BBC: Phil Jones Q & A

14 February, 2010 by

Candid answers

The BBC’s Roger Harrabin has interviewed Phil “CRU” Jones and put to him a number of questions, many from a decidedly sceptical viewpoint. The questions, labelled A – W, provide many revealing answers. Here are some of the most interesting:

A – Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I’ve assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.

Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).

I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

Translation: There is nothing unusual about the late 20th century warming.

B – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

Translation: There has been no statistically significant warming since 1995.

D – Do you agree that natural influences could have contributed significantly to the global warming observed from 1975-1998, and, if so, please could you specify each natural influence and express its radiative forcing over the period in Watts per square metre.

This area is slightly outside my area of expertise. When considering changes over this period we need to consider all possible factors (so human and natural influences as well as natural internal variability of the climate system). Natural influences (from volcanoes and the Sun) over this period could have contributed to the change over this period. Volcanic influences from the two large eruptions (El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991) would exert a negative influence. Solar influence was about flat over this period. Combining only these two natural influences, therefore, we might have expected some cooling over this period.

Translation: We don’t know what caused the warming, so it must be us.

E – How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?

I’m 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 – there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.

Translation: Despite my answer to “D”, I know which side my bread is buttered.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate

Tim Lambert: How I "wiped the floor" with Monckton

13 February, 2010 by

I have just watched the meat of the Monckton v Lambert debate: the initial presentations, the questions to each other, and the five minute summing up. The Sky News version did not include the Q & A session from the audience (no great loss, I would expect, given it was a lay audience).

Monckton was far the better presenter, confidently and forcefully making his points. Lambert, on the other hand, looked edgy and uncomfortable. Admittedly, with Alan Jones as a moderator, it was always going to be difficult for Lambert, but I feel it makes up for the thousands of Lateline interviews conducted by another Jones, Tony, and of course Kerry O’Brien on the 7.30 Report, where any number of sceptics were battling the presenter before they even started.

Lambert, who lacked confidence in his presentation, nonetheless swaggers back to the comfort of his own blog, Deltoid:

You know that famous scene in Annie Hall where a bore is going on and on about Marshall McLuhan’s work and Allen produces McLuhan who tells the bore that he got McLuhan all wrong? Well, that’s kind of what happened in my debate with Monckton. Based on what he had identified as his most important argument in previous talks I was pretty sure he would argue that climate sensitivity was low based on his misunderstanding of Pinker et al Do Satellites Detect Trends in Surface Solar Radiation?. And sure enough, he did.

You remember how I called Lambert’s blog “smug”? It must be great to be him – arrogant, cocksure, and of course, always right, never conceding anything – the antithesis of a proper scientist, of course, who should be always cautious, questioning, doubting, dare I say it, sceptical. And his adoring warmist fans in the comments reassured him he’d done a great job and he’d won comfortably and Monckton was a charlatan. As he modestly puts it himself:

The folks I talked to afterwards (which may, perhaps, be a biased sample [Really? – Ed]) say that I wiped the floor with him. Which is a pretty good result since I’ve never done anything like this before. (source)

“Wiped the floor”? I am amazed that Lambert is ungracious enough to crow about such things on his blog, even if it was said by others. I imagine many more of the audience said similar things to Monckton, but I cannot for a minute see him gloating publicly about it.

Certainly on the Pinker paper, Lambert appeared to have a point that needed further investigation. But Monckton will go away and look at the paper again and no doubt come back with a response (which I will post), because that is the way in which scientific discourse progresses. Elsewhere in the debate, Lambert was unconvincing, recycling the usual warm-mongering rhetoric that we’re so used to, relying heavily on GISS data and temperature sets to show warming, when the satellite record shows stasis since 2001. It was a shame the satellite/surface dichotomy was not explored further.

[UPDATE: I should also add that Lambert’s five minute sum up at the end was particularly weak (actually lasting about two minutes), allowing Monckton really to cash in with a far more powerful conclusion. You can watch them here and make up your own mind – Ed]

If the science is so settled and Lambert was so right and Monckton so wrong, it certainly didn’t show. The debate isn’t over.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Break from blogging

9 February, 2010 by

Just a little overwhelmed with a gazillion other things at the moment, meaning that the blog will continue to take a back seat for a while. In the mean time, the Live Blog Roll will give you all the climate realism you crave!

Hope things will calm down a bit in a few weeks.

Best regards,

Simon

Filed Under: Climate

Monckton v Lambert

8 February, 2010 by

Christopher Monckton will debate Tim Lambert in Sydney on 12 February. We all know Monckton of course. Tim Lambert is responsible for the insufferably smug warm-blog “Deltoid.” Details:

Friday 12 February 2010 – 12:30pm
at
HILTON HOTEL SYDNEY, Grand Ballroom

The Moderator and MC will be
Australia’s leading Broadcaster, 2GB’s
Alan Jones AO

Please register by providing name, address, phone & email details.
Email to: cool@exemail.com.au
or FAX: (02) 4861 2029
Special enquiries ring 0419 703 465…

Deltoid has posted about it (obviously), and one of the comments sums it up rather well:

This will be a turkey shoot. I almost feel sorry for you Tim. (No, not really).

Still, you can always come back here, lick your wounds, and explain how you would have won if only it was a fair contest. You know, if you hadn’t taken a knife to a gunfight!

LOL!

Filed Under: Climate

Liberal has-beens dump on Abbott

8 February, 2010 by

Astonishing disloyalty

Call me old fashioned, but I thought that one of the principles in Coalition politics would be supporting your leader in the common aim of getting rid of Rudd and his tawdry government. How wrong one can be. Instead of backing Tony Abbott all the way, as they should, political has-beens Malcolm Turnbull and John Hewson think that it is somehow beneficial to the cause to make pompous speeches in Parliament slagging off the new Coalition policy on climate change, or write articles for the ABC about how the Liberals are using scare tactics about the ETS. I mean, what freaking planet are these guys on? Clearly they put their own petty self interest way above the interests of the party (and the country).

Traitor Turnbull first:

Former Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull has vowed to cross the floor and vote for the Government’s emissions trading scheme (ETS), arguing the Opposition’s alternative plan will achieve “very little” except raise taxes.

Mr Turnbull lost the Liberal leadership to Tony Abbott late last year following a Liberal mutiny against his decision to support the ETS.

Mr Turnbull urged his colleagues to think beyond the next election and legislate for the long term and reminded them that until December last year there was bipartisan agreement to adopt an ETS.

Mr Turnbull says the ETS is the only credible way to meet the Government’s commitment to reduce emissions by 5 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020.

“These bills are as much the work of John Howard as of Kevin Rudd,” he said. [Times have changed, pal, in case you haven’t noticed – Ed]

“I will be voting in favour of this bill.

“All of us here are accountable not just to our constituency, but the generations that will come after them and after us,” he said.

Mr Turnbull said that climate change was a global problem and if Australia expected countries like China and India to act it must lead the way with an ETS. (source)

Yeah, mate, like China and India give a rats what Australia (1.5% of global emissions) does – idiot. We all know you’re just trying to secure all those dollars in future carbon trading, aren’t you? And now for Hewson:

Former Liberal leader John Hewson has taken aim at Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s climate change policy, accusing him of using fear to win over voters.

In an opinion piece for the ABC’s The Drum which denounces both sides of politics for “squibbing” action on climate change, Dr Hewson has also criticised the media for focusing on the colour of the political debate rather than the substance of the science.

Dr Hewson has urged both Mr Abbott and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to show leadership on the issue instead of “wallowing in the colour and movement of grossly irresponsible politicking”.

“I am particularly disturbed by the way our current ‘debate’ on the challenge of climate change is unfolding,” he writes.

Dr Hewson’s comments come as today’s Nielsen poll in the Fairfax media shows voters prefer the Coalition’s policy over Mr Rudd’s emissions trading scheme. (source)

See how out of touch you are with reality? Even the polls show the complete opposite.

Advice to Tony Abbott: dump these traitors from the party, along with any other turncoat that dares vote with the government on the ETS.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

BBC: pension fund invested in climate companies

7 February, 2010 by

Sunday Express

If you’ve ever wondered why the BBC has been so biased towards the global warming movement, perhaps the UK Express has provided the answer. It appears that huge swathes of the BBC’s own massive pension fund is invested in companies “whose success depends on the theory [of AGW] being widely accepted.”

The corporation is under investigation after being inundated with complaints that its editorial coverage of climate change is biased in favour of those who say it is a man-made phenomenon.

The £8billion pension fund is likely to come under close scrutiny over its commitment to promote a low-carbon economy while struggling to reverse an estimated £2billion deficit.

Concerns are growing that BBC journalists and their bosses regard disputed scientific theory that climate change is caused by mankind as “mainstream” while huge sums of employees’ money is invested in companies whose success depends on the theory being widely accepted.

The fund, which has 58,744 members, accounts for about £8 of the £142.50 licence fee and the proportion looks likely to rise while programme budgets may have to be cut to help reduce the deficit.

The BBC is the only media organisation in Britain whose pension fund is a member of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, which has more than 50 members across Europe.

Its chairman is Peter Dunscombe, also the BBC’s Head of Pensions Investment.

Prominent among its recent campaigns was a call for a “strong and binding” global agreement on climate change – one that fell on deaf ears after the UN climate summit in Copenhagen failed to reach agreement on emissions targets and a cut in greenhouse gases.

So if you were being cynical, you may think the BBC plugs the alarmist line in order to ensure the security of its own investments, which aren’t doing so well at the moment. Sounds like a serious conflict, undermining the Corporation’s editorial impartiality (and probably breaching its own guidelines).

Read it here. (h/t Jonathan S-B)

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

MUST SEE: BBC Newsnight: Climate change scepticism hotting up in Australia

7 February, 2010 by

BBC’s flagship current affairs programme, Newsnight, has an extended section on the changing political climate in Australia:

H/t: Tom S

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Pachauri's flights stretch to the moon (and back)

6 February, 2010 by

Patchy old Pachy

Hypocrisy Alert: Don’t do as I do, do as I say, and that’s especially true of the IPCC which wants us all to dismantle our economies in order to “save the planet”. Except those edicts don’t apply to the IPCC head himself, old Pachy, as he clocks up half a million air miles in 19 months:

On his international missions, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), called for radical action to stave off environmental disaster.

He urged people to eat less meat, pay aviation taxes and even ban giving iced water in restaurants. But in order to get his message across, the former railway engineer, who lives in Delhi, created an enormous carbon footprint of his own.

Dr Pachauri has been the chairman of the panel since 2002. Documents available on its website showed that in one 19-month period, he clocked up more than half a million miles in the air as he travelled the world on official business.

Between January 2007 and July 2008, he took more than 120 long-haul flights and 43 short-haul trips, taking in countries such as New Zealand, America and Fiji.

Dr Pachauri’s trips would have produced 121.1 tons of carbon dioxide, according to calculations by ClimateCare, a carbon offset provider.

It is estimated that the average Briton produces around 8.6 tons of carbon dioxide a year, while the average Indian produces just over one ton.

Nice work if you can get it.

Read it here.

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BBC: "More people are now doubters than firm believers."

6 February, 2010 by

At least in the UK, the media are beginning to cover the shonky science stories, and public opinion is reacting. As the BBC reports, public support for the alarmist cause is haemorrhaging fast:

The number of British people who are sceptical about climate change is rising, a poll for BBC News suggests.

The Populus poll of 1,001 adults found 25% did not think global warming was happening, a rise of 8% since a similar poll was conducted in November.

The percentage of respondents who said climate change was a reality had fallen from 83% in November to 75% this month.

And only 26% of those asked believed climate change was happening and “now established as largely man-made”.

The findings are based on interviews carried out on 3-4 February.

In November 2009, a similar poll by Populus – commissioned by the Times newspaper – showed that 41% agreed that climate change was happening and it was largely the result of human activities.

Dropping like a stone

“It is very unusual indeed to see such a dramatic shift in opinion in such a short period,” Populus managing director Michael Simmonds told BBC News.

“The British public are sceptical about man’s contribution to climate change – and becoming more so,” he added.

“More people are now doubters than firm believers.”

Whereas here in Australia, the ABC and Fairfax have been doing their very best to sweep it all under the carpet. Unfortunately, the carpet now has a massive bulge in the middle, which nobody can miss. Public opinion here will follow suit in due course, making Rudd and Wong’s blinkered, headlong charge towards an ETS even more ridiculous.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Climate sense from Miranda Devine

6 February, 2010 by

© SMH

Climate sense

The latest article from the devine Miranda will have the SMH-reading intelligentsia choking on their organic muesli and skinny lattes, as she confronts them with the reality of the climate debate (something the Fairfax press has done so well to conceal):

As the wheels keep falling off the climate alarmist bandwagon, it’s suddenly become fashionable to be a sceptic. Out of the woodwork have crawled all sorts of fair-weather friends.

But where were they when the going was tough, when we were being hammered as Holocaust deniers, planet wreckers, in the pay of the “Big Polluters”, bad parents, pariahs, equivalent to murderers? It was pure McCarthyism.

But now, even the most aggressive alarmists have gone quiet or softened their rhetoric and people who sat on the fence have morphed into wise owls.

They still think it’s acceptable to mock touring British sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton’s protruding eyes, a distressing symptom of his thyroid disease, in an effort to marginalise him as a lunatic, rather than address his criticisms. But, when even the British left-leaning [“left-leaning”? Falling off the edge, more like – Ed], warmist-friendly Guardian newspaper has begun to investigate the fraud involved in “sexing up” climate change science, it’s clear the collapse of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s credibility and the holes in the case for catastrophic man-made climate change can no longer be ignored.

We are witnessing an outbreak of neo-open-mindedness and face-saving from people who brooked no nuance.

Read it here.

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