Whiteout

David Whitehouse takes aim at John Beddington's claims about global sea levels:

[T]he statement by Professor Sir John Beddington, who has said that global sea level has increased by about 10 cm in the last 50 years (and so man must be to blame, unequivocally) is highly misleading, and a partial representation of the data. Whilst it is true that the sea level has increased by 10 cm in the past 50 years (coincident with a period of global warming), it also increased by 10 cm in the previous 50 years when man could not have been to blame!

Comments

[golf charley]

With genuine scientists much quicker to criticise junk science, ie the Times Atlas fiasco, perhaps some oceanographers would like to chip into this debate

[Mac]

Another example of the missing AGW signature.

Rising seas - NOPE

Tropospheric temps - NOPE

Polar temps - NOPE

Glaciers/Ice Sheets - NOPE

Sea ice - NOPE

SST - NOPE

Oceanic energy content - NOPE

[breath of fresh]

Its worse than we thought because it the same as before.

No doesn't work does it !!!!

[H Driffold Cosgood]

Another devastating bit of logic from David Whitehouse.

[zx]

What is it [truly I'm interested] that makes an intelligent man like Beddington try to frame his Historically unprecedented event?? without checking that real history won't bite him on his unmentionables?.

[TheBigYinJames]

Because he knows that 99% of people will read the headline and believe it. By the time the other 1% find out it's crap they have no means of informing the other 99% of the original mistake, so they go on thinking it's true.

Sceptics lose out to this tactic every time.

[PFM]

The more one hears from these people, the more scientifically illiterate they appear.

[simpleseekeraftertruth]

Would the secondary role of Government Chief Scientific Adviser be that of Government Chief Scientific Scapegoat when all unravels? After all, at £165,000 p.a. (2007) it could reasonably be expected that you took the post from other candidates on merit, even under the then Nulab incumbents.

[Maurizio Morabito]

I have been wondering for a while..what pushes evidently brilliant minds (Beddington, Rees, Hoskins, Nurse) into behaving like illiterate and fools when climate is mentioned?

Let me be clear before the usual suspect accuses me of being disrespectful: I don't consider them fools or illiterate by any stretch of the imagination. Some of them will be remembered as giants in their field, and rightly so.

If I thought otherwise, I would not be wondering.

[exstudent]

Beddington is a population biologist, and as such prob knows as much about climate scientist and any other non climate science scientist.

He rose though Imperial College hardly leaving a trace. When I was there he was one of those professors who one always wondered what they did and why they got their job...I am still wondering.

[ekrau1]

David Whitehouse for Government Chief Scientist!

[golf charley]

SSAT

I hope so! All Depts have a scientific adviser, so hopefully they will all be culled.

Their replacements will, no doubt, be based on recommendations from the Royal Society and Paul Nurse......

[golf charley]

Maurizio

Chosen for being "on message" rather than on technical merit

[Maurizio Morabito]

This appears topical, even if only indirectly climate-related:

The suggestion by Dr. Norris that the failure to implement X2 at 74 kilometers, that that’s going to end the delta smelt existence on the face of our planet is false. It is outrageous. It is contradicted by her own testimony, it is contradicted by Mr. Feyrer’s testimony, it’s contradicted by the most recent adaptive management plan review, it’s contradicted by the prior studies, it is — candidly, I’ve never seen anything like it. [...]

“And I am going to make a very clear and explicit record to support that finding of agency bad faith because, candidly, the only inference that the court can draw is that it is an attempt to mislead and to deceive the court into accepting not only what is not the best science, it’s not science. There is speculation. There is primarily, mostly contradicted opinions that are presented that the court finds no basis for, but they can’t be anything but false because a witness can’t testify under oath on a witness stand and then, within approximately a month, make statements that are so contradictory that they’re absolutely irreconcilable with what has been stated earlier.”

[simpleseekeraftertruth]

David Whitehouse has shown that one of the International Dimensions of Climate Change = 0. One would hope that he will cast his eye over a few of the others.

[breath of fresh]

The International Dimensions of Climate Change report was overseen by

Lead Experts

A group comprising of senior scientists and other experts are working with Foresight to ensure that the project is based on cutting-edge evidence, and that its analysis is of the highest technical and scientific standard.
Lead expert group

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Lead Expert Group is working closely with Foresight to ensure that the International Dimensions of Climate Change project includes cutting-edge evidence and its findings are of a high technical and scientific standard.

Professor Andrew Sentance – Chair
External member of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), and part-time Professor of Sustainable Business at Warwick Business School.

Dr. Richard Betts
Head of Climate Impacts research team in the Met Office Hadley Centre Dr Betts was lead author on the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a lead author of the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment.

Dr. Thomas Downing
President of the Global Climate Adaptation Partnership and visiting professor in the University of Oxford. Formerly Director of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) in Oxford and Munich Re Foundation Chair in social vulnerability with the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security.

Dr. Tobias Feakin
Director of the National Security and Resilience Department, Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies

Well call me cynical but a missive full of maybe's and wooly opinions hardly seems to be

'based on cutting-edge evidence, and that its analysis is of the highest technical and scientific standard'

eg

International instability could increase

Climate change could affect the overseas resources and infrastructure on which the UK depends.

The financial sector and business more generally may fail to properly evaluate and take into account changes in the balance of risks

are some examples.

And we pay for this circular reasoning based on thinning evidence.

[September 2011]

(Revolutionary?) Beddington also wrote in: "Food security: contributions from science to a new and greener revolution", Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B) (© 2010 The Royal Society) (emphases mine):

Rice production in Asia is also likely to be hard hit by climate change, as rice is particularly vulnerable to high temperatures (IPCC 2007). Also impacting on food production in Asia is the potential loss of dry-season Himalayan glacial meltwater, on which hundreds of millions of people in the Indian sub-continent and China are dependent. These glaciers are expected to lose 80 per cent of their volume by 2035 (Stern 2006; IPCC 2007; Xu et al. 2009).

The lead author of the chapter on sealevel in the forthcoming AR5 is from PIK (Potsdamer Institut für Klimafolgenforschung). Do you think perhaps someone from PIK will say something different than Beddington?

[SayNoToFearmongers]

I think more than a little bluffing capacity is evident here - despite Jonny B having trained as an economist he somehow ends up managing to land a gig as a population biologist. This training of course goes a long way towards explaining his record of insubstantial opinions (with due apologies to Winston Churchill):

If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is John Beddington, in which case you get three opinions.

[Pharos]

Curious, is it not, that the announcement of Sir John's knighthood is, I believe, the only one which fails to state what services were rendered to justify such knighthood.

http://www.direct.gov.uk/prod_consum_dg/groups/dg_digitalassets/@dg/@en/documents/digitalasset/dg_188429.pdf

[autoknight]

A knighthood is a perk of the job of govt chief scientist. It is automatic.

[September 2011]

With the knight John Beddington (Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government...) and Hans Joachim "John" Schellnhuber (He was appointed Commander of the British Empire ((CBE) Order of knighthood of the United Kingdom) by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 2004. He is also providing advice to the President of the European Union Comission, José Manuel Barsoso. In 2007, he has been appointed as Chief Government Advisor on Climate and Related Issues during Germany's EU Council Presidency and G8 Presidency. Founding Director of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Chair of the German Advisory Council on Global Change) we have got already two Chief Government Advisors who proclaimed the inconvenient IPCC-Himalaya-WG2 post-normal melting.

Do you know any other Government whose Advisors have used this alarming/alarmist IPCC-Himalaya claim directly?

[Geoff Sherrington]

I am hearing this argument from friends. "Surely there must be a minimum amount of CO2 put into the air to keep each person alive. If cooking comes from camel dung fires or from nuclear energy, there is still a minimum quantum of energy that keeps each person alive. Is it therfore valid to talk of non-anthropogenic effects pre-1970, but plus-anthropogenic effects after that date? Would one not expect CO2 to rise in proportion to global population in the first instance, with not much logic for a 1970 break point?"

[David S]

Dr Betts as you read this blog and frequently make thoughtful and provocative contributions here, can you take away a plea to minimise the use of the words "could" and might" in the IDCC report, and concentrate on things that are demonstrably likely to happen. In particular, there seems little evidence to support predictions of a rapid acceleration in global sea level rises, and none of the models appears to show appreciable skill in predicting global rainfall patterns. Also, the irresistible conclusion to be drawn from the Dressler v Spencer controversy is that nobody has yet produced a really compelling argument about the sign, let alone the magnitude, of any feedback mechanism that should be applied to the basic greenhouse effect.

[kim]

Geoff, the minimum amount of power to keep a human alive is ~100 Watts. That puts the theoretical maximum human population of the earth in the quadrillions, practically impossible, if all the sun's energy reaching the earth is directed toward the sustenance of humans. So much for many 'sustainability' arguments.

Worry when 'energy footprint' is the watchword instead of 'carbon footprint'.
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