Sutter thread

CNN's JD Sutter - the author of that piece the other day that alleged the Marshall Islands are going to disappear - wants to talk to sceptics. How nice!

The comments are yours sir. I'm hoping you will tell us why you are telling your readers these things about Pacific atolls.

[Preemptive comments by others will be deleted. Let's wait until the man himself has chimed in].

Update on Jul 9, 2015 by Bishop Hill

From the silence, I guess this could be one of those "new dialogues" that upholders of the climate consensus are always on about. Oh well.

Sokal hypothesis confirmed

Well, you really can't keep a good man down! Having written a bizarre paper ("Moon Landing") that drew conclusions from a sample size of zero,  having then written a follow up paper ("Recursive Fury") that libelled anyone who thought that his first effort was at all odd, and, moreover, found that the head of climate impacts at the Met Office was a conspiracy theorist, Stefan Lewandowsky was ultimately forced to retract the latter.

Undeterred, the great man has decided to put this magnum opus to good use, apparently setting out to confirm the Sokal "no-threshold" hypothesis for publishing gibberish in academic journals. Yes folks, he has managed to get "Fury" republished, this time at the open-access Journal of Social and Political Psychology, triumphantly confirming that there is no paper too daft to be published in the peer-reviewed literature.

You just have to laugh. Academia eh?

Met Office still brazen

Readers may recall the paper I wrote for GWPF on the problems with the UKCP09 climate projections. These were demonstrably unreliable: the predictions were formulated as a weighted average of possible future climates, but it was discovered that only unrealistic future climates were taken into account. Readers may also recall that this has all been acknowledged by the Met Office, but that they are refusing to acknowledge that it is a problem.

Astonishing then to see that the Met Office is still pushing UKCP09, with a new paper in Nature Climate Change, dutifully (and inevitably) picked up by the BBC:

Click to read more ...

Learned societies and Stalinism

Marcia McNutt, the editor of Science magazine and the author of a recent, moderately bonkers editorial about climate change (discussed by Judith Curry here) has been nominated to be the next head of the US National Academy of Science.

OK, so "learned society led by politically active environmentalist" is not news, but what about this.

Under Academy's bylaws, other candidates could be nominated by NAS members, but that has never happened. McNutt’s name will be presented to the full membership for formal ratification on December 15, the Council said.

Yes, that's right. The NAS uses the electoral system pioneered by Stalin and popularised by the Kim family and the Royal Society: one member, one vote, one candidate.

When will they learn?

Conservatives on the ECC

The following are the Conservative members of the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee, together with some quotes that should help readers place them. Should we assume that no further scrutiny of this area of policy is intended?

Antoinette Sandbach:

“Biodiversity loss and climate change are clearly happening, and we need to ensure that policy making in this area is science-based and practically focused, rather than endless legislation going through the Welsh Assembly, which sounds good but achieves less than proper and focused policymaking would.”

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More on calcifiers

Updated on Jul 6, 2015 by Bishop Hill

In response to my comments on her appearance on BBC news, Daniela Schmidt has tweeted some thoughts. Recall that I highlighted some comments she had made in a Geology paper about calcifier exctinctions occurring tens of thousands of years after extreme temperatures were reached, contrasting this with her on-air claim that the oceans were doomed by the end of the century:

My children will be alive in 2100. I would like them to be able to swim above a coral reef and enjoy its beauty. I would like them to be able to eat mussels and oysters and crayfish and if we continue to release CO2 at the current rate this is not going to happen.

Prof Schmidt has apparently told Roger Harrabin that I have misunderstood her work. In a tweet she notes that her comments in Geology represented a citation of other scientists:

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Marshall islands typhoon: weather not climate

Updated on Jul 4, 2015 by Bishop Hill

In my Twitter timeline come a couple of tweets from Tony de Brum Foreign Minister of the Marshall Islands, which is currently in the middle of a typhoon:

Just landed home. Majuro like a war zone. Roofs torn off, huge blackout, ships ashore. On alert for more tonight.

Today in Majuro. My family home battered by the beginnings of yet another cyclone. Climate change has arrived. MinTdB

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Science says one thing, scientists another

Anyone would think there was a big climate conference coming up, because the BBC is pumping out the climate propaganda left right and centre. A couple of nights ago we had Kirsty Wark fawning all over Chris Rapley on Newsnight (from 40 mins) and wondering why good people like him weren't making the policy decisions. Today we have Roger Harrabin on ocean acidification (video here).

The samples are chalky white for millions of years from the fossils of tiny shellfish. That's until this dramatic point 55 million years ago [the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum; PETM], when the oceans suddenly got hotter and more acidic and the shellfish disappeared. It took shellfish 160,000 years to recover and scientists say humans are changing the seas ten times faster than at this catastrophic event...

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Does Labour hate the North?

I missed this news a couple of days back, but it's quite an interesting as a demonstration of the results of the Climate Change Act and the duplicity of the political classes:

Yorkshire’s coal mine to close

More than 400 people are expected to lose their jobs due to the closure of the Hatfield Colliery in South Yorkshire.

It is closing 14 months earlier than scheduled.

According to trade union Prospect, 420 “high-skilled” jobs and further jobs in the supply chain will be lost.

Click to read more ...

ECC elections

Results are coming through for the election of committee members for the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee.

As well as the SNP chairman, we now have:

• Alistair Carmichael (LibDem) - a windfarm proponent
• Ian Lavery (Lab), former head of the National Union of Mineworkers
• Melanie Onn (Lab), MP for Grimsby, a centre for offshore wind
• Matthew Pennycook (Lab) - looks like a machine politician, allegedly pro-shale
• Alan Whitehead (Lab), a green

Which means Graham Stringer is no more. No sign of the Conservative members yet.

Polar propaganda

The US Geological Survey is trying on the "polar bears are all going to die" line again, the latest in a long line of attempts to link polar bear populations to summer ice extent (predicted to decline rapidly under global warming) despite all the evidence pointing to spring ice thickness (little affected by small amounts of warming) being the critical factor. In fact it is thick ice that seems to be the problem, causing declines in populations of both seals and the polar bears that prey on them. Polar bears do most of their feeding in the spring, when seal pups are there for the taking; they tend to fast over the summer.

The USGS press release is interesting, revealing that the authors used IPCC models of sea ice extent and then tried to derive future polar bear populations from them (I kid you not). They conclude that all bear populations will decrease in the future except in one region "where sea ice generally persists longer in the summer". And confirming that they are quite clear that it's summer ice that is the issue, there is this:

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The compliant media and the scary stories

The BBC and every other environmental pressure group in the country is reporting the release under FOI of a draft Defra report on the impacts of unconventional oil and gas with considerable excitement. The main theme is encapsulated in the headline: "Fracking 'could lower house prices' says draft official report".

Here, for comparison, is an FT report from 2013 about the effects of the Bakken shale revolution in North Dakota.

City-data.com, which analyses house sales, says the average house or condominium in Williston in 2009 cost $101,906. By 2011, the average was $122,000 – still below the norm for North Dakota. “But since then prices have doubled or in some cases tripled,” says estate agent Arlene Hickel, of Bekk’s Realty in Williston.

A study of home prices in Pennsylvania also found an overall positive effect, with only homes with a private groundwater supply negatively affected (in the UK this would be pretty much nobody). And even here it is worth noting the part that fear plays in this effect. There is no real evidence that shale gas actually affects ground water - there are only environmentalists' scare stories compliantly repeated by a compliant media. When The Economist, once considered a serious publication, puts a "flaming faucet" at the top of a story about shale, you realise that something has gone badly awry.

Update on Jul 2, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Here is the unredacted report. The section on house prices bears reading. You will get a rather different impression to the one you get from the BBC.

The two Ds and their killer plan

Many of the metropolitan chatterati are getting their knickers in a twist this morning over the expansion of London airport capacity. Deep-green Tory MP Zac Goldsmith is threatening to resign his seat in protest over the official Airports Commission decision to go with a third runway at Heathrow.

While the commission has been working away, its chairman Howard Davies has engaged in some interesting correspondence with Lord Deben. I was particularly struck by this letter from Lord D in which he specifies the level of carbon emissions that the aviation industry will be permitted to make:

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Why science is not enough

There's an excellent take-down of the "evidence-based policy" movement at SciDevNet. Author Erik Millstone seems to have a pretty firm grasp of things:

...the relevance of...models is more often assumed than it is demonstrated. In the case of climate change, some computer models of the impact of greenhouse gases on climate might usefully approximate to global realities.

Science advisers often ignore or conceal key uncertainties when offering judgements, perhaps catering to policymakers’ preference for reassuring oversimplifications

...some stakeholders might claim a uniquely authoritative understanding of an issue based on evidence

The madness of Lord Deben

Lord Deben was on the Today programme promoting the Committee on Climate Change's 2015 progress report, which I shall read at my leisure. However Lord D's performance was amazing: he sounds more and more like Paul Ehrlich every day. No doubt the writing in capital letters will follow in due course.

This was completely swivel-eyed stuff, a full-on regurgitation of every bit of environmentalist disinformation that he could conjure up in three minutes with barely a pause for breath. For example, we had a bogeyman tale about Bangladesh facing doom, although Lord D was rather vague about what precisely it was that was going to be causing this crisis:

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