Episode 3 of The Barometer is now out! We’re investigating the poles this month. There’s an interview with a couple of guys from the Centre for Atmospheric Science who’ve worked in the Arctic and an interview with the organiser of Polar Live with a couple of clips of music that’ll be played at that concert.
Here it is:
It sounds like Bjørn Lomborg is doing a bit of a U-turn in today’s Guardian.
He was always a bit of a favourite with the “skeptics” by saying that there was little economic argument to act on climate change. And that it was a bit of an obsession with middle class people in developed nations. Well, it gets you thinking at the very least. However, he is not without his critics – The Lomborg Deception, for example, aimed to take apart some of his arguments.
So, I was pretty surprised to see that Lomborg seems to have changed his mind.
Then it struck me that maybe its not so strange.
10 years ago, I guess a great way to get people to listen to you would have been to say that acting on climate change was a waste of time. That’s what Lomborg did and he was certainly listened to.
Right now, given all the media puff about climate science all being a scam, it seems that the best way to get publicity is to come out say that climate change is “a challenge humanity must confront”.
What to make of all this?
Well, it seems that Lomborg is a pretty decent self-publicist even if he’s not convinced by his old arguments anymore.
I can’t help feeling that the last 10 years have been wasted (from the point of view of engaging policy makers and the public with the implications of climate change) and that Lomborg played quite a big part in that.
Update: there’s another interesting column in today’s Guardian responding to Lomborg’s new position. Asking some interesting questions.
I took an unscheduled stop on my cycle in to work this morning to take some photos of the amazing altocumulus that was over my patch of West London. Here’s a quick snap:
And here’s another looking straight up, it was lovely and fuzzy:
Anyway, it got me thinking about the old saying “Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning. Red at night, sailor’s delight.” This relates to the Norwegian model of fronts, which is summarised by this figure below:
So the saying kind of works because, if you see some altocumulus then it is quite likely to be at the leading end of a warm front. This means that some bad weather may be on its way. Sure enough, here’s the current Met Office forecast (though I doubt that this was constructed by looking up at the clouds!):
The other question that comes up here is: why is the altocumulus red? The quick answer is that its at about the right height to pick out the red light that is scattered from the sunlight that is travelling through the atmosphere at a particular angle in the mornings and the evenings but see here for a more complete discussion.
We’ve just released episode 2 of The Barometer, this time we’re talking about the volcano. This is quite relevant to us as members of the Centre for Atmospheric Science were involved in taking observations (ground and air based) and talking to the media about the situation as it developed.
Here it is:
I was fortunate enough to combine a trip down to London yesterday with the Science Blogging Talkfest organised by Alice Bell and Beck Smith.
It was a nice event with not too much mutual back slapping going on – Jack of Kent was also on hand to keep scientific egos in check.
I thought I’d go over a couple of the points that came up that particularly interested me…
“Climategate” was raised at one point but wasn’t really discussed much. Despite my interest in climate science, I think that not dwelling on the UEA emails was probably for the best. No-one that’s spent much time on that issue has come out of it well (apart from those fantasists that now have a fragment of reality to associate with their conspiracy theories). One point that I should have made was that it’s all very well flinging mud and picking at the science from the edges but until the “sceptic” bloggers face the same scrutiny as those they attack (both in the press and scientific journals) there’s no level playing field here and this, in my view, needs resolving.
Blog comments came up and was an interesting discussion, including the idea that readers could be charged for leaving comments! I’m particularly interested in reader comments as, from the point of view of climate science, I’m always amazed at how many comments climate blogs and newspaper articles generate. With Alok and Mark there, I would’ve loved to hear how trolling patterns have changed at The Times since the paywall went up and whether the Grauniad has any plans to restrict commenting to unidentifiable individuals.
Ed Yong brought up some work by the Pew Research Center that looked at the proportion of stories on science in new (10%) and old media (1%), citing this as a success for science blogging. This research slightly worries me because the Traditional Press column only adds up to 73% where the Blogs one gets to 100% but the bigger point, which Mark Henderson raised, was that the volume of science blogs is not necessarily a good thing as a lot of these blogs are written by, for example, climate change deniers and quacks. Well, nice point but a shame that The Times’ science supplement Eureka put one of the top climate change “sceptic” sites – Watts Up With That? – in its Top 30 Science Blogs earlier this year! Unfortunately, the event ended there and I didn’t get a chance to put this point to Mark (and maybe it would’ve been a bit mean.)
All in all, a great night out which I’m sure will generate many blog posts!
A couple of days ago I wrote a post suggesting that Christopher Monckton’s awful musings on climate change should just be ignored.
I was wrong.
Monckton is now encouraging readers of WUWT to email the President of John Abraham’s university (St. Thomas University) to take down his criticisms of a talk Monckton gave.
Firstly, this is not how science should be done.
Secondly, this is just the kind of mob mentality that led to the break down in relations between the “sceptic” bloggers and the UEA scientists that reached a climax with the climategate media non-event. It seems that Monckton and WUWT have learnt absolutely nothing from all this and are continuing with the same tactics that they employed in the past.
In response, the Hot Topic blog has started a petition in support of Abraham to send to the President of St. Thomas University. Whilst I wish we didn’t have to waste time on things like this, I think it’s important to make it clear that this type of action is not acceptable.
I’ve just notice (via Stoat) that Christopher Monckton has spent a lot of time trying to refute the claims made by John Abraham in this long document. Abraham had produced a talk debunking the points that Monckton made in a talk last year, which I guess upset Monckton.
Most of Monckton’s points are not very interesting (I only looked at 50 or so of the 500ish, yawn) and he still feels the need to defend the IPCC First Assessment Report “Hockey Stick” type graph (see his page 16), which is misguided at best. I also don’t know where he gets the idea that the central England temperature is “regarded as a reasonable proxy for global temperatures”. I’m sure that there are other equally wrong things in there.
But after spending 20 minutes or so reading it, I started to wonder “why am I bothering?” Monckton has never demonstrated himself to be a reliable source of information on climate science (or other things) yet he’s managed to get into a position where people listen to him.
Should we just ignore him? Or do people still have to show that most of what he says on this subject is not reliable?
The final of the three UK reports that resulted from the CRU email leak/theft was published today. It all sounds pretty good for CRU.
Their first of 3 key findings is very positive:
“Climate science is a matter of such global importance, that the highest standards of honesty, rigour and openness are needed in its conduct. On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.”
The second of the three key findings is also positive for CRU:
“In addition, we do not find that their behaviour has prejudiced the balance of advice given to policy makers. In particular, we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.”
As suspected, they do find that there are issues relating to openness. The third key point:
“But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of the CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA, who failed to recognise not only the significance of statutory requirements but also the risk to the reputation of the University and, indeed, to the credibility of UK climate science.”
They also say later in the document:
“We find that CRU’s responses to reasonable requests for information were unhelpful and defensive.”
It looks like there’s lots of other interesting things in there – that the tree-ring proxy reconstructions and peer-review issues didn’t seem to worry the review panel much caught my eye.
Perhaps the biggest criticism relates to the infamous 1999 WMO report:
“…the figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading. We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice data, but we believe that both of these procedures should have been made plain – ideally in the figure but certainly clearly described in either the caption or the text.”
I need to read through the report properly but at first glance it looks very supportive of the CRU scientists.
So, after all the issues relating to the IPCC in recent months (e.g. the unimaginatively named “Climategate”, “Glaciergate”, the now retracted “Amazongate” and the not-so-heavily-covered-…-I-wonder-why? “SeaLevelGate”) the wheel keeps on turning and we’re looking at another IPCC report in 2013.
How have things changed with the IPCC? Have they made any effort to change after all the negative publicity?
Well, the IPCC issued the list of chapters and authors for the Fifth Assement Repoert (AR5) and I thought I’d have a quick look at what’s new. I’ve only looked at WG1 because that’s what I know and what I find most interesting.
“Clouds and aerosols” get their own chapter and regional climate change is mentioned, which are key areas that need addressing. Irreversibility is also now considered.
The new author list has lots of changes from the AR4. A very quick analysis shows that less than 20% of the Coordinating Lead Authors or Lead Authors from AR4 are Coordinating Lead Authors or Lead Authors in AR5. Notable absences include Phil Jones, Keith Briffa and Michael Mann (although Mann was not an AR4 author either) – whether this is a consequence of “Climategate” is unknown but I expect it will make some people happy.
More nations are now represented in the list of Coordinating Lead Authors or Lead Authors (up to 45 from 34) but American authors now make up a slightly greater proportion (26% vs. 21%).
From this very quick look, it would seem difficult to criticise the AR5 IPCC for being the same old faces, so congratulations to them on that count.
Caveats: I’ve not looked at how these changes compare to the author-tunrover from the Third to the Fourth ARs and old Coordinating Lead Authors or Lead Authors could still turn up as Contributing Authors.
The number crunching for this post was done by Meghan Hughes. Thanks!
So, here’s a shameless plug for a new podcast we’ve put together at the Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Manchester. We’ve tried to keep it short (this episode is about 14mins long), fun (the theme of the main discussion in this episode in the atmosphere of the World Cup) and topical (there’s some quick News stories in there too).
This is our first attempt but I’m quite proud if it! More episodes to follow, hopefully every two weeks or so. Enjoy:
I'm a researcher working on weather and climate science. I investigate European extreme events and Antarctic climate change.
This blog charts my reactions to news stories on weather and climate and why I love atmospheric science.
