance to delve into the background of a windfarm protestor.
The victim, George Watson, is going to sue.
Appalling, if true.
H/T Ben Pile
Bishop Hill
A correction. RIPA is not strictly "antiterrorism law", as I originally characterised it above. It applies to criminal and terrorism activities. I've changed the headline and text accordingly.
Josh Jan 10, 2012 Josh 
See Judith Curry's great post about what looks like an interesting new book by David Weinberger Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room.
Feels like familiar territory.
Bishop Hill Jan 10, 2012 Climate: Mann Climate: Models Michael Mann is in Scientific American today, with a podcast discussing computer models and the hockey stick man has a pop at Freeman Dyson:
I have to wonder if Freeman Dyson will get on an airplane or if he’ll drive a car because a lot of the modern day conveniences of life and a lot of our technological innovations of modern life are based on phenomena so complicated that we need to be able to construct models of them before we deploy that technology.
This is a bit of straw man, and Mann in fact goes on to discuss the fact that
we can’t do experiments with multiple Earths and formulate the science of climate change as if it’s an entirely observationally based, controlled experiment.
However, after a lot of words about how models are used, he returns to his strawman.
And again, does Freeman Dyson, assuming he is willing to get on an airplane even though models have been used to test the performance of the airplane, assuming he does and he knows he’s going somewhere where they’ve predicted, where weather models have predicted rainfall for the next seven days, does he not pack his umbrella because he doesn’t believe the models? It's just in that case the worst that will happen is somebody gets wet when they wouldn’t otherwise have. In this case, the worst that can happen is that we ruin the planet.
It's not desperately edifying, is it?
Bishop Hill Jan 10, 2012 BBC Jonathan Renouf, best known as the man behind the Climate Wars programme, is being highlighted in a posting on Tom Nelson's blog. Renouf is telling Keith Briffa what he is required to do in an interview that is to be recorded.
Your essential job is to "prove" to Paul that what we're experiencing now is NOT just another of those natural fluctuations we've seen in the past. The hockey stick curve is a crucial piece of evidence because it shows how abnormal the present period is - the present warming is unprecedented in speed and amplitude, something like that. This is a very big moment in the film when Paul is finally convinced of the reality of man made global warming.
The failure of the BBC Trust to investigate the allegations arising out of Climategate is beginning to look indefensible. The problem is that the head of the Trust, Alison Hastings, has already been involved in an investigation into the BBC's climate change coverage. This cleared BBC management and Roger Harrabin of any wrongdoing over the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme, essentially on the word of, well, BBC management and Roger Harrabin. She is therefore completely compromised.
I predict that the Trust will try to ignore these new allegations.
(Postscript: anyone else notice the name of the person who was hattipped over at Tom Nelson's for highlighting the story?)
Bishop Hill Jan 10, 2012 Climate: Models A new paper by Gillett et al finds that transient climate response (i.e. short-term sensitivity) is lower than previously thought.
Projections of 21st century warming may be derived by using regression-based methods to scale a model's projected warming up or down according to whether it under- or over-predicts the response to anthropogenic forcings over the historical period. Here we apply such a method using near surface air temperature observations over the 1851–2010 period, historical simulations of the response to changing greenhouse gases, aerosols and natural forcings, and simulations of future climate change under the Representative Concentration Pathways from the second generation Canadian Earth System Model (CanESM2). Consistent with previous studies, we detect the influence of greenhouse gases, aerosols and natural forcings in the observed temperature record. Our estimate of greenhouse-gas-attributable warming is lower than that derived using only 1900–1999 observations. Our analysis also leads to a relatively low and tightly-constrained estimate of Transient Climate Response of 1.3–1.8°C, and relatively low projections of 21st-century warming under the Representative Concentration Pathways. Repeating our attribution analysis with a second model (CNRM-CM5) gives consistent results, albeit with somewhat larger uncertainties.
It's still a model though, isn't it?
Bishop Hill Jan 10, 2012 Climate: MWP James Padgett and I have both been pestering Fred Pearce about the claim he makes in The Climate Files about the Soon and Baliunas paper, namely that all four of the peer reviewers of the paper recommended rejection.
Fred, to his credit, has checked his records. He says he can't locate his source and he therefore concludes that he has got it wrong.
I agree with you, Andrew, that my statement that four reviewers recommended rejection of the original paper is almost certainly wrong. I have searched my files for any statement from any of the parties making that claim, and can find none. (The reviewers asked for revisions, but that would be normal.)... I cannot be sure, but it is certainly possible that I simply misread Clare Goodess's November 2003 statement that the paper had "gone to four reviewers none of whom had recommended rejection".
James has written up the story at WUWT, and notes how Fred's book - a single secondary source that supports the AGW narrative - has been used by Wikipedia rather than the account of Clare Goodess - a primary source that doesn't.
My children tell me that they are taught at school that "Wiki always lies". This is probably going too far, but on climate change matters, it's probably best avoided.
Bishop Hill Jan 10, 2012 Climate: other Statistician Victoria Stodden makes a call for scientists' data and code to be shared.
Many people assume that scientists the world over freely exchange not only the results of their experiments but also the detailed data, statistical tools and computer instructions they employed to arrive at those results. This is the kind of information that other scientists need in order to replicate the studies. The truth is, open exchange of such information is not common, making verification of published findings all but impossible and creating a credibility crisis in computational science.
Federal agencies that fund scientific research are in a position to help fix this problem. They should require that all scientists whose studies they finance share the files that generated their published findings, the raw data and the computer instructions that carried out their analysis.
The ability to reproduce experiments is important not only for the advancement of pure science but also to address many science-based issues in the public sphere, from climate change to biotechnology.
I think we need a law in this country that says that scientific findings for which data and/or code are not available should not be allowed to inform public policy.
Bishop Hill Jan 9, 2012 Energy: wind The action today is all on the question of wind farms. This has been prompted by the publication of a report by the thinktank Civitas, which is strongly critical of the UK's wild expenditure in this area and cites some Dutch research to back its case up.
The Telegraph reports:
A study in the Netherlands found that turning back-up gas power stations on and off to cover spells when there is little wind actually produces more carbon than a steady supply of energy from an efficient modern gas station.
The Civitas report has prompted a response from Leo Hickman in the Guardian. Lots of comments coming in saying that it's not true and that wind saves fuel for energy companies. It looks as though this will be quite a thread.
In among all the shouting though, you have to wonder - if wind saves fuel for energy companies, why do we need a "renewables obligation" to make them adopt this technology?
Bishop Hill Jan 8, 2012 BBC Hearty congratulations to Anthony W for hitting the 100 million page views mark, which is an extraordinary achievement.
Richard Betts was asking what the equivalent figures are here. I haven't previously posted about reader numbers here, but since Richard asked, here they are (click for full size):
