Black and greenie

Richard Black has been chatting to some environmentalists (I kid you not) and they've told him that the government isn't as green as they said they were going to be, and there is concern that there is going to be a dash for gas.

"There are growing pressures to create a UK energy system very heavily dominated by gas," Michael Grubb, chair of energy and environment policy at Cambridge University, told BBC News.

"There's a risk that the government is trying to give the gas industry assurances that could be misleading because they are not compatible with all we know about climate change."

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Climate models for politicians

Some weeks ago, I invited readers to improve upon parts of a summary of global warming science, written by Julia Slingo for the benefit of readers in central government. The ground covered was mainly about surface temperatures. At some point I may well write this up into something more formal.

I think it would be interesting to also say something about climate models and their uncertainties and I have been giving this some thought. My knowledge of climate models is somewhat sketchy, so some of my understanding may be incorrect, but here's the ground I think central government really ought to understand:

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More world government

This just in from Scientific American: an opinion piece about the kind of superstate that the environmental movement would like us to have in response to AGW:

To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers. There would have to be consideration of some way of embracing head-in-the-cloud answers to social problems that are usually dismissed by policymakers as academic naivete. In principle, species-wide alteration in basic human behaviors would be a sine qua non, but that kind of pronouncement also profoundly strains credibility in the chaos of the political sphere. Some of the things that would need to be contemplated: How do we overcome our hard-wired tendency to “discount” the future: valuing what we have today more than what we might receive tomorrow? Would any institution be capable of instilling a permanent crisis mentality lasting decades, if not centuries? How do we create new institutions with enforcement powers way beyond the current mandate of the U.N.? Could we ensure against a malevolent dictator who might abuse the power of such organizations?

Theatrical works

This story is not climate-related, but is somehow very resonant with the issues we return to again and again here at BH. Josh points me to this retraction of many of the most scandalous details about Apple's Chinese subcontractor, FoxConn. It appears that the source of the disinformation, Mike Daisey, was a well-meaning chap who just wanted to make people care.

Sound familiar?

Daisey says he stands by his story "as a theatrical work".

More learned analysis of Climategate

Another academic paper on the meaning of CLimategate comes in the shape of this study, by Marianne Ryghaug and Tomas Moe Skjølsvold.

This article analyzes 1073 emails that were hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in November, 2009. The incident was popularly dubbed “Climate Gate”, indicating that the emails reveal a scientific scandal. Here we analyze them differently. Rather than objecting to the exchanges based on some idea about proper scientific conduct, we see them as a rare glimpse into a situation where scientists collectively prepare for participation in heated controversy, with much focus on methodology. This allows us to study how scientists communicate informally about framing propositions of facts in the best possible way. Through the eyes of Science and Technology studies (STS) the emails provide an opportunity to study communication as part of science in the making across disciplines and laboratories. Analysed as “written conversation” the emails provide information about processes of consensus formation through ‘agonistic evaluations’ of other scientists work and persuasion of others to support ones own work. Also, the emails contain judgements about other groups and individual scientists. Consensus-forming appeared as a precarious activity. Controversies could be quite resilient in the course of this decade-long exchange, probably reflecting the complexity of the methodological challenges involved.

The paper is also being discussed at Klimazwiebel.

(H/T Messenger)

Black's Whitewash

BBC watchers might be interested in a new blog called Black's Whitewash, focusing on the activities of BH favourite, Richard Black.

Irony fail

Readers will be amused by the outpourings of Lawrence Souder and Furrah Qureshi of Drexel University. Their latest paper appears in the Journal of Scientific Communication.

Most accounts of an ideal scientific discourse proscribe ad hominem appeals as one way to distinguish it from public discourse. Because of their frequent use of ad hominem attacks, the Climategate email messages provoked strong criticisms of climate scientists and climate science. This study asks whether the distinction between public and scientific discourse holds in this case and thus whether the exclusion of ad hominem arguments from scientific discourse is valid. The method of analysis comes from the field of informal logic in which argument fallacies like the ad hominem are classified and assessed. The approach in this study focuses on a functional analysis of ad hominem—their uses rather than their classification. The analysis suggests three distinct functional uses of ad hominem remarks among the Climategate emails: (1) indirect, (2) tactical, and (3) meta-. Consistent with previous research on ad hominem arguments in both public and scientific discourse, these results reinforce the common opinion of their fallacious character. Only the remarks of the last type, the meta- ad hominem, seemed to be non-fallacious in that they might help to preempt the very use of ad hominem attacks in scientific discourse.

Throughout their paper, Souder and Qureshi refer to anyone who questions any aspect of the AGW hypothesis as "deniers". Perhaps irony hasn't made its way to the top of the ivory tower yet.

The paper is quite interesting though.

MSNBC on Climategate and the inquiries

There is a very interesting, if rather toe-curling, segment about Climategate and the inquiries on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC.

Although she kicks off with the normal straw man about hiding declines in global temperature, she soon moves on to something that is closer to the truth, explaining that hide the decline was about hiding the failure of the proxies to track temperatures in the period after 1960. This is good, but she then elides into an important piece of misinformation, by suggesting that this is an issue that only affects the post-1960 period. This is of course, not the case. Since nobody knows what causes the divergence, nobody knows whether it affects earlier periods or not, although of course there are strong suggestions that it does.

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World government

Some time ago a journalist told me that many of his colleagues were so keen on environmentalism because they wanted to see a world government. I thought it was a bit kooky at the time and didn't really give it too much thought.

Interesting therefore to see Richard Black's article today, in which we see environmentalism being used to push just such a world government agenda. The idea appears to be that poor countries should be able to vote to transfer money from rich countries to themselves.

I expect our politicians to be fully in favour.

More Nullius

Suddenly the reactions to my Nullius in Verba report on the Royal Sociey are coming thick and fast. Bernie Lewin has written a long blog post, the first of two on the report.

Montford’s sparse and unembellished chronicling of the relaxation of this discipline is what makes it such a powerful work. Montford does not pretend to chronicle the perversion of science itself, as Richard Lindzen suggests in the Foreword – he does that elsewhere, and daily, on his blog. Nonetheless, his story of the perversion of the Royal Society is an emblem, a sign or an indicator of this general perversion, wherein, as Lindzen puts it, the legitimate role of science as a powerful mode of inquiry is replaced by the pretence of science to a position of political authority. Montford’s is a story no less of how a leading institution of the scientific revolution—the sober, reasonable, disinterested, oh-so-Anglican model for the European Enlightenment—after preserving its integrity for so long, has only recently, and grossly, perverted itself with the promotion of one opinion in particular, namely: the ‘consensus’ opinion on the ‘settled science’ behind the need for urgent action to mitigate a global climate catastrophe.

Questioning Mann

Anne Jolis's review of Michael Mann's Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars is the only one I've seen in the mainstream media that approaches the book with anything other than a placid acceptance of Mann's utterances.

Mr. Mann closes "The Hockey Stick" with a passionate call for more scientists to join him "on the front lines of the climate wars." "Scientific truth alone," Mr. Mann writes, "is not enough to carry the day in the court of public opinion." It would be "irresponsible," he says, "for us to silently stand by while industry-funded climate change deniers succeed in confusing and distracting the public and dissuading our policy makers from taking appropriate actions." These are unfortunate conclusions for a scientist-turned-climate-warrior whose greatest weakness has always been a low estimation of the public intellect.

DPA magazine on Nullius in Verba

I had missed this editorial in DPA magazine, much of which concerns my GWPF report on the Royal Society.

Whether or not the scientific community can truly be insulated from political influence, particularly when its research is financed, in part, through public funding, is a moot point. However, institutions like the Royal Society must presumably speak with the majority voice of their members. If the consensus among scientists is that anthropogenic climate change is a reality, then calls for “drastic action on energy and climate policies from policy makers and governments” are to be expected from a responsible scientific body. More worrying is the possibility that the views of dissenters are not being given proper hearing for fear of opprobrium; this, rather than the broader accusation of political grandstanding, is probably behind Andrew Montford’s call for more “open-mindedness and balanced assessment”.

Read the whole thing.

Climate Hawkins

Ed Hawkins, a climatologist at Reading University, has written a short blog post reporting a comparison he has done of climate model output to data. He specifically addressing the question of the Arctic temperatures, which I mentioned in yesterday's post, masking the model output so as to exclude the Arctic and thus giving an apples-to-apples basis for the comparison.

The models used are the CMIP5 ensemble, which I think I'm right in saying is very recent - within the last year or two. I would be interested in seeing some AR4-era model runs and checking how these panned out against the same temperature data.

Forensic analysis of the Heartland memo

Watts Up With That? has just published an expert forensic analysis of the Heartland strategy memorandum and it's not looking good for Dr Gleick.

...the analytic method that correctly and reliably identified twelve of twelve authors in calibration testing also selected Gleick as the author of the disputed document. Having examined these documents and their results, I therefore consider it more likely than not that Gleick is in fact the author/compiler of the document entitled ”Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” and further that the document does not represent a genuine strategy memo from the Heartland Institute.

Read the whole thing.

Jo Nova on Richard Black

BBC watchers will want to take a look at Jo Nova's analysis of how the corporation reported Climategate as compared to how it reported Fakegate.

A must-read.