Wednesday
Oct022013
by 
Josh
Josh Next Steps in Climate Science - Cartoon notes
Oct 2, 2013 Climate: IPCC IPCC Josh Royal Society ;)
Click image for a larger version
Following Katabasis report here are the first of my cartoon notes from the 'Next steps in climate science' meeting at the Royal Society today. I will add to this page and update with colour as and when I can. I am already looking forward to tomorrow - today was a blast!
Other pages will appear below - click an image for a larger version
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
Update on Oct 4, 2013 by
Josh
Josh
Now added the rest of Day 1 and all of Day 2 - apologies for the amount of pages, there was a lot to draw!
Reader Comments (18)
Can I suggest Paul Nurs Wearing a sandwich board proclaiming
IPCC doom and gloom
Meets climate skeptic similarly dressed proclaiming
RIP CC
A Spanish theme could be a matador having a cape emblazoned "AR5" vs the IPCC bull. The defiant thrust of estocada through the cape, with the adjacent speech bubble: "Olé"
Josh, can I suggest: "The Circle of Life" or some play on that wording, with a portrayal of doommongering down the ages. Flood, the Devil, maybe barbarians at the gates, flying saucer menace, and back again to flood. Caption: "Fear We Go Again". (I have long thought that apocalypse myths are a deep human need, Gwobull WarmingTM being just the latest incarnatian.) Perhaps, inside the circle, the myth peddlers might be portrayed. Perhaps outside it, tiny figures fleeing in panic. Perhaps the myth peddlers could all be Michael Mann in the clothing of the age.
I would suggest showing the great doomsday scenarios of all time.
1. You would be tormented for eternity by demons
2. You would inhabit a post-nuclear badlands where the living would envy the dead
3. You would be able to grow grapes in Northumberland.
As doomladen scenarios go the third one doesn't really cut the mustard. It simply isn't doomladen enough.
Thank you Josh - sensationally funny and informative!
This thought evidently occurred to Steven Goddard recently, when he commented on a Guardian piece:
.Needless to say the comment was removed by moderators for 'breaching community standards'...
Double bonkersgood Josh. Marvellous talent.
I saw, last night, why Nurse is desperate not to upset the apple cart. They are building a heads in the clouds blue sky research unit in central London. It is massive, is costing an absolute fortune to build, will cost an absolute fortune to run with thousands of "scientists and philosyphers and is paid for by............ you guessed it (but it wasn't difficult was it) the UK taxpayer.
Uncertainty Monster a giant Dick with a loose condom
Excellent Josh, some much needed humour - laughed out loud - Thank You!!
Looking for help
I've compiled a table which contains what I think is the essential differences between the "two sides" in the climate debate.
I would very much appreciate comments both from sceptics and those favourable to the IPCC interpretation.
The article is here: http://scottishsceptic.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/sceptics-vs-academics/
And comments may be left on the article.
Epic the typical, the Peters, the pipers, the picked.
===============
jamspid, the monster dick comment made me laugh.
get real here is the truth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmWFrMq3qNY
Genius - I'm really glad we've got Josh and they've got John Cook!
BTW, I read Bob Ward as 'Bob Warp' at first. It still fits...
And +1 to jamspid.
Josh, your brilliant sketches of these little meetings continue to delight and inform. They are the next best thing to being there :-)
This series was particularly timely (along with Katabasis' report!) for a post I've finally finished putting together, so I hope you don't mind that I lifted one (again!) <Blatant plug alert>
IPCC’s extreme sausage: unkosher and unsustainable treife
There I was, waiting eagerly for part II pictures and they were here all along. They deserve a post of their own to flag them up.
Outstanding way to record such an event and these are even better than last year. Even though they’re from a sceptic point of view I’d post them on a warmist site if I was them because they capture the moment. What comes across is that there’s so little difference between them and us it’s ludicrous. The wedge is how we perceive science interacts with policy.
I think scientists see it as their job to make the case for acting on CO2 and it inhibits the expression of the true state of the science to the public. I think they’re embarrassed that they haven’t made a cleaner picture to convince people. They are doing what scientists are supposed to, which is exploring all the different elements that may one day tell us how climate works. The flaw was when they claimed they already knew.
AGW wasn’t the first science subject to become a bit of an obsession for me. The first was virology, specifically H5N1. The scientists were and are in the same boat as climate scientists, although they’ve handled it in a slightly different way. The public, the media and politicians keep pressuring them to be definitive about when a pandemic will occur. Honestly they admit that they don’t know. They also admit they don’t know how fatal it or any of the new threats (H7N9 or MERS) would be if they made the jump to humans. Each year they learn more about viruses and they can say for certain that H7N9 has more of the genes it needs to become a human pandemic strain than H5N1 but they still can’t say if or when it might happen. They did make a huge mistake with swine flu. The fault was not in making the initial alarm call about the disease because at the time there was little information but the moment they realised how mild a strain it was they should have made an official call to stand down the alert level. There should have been as big a news blast to end the panic as there was to start it. Similarly they should have held press conferences to mark the end of the SARS crisis because people needed to know that the threat had been real and had been successfully dealt with by rapid and brave action by medical staff and authorities.
The only way that scientists should be crafting their work into a persuasive message is if they want the responsibility for what is done in the name of that science and are prepared to weather any backlash that might ensue. They absolutely have to stop presenting their theories/fears/opinions as part of the science or worse, collating those intangibles into something that is supposed to be as reliable as data.
The bit about sea level rise making methane clathrates more stable makes sense, since it puts them under deeper and thus cooler water. I suppose it offers a mechanism for why they've never caused runaway warming.