Caspar and the Jesus paper

There has been the most extraordinary series of postings at Climate Audit over the last week. As is usual at CA, there is a heavy mathematics burden for the casual reader, which, with a bit of research I think I can now just about follow. The story is a remarkable indictment of the corruption and cyncism that is rife among climate scientists, and I'm going to try to tell it in layman's language so that the average blog reader can understand it. As far as I know it's the first time the whole story has been set out in one place. It's a long tale - and the longest posting I think I've ever written. You may want to get a long drink before starting, and those who suffer from heart disorders may wish to take their beta blockers first.

Click to read more ...

BBC backing climate change alarmism - official

The Harmless Sky blog has discovered that support for the catastrophic global warming case is official BBC policy. Tony quotes a BBC report as follows:

The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change].

The details of the seminar are, as one might expect from an organisation like the BBC which holds the public in such contempt, a secret. An FoI request has revealed that uber-warmer, Lord May, was the driver behind the decision, but the rest of the details are only going to be revealed if the Information Commissioner can force them to toe the line.

Update: Interesting also to remind ourselves that as recently as a year ago, the head of BBC news was claiming that the Corporation had no line on climate change. Well, what did you expect from a BBC man? The truth?

These ones are blunt too!

Iain Dale says that Boris has appointed Rosie Boycott as London's food czar. Rosie, the former editor of the Independent on Sunday, has her own small organic farm it seems, and reckons that if everyone had their own small organic farm then we'd all be much healthier and we'd be helping climate change too. (As Iain points out, we don't exactly want to help climate change, but leave that aside for the moment.)

You have to wonder about the collective intelligence of the journalistic classes don't you? You can tell them till you're blue in the face that small farms are more inefficient than big ones; that this means that they use more resources than small ones, and that this is bad for the environment; and that all of this goes doubly for organic farms.

And no matter how hard you try to ram this simple fact into their dull heads, they just don't get it.

It's amazing. These people - Boris and Rosie - have reached the very peaks of the journalistic profession, with the six figure salaries and the small organic farms that go to those in these exalted positions, and yet to any mildly educated outside observer they appear to be semi-educated half-wits. I'm left wondering who is worse: the dumb journalist who can't understand simple economics or the dumb journalist who appoints her to run a department in London's government.

Not the sharpest tool in the box

Everybody's piling in on Alex Lockwood, who seems to be one of those "academics" who earn their daily bread by campaigning for left wing causes. And seeing as everyone's having such fun, it seems a pity not to contribute something to the metaphorical kicking too.

Rather than throw brickbats at his current article (calling for censorship of people who don't toe the line on climate change) I thought I'd look through his recent oeuvre to see what else he has had to say.

Here's a goody, in which he takes umbrage at an article of Brendan O'Neill's in which the Spiked man accuses greens of wanting to curb our freedoms. This has got Mr Lockwood riled, and, all flustered, he girds his loins, summons up all his intellectual firepower and unleashes the following salvoes of pure illogic, the like of which can only be launched by journalism lecturers at the University of Sunderland. O'Neill is wrong to say greens want to curb freedoms because....

• There's nothing new here
• O Neill doesn't mention the science
• The argument has moved on
• O'Neill links to his own articles too much
• Well, yes, only the rich will be able to afford free movement when I'm running the country

I make that four logical fallacies and one admission that O'Neill is correct.

God help his students.

Overheating

Tim W is astounded at the temperature to which poverty campaigners think that it is necessary to heat one's home, namely 21^oC.  Well, I've news for him. 21^oC may be adequate for the poor, but for the political classes, only a steamy 23^oC will do.

The temperature in Cabinet Office buildings is normally set at 23 degrees where it can be centrally controlled.

Climate cuttings 21

We spoke too soon! Having thought that Ozzy scientific body CSIRO had released their drought data, it turned out that they had actually only released summaries of the numbers. Are they hiding something?

Roy Spencer went to Washington and gave a presentation in which he said that previous estimates of the sensitivity of the climate to CO₂ were too high. For his troubles he received much support and a certain amount of abuse.

Climate models were the flavour of the week. Professor Demetris Koutsoyiannis of the National Technical University of Athens published a paper in which he demonstrated that climate models have no predictive skill at regional levels, and there is no evidence that they work at larger scales either. This is a pity, as we are currently destroying our economies on the basis of the output of climate models. Meanwhile Lucia looked at weather noise as produced by climate models and started an assessment of how this compared to real weather. First results were for a model called EchoG, which produced weather with twice as much variability as what we observe around us. Not very realistic then.

Anthony Watts discovered a NASA server had been left accessible to outside users. The AIRS satellite takes infrared soundings of the Earth. Watts took a tour of the server and found some interesting stuff, including a chart showing cooling of the tropical oceans since 2002. The tropics are meant to warm the most in a global warming scenario. They also seem to have some results in the offing which are at variance with one of the key inputs to climate models - namely that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is well-mixed.

The rumpus over Lord Monckton's article for the American Physical Society grumbled on. Real Climate tried to take it apart. The noble lord fired back. Notable in his response is a list of the areas which Real Climate didn't even try to critique - the failure of computer models to predict the climate is one; that the IPCC's method of evaluating climate sensitivity is weak and relies on only four scientific papers, another. That's F-O-U-R articles. Sheesh!

This is not snow

In yet more evidence of dangerous heating of the planet....there was snow in Sydney, Australia. In a remarkable piece of spin, this was reclassified by the Bureau of Meterology as "soft hail".

Without batting an eyelid, the BBC changed its tune on Arctic ice melt. Just six weeks ago scientists were reporting that there was going to be a record melt this year. Now, they are saying that there won't.

And finally, Steve McIntyre wonders if Keith Briffa has just been caught out. As we noted last time round, Briffa has consistently stonewalled requests to see his data. But the Royal Society has recently told McIntyre that it takes the data issue very seriously, strongly suggesting that they, unlike the journals Nature and Science, are going to insist that Briffa toes the line regarding the numbers behind his recent paper.

Photo credits: Storm Afar by WUJI9981

The language of the left

The problem with trying to alter the meaning of words to suit your political programme is twofold. Firstly, ordinary people don't have a flaming clue what you're talking about. Secondly, you can get yourself in a right pickle.

You remember that there was a bit of a kerfuffle some months back when an opinion poll of published climate scientists found that a quarter of them reckoned the whole global warming thing was being overstated. Lots of people on the sceptical side of the debate then started jumping up and down and hooting like lovelorn monkeys (I include myself in this), and asking "where's your consensus now, greenies?"

To which the inevitable response was that, although the greens had for years been talking as if there were only two or three scientists on the whole planet who disagreed with the AGW theory and that they had been sectioned in 1968, the word consensus actually didn't in any way imply anything like unanimity and so their new position (that some scientists disagreed) was entirely consistent with the old one (there's a consensus).

Got that? It's nonsense of course. But wait for this: they're at it again!

Today's linguistic gymnastics revolves around the meaning of the word "most". A pretty simple word, you might think; one that a moderately literate schoolchild could use with ease? You'd be wrong. According to our green friends, "most" is a (ahem) most interesting word, full of subtlety and nuance.

First a little background. In the last edition of Climate Cuttings, I wrote about the shenanigans around the American Physical Society's invitation to Lord Monckton to write a piece supporting the sceptical position on AGW. Today, a chap called Arthur Smith has written a rebuttal of the Monckton piece which he has posted at his website here. He has many criticisms of Monckton, but the one that concerns us relates to Monckton's statement that:

[IPCC, 2007] concluded that anthropogenic CO2 emissions probably caused more than half of the global warming of the past 50 years

His objections to this statement are as follows:

The relevant statement from the IPCC AR4 WG1 SPM is "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations." (p. 10). Note Monckton has substituted "more than half" for "most" (English language implication is a lesser amount), "CO2" for "greenhouse gas" (incorrect but irrelevant), "probably" for "very likely" (strong reduction in implied certainty), "past 50 years" for "since the mid-20th century" (inconsequential) and "global warming" in scare-quotes for "observed increased in global average temperatures" (appears to discredit the observations of warming).

(My emphasis)

The statement I've bolded is simply not correct. "Most" can mean less than half, but when it is used in this alternate sense, the usage is quite different to the way the IPCC have used it.

By way of a non-climate example, we might say,

Tony Blair won the most votes in the 2005 election.

a statement which is true, and psephological nerds will also know that TB secured a share of the vote which was well short of half. But we'd also say of the same election (and again, quite correctly) that,

Most people didn't vote for Tony Blair.

The difference in usage is quite different. When used as a pronoun at the start of a sentence, the word "most" only ever implies more than half. The implications of a contrary view are amusing. Let's look at Arthur Smith's own rebuttal of Lord Monckton. He criticises Monckton's statement that climate models don't predict El Nino, La Nina, and so on, saying.

most of the models used by the IPCC exhibit significant oceanic oscillations of these sorts

[Not that many of them, eh? Less than half?]

He also tells us along the way that

I have recently been closely involved in several email and online discussions on climate and thus have become quite familiar with most of the issues involved.

[Doesn't he think he should be familiar with more than half of the issues before launching his rebuttal?]

Really, guys - with the best will in the world, you'll find life so much easier if you just stick to the everyday meaning of words.

Tagging bank notes

There is an interesting FoI response up on WhatDoTheyKnow? The request was to see what documents there were relating to plans to put RFID tags in bank notes. The response is that there is too much to give within the prescribed cost limits for a request, from which we can presumably conclude that plans are at a relatively advanced stage.

The civil liberties implications of this will very much depend on the range of the particular tags used. Could we have government detector vans driving round the streets looking for stashes of cash? Will the police know how much cash I have in my pocket?

We need to know.

Killing abusive husbands and intruders

The news today is that there is to be an overhaul of the law on homicide, with the partial defence of provocation being done away with. In its place will come two new partial defences:

• killing in response to a fear of serious violence
• in exceptional circumstances only, killing in response to words and conduct which caused the defendant to have a justifiable sense of being seriously wronged.

The spin that's being put on this is that it's all to do with domestic violence, and I've no reason to believe that this isn't the thinking behind the legislation. What is interesting is the effect this may have on the intruder in the house scenarios about which I've posted recently.

The scenario of a woman faced with an abusive partner who returns home drunk and threatening is, in many ways, rather similar to that of the homeowner faced with an intruder. While the battered wife knows her partner, she can't know how he will behave at that moment. The homeowner, of course, knows nothing of his opponent at all. With this information deficit, they both might end up killing their attacker.

In the past, as was noted in the Law Commission report which preceded these proposals, battered wives who kill their abusive husbands have been faced with a dilemma:

[D]efendants sometimes plead guilty to manslaughter for fear that a plea of self-defence might fail and leave them with a murder conviction.

If you follow the "audit trail" behind this claim, its source is evidence presented by a group called Justice for Women, which calls for law reform in support of battered wives. However, students of the case law around dealing with intruders in the home may well have come across the case of Brett Osborn, who stabbed a deranged intruder, and later admitted manslaughter for fear that the jury would reject a plea of self-defence. Assuming the facts of the case are as they seem, he appears to have had exactly the same issues to deal with as a battered wife.

This being the case, it looks very much as though the partial defence that will save the battered wife, might also save the homeowner. This new law could be rather interesting because it offers something to both left and right. The left will tend to support the battered wife, the right, the homeowner. One wonders what arguments are going to be put forward to try to limit the new law to one rather than the other.

(By way of an aside, there was a chap from Civitas on the telly today, arguing that the reform was not needed, because a battered wife could run away. But why should she, any more than the homeowner threatened by an intruder? )

Climate cuttings 20

Edition 20 of Climate Cuttings finds the blogosphere debating the outcome of the OfCom inquiry into The Great Global Warming Swindle.  Both sides claim vindication, but as someone pointed out, if Channel Four came out of it so badly, how come they're allowed to repeat the show with only minor edits? The best round up (or roundups) were at Climate Audit, with a close analysis of the complaints and the rulings. Meanwhile Hamish Mykura of Channel Four revealed that the station plans to broadcast An Inconvenient Truth. Given that a judge has already ruled that Al Gore's film is full of errors and exaggerations, expect OfCom to be kept very busy.

The University of Illinois, which runs the Cryosphere Today website, has adjusted its data again. Suddenly there hasn't been nearly as much sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere as previously thought. This is apparently the third time this has happened this year, and the change is always in the same direction. Funny that. Unfortunately for Cryosphere Today, the unannounced change was spotted by Mikel Mariñelarena.

Meanwhile the Hadley Centre and NASA also seem to have been adjusting their data after the event.

Lord MoncktonThe American Physical Society got cold feet over publishing Lord Monckton's critique of climate sensitivity calculations and slapped a notice at the top saying it wasn't peer-reviewed. The noble lord wasn't amused.

Russ Steele notices that one of the surface stations used for estimating the global temperature is still contributing readings more than two years after it was closed. This doesn't inspire much confidence in the output, does it?

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a pattern of temperature changes in the Pacific Ocean, has shifted to a cool phase. Some think this means that the globe will experience cooler temperatures for the next twenty to thirty years. 

Prashant SardeshmukhA new paper in Climate Dynamics by Compo and Sardeshmukh reported that recent warming over land is mainly caused by the oceans rather than directly by greenhouse gases. Roger Pielke Snr explains the importance.

Nature Climate Feedback mentioned Climate Audit, without explaining to their bewildered readers who or what it is. Previously they've refused to even acknowledge McIntyre's existence.

CSIRO seem to have noticed the criticism that they were getting for not archiving data backing up their recent paper on Australian droughts, which I reported in the last edition of Climate Cuttings. The numbers have now appeared on the Ozzy Meterorology Bureau website.

Update on Jul 27, 2008 by Bishop Hill

Just noticed that the Cryosphere Today story is a year old! Doh!

Thought for the day

And a happy thought at that: if Labour can't hold onto Glasgow East, is there a possibility that they might not even be the official opposition next time round?

Urumqi and the Great Leap Forward

The Graun published a fairly bog-standard global warming scare story the other day. This time it's the melting of a glacier in Western China which is causing alarm, drought, despair and hyperactivity in small children.

The Urumqi No1 Glacier is so named because it was the first icefield to be measured in China. Since 1953, scientists have been monitoring its thickness and length, analysing traces of pollution and tracking changes in temperature at this 3,800-metre altitude. The results leave no room for doubt that this part of the Tian (Heaven) mountain range is melting.

According to the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, the glacier has lost more than 20% of its volume since 1962 as the temperature has increased by almost 1C. And the rate of shrinkage is accelerating. For the first time last year, it was so warm in the summer that rain rather than snow fell on the glacier. A lake formed on the top of the icefield, which is retreating at the rate of nine metres a year.

On a whim, your humble correspondent decided to surf on over to the NASA GISS and download the climate station record for Urumqi. Here it is:

Now, you don't have to look at this graph for very long to realise that what has happened in Urumqi is not the result of a gradual warming of the globe due to industrialisation, but a sudden change in the recorded temperature in 1961, whether caused by a change in station location or a some other factor. In fact, if you download the data, you can time the change in temperature even more precisely - to March 1961. This would suggest that it's a station move.

Secondly, Jonathan Watt's claim that the temperature in Urumqi has increased by 1^oC since 1962 appears incorrect, since the temperature in 2007 is clearly about the same as that in 1962. He may mean 1961, which was 0.8^oC cooler than 2007, but we should note that if you picked 1962 rather than 1961 you would say that current temperatures were lower than ones in the past. Someone who knows how to get the corrected data could perhaps put a trend line on the period 1961 to 2007 to get a more scientific take on what is happening. Using the eyeball method of analysis, you wouldn't say that there was a clear upward trend since 1961. If anything, the opposite.

Intriguingly though, the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s was the period of Mao's Great Leap Forward, the attempt to industrialise China over a single five year plan. So while the sudden jump in 1960 is probably to a station move rather than industrialisation, the thought occurs to me that study of  I wonder if closer study of Chinese temperature history might shed further light on the urban heat island adjustment. One for Anthony Watts to look at, perhaps.

Even more intriguingly, in the same Guardian article, we learn that the Chinese are looking to dismantle local smoke-belching factories.

There are few places in the world where the cause and effect of global warming are so closely juxtaposed. An hour's drive from the glacier, the road passes coal-fired power plants and factories that belch carbon and sulphur into the sky. They were built during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong ordered industry to be shifted into remote areas of the countryside so that it would be harder to target in the event of a war with the Soviet Union.

This "Third Front" policy is now viewed as an environmental disaster. A senior engineer at the Houxia concrete plant says the factory will close within three years because the government recognises the need to reduce emissions and pollution.

So, reading between the lines, could it be that the Chinese are recognising that the problem of glacier melt is caused by local industry rather than any alleged global warming?

New template

The chaps at Squarespace have released a new version of their content management system which has lead to a bit of a change in the template for this site.  If I had the time or the inclination I might change things more radically, but for the minute it's still pretty much the same.

The upgrade has brought some natty new changes. I particularly like the ability to manipulate images from within the WYSIWYG editor - resizing, captioning, changing the text wrapping and so on.

Duty of care

There was a story in the Herald the other day about a father whose daughter had not received any English tuition in the run up to her exams. Dad, a toolmaker, had employed a private tutor and having had to part with his hard-earned cash through no fault of his own had sued the council for compensation.

Rather than pay him off, as is normal in these kinds of thing, the council had turned up at the Sheriff Court and argued, apparently with a straight face, that they had no duty of care to the child.

This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. Connoisseurs may remember the attempts made by the Health & Safety Executive to argue that they had no duty of care to rail passengers. Likewise, the Inland Revenue have tried to absolve themselves for any responsibility for advice they give to taxpayers.

You have to just stand back in admiration at the sheer brazenness of the way in which the state can on the one hand bang you up in jail if you fail to send your children to school, while at the same time arguing that they don't actually have to do anything as menial as actually educating the little buggers once they're there.

Really, truly, the state is not your friend.

Blood of Eden

I used to listen to Peter Gabriel a lot when I was younger, but I've kind of lost touch with the world of popular music since getting a job and a family. Then I chanced upon this video on YouTube the other day, and I've listened to it roughly every two to three waking hours since. I'm still trying to work out if it's the song, the arrangement or the performers that sends shivers down my spine. The young lady singing the harmony, whose name is apparently Paula Cole, has a fine pair of lungs on her, I would say.