IPCC statistics ruled illegal

Bayesian statistics, the approach favoured by the IPCC in its assessments of the world's climate, has been ruled illegal by the Appeal Court in London. As the judge explained in a case revolving around possible causes of a fire:

Sometimes the "balance of probability" standard is expressed mathematically as "50 + % probability", but this can carry with it a danger of pseudo-mathematics, as the argument in this case demonstrated. When judging whether a case for believing that an event was caused in a particular way is stronger that the case for not so believing, the process is not scientific (although it may obviously include evaluation of scientific evidence) and to express the probability of some event having happened in percentage terms is illusory.

David Spiegelhalter notes that "[to] assign probabilities to events that have already occurred, but where we are ignorant of the result, forms the basis for the Bayesian view of probability". That being the case, one wonders whether this opens up the possibility of legal challenges to the IPCC assessment reports.

For once, however, I find myself on the IPCC's side. I imagine a higher court will set the ruling aside.

The bureaucrat as green activist. Again.

Chris Horner is pursuing another very interesting line of inquiry into the activities of the US Environmental Protection Agency - one that looks as though it will provide yet more evidence of bureaucrats using their powerful positions to advance the interests of green activists at the expense of taxpayers.

Environmental Protection Agency officials are making an "on-going practice" of "near-immediate turnaround to provide records to environmentalist pressure groups," while imposing "starkly disparate treatment of groups with different perspectives but which are otherwise similarly situated," a conservative think tank charges today in a unusually lengthy Freedom of Information Act request."

Green dad twit

Greendadtwit is the nom-de-tweet of Jason Rose, the "Head of Media" for the Scottish Green Party in Holyrood. (Presumably he is the PR person rather than actually head of anything, but that's another story).

I recently came upon a tweet he sent after my appearance on the BBC newsdrive show - readers may recall I had an interesting exchange of views with the interviewer over what he saw as my status as a "denier". Anyway, despite my having explained that I am not denying anything, including mankind's influence on the climate, Mr Rose had this to say.

13,950 peer reviewed climate reports and .@BBCNewsdrive gives airtime to Montford the Denier to witter on. Poor show.

It's not only the dishonesty and misrepresentation that one notices. It's also the attempt to prevent dissenting views appearing at all.

I wonder when Newsdrive will call again.

Mann says "McIntyre"

Readers are no doubt aware that Steve McIntyre is back in the blogging saddle, taking a look at Mann's AGU talk from before Christmas and noting that its rhetorical effect relied upon some amusing presentational choices:

There were two components to Mann’s AGU trick. First...Mann compared model projections for land-and-ocean to observations for land-only. In addition...Mann failed to incorporate up-to-date data for his comparison. The staleness of Mann’s temperature data in his AGU presentation was really quite remarkable: the temperature data in Mann’s presentation (December 2012) ended in 2005! Obviously, in the past (notably MBH98 and MBH99), Mann used the most recent (even monthly data) when it was to his advantage. So the failure to use up-to-date data in his AGU presentation is really quite conspicuous.

Interestingly, Mann has now responded in person (rather than via say RealClimate). Intriguingly, he had decided to mention McIntyre by name, a rare and perhaps significant event I would say. One has to say, it did appear rather silly to refuse to do this.

Mann's response features a lot of huffing and puffing and conjuring up of unidentified "falsehoods", but through all the verbiage he seems to admit the point about the data stopping at 2005:

I will be updating my lecture slides, many of which are indeed somewhat out of date.

...although he is silent on the use of a land-only dataset to compare to land-ocean predictions.

Update on Mar 4, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Brandon Schollenberger has more at WUWT.

Dave Summers on everything

BH reader Dave Summers, a Professor emeritus of mining engineering, is interviewed by CNBC on just about everything to do with energy and climate. There's caution on shale, pessimism on the economy and a healthy dose of scepticism on climate:

As long as journalists are advocates rather than reporters the true story will not emerge. The lack of journalistic challenge in the mainstream media to the deliberate deception employed in hiding the decline in temperature prediction accuracy with the tree rings which dropped just as temperatures were rising, thus invalidating the "hockey stick," was an early indication that media manipulation was going to be a critical factor in this debate.

How long must global temperatures remain relatively stable before someone brings this up as a front page story? The amount of money involved with those who espouse anthropogenic causes of climate change dwarfs the funding that has gone to those who raise questions when so many papers so this "may" happen, and that "might" occur. And those who pay the bills . . .

The great still

Commenters have been noting the preposterously low output of the wind fleet at the moment - currently generating about 0.4GW or a tenth of one percent of demand.

The environmentalist argument is that by use of smart grids we can import wind power generated in other parts of Europe (I think this is because the spirit of European cooperation will inspire them to offer it to us rather than using it themselves.

However, a look at the current windspeed map for Europe suggests there may be a flaw in this plan:

Update on Mar 3, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Last night wind generation fell to 0.029GW.

Retirement is opportunity

Sir John Beddington's retirement is now only a few weeks away and he is taking the opportunity to warn everyone, just one more time, that the end of the world is nigh. On about three or four dozen different fronts.

In his speech to the Royal Academy of Engineering a few days ago he had this to say.

Sir John warned that low probability, high impact events are becoming increasingly frequent, and highlighted other concerns such as space weather events and unexpected effects from computer trading in financial markets.

Is there any empirical evidence to support this claim? Any at all?

1970s global cooling alarmism

Updated on Mar 1, 2013 by Bishop Hill

This is a guest post via Andrew at Popular Technology.net. It outlines just how much media hype there was over global cooling in the 1970s.

During the 1970s the media promoted global cooling alarmism with dire threats of a new ice age. Extreme weather events were hyped as signs of the coming apocalypse and man-made pollution was blamed as the cause. Environmental extremists called for everything from outlawing the internal combustion engine to communist style population controls. This media hype was found in newspapers, magazines, books and on television:

Click to read more ...

A new HSI review

The latest edition of Mathematics Today includes a review of the Hockey Stick Illusion. The reviewer seems to like it:

Overall it is a good read for anyone following the Global Warming Debate. It is well written and referenced but it should be read alongside other points of view.

...but I'm not sure he has taken on board all of the arguments made in the book.

Mathematics Today review

The unbearable detachment of EU beings

This is a guest post by Pat Swords.

One sometimes has to go be persistent and dig out the evidence bit by bit until one has what can be justifiably described as a 'smoking gun'. Look at the attached emails, received from the EU Commission by Joseph Caulfield, one of those now following my 'road somewhat less travelled'. If you look at the first message you might be initially perplexed, but then you might not recognise the person in the Commission it is from. However, while not a household name, the sender does have some major significance: she is the Secretary General of the EU Commission.

Click to read more ...

Deben in Veolia mode again

Oxford University has given a platform to Lord Deben to speak about climate change. Once again, the noble Lord's calls for action that strangely seems to coincide with the interests of Veolia UK Ltd, the company he chairs, and many of whose share options he owns.

In a speech given at the Oxford Environmental Change Institute, Deben sets about dissenters from the climate consensus with the gusto that is customary when there are large profits at stake. It is amusing also to learn about his concern over us sceptics' political and, erm, financial interests.

I don't think he says anything new, although he probably uses the d-word more than usual.

There's a report from the meeting and a podcast here.