The BBC's reeducation programme

The BBC Trust has issued a new report into progress on adopting the recommendations of the Steve Jones review of science coverage. This was the integrity-free publication that recommended keeping sceptics off air as much as possible.

According to the new paper, the BBC has been holding a series of seminars to bang home the "keep sceptics off air" message and will keep up this re-education programme in the future. There's also this:

The Trust wishes to emphasise the importance of attempting to establish where the weight of scientific agreement may be found and make that clear to audiences. The Trust also would like to reiterate that, as it said in 2011, “This does not mean that critical opinion should be excluded. Nor does it mean that scientific research shouldn’t be properly scrutinised.” The BBC has a duty to reflect the weight of scientific agreement but it should also reflect the existence of critical views appropriately. Audiences should be able to understand from the context and clarity of the BBC’s output what weight to give to critical voices.

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Gassing

Updated on Jul 4, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Robin Wylie, an academic at University College London, has written a fascinating piece at Live Science on volcanic emissions of carbon dioxide, which is an area of geoscience that is, like so many others, characterised more by ignorance than understanding - only 33 of the known 150 "smokers" have been examined by scientists.

According to Wylie, the latest research suggests that volcanic emissions are many times what they were thought to be a couple of decades ago:

In 1992, it was thought that volcanic degassing released something like 100 million tons of CO₂ each year. Around the turn of the millennium, this figure was getting closer to 200. The most recent estimate, released this February, comes from a team led by Mike Burton, of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology – and it’s just shy of 600 million tons. It caps a staggering trend: A six-fold increase in just two decades.

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Lessons from the shop floor

John Shade posted this as a comment on the last post and commenters suggested that it was worthy of standing as a post in its own right. Having read it, I agree that it is well worth discussing.

One of the biggest breakthroughs in industrial statistics occurred in the 1920s when Dr Shewhart of the Bell Laboratories came up with a way to decide when it was likely that a cause of some of the observed variability in a system could be identified. He discovered that engineers and quality control managers, as well as machine operators, who ignored this method were liable to mount wasteful investigations into what they thought were odd or unacceptable data values, and almost inevitably make changes to the production process from which the data came. Such interventions generally made the process worse, i.e. with more variability that it had before. There was a great effort in those days to reduce the noise in telephone connections, and part of this was aimed at reducing the variation from one telephone handset to the next. They dreamed of replacing the old phrase 'as alike as two peas in a pod', with 'as alike as two telephones'. But many well-intentioned efforts were making things worse.

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Where there is harmony, let us create discord

Updated on Jul 3, 2014 by Bishop Hill

My recent posts touching on statistical significance in the surface temperature records have prompted some interesting responses from upholders of the climate consensus, with the general theme being that Doug Keenan and I don't know what we are talking about.

This is odd, because as far as I can tell, everyone is in complete agreement.

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The debate at the FST

A report of the recent climate change discussion at the Foundation for Science and Technology has been published here. Audio of the main speakers is available from the FST's website.

Featuring Mark Walport, Jim Skea, Peter Lilley and David Davies, the subject was "What is the right level of response to anthropogenic induced climate change?". From the report of proceedings, little new ground was broken. I was, however, interested to learn from Walport that it is "clear" that climate change is happening and that its impacts are already evident, a position of delicious imprecision: I imagine we are supposed to infer that he means manmade climate change, but of course manmade climate change is not "clear". As I have mentioned previously, I have put it to Walport that we are unable to demonstrate a statistically significant change in surface temperatures because of the difficulty in defining a statistical model that would describe the normal behaviour of surface temperatures, a claim that seems to have the support of the Met Office. I don't know of any other metric in which a statistically significant change has been demonstrated. Walport did not dispute my position on surface temperatures but suggested that seeing many observational metrics moving together led to a conclusion that manmade global warming was upon us.

This may be the case, but I wonder if there is a robust statistical analysis of to support Walport's position. Perhaps a letter is in order.

(Please could we avoid comments that are simply venting about Walport - stick to the issues please.)

Think before you vote

Tata Steel is to shed hundreds of jobs at its plant in Port Talbot. And the reasons?

Chief executive Karl Koehler said the changes were vital if the company was to remain competitive.

He pointed to the UK's high business rates and "uncompetitive" energy costs as factors in the decision.

So despite all those people who claim that energy costs are nothing to do with the flight of heavy industry from these shores, it seems quite clear that it is in fact an important factor.

It's interesting to consider that most of those who have been flung out of work probably voted for the area's Labour MP Hywel Francis, a proponent of an decarbonisation target during the passage of the recent Energy Bill (and apparently a former communist!). Francis is to stand down at the next election, replaced by the red prince, Stephen Kinnock, another keen advocate of renewables. So to some extent the people of Port Talbot may be the authors of their own misfortunes.

Neither the MP nor his prospective replacement appears to have commented on the news as yet. In such circumstances, keeping one's head down is probably wise.