Jul 29, 2011 at 11:00 AM | Richard Betts

The UK Climate Change Risk Assessment, a key piece of work under the Climate Change Act, is nearing completion. I am involved. Peer-review will begin in the next month, and it will report to Parliament in January. Uncertainties are a key part of this.

Thank you very much for that information.

I will put some serious thought into whether I should hold my breath or not.

I hope that the caveats are not going to be buried away in a small red box at the bottom of page 93 (copyright Private Eye).

Richard

Yes I think the world is probably going to get warmer as a result of ongoing emissions of greenhouse gases - I don't know how much warmer, and I don't know what the impacts will be

This is where I came in some years ago. Why do you believe that? Given that the earth has warmed and cooled by several degrees over the course of millenia with CO2 at all sorts of levels and apparently unrelated at any given time to temperature, insofar as we know to any degree of accuracy what the temperature was and what the CO2 levels were, why should we believe that this time the last 30 years of warming from 1975 to 2005 will not be followed by 30 years of cooling as it was between the mid-40s and the mid-70s? What is your justification for using the simplistic (and as I am led to believe largely inaccurate) term "greenhouse gases"? The earth is not a closed system and the circulation of gases is therefore not to be treated as if it were. Do you accept that gases do not "trap" heat -- another neat shorthand phrase which has been used to alarm the populace by certain activists; they may absorb it but they also re-radiate it. I know little about radiation or wavelengths (other than on a radio) but I am told that CO2 only absorbs heat within defined wavelengths and also on a logarithmic basis so that if a doubling of CO2 were to cause 1 degree rise in temperature then it would require a further doubling to raise the temperature by a further 1 degree. Do you accept this argument? I've got several dozen other questions that nobody has satisfactorily given me an answer to (based on real-world evidence rather than models, that is) but I don't want to hog your time too much.
In fact if you don't have the time to reply I'll be quite happy if you are at least aware of why there are a number of reasonably intelligent non-scientists around who do have what they consider very good reasons for thinking that a lot of climate science -- as it is sold to the public -- simply does not stack up.
Finally, a question that I really wouldn't expect you to answer (:-( -- why does the phrase "climate change risk assessment" fill me with a sense of impending doom?

Richard Betts

Thank you. Please keep us informed. I would suspect that The Bishop will gladly post a topic in future on your deliberations.

Lord Beaverbrook

Actually we are looking at solar cycles, as my colleague Adam Scaife was reported as mentioning in the FT a few weeks ago. Will keep you posted on that.

Brownedoff

The UK Climate Change Risk Assessment, a key piece of work under the Climate Change Act, is nearing completion. I am involved. Peer-review will begin in the next month, and it will report to Parliament in January. Uncertainties are a key part of this.

Don't recall Guido covering much scientific before ...

Ground Control to Major Blunder
http://order-order.com/2011/07/29/in-other-news/

Jul 28, 2011 at 3:19 AM | Ecclesiastical Uncle

After being convinced by RB that he is powerless to rein in the unbridled verbal excesses of Huhne/Hendry/Barker, I assumed that the person with that duty would be the Chief Scientific Advisor to the DECC.

The CSA was appointed by Edward Miliband MP on 01 October 2009, that is, 11 months after 463 MPs voted for the Climate Change Act 2008, on 28 October 2008.

Thus, far too late to give advice before the CCA was put on the statute book.

Never mind (!), the CSA was there during the final knockings of the last government and for all of the period of the "greenest goverment ever".

However, my assumption proved to be incorrect because the summary of his duties does not include reining in the verbal incontinence of his Ministers, rather, anything but that.

see: http://tinyurl.com/3qyzsdc

So, who is supposed to make sure that Ministers mention that there are scientific uncertainties surrounding the topics upon which they speak? The Prime Minister? The Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of Huhne's party? The President of the Royal Society? Apparently no-one.

That only leaves the electorate, at the next general election.

General info.

And the committee took notice. In its report today, it calls for serious action, not on peer review but on fraud. "Although it is not the role of peer review to police research integrity and identify fraud or misconduct," the committee's chair, Labour MP Andrew Miller said yesterday, "we found the general oversight of research integrity in the UK to be unsatisfactory and complaisant."

Complaisant? It means eager to please or obliging. But eager to please whom? Well, scientists. It's like another cosy community where institutional advantage breeds indifference to misconduct down the line.

"Employers must take responsibility for the integrity of their employees' research," the committee says, in words that eerily echo the storm over ethics in red-top journalism. "However, we question who would oversee the employer and make sure that they are doing the right thing."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jul/28/scientific-fraud-regulation

Richard thnks for your answers, I`m away to digest them. Our contacts with real climate scientists are rare and most papers are behind fire walls, so I have lots of things that puzzle me. One is chaotic systems, especially ones where we don`t have an understanding of a very large pecentage of the drivers, and no idea how many "unknown unknowns" there are.

I chose 8000 fee because the adiabatic lapse rate is roughly 2C per 1000 feet and the average temperature of the earth is 14C Im aware that temperatures vary, but the generalit is that it`s below 0C around that height. (100,000 flying miles per annum, boredom and the flight information channel on the in flight entertainment systems. I`d share my data with you but there are IPR issues)

Richard Betts

There is no concern at all between you and your colleagues of the effects that a solar minimum could bring to Global temperatures?
No reliance on historical events in the Northern Hemisphere from the Maunder and Dalton minimums?

Am I correct in thinking then that the best scientific knowledge being passed to the Government is still that the Earth will continue to warm in the next decade?

Green Sand

Fair comment - thanks. My colleagues and I can (and do) advise on the potential errors / uncertainties in the climate science, but that's only half of what you are referring to, I think - the other half concerns the economic (and other) consequences of whichever course of action is chosen in terms of decarbonisation (or whatever). That's really not my area I'm afraid - I can only contribute the part of the advice for which I'm qualified.