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Entries by Bishop Hill (6700)

Thursday
Apr092015

Diary date - Berlin

 I shan't be going to this, will you?

How many more of these non-elected organisations are there beavering away demanding that the planet be saved - or else?  I suspect the Greek debt could be paid off if in its entirety if these pressure groups were all deprived of the money they receive to operate.

TM

 

 

Wednesday
Apr082015

Green children.....

News from Balcombe

To paraphrase Ignatius Loyola: Give me child  while he is still at school and I can make him think the way I think he should.

TM [LInk repaired]

 Update 8.40am  12 April 2015

It is alarming to see that the Australians schools are at it too, in what appears to be a more organised way

See  the article from Quadrant on GWPF

Tuesday
Apr072015

Diary dates, not to be missed edition

I recently became aware of a seminar taking place in London at the end of the month. Run by the Central London branch of the British Universities Industrial Relations Association, it looks as if it absolutely should not be missed.

Central London BUIRA Seminar

Climate Change, Work, Labour and Trade Unions, with Professor Fred Steward (Policy Studies Institute, University of Westminster) on Labour and the Green Economy and Dr Paul Hampton (Fire Brigades Union) on Trade unions and climate change in the UK: prisoners of neoliberalism or swords of climate justice?

Followed by round table discussion on what trade unions can do with Sarah Pearce (Unison), Graham Petersen (UCU), Igor Diaz and Jairo Quiroz from the Columbian coal miners’ union SINTRACARBON, and Christine Haigh from Global Justice.

Click to read more ...

Monday
Apr062015

Arguing the toss

Verity Jones at Digging in the Clay has an interesting post on the hierarchy of disagreement  (H/T WUWT) and the merits or otherwise of counterargument and refutation. 

The trouble is there are those  who aren't interested in listening to facts which refute their arguments and like to shout instead - the Bishop met some recently at the BBC.  

 

Monday
Apr062015

Disappearing coastlines? Disappearing membership

This may well be the last straw for my family's long membership of the National Trust as Dame Helen Ghosh joins the CAGW activists with a vengeance.  We drafted a letter of resignation last year  because of the increasingly political stance being taken by the NT and NTS and then didn't send it.  It's still on file though, now where did I put the stamps?

TM [Link repaired]

Monday
Apr062015

Off

It's the Easter break and the family is going to take some time off. Blogging will therefore be light to non-existent for a few days. However, Today's Moderator and Josh may post topical stuff from time to time.

Friday
Apr032015

Science's pollution problem

Science Direct covers what looks like a very interesting paper by Arthur Caplan, which looks at science's "pollution problem", namely the ability of junk science to get published.

The pollution of science and medicine by plagiarism, fraud, and predatory publishing is corroding the reliability of research," writes Dr. Caplan. "Yet neither the leadership nor those who rely on the truth of science and medicine are sounding the alarm loudly or moving to fix the problem with appropriate energy.

Friday
Apr032015

A declaration of orthodoxy

When a mainstream climate scientist comes up with some findings that go against the narrative of impending catastrophe they usually feel obliged (or are obliged by others) to take steps to distance themselves from the implications - hiding them, issuing declarations of orthodoxy, or saying something rude about dissenters.

We saw something of this in Bjorn Stevens' recent paper on aerosol forcing, with the implications for climate sensitivity left to one side. Yesterday, however, Stevens went futher and issued a declaration of his absolute global warming faith.

Many scientists (myself included) believe that a warming of more than 2ºC from a doubling of the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide is consistent with both my new study and our best understanding. Some insight into our reasoning can be found in a number of excellent blogs reporting on a workshop on Earth’s Climate Sensitivities, which I co-organized just last week, e.g., http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/04/reflections-on-ringberg

Click to read more ...

Thursday
Apr022015

Johansen's climate sensitivity estimate

April 1st is an interesting choice of date on which to release a new paper on climate sensitivity, but nevertheless that is the choice of Nature Climate Change. The new estimate has been produced by a team led a new name in this area: Daniel Johansen of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. The only member of the team who may be familiar to readers is Claudia Tebaldi.

The article's headline conclusion is that ECS cannot be lower than 2°C.

Here we analyse how estimates of ECS change as observations accumulate over time and estimate the contribution of potential causes to the hiatus. We find that including observations over the hiatus reduces the most likely value for ECS from 2.8 °C to 2.5 °C, but that the lower bound of the 90% range remains stable around 2 °C. We also find that the hiatus is primarily attributable to El Niño/Southern Oscillation-related variability and reduced solar forcing.

Click to read more ...

Thursday
Apr022015

Twotalitarianism

I must say I am watching the behaviour of the Twitter management carefully, as it looks somewhat alarming. As Anthony reports, Tom Nelson has been suspended for asking if a Katharine Hayhoe graph was "crap". That's asking, not saying. Meanwhile Gavin Schmidt describes a different graph as crap (that's saying, not asking) and it's all fine and dandy.

 

Thursday
Apr022015

Mike Hill: light

Some interesting developments on the Mike Hill front. In this post I will discuss an email received from Hill's wife, saying that I have maligned her husband. I am happy to bring her points to readers' attention.

She raises a number of specific issues, which I will address one at a time.

1.Articles to which you refer do not indicate a job application to Cuadrilla.

Click to read more ...

Thursday
Apr022015

Diary dates, find us some energy edition

In May, the Glasgow Science Centre is holding a debate which might be summarised as "OMG where is the energy going to come from?".

Join us and a highly-qualified guest panel, chaired by writer and broadcaster Iain Macwhirter, on Tuesday 5th of May to discuss the challenges we all face as the energy sector moves into an uncertain future.

Challenges include:

•Tackling the impact of climate change and responding to carbon-cutting legislation
•Finding new sources of conventional energy including oil and gas
•Developing new renewable energy sources such as offshore wind and marine
•The future of nuclear.

The guest panel includes:

Peter McGregor, International Public Policy Institute, University of Strathclyde
Gordon Ballard, Chairman, Schlumberger UK
Ken Cronin, Chief Executive, UK Offshore Oil & Gas
Niall Stuart, Chief Executive, Scottish Renewables

 Tickets are free and available here.

Thursday
Apr022015

We ♥ fracking

Ben Webster in the Times is having a lot of fun at the expense of Greenpeace, whose poll on public attitudes to unconventional oil and gas rather rebounded when it emerged that more people were in favour of developing a shale gas industry than were against.

Paywalled here.

Tuesday
Mar312015

Not tired of climate change

As readers here are aware, Joe Smith's chief claim to fame is that in the first years of the 21st century he managed to pervert the BBC's environmental output, ensuring that the green political agenda was adhered to across the corporation's output, from comedy to current affairs.

During today's BBC World Service show  Are We Tired of Talking About Climate Change?, Smith seemed to admit that this had been a "tactical error" with the narrative of gloom and doom apparently switching the public away from the desired political programme and inducing little more than an extreme case of apathy. You have to admire his chutzpah.

Click to read more ...

Tuesday
Mar312015

A lack of self-awareness

I caught most of Costing the Earth today, in which some of the problems with mainstream climate science were discussed. It featured a bunch of alarmists and ex-alarmists discussing aspects of the science that they had until quite recently decried sceptics for mentioning. Towards the end they wondered whether sceptics shouldn't perhaps be admitted to the debate. I'm not sure that they quite grasped the irony of this position and certainly, when the presenter asked about sceptics being presented as crackpots, nobody deigned to answer.

It's definitely worth a listen.