More on the ice age scare

In Quadrant magazine, Tony Thomas has been doing some fascinating research on the 1970s ice age scare.

A great embarrassment to the warming-catastrophic community is that 40 years ago the climatology scare was about cooling and onset of an ice age. Warmists today go, “Pooh! That cooling stuff  then was just a few hyped-up articles in magazines. Cooling never got any traction in the real science community!”

Really? Then explain this away

Read the whole thing.

Greens running scared of debate

Scaredy cat photo by Iris under CC. https://www.flickr.com/photos/irisphotos/8340124055Greens have never been keen on being challenged on their views and with the spotlight on Paris at the moment they are even more keen that they only get soft interviews. I did a BBC interview a while ago and was told when the booking was made that I was up against Lord Deben. However, shortly beforehand I was told that the great man was "no longer available", no doubt not wanting to have anything he'd said about his business interests to the Energy and Climate Change Commmittee mentioned on air.

Prince Charles is a case in point too. According to the Guardian he has said that he will only appear on Channel Four news if he is allowed to vet the questions beforehand and has full editorial control. Channel Four has told him where to go of course, although the article hints that Sky News may have agreed to the same terms in a recent interview with HRH.

Meanwhile Natalie Bennet, the leader of the Green party has refused to appear on the Week in Westminster opposite Nigel Lawson.

Could be talking to Week in Westminster on #climatechange. Declined to be on with Nigel Lawson - preposterous views shouldn't be legitimised

— Natalie Bennett (@natalieben) December 2, 2015

Not that this will make any difference. The greens have so many supporters in the mainstream media that they will always be able to line up some more soft interviews.

Update on Dec 4, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Of course Natalie Bennet is happy in the company of violent thugs:

Solving the Uruguay mystery

According to Wikipedia, in 2013, Uruguay had 10MW of wind power capacity out of a total electricity generating capacity of 2337MW. That's 0.4%. Fully 1538MW or 66% was hydro. It suggests wind as a percentage of generating capacity would hit 30% by 2016.

Six months ago, Bloomberg reported that wind capacity was due to hit 800MW this year.

But today, according Jonathan Watts in the Guardian, Uruguay has made a "dramatic shift to nearly 95% electricity from clean energy". The picture at the top of the article is, of course, of a wind turbine and we learn that:

Uruguay gets 94.5% of its electricity from renewables. In addition to old hydropower plants, a hefty investment in wind, biomass and solar in recent years has raised the share of these sources in the total energy mix to 55%, compared with a global average of 12%, and about 20% in Europe.

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Silencing dissent

Is that a brown shirt?A group called Ecojustice has called for an investigation into global warming dissenters, under Canada's Competition Act. Their case, if you can credit it, is that the act forbids anyone from making misleading statements when selling stuff or for promoting their business interests.

Interestingly, the groups targeted are Friends of Science, the International Climate Science Coalition, and the Heartland Institute. Given that none of these are businesses, the investigation promises to be rather short.

Interestingly, one of those involved is Danny Harvey, an academic from the University of Toronto. He gets a mention in the Climategate emails, where he was involved in Hockey Team efforts to dish out retribution after the publication of the Soon and Baliunas paper (Hockey Stick Illusion p. 406). I understand that he is now an editor at Climatic Change too. I imagine you have to take care about what you submit to that journal.

The decline and fall of the university

'Is it OK to write "kooky", I wonder'.A series of stories in recent days leaves me with the impression that the university system in the Anglosphere countries is on the verge of total collapse.

Take for example the story that students at Brown University are going underground in order to meet and discuss current affairs free of university policies on "safe spaces", which, for the unitiated, are designed to restrict any speech that challenges left-wing memes.

Tales of similar left-wing attacks on free speech at other American univerities are rife as well.

Until recently, I had rather blithely assumed that such foolishness had not yet crossed the Atlantic, but how wrong I was. This video of a debate on gender politics at the University of Bristol is a case in point. The constant hesitation by the panel chairman, as he tries to work out whether what the speakers have said falls foul of the "safe spaces" policy, is something to behold. Is "kooky" OK, the panellists wonder at one point.

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Quote of the day, epic noodle edition

Ridley and Peiser claim that research is increasingly showing climate sensitivity to be low. This is entirely the opposite of what has been happening. The most likely range of values of climate sensitivity (the amount of increase in surface temperature that eventually occurs as a result of the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere) was established over a century ago. Recently revealed documents show that Exxon Mobil Corporation itself studied climate science as early as the late 70’s, and its findings were in clear agreement with the National Academy of Science 1979 report, which estimated a climate sensitivity of 3°C, plus or minus 1.5° C. Tables in Exxon’s 1982 Climate Change “Primer” for executives show predictions for 2015 markedly similar to contemporary estimates by NASA, and NOAA.

Greg Laden explains that a stream of evidence for low climate sensitivity cannot exist, because in the 1970s people agreed that climate sensitivity was high.

I gather that our friend ATTP found this a powerful and persuasive argument.

Oz Met Office hacked

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has apparently been hacked.

China blamed for 'massive' cyber attack on Bureau of Meteorology computer

China is being blamed for a major cyber attack on the computers at the Bureau of Meteorology, which has compromised sensitive systems across the Federal Government.

Key points:

• ABC told there is little doubt the "massive" breach came from China
• Motivation for attack could be commercial, strategic or both
• Bureau provides critical information to a host of agencies, including link to Defence Department
• Could "take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fix"

This seems like a bit of an odd target, doesn't it?

Integrity and the climate scientist

Here's an excerpt from Matt Ridley's article in the Times a few days ago.

How unusual is today’s temperature? As I did this weekend, you have no doubt had conversations along the following lines recently: “Hasn’t it been mild? End of November and we’ve hardly had a frost yet!” All true. But then be honest: can you not recall such conversations throughout your life? I can. And here’s what the Met Office had to say about November 1938, long before I was born: “The weather of the month was distinguished by exceptional mildness: at numerous places it was the mildest November on record.” In 1953, November was even milder and there was no air frost recorded in Oxford in the last four months of the year at all.

I am not saying it has not generally become warmer, but that the variation dwarfs the trend. Let’s go back a little further, to the Middle Ages. It used to be argued by some that the “Medieval Warm Period” of about a thousand years ago, when mountain glaciers retreated, vines grew further north and Iceland was widely cultivated, was confined to Europe. We now know from multiple sources of evidence that it was global. Tree lines were higher than today in many mountain ranges, for example. Both North Pacific and Antarctic Ocean water temperatures were 0.65C warmer than today.

And here is a letter from Professor Joanna Haigh in response:

Sir, A quarter of a century after Margaret Thatcher first warned of the perils of climate change, it is disheartening to find columnists in the UK media still confusing weather with climate and anecdote with evidence...

Personal conversations about British November weather cannot be a substitute for global observations of climate change — not only increasing temperatures but ice melt, the migration of wildlife, the acidification of the ocean, and so on. These observations confirm that man-made climate change presents real and increasing risks for the future.

The green establishment is not exactly covering themselves in glory on the integrity front at the moment are they?

The BBC's week of lies

The tsunami of environmentalist disinformation, naked campaigning and outright lies coming from the BBC this week is quite extraordinary. It's impossible to keep up with it all and I'm not even going to try. I'll leave this as an open thread for anyone who wants to post stuff. Feel free to transfer things from unthreaded too.

As a starter for ten, in an email Tony Newbery notes Nick Robinson's frantic attempts to make sure that all the listeners knew that Matt Ridley is not a scientist and compares this with the introduction given to Britt Basel in a segment the same day about Vanuatu: the lady in question was introduced as "a climate change adviser". However, this is not how she describes herself:

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Charities are not what they were

The local press in Northumberland is reporting the appearance in the magistrates' court of the protestors who disrupted the Banks Mining Shotton facility - this was a fairly transparent attempt to have a go at Matt Ridley, in whose back yard the mine is located.

I was interested to see that one of those facing charges is Friends of the Earth campaigner Guy Shrubsole, a familiar name from Twitter.

Perhaps even more remarkable was the appearance of Roger Geffen. That's Roger Geffen MBE, to give him his full title - he was honoured for services to cycling it seems having been the campaigns director of CTC, the cycling charity, for many years.

It's funny to see these officials of registered charities appearing in the dock. Charities are not what they were.

Phytoplankton love carbon dioxide

Further to the last post, and with truly magnificent timing, I come across a new paper from John Hopkins University:

As anthropogenic CO₂ emissions acidify the oceans, calcifiers generally are expected to be negatively affected. However, using data from the Continuous Plankton Recorder, we show that coccolithophore occurrence in the North Atlantic increased from ~2 to over 20% from 1965 through 2010. We used Random Forest models to examine >20 possible environmental drivers of this change, finding that CO₂ and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation were the best predictors, leading us to hypothesize that higher CO₂ levels might be encouraging growth. A compilation of 41 independent laboratory studies supports our hypothesis. Our study shows a long-term basin-scale increase in coccolithophores and suggests that increasing CO₂ and temperature have accelerated the growth of a phytoplankton group that is important for carbon cycling.

So the population of coccolithophores has increased by an order of magnitude. And since coccolithophores sequester carbon dioxide when they calcify, that means a favourable carbon cycle feedback just got a whole lot bigger.

Excellent news, I'm sure you'll agree.

Observations are the darnedest things

One of the more iconic figures from the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report was SPM10, which purports to show the relationship between cumulative carbon dioxide emissions and temperature.

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More science with Guardian characteristics

From today's business pages:

This week, as we near the end of a year expected to have been the warmest on record, more than 130 governments and 25,000 officials will meet in Paris to discuss how the rise in temperature can be limited to 2% above pre-industrial levels.

As Stern said, the risks of pushing past 2% to a roasting 4% or 5% are now that much greater and more needs to be done in the coming decades than he expected.

Coming so soon after last week's centrigrade/farenheit debacle, this seems to be turning into something of a specialism for Guardian hacks.

Quote of the day, renewables edition

[Politicians] have helped persuade us to spend billions on technologies that are never going to make much difference.

Dieter Helm on the state of the climate

A royal conversion on the road to Damascus

The Guardian has a short piece in which various prominent fellows of the Royal Society discuss what they think new president Venki Ramakrishnan should do with his term of office, which kicks off soon. Most of it is rather dull, but Martin Rees's comments were interesting:

The Society should offer the public (and politicians) the best scientific assessment of controversial issues, without downplaying the uncertainties. Its policy work is crucial - and it’s good that Claire Craig, a scientist who is now one of Sir Mark Walport’s deputies, is joining the Society to head up this area of its work.

But when engaging with broader social or ethical issues, I think the Society should be wary of advocacy and should instead present options. It should encourage scientists to participate more actively in public debates on (for instance) responses to climate change, and the ethics of gene editing. But it shouldn’t take a collective stance on topics where there are seriously divergent views among experts, as well as non-experts.

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