Flannery flung out

New Australian PM Tony Abbott has got straight down to the job of cleaning the Augean stables of public sector sinecures. Top of the list seems to have been Tim Flannery, the head of the Climate Commission.

PROFESSOR Tim Flannery has been sacked by the Abbott Government from his $180,000-a-year part-time Chief Climate Commissioner position, with the agency he runs to be dismantled immediately.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt called Prof Flannery this morning to tell him a letter formally ending his employment was in the mail.

Good things happen when conservatives are in power.

Book reviews

Does anyone fancy writing a book review for me? I have a few titles queued up, which I am going to struggle to get to in the near future. There's nothing technical.

Drop me a line if you'd like a shot.

Update on Sep 18, 2013 by Bishop Hill

OK, got four people up for the two jobs, so that's fine. Feel free to offer your services for future titles if you want though.

More from the "you're a poo-head" school of science

Professor Nilay Shah of Imperial College London has announced the results of his deep meditation (£) on the climate debate.

Politicians who dismiss the need for urgent action on climate change are like the South African leaders who contributed to thousands of unnecessary deaths by claiming that HIV did not cause Aids, a scientist has claimed.

Professor Nilay Shah, of Imperial College London, said that politicians such as Tony Abbott, the Prime Minister of Australia who has raised doubts about the science behind climate change, would be judged as harshly by future generations as those who questioned the medical evidence on Aids.

I'm not sure if this is just an attempt to get his name in the papers or a defence of the gravy train he is riding. Probably a bit of both. But you can't help but wonder if anyone is going to want to read his report now. I mean, who wants to read something written by somebody who operates at that level of invective? Doesn't it just turn people off?

Abraham's Nuccitello

Writing at WUWT, Matt Ridley is taking John Abraham to task for his extensive use of Nuccitello in a Matt-bashing article at DeSmog. I thought this bit was very funny:

It’s a poor response, characterized by inaccurate representation of what I said, even down to actual misquoting. In the whole article, he puts just four words in quotation marks as written by me, yet in doing so he misses out a whole word: 20% of the quotation. Remarkable. If I did that, I would be very embarrassed.

McKitrick explains the models

Ross McKitrick has a must-read article in the Financial Post, looking at climate models and their environmentalist-like divergence from reality:

The IPCC must take everybody for fools. Its own graph shows that observed temperatures are not within the uncertainty range of projections; they have fallen below the bottom of the entire span. Nor do models simulate surface warming trends accurately; instead they grossly exaggerate them. (Nor do they match them on regional scales, where the fit is typically no better than random numbers.)

Dixon in the dock?

The revolving door between the bureaucracy and environmentalists whirrs once again. A week or so ago, I noted the campaign by Friends of the Earth, and in particular their director Richard Dixon, against Dart Energy, a company that is trying to expand its coalbed methane operations in central Scotland. The campaign took a lurch towards the disreputable when Dixon gave his twitter followers to believe that the suspension of the company's shares on the Australian Stock Exchange was caused by financial difficulties rather than - as Dixon surely must have known - it being normal procedure for a company about to undergo a financing round.

The financing has now been successfully completed, underlining the misdirection by Friends of the Earth, but there has been an interesting new twist this week. As well as being the director of Friends of the Earth Scotland, Dixon turns out to be a board member of Sepa - the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency - the regulator to which Dart Energy must apply for its licences and to which it must genuflect every time it wants to do just about anything more dramatic than take a coffee break.

Click to read more ...

Speaking Nuccitello

Readers will recall that I recently wrote a briefing paper for GWPF on the Cook et al 97% consensus paper. Today Dana Nuccitelli has written a post in which he translates my paper into his own idiosyncratic language, Nuccitello. Readers may struggle with Nuccitello at first, but you will get the hang of it, I'm sure.

For example, many of you may find it hard to work out how it is possible to discuss my paper, with its consideration of the nature of the 97% consensus, under the heading of "consensus denial". Once you see that this is merely a translation into Nuccitello, all becomes clear.

The same blog post has further examples of this strange language. In Nuccitello, those who helped themselves to the documents that Skeptic Science's admins left open to public view are "thieves". And where I quoted participants on the forum as saying

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Cli-fi

A propos of my earlier posting about "Cli-fi", take a look at what Brian Micklethwait found in his local bookshop.

Empathy, EU style

The cynicism of the bureaucrat knows no bounds, but EU Climate Change Commissioner Connie Hedegaard really takes some beating:

Regardless of whether or not scientists are wrong on global warming, the European Union is pursuing the correct energy policies even if they lead to higher prices, Europe’s climate commissioner has said.

Bureaucrats operate under perverse incentives, that much is understood, but when, as they tend to do, these reveal themselves as such wholehearted contempt for the general public the revelation takes the breath away every time.

A response to the CSAs

Michael Kelly has a letter in the Times responding to the Chief Scientific Advisers' call to trust the IPCC.

Sir, In any form of exact science or engineering, having a discrepancy of a factor of two between theory and experiment would be a source of grave embarrassment. This is not so with climate science where the climate models have overestimated the effect of increasing CO2 on the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere by a factor of two over the past 25 years.

For this reason, the divergence between the predictions of theoretical models and real-world data is growing. If the forthcoming fifth assessment report does not address this problem and its implications in an open and candid manner, the validity of the report will be widely questioned.

Kapow.

The genius of academe

Ivory Tower by Sue Barnes (Click for details)Google Alerts advises me of a new paper in the journal Research Policy entitled 'Boundaries, breaches, and bridges: The case of Climategate'. Penned by Raghu Garud of the Business School at Penn State and colleagues from the University of Alberta and MIT's Sloan School of Business, it examines the aftermath of Climategate, looks at efforts to restore the credibility of climate science, and considers why people still doubt.

The authors have a bit of a problem though. While they claim to have read Watts up with That and Climate Audit, neither blog is cited in a meaningful way. Similarly, The Hockey Stick Illusion is named in passing, but this blog and Hiding the Decline don't even warrant a mention. Garud and his colleagues have learned about Climategate and global warming sceptics from tomes such as Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand by Haydn Washington and John Cook (cited seven times), J.L. Powell's The Inquisition of Climate Science (cited ten times) and Mann's Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (seven times).

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Another climate splash in the Mail on Sunday

David Rose has a big splash in the Mail on Sunday, covering a leaked version of the Summary for Policymakers, Nic Lewis's report on the Met Office model and taking a well-aimed potshot at Bob Ward to boot.

They recognise the global warming ‘pause’ first reported by The Mail on Sunday last year is real – and concede that their computer models did not predict it. But they cannot explain why world average temperatures have not shown any statistically significant increase since 1997.

Update on Sep 15, 2013 by Bishop Hill

The Met Office has issued a holding response to the Mail article. Significantly, no mention is made of Nic Lewis's criticisms of their model.

+++Harris and Lewis+++

Nic Lewis has published a detailed comment on the Met Office’s report on climate sensitivity, which was itself very much a response to the Otto et al paper of which Nic was an author. The comment is here.

There is a great deal of interest, not least of which is the fact that the Met Office seems to have made a series of misrepresentations of Otto et al, as well as making several mistakes.

One of these though is astonishing.

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Please, please, believe

With the Science and Technology Committee currently, and with a slight air of desperation, trying to work out a way to persuade the public that the IPCC is trustworthy, it's amusing to see government Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Mark Walport and his three illustrious (and not so illustrious) predecessors writing to the Times today, apparently with the same aim. The article is paywalled, but it's mostly just a recitation of the AGW mantra, with much mention of the empty "consensus".

This is the bit where they explain why we should be getting worried:

It is widely expected that the panel’s fifth assessment report on the physical science basis of climate change, which will be published later this month, will present even greater confidence in the evidence that the climate is warming as a result of human activities.

And therein lies the problem. The models have failed, utterly, completely and catastrophically to predict the halt in temperature rises. That we should then be expected to accept "even greater confidence" about conclusions drawn from them is risible nonsense. This kind of spin is exactly the kind of thing one has come to expect from government chief scientific advisers and the climate establishment and is precisely why people are distrustful of their public utterances.

Dialing back the alarm

Matt Ridley has an article in the Wall St Journal today, looking at how the forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report is handling climate sensitivity and the halt in temperature rise. Most of this will be familiar stuff to BH readers. Here's how he concludes:

Since the last IPCC report in 2007, much has changed. It is now more than 15 years since global average temperature rose significantly. Indeed, the IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri has conceded that the "pause" already may have lasted for 17 years, depending on which data set you look at. A recent study in Nature Climate Change by Francis Zwiers and colleagues of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, found that models have overestimated warming by 100% over the past 20 years.

Explaining this failure is now a cottage industry in climate science. At first, it was hoped that an underestimate of sulfate pollution from industry (which can cool the air by reflecting heat back into space) might explain the pause, but the science has gone the other way—reducing its estimate of sulfate cooling. Now a favorite explanation is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean. Yet the data to support this thesis come from ocean buoys and deal in hundredths of a degree of temperature change, with a measurement error far larger than that. Moreover, ocean heat uptake has been slowing over the past eight years.

The most plausible explanation of the pause is simply that climate sensitivity was overestimated in the models because of faulty assumptions about net amplification through water-vapor feedback. This will be a topic of heated debate at the political session to rewrite the report in Stockholm, starting on Sept. 23, at which issues other than the actual science of climate change will be at stake.