Solid rock

Yesterday Michael Shermer, the founder of the Skeptics Society, issued one of those mildly irritating calls for global warming sceptics to run up the white flag:

Libertarians, tea partyers, & free market advocates: you're on the wrong side of the climate issue. The science is rock solid. Follow data.

Being a global warming sceptic who falls into more than one of the categories mentioned, I asked Shermer whether he wanted to discuss the issue or whether he was in broadcast mode. As he didn't reply I proceeded to press him to explain exactly what was the science was that he felt was "rock solid" - was it cloud feedbacks, uniform priors in ECS, deep ocean heat transport, climate models? Libertarian sceptics wanted to know.

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Patience of Barton Moss residents reaches limits

In the email today comes a note from the Barton Moss Community Liaison Group describing its first meeting. Its seems that many residents of the area are mightily fed up, and chiefly with the environmentalist "saviours":

The CLG heard from people whose businesses are being disrupted, with customers, suppliers, staff and family life being affected, with the inevitable consequences of lost orders, cancelled or late deliveries, loss of productivity and employees unable to arrive to work on time to earn their living.

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More violence and intimidation from greens

The Mail is reporting that environmentalists are flocking to the iGas site at Barton Moss, where they are intimidating the locals, spitting at policemen and generally behaving badly.

[Chief Inspector] Roberts said the force had recorded offences of assault, damage, harassment of residents and workers, a flare fired at the police helicopter and threats to kill.

'I attended a residents’ meeting last week and people there were close to tears and have had enough of this daily disruption to their lives,' he continued.

'Locals, who initially supported the protesters, out walking their dogs and driving down Barton Moss Road have been approached by protesters in balaclavas and have been questioned by them, which has been extremely intimidating.

This is perhaps a good moment to ask ourselves whether the BBC has ever made a programme critical of environmentalism or environmentalists.

HadCRUT 2013

The HadCRUT global temperature anomaly for 2013 is 0.486. If so it should be outside the 5-95% bands on Ed Hawkins' famous graph.

That will be more standstill then.

Kevin Anderson does science

Kevin Anderson was on an Irish radio show called Eco Eye the other day. With a title like that one's expectations are not high in the first place and it turned out to be possibly the single most unscientific take on climate change I've ever come across.

Take Kevin Anderson on rates of climate change:

The climate is undoubtedly changing but the climate has always changed, so there's nothing particularly new about this. What is interesting to us and actually disturbing is the rate of change, so the climate is changing as it has always but it is going faster. The rates of change are different to how it has been in the past. And we are as confident as we are about any other area of science that this is due significantly to the emissions that we as human beings put into the atmosphere, principally from burning fossil fuels but also from the production of our food.

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Steyn fights

Mark Steyn has posted an interesting update on his defence of Michael Mann's defamation suit. It seems that Steyn has had differences with the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute over tactics and is now feeling vindicated as the case has become bogged down in procedural argument. And he wants the case dismissed rather than going to trial, as this is what will best protect the principle of free speech:

Defendant Steyn stands by his words and is willing to defend them at trial and before a jury, should it come to that. However, as a noted human-rights activist in Canada and elsewhere, he believes that the cause of freedom of expression in the United States would best be served by dismissing the amended complaint, and that a trial would have a significant "chilling effect" in America of the kind the Anti-SLAPP laws are specifically designed to prevent.

You can see his point.

Diary date: AR5 hearing

This is just up on the Energy and Climate Change Committee website:

Energy and Climate Change: IPCC 5th Assessment Review

28 January 9:30 am

Witnesses:

• Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, Grantham Institute
• Professor Myles Allen, Oxford University
• Dr. Peter Stott, Met Office
• Professor Richard Lindzen, MIT
• Nicholas Lewis, Independent Climate Scientist
• Donna Laframboise, journalist.

My understanding is that there will be two panels, with the upholders of the consensus up first followed by the dissenters.

Parliamentary wrecking balls

The Public Accounts Committee are currently looking at the effect of infrastructure investment on consumer bills, covering both water and energy. The committee yesterday heard from Dr John McElroy, Director of Policy & Public Affairs, RWE/npower. His contribution was marred by the antics of the chairman, Margaret Hodge who completely dominated proceedings, and whose obsession with the company's tax arrangements suggests that she wants consumers to be paying higher bills not lower ones. When he could get a word in edgeways McElroy had some interesting things to say, not least his certainty that government policy is driving investment to the highest-cost forms of energy and there is absolutely no money to be made in gas generation right now. The political classes are wrecking the energy market good and proper.

Start watching at about 15:02 to avoid the worst of Hodge's grandstanding.

Direct link here.

Taking Morgan

Somewhat off topic for this blog, but David Rose emails to say his first novel has just been published. Taking Morgan is a thriller set in Gaza and Washington DC and is available on one of those unbelievably cheap ebook deals at Amazon at the moment, but only for a few days.

Get it here.

Still a standstill

David Whitehouse, writing at the GWPF, notes the release of 2013 surface temperature data from NOAA and NASA. Depending on your predelictions this can be headlined as "Fourth hottest ever!!!" or, as I have done "Still a standstill".

When asked for an explanation for the ‘pause’ by reporters Dr Gavin Schmidt of NASA and Dr Thomas Karl of NOAA spoke of contributions from volcanoes, pollution, a quiet Sun and natural variability. In other words, they don’t know...

Given that the IPCC estimates that the average decadal increase in global surface temperature is 0.2 deg C, the world is now 0.3 deg C cooler than it should have been.

Land use not climate change

Myles Allen may feel that the Prime Minister is right to suspect a link between the recent floods and climate change but the published literature inveighing against that idea is building up. Not only was there the IPCC's SREX report but a paper published recently comes to the conclusion that it's population density and land use that are the critical factors involved.

A holistic perspective on changing rainfall-driven flood risk is provided for the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Economic losses from floods have greatly increased, principally driven by the expanding exposure of assets at risk. It has not been possible to attribute rain-generated peak streamflow trends to anthropogenic climate change over the past several decades. Projected increases in the frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall, based on climate models, should contribute to increases in precipitation-generated local flooding (e.g. flash flooding and urban flooding). This article assesses the literature included in the IPCC SREX report and new literature published since, and includes an assessment of changes in flood risk in seven of the regions considered in the recent IPCC SREX report—Africa, Asia, Central and South America, Europe, North America, Oceania and Polar regions. Also considering newer publications, this article is consistent with the recent IPCC SREX assessment finding that the impacts of climate change on flood characteristics are highly sensitive to the detailed nature of those changes and that presently we have only low confidence¹ in numerical projections of changes in flood magnitude or frequency resulting from climate change.

You see what I mean about Owen Paterson being on the side of science?

Ship ahoy

Steve McIntyre has a couple of amusing posts looking at the holes appearing in the story of Ship of Fools team leader Chris Turney and those that may soon be appearing in the bank balance of the University of New South Wales.

If Turney really has cost the University as much money as McIntyre suggests may be the case then one wonders what repercussions there will be. None?

Exploring the fascist borderline

The Patterns in Physics affair has been exercising many in the climate blogosphere in recent days. I missed the initial furore as I was somewhat under the weather. My impression is that those involved in the journal left themselves open to criticism. It was inevitable that their every move would be scrutinised and a squeaky-clean approach should have been adopted. In some ways though, the affair just increases my general dissatisfaction with the peer review process as a whole. The papers that have appeared in the journal will stand or fall on their own merits rather than the identities or sympathies of the peer reviewers involved.

But I've voiced thoughts like this before.

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The empty set

Readers will recall my posts on two recent papers which looked at how climate models simulated various aspects of the climate system, using these to draw inferences about our future. The Sherwood et al paper picked the models that best simulated clouds and showed that these predicted that the future would be hot. "Planet likely to warm by 4C by 2100", wailed the Guardian. Meanwhile, the Cai et al paper picked the models that best simulated extreme rainfall and showed that these predicted more frequent extreme El Nino events. "Unchecked global warming 'will double extreme El Niño weather events'", the Guardian lamented.

Reader Patagon wondered, not unreasonably, which models fell at the intersection of "best climate model simulation of clouds" and "best climate model simulation of extreme rainfall", and his question prompted the following response from Nic Lewis:

I was also wondering that. So I've cross-referred between the new Cai et al. ENSO/extreme rainfall paper, and the recent Sherwood et al. paper tracing the spread in climate sensitivity to atmospheric convective mixing and implying therefrom that climate sensitivity is over 3°C.

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Montague's triumph

Sarah Montague's performance on her Hard Talk interview with Ed Davey was something to behold. In the half of the interview devoted to shale gas she managed to channel pretty much every green scare story on the subject to date.

This was a triumph of political activism in the guise of journalism.