Harrabin cites Marcott

It's hard to imagine a more thoroughly discredited scientific result than the Marcott graph, which must rank amongst climatology's most shameful moments. Nevertheless, the BBC's Roger Harrabin has given it the full-page treatment in his latest piece on the IPCC, as eye-candy to go alongside an interview of Rajendra Pachauri.

Meanwhile, Marcel Crok gets a mention in this Matt McGrath piece on the key questions facing the IPCC.

Deben makes waves

The Times has a raft of articles about global warming this morning (all links are paywalled). There's a Ben Webster article on the Met Office model, a leader:

So far there are only theories as to why the Earth has warmed so much slower in the past 15 years than some models predicted. The models may have been wrong. The scenarios inferred from them may have been alarmist. This much is clear: the IPCC must tackle head-on what it calls the “hiatus” in global warming, and follow the evidence rather than buckle to political pressure from either side of the debate.

And finally there's a short piece about Lord Deben's rather slimy reaction to my being allowed to speak on Radio 5 yesterday (unfortunate spelling mistakes per original):

Lord Debden, the former Conservative Environment Secretary who is chairman of the government-appointed Committee on Climate Change, yesterday used Twitter to criticise the BBC for interviewing a prominent climate sceptic.

Following Radio 5 Live’s interview with Andrew Montford, Lord Debden (known as John Gummer before being made a peer) wrote: “Does BBC give platform to those who don’t believe smoking causes cancer?”

Lord Debden was himself then criticised on Twitter for making a false comparison by implying that the science linking manmade emissions to rising temperatures was as strong as the evidence linking smoking to cancer.

Spiegel on the IPCC's dilemma

In an article published in its English language edition today, Der Spiegel covers the IPCC's dilemma over the pause - very much the same ground I dealt with in my Spectator blog the other day.

Data shows global temperatures aren't rising the way climate scientists have predicted. Now the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change faces a problem: publicize these findings and encourage skeptics -- or hush up the figures.

Not waving but drowning

Updated on Sep 23, 2013 by Bishop Hill

A couple of journalists seem to have shown some interest in Nic Lewis's critique about the UKCP09 climate projections. This may explain why the Met Office has suddenly issued a response a week after Nic's report came out:

Today an article by the GWPF think-tank looks at one element of this – the UK’s official climate projections, known as UKCP09, which were produced by the Met Office.

It claims the Met Office climate model used to make those projections, HadCM3, contains an error and that, because of this error, the projections overestimate warming. The GWPF’s article, however, accepts that the claims of an error have not been substantiated.

Click to read more ...

Bob's dinner

I think my radio appearance this morning may have spoilt Bob Ward's breakfast, judging by the spluttering this morning.

Dinner will be no better - I'm due to be on the BBC TV news tonight. As I understand it there are two slots, one at 6pm and one at 10pm, covering different angles of the climate/IPCC story.

Climate's great dilemma

I have an article up at the Spectator's Coffee House blog on that awful dilemma for the IPCC:

It will not be an easy task. However the IPCC chooses to deal with the problem the repercussions are unpleasant. They might try to explain away the warming hiatus in some way: the in-vogue explanation is that the heat that should have been in the atmosphere has escaped, undetected, to the deep oceans. Evidence to support this idea is, however, scant at best, and going down this route is going to involve the IPCC admitting that there is much about the climate system that is not yet understood. This will be a hard act to carry off while simultaneously claiming that they are certain that mankind caused most of the recent warming.

The Climate Model and the Public Purse

In the kerfuffle over the Mail on Sunday's spread on climate change last week, the panel looking at the problem in the Met Office climate predictions got sidelined somewhat. But the implications of the error are potentially very expensive.

This is the conclusion of a new briefing paper I've put together for GWPF, entitled The Climate Model and the Public Purse. It outlines the nature of the problem and then looks at where the UK climate projections are being used.

Click to read more ...

Morning Reports

I did a interview for BBC Radio Five's Morning Reports slot. I think Bob Ward must have choked on his breakfast because he was tweeting furiously about it before I'd even got out of bed.

The audio is below.

Morning reports

AR5 Leake

Jonathan Leake has a full-page article in the Sunday Times (paywalled). It's a pretty good summary of the state of play as we head to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report next week although I don't think there's anything that will be news to readers here.

What seems clear is that whatever our response to climate change, whether it is geoengineering or replacing fossil-fueled electricity generation with low-carbon power stations and wind farms, the bills are likely to be astronomical. As long as public confidence in climate science is falling, it would be a brave political leader to sanction spending on that scale.

A message to Will Hutton

Dear Will (if you'll forgive the familiarity)

Thanks for the link in your Guardian post - much appreciated. There's lots I could take issue with in your post, but let me focus on the bit quoted below (and not just because it mentions me).

Science has not helped its own cause. The open science movement, and even the Royal Society, has become concerned that the quest to win commercial funding has made a growing number of scientists too anxious to make their science unique. Too many scientific papers are published in which researchers make it hard for others to reproduce their lab experiments. Key data are omitted.

Compared with what is happening in some drug and cancer research, climate change science is remarkably honest, reproducible and subject to open criticism: the IPCC insists on the best methodology. But for climate change sceptics such as Andrew Montford, Bjørn Lomborg or Nigel Lawson's influential Global Warming Policy Foundation, this is an inconvenient truth. Climate change science must be greeted with the same sense that science in general is fallible.

Your suggestion that the IPCC insists on the best methodology made me laugh. I don't suppose the intracacies of Bayesian statistics are your cup of tea, but you really should try to get your head around l'affaire Forster and Gregory. If you are reading this, Will, it is an example of climate science using the worst methodology - a methodology without any support among reputable statisticians - and the IPCC rewriting the results of people who used the best methodology.

You need to to expand your reading I think.

But thanks again for the link.

Cook's progress

I have an opinion piece in Canada's Financial Post, taking a look at the global warming consensus as revealed in a series of studies, including the Cook one.

Once the methodology used by Cook and his colleagues is understood, it becomes abundantly clear that the consensus it describes is a very shallow one; the results add up to little more than “carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas” and “mankind affects the climate.” These are propositions that almost everybody in the climate debate accepts; the argument continues to be over how much greenhouse gases have affected us in the past and how much they will affect us in the future, and whether any of this represents a problem.

By coincidence, John Cook has been given the right of reply to my piece last week in the Australian looking at the same question. There's a lot of huffing and puffing, but I don't think he nails it.

Speccy on AR5

The Spectator has a leader article on the Fifth Assessment Report today, and pretty much nails it:

Next week, those who made dire predictions of ruinous climate change face their own inconvenient truth.  The summary of the fifth assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be published, showing that global temperatures are refusing to follow the path which was predicted for them by almost all climatic models. Since its first report in 1990, the IPCC has been predicting that global temperatures would be rising at an average of 0.2° Celsius per decade. Now, the IPCC acknowledges that there has been no statistically significant rise at all over the past 16 years.

And the outlook seems to be upbeat too:

As things have worked out, carbon emissions in the rich world have been falling anyway — not due to green taxes but to better technology, like fracking. Global warming is still a monumental challenge, but one that does not necessarily have to be met by taxing the poor off the roads and out of the sky. Sanity is returning to the environmental debate. Let us hope that, before too long, it also returns to British energy policy.

Robbins in the minefield

I've been very nice about Martin Robbins from time to time - I do think he writes some interesting stuff, and he looks at things from interesting angles occasionally too. His blind spot on climate change has always been a bit of a mystery to me.

His article in Vice (which sounds dodgy, but appears to be safe enough) seems to throw some light on the reasons, suggesting that he really only has the most superficial understanding of the subject. For example, he pulls out the NOAA temperature graph and berates us dissenters for pointing out the post-millennial pause, the one that the IPCC is struggling to explain. "But look at the pre-millennium temperature rise" he seems to say. "What a bunch of cherrypickers you bad people are!"

Click to read more ...

Dear old George

Dear old George Monbiot has reentered the climate fray - I somehow missed this at the start of the week. It seems like an eternity since he last graced us with his presence, but readers looking for amusement will be pleased to hear that his gratingly sanctimonious style has altered not a bit in the interim.

George's ire has been piqued by the temerity of David Davies, the Tory MP who led the motion against the Climate Change Act in the House of Commons last week. George, in common with the Labour MPs who spoke that day, spends a lot of time ranting about conspiracy theorists, while signally avoiding the fact that the only people who ever mention conspiracies are those, like him, who are obsessed with the idea of fossil-fuel-funded denialist devil-men (Or is green lizards controlling our brains? It's hard to keep up sometimes).

Click to read more ...

Deben's doubtful stories

A bit of a car crash for Lord Deben this morning, claiming that Bangladesh is sinking beneath the waves and that refugees are already fleeing the delta.

Deniers/dismissers upset. Say no homelessness attributable to climate change. Yet 1000s in Bangladesh forced from homes by rising sea levels.

Unfortunately, his rather better informed followers on Twitter were quick to point out to him that Bangladesh is actually expanding:

New research shows Bangladesh may not be as vulnerable to rising sea levels caused by climate change as previously feared, scientists in Dhaka say.

They say satellite images show the country's landmass is actually growing because of sediment dumped by rivers.

I wonder what other fairy stories the Climate Change Committee tells the government.