Comedy debate

I always like it when upholders of the scientific consensus hold a debate, because they never fail to give us the opportunity to have a good old laugh at them. Take this major event later this month when the Press Gazette is going to look at whether sceptics should be heard or not:

Chaired by Fiona Fox of the Science Media Centre it will ask whether it is time for journalists to rewrite the ethical rulebook and simply acknowledge a few scientific truths.

Among the panelists are broadcaster and geneticist Professor Steve Jones who published a report for the BBC Trust in 2011 in which he argued that the corporation gave too much weight to fringe scientific viewpoints on subjects such as climate change, GM crops and MMR.

Click to read more ...

The view from Number 10

Paul Homewood has had a hilarious response to his inquiry about what evidence David Cameron was using to support his view that we are "seeing more abnormal weather events".

Downing Street has replied to his FOI request:

"the quote...makes clear that this is a visual observation - "we are seeing".

Yours sincerely

In other words Cameron looked out of the window.

Face, palm.

Mixed media

There are some mixed messages on the shale gas front this morning. The FT is reporting that the brakes are being put on the nascent industry in the UK, although there doesn't seem to be anything new here - the story covers some of the dodgy old stories about UK shales being more heavily faulted than US ones and sounder ones about the regulatory burden in the UK - so I'm not quite sure what prompted it.

Meanwhile, the BBC is reporting that Cuadrilla reckon the amount of gas in the Bowland may have to be revised upwards from the figure that astounded the country last year.

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Phew

As readers may have gathered, I have been a bit preoccupied in recent days, mainly with helping GWPF on this that and the other. I think things are now going to ease off a bit, so I can devote a bit more time to blogging.

One project that has been keeping me busy was helping with the report by Nic Lewis and Marcel Crok on climate sensitivity. Marcel tweeted about this earlier today:

Nic Lewis and I will present our GWPF report "A Sensitive Matter: How the IPCC buried evidence showing good news about global warming" on Thursday March 6 in press centre Nieuwspoort (The Hague, The Netherlands). Lewis and I will both give a presentation. There are still tickets available. The meeting starts at 10 am (Dutch time). To register send an email to kantoor@groenerekenkamer.nl

Two versions of the report (long and short one) can be downloaded on Thursday from the GWPF website.

The short version one is directed at the layman while the full long one is for more technically minded readers. They should help to provide James Painter with the answers to the questions he posed the other day. There's also a Dutch language version coming.

There are quite a few other things on the go, and which are keeping me very busy. These will appear over the next few days, weeks and months.

Painter slipped

James Painter has an amusing article in The Conversation, the left-wing campaigning website paid for by your taxes.

In it he writes about certainty and uncertainty in the global warming debate and takes issue with Nigel Lawson's appearance on the Today programme (along with just about every other left-wing campaigning academic it seems).

Framing the climate challenge as risk assessment has been gaining considerable traction among some politicians. Lawson’s response to the question was to argue that even if there is a problem of global warming, it will have only marginal effects.

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Behold, a Gordian - Josh 261

If you read the comment threads at Climate Audit then you will be familiar with a character called Nick Stokes who argues the impossible and indefensible with great tenacity. Steve's patience with him is exemplary and this thread, in particular, prompted the cartoon.

Cartoons by Josh

More dark rumours

Take a look at this.

The German owner of Npower is set to write off hundreds of millions of pounds on the value of its British power plants in the latest sign of a deepening crisis among the big six energy suppliers. RWE, one of Europe’s largest power companies, will reveal the British loss as part of an expected £4bn writedown of the value of its fleet of power stations.

...

The hit will alarm Whitehall, which is increasingly worried about the lights going out. Companies have stopped building new power stations amid a political and regulatory backlash, sparked last year by Ed Miliband’s pledge to freeze energy prices.

...

Peter Atherton, analyst at Liberum Capital, said Britain had become uninvestable as political pressure over soaring household bills has intensified. “I can think of a dozen very good reasons not to invest in the UK, and not one good one to invest here this side of the election,” Atherton said.

Cool, calm, collected

Here's a climate scientist seeking to bring a bit of sanity to the current outbreak of hysteria over extreme weather. While Lord Deben rather hilariously reckons he can see global warming in the weather patterns for January, John Wallace, a climatologist at the University of Washington has a rather more sensible take on it:

Like many of my colleagues in the climate dynamics community, I am not convinced that this winter’s extreme cold lies outside the range of internally generated variability of the climate system or that it was exacerbated by the recent reduction of summer Arctic sea ice coverage. The evidence linking Arctic amplification to the behavior of the wintertime polar vortex is not strong and it is not well supported by independent, peer-reviewed studies.

Click to read more ...

The global warmist plan

Holman Jenkins, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, has written an amusing piece looking at the state of play for global warming campaigners, and in particular plans to sway the midterm elections towards the Democrats:

Let's restate more accurately a plan recently announced by Thomas Steyer, a California hedge-fund billionaire whose idea is to make the coming midterms about climate change: He would spend $100 million to flog an issue voters don't care about, to defeat Republicans whose defeat would have no impact on climate change, in order to replace them with Democrats whose election would have no impact on climate change.

Mr. Steyer's thinking is puzzling unless his goal is to make $100 million disappear. If his purpose were to elect Democrats, wouldn't his money go further attacking Republicans on matters of interest to voters? If he wants to move the ball on climate change, wouldn't a better place to start be undoing the damage his fellow climate lobbyists have done to the cause with their hysterical exaggerations, false statements and moral bullying?

You can see his point.