Quote of the day, epic noodle edition

Ridley and Peiser claim that research is increasingly showing climate sensitivity to be low. This is entirely the opposite of what has been happening. The most likely range of values of climate sensitivity (the amount of increase in surface temperature that eventually occurs as a result of the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere) was established over a century ago. Recently revealed documents show that Exxon Mobil Corporation itself studied climate science as early as the late 70’s, and its findings were in clear agreement with the National Academy of Science 1979 report, which estimated a climate sensitivity of 3°C, plus or minus 1.5° C. Tables in Exxon’s 1982 Climate Change “Primer” for executives show predictions for 2015 markedly similar to contemporary estimates by NASA, and NOAA.

Greg Laden explains that a stream of evidence for low climate sensitivity cannot exist, because in the 1970s people agreed that climate sensitivity was high.

I gather that our friend ATTP found this a powerful and persuasive argument.

Oz Met Office hacked

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has apparently been hacked.

China blamed for 'massive' cyber attack on Bureau of Meteorology computer

China is being blamed for a major cyber attack on the computers at the Bureau of Meteorology, which has compromised sensitive systems across the Federal Government.

Key points:

• ABC told there is little doubt the "massive" breach came from China
• Motivation for attack could be commercial, strategic or both
• Bureau provides critical information to a host of agencies, including link to Defence Department
• Could "take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fix"

This seems like a bit of an odd target, doesn't it?

Integrity and the climate scientist

Here's an excerpt from Matt Ridley's article in the Times a few days ago.

How unusual is today’s temperature? As I did this weekend, you have no doubt had conversations along the following lines recently: “Hasn’t it been mild? End of November and we’ve hardly had a frost yet!” All true. But then be honest: can you not recall such conversations throughout your life? I can. And here’s what the Met Office had to say about November 1938, long before I was born: “The weather of the month was distinguished by exceptional mildness: at numerous places it was the mildest November on record.” In 1953, November was even milder and there was no air frost recorded in Oxford in the last four months of the year at all.

I am not saying it has not generally become warmer, but that the variation dwarfs the trend. Let’s go back a little further, to the Middle Ages. It used to be argued by some that the “Medieval Warm Period” of about a thousand years ago, when mountain glaciers retreated, vines grew further north and Iceland was widely cultivated, was confined to Europe. We now know from multiple sources of evidence that it was global. Tree lines were higher than today in many mountain ranges, for example. Both North Pacific and Antarctic Ocean water temperatures were 0.65C warmer than today.

And here is a letter from Professor Joanna Haigh in response:

Sir, A quarter of a century after Margaret Thatcher first warned of the perils of climate change, it is disheartening to find columnists in the UK media still confusing weather with climate and anecdote with evidence...

Personal conversations about British November weather cannot be a substitute for global observations of climate change — not only increasing temperatures but ice melt, the migration of wildlife, the acidification of the ocean, and so on. These observations confirm that man-made climate change presents real and increasing risks for the future.

The green establishment is not exactly covering themselves in glory on the integrity front at the moment are they?

The BBC's week of lies

The tsunami of environmentalist disinformation, naked campaigning and outright lies coming from the BBC this week is quite extraordinary. It's impossible to keep up with it all and I'm not even going to try. I'll leave this as an open thread for anyone who wants to post stuff. Feel free to transfer things from unthreaded too.

As a starter for ten, in an email Tony Newbery notes Nick Robinson's frantic attempts to make sure that all the listeners knew that Matt Ridley is not a scientist and compares this with the introduction given to Britt Basel in a segment the same day about Vanuatu: the lady in question was introduced as "a climate change adviser". However, this is not how she describes herself:

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Charities are not what they were

The local press in Northumberland is reporting the appearance in the magistrates' court of the protestors who disrupted the Banks Mining Shotton facility - this was a fairly transparent attempt to have a go at Matt Ridley, in whose back yard the mine is located.

I was interested to see that one of those facing charges is Friends of the Earth campaigner Guy Shrubsole, a familiar name from Twitter.

Perhaps even more remarkable was the appearance of Roger Geffen. That's Roger Geffen MBE, to give him his full title - he was honoured for services to cycling it seems having been the campaigns director of CTC, the cycling charity, for many years.

It's funny to see these officials of registered charities appearing in the dock. Charities are not what they were.

Phytoplankton love carbon dioxide

Further to the last post, and with truly magnificent timing, I come across a new paper from John Hopkins University:

As anthropogenic CO₂ emissions acidify the oceans, calcifiers generally are expected to be negatively affected. However, using data from the Continuous Plankton Recorder, we show that coccolithophore occurrence in the North Atlantic increased from ~2 to over 20% from 1965 through 2010. We used Random Forest models to examine >20 possible environmental drivers of this change, finding that CO₂ and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation were the best predictors, leading us to hypothesize that higher CO₂ levels might be encouraging growth. A compilation of 41 independent laboratory studies supports our hypothesis. Our study shows a long-term basin-scale increase in coccolithophores and suggests that increasing CO₂ and temperature have accelerated the growth of a phytoplankton group that is important for carbon cycling.

So the population of coccolithophores has increased by an order of magnitude. And since coccolithophores sequester carbon dioxide when they calcify, that means a favourable carbon cycle feedback just got a whole lot bigger.

Excellent news, I'm sure you'll agree.

Observations are the darnedest things

One of the more iconic figures from the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report was SPM10, which purports to show the relationship between cumulative carbon dioxide emissions and temperature.

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More science with Guardian characteristics

From today's business pages:

This week, as we near the end of a year expected to have been the warmest on record, more than 130 governments and 25,000 officials will meet in Paris to discuss how the rise in temperature can be limited to 2% above pre-industrial levels.

As Stern said, the risks of pushing past 2% to a roasting 4% or 5% are now that much greater and more needs to be done in the coming decades than he expected.

Coming so soon after last week's centrigrade/farenheit debacle, this seems to be turning into something of a specialism for Guardian hacks.

Quote of the day, renewables edition

[Politicians] have helped persuade us to spend billions on technologies that are never going to make much difference.

Dieter Helm on the state of the climate

A royal conversion on the road to Damascus

The Guardian has a short piece in which various prominent fellows of the Royal Society discuss what they think new president Venki Ramakrishnan should do with his term of office, which kicks off soon. Most of it is rather dull, but Martin Rees's comments were interesting:

The Society should offer the public (and politicians) the best scientific assessment of controversial issues, without downplaying the uncertainties. Its policy work is crucial - and it’s good that Claire Craig, a scientist who is now one of Sir Mark Walport’s deputies, is joining the Society to head up this area of its work.

But when engaging with broader social or ethical issues, I think the Society should be wary of advocacy and should instead present options. It should encourage scientists to participate more actively in public debates on (for instance) responses to climate change, and the ethics of gene editing. But it shouldn’t take a collective stance on topics where there are seriously divergent views among experts, as well as non-experts.

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The COP ritual

GWPF's campaigning arm has just released a completely brilliant paper reviewing the COPs. I say this with some authority, since I compiled the text, although to be fair most of the brilliance is provided by Josh.

Do take a look.

Bill Gates and the strings he attaches

I seem to detect something of a theme emerging ahead of the Paris conference, namely the idea of technological solutions to climate change. There has been something of a buzz on Twitter in recent days, and today comes an announcement that a bunch of eco-minded billionaires are calling for a big spending spree on energy technologies. The group is headed by Bill Gates and they are offering up some of their own money, but with strings attached:

Led by Gates, about 20 private business leaders have signed on to the initiative, making their pledges conditional on governments also pledging more money, said a former U.S. government official who is familiar with the plan.

This is rather odd. If the planet is under threat, and these guys have money burning a hole in their pockets, surely spending it on tech fixes is the right thing to do regardless of what the government does? Why does it only become the right thing to do if much poorer people, who may have different and more immediate priorities, are forced to contribute too?

Update on Nov 30, 2015 by Bishop Hill

David Attenborough says we need a "universal plan" with lots of scientists developing renewable energy sources. Top down "solutions".

Sir David Attenborough: "If you can put a man on the moon in ten years," you can create cheap renewable energy https://t.co/gQIJas0Lrr

— Sky News (@SkyNews) November 29, 2015

Greens fade to grey

No comment required.

Lean times for the green blob

Some years back I was discussing the state of environmental coverage in the media with someone from the Telegraph. I commented that I thought it was very strange that the Tele had taken Geoffrey Lean on as a correspondent given that his views were pretty much anathema to most of its readers.

"Ah, that's simple" I was told. "He's not there for the benefit of the readers but because green advertisers want him". This made perfect sense at the time.

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The Times does climate

Respected professor, or international laughing stock?The Times has a trio of articles on climate this morning, from Mark Lynas, from Matt Ridley, and from science editor Tom Whipple. Matt Ridley is doing the good news on global warming, Lynas is doing the "right wing people must do as I say" thing. But it was Whipple's piece that caught my eye. This was because he opened by shooting himself smack bang in the middle of his foot. As a way of getting attention this is hard to beat.

He achieved this feat of public relations when he described a Royal Society meeting and

...a talk by a respected professor who expected the summer collapse of Arctic ice before 2020. The problem, for those listening, was that this same professor had previously given different dates — 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2016.

Yes folks, he means Peter Wadhams, who I think it's fair to say is not actually much respected at all - he is actually seen by both sides of the climate debate as a bit of a noodle. Whipple does seem to have cottoned on to the fact that Wadhams was wildly wrong, but he seems to be under the impression that he will be right in the near future. I'm not sure how convincing this is.

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