UK: Climate madness and climate sanity

27 November, 2011 by

Huhne-atic

The UK is further along the road to climate madness than Australia, but where the UK now stands provides a possible vision for the future in Australia, if the Labor/Green policies are allowed to continue unhindered. Both the UK and Australia have the same characters in this vulgar melodrama, just a different cast.

In the UK, the long-suffering public has to deal with that eco-lunatic Chris Huhne, Mr Windmill, who is systematically strangling the UK’s fossil fuel energy production capacity, without having seriously considered what can replace it. In Australia we have Bob Brown, a blinkered environmental extremist, completely disconnected from the real world.

Today we have two articles from the UK Telegraph which demonstrate the ever widening gap between the rarified atmosphere of government and the harsh reality outside. Firstly, we have Huhne on the forthcoming Durban conference, sincerely believing that it will achieve something significant:

If we have learnt anything from the financial crisis, it is that clear rules implemented properly can prevent the toxic build-up of risk. A recent survey of large global firms found that 83 per cent of business leaders think a multilateral agreement is needed to tackle climate change. Businesses want certainty; only the politics lags behind.

A commitment to a new agreement will provide that certainty – and Kyoto provides the basis of the rules we need to manage a destabilising climate. Durban must not be the end of Kyoto, but a chance to build on what it began.

We recognise that it will take time to negotiate this.

So we also want immediate action. Current voluntary pledges to reduce emissions are not yet enough; in Durban, we should agree that we must close the gap, building momentum towards a major review of ambition.

We must build the system we use to measure and verify emissions cuts. We must do more on long-term financial support for developing countries and agree how the new Green Fund will operate. And we must continue to reduce emissions from deforestation.

Above all, we must show leadership. Next year I will continue to press for a more ambitious EU emissions target: a 30 per cent reduction by 2020. That will help us raise our sights globally.

Milton Friedman once said: “Our basic function is to keep good ideas alive until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” That is a good description of the task that awaits in Durban. (source)

To quote The Thick of It, Huhne is “disconnected to the point of autism”. When the rest of the world is backing away (apart from Australia, of course), the UK is heading for even deeper emissions cuts! And his quoting of Friedman shows that this entire facade is pure politics. Skating over the fact that this isn’t keeping a good idea alive, but a bad idea struggling for breath and surviving only thanks to a ventilator, Huhne is on a political crusade which will not be sidetracked by trivial matters like another GFC. Pity the poor Brits.

A third article in the Telegraph here, explains how Huhne will give such long-term financial support to developing countries: GBP 1 billion of British taxpayers’ money will be sent to Africa to help them “tackle climate change.” Given the parlous state of the UK economy, you’d have to conclude that their priorities are a little out of kilter… Check out the comments on that one.

At least they have an antidote in Christopher Booker, one of the few commentators who fully understand the desperate situation the UK is heading towards. His near-weekly dose of climate sanity is always essential reading, but particularly so today:

To grasp the almost suicidal state of unreality our Government has been driven into by the obsession with global warming, it is necessary to put together the two sides to an overall picture – each vividly highlighted by events of recent days.

On one hand there is the utterly lamentable state of the science which underpins it all, illuminated yet again by “Climategate 2.0”, the latest release of emails between the leading scientists who for years have been at the heart of the warming scare (which I return to below). On the other hand, we see the damage done by the political consequences of this scare, which will directly impinge, in various ways, on all our lives.

It is hard to know where to begin, after a week which opened with The Sunday Telegraph’s exclusive on a blast of realism from Prince Philip over the folly of our Government’s infatuation with useless windmills. Then came an excoriatory report from the House of Lords on how we have so run down our nuclear expertise that it is doubtful whether we can hope to run a new generation of nuclear power stations. Next, there was a report from a leading Swiss bank finding that the EU’s “emissions trading scheme” has wasted $287 billion (£186billion) over six years – paid by all of us, to achieve nothing in terms of reducing “carbon emissions”. There was also a front page story in another newspaper, warning that (as readers of this column have long been aware) within nine years we could all be paying nearly £300 a year to subsidise solar panels and those same useless windmills.

…

All this madness ultimately rests on a blind faith in the threat of man-made global warming, which no one has done more to promote than the scientists whose private emails were again last week leaked onto the internet.

It is still not generally appreciated that the significance of these Climategate emails is that their authors, such as Michael Mann, are no ordinary scientists: they are a little group of fanatical insiders who have, for years, done more than anyone else to drive the warming scare, through their influence at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And what is most striking about the picture that emerges from these emails is just how questionable the work of these men appears.

We see how they torture the evidence to support their theory – even to the point where some of them seem to lose faith in the story they are trying to tell. And we also see how rattled they were as soon as their work was challenged by expert outsiders such as Steve McIntyre, the mathematician who exposed the methods used to create Mann’s “hockey stick” temperature graph, which the IPCC had made Exhibit A for their theory.

Again and again we see them trying to defend the indefensible, giving vent to wild personal abuse of the enemies of what they call their “cause”, and stopping at nothing to keep their critics’ evidence out of IPCC reports and scientific journals, and prevent dissenting views from getting media atention.

This is no longer science worthy of the name. As I wrote when the first Climategate emails appeared in 2009, the global warming scare is far and away the greatest scientific scandal of our generation. When we then contemplate the insanity of the measures the politicians have imposed on us in consequence, we know we are looking at a collective flight from reality which has no precedent in the history of the world. (source)

Australia is actually better placed than the UK to retreat from the madness. At least we have a political party that opposes pointless carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes. All the major parties in the UK support the kind of nonsense Huhne is proposing, although there are signs of retreat there as well.

The big question, however, is this: Will sanity prevail before it’s too late?

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EU carbon price tumbles to new low

26 November, 2011 by

The only way is down…

As if the European financial crisis wasn’t bad enough. Not only is GFC Mark II just around the corner, courtesy of a US debt of over $15 trillion, the sound financial management of Greece, Italy, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, etc etc, but also, thanks to Julia Gillard’s pointless carbon tax (AU$23 per tonne, rising each year thereafter), Australia’s competitiveness at a very difficult time will be severely compromised in the global economy, as European carbon prices enter free fall:

European Union carbon permits and U.N.-backed credits collapsed to record lows on Thursday, extending this week’s sharp price slide as fears of a slowing economy sapped demand in the markets that are heavily supplied with emissions units.

It was also a signal that market participants are losing confidence in the flagging EU carbon market, the world’s biggest cap-trade scheme, traders and analysts said.

This latest crash could not have come at a worse time. In just a few days a U.N. climate summit in South Africa will resume work on a new globally binding pact to cut emissions.

Investors are already nervous about the future of carbon markets, given the uncertainty around when a new climate pact will emerge and what trading mechanisms will operate under it.

“Confidence is at an absolute minimum. It’s the macro-economic picture and the whole sentiment is not too good,” said a carbon trader at a financial institution.

Front-year carbon permits called EU Allowances (EUAs) closed 6.6 percent lower at 7.91 euros ($10.54) a tonne, after touching an all-time low of 7.80 euros earlier.

“There’s room to go down to 7 euros,” said Matteo Mazzoni, carbon analyst at Nomisma Energia in Italy, adding that 7.70 euros could be the next support level.

Some 11,000 power generators and industrial plants from 30 European countries take part in the region’s emissions trading scheme. It covers around half of the bloc’s carbon emissions.

Benchmark U.N.-issued carbon credits, which come from accredited emission reduction projects in developing countries, closed down almost 8 percent at 5.43 euros, after hitting a new record low of 5.30 euros.

FREEFALL

Carbon prices have shed more than half their value since June, as the euro zone’s worsening debt crisis choked demand for emissions permits.

The EU carbon market is also oversupplied with hundreds of millions of permits, and some analysts don’t expect demand to outpace supply until 2020.

“The oversupply seems to be overwhelming,” the trader said. (source)

Demand won’t outpace supply until 2020 – meaning that if the carbon tax survives that long (highly unlikely), Australians will suffer at least three years of a fixed carbon price far greater than that in the EU, and then a market-based trading scheme which will have a price floor of $15 from day one.

Hello? Julia and Greg? Are you receiving any of this? This Labor government sure know how to screw a country. Their own.

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Media hypocrisy: Wikileaks good, Climategate bad

26 November, 2011 by

Double standards...?

More journalistic double standards in our balanced media. Fairfax loves to defend Julian Assange, darling of the Left, for the release of the Wikileaks material, but is far more reticent about defending those who were responsible for the release of the Climategate emails.

Sunday Age editorial, 12 December 2010

Julian Assange and the public’s right to know

…

WikiLeaks, acting with newspapers around the world including The Age and The Sunday Age, is publishing information that makes governments uncomfortable. This action affirms the role of the media, which have a duty to expose the secret machinations of those who wield power. In the US, the chairman of the Senate homeland security committee, Joe Lieberman, has suggested that because it published some of the leaked information The New York Times might be subject to criminal investigation. This would breach the First Amendment protecting freedom of the press.

So leaks of intelligence that may damage national security is fine, because it is the duty of a journalist to “expose the secret machinations of those who wield power.”

The IPCC and climate scientists around the world also wield power. Lots of it. National governments are on the verge of turning their economies upside down on the basis of the IPCC’s dire predictions for the climate if emissions are not drastically reduced. How would The Age respond to exposing the “secret machinations” of the IPCC? Very differently, of course.

When Climategate 2.0 broke this week, The Age was more interested in the opinion of Phil Jones, one of the alleged “victims” of the leak, rather than staunchly supporting the release of the emails themselves:

The Age, 24 November 2011

Climatologist speaks out after new leak

The British climatologist ensnared in a major new email leak has taken his case to the public, arguing that he and his colleagues’ comments have again been taken out of context.

The University of East Anglia’s Phil Jones was one of the major players in the controversy that erupted two years ago over the publication of emails which caught prominent scientists stonewalling critics and attacking them in sometimes vitriolic terms.

The University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit is one of the world’s leading centres for the study of how world temperatures have varied over time [not any more – Ed], and Jones came under particular scrutiny following the 2009 disclosures – even receiving death threats over allegations that he was a leading a conspiracy to hype the dangers of climate change.

Jones and his colleagues have since been vindicated by a series of independent investigations, but the university’s reputation has been dented by criticism that it refused to share data with sceptics.

Jones said that his “heart did sink a bit” when he heard about the most recent leak, which apparently consists of old messages held back the first time around. (source)

A quick Google search of “Wikileaks” at “site:theage.com.au” produces 15,400 results. A similar search of “Climategate” produces just 330, barely 2% of the coverage given to Wikileaks. Fairfax also invariably refers to the release of the Climategate emails as a “hacking”, in order to taint it with illegality or criminal behaviour. Naturally, Fairfax also avoids giving prominence to the story because it challenges one of their preset agendas, that of the reality of dangerous man-made climate change.

So instead of robustly defending the release of the emails as a “journalistic duty”, Fairfax pens a teary piece about the “victims”, including rehashing the non-story of the “death threats” in order to garner sympathy for the scientists whose confidences have been betrayed. Such a stark contrast.

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Climate sensitivity and Climategate 2.0

25 November, 2011 by

Climate sensitivity distribution. 3 C is the upper limit (click to enlarge)

Some break this is turning out to be! Climate stories are breaking every day, and they deserve some coverage here. Two articles in The Australian today are of particular interest.

Firstly, the publication of a paper in Science that questions the high-end climate sensitivity probabilities put forward by the IPCC. Remember, climate sensitivity is the KEY question. If the climate isn’t sensitive to CO2, then “man-made global warming” is a non-problem. It’s the fact that the climate models project that there is a real possibility of significant climate sensitivity, leading to substantial and dangerous warming, which is enough, the IPCC would argue, to justify drastic emissions cuts based on the precautionary principle. The problem is that it may not be true:

DRAMATIC forecasts of global warming resulting from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide have been exaggerated, according to a peer-reviewed study by a team of international researchers.

In the study, published today in the leading journal Science, the researchers found that while rising levels of CO2 would cause climate change, the most severe predictions – some of which were adopted by the UN’s peak climate body in its seminal 2007 report – had been significantly overstated.

The authors used a novel approach based on modelling the effects of reduced CO2 levels on climate, which they compared with proxy-records of conditions during the last glaciation, to infer the effects of doubling CO2 levels.

They concluded that current worst-case scenarios for global warming were exaggerated.

“Now these very large changes (predicted for the coming decades) can be ruled out, and we have some room to breathe and time to figure out solutions to the problem,” the study’s lead author, Andreas Schmittner, an associate professor at Oregon State University, said.

…

Professor Schmittner said taking his results literally, the IPCC’s average or “expected” value of a 3C average temperature increase for a doubling of CO2 ought to be regarded as an upper limit. (source)

Wait for the warmists to start the smear campaign on that poor guy. And at the same time, more explosive Climategate emails show the extent to which uncertainty was minimised within the climate science community in order to avoid any possible damage to “The Cause”.

In one 2009 email exchange between British government advisers and climate scientists, including Professor Phil Jones from the University of East Anglia who was a key figure in the first Climategate saga, one adviser writes: “I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the government can give on climate change to help them tell their story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.” The exchange concerns a project called Weather Generator that forecasts heatwaves and extreme rainfall events across Britain.

In a 2003 email to colleagues, the UEA’s Irene Lorenzoni writes: “I agree with the importance of extreme events as foci for public and governmental opinion.” (source)

Details have also emerged at the close relationship between those scientists and the BBC, confirming suspicions that the UK’s national broadcaster is acting as an environmental activist mouthpiece for climate alarmism:

Yes, glad you stopped this — I was sent it too, and decided to spike it without more ado as pure stream-of-consciousness rubbish. I can well understand your unhappiness at our running the other piece. But we  are constantly being savaged by the loonies for not giving them any coverage at all, especially as you say with the COP in the offing, and being the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are, there is an expectation in some quarters that we will every now and then let them say something. I hope though that the weight of our coverage makes it clear that we think they are talking through their hats. (source)

“The objective impartial (ho ho) BBC”. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Ah, pity the poor Brits paying their TV licences for this kind of disgraceful bias. Little reason to doubt that the ABC is in a similar position – you only need to look at their output on climate matters to see that.

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"Marooned!" from Climategate 1.0

24 November, 2011 by

I thought I’d repost this image from Climategate 1.0, as it shows what the consensus boys (or, as we should now call them, “the cause”) get up to in their spare time. The filename is “marooned.jpg”. If their climate modelling is anywhere near as awful as their Photoshop skills, it would explain a lot…

Disappointed there's no sequel in CG 2.0

Who can name them all?

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Mainstream media responds to Climategate 2.0

23 November, 2011 by

Generic Climategate 2.0 story:

“Waffle, waffle, waffle. UEA. Platitude, platitude. Storm in a teacup. Out of context. Flannel, flannel. Michael Mann. Filthy deniers. Cliché, cliché. Evil plot to ruin Durban. Phil Jones. Science is settled. Rhubarb, rhubarb. Fully investigated. Three hundred enquiries. Scientists cleared of wrongdoing. Waffle, waffle. Al Gore. IPCC robust. 2500 scientists. Yawn, yawn. Move along. Nothing to see here. Hey, look at that polar bear drowning! (© All the world’s media).”

Or in cartoon form:

The usual story from the lame stream media (with apologies)

Reminds me of Lieutenant Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun…

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Climategate 2.0

23 November, 2011 by

A second release of emails on the second anniversary of Climategate 1. It looks like emails held back from the original release. Currently downloading…

Perfect timing, just before Durban (as it was two years ago, just before Copenhagen)

More to follow but here are some links:

Watts Up With That: Climategate 2.0 emails – They’re real and they’re spectacular!

Jo Nova:  Breaking! Apparently, more emails released. Climategate II?

Here’s the read me file (courtesy of Tallbloke)

[Read more…]

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Rich nations "give up" on climate deal as GHGs reach record levels

22 November, 2011 by

The ABC thinks particulates and toxins are GHGs…

Greenhouse gases are continuing their steady rise, and the climate is stubbornly refusing to play the game:

The amount of global warming-causing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere rose to a new high in 2010 and the rate of increase has accelerated, the UN weather agency said on Monday.

Levels of carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas and major contributor to climate change – rose by 2.3 parts per million between 2009 and 2010, higher than the average for the past decade of 2.0 parts per million, a new report by the World Meteorological Organisation found.

“The atmospheric burden of greenhouse gases due to human activities has yet again reached record levels since pre-industrial time,” said WMO secretary-general Michel Jarraud. (source)

No emotive language there. Despite the fact that emissions have risen significantly over the last decade or so, the increase in global temperature has slowed significantly. This alone is sufficient to demonstrate that the hypothesis of “dangerous global warming” is false. As Bob Carter explained in a recent email exchange:

The greenhouse hypothesis, which is almost never formulated correctly in the public discussion, but is “That human carbon dioxide emissions are causing dangerous global warming”. 

Given that the mixing time of the atmosphere is ~1 yr, and that physical radiative effects are instantaneous, a 10 year period is plenty of time to test that hypothesis. And the data that I cited invalidate it.

Note that that DOESN’T mean that humans have no effect on global temperature, because we know they do. What is indicated is that that effect is small, and for the time being lost in the noise of natural variation of the climate system.

So it is fortunate, then, that there is no chance of any global agreement on reducing emissions in the near future, because it would be a complete and utter waste of time and money. Headline of the day, in The Guardian, is not exactly what their moonbattish environmental staff would like to be writing a few days before Durban:

“Rich nations give up on climate treaty until 2020”

Governments of the world’s richest countries have given up on forging a new treaty on climate change to take effect this decade, with potentially disastrous consequences for the environment through global warming.

Ahead of critical talks starting next week, most of the world’s leading economies now privately admit that no new global climate agreement will be reached before 2016 at the earliest, and that even if it were negotiated by then, they would stipulate it could not come into force until 2020.

The eight-year delay is the worst contemplated by world governments during 20 years of tortuous negotiations on greenhouse gas emissions, and comes despite intensifying warnings from scientists and economists about the rapidly increasing dangers of putting off prompt action.

After the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009 ended amid scenes of chaos, governments pledged to try to sign a new treaty in 2012. The date is critical, because next year marks the expiry of the current provisions of the Kyoto protocol, the only legally binding international agreement to limit emissions.

The UK, European Union, Japan, US and other rich nations are all now united in opting to put off an agreement and the United Nations also appears to accept this. (source)

Hang on a minute, didn’t Julia Gillard sell her carbon tax on the premise that Australia was lagging behind the rest of the world? Ah, that was a lie, wasn’t it? In fact, we are at the bleeding edge of climate madness, with our economy set to haemorrhage billions of dollars over the next forty years thanks to a pointless carbon tax which morphs into an ETS, neither of which will do anything for the climate. What it will do, however, is send thousands of jobs overseas, and funnel your hard-earned taxes to developing countries. Great move.

Barely a month after the carbon tax was passed into law, the chance of any global deal, on which all the highly favourable treasury modelling was based, has evaporated. What was that about the rest of the world following Australia’s lead? Greg? Hello?

The reality is that there is no chance of a “global deal” on anything. With 190-odd countries’ competing interests battling it out, the possibility of reaching an agreement about something as simple as what colour the sky is today is all but impossible.

At least this gives us all some breathing space. The Coalition will repeal the carbon tax in 2013, and a few cold winters in Europe and the US, combined with ever increasing fuel poverty, will finally force their governments to think twice about setting nonsensical renewable energy targets. Politicians will begin to realise that adaptation might be a better way of allocating valuable and scarce resources, rather than mitigation which simply won’t work.

By the way, if you would like to relive some of the dramas of Copenhagen, go here.

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CSIRO scientist: zero emissions ain't enough

21 November, 2011 by

A synthetic tree...

Yet more climate nonsense to spoil my day. It won’t be sufficient to halt dangerous climate change “merely” to reduce CO2 emissions to zero, according to a report on ABC’s AM programme this morning. We need to go further (beyond zero, if you will excuse the pun), and start sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere (no, really):

MIKE RAUPACH: There is very little wiggle room left, perhaps none at this stage and the issue of course is that a large fraction of the CO2 that goes into the atmosphere stays there for a very long time and that means that what we do now has a long-term future shadow. 

SIMON LAUDER: Dr Raupach is part of an international team which used mathematical models to see what will happen to the climate in the long term under various scenarios. He says if emissions aren’t rapidly reduced to zero, future efforts will have to go further and remove CO2 from the atmosphere to prevent warming of more than two degrees. 

MIKE RAUPACH: If we do reduce emissions rapidly then zero emissions will do but even a small leakage in the long term like over a hundred years from now, of about 10 per cent of current emissions, is enough to keep temperatures slowly rising. (source)

“Zero emissions will do”!! Phew, that’s OK then. For as we all know, reducing emissions to zero is the easy bit. You only have to look at global energy consumption to see that we’re really, really close to a fully renewable energy budget (the renewables component of the chart is that wafer thin segment on the right, just in case you can’t quite see it):

Only 90-odd percent to go…

So once we’ve done that, and we’re all living in the cold and the dark, with no cars, buses, planes and electricity, we can then use whatever energy is left over (which won’t be much) to power synthetic trees (like those pictured above) to remove the CO2 out of the atmosphere. It will be an environmentalist’s dream – a landscape littered with useless windmills and fake trees, with no humanity and no prosperity. Just what Bob Brown wants for Australia. And the climate will continue to do exactly what the hell it wants, because that’s what the climate does.

And Lauder gets full marks for conducting, to the letter, the standard ABC interview of a climate alarmist, where the alarmist is allowed to talk as much nonsense as he/she likes completely unchallenged, and without having to account for any of the ridiculous assertions he/she makes. At no point does Lauder challenge the scientific basis of the UN’s 2 degree target, or the reliability of the “mathematical models” of which he is obviously so in awe, or whether adaptation strategies might provide better value for money than mitigation, or whether the release of this story is simply clever timing a few days before yet another pointless climate gab-fest in Durban.

But that would be asking too much of the “groupthink-infested” ABC, wouldn’t it?

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IPCC admits uncertainty in extreme weather link

18 November, 2011 by

Yasi - no link to climate change

[I know I’m on a break, but this story was too important not to comment – Ed]. The risk of more frequent extreme weather is one of the most potent scare tactics used by climate alarmists and politicians alike. The Greens are the experts at this kind of moral posturing, with the following being a classic example:

GREENS leader Bob Brown is facing mounting condemnation after calling on coal companies to foot the bill for the Queensland flood recovery.

Senator Brown said coal companies, as major climate change contributors, should pay a 40 per cent resources super profits tax to pay for the clean-up. (source)

Or this:

The Australian Greens say Tropical Cyclone Yasi is a “tragedy of climate change”.

The party was heavily criticised after it linked the Queensland floods to climate change and blamed coal miners.

Greens deputy leader Christine Milne says the cyclone is another example of why it is important to cut carbon pollution.

“This is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy of climate change,” she said. (source)

But the Greens don’t care about the facts. They are more interested in pushing their extreme-Left agenda of social change via the Trojan horse of environmentalism, and they will use any tools and tactics they can find to achieve that aim.

The UN is very similar in its response, blaming global warming for increased extreme weather events (naturally to justify its position of advocating urgent action on climate). The Russian heatwave and Pakistani floods were a prime example (see here).

But today we read that a leaked report, astonishingly from the IPCC itself, analysing the link between climate change and extreme weather, has admitted to considerable uncertainties:

WIDELY-HELD assumptions that climate change is responsible for an upsurge in extreme drought, flood and storm events are not supported by a landmark review of the science.

And a clear climate change signal would not be evident for decades because of natural weather variability.

Despite the uncertainties, politicians – including US President Barack Obama in his address to federal parliament yesterday – continue to link major weather events directly to climate change.

Greens leader Bob Brown yesterday highlighted Mr Obama’s climate change comments and said the extreme weather impacts were “not just coming, they are happening”.

But rather than bolster claims of a climate change link, the scientific review prepared by the world’s leading climate scientists for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlights the level of uncertainty. After a week of debate, the IPCC will tonight release a summary of the report in Kampala, Uganda, as a prelude to the year’s biggest climate change conference, being held in Durban, South Africa.

The full report will not be released for several months but a leaked copy of the draft summary, details of which have been published by the BBC and a French news agency, have provided a good indication of what it found.

While the human and financial toll of extreme weather events has certainly risen, the cause has been mostly due to increased human settlement rather than worse weather.

There is only “low confidence” that tropical cyclones have become more frequent, “limited to medium evidence available” to assess whether climatic factors have changed the frequency of floods, and “low confidence” on a global scale even on whether the frequency has risen or fallen. (source – behind paywall)

They can’t even determine the sign of the effect! You can’t get much more uncertain than that!

Overconfidence in its own results by the IPCC is one of the greatest challenges that must be overcome to sweep away the political spin that clouds the IPCC’s reports. Suppression of uncertainty is one of the main criticisms of later reports (especially 2003 and 2007), so an acknowledgement that uncertainty exists is a positive step. It’s very surprising to see the IPCC apparently reporting the science in a more impartial way than has been seen before. Previously such off-message results would have been twisted and spun to keep the agenda going. But here we have the IPCC publishing material which challenges the agenda.

This story is important for two reasons: firstly, that politicians can no longer continue to parade extreme weather events as evidence of climate change to justify their policies, and secondly, it shows (I hope) a change in the attitude of the IPCC, which appears to be more willing to accept the level of uncertainty in the science of climate change in general.

However, I wouldn’t hold out too much hope – the next main report will no doubt be back to business as usual…

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