Books
Click images for more details
Bishop Hill Oct 19, 2011 Climate: IPCC Judith Curry's thoughts on Donna Laframboise's book are well worth the read - especially this bit:
In terms of the broader audience, I have to say that I hope that this book leads to the discontinuation of the IPCC after the AR5 report (which is already well underway, and is arguably sufficiently tarnished that it is likely to have much less influence than previous reports.)
Bishop Hill Oct 19, 2011 Bureaucrats Greens Health Fiona Godlee, the editor of the British Medical Journal, has penned an editorial that reads, if not as the longest suicide note in history, then at least as a suicide note written by someone with a bit more time on their hands than they need to get the job done.
The editorial was prompted by a recent BMJ conference about the "Health and Security Perspectives of Climate Change", and this is what Ms Godlee has to say about it.
The greatest risk to human health is neither communicable nor non-communicable disease, it is climate change. Saying this, as I and others have started doing at conferences, seems to take a certain courage. We’ve been emboldened by clear statements from WHO’s director general Margaret Chan and from the Lancet (www.thelancet.com/climate-change). But this week, at a meeting hosted by the BMJ in collaboration with an extraordinary alliance of organisations (http://climatechange.bmj.com, doi:10.1136/bmj.d6775), it became clear that we are going to have to get braver still.
Apparently people trust doctors and soldiers more than other professionals. It's hard to imagine that respect lasting much longer when the money the public puts into healthcare and defence ends up paying for this kind of thing.
Bishop Hill
I'm struck by Chris Rapley's reported that "the science is overwhelming and settled."
I thought real scientists didn't say that.
Bishop Hill
By a wonderful coincidence, Maurizio Morabito is livetweeting Rapley's lecture from the Institute of Physics tonight. He seems to be giving a rather different account of what we know about climate change to informed listeners.
Bishop Hill Oct 18, 2011 Economics Energy: solar Media The Economist has long been a bastion of liberal economic thinking, with an honourable history of arguing for free markets and free trade dating right back to the Corn Laws. So it's perhaps not a surprise to read the magazine's argument that governments have wasted vast sums in subsidising solar "energy" companies.
Europe’s solar subsidies have proved not just expensive, but also unreliable. As so often happens with such regimes, their excessive generosity has led to a glut of output, and their cost has risen, leading governments to cut rates. Capacity will probably shrink as a result, discouraging innovation.
Bishop Hill Oct 16, 2011 BBC Nigel Lawson has a piece up at the Sunday Times. It's paywalled of course, but is reproduced at the GWPF site. Lawson is taking a pop at the BBC, and relates the story of his engagement with Steve Jones after the "no platform" report was published by the Beeb.
Let us just say that Jones seems to have come off considerably worse.
Bishop Hill Oct 16, 2011 Blogs I'm a bit tied up with other stuff right now. Normal service should resume in a day or two.
Bishop Hill Oct 14, 2011 Climate: other Donna Laframboise's new book about the IPCC is out. It looks like this is going to be a good one:
Blooming brilliant. Devastating" - Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist
"...shines a hard light on the rotten heart of the IPCC" - Richard Tol, Professor of the Economics of Climate Change and convening lead author of the IPCC
"...you need to read this book. Its implications are far-reaching and the need to begin acting on them is urgent." - Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics, University of Guelph
Bishop Hill Oct 13, 2011 Climate: Mann 
Tip o' the hat to Lord Beaverbrook and Oxbridge Prat in Unthreaded, who note that Michael Mann has written his own take on the Hockey Stick wars. It's turning into a crowded field, what with me and Bradley covering the same ground.
Publication date is March 2012
Bishop Hill Oct 12, 2011 Climate: solar This is an exciting time for solar physics, and its role in climate. As one leading climate scientist told me last month, it's a subject that is now no longer taboo. And about time, too.
The BBC's Paul Hudson
Bishop Hill Oct 12, 2011 Climate: MWP Climate: Sceptics Reports on Progress in Physics, a journal published by the Institute of Physics here in the UK, has published a paper by Raymond Orbach, an engineer a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin. It's available in return for free registration, and I actually think it's worth it, if only because it's so toe-curling.
In some ways the paper's title tells you all you need to know about it. `Our Sustainable Earth' looks at (you guessed it) eight climate myths propagated by bad people. Like every other set of climate myths you have ever seen, each of the myths is entirely devoid of sources - Orbach has taken them from this page at his university's website. Where they got them from is a mystery.
In fact, absence of citations is a bit of an issue. Here's how Orbach starts to deal with claims about the medieval warm period.
Climate scientists now understand that the Medieval Warm Period was caused by an increase in solar radiation and a decrease in volcanic activity, which both promote warming. Other evidence suggests ocean circulation patterns shifted to bring warmer seawater into the North Atlantic. Those kinds of natural changes have not been detected in the past few decades.
Interesting claims - but where did they come from? We are not told. We are expected to take Prof Obach on trust. At the risk of repeating myself, one would never get away with this kind of thing on a blog.
(PS: Note to Prof Orbach - the ocean near the top of the globe is the Arctic (with a c in the middle). And it's Santer not Senter.
Bishop Hill Oct 11, 2011 Blogs Climate: other Shub Niggurath has raised some more concerns about the standard of record-keeping at Skeptical Science.
Bishop Hill Oct 10, 2011 Climate: other The Constitution Unit at University College London has launched a project to examine the state of play in the area of FOI/EIR, apparently as a result of Climategate.
Let's just say I don't get a warm feeling from reading the project proposal or this presentation that sits alongside it.
Bishop Hill Oct 9, 2011 Climate: IPCC I am mentioned in passing at Judy Curry's blog, where Andrew Lacis has written a post about one of his papers.
If you were to go and read the acknowledgment that is at the end of the Science paper, you would see the very standard “thank you” for helpful comments from numerous GISS colleagues, and a “thank you” for funding support from NASA program managers.
But, you would not see there any mention of Bishop Hill. Why so? And, would the Science editors have really let that happen?
Bishop Hill Oct 9, 2011 Climate: WG2 Climate: WG3 A week ago I traced one of the scientific claims underlying the the Climate Change Committee's policy recommendations back to source. This was the claim that there would be 5-8% increase in dry areas in Africa.
The source was a paper by Fischer et al 2005, although the dry-areas claim could actually be traced back further.
However, I'm grateful to a reader for pointing out some interesting things about Fischer et al 2005. While it is clearly the soure of the IPCC's doom-laden claim, in fact the paper is rather optimistic about the effects of climate change on agriculture. Here is what it has to say about sub-Saharan Africa:
Bishop Hill Oct 9, 2011 Climate: other FOI I enjoyed this talk by Ben Goldacre about his work on exposing bad conduct by big pharma scientists.
I was particularly taken by his opening gambit, namely that science rejects argument from authority. Too right. However, I couldn't help but be reminded of Simon Singh's contribution to the Spectator debate, which was essentially argument from authority from beginning to end. Perhaps Dr Goldacre should give his friend Dr Singh a lesson in basic scientific philosophy.
There is also a good section on data availability, another area on which the official sceptics might like to spread their criticisms around a little bit more widely.
Bishop Hill Oct 8, 2011 Climate: WG2 Climate: WG3 Myles Allen has an interesting piece up in the Guardian, putting Al Gore right on what climate models really tell us (theoretically) about extreme weather.
The claim that we are "painting more dots on the dice", causing weather events that simply could not have occurred in the absence of human influence on climate, is just plain wrong. Given the paucity of reliable records and bias in climate models, it is quite impossible to say whether an observed event could have happened in a hypothetical pristine climate. Our research focuses on quantifying how risks have changed, which is a much easier proposition, although addressing all the uncertainties still makes working out these "relative risks" a painstaking affair.
He also has some interesting things to say about policy:
Enthusiasm for doing anything about climate change seems to have given way to resignation that we will simply have to adapt. For the foreseeable future, this overwhelmingly means dealing with harmful weather events that have been made more likely by human influence on climate. What we can't say right now is which these events are, and therefore who is being harmed and how much.
If mitigation efforts have indeed stopped, that's good. There are still the subsidies we give to renewables, of course, but I think most people would agree that these are meaningless gestures rather than mitigation.
