The Met Office brings doom to a place near you

Posted by TonyN on 19/06/2009 at 11:56 pm The Climate 32 Responses »
Jun 192009

On Thursday, the Met Office launched its new report on global warming, UK Climate Projections 2009 otherwise known as UKCP09. This is based on the output of Hadley Centre climate models that predict temperature increases of up to 6°C with wetter winters, dryer summers, more heatwaves, rising sea levels, more floods and all the other catastrophes that one would expect from similar exercises in alarmism.

What makes this report different from any of its predecessors is the resolution of the predictions that the Met Office is making. They are not just presenting a general impression of what might happen globally during this century, or even how climate change could affect the UK as a whole. They are claiming that they can predict what will happen in individual regions of the country. Apparently there is even a page somewhere on their website where you can enter your postcode and find out how your street will be affected by global warming in 2040 or 2080, although I’ve failed to find it.

All this is rather unexpected. In May last year, I posted here and here about a world summit of climate modellers that took place at Reading University. On the agenda was one very important problem for them; even the most powerful super-computers that have been developed so far are not capable of running the kind of high resolution models that they claim would allow them to reduce the degree of uncertainty in their predictions and also make detailed regional predictions that policy makers would like to have so that they can build climate change into infrastructure planning.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the conference website: Continue reading »

How green were the UK’s European Election results?

Posted by TonyN on 12/06/2009 at 11:33 pm The Climate 13 Responses »
Jun 122009

Now that the dust is beginning to settle after the elections for the European Parliament, it’s worth asking what part ‘the most serious threat facing us today’ played in the results. Surely climate change must have been in the forefront of most people’s minds as they made their mark on the ballot paper?

Here are the results for the main contenders:

 

 

euro_elections1.JPG

 

 

Of the six parties at the top of the list, only one has climate scepticism as a stated policy, and that is UKIP, who came second ahead of the ruling Labour Party for whom the crusade against global warming is a major priority. (For those who are not familiar with UK politics, UKIP’s main policy is withdrawal from the EU.)

The Liberal Democrats, who arguably take an even stronger line on saving the planet, than Labour, lost ground.

The Conservatives, whose pronouncements on climate change attempt to match Labour’s, only increased their share of the vote slightly at a time when they are almost certain to form the next government and were expected to do much better.

So where did all those people who are so concerned about ‘the most serious threat facing us today’ make their mark on the ballot papers? Continue reading »

We should all listen to Mike Hulme

Posted by TonyN on 06/06/2009 at 11:39 pm The Climate 18 Responses »
Jun 062009

Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia and founding director to the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, has been in the news again recently. His new book Why we Disagree about Climate Change has led to sceptics – who I suspect have not read it – welcoming him to their fold. Even the Daily Mirror, which is not a publication that one might choose to rely on for scientific information, has reviewed the book. So has this eminent scientist who has been at the heart of the climate debate for decades really changed sides?

It is certainly true that he wrote an opinion piece for the BBC News website in 2006 warning his colleagues not to exaggerate their findings in order to attract attention. He even went further and condemned the conference – and associated media campaign – which Tony Blair used as a launch-pad for his newly discovered commitment to the crusade against global warming:

The Exeter conference of February 2005 on “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change” served the government’s purposes of softening-up the G8 Gleneagles summit through a frenzied week of “climate change is worse than we thought” news reporting and group-think.

By stage-managing the new language of catastrophe, the conference itself became a tipping point in the way that climate change is discussed in public.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6115644.stm

In the same article he said that:

The language of catastrophe is not the language of science. It will not be visible in next year’s global assessment from the world authority of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

This seems to have been a triumph of hope over experience. No one who has consulted the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report could be left in any doubt about the intention of the authors to create alarm, and this was reinforced by the press campaign that accompanied its release. Since then, Hulme has been prepared to criticise the IPCC process too.

Continue reading »

Pennies from heaven, and a very political economist

Posted by TonyN on 25/05/2009 at 10:53 pm The Climate 5 Responses »
May 252009


According to an article at Times Online, the London School of Economics has recieved a £12 million donation to set up a new institute to study the economics of climate change. The philanthropist concerned is Yorkshire born Jeremy Grantham, founder of a  £55 billion investment fund called GMO. He is clearly a very successful investor and has endowed the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, from which the funding comes, with £165 million of his own money.

Grantham grew up in Yorkshire and went to university in Sheffield before moving to America in 1968 to take an MBA at Harvard. However, his decision to invest some of his foundation’s money in Britain was not a nostalgic one. It followed the publication of Lord Stern’s report on The Economics of Climate Change and it is now Stern who heads the LSE institute.

Those choices are already paying dividends. The LSE’s research seems likely to play a key role in this December’s UN negotiations in Copenhagen where world leaders will seek agreement on cutting greenhouse gases.

Times Online

Grantham clearly takes ‘the environment’ very seriously. Here is what he told The Times about why he is being so generous:

“Because climate change is turning into the biggest problem humanity has ever faced. I wanted to invest my money in places where it might actually help tackle that problem,”

“We are destroying the planet. We are in the middle of one of the greatest extinctions of species Earth has seen. If it continues unchecked, humanity will soon be running out of food and water.

“What it means is that the environment, especially climate change, is going to be the central issue for all society, including business, politics and the economy. Capitalism and business are going to have to remodel themselves and adapt to a rapidly changing and eventually very different world.”

Times Online

These views extend far beyond the world of mainstream science, all the way to the wilder shores of environmental activism and alarmist propaganda; not at all the kind of speculation that you would expect a respected academic institution like the LSE to be associated with. It would also seem that Grantham has a pretty low opinion of anyone who is not either a scientist or, presumably, a financier like himself:

“Humanity is largely innumerate,” said Grantham. Continue reading »

Over-selling West African ‘megadroughts’

Posted by TonyN on 27/04/2009 at 11:49 am The Climate 4 Responses »
Apr 272009

A recent report by Richard Black on the BBC’s Science & Environment website is headed ‘West Africa faces ‘megadroughts’. Most climate sceptics who visit blogs like Harmless Sky will anticipate what is coming next – but in this case things aren’t quite so simple.

The article refers to a new research paper published in Science by a team from the University of Texas. They have been sampling sediments from Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana which indicate that this area is regularly subject to severe droughts which last not just for years, or even decades, but for centuries.  The most recent one ended about 250 years ago, comfortably before human activity can be blamed for climate change.

Apparently the researchers are baffled about what causes these phenomena. Recurrent droughts lasting a decade of so are thought to be associated with variations in ocean currents, which in turn influence the intensity of rainfall. But these ‘megadroughts’ are on an altogether different scale and no explanation of the cause is being offered.

Such events should not be confused with the appalling drought in the Sahel during the 1970s and 1980s which is estimated to have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

Here is what one of the scientists has to say: Continue reading »

After Copenhagen - what really happened?

Posted by TonyN on 28/03/2009 at 11:59 pm The Climate No Responses »
Mar 282009

In the months leading up to the recent climate change conference in Copenhagen, politicians and the media were pretty quiet about global warming. Not any more!

It is difficult to resist the idea that this conference was a high profile vehicle for launching a coordinated campaign to bring climate back into the news. Many observers seem to believe that the next conference in Copenhagen, in December this year, may be the last chance to get a worldwide deal on CO2 emissions, and for the first time things are not all going the alarmist’s way. Very real economic turmoil has trumped speculation about climate catastrophe.

So how does one set about assessing what happened at Copenhagen?

Well the first thing to remember is that it is unwise to try and reach any conclusions while the conference is taking place or in its immediate aftermath. A glance at the organiser’s web site reveals that among their ‘Media Partners’ were Time magazine, Scientific American and National Geographic, all of which have very definite positions on climate change. We can be sure that so far as media coverage is concerned, the main stories will have been carefully planned well in advance and that the conference will be promoted by a very high profile PR campaign. One might ask, however, why what purports to be a scientific conference needs ‘Media Partners’?

We can also be sure that these stories will carry precisely the spin that the organisers wish and that they will also be dramatic. The Media Partners would be very disappointed if they were not. Continue reading »

Eco-psychologists and a very strange conference

Posted by TonyN on 07/03/2009 at 5:44 pm The Climate 4 Responses »
Mar 072009

This is part of a comment that turned up on another part of Harmless Sky:

Robin Guenier says:

March 6th, 2009 at 8:55 am

Here an interesting story: this weekend, the University of the West of England is holding a conference on “Climate Change Denial”, organised by (wait for it) the Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. It will be “bringing together a group of people – climate change activists, eco-psychologists [!!], psychotherapists and social researchers – who are uniquely qualified to assess the human dimensions of this human-made problem”. Professor Hoggett, who is helping to organise the conference, says:

We will examine denial from a variety of different perspectives – as the product of addiction to consumption, as the outcome of diffusion of responsibility and the idea that someone else will sort it out and as the consequence of living in a perverse culture which encourages collusion, complacency, irresponsibility.

http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=63&cp=31#comment-12166

Robin goes on to make the point that the usual cause of scepticism is a lack of convincing evidence; a perfectly rational response to uncertainty.

Apparently this has not occurred to the organisers of this conference, who seem intent on treating climate scepticism as a pathological condition. Perhaps they have never wondered whether likening anyone who just happens not to share their convictions to holocaust deniers is altogether normal? And what might they think about Christian fundamentalists who refer to the followers of other faiths as heathens?

But it was the reference to eco-psychologists that really caught my eye. What on earth could that be about? A vegan shrink who rides a solar powered bicycle perhaps?

I had to go no further than the Daily Green website to find out: Continue reading »

Of eternal warming, penguins and seals

Posted by TonyN on 10/02/2009 at 11:38 am The Climate 4 Responses »
Feb 102009

Here are a couple of stories that have been very popular with the media recently.First, there is a sad tale of vanishing ice and an endangered species:

Emperor penguins face extinction

Emperor penguins, whose long treks across Antarctic ice to mate have been immortalised by Hollywood, are heading towards extinction, scientists say.

Based on predictions of sea ice extent from climate change models, the penguins are likely to see their numbers plummet by 95% by 2100.

That level of decline could wreak havoc on the delicate Antarctic food chain.

The research is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7851276.stm

So we have a heart-wrenching story, based entirely on the predictions of computer models, which was published in one of the most prestigious America science journals, PNAS. (The National Academy of Sciences is the American equivalent of the Royal Society.)

Then there is this thoroughly scary offering:

Global warming is ‘irreversible’

A team of environmental researchers in the US has warned many effects of climate change are irreversible.

The scientists concluded global temperatures could remain high for 1,000 years, even if carbon emissions can somehow be halted.

The report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Colorado comes as President Obama announces a review of vehicle emission standards.

It appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7852628.stm

The authors relied on measurements as well as many different models to support the understanding of their results.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090126_climate.html

Now we have two eye-catching papers published recently in PNAS that rely on what computer models tell us about the future, in this case not just a century ahead, but over a whole millennium.

At a time when global warming seems to have been on hold for nearly a decade, it is hardly surprising that climate scientists are having to rely on predictive models that tell them about the future, rather than on empiric evidence of climate change at the present time, to keep their research in the news. Vanishing glaciers, melting sea ice, rising sea levels and violent hurricanes are becoming harder to find. Worse still, most of North America and Europe are experiencing an unusually cold and snowy winter. The general public can hardly be expected to take climate change scare stories too seriously at the moment, as they only have to step outside the door to realise that it is pretty cold. To them, that is clear evidence that global warming is not happening, for the moment at least, even if this carries little weight scientifically.

For climate scientists, long range predictions have great advantages: Continue reading »

Climate change secrets and the Aarhus Convention

Posted by David Holland on 04/02/2009 at 10:14 am The Climate No Responses »
Feb 042009

[As most Harmless Sky readers will know, climate science can be a pretty secretive business. David Holland has spent much time attempting to bring important information about research that underpins global warming alarmism into the public domain. He has written an excellent critique of Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick graph and the IPCC processes which allowed a shoddy piece of research to become a political  icon. He has also co-authored an analysis of  the Stern Review with Ross McKitrick, Bob Carter, Richard Lintzen Nigel Lawson and others. ]

From time to time Brits have complained that only we bother to implement EU Directives properly, and then with some vigour and occasional gold plating. We note, sometimes admiringly, the apparent lack of their enforcement the further south one goes in Europe.   Directive 2003/4/EC, on the other hand, is an exception because it is almost universally honoured in its breach. In a preamble it refers to a little known convention, to which the EU is a signatory, and states that provisions of Community Law must be consistent with it. To understand the importance of the convention and the directive you have to consider the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 – the EIR.

The EIR came to public attention when Mr Justice Sullivan, on a judicial review request from Greenpeace, required the British Government to redo its consultation over nuclear energy.   An important part of his judgement was:

Whatever the position may be in other policy areas, in the development of policy in the environmental field consultation is no longer a privilege to be granted or withheld at will by the executive. The United Kingdom Government is a signatory to the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (“the Aarhus Convention”).

Ultimately, it is the Aarhus Convention that has primacy and to which those interested in “Justice in Environmental Matters” should look. There is, incidentally, a Compliance Committee to which anyone may report breaches of the convention.  Article 1 states the objectives of the convention to be: Continue reading »

Goodbye to 2008

Posted by TonyN on 31/12/2008 at 9:32 pm New Statesman, The Climate 68 Responses »
Dec 312008

As the final freezing hours of 2008 fade into history, this would seem to be a good time to look back at the year and also at the short history of Harmless Sky, which is now just over a year old.The first rather tentative pages went live on 17th December 2007.It would be tedious to rehearse all that has happened, so I am going to focus on just one topic which encapsulates much of what this blog is about and highlights issues that are now at the heart of the climate debate.At the beginning of the year I came across two articles published by the New Statesman, which had generated a huge number of comments on their website. The first was by Dr David Whitehouse, an astrophysicist who was the BBC’s Science Correspondent from 1988-98 and then science editor of BBC News Online from 1998-2006. During this period he must have been ideally placed to see how concern about global warming grew from being the preoccupation of a few scientists and environmental activists into a new scientific and moral orthodoxy. His article was provocatively entitled, ‘Has Global Warming Stopped?’

After describing the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, Dr Whitehouse pointed out that although CO2 levels have continued to rise during this century, temperatures have failed to do so. He then explored a weakness in the hypothesis, demonstrating that, although it can explain the warming of the last decades of the twentieth century very well, it cannot explain why temperatures have levelled off, and then fallen, without a commensurate decline in CO2 levels. Dr Whitehouse did not in any way suggest that the hypothesis was bad science, but merely probed the way in which it relates to recent temperature trends that are quite unexpected. He also suggested that this flaw in the hypothesis might indicate that there are natural influences on global temperature of which we are still unaware, and questions whether our understanding of the climate is adequate to draw firm conclusions about what is happening.

So we are led to the conclusion that either the hypothesis of carbon dioxide induced global warming holds but its effects are being modified in what seems to be an improbable though not impossible way, or, and this really is heresy according to some, the working hypothesis does not stand the test of data.

It is the use of the term heresy that puts this thoughtful, cautious and scrupulously argued article in context. The Environment Columnist of the New Statesman is Mark Lynas, one of the high priests of global warming alarmism, and that venerable publication’s editorial policy on climate change is set accordingly.

A month later, a furious and somewhat hysterical response from Mark Lynas appeared. It started like this: Continue reading »

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