Crooked briefs

Yesterday a magistrate handed down a guilty verdict to the loons from the Plane Stupid group who went airside at Heathrow airport last year and disrupted operations for several hours. A jail sentence is, apparently, "almost inevitable". Many of the perps seem to have form for this sort of thing. Kara Moses, for example, has previous form relating to fracking and Didcot power station; Sheila Menon was involved at Balcombe.

Perhaps the most interesting one though is Melanie Strickland, who turns out to be a solicitor and author for the Law Society Gazette. 

Can't she be struck off for this kind of thing?

How is this not fraud?

I'm not a great one for shouting fraud, but I can't see that there is any other conclusion that one can draw.

Somebody on Kickstarter is trying to raise funds for a film about Kiribati, the coral atoll that all BH readers know is not getting smaller. 

Yet the promoters of this film are saying this (click for larger):

That to me looks distinctly like a false statement being used to raise money. A fraud, in other words.

Recollections of Bob Carter

This is a guest post by Professor David Henderson.

I became involved with climate change issues, entirely by accident, at the end of 2002. A year or so after this event, as my acquaintance with the subject broadened, I became aware of Bob Carter’s writings, and I was impressed. I marked him down as an author to be followed.

It was not until 2006 that we met, through an initiative on my part. At the end of 2005 the Stern Review was published. I felt that it deserved a comprehensive critique, and so far as the economic aspects were concerned a team of potential authors was already to hand. Well before the Review appeared, Sir Nicholas Stern (as he then was) had given a public lecture the text of which was published (together with an annex on climate science). I put together a team of nine economists, and we published in the journal World Economics (June 2006} a short critical article entitled ‘Climate Change: The Stern Review “Oxonia Papers”’.  Alongside our piece there also appeared a reply by Stern.

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A "substantial" error in GISS Model E

Over the weekend Nic Lewis posted a brief update to his latest posting on the Marvel et al paper. In it, he described something he had unearthed in a paper by Chandler et al. I've reproduced it here.

I have just discovered (from Chandler et al 2013) that there was an error in the ocean model in the version of GISS-E2-R used to run the CMIP5 simulations. The single forcing simulations were part of the CMIP5 design, although it is possible that some or all of them were run after the correction was implemented.

Chandler et al write:

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The daft and the non-daft climate model runs

Nic Lewis has published another fascinating article about the Marvel et al paper over at Climate Audit. I was particularly taken by the discussion of the GCM runs that lay behind Marvel et al's assessment of the effect of land-use changes.

In essence, the authors did five runs of the model, with only land-use forcing changes. This tends to produce a cooling, and four of the runs gave similar results, with their average looking like this:

But one looked entirely different; like this:

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What's up with El Reg?

A few days back The Conversation published a moderately dull article about paleoclimate, written by a couple of postdocs at Bristol. Its title kind of gave the game away up front:

The last time Earth was this hot hippos lived in Britain (that’s 130,000 years ago)

This introduced a temperature reconstruction that had been bodged together by an author at Wikimedia. It all seemed fairly pitiful to me, and hardly worth the bother, although I wondered for a time about whether I could get an easy laugh by noting that the authors had cited approvingly Michael Mann's 2008 carcrash paper:

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Paris and the risk of green judges

@Robin Hutton under CC licence. Click for link.Paris has been and gone and attention has mostly moved on to the latest eccentric claim about what the climate is going to do to us next (intoxicated fish anyone?). But a few outlets are still asking questions. Yesterday Carbon Brief explained that the timetable for ratification is almost impossibly vague:

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Real-world efficacies

BH readers have long been aware that low estimates of climate sensitivity based on observations are little affected by the pause and will therefore be little affected by this year's El Nino either. The discussion in this area will continue to focus on subjects like efficacies and aerosols. Marvel and colleagues are apparently formulating a response to Nic Lewis's critique, which is sure to be interesting. While we're waiting, I have been passed a preprint of a forthcoming Piers Forster paper in Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, which makes some interesting observations on the efficacy debate.

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Hot, apparently

© Copyright ronnie leask under CC licence. Click for link.So the stove is on, and outside the snow is starting to melt a little. It looks as though a thaw will set in by this evening.

Meanwhile Twitter and the newswaves are awash with tales of warmest years, although I have to say most of it has passed me by. I did pick up this interesting exchange on Josh's feed though.

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Xing's bendy hockey stick

You wait for ages for a hockey stick to turn up and suddenly two turn up at once. Hot on the heels of the Wilson et al temperature reconstruction comes Xing et al, a new effort from a Chinese team. In their figure, shown below, it's the blue line we're interested in. In truth it's a pretty bendy hockey stick.

A few thoughts and observations based on a skim of the paper:

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Quote of the day, sound science edition

...can you guys fill in the "look at the impacts we're already seeing" part with a bunch of examples? In addition to the scientifically sound examples you'll give it would also be good for me to get an updated list of extreme events that are plausibly climate related.

US climate envoy Todd Stern reaches out beyond the scientifically sound

Via Chris Horner.

Fifty shades of green

Peter Lilley's speech during the Energy Bill debate in the House of Commons on Monday is well worth a look. This is the text, lightly edited.

Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con):

…Wherever we are on the spectrum on global warming, from sceptical to alarmist, we can surely all agree on one thing: that we should try to achieve the targets to which we are committed for reducing CO2 at the least cost to our constituents, - because it is ultimately they who bear it either through their [household] budgets or their jobs. So when the Secretary of State found that subsidies were proving unnecessarily generous to achieve our targets and we were achieving them ahead of time, so that without changing those targets she could reduce those subsidies, I assumed the whole House would be in universal agreement with what she was proposing; even I, for once, was on her side. But it was not so: there were calls from the green lobby and the Opposition to keep subsidies higher than necessary for longer than necessary to achieve the targets to which we are committed.

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Bob Carter

I awake this morning to the sad news of the passing of Bob Carter.

I never met Bob, but we exchanged emails from time to time, particularly when I was providing editorial input to his paper on sea-level rise, which I still rate as one of the best things GWPF has published. He had a very sharp mind, but was great fun to work with. His strength of character in the face of years of personal attacks is an example to us all.

Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts both have more personal recollections.

Diary dates, tree rings edition

Academic: let's try violence

It goes without saying that huge numbers of academics are a waste of time, space and money, but on a purely selfish level I'd hate anyone to actually deal with the problem. Where else are you going to get an endless stream of people willing to make fools of themselves in public? Without them I'd have nothing to write about.

There I was this morning struggling for something to write about, when Dr Tara Smith came to my rescue. Dr Smith is a legal scholar (allegedly) at Bangor University in Wales, although she is a native of Ireland. In The Conversation, she has set out her view on why environmentalists should be able to break the law with impunity. This was prompted by a US court deciding to throw out an argument by a bunch of hippies that their blocking oil trains was justified by "necessity" and therefore not criminal. 

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