Is there an environment conference on the way?

I guess there must be - the BBC is doing its usual pulling out of all the stops to get AGW plastered across the airwaves. Tuesday's Horizon is about an alleged increase in "freak weather".

Something weird seems to be happening to our weather - it appears to be getting more extreme.

In the past few years we have shivered through two record-breaking cold winters and parts of the country have experienced intense droughts and torrential floods. It is a pattern that appears to be playing out across the globe. Hurricane chasers are recording bigger storms and in Texas, record-breaking rain has been followed by record-breaking drought.

Horizon follows the scientists who are trying to understand what's been happening to our weather and investigates if these extremes are a taste of whats to come.

H/T Climate Realists, who note that the show will feature Kerry Emanuel and Katharine Hayhoe, among others.

Politicians are the problem

In an announcement that is somewhat reminiscent of the Soviet Union, leaders of the opposition parties in Scotland have united in their backing for the ruling SNP's policy on climate:

The leaders of Scotland's political parties have united to reaffirm their commitment to tackling climate change and cutting emissions.

First Minister Alex Salmond, Labour's Johann Lamont, Tory leader Ruth Davidson and Willie Rennie of the Lib Dems have pledged to help meet targets.

Holyrood has passed legislation committing Scotland to a 42% cut in emissions from 1990 levels by 2020.

It is also committed to a reduction of 80% by 2050.

I would have thought a 42% reduction in votes for their parties by 2020 and an 80% reduction by 2050 would be a suitable response.

Update on Mar 24, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Perhaps Scottish politicians should take a look at what's happening in Australia right now, where it looks as if the carbon-taxing Labour party is heading for a rout.

Behind the scenes at Skeptical Science

Apparently someone has obtained a behind-the-scenes look at Skeptical Science. There was apparently a security hole in their internal forum.

Details here.

(H/T Shub)

Accelerating global warming

Via Leo Hickman's Twitter feed, the World Meterological Organisation has issued its Annual Statement on the Status of the Global Climate, announcing that that global warming is accelerating.(Press release here)

The annual statement for 2011 was released for World Meteorological Day 23 March. In addition, WMO also announced preliminary findings of the soon to be released Decadal Global Climate Summary, showing that climate change accelerated in 2001-2010, which was the warmest decade ever recorded in all continents of the globe.

A few years ago, reader Paul M produced an instructive paper on how this kind of analysis works. Perhaps the IPCC should familiarise themselves with it before their next state of the global climate statement.

Pinning down the debate

In his Radio 5 interview, James Delingpole correctly framed the argument over AGW as being over (a) how large the effect is (b) how much warming there will be and (c) how much of a problem it is.

Vicky Pope at the Met Office has taken a different approach in an article in the Guardian today.

You can see research by the Met Office that shows the evidence of man-made warming is even stronger than it was when the last IPCC report was published. A whole range of different datasets and independent analyses show the world is warming. There is a broad consensus that over the last half century warming has been rapid, and man-made greenhouse gas emissions are very likely to be the cause.

Click to read more ...

Dellers on Radio 5

James Delingpole was on the Richard Bacon show on BBC Radio Five Live yesterday (audio here from 1:16:20). It's combative stuff, as you would expect from an avowed right-winger appearing on the Beeb.

James mentions my GWPF report and is challenged on his suggestion that the Society gave no thought to its support for AGW. He suggests that my report said this. This is not quite correct. I suggested that the Society didn't actually consult the fellows before supporting the movement.

I think in terms of getting over a reasonable case of what the sceptic argument is, James did well. It was nice to see the silly "97% of scientists support AGW" claim nailed.

Update on Mar 23, 2012 by Bishop Hill

I'm just scanning the text of Delingpole's book, and I can't actually find the bit where he says that the Royal Society gave no thought to supporting the AGW movement. Can anyone find it?

Thought for the day

As we know, Mann doesn't mention The Hockey Stick Illusion in his new book. Is it a surprise that none of the reviews of his book have mentioned it either?

Mann's emails - the next steps

The Washington Post has a very useful article looking at what happens now the Virginia Supreme Court has thrown out Cuccinelli's attempt to get Mann's emails.

Now that Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s investigation into climate research has been tossed out of court, a similar case in Prince William County targeting the same ex-University of Virginia scientist moves into the spotlight.

And this case, seeking some 12,000 emails sent and received by scientist Michael E. Mann, using the Freedom of Information Act, appears to have a far greater chance of success.

That’s because U.Va. apparently has already given the 12,000 e-mails to Mann himself, though he left Charlottesville years ago. The American Tradition Institute, the conservative group hoping to show that climate change scientists like Mann manipulated their data, argues that U.Va. can’t give the e-mails to one person and not another. By giving the emails to Mann, the university has waived any exemptions they’re claiming to the state Freedom of Information Act, ATI says.

The article is reproduced at the ATI website.

Mann cuttings

A couple of Mann-related bits and pieces.

Simon Lewis, the scientist who is perhaps best known for pursuing a complaint against EU Referendum through the Press Complaints Commission, has written a review of Mann's book. It's reproduced on Mann's Facebook page.

Meanwhile, Mann himself has a letter in the Wall Street Journal complaining about Anne Jolis' review.

Mann overboard - Josh 157

With Mike Mann's book still getting good coverage in various corners of the media I felt another cartoon was needed. Especially as another Mike, Mike Daisey, gave us such a brilliant quote: "I stand by it as a theatrical work" speaking of his made up story about the conditions at a Chinese factory which makes Apple products ( you can read the whole retraction here).

Mike Mann is not totally happy with all the PR, though, as we know from his Twitter reaction to reviews by Anne Jolis and Miranda Devine. He is probably going to be really teed off when he see this poll on the Daily Kos.

Click for a larger image

The article's title is 'Michael Mann is a Modern Hero and we need to acknowledge that!'. To date around 97% of readers do not agree and think he is either distorting evidence or should be fired from the University. That number sounds like a consensus to me.

And 'Game of Thrones'? It's an HBO blockbuster of a series based on George R R Martin's books 'A Song of Fire and Ice'. If you haven't seen the series you might not have the foggiest clue  what I am referring to... but, never mind, even the title 'A Song of Fire and Ice' couldn't be more apt. And guess what the show's slogan is: "Winter is coming".

Cartoons by Josh

Climatologists go open

John Graham-Cumming notes that CRU and the Met Office have come over all open, as these excerpts from the CRUTEM4 paper make clear.

we are able to make the station data for all the series in the CRUTEM4 network freely available, together with software to produce the gridded data (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/ and http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/).

..and...

The code required to produce the CRUTEM4 fields and timeseries will soon be made available. Note that code previously released for CRUTEM3 cannot be used to exactly reproduce CRUTEM4 temperature series due to changes in processing methodology.

Hopeful fudging

I briefly met Chris Hope of the Judge Business School at the Cambridge Conference last year - Chris works in climate policy if I remember correctly. He has just started following me on Twitter and sent a tweet in response to reader Andrew's guest piece on mathematical models.

He was picking up on the statement that "invariably [models] require 'tuning' to real world measurements" and responds:

Aren't climate scientists criticised for this?

This seemed a reasonable point to me.

Environmentalists trashing the environment

The "Environmentalists Trash the Environment" theme is one I return to occasionally here at BH, and there's a splendid example in the latest edition of Der Spiegel. It concerns CFL lightbulbs, which are something of a personal bugbear simply because of their uselessness. But here's a new angle on the hypocrisy of CFLs.

Because of the mercury, throwing broken energy-saving light bulbs into the ordinary trash is of course prohibited. A waste disposal company from Nuremberg in southern Germany has invented a machine that carefully cuts apart each light bulb and sucks out the fluorescent material and mercury. The mixture is then packed into airtight bags and filled into blue, 300-kilogram barrels. The barrels are loaded onto a truck and taken to a former salt mine in the Harz Mountains of central Germany. Thus, the energy-saving light bulb ends up in an underground waste depot, where it will remain forever as contaminated waste.

It's not just lightbulbs though. Read the whole thing.

(H/T Alan, by email)

A whole new bias

A new paper by Brienen et al in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles suggests that there may be a whole new set of biases in tree ring studies.

Tree ring analysis allows reconstructing historical growth rates over long periods. Several studies have reported an increasing trend in ring widths, often attributed to growth stimulation by increasing atmospheric CO₂ concentration. However, these trends may also have been caused by sampling biases. Here we describe two biases and evaluate their magnitude. (1) The slow-grower survivorship bias is caused by differences in tree longevity of fast- and slow-growing trees within a population. If fast-growing trees live shorter, they are underrepresented in the ancient portion of the tree ring data set. As a result, reconstructed growth rates in the distant past are biased toward slower growth. (2) The big-tree selection bias is caused by sampling only the biggest trees in a population. As a result, slow-growing small trees are underrepresented in recent times as they did not reach the minimum sample diameter. We constructed stochastic models to simulate growth trajectories based on a hypothetical species with lifetime constant growth rates and on observed tree ring data from the tropical tree Cedrela odorata. Tree growth rates used as input in our models were kept constant over time. By mimicking a standard tree ring sampling approach and selecting only big living trees, we show that both biases lead to apparent increases in historical growth rates. Increases for the slow-grower survivorship bias were relatively small and depended strongly on assumptions about tree mortality. The big-tree selection bias resulted in strong historical increases, with a doubling in growth rates over recent decades. A literature review suggests that historical growth increases reported in many tree ring studies may have been partially due to the big-tree sampling bias. We call for great caution in the interpretation of historical growth trends from tree ring analyses and recommend that such studies include individuals of all sizes.

Presumably, this new source of bias applies just as much to tree ring studies where the increase in growth is ascribed to temperature.

(H/T Hockey Schtick)

Mathematical models for newbies

Reader Andrew sent me his summary of the basics of mathematical models, which I think readers will find useful.

I have been devising mathematical models (simulations) of physical processes for over 20 years, and I just wanted to point out some of the basics that might help people understand these types of models:

1. The physics of the process (to be modelled) may be well understood, but although this helps it is somewhat irrelevent to the accuracy of all but the  most simple model (although you will almost certainly not get a good model if you don't understand the physics). Nearly all computer models are based on mathematical formulae, commonly binomial expansions, that are representative of the physical situation.

Click to read more ...