- Bishop Hill blog

Simon Singh has issued the next installment in his blog series about Fraser Nelson's position on climate change. I am somewhat in awe of this latest display, which is based around the idea that we should make policy decisions assuming a warming of 4°C/century.

Now, as readers here know, the IPCC's last forecasts of a 2°C/century warming are on the cusp of falsification (or even over it, depending how you calculate things), just over ten years since they were issued. Yet here is Dr Singh saying that we should base public policy decisions on the presumption of a warming twice as large!

One doesn't like to be rude, but who on earth bases public policy decisions on hypotheses that are already falsified?

Who bases life and death decisions on a fairy story?

Update on May 8, 2011 by

Bishop Hill

Simon Singh tweets to say he and Fraser agree on the science and have moved on (!) Bob Ward says hi too.

See my Twitter page.

Update on May 8, 2011 by

Bishop Hill

Doug Keenan's comment at Dr Singh's blog is interesting. He picks up on Singh's claim that "allowing for uncertainties in the observations, that last three decades have each been significantly warmer than the previous one."

Doug replies:

The quoted statement is false. I had a full-page op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal last month which explained the statistics in layman's terms; see
http://www.informath.org/media/a42.htm
We do not know if there has been a significant warming. And that is regardless of the time span.

I e-mailed Simon Singh about the piece on April 28th. Hence he is presumably aware that what he is stating is false.

The ending is a bit strong, I think. I'm sure Dr Singh gets a lot of fan mail and he has also been on a UK tour for much of the intervening period. That said, Doug has set out the reasons why he thinks the warming cannot be said to be significant and they certainly seem valid to me. It would be interesting to know if Dr Singh has anything to back up his opposite opinion. I fancy not.