It's all over but for the sweating?

[Arragonis]

Sir John Beddington, the retiring UK Science Advisor decided to let forth last week on how we are all doomed, he said

The variation in the temperature or rainfall, which Britain has been experiencing lately, is double the average rate.

Nope



He also said

The variation in the temperature or rainfall, which Britain has been experiencing lately, is double the average rate

Er, nope



And this is a taxpayer paid official scientist ?

But lets go on, the head of the UK enironment agency, Lord Smith recently said :

We are experiencing a new kind of rain.

Instead of rain sweeping in a curtain across the country, we are getting convective rain, which sits in one place and just dumps itself in a deluge over a long period of time. From the point of view of filling up the rivers and the drains, that is quite severe.

Oh, ok - you are the "expert" I suppose as opposed to someone who studied the weather...

(UK weather presenters used to be employed by the MOD and not the BBC, they were scientists)

The veteran meteorologist, Bill Giles, has criticised remarks by Lord Smith, the chairman of the Environment Agency, who had blamed the growing threat of flooding on a new kind of precipitation, known as convective rain.

However, Mr Giles, who joined the Met Office in 1957 and was head weather presenter at the BBC between 1983 and 2000, insists that convective rain has been a regular feature of British weather since the “beginning of time”.

In a letter to The Sunday Telegraph this week, he says that the term is merely a way of describing a type of intense rainfall that typically occurs on warm summer days. He writes: “There is nothing new about convective rain. Perhaps next time he should get a meteorologist to check his answers so that he doesn’t appear so ignorant of simple straightforward facts.

Mr Giles says that Lord Smith’s comments show that he has “no concept or knowledge of meteorology”.

And these are the people in charge ?

[Arragonis]

I'm not a fan of the Daily Mail - the endless pics of celebs in little or no clothing etc. They have been running a few articles by David Rose on how models are not matching reality. Last week the Committee on Climate Change (a uk.gov funded body) tried to suggest this was wrong. This is the DM's response.

The official watchdog that advises the Government on greenhouse gas emissions targets has launched an astonishing attack on The Mail on Sunday – for accurately reporting that alarming predictions of global warming are wrong.

We disclosed that although highly influential computer models are still estimating huge rises in world temperatures, there has been no statistically significant increase for more than 16 years.

Despite our revelation earlier this month, backed up by a scientifically researched graph, the Committee on Climate Change still clings to flawed predictions.
All a con? The Mail on Sunday revealed some of the science behind the scare tactics for Global warming were miscalculated - and now they are being attacking for pointing out the truth

All a con? The Mail on Sunday revealed some of the science behind the scare tactics for Global warming were miscalculated - and now they are being attacking for pointing out the truth

Leading the attack is committee member Sir Brian Hoskins, who is also director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College, London. In a blog on the Committee on Climate Change’s website, Sir Brian insisted: ‘The scientific basis for significant long-term climate risks remains robust, despite the points raised .  .  . Early and deep cuts in emissions are still required.’

He also claimed our report ‘misunderstood’ the value of computer models. Yet in an interview three years ago, Sir Brian conceded that when he started out as a climate scientist, the models were ‘pretty lousy, and they’re still pretty lousy, really’.

Our graph earlier this month was reproduced from a version first drawn by Dr Ed Hawkins, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science. Last week it was reprinted as part of a four-page report in The Economist.

The accuracy of computer forecasts is vital because they influence politicians and their key environmental advisers on how urgently to act on climate change – and how many billions of pounds they take from the taxpayer in ‘green’ levies.

The Committee on Climate Change claims such forecasts must be right because world temperatures have previously matched computer models’ ‘outputs’ for most of the past 60 years. Yet as this newspaper pointed out, for almost all of that 60-year period the models were not making predictions – because they did not yet exist.

Instead, the models had recently been making ‘hindcasts’ – backward projections based on climate simulations and tailored to actual temperatures. The evidence shows the models collapse when they try to forecast the future.

Author Andrew Montford, who runs the widely read Bishop Hill climate blog, leapt to The Mail on Sunday’s defence and said Sir Brian’s reliance on ‘hindcasts’ was ‘crazy, crazy stuff’.

David Whitehouse, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the graph showed models were so unreliable that ‘if this kind of data were from a drugs trial it would have been stopped long ago’.

And last week, The Economist repeated our claims that many scientists now believe that previous estimates of ‘climate sensitivity’ – how much the world will warm each time the level of carbon dioxide doubles – are far too high.

In a key 2007 report, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested this was most likely to be about 3C, with 4.5C considered ‘likely’. However, recent research suggests the true figure is much lower – between 1.5C and 2C – giving the world many more decades to avoid disaster through effective new technologies.

The Committee on Climate Change, established by the 2008 Climate Change Act, advises the Government on setting ‘carbon budgets’ and CO2 emissions cuts. It is chaired by Lord Deben, who also heads Veolia Water UK, which connects windfarms to the National Grid.

To save you from having to peer at celebs in no clothes, this is the graph of note:



and The Economist article is here.

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Right, more snow and rain is part of the climate change models. As are much different jet stream patterns, due to the melting Arctic ice.

Would you care to check the current arctic ice situation and post back please, maybe with a chart ? Is it higher or lower than last year, or maybe the year before or the year before that ?

Oh never mind, here is the chart



Note how 2012 dipped a long way - was that the ice melting or just something to do with how we measure it - satelites and LIDAR/RADAR. There was a big storm which broke up a large part of the ice. I don't know, but it is a question. It has been ice free before.

Just out of interest how long into the past does the record (above) extend ?

As for more snow, less snow, more rain, less rain - hmmm...

‘Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,’ predicted David Viner of the University of East Anglia in March 2000.

Voluminous evidence is itself testament to global warming’s weakness as science. As Karl Popper argued in the 1920s, it is almost always possible to find evidence to support a proposition. Come rain or shine, drought or storm, global warming came to acquire the characteristics of phlogiston in the 18th century theory of combustion.

‘Chemists have made phlogiston a vague principle, which is not strictly defined and which consequently fits all the explanations demanded of it,’

the great French scientist Lavoisier wrote.

‘Sometimes it has weight, sometimes it has not … Sometimes it passes through the pores of vessels, sometimes they are impenetrable to it …

‘It explains at once causticity and non-causticity, transparency and opacity, colour and the absence of colours.’

It must be conceded that proponents of phlogiston explained their ideas with rather greater elegance than 21st century believers in global weirding. So the science is inherently weak.

[freebeard]

Discordianism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The religion has been likened to Zen, based on similarities with absurdist interpretations of the Rinzai school, as well as Taoist philosophy. Discordianism is centered on the idea that both order and disorder are illusions imposed on the universe by the human nervous system, and that neither of these illusions of apparent order and disorder is any more accurate or objectively true than the other.

[radioranger]

Sorry , not to change the topic but shouldn,t all cars be white to lessen the amount of power it takes to cool them seeing AC is a given these days. i figure the heat gain would add up to quite a lot of wasted fuel . so all Green cars should be white at least.

[NeilBlanchard]

I notice you ignored my queries about what Brian Cox et al say about climate change... Why is that, I wonder?


The volume of Arctic is a fraction of what it was in 1980.




Arctic Death Spiral Bombshell: CryoSat-2 Confirms Sea Ice Volume Has Collapsed | ThinkProgress

An Illustrated Guide To 2012 Record Arctic Sea Ice Melt | ThinkProgress

The ice is young and thin and very fragile - it is severely cracked and broken very early in the season:

Ice Breaking News: This Is Your 2013 Arctic Freezing Season On Crack | ThinkProgress

[Arragonis]

Anyone remember this from a few pages ago ?



Hmmm

Q: What do paleotemperature reconstructions show about the temperature of the last 100 years?

A: Our global paleotemperature reconstruction includes a so-called “uptick” in temperatures during the 20th-century. However, in the paper we make the point that this particular feature is of shorter duration than the inherent smoothing in our statistical averaging procedure, and that it is based on only a few available paleo-reconstructions of the type we used. Thus, the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions. Our primary conclusions are based on a comparison of the longer term paleotemperature changes from our reconstruction with the well-documented temperature changes that have occurred over the last century, as documented by the instrumental record. Although not part of our study, high-resolution paleoclimate data from the past ~130 years have been compiled from various geological archives, and confirm the general features of warming trend over this time interval (Anderson, D.M. et al., 2013, Geophysical Research Letters, v. 40, p. 189-193; Welcome to AGU Online Services).

A scientist has his take on it all.

The press release clearly explains that the paper (a) combines data from many sites around the world to create a "temperature reconstruction" which gives a "sense of the Earth's temperature history," and (b) "that history shows" a cooling over the past 5000 years, until the last 100 years when all of that cooling was reversed.

This scientist also goes as close as possible to suggest misconduct without actually doing so.

If this is climate "science" its pathetic.

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

What does Brian Cox say about anthropogenic climate change?

Brian Cox likes to call people Deniers and promote scientists as gods, and when he is challenged on it because Peer Review seems broken (see above) he just responds with quotes like

Utter Bollocks

And he called Martin Durkin's film

Polemic Bollocks

so obviously he noticed it was a polemic which is what it was meant to be. His most recent statements have also said that Homeopathy is

Utter Bollocks

too. His main partner in these statements is a chap called Robin Ince - they do a radio program together called "The Infinite Monkey Cage" where they tackle science issues. Ince is a comedian.

Cox is a great presenter, probably a great scientist too and I like him to have forthright views.

I can like him and disagree with him, same for you

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

What does David Attenborough say about anthropogenic climate change?

David Attenborough says incorrect things, and has to correct them.

It wasn't his fault, it was sloppy fact checking by the BBC who took a press release as fact, just like the IPCC has - Himalayan Glaciers due to be gone by 2030 anyone ?

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

What does Neil DeGrasse Tyson say about anthropogenic climate change?

Who ? Oh hang on, he was the guy who predicted Obama would lose to McCain ?

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

What does Bill Nye say about anthropogenic climate change?

I've never seen him in action, but I understand he was bugg... sorry, er, bettered in a rather unfriendly fashion in a TV exchange on AGW recently. He likes Bow Ties, which despite Dr Who liking them too are not cool. He likes limos and bottled water too.



Shouldn't he be on a bus or at least in a Prius or better still taking a bike ?

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

What does Jane Goodall say about anthropogenic climate change?

We are all thieves for depleting resources from our children and nature. We are back to the "make people wealthier and they will leave wildernesses alone" arguments - see the talk I linked to above.

You want to stop people taking local resources and land give them jobs. You do that on economic development. Which needs cheap energy. You stabilise their populations and at the same time technology moves on and we get more from less - again.

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

What does Michio Kaku say about anthropogenic climate change

He has done a few Horizon BBC science programs on hard physics - very very good presenter.

The only thing I have seen from him is the more storms due to AGW thing. Except there is no statistical evidence of that, in fact probably the opposite (<-- scientist, with a blog)



He also missed the point Richard Muller (BEST, and the "skeptic who converted" mentioned in earlier pages) said in the interview I linked to with NPR - the theory states there will be less extreme weather, not more.

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

What did Carl Sagan say about anthropogenic climate change?

We are all doomed, DOOMED I tell ye. Wonder if he would say that now ? Wonder what Richard Feynman would be saying these days ? Wonder if they would look at peer review, lack of openness in the stats, the idea that "models" are reality and re-running them can be counted as an "experiment".

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

What does Richard Dawkins say about anthropogenic climate change?

Be believes anyone who argues against any part of science, including AGW, must also believe in "Intelligent Design" or some other bollocks. And like Cox believes that science and peer review are working fine and make it all absolutely true and there is no problem with openness in the stats and methods or that papers that pass peer review can be shown to have so many doubts in under 2 weeks of publication.

I agree with him on being an atheist, I have no interest in taking it as far as he does - if people have a faith then that is their business and nobody else's. Society in general should be ruled by law applied equally to all.

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

What does Vandana Shiva say about anthropogenic climate change?

That big corporations are...oh everything from ruining local food production to stealing resources and our future etc. Except global food production is up - there shouldn't be anyone going hungry. The fact that there is and lots of people don't have access to clean water is more of a threat to the populations she writes about than AGW.

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

What Steven Hawking say about anthropogenic climate change?

Apparently it is a bigger threat than nuclear weapons.

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

What does Craig Venter say about anthropogenic climate change?

He's going to make Algae that will make fuel out of CO2 funded by Exxon ?

***********

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Climate change is the equivalent of a meteor the size of Mount Everest hurtling at 40,000 MPH about to hit the earth....

Care to link a source ?

Originally Posted by radioranger

Sorry , not to change the topic but shouldn,t all cars be white to lessen the amount of power it takes to cool them seeing AC is a given these days. i figure the heat gain would add up to quite a lot of wasted fuel . so all Green cars should be white at least.

In the old Soviet Union white cars were reserved for influential party members in warm areas as they had no AC at all.

[Arragonis]

More madness. A few years ago in Australia they had a drought. Their "climate commissioner" (on a modest $180K a year and owns seafront property) said that these droughts would become more and more the norm.

So they built a desalination plant to provide drinking water, just in case - that precautionary principle again.

Last year there were severe floods in Australia, and even now the dams are full of water.

Instead of realising that perhaps the desal plant is a mistake, they are going to burn millions making it run on renewable energy...

Renewable energy drives up desal cost - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

A parliamentary committee has heard it will cost about $15 million more each year to power Adelaide's desalination plant with renewable energy than it would with fossil fuel.

SA Water has confirmed the use of green energy to power the plant will cost $43.7 more over the next three years.

Under the plant's operating arrangements, some of its carbon footprint is offset by the purchase of renewable energy certificates.

SA Water admitted in October the plant will be switched-off at the beginning of 2015 as soon as its warranty period expires.

A water price rise of 25 per cent was introduced by the Government in July to cover the operating costs of the $1.8 billion plant.

Opposition frontbencher Rob Lucas says alternative energy arrangements should have been considered.

"Most of the insiders within SA Water say a combination of green energy and traditional forms of energy would have meant a more cost effective price contract and therefore lower prices for water consumers," he said.

Note that "Lower Prices" bit - the uk.gov tried that trick last week, and was royally rogered by everyone from the greens to the hardest of skeptics.

You know how your energy bills are SO much worse than they were? ? The Register

You don't need to be a carbon sceptic to see that this plan is painfully expensive, set to get a lot worse, and producing very little in the way of results.

And you don't need to be a carbon sceptic to see that the government is, bluntly, lying to us about this, either. It would be one thing to say "these massive price rises are mostly down to green policies" and then let us vote for whether we wanted them or not, but that's not what happens. Instead the report states early on:

The average impact of [green] policies is estimated to be a net saving of around 5% (including the impact of Building Regulations) in 2013 compared to what bills would have been if these policies had never been introduced ...

Next page: We made electricity more expensive. You paid more for a more efficient fridge. Assuming the fridge didn't cost anything and we didn't make the power more expensive ... we're saving you money!

[TheEnemy]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

As Scientists Predicted, Global Warming Continues | ThinkProgress

The problem with your realists view is that it picks endpoints and can be used to make any slope they want.

The way I look at it is a curvy averaged fit, it gives a better view of what is actually going on.

Edit to add: I notice its NASA data based on the 2005 peak, which is the data set that shows the greatest warming of all of the groups. Also if you go before the 1970's and do a straight line fit to say the 1930's it would be much flatter. I would lay odds that if you went back to the 1880's that it would be pretty flat though still rising.