Royal Society book prize

The Royal Society has shortlisted Jon Turney's Rough Guide to the Future for its annual book prize.

There is a report in the Guardian, which includes this:

The most powerful chapters of Turney's meticulously researched book deal not with far-off scenarios...but the remorseless statistical trends pointing towards a short-term future of rampant population growth, climate crunch, water and food supplies under increasing pressure and dwindling biodiversity.

In 2009, for example, the UK Meteorological Office predicted average warming of 4C if current carbon emission trends continue unchecked. According to the report this will almost certainly happen by the end of the century, but possibly as soon as 2060. The average rise conceals increases of up to 15C in the Arctic, and up to 10C in western and southern Africa, meaning 20% less rainfall in these regions. That rain will fall elsewhere. India will see 20% more rainfall and an increased risk of flooding.

It's interesting to compare this take on the future with Richard Betts' comments here a couple of days back.

Watermelon season - Josh 127

James Delingpole writes about The Linear No Threshold Hypothesis

Click to read more ...

Corrupt inquiries

Readers here have come across one two university cover-ups in the last few years, so the news reported at Climate Audit that the President of Penn State university has been fired for failing to investigate allegations of paedophilia against one of football coaches is perhaps less of a surprise than it might be to others. For these latest allegations to be centred on Penn State - Michael Mann's place of work, and the university responsible for one of the Climategate non-inquiries adds a certain piquancy to the story.

As McIntyre points out, the impetus do this seems to have been to protect the university's commercial interests. One can only assume that the university bigwigs were incentivised to maintain and grow the flow of funds into the football programme.

When we turn to the university of East Anglia then, we might wonder if we can see a similar commercial incentive in place. I think we probably can - it is known that CRU was bringing in very large sums of money from US funding bodies for doing very little at all. The need to protect that flow of funds may well have been enough for the integrity of the inquiries to be jettisoned from the start.

Can we conclude from this that the universities are not working for the public benefit?

(H/T Dead Dog Bounce)

Back on Black

Remember this? Richard Black, 2 November 2011

The original "hide the decline" claim is one of the most easily de-bunked in the entire pantheon of easily-debunkable "sceptic" claims.

Phil Jones wrote the email in 1999, immediately following what still ranks as one of the hottest years on record, and well before the idea of a "slowdown" or "hiatus" or even "decline" in warming gained currency.

So it can't have had anything to do with hiding a global temperature decline.

And this? Richard Black, 3 November 2011

A number of comments have quite rightly pointed out that the "hide the decline" email was also critiqued at the time of "ClimateGate" in its proper context - ie, reconciling a tree-ring dataset with an instrumental dataset.

This wasn't the sense in which I dealt with it in this post, obviously - I was focussing on the mis-use of the email in claims that it "hid a decline", or slowdown, in temperatures from 1998 onwards.

With hindsight I should have made that clear in the text, and I could also usefully have pointed out that some "sceptical" blogs took pains to clarify the issue at the time, such as the wattsupwiththat post reading "contrary to what you've likely read elsewhere in the blogosphere or heard from the few policymakers and pundits actually addressing the issue, it was not the temperature decline the planet has been experiencing since 1998 that Jones and friends conspired to hide".

Then cast your mind back to this: Richard Black 31 March 2010

...the most significant and potentially damaging of the accusations [was] that Professor Jones and other climate scientists sought to subvert the peer review process, and manipulated data in a manner calculated to produce a picture of rising temperatures (the infamous "trick" e-mail)

Funny how the story just never quite seems to come out right at the BBC.

Dangerous climate change?

This is a slightly edited version of a comment Richard Betts left on the discussion forum. I thought it was quite challenging to much of what we hear about climate change in the mainstream media and therefore worthy of posting here as a header post. (Richard, for anyone visiting for the first time, is head of climate change impacts at the Met Office).

Most climate scientists* do not subscribe to the 2 degrees "Dangerous Climate Change" meme (I know I don't). "Dangerous" is a value judgement, and the relationship between any particular level of global mean temperature rise and impacts on society are fraught with uncertainties, including the nature of regional climate responses and the vulnerability/resilience of society. The most solid evidence for something with serious global implications that might happen at 2 degrees is the possible passing of a key threshold for the Greenland ice sheet, but even then that's the lower limit and also would probably take centuries to take full effect. Other impacts like drought and crop failures are massively uncertain, and while severe negative impacts may occur in some regions, positive impacts may occur in others. While the major negative impacts can't be ruled out, their certainty is wildly over-stated.

While really bad things may happen at 2 degrees, they may very well not happen either - especially in the short term (there may be a committment to longer-term consequences such as ongoing sea level rise that future generations have to deal with, but imminent catastrophe affecting the current generation is far less certain than people make out. We just don't know.

The thing that worries me about the talking-up of doom at 2 degrees is that this could lead to some very bad and expensive decisions in terms of adaptation. It probably is correct that we have about 5 years to achieve a peak and decline of global emissions that give a reasonable probability of staying below 2 degrees, but what happens in 10 years' time when emissions are still rising and we are probably on course for 2 degrees? If the doom scenario is right then it would make sense to prepare to adapt to the massive impacts expected within a few decades, and hence we'd have to start spending billions on new flood defences, water infrastructure and storm shelters, and it would probably also make sense for conservationists to give up on areas of biodiversity that are apparently "committed to extinction" - however all these things do not make sense if the probability of the major impacts is actually quite small.

So while I do agree that climate change is a serious issue and it makes sense to try to avoid committing the planet to long-term changes, creating a sense of urgency by over-stating imminent catastrophe at 2 degrees could paint us into a corner when 2 degrees does become inevitable.

*I prefer to distinguish between "climate scientists" (who are mainly atmospheric physicists) and "climate change scientists" who seem to be just about anyone in science or social science that has decided to see what climate change means for their own particular field of expertise. While many of these folks do have a good grasp of climate science (atmospheric physics) and the uncertainties in attribution of past events and future projections, many sadly do not. "Climate change science" is unfortunately a rather disconnected set of disciplines with some not understanding the others - see the inconsistencies between WG1 and WG2 in IPCC AR4 for example. We are working hard to overcome these barriers but there is a long way to go.

Nature: no scrutiny of the academy

Nature once again takes up the cause of its favourite son, Michael Mann, arguing that taxpayers should  stump up the cash for academics and should not be able to see what they are doing.

To protect academic freedom is a foundation for intellectual property and copyright laws, while in court, both Mann and the university warned of the chilling effect of such demands on communication between scientists. Certainly, many researchers are more wary of e-mail today, and given Mann's experiences, who can blame them?

The intellectual property and copyright should belong to the taxpayers who stumped up the cash - probably unwillingly - in the first place. If academics don't like the scrutiny they should get themselves out of the public sector.

Darien II

One commenter on the last thread rather perspicaciously pointed out the parallels between Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond's leap for renewables and the Darien scheme - the disastrous commercial venture at the end of the 17th century that bankrupted the Scottish establishment and led to the country having to go cap in hand to the English and ask for union.

With this in mind, it's useful to notice the report by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers into energy needs for an independent Scotland. As the Telegraph says,

Scotland faces buying power from abroad to keep the lights on because Alex Salmond has no “practical strategy” for delivering his promise of a green energy revolution, a damning report by a leading engineering group has concluded.

Darien II, indeed.

Will renewables kill off Scottish independence?

H/T to a reader for this from the Telegraph a few days ago.

Thee Prime Minister cited an analysis by banking giant Citigroup that said Scottish home owners and businesses would have to provide £4 billion of subsidies per year to make wind and wave farms economically viable.

Distributed to companies across the world, the report warned them to exercise “extreme caution” over investing in Scotland before the SNP’s separation referendum as a ‘yes’ vote could render green energy plants “unaffordable”.

The Citygroup study said green energy currently relies on subsidies paid by all 27 million UK households and 4.5 million businesses. Scotland only accounts for eight per cent and five per cent of these totals respectively.

English and Welsh taxpayers would be highly unlikely to agree to continue paying this money to a “foreign country” post independence, it said, leaving green energy investors with “stranded” assets.

Now I see - Cameron's obsession with renewables is a way to keep the UK together.

Beddington hearing

Sir John Beddington is about to be grilled by the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on the role of chief scientific advisers.

The video will be here from 11:30am UK time.

Lüdecke et al

Updated on Nov 7, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Over the weekend I was sent a prospective guest posting by Lüdecke et al - this was the same one that has now appeared at Judith Curry's and Matt Briggs' sites. Given that it is widely available elsewhere, I don't see any point in reposting here. However, there has been a rather remarkable reaction to the posting, which looks like it will keep the climate blogs busy for a while.

Click to read more ...

The Ecologist talks sense

No, really. I found a really quite sensible article in the Ecologist about global warming and in particular about climate models.

Mistakes, cover-ups and inaccuracies have served to undermine many people’s faith in climate science at a time when its work is more important than ever.

Whiteout

David Whitehouse takes a long hard look at Richard Black's (ahem) analysis of global temperatures.

The problem with [Black's analysis] is that it makes the rudimentary mistake of ignoring the short-term variations and noise in the data resulting in spurious trend estimates that, as statistics often does in the wrong hands, obscures more than it illuminates. A more scientific and statistically preferable approach is to start in 1991, using monthly data, and plot ten-year regression lines. It is obvious that they are converging on zero for the past decade – the exact opposite of what Black told his audience.

DECC's paper on climate statistics

DECC has published a paper on climate statistics examining the question of whether they are "coherent and accessible".

It's actually very interesting. Take this for example:

DECC statisticians told us that they manage a shared mailbox for queries about climate change statistics, and that over the two years that this mailbox has been in place not a single enquiry has been received about wider climate change statistics. In addition, we were told that a recent user consultation exercise run by DECC statisticians did not highlight any issues concerning user needs for more general “climate change” data. DECC has concluded that it “does not appear to be the case that users see DECC as the organisation responsible for pointing them in the right direction if needed”.

Jeff Id's critique of BEST

Jeff Id's has published a critique of BEST over at WUWT. This is more in the "pointed questions" style than a debunking or a trashing of the team's work.

I imagine a lot of people will be able to agree that the points are valid.

Australian temperatures

This is a guest post by Philip Bradley. Please note that all graphs can be seen full size by clicking on the image.

An analysis of Australian temperature data recorded at fixed times, and the implications for the 'global average land surface temperature' derived from minimum and maximum temperatures

Jonathan Lowe, an Australian statistician, has performed extensive analysis of weather data recorded at fixed times by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). This analysis is available at his blog, A Gust of Hot Air. The data comes from 21 weather stations manned by professional meteorologists.

This work needs to be brought to a wider audience because it paints a very different climate picture to the global land datasets based on minimum and maximum temperatures – GISS, HadCRUT and the recent BEST analysis.

Click to read more ...