Defence of the realm

Paul Nurse has written to the Times to try to defend the idea that the Royal Society speaks with a united voice on global warming.

Sir, It is possible to think from the letter of Michael Kelly, FRS, (Jan 29) that the Royal Society might not be fully supportive of the views of the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser and the IPCC on the science of climate change. That would be wrong.

In 2010 the Royal Society produced a guide that set out what climate science was well established, where there was wide consensus but still debate and where there remains substantial uncertainty.

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Walport the soothsayer

Listen to this interview with chief scientific adviser Sir Mark Walport in which he describes the relationship between extreme weather and climate change (link below).

...we know that, statistically, in those parts of the world where there is rain there will be more rain, we know that as water levels rise there will be more flooding...

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, unmitigated tosh. We "know" nothing about future rainfall. We have a hypothesis coming out of a very iffy set of computer models. This sort of claim, made without even the merest hint of uncertainty, is why people are so suspicious of the utterances of chief scientific advisers.

Walport on Nicky Campbell show

Yeo makes the big time

Gallery Guido has taken it upon himself to cover the Energy and Climate Change Committee hearings and, in typically astute fashion gets the members of the panel about right:

Suffice it to say that John Robertson’s questioning would have been a credit to a clever dugong. Albert Owen nearly grasped the idea that that a Greenpeace activist in charge of an IPCC Chapter might lack objectivity. And Tim Yeo’s chairing was as good as a golf club captain in a Saturday night lock-in.

And the exchange between Lindzen and Yeo about the pause comes in for special mention:

It dawns on Lindzen the chairman has special needs. He explains how a 16-year smoothing average means one thing, how a pause and plateau means another.

The lasting impression seems to have been that most of the committee members are not up to the job:

These particular MPs are simply not up to it. Climate enthusiasts will be embarrassed by them, and sceptics contemptuous. They are treasured, however, by sketch writers.

Read the whole thing.

The Unprofessional Panel on Climate Change

This is a guest post by David Holland.

After suggesting that they would not be released, WGI have now released some of the AR5 WG1 review editors’ reports. I say ‘some’ because I have also obtained from the University of Reading copies of the review editor reports by Keith Shine and Tim Palmer. Among the materials released by the university were the equally interesting interim review editor reports. These suggest that Shine and Palmer did their job properly.

It is noteworthy that the university appears to have learnt from their Climategate experiences, responding to my FOI request without any argument. The same cannot be said for DECC, which once again made sure of not physically holding any review editors’ reports, perhaps to ensure that they could not be obliged to release them. The University of Cambridge used the discreditable Met Office ‘Mitchell’ defence, claiming that Peter Wadhams worked for the IPCC as a review editor on a personal basis. I have appealed this decision.

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Where next for climate policy?

One of the most significant exchanges at Tuesday's parliamentary hearing was the admission by Brian Hoskins et al that the CMIP5 model ensemble did not incorporate the latest IPCC estimates of the effects of aerosol pollution on the climate. In rather simplified terms, the warming at the end of the twentieth century can be explained as a strong warming masked by strong aerosol cooling or by a relatively weaker warming masked by a relatively weaker aerosol cooling. Recent satellite observations are suggesting that the aerosol cooling is much weaker than previously thought and the corollary of this finding is that the climate sensitivity is necessarily lower.

Hoskins and his colleagues excused the IPCC's failure to update the models, noting that the new estimates of weaker aerosol forcing are relatively new. This may well be the case (although I understand that the evidence has been accumulating for some time), but the implications for UK policy are interesting regardless. Lord Deben's Climate Change Committee have just considered the findings on climate sensitivity in the Fifth Assessment Report and have concluded that no changes are required to the Fourth Carbon Budget. However, if we now know that the models have a warm bias, the findings of the CCC are inevitably undermined. Until we have new model runs incorporating the new aerosol forcings, what should policymakers do?

Getting the shale message across

Owen Paterson was up in front of the Lords' Economic Affair Committee yesterday (video here, but it's a bit of a long haul to tell the truth). One of the concerns of their lordships was that the government is losing the propaganda war over the risks and benefits of shale gas. The minister was repeatedly pressed about what the government was going to do to sway public opinion once and for all and there was much talk of a lack of "joined up government".

Paterson made what I thought was a fairly obvious point which was that he, as a politician, was unlikely to be trusted anyway and he rather gave the impression that our political lords and masters feel powerless to change things.

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European justice?

Pat Swords sends me a link to this press release by the European Platform Against Windfarms, who have been suing the European Commission over its non-compliance with the Aarhus Convention. The Commission's response was to apply to the European Court of Justice to have the case thrown out on the grounds that the EPAW is not a legal person. The court has apparently now decided to accept the Commission's case without allowing EPAW to respond.

There is no doubt that this is remarkable, EPAW had no opportunity to reply to the arguments put forward against it, especially the main one, which is not based on fact: the European Commission having decided that EPAW was ‘a non-profit-making legal person registered in France’. However, when EPAW first formally approached the European Commission, on behalf of itself and other environmental NGOs, in requesting an Internal Review of the EU’s post 2020 renewable programme, it provided specific contact details in Scotland, which were to be used for this purpose.

Moreover, it seems that the court has previously accepted cases from organisations - including ones involved with violence - that have similar structures to EPAW. There appears to be a very strong suggestion that the court is bowing to the will of the Commission.

"European Court of Justice". There's a /sarc tag missing there I think.

Walport responses

Mark Walport's call for a grown up debate on climate change has prompted a couple of responses in the letters pages.

Sir, Sir Mark Walport (“Top scientist tells climate sceptics to grow up”, Jan 27) is right that we need a grown-up debate about what to do about climate change. However, that can only take place if some light is shone on the scientific uncertainties around the matter. Most scientists agree that man is affecting the global climate, but this agreement is insufficient to inform policy as there is no consensus about the degree of man’s contribution to rising temperatures compared with other natural factors beyond our control. Given the expense of many of the proposed climate mitigations, it is right that these uncertainties are discussed openly as part of Sir Mark’s grown-up debate. It may well be that we are best to do nothing for the moment.

Robert Birch

Brompton, N Yorks

Sir, I should remind Sir Mark Walport that there are more Fellows in the Royal Society who are sceptical of the ways of the IPCC than Fellows who work within the fields covered by that organisation. If the climate change case comes to be seen as having been oversold, and billions of pounds misinvested, the credibility of science advice will take a terrible blow.

Professor Michael J. Kelly, FRS

University of Cambridge

The Stern letter

Some months ago I asked the Treasury for copies of correspondence relating to the Stern Review in the year up to that paper's publication. I put in my request under EIR and was told, surprisingly (or perhaps not), that there was only a single document that could be construed as environmental information. After much to-ing and fro-ing they have decided to release this to me.

Here it is.

It's a letter from Stern to Gordon Brown sent shortly before the publication of the report and outlining Stern's ideas for possible policy initiatives that could follow the publication of the report. It's not desperately interesting. Nevertheless, while I find it hard to put a finger on the problem,  I don't get a warm feeling from what I see there.

AR5 hearings

This thread is for discussion of this morning's AR5 hearings. At 9:30 we will have Brian Hoskins, Myles Allen and Peter Stott, with the sceptics - Lindzen, Laframboise and Lewis - following at 10:30.

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Walport's reverse thinking

Hidden behind the Times paywall, I gather that Sir Mark Walport is being rude:

Climate sceptics should stop attacking the science of global warming and have a “grown-up” debate, the Government’s most senior scientist has said.

Sir Mark Walport accused climate sceptics of questioning the scientific evidence in order to dodge the more challenging question of what to do about it.

OK, so let me get this right. The world hasn't warmed for 17 years or so. Climate scientists can only hypothesise as to the reasons why. We can't detect any significant changes in the surface temperature record. The evidence about climate sensitivity is that it's much lower than we had been led to believe (but the IPCC obfuscated the issue).

And Sir Mark thinks we are wrong to discuss the science?!

What does this tell you about our chief scientific adviser?

More Briffa vs Ridley

There has been another exchange between Keith Briffa and Matt Ridley in the pages of the Times. Briffa's new letter was as follows:

Sir, Matt Ridley’s response (Jan 17) to my letter further confuses and misrepresents the issues.

He says that I said I reprocessed a tree-ring data set “rather than ignoring it because it gave less of an uptick in temperatures in later decades than the small sample of Siberian larch trees” that I published.

What I in fact said was that I reprocessed the same data set used by different researchers in their version of this chronology. This was in order to improve the representation of long-timescale information in these data. Ridley persists in the repeated claim that a “larger tree-ring chronology from the same region did not have a hockey stick shape”, implying that a chronology based on more tree-ring data would invalidate our conclusions and insinuating that just such an “adverse” chronology had been concealed by us and would not have come to light without a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. He is wrong on both counts. An FOI request was made to the University of East Anglia for a chronology whose existence was revealed as a result of the theft of emails from the Climatic Research Unit. The Information Commissioner’s Office and the Information Tribunal rejected this request, accepting our explanation that the chronology in question was produced as part of ongoing research intended for publication. This chronology was subsequently published, but as a demonstration of how a failure to recognise and account for inhomogeneities in the underlying measurement sets can produce an unreliable indication of tree growth and inferred summer temperature changes.

Ridley quotes me as saying my “research was validated by the inquiry chaired by Sir Muir Russell.” I said no such thing. The Independent Climate Change Email Review had no remit to “validate” any research. What I actually said was that I had not “cherry-picked” my data to produce a desired result, which was the specific accusation levelled at me in Ridley’s piece (Opinion, Jan 6). Sir Muir Russell’s team examined this specific accusation and found that I had not.

Professor Keith R. Briffa

Matt has sent  me a copy of his response which is as follows:

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Climate precrimes

Chris Hope's one-man struggle to get a carbon tax put in place in the UK is given another airing in the Guardian. There's not much that readers haven't heard before, except that he puts a figure of £6bn per annum on it. It's a pity that there is no mention of the fact that Pigou taxes are supposed to be revenue neutral, but this is the Guardian we are talking about.

It's a funny thing though. Hope is arguing that shareholders in fossil fuels companies should be punished to the tune of £6bn to compensate unidentified individuals for costs that may or may not be incurred in the future (and despite the fact that for many years to come these costs are actually expected to be benefits). It's all rather reminiscent of the concept of a precrime, with something of the flavour of an extortion racket about it too.

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One small step for Science

Marcia McNutt, from June last year the editor in chief of Science, has issued a new reproducibility policy for the journal.

Science advances on a foundation of trusted discoveries. Reproducing an experiment is one important approach that scientists use to gain confidence in their conclusions. Recently, the scientific community was shaken by reports that a troubling proportion of peer-reviewed preclinical studies are not reproducible. Because confidence in results is of paramount importance to the broad scientific community, we are announcing new initiatives to increase confidence in the studies published in Science. For preclinical studies (one of the targets of recent concern), we will be adopting recommendations of the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) for increasing transparency.* Authors will indicate whether there was a pre-experimental plan for data handling (such as how to deal with outliers), whether they conducted a sample size estimation to ensure a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio, whether samples were treated randomly, and whether the experimenter was blind to the conduct of the experiment. These criteria will be included in our author guidelines.

This is a start I suppose. I can't see anything about availability of data and code, which is always going to be the starting point for reproducibility. Still, every little helps.

Reader Lance Wallace sends this further excerpt:

Because reviewers who are chosen for their expertise in subject matter may not be authorities in statistics as well, statistical errors in manuscripts may slip through. For that reason…we are adding new members to our Board of Reviewing Editors from the statistical community to ensure that manuscripts receive appropriate scrutiny in their methods of data analysis.

Which is definitely a win.

Windfarm blight or shale gas bounty?

The Mail on Sunday is reporting the results of a study at LSE, which found that wind turbines adversely affect house prices in their immediate vicinity.

The study by the London School  of Economics (LSE) – which looked at more than a million sales of properties close to wind farm sites over a 12-year period – found that values of homes within 1.2  miles of large wind farms were being slashed by about 11 per cent.

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