On rainforest sensitivity

A couple of days ago, I posted on the news that Dr Simon Lewis, a rainforest expert from the University of Leeds, has filed a complaint about an article written by Jonathan Leake at the Sunday Times. Leake's article concerned the IPCC's use of "grey" literature to support a claim that the Amazon is very sensitive to drops in rainfall and that as much as 40% was in danger of being wiped out by small reductions in precipitation.

Click to read more ...

Visser et al on the divergence problem

There is a new paper up for open review at Climate of the Past. Visser et al look at the divergence problem and propose a way for dealing with it when calibrating proxies.

One for the statisticians.

Graun still deleting comments

Not a comprehensive survey, but of the first 50 comments on Pachauri's article in the Guardian, 18 were deleted.

Criticism is forbidden.

Booker on GLOBE

Christopher Booker picks up the GLOBE story for the Sunday Telegraph.

Josh 14

More cartoons by Josh here.

UEA says "who cares what you think!"

The University does not see any conflict of interest in Lord Oxburgh's affiliation with Globe UK, a small parliamentary body from which he receives no financial reward and whose members include well-known parliamentarians such as Ken Clarke, Chris Huhne, Lord Fowler, Simon Hughes and Tim Yeo.

Lord Oxburgh's  views on climate change are a matter of public record.

The University fully expects that Lord Oxburgh and the panel will question CRU's work in the most objective way, and is committed to taking whatever action is necessary following publication of his report.

Full story at El Reg.

Climate change in schools

Readers who have expressed concern over the use of green propaganda in schools will be interested in this, a report on the Climate Change Schools Project.

The students really benefitted from the experience and really seem more aware of the different issues connected to climate change. They often now come to school in the morning to ask if I have heard the news and telling me we really do need to do something- Last week it was the fact that 1 in 6 houses are going to be at risk of flooding in the later part of this century.’

Climategate and storms

TonyN at Harmless Sky has a new story based on the Climategate emails. He shows how IPCC authors struggled to give the impression that storms were becoming more severe when the evidence showed that the opposite was true.

Take a look.

False alarm

New Scientist in 2005:

Failing ocean current raises fears of mini ice age

The ocean current that gives western Europe its relatively balmy climate is stuttering, raising fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini ice age.

The dramatic finding comes from a study of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, which found a 30% reduction in the warm currents that carry water north from the Gulf Stream.

The slow-down, which has long been predicted as a possible consequence of global warming, will give renewed urgency to intergovernmental talks in Montreal, Canada, this week on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

The American Geophysical Union press release 2010

New measurements of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, part of the global ocean conveyor belt that helps regulate climate around the North Atlantic, show no significant slowing over the past 15 years. The data suggest the circulation may have even sped up slightly in the recent past.

The findings are the result of a new monitoring technique, developed by oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using measurements from ocean-observing satellites and profiling floats. The findings are published today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Failing ocean current raises fears of mini ice age

Update on Mar 26, 2010 by Bishop Hill

Doug Keenan in the comments gives some of the backstory to the Bryden paper that was the source of the original New Scientist piece:

A scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory noticed that the paper had a simple error in arithmetic—and that when the error was corrected, there was no evidence of slowing circulation. The scientist, Petr Chylek, published his criticism of the paper in the popular journal Physics Today [2007]. I asked Chylek why his correction was not published in Nature. Chylek replied: "Although they [Nature] did not deny that my criticism was correct, they decided not to publish as being of no great interest to Nature readers".

Simon Lewis and the PCC

The Guardian reports that Dr Simon Lewis, an expert in tropical rain forests from the University of Leeds, has made a formal complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about Jonathan Leake's Amazongate article in the Sunday Times.

Leake's article said that the IPCC had reported that 40% of the Amazonian rainforest was very sensitive to changes in rainfall and might therefore be wiped out by global warming. Leake observed that this claim was based on a WWF report that cited in turn a Nature paper that had nothing to do with rainfall.

Click to read more ...

Russell panel minutes 25th Feb

Another set of minutes of Sir Muir Russell's panel has been published. Not much has happened.

• They are going to give £1500 to the Science Media Centre
• They are going to appoint a project manager
• Peter Clark says BP has not funded CRU in recent years
• Evidence to be published
• Norton and Clark to meet Jones and Osborn 

Climategate report coming soon

The House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology has announced that it will publish its report on the Climategate emails on 31st March.

Offline

I'm offline tonight. It's the school show. Apparently the delight I have in store is a sci-fi eco-fable of some kind.

Mrs Hill says I'm not allowed to heckle.

THES article

I have an article about Climategate in the Times Higher Educational Supplement. See here.

GLOBE page at the House of Commons

The UK House of Commons register of all-party groups for GLOBE appears here. Not very interesting, but it looks as though the board may have changed recently. The officers of the Parliamentary group (Who may be different to the company board) are:

Stephen Byers
Graham Stuart
Barry Gardiner
Lord Hunt of Chesterton
Lord Oxburgh
Colin Challen
Eric Joyce

Readers have already noted Stephen Byers' recent problems. It's only fair therefore to note that Eric Joyce is a remarkable character - the first MP to claim more than £1m in expenses and on more than one occasion the most expensive MP in the house. He once famously claimed for three oil paintings on expenses "because they looked nice".

In 2009 Colin Challen called for all UK domestic flights to be phased out by the end of the year.