My Affair with George Monbiot: part 1

Posted by Geoff Chambers on 17/10/2010 at 8:31 am The Climate 144 Responses »
Oct 172010

On 20th May, 2009,  Monbiot had an article  at  Guardian Environment entitled Price of doing nothing costs the earth with the sub heading

MIT scientists forecast a global temperature rise of 5.2o C by 2100 – but climate change deniers reject models devised by the world’s finest minds. So what do they suggest instead… seaweed?

Here are comments number 11 -15

Hamlet4 (20 May 2009 2:10PM

@George

Thats not science – its a computer model trying and failing to describe a immensely complicated chaotic system. Please read up on the butterfly theory to find out HOW wrong such models can be over time. The 90 % confidence levels for forecasts over 90 years is simply absurd. Rubbish in – Rubbish out.
Hamlet4 (20 May 2009 2:18PM)

@Monbiot

OK, all those of you who reject modelling, answer the question: what would you use instead?

nr 1 – How about using your brain, not your political belief system.

nr 2 – Try and build models that explain the present stagnation in temperature, sea-level rise and increase in ice-extent, instead of just pretending its not happening.

nr 3 – Emphasize the limitations of such models, instead of using them trying to create fear and thereby grants.

 

scunnered52 (20 May 2009 2:29PM)

George the only person you are scaring is your self. All climate model projections are currently in serious error because they over-estimate “climate sensitivity”; and that’s due in main to what the modellers don’t know. I would recommend you undertake to create your own climate model. Here is DIY course on how to do so…

 

geoffchambers (20 May 2009 2:38PM)

At the end of the article … is this:

“This work was supported in part by grants from … foundation sponsors of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change”.

And who are these industrial sponsors? Why, Exxon, BP, Shell, Total, among others. This is research funded by Big Oil money. Can this be right?

Monbiot (20 May 2009 2:44PM)

Hamelt4: [sic]

You appear to be suggesting that the MIT team is guided by political beliefs and is using this model to create fear and harvest grants. Perhaps you would care to provide some evidence?

Monbiot denied the accusation that the models were used to “create fear and thereby grants” but deflected Hamlet4’s demand to Monbiot to  “us[e] your brain, not your political belief system” onto the MIT group, which Hamlet4 hadn’t mentioned (though I had). Clearly, Monbiot was rattled, because 11 minutes later,  he was back with this comment:

Monbiot (20 May 2009 2:55PM)

scunnered52:

Of all the posters on these threads, you are the one who looks to me most like an astroturfer: in other words someone posing as an independent citizen while being paid by organisations which have an interest in the outcome. Is my suspicion correct? How about providing a verifiable identity to lay this concern to rest?

 

Now look at scunnered52’s intelligent comment above and try to spot why Monbiot should accuse him of being an astroturfer. Odd, isn’t it?

 

Half an hour later, a puzzled Hamlet4 replied to Monbiot’s non sequitur of a question, with a comment that finished:

Try and THINK Monbiot – do you really believe that these models are producing accurate descriptions of our climate 90 years from now ???.

scunnered52 and Hamlet4 then disappeared, and I went off on another tack:

geoffchambers (20 May 2009 3:35PM)

George asks whether we should use computer models or seaweed for predicting future climate change. Research conducted by the International Institute of Forecasters on the accuracy of forecasting suggests that predictions made by the general public are usually more accurate than those made by experts. This is because the man in the street tends to believe things will probably continue much as they have in the past, while your expert tends to follow the spaghetti off the edge of his graphs into the wide blue yonder. So the correct answer is: seaweed.

I then came back to the subject of research financed by Big Oil: Continue reading »

Ofcom manage to clear Labour government on political advertising charge - just!

Posted by TonyN on 14/10/2010 at 11:18 am TV Adverts 9 Responses »
Oct 142010

Readers of this blog, and many others, sent complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority a year ago when the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s Bedtime Story climate change advertisements appeared on TV and in the print media. This resulted in two of the print media advertisements being banned on the grounds that they were misleading, and a good deal of adverse publicity for the politicians when complaints reached record numbers.

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(If the video viewer does not appear on your computer then use this link)

However the ASA only dealt with some aspects of these complaints. There were 537 people who were concerned that the Bedtime Story video, which appeared repeatedly in slots on prime-time television, amounted to political advertising. This is banned in the UK under the Communications Act 2003 and is a matter for the broadcasting regulator Ofcom, and not the ASA.

We were all informed by the ASA that complaints falling into this category would be referred to Ofcom and that:

When both bodies have concluded their investigations we plan to notify complainants of bout our and Ofcom’s decisions, and we will write to you again at that point.

Things didn’t work out quite that way. The ASA published their decision back in March, but Ofcom has only managed to do so this week. Having read what they have to say (Ofcom Broadcast Bulletin No 167 p20-28) one might reasonably wonder what has taken them so long. Continue reading »

Moderation in Moderation: Comment is Free at The Guardian?

Posted by Geoff Chambers on 06/10/2010 at 10:28 am The Climate 116 Responses »
Oct 062010

As I’ve said on other threads far too often, I was extremely peeved to be banned for life from Comment is Free, the Guardian’s interactive website, since I think commenting there is one of the most useful things a simple footblogger in the Climate Wars can do.

The Guardian is read by Greens and the pro-green centre-left, so it’s possible to have a real debate, and perhaps influence opinion on the opposing side. Guardian readers are clearly far more numerous than those of any sceptical blog, they are more likely to be believers in global warming than readers of Delingpole or Booker, and they are therefore more in need of enlightenment. I also felt that if Guardian editors realised that a majority of readers did not accept the warmist argument, they might put pressure on the Environment Editors to be more even-handed in their treatment.

On the last point I was clearly totally wrong, as evidenced by a recent interview given by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in “the Hindu” newspaper, in which he said:

“A year ago we decided the environment was the biggest story of our lives. So we have six reporters doing the environment … And then we built a network of … about 20 or 30 sites. A huge amount of editing and resources goes into the environment.” and by the comment by Environment Editor James Randerson that climate change is “editorial policy”.

Commenters here and elsewhere have objected that commenting on CiF is a waste of time, because of the distracting tactics of warmist trolls, and because of the apparent bias of moderators. Andrew Montford (Bishop Hill) was recently prevented from commenting on the thread to his own article when he was subjected to “pre-moderation”. I’ve never been convinced that the moderators are biased, since warmist comments frequently disappear, even comments by Guardian contributors,  like Blucloud and GPWayne.

I’ve just conducted an experiment at CiF, and I’m fairly sure I know how the “censorship” works. I can state with certainty (well, let’s say, with IPCC-style 90% confidence) that: Continue reading »

Investors shun green energy

Posted by TonyN on 30/09/2010 at 8:00 am The Climate, The Wind 18 Responses »
Sep 302010

A recent editorial from the Investors Chronicle posed this question about investment in green energy:

Thursday 2 September 2010 – Jonathan Eley, Editor, writes:

What are investors to make of green energy and other sustainable technologies? Instinctively, it should be a “big thing”. Carbon-based fuels are inevitably going to get more expensive, and governments around the world have pledged to spend mind-boggling amounts of money developing green technology and bribing us to adopt it. Yet despite this positive backdrop, picking winners at the company level has been frustratingly tricky – as anyone who’s invested in the sector will know to their cost.

[My emphasis]

Investors Chronicle

It is not surprising that investors should be both puzzled and worried, as a glance at some share performance charts for leading players in the wind power industry shows:

wind-power-share-prices.PNG

The extent to which public companies involved in what has become known as the green energy revolution can attract the support of investors is, perhaps, one of the more useful indicators of the state of play in the climate debate. However convincingly the IPCC may pontificate about the dangers of global warming and the need to reduce Co2 emissions immediately, and whatever pious aspirations worthy politicians may mouth, this tells us whether rhetoric is translating into action in the real world. Are investors willing to back what they are being told?

Continue reading »

The IAC report and IPCC ‘expert judgement' of confidence

Posted by TonyN on 23/09/2010 at 8:00 am CRU Email Hack, The Climate 10 Responses »
Sep 232010

Back in March, I put up a post, Phil Jones and the ‘expert judgement’ of the IPCC. This raised questions about one of the most important tables in the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of Working Group I (WGI) in the  IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). This table assigns levels of ‘likelihood’ to evidence of observed trends in extreme weather events, the possibility that there is a human contribution to these trends, and predictions that the trends will continue during the 21st century.

According to this table, the authors of the IPCC report have greater confidence in the predictions than either the observations they are derived from or the hypotheses that they are based on, which seems to turn logic on its head. So when I started ploughing through the InterAcademy Council’s Review of the Processes and Procedures of the IPCC I was interested to see that the same table turns up on page 31 in a very critical chapter headed IPCC’s Evaluation of Evidence and Treatment of Uncertainty.

table-3_4-ar4_wgi_spm_edited.jpg

So far as I can see, the IAC have not addressed the precise point that I was making, but it is quite clear that they are very concerned about the way in which the last assessment report represented confidence and uncertainty, and that they have chosen to highlight this table as an example of the impact that expert judgement of confidence in research findings has.

Before going any further, lets bear a couple of points in mind. The phenomena listed in the table – droughts, storms, heatwaves, sea level rise, tropical storms (hurricanes and cyclones) and heavy precipitation (floods) – are the stuff of which anthropogenic climate change nightmares are made. The media, politicians, and environmental activists have used evidence that these are probably increasing in frequency and severity, and are likely to continue to do so, as the main plank in their justification of action on climate change. The credibility of their assertions depends on one authority only: the IPCC reports.

Here is what the IAC report has to say in the introduction to the chapter on The IPCC’s Evaluation of Evidence and the Treatment of Uncertainty. Continue reading »

Pachauri's future in his own words: will he go quietly?

Posted by TonyN on 16/09/2010 at 8:00 am The Climate, Uncategorized 26 Responses »
Sep 162010

pachauri.jpg

 

On the evening after the IAC’s critical report on the processes and procedures used by the IPCC was published, Roger Harrabin of the BBC made no secret of the precarious position that the organisation’s chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, is now in. Describing him as ‘putting a brave face on it’ the BBC’s Environment Analyst introduced this outburst from the IPCC chairman:

Honest scientific discourse wilts under gross distortions and ideologically driven posturing. Sadly, such tactics have been a prominent feature of climate science for many years and they show no sign of letting up. My hope is that the accumulation of so many investigations into climate science will strengthen public trust so that we can move forward.

BBC Six o’Clock News, Radio 4, 30th August 2010

There is an extraordinary, and ironic, ambiguity in the first two sentences. Pachauri is, no doubt, talking about the IPCC’s critics, but surely precisely the same accusations could apply to that organisation under his leadership. Be that as it may, Harrabin’s verdict on Pachauri’s future prospects was that, ‘the full climate panel meet in a few weeks time in Korea. It will be a major surprise if Professor Pachauri is still running it after that.’  Harrabin usually seems to be well informed about what the warmist movement is thinking, so he may well be right in anticipating an attempt to oust Pachauri.

The chairman of the IPCC is elected by the governments that are signatories of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and at present there  are nearly 200 of them. In order to get rid of Dr Pachauri – if he chooses not to go quietly – would presumably require that process to be reversed in the form of a motion of no confidence. There would seem to be some indications that Pachauri will not go quietly, and that the meeting in October will be a very lively affair indeed.

The BBC website carried a report on 25th January 2010, when the Himalayagate scandal had just broken, which was headlined, ‘I will not go, says climate chief’. This included a brief, but very interesting, video interview with Dr Pachauri. Here is part of what he had to say, apparently in response to being asked whether he intended to resign: Continue reading »

Lord Oxburgh caught in the headlights

Posted by TonyN on 09/09/2010 at 9:29 pm CRU Email Hack 12 Responses »
Sep 092010

oxburgh2.jpg

 

Yesterday I watched the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee questioning Lord Oxburgh. Once the official transcript becomes available I expect that this will cause quite a stir. If there was any doubt before that his inquiry was a fiasco, then there can be none now.

What follows are a few notes based on listening to a recording rather carefully last night.

At the outset, Oxburgh made it very clear that he had been most unwilling to take on the job of chairing the review panel when the University of East Anglia (UEA) asked him, however he had eventually been persuaded.  Why the university had been so persistent in their overtures, rather than just looking elsewhere, was not explored, but perhaps it will be at some point in the future.

In the early stages of the committee session it was quickly established that, although the Vice-Chancellor of the university, Professor Acton, had told the previous Science and Technology Select Committee that he was about to announce a review that would ‘reassess the science [at CRU] and make sure that there is nothing wrong’, Oxburgh was given no such instructions. Instead he was asked merely to consider the honesty and integrity of the scientists.

Nevertheless, the review panel was provided with a list of eleven papers published by CRU scientists on which to base their judgement. Graham Stringer attempted to find out how these papers had been chosen and by whom, which is rather important. Sceptics have pointed out that whoever did choose them steered well clear of the research findings that awkward questions have been asked about.

This is what happened: Continue reading »

Sublime Stimulations: climate models, uncertainty, and the ‘fortress mentality'

Posted by TonyN on 28/08/2010 at 9:08 pm CRU Email Hack 34 Responses »
Aug 282010

(Sublime: producing an overwhelming sense of awe or other high emotion through being vast or grand)

Commenters on this blog have posed the question: why are social scientists not taking more interest in the climate science community and the mechanisms by which its activities over the last decade have come to influence public opinion and public policy? What follows may give a clue as to why they would be inclined to steer very well clear of this area of research.

Myanna Lahsen is an anthropologist who has studied a new tribe that has emerged as part of the wider community of climate scientists: climate modellers. Over a period of 6 years (1994-2000), while she was based at NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado), a major base for modellers, she travelled widely to conduct over 100 interviews with atmospheric scientists, 15 of whom were climate modellers. Her findings were published in Social Studies of Science as Seductive Simulations? Uncertainty Distribution Around Climate Models in 2005.

The purpose of Lahsen’s paper was to consider the distribution of certainty around General Circulation Models (GSMs), with particular reference to Donald MacKenzie’s concept of the ‘certainty trough’, and propose a more multidimensional and dynamic conceptualisation of how certainty is distributed around technology. That, thankfully, is not the subject of this post, interesting though it is once you work out what she is talking about.

At the heart of her research is the question of whether modellers are just too close to what they are doing to assess the accuracy of their simulations of Earth’s climate  that they create. She suggests that atmospheric scientists who are at some distance from this field of research may be better able to do so, which is not so surprising, but she also reveals a darker side of the culture that climate modellers are part of which is much more disturbing.

It is the ethnographic observations that emerged from her extensive fieldwork that I want to concentrate on here, and I’m going to quote from her paper without adding much by way of comment. In light of the Climategate emails, these extracts speak for themselves.

At the end of the introductory section of the paper, and under the heading The Epistemology1of Models we find two quotations that give a hint of what is in store:

The biggest problem with models is the fact that they are made by humans who tend to shape or use their models in ways that mirror their own notion of what a desirable outcome would be. (John Firor [1998], Senior Research Associate and former Director of NCAR, Boulder, CO,

USA)

In climate modeling, nearly everybody cheats a little. (Kerr, 1994) [Writing in Scinece]

Page 898

Continue reading »

Lindzen circa 1992 on consensus, climate models, funding, and motivation

Posted by TonyN on 20/08/2010 at 8:32 pm Politics 5 Responses »
Aug 202010

Following on from last week’s post – A very convenient network –, here are some excerpts from another document that turned up when I was sifting through old files. Some of these are relevant to the influences represented in the diagram I used in that article.

In 1992, Richard Lindzen wrote a paper for Regulation, a journal published by the Cato Institute. Its title was ‘Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus’. Nearly two decades have passed since then, quite a long time in the development of any field of research, but in terms of the short history of climate science, almost an aeon. When Lindzen was writing, most people, including politicians and policy makers, would barely have heard of global warming.

Perhaps one of the most ruthless tests of opinion on a controversial subject is that of time. All too often views that seemed pertinent when they were expressed become tarnished as they are overtaken by events. So before looking at some of the things that Lindzen had to say so long ago it’s worth considering the context in which he was speaking back in 1992.

Only four years previously, James Hansen had made his infamous claim to a senate committee (chaired by an ambitious young senator called Al Gore) that he was 99% certain that temperatures were rising and that human input was at least partly responsible. It can reasonably be argued that it was this particular event that put AGW on the scientific and political agendas. The IPCC was also set up by UNEP and the WMO in 1988.

Only a decade previously, concerns about human influence on the climate were focused on soot generated by industrial processes causing a new ice age. It seemed that, at the time that Lindzen wrote his article, climatologists had already made up their mind that humans were changing the climate even if they weren’t too sure in which direction that change might take.

The IPCC had produced its first assessment report only two years before, in 1990. So at the time that Lindzen’s article was published, the relatively new discipline of climate science had reached two contradictory conclusions in no more than twenty years. Even so climate science was beginning to find its feet and attract political attention. Continue reading »

A very convenient network?

Posted by TonyN on 13/08/2010 at 8:40 pm Politics 50 Responses »
Aug 132010

symbiosis_full.png

(Click for larger image)

 

This diagram is concerned with the following issues: is it in the interests of any of the parties concerned to question the science of anthropogenic climate change, or to dissent from the view that global warming is without doubt a major threat that can only be averted by urgent action.


I came across this the other day when I was clearing some files. It was drafted in January 2007, shortly before the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report was published.References to a New Labour government, that at that time seemed likely to cling to power indefinitely, may be a little passé now, but I have not updated what I wrote then  because the main thesis has not changed. At that time I was beginning to wonder whether the campaign against global warming really had much to do with scientific evidence, and I think that it is still possible to make a case that it does not.

If I was revising the diagram today, and there are many minor changes that could be made, it might also be necessary to make a distinction between the mainstream media and the web-based media; particularly blogs.

Until the interrelationships between the six elements illustrated in the diagram begin to break down, it would seem unlikely that there can be any real curtailment of climate change alarmism. Although the diagram does not reveal any kind of conspiracy – but rather a symbiotic network that very effectively drives forward an agenda that benefits all concerned – it does imply a level of uncritical, perhaps even cynical, collusion.

Key to the Diagram:

A.      Government benefits from the Media.

Favourable media coverage is crucial if any democratic government is to stay in power. By appearing to lead the fight against global warming, our the New Labour administration can present a green, caring image to the electorate, promoting the idea that it is a major player on the world stage attempting to protect not just its own people, but all humans everywhere. At a time when most news coverage of the Blair administration is concerned with the debacle in Iraq, failure to deliver improvements in public services, and scandals involving ministers, global warming presents a quite irresistible opportunity to improve the government’s very tarnished image. The scope for spinning tax increases as a noble effort to combat the threat of climate change is also obvious. Whatever Tony Blair’s merits as a prime minister may be, he is undoubtedly an exceptionally skilful publicity manager who understands that the press like to be thrown some red meat from time to time. For journalists, authoritative prophecies of doom, backed by the government no less, are something that they can really make a meal of and still appear to be acting responsibly. Continue reading »

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