1. On 14th Feb the Mail on Sunday published a story titled Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

Typically of the Daily Mail and its coverage on the issue: it was a distortion. Real Climate points out:

What Jones actually said is that, while the globe has nominally warmed since 1995, it is difficult to establish the statistical significance of that warming given the short nature of the time interval (1995-present) involved. The warming trend consequently doesn’t quite achieve statistical significance. But it is extremely difficult to establish a statistically significant trend over a time interval as short as 15 years–a point we have made countless times at RealClimate.

In fact it hugely distorts what Phil Jones said. More on the Daily Mail’s farcical reporting on climate change exposed here.
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A couple of weeks ago, Ben Goldacre bashed out a quick piece for the Guardian’s news desk on the subject of the General Medical Council’s damning verdict on the conduct of Andrew Wakefield, in which he said:

As the years passed by, media coverage deteriorated further. Claims by researchers who never published scientific papers to back up their claims were reported in the newspapers as important new scientific breakthroughs, while at the very same time, evidence showing no link between MMR and autism, fully published in peer reviewed academic journals, was simply ignored. This was cynical, and unforgivable.

That last paragraph is particularly important because it shows one of the more common ways in which mainstream media outlets consistently distorts the truth by selectively highlighting particular claims and/or research on the basis of whether it conforms to an established narrative. Take, for example, yesterday’s Sunday Times, which devoted several hundred words to the uncritical promotion of the latest effluvial outpourings of  TV weatherman and all-round climate crock, Anthony Watts.
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One of the more common, and thoroughly, dislikeable practices associated with climate change ’skepticism’, creationism/intelligent design and with the peddling of pseudoscience, is that of quote-mining.

Quote-mining is the practice of scouring scientific papers and reports for quotes that can be readily presented out of context in support of the quote-miners preferred position or argument irrespective of whether those quotes provide a fair reflection of the actual contents of the paper. It’s actually a practice that recognised as a logic fallacy, not to mention a form of false attribution and it’s neither a clever nor a particularly honest practice for anyone to engage in.

Sadly, there’s currently a perfect illustration of the fallacious use of quote mining to be found at Devil’s Kitchen; one that relates – unsurprisingly – to one of the key chapters in the IPCC’s AR4 report on Climate Change. continue reading… »

contribution by Climate Sock

Another week, another shonky poll? On Friday the BBC reported their new survey, which they claimed showed a clear drop in the number of people who believe in climate change or that it’s man-made.

After the BBC’s inaccurate coverage of a climate poll last year, I was ready for this to be another bit of mis-reporting ripe for a take-down.

Yet in both the poll and the way the BBC described the numbers, there’s little to fault: their data do indeed suggest that belief in man-made climate change has fallen since November.

But I’m not convinced that the UEA emails or the glacier controversy were behind these changes, or that the changes in levels of belief are inherently interesting or important.
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Godfrey Bloom is a UK Independence Party MEP from Yorkshire & North Lincolnshire. He is a fervent climate change denier and has made speeches at the EU Parliament stating global warming isn’t happening and dismissing the idea of Co2 as a pollutant. Bloom also records videos for his own YouTube account.

Recently he made a video (below) standing in front of a Greenpeace boat. He starts off by calling it a “fascist boat”, funded by “ridiculous middle-class, middle-aged people spouting junk science”.

He goes on to say:

This is a huge stunt for middle class people to have a little bit of a float around the world. The whole thing is a sham, the whole thing is ridiculous.

He then concludes the short video with:

And I don’t often say anything good about the French but one thing I can say – well done the French for sinking one of these things. Vive Le France!

There’s only one incident he could be referring to: the French intelligence services sinking of the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior in 1985 which killed a photographer and injured others.

Bloom is praising an incident that killed an innocent person and led to the resignation of the French Defence Minister.

Not long after he made the video, it vanished from Youtube. But a Libcon reader who had seen it in horror passed it to us. Here, we publish it for the first time.
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contribution by Peter McColl

Sunny pointed out on CiF yesterday that the BBC gave yet more air time to climate change denial on Newsnight the night before. What the mainstream media describe as ‘balance’ has been a matter of concern for some time to me.

The strategy deployed by climate change denialists focuses on two elements. Firstly, problematising the science of climate change, and then appealing to ‘balance’ in the media to ensure coverage of their position.

This is made all the more extraordinary by the lack of coverage for the other conspiracy theories Sunny mentions.

A couple of weeks ago Rod Liddle, the chungwit slated as next editor of ‘The Independent’ was on the radio. He was asked about a range of his more sensationalist opinions. This included his opinions on climate change.

Liddle claims not to be a climate change denier. He is, instead, a climate change ‘moderate’. This, he claims, means he refutes the extremist claims of both climate change deniers, and the extremist climate change believers.

Now this rankles with me.
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contribution by Adam Ramsay

Today we will serve the Treasury with legal proceedings. We are trying to stop them allowing RBS to pump public money into fossil fuel projects driving us towards climate catastrophe.

As I discussed a week ago, the Royal Bank of Scotland have long been Europe’s dirtiest bank. Since the bail-out just over a year ago, they have poured billions of pounds of public money into fossil fuel extraction projects driving wars, human rights abuses and climate change around the world.

Their climate impact is so high that, according to this recent report (pdf) the government could potentially do more about global emissions through active ownership of RBS than through all UK domestic activity.

They have also funded, with our money, projects which risk: inflaming wars in central Africa, destroying pristine arctic wilderness and systematically abuse workers.

We thought there must be laws to prevent such abuses of public money. It turns out that there are.
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contribution by Giles Wilkes

I thank LeftOutside for introducing me to this topic. I think the following is clearly true:

1. For a great proportion of our scientific beliefs, we have to rely on a long-established consensus. For example, I ‘believe’ that a hydrogen atom has a proton and an electron because I have been told by a huge consensus, it sort of makes sense, and I trust the consensus. For views on evolution, the Holocaust, whether transfats cause cancer, or carbon dioxide causes global warming, no single person can themselves compile enough evidence. You need to rely on scientists who themselves rely on more scientists.

2. Conspiracy theorists seldom or never have enough data for their views, but rely on a profound belief in the bad faith of their opponents. This is a sort of heroic arrogance – ‘I alone in my living room have worked out how misled thousands of others are’. 99% of the time, they are wrong; 1%, we are talking Galileo

3. However, people often form opinions, or choose which ‘consensus’ to trust, on the basis of feelings. This particularly works in a negative way; if you really hate X and X believes somethingis true and important, then thinking and proclaiming it as untrue gives enormous pleasure. This happens whether X is some braying redfaced foxhunter or sanctimonious good for nothing leftie student.
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Let’s try a bit of word association… James Delingpole..?

I’m guessing that ‘climate change denier’ was probably the first thing that came to mind, although having read George Monbiot’s latest missive on CiF, ‘vicious douchebag’ seems rather more apt.

On Sunday, Delingpole posted this on his blog at the Telegraph:

The Warmists are looking increasingly foolish and wrong. But they aren’t going to go down without a fight. Consider, Exhibit A, this nauseating email currently being sent out to Conservative candidates. It seems that in the last week a couple of hundred Tory candidates have received variations on the theme below. Note that these emails do not come from a named organisation but from individual voters in each of the different prospective parliamentary candidates’ constituencies.

The text of the email in question, which he also posted, goes like this:

Dear Edwin Northover

I was concerned to note the results of a survey of 140 Conservative candidates for parliament that suggested that climate change came right at the bottom of their priorities for government action.

I hope you can reassure me that you recognise the importance and success of climate change action by the UK government at home and internationally.

Can you clarify that:

You accept that climate change is caused by human activity?

Do you support the target to achieve 15% renewable energy by 2020?

Do you support the EU imposing tougher regulation to combat climate change?

Kind Regards, *** ***”.

Not only does that look to be a perfectly polite and reasonable enquiry but it looks, to me at least, very much like the kind of  simple fill-in-the-blanks form email that’s pretty much a staple tool of internet-based campaigning.

In other words, it about as far from ’stalking’ – the term Delingpole used in the title of his post – as its possible to get. continue reading… »

contribution by Adam Ramsay

Billy Bragg’s refusal to pay taxes to fund RBS bonuses is the latest manifestation of the question: what is to be done with Britain’s biggest bank?

But as well as bankers yachts, we should also look at the other things RBS-NatWest are paying for with our cash.

According to this report RBS-NatWest are Europe’s biggest funders of fossil fuel extraction. This finance is so significant that this more recent report by Cass Business School fellow Nick Silver found that the government could potentially have more impact on global carbon emissions through responsible ownership of RBS-Natwest than through cutting all domestic emissions.

And it’s not just levels of emissions that we should worry about. In March last year, RBS-NatWest provided around £100 million of, essentially, our money to Irish company Tullow Oil.

Tullow are involved in an extraction project on the war struck border between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. In an area that has seen chronic violence, a resource war fueled by RBS loans is a serious prospect.
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contribution by Climate Sock

Following the UEA email hack, it’s become part of the media narrative that opinion is turning against man-made global warming.

It’s usually worth checking any such media claim about changes in public opinion that have supposedly occurred following a series of news stories, particularly ‘dramatic revelations’.

Even when people are aware of these stories, they are often not interested, or may be disinclined to believe them and change their opinion.

Testing the impact of the UEA story is tricky, because there are currently no public polling firms that have regular polls with consistently phrased questions about climate change. But data from two polls, one taken in early November, the other in early December, do suggest that the UEA story has had no measurable impact on belief in man-made global warming.

Satisfyingly, both polls were commissioned by newspapers that tried to use them as evidence of growing public doubt in man-made global warming.
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Back in September when he announced the UK’s nuclear ‘renaissance’, Gordon Brown’s government insisted it would create 100,000 new jobs. ‘Building a new generation of nuclear power stations will create thousands of jobs in manufacturing in the UK,’ said Derek Simpson, the joint leader of Unite. That figure has since fallen to by 10% to 90,000 but that’s still a big promise.

Thanks to French nuclear company AREVA, however, we’re now getting an idea of how those numbers break down and the spin around nuclear job creation is revealed. AREVA’s EPR reactor is one of two designs the UK government is looking at building and is also being considered in the US…

…a new U.S. EPR™ would create up to 11,000 direct and indirect jobs during component manufacturing (including AREVA’s Newport News heavy component facility in Virginia) and plant construction. On top if this, construction and operation would also create more than 400 permanent jobs and spur billion of dollars in investment in the local economy.

The UK government wants ten new reactors, so that would create 110,000 ‘direct and indirect’ jobs according to AREVA’s numbers, wouldn’t it? Well, it might. That number is in the same ballpark as the UK government’s figures of 90,000-100,000 but it assumes that all ten reactors are built at the same time. continue reading… »

It looks like being a long, drawn-out general election campaign and that mean plenty of opportunities for politicians to demonstrate their scientific illiteracy and statistical ineptitude.

This is a field in which, as might readily be expected, the Tories have already taken an early lead courtesy of Cameron’s Greenwash Guru and ex-Non-Dom, Zac Goldsmith, who’s clearly failed to take to heart the first rule of writing fact-check articles; make absolutely sure your own facts are correct before you publish:

Every few months, an organisation called Sense About Science (SAS) issues a pamphlet that makes fun of celebrities getting their science wrong. It is full of what it regards to be false assertions by celebrities about the benefits of homeopathy and so on, and ends with an offer by the organisation to act as a fact-checking service.

Actually, Sense About Science’s Science for Celebrities series is an annual publication but that’s the least of Zac’s problems when compared to the abject intellectual dishonesty and general ineptitude of the rest of his commentary. continue reading… »

2009 was the year that left-wing campaign groups independent of the Labour party found their voice and found the Internet.

There have been notable successes for the left blogosphere but in this I want to highlight and point to the top left campaign groups that have made a mark and will continue to grab the limelight in 2010.

Compass
2009 was the year that Compass threw off its shackles as an exclusively Labour-left group and embraced the idea of positioning itself as a broader, more plural left-wing pressure group. As Gordon Brown failed to live up to their expectations, Neal Lawson realised that trying to work just within the party and push from the left was useless when most people on the left were abandoning New Labour in droves.

The Left is much bigger than Labour and that is where Compass want & need to be. They got some stick for inviting Caroline Lucas to the conference rally but I think it was an important watershed.

Compass did well to tap into the anger over bankers bonuses and I hope they continue to develop left wing populism in 2010. They were the most high-profile left-wing campaign group of 2009.
(disclosure: I’m a member but didn’t part in any of the re-positioning discussions)
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contribution by Madam Miaow

This letter was written in response to Mark Lynas in the Guardian blaming China for Copenhagen

Dear Mark,

So the cold war is alive and well.

Western spin is really pulling out all the stops, perhaps because we are onto you as the various blogs and forums show.

If anything, China got strong-armed into signing a weak deal at Copenhagen when it should have held out as Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba and others have said.

The US and the rich nations use up almost all the carbon allowance in the atmosphere over the past 160 years, the US dithers over ten years of Bush, they refuse to ratify Kyoto, the Danish summit chair has to resign when she’s caught fast-tracking the rich nations’ deal, the West fail in their Kyoto pledges, Canada rips up its Kyoto deal and proceeds with exploiting its huge reserves of dirty oil, the US will only reduce emissions by 4% against the 1990 base year and not the 17% you describe as “serious cuts”, while China makes real strides in green technology, and so on.

But it is all China’s fault.
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contribution by Left Outside

Tory MEP Dan Hannan has a dreadful top ten reasons to leave the EU (H/T Thomas Byrne). I hold no love for the EU but I hold Dan in even deeper disdain. This list has not changed my mind.

1. Since we joined the EEC in 1973, we have been in surplus with every continent in the world except Europe. Over those 27 years, we have run a trade deficit with the other member states that averages out at £30 million per day.

Correlation is not Causality. Perhaps, just perhaps, not being in a free trade area with other European states would have lead us to run a worse deficit with the rest of the world. Perhaps, just perhaps, allowing UK Governments to protect inefficient UK firms would have lead us to run smaller surpluses with other continents. I certainly don’t know; evidently neither does Dan Hannan.
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The last few weeks have produced more than their fair share of idiotic ramblings on the subject of climate change and climate science but surely none worse than Iain Dale’s latest pathetic effort:

Oxford is Cool

From one of my readers, Victor NW Kent…

The Met Office has released all of its stored temperature readings “confident that they will prove its prediction of global warming”. Useful.

Purely at random I chose a Midlands city – Oxford, which has recorded data going back to 1853.

Yes, Iain Dale (2:1 in German, Linguistics and TEFL from the University of East Anglia) really is suggesting that his readers check the evidence for climate change in the Met Office’s data using a method posted in comments on his blog by one of his semi-house trained comment-box chimps.

This is obviously an accident waiting to happen but in the interests of humouring him, for the moment, lets look at the method proposed by Victor:
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The 193 governments that met at Copenhagen were unanimous about one proposition. And it’s a remarkable one – that whereas anarchy is a bad idea within national borders, it’s a good idea across borders.

The anarchist says: “We don’t need government. Private contractual agreements between individuals are sufficient.” No-one at Copenhagen agrees with this when they look within a national boundary. But they all agree with it, when it comes to supra-national matters. They think global government – in the sense of a coercive body standing above national governments – is inferior to agreements between national governments.

The failure to reach a meaningful agreement at Copenhagen, however, throws this view into  question.

What I mean is that there are clear reasons why anarchy within borders is thought undesirable.  If laws could only be reached by the unanimous agreement of all individuals, the rich and powerful would only consent to be bound by them on terms onerous to the poor.
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Thanks to the Copenhagen summit and the fall out from the CRU hack the subject of Climate Change here has been the subject of much discussion recently, not least here at LC.

A lot of this has centered on “climategate”, the battle between “deniers” and “believers”, or got bogged down in arguments about hockey sticks, computer models, the medieval warm period etc., but I think it is worth going back to the scientific arguments for AGW from first principles.

Much of this has been touched on before at LC and some of it may seem overly basic – but I believe it is worth going over again because it is important to keep sight of the basic scientific case for AGW and to point out that many of the disccussions I mentioned above have little or no impact on this basic science.

Human CO2 emissions

There has been an increase in the level of several GHGs in the atmosphere, the most significant being CO2 – which has increased from 280ppm to 385ppm. That this is due to human activity, largely the burning of fossil fuels, is not in doubt – CO2 from different sources contains different carbon isotopes and by analysing their relative presence it is possible to determine the source of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere. The notion that such an increase in CO2 levels as a result of the burning of fossil fuels would cause the earth’s climate to warm was first proposed in 1896 by Svante Arrhenius.
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On Wednesday, The Telegraph’s in-house global warming denier, James Delingpole, published an article in which it was claimed that climate scientists working at the Hadley Centre for Climate Change, which is based at the headquarters of the Meteorological Office, near Exeter, had ‘probably tampered with Russian climate data’ under the headline:

‘Climategate goes SERIAL: now the Russians confirm that UK climate scientists manipulated data to exaggerate global warming’.

‘The Russians’, it turns out, did nothing of the sort and scientists working at the Hadley Centre are only tangentially related to the so-called ‘Climategate’ story, which relates to the hacking of a web-mail server at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.

The source of Delingpole’s claims, which were reported uncritically by a number of Russian news agencies, is disclosed in the news release which he quotes in full in the article, before going on to provide links to articles by Steve MacIntyre (Climate Audit) and Jeff Id (posted at TV Weatherman Anthony Watts’ ‘Watts up with that’).
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