Into the dustbin

Donna Laframboise's new book about the IPCC is now available. Here's the blurb:

Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is a non-stop train wreck. The IPCC is supposed to be an objective scientific body, but Pachauri writes forewords for Greenpeace publications and has accepted a 'green crusader’ award. He is an aggressive policy advocate even though his organization is supposed to be policy neutral. In 1996, an Indian High Court concluded that he’d "suppressed material facts" and "sworn to false affidavits." He has long claimed to hold two PhDs, but in fact only earned one.

This book is a collection of essays about Pachauri originally published as blog posts between February 2010 and August 2013. Essay number one, The IPCC and the Peace Prize, appears here for the first time. It documents how Pachauri improperly advised IPCC personnel that they were Nobel laureates after that organization was awarded half of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize (Al Gore received the other half).

Scientists aren’t supposed to embellish. They’re supposed to be clear-eyed about what is true and what is false. The idea that hundreds of scientists have been padding their resumés, that they’ve been walking around in broad daylight improperly claiming to be Nobel laureates, isn’t something any normal person would expect.

Click to read more ...

Balcombe brouhaha

Yesterday, police issued an order for Balcombe protestors to restrict themselves to a defined area near the Cuadrilla site, so as to minimise disruption to road users. It appears that a few of the ne'erdowells have now been arrested for breach of the order.

Jolly good.

[The Brighton Argus is liveblogging here]

Update on Sep 10, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Bizarrely, the parish council has asked Geoffrey Lean - of all people - to chair a meeting of villagers with the Environment Agency.

An unequivocal rejection of the scientific method

Justin Gillis, the green guy at the New York Times, has an extraordinary take on climate sensitivity in his latest column. Discussing the upcoming Fifth Assessment Report he tries to claim that all the empirical and semi-empirical measures of ECS are "outliers"

...we have mainstream science that says if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles, which is well on its way to happening, the long-term rise in the temperature of the earth will be at least 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, but more likely above 5 degrees. We have outlier science that says the rise could come in well below 3 degrees.

Click to read more ...

Scitech committee talk to journos

The Science and Technology Committee interviewed two panels today. First up were James Randerson and Catherine Brahic of New Scientist today, and they were followed by Fiona Harvey, Richard Black and a freelancer called Lewis Smith. There were some class moments. I almost fell off my chair when Randerson presented the Stern report as an honest attempt to take the bile out of the climate debate and again when Brahic suggested that science said we had to change our lifestyles. I was also intrigued by Brahic's claim that climate sensitivity is a bit irrelevant. It's all about the emissions scenarios apparently.

Victory declared

Ed Davey has given a speech at the Royal Society in which he declared that exploiting shale gas will not affect the political classes ability to hit the decarbonisation targets with which they have shackled the UK.

Fracking for shale gas is not a "great evil" and can act as a bridge to a "green future" in the UK as long as it is properly regulated, according to the energy and climate secretary Ed Davey.

In a major speech in defence of exploiting domestic shale gas he said that Britain can extract the gas without endangering the country's climate targets.

Nick Grealy reports that this speech was delivered from a stage that included both Doug Parr of Greenpeace and David Kennedy of the CCC, and it sounds from Grealy's commentary as if Kennedy was not a happy bunny. However, there seems to be a strong hint that the LibDems are going to try to sweeten this particular bitter pill by handing over the resulting tax revenues to their pals in the renewables industry. But Grealy still sees this as the beginning of the end:

We’ve won the war.  Plenty of stay behind bitter enders fighting pointless battles will still try and slow things down and they will regroup.  But talking to some present today, there will also be many who will now work constructively with the industry to achieve benefits for the economy and the environment.

And as if to underline the point, the Balcombe protest camp is about to be cleared. Not before time.

The no-response response

Skeptical Science has published a defence of the Cook et al Consensus paper. Yours truly is mentioned, but in such an obfuscated way as to suggest that they know they've been rumbled:

There have been a number of contrarians claiming that they are part of the 97% consensus, which they believe is limited to the position that humans are causing some global warming. The first error in this argument is in ignoring the fact that the data collected in Cook et al. (2013) included categories that quantify the human contribution, as Andrew Montford and the GWPF recently did, for example.

This is an aggressively illogical set of statements, which seems to me to deliberately try to confuse, by conflating the subject of the Cook paper - abstracts of papers - with the views of individuals.

The Cook survey did indeed include categories for papers that quantified the human contribution. It also included categories that did not. The few papers that quantify the human contribution were categorised accordingly. Most papers do not quantify the human contribution, and Cook et al included most of these within categories that made them part of the consensus. This led to the nonsense of one of Shaviv's papers being classified as supporting the consensus.

The consensus as defined by review of abstracts of papers is therefore a shallow one that includes papers that do not quantify the human contribution and Cook et al know it but can't bring themselves to say it out loud.

Huhnebris

BH favourite Chris Huhne has attempted a relaunch of his political career, blaming his fall from power at DECC on a conspiracy by the Murdoch press. If I'm understanding his case correctly, it wasn't the Mail that made all the initial running on the investigation of his case, and lawbreaking and marital infidelity by a cabinet minister - not normally the subject of media coverage - was only forced into the conciousness of an otherwise uninterested public through the relentless campaigning of Mr Murdoch's newspapers (in league with big oil and the devil himself).

Or something like that.

Anyone convinced?

Replication, schmeplication

The Scientist reports on the failure of many scientific papers to include enough information to allow others to replicate the results.

Reproducibility is a hallmark of good science. However, despite the fact that most scientific journals require authors to list the resources used in their experiments, almost half of the papers examined in a new study failed to specify all of the items needed to replicate the findings. The study was published Thursday (September 5) in the journal PeerJ.

From the looks of it, the papers studied were mainly in the life sciences, but this is clearly just as much an issue for climatology. Unless you are an scientivist, of course, in which case replication means being able to reach vaguely similar results using different, but equally obscure methods.

Rose on the Arctic sea ice

David Rose has another climate piece in the Mail on Sunday this morning, looking at this year's expansion of Arctic sea ice. There are lots of familiar names quoted - Ed Hawkins is one, and there is also this quote from Judith Curry:

US climate expert Professor Judith Curry said last night: ‘In fact, the uncertainty is getting bigger. It’s now clear the models are way too sensitive to carbon dioxide. I cannot see any basis for the IPCC increasing its confidence level.’

Mapping the sceptic blogosphere

Readers may remember Amelia Sharman as one of the authors of the "Entrepreneur" paper, about the disreputable shenanigans that led to the EU's biofuels mandate.

Amelia is now in the midst of a PhD looking at global warming sceptics and has just publiished a working paper, describing the results of a social network analysis of sceptic blogs. It can be seen here.

I've only skimmed through it, but it looks reasonable enough. One issue I noticed is that she has based her analysis of BH traffic on the domain bishophill.squarespace.com, which is what I used before I got www.bishop-hill.net, so the figures may not be accurate. But I guess this is why publishing a working paper is a useful approach.

Aussie elections open thread

Here's a thread for anyone who wants to discuss the Australian election result. What does it mean?

Where we went wrong

A couple of years ago I did a green week event at the University of Strathclyde on which I was, as is normal at these kinds of things, the only attendee not fully signed up to the green agenda. My report of the event is here. The "environmental officer from business" mentioned in the report was from Ineos, the huge chemical company that operates the Grangemouth oil refinery. At the time I had held out vague hopes that the Ineos chap might be on my side, but he was just as green as the rest of the panel, if not quite so rabid about it.

I was reminded of this by the FT article (reproduced here), which reveals that Ineos is considering shutting down Grangemouth entirely:

Ineos, the chemicals group, is considering shutting down its plant in Grangemouth, Scotland, due to rising costs and the decline in production of gas from the North Sea. Its chairman singles out energy costs, which he says has been driven up by high environmental taxes on consumers.

I wonder if things might have turned out a bit differently if big business had stood up to environmentalists rather than being co-opted by them. The funds of the big companies in the UK flow almost exclusively to the greens, so it's hard to be very sympathetic to their managements.

(As an aside, wouldn't it be great if there was a new source of gas to replace the declining North Sea production? Maybe even one located right next door to Grangemouth.)

Section 14 for Balcombe protestors

Greenshirts in Balcombe have blocked the main London road past the site and have won themselves a Section 14 order, under the Public Order Act 1986. This basically tells protestors where and when they are allowed to assemble, the conditions on the order's  use being essentially that the protest is causing a disruption to the law-abiding section of society.

This means they have to get off the road or face fines and/or imprisonment, although by the looks of it, not nearly long or large enough, respectively.

Garden shed tinkerers

There is a fascinating layman's intoduction to climate models over at Ars Technica. Author Scott Johnson starts out with the standard potshot at global warming dissenters, takes a look at how a GCM is put together and talks to lots of climate modellers about their work and all the testing they do; it has something of the air of a puff piece about it, but that's not to say that it's not interesting.

Here's now it opens:

Talk to someone who rejects the conclusions of climate science and you’ll likely hear some variation of the following: “That’s all based on models, and you can make a model say anything you want.” Often, they'll suggest the models don't even have a solid foundation of data to work with—garbage in, garbage out, as the old programming adage goes. But how many of us (anywhere on the opinion spectrum) really know enough about what goes into a climate model to judge what comes out?

Click to read more ...

Diary date: persuasion

The Science and Technology Committee's inquiry into how to persuade the public to believe the Fifth Assessment Report restarts next week with two more panels of witnesses:

Monday 9 September 2013
Wilson Room, Portcullis House
At 4.30 pm

• James Randerson, Assistant National News Editor (environment, science and technology), The Guardian
• Catherine Brahic, News editor: environment & life sciences, New Scientist

At 5.20 pm

• Fiona Harvey, Environment Correspondent, The Guardian
• Lewis Smith, Freelance Journalist

Wednesday 11 September 2013
Thatcher Room, Portcullis House
At 9.15 am

• Tony Grayling, Head of Climate Change and Communities, Environment Agency
• Phil Rothwell, Head of Strategy and Engagement (Flood and Coastal Risk Management), Environment Agency
• Paul Crick, Director of Planning and Environment, Kent County Council, and
• Katie Stead, Environment Officer, Investment and Regeneration Service, Kirklees Council

 At 10.15 am

• John Hirst, Chief Executive, Met Office, and
• Professor Julia Slingo OBE, Chief Scientist, Met Office

Normal service has been resumed.