Derek Sorensen

Evil Oil-funded Climate Change Deniers have kidnapped the BBC’s Richard Black and replaced him with a climate-change sceptical clone.

It’s the only way I can account for this BBC environment article.

Here’s the end of the piece, which is about modelling the climate of the UK - one of the best understood climates in the world. The phrase “these figures” in the quote refers to the wildly difffering predictions of various different climate models on such things as floods and heatwaves:

When quizzed about these figures, one of the Met Office scientists said that many other projections were based on single computer models.

Putting the range of uncertainty in the public domain from this large suite of models was, she said, “intellectually honest”.

Fair enough. But the exercise also surely gives you an insight into the limits of current modelling when the various models, each of them supposed to be “state-of-the-art”, reach such divergent conclusions.

As a policymaker, as a business leader, as a citizen, would you make decisions on the basis of these models?

Something should be done! We want the old Richard Black back - this one isn’t nearly as funny - but he doies appear to be more “intellectually honest”.

Seriously, though, it’s quite an interesting thing to see Black, formerly so cosy with UAE’s CRU, etc. suddenly writing something that you would not be at all surprised to see on a sceptical site: that models can’t be relied upon. And whatever else he is, Black is no fool. He knows that the entire fabric of Man-made Global Warming is based on computer models. To declare no faith in them is to declare disbelief in Man-made Global Warming.

I never thought I’d see the day. First Monboit falling in love with Nuclear energy, then Mark Lynas declares his mistrust of the IPCC, and now Richard Black, quite possibly the most visible of the Climate Change Alarmists at the BBC, admits that Man-made global warming is a crock. Who knows, he might even start reporting real science, as opposed to Team “science”, one day soon.

They say that rats leave a sinking ship. Is that what we’re seeing here? Or could there be a more charitable explanation? I honestly hope so; I don’t believe anyone is ever totally beyond redemption. Hate the sin, not the sinner, and all that.

It’s been interesting following the extent of sea ice in the arctic through the year. It seemed at one point as if it was going to break the record minimum set back in 2007, but then in mid July the rate of loss started slowing down, taking it well within the “normal” range. I understand this was due to changing wind patterns, so ice wasn’t being blown southwards as fast into warmer waters. And early in August even seemed to be increasing slightly. However, it appears to have suddenly taken a nose dive - it appears to have lost around a quarter of it’s area almost overnight. Here’s the graph for today (7th August 2011):
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A very interesting perspective about why support for “Anthropogenic Climate Change” has dwindled as far as it has.

I’m not a scientist, but …

Well worth a read.

According to this promotional video, 1.8 billion people will take part in the 2012 Earth Hour.

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There is currently a bit of a stir in the blogosphere regarding a podcast by Murry Salby where he challenges the IPCC claim that increases in CO2 are Anthropogenic (human caused). Although I blogged about it yesterday, the conversation now seems to have really got going, and I thought it might be useful to write up a point by point summary of the key scientific arguments being advanced.

Note: the current discussion is about the podcast, and not Salby’s paper which will be published in about six weeks time. That’s when the real discussion will begin; this is just the appetiser.

In the points below, “For” indicates those points which support the IPCC thesis: The increase in CO2 this century is driven mainly by Anthropogenic emissions. “Against” indicates those points which undermine it.
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I came across something a couple of days ago which gave me pause for thought. I made a passing reference to it in a recent blog comment, but this is my first proper attempt to outline my current understanding.

The current state of the science

The image below illustrates the carbon cycle.

(Image source: NASA)
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Reach for your wallets, people; the next big scam has just been announced.

They’ve done Hydrogen (component of Methane), Oxygen (Ozone), Fluorine and Chlorine and the current focus for global moneygrabbers is Carbon. It appears Nitrogen might be next:

Royal Society: What would a global policy to regulate human use of fixed nitrogen look like?
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Steve Jones appears to be rather cross at the reception his report into the BBC’s science reporting received.

The first four paragraphs of his diatribe are about Flat Earth theory, and at least part of it appears to be a debunking, which rather baffles me - why bother? But paragraph 4 begins with this wonderful non-sequitur:

Flat Earthism goes back a long way and is alive today, for one English primary-school child in five believes in it.

Well, yes, Steve; and many five year olds believe in Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy. That says nothing about the prevalence of adults who believe in those things. To a child, looking around him, the earth looks flat. They have to be taught that it is a sphere.
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Ah, school. I have to admit I hated most of my time in school. I was a spotty, geeky, bespectacled youth, not given to sport and mortally afraid of girls, mainly because I liked them so much.

Over the years I attended a number of diffrerent schools, and was subjected to a variety of teaching methods by teachers of varying degreees of quality and - well, not to put too fine a point on it - likeability. And it seems to me, looking back, that the subjects I did the best in were the subjects where I liked the teacher. The teaching methods didn’t seem to matter; as long as the teacher was someone you liked and you wanted to please, you worked, and by working, you learned.

The best example of this, and for me the best teacher I had, was my grammar school Biology teacher, Mr Davidson. His declared approach to teaching was this: that he could only actually help some of the students in his class, and they were the in-betweeners.

Some kids were not academically inclined, and they were unlikely to do very well. Some were stupendously clever and would learn whatever he did. But the ones in the middle would usually do ok, but would do better if he got his job right. I don’t know whether he was right, but it made sense to me at the time and it still does.

Mr Davidson had a teaching method which was unique in my experience. In a one-hour Biology lesson, he would spend less than five minutes on the topic being taught; the rest of the lesson would be about completely unrelated things. In one lesson about bird nesting habits, for example, he drifted off into a discussion about how soldiers react when enemy soldiers surrender.

On one occasion we found the biology lab unlocked. This was highly unusual. Normally the lab would be locked, and we’d be expected to wait in the corridor outside until he arrived and let us in. Unsure what to do, we filed in anyway and took our seats at the benches. Suddenly Mr Davidson popped up from behind the bench at the front of the class, holding some kind of handgun, and pointed it at the class. Nobody dared move. He remained there for about half a minute before dropping back down behind the desk, to reappear seconds later with his jacket held up to his neck, and said “What colour tie am I wearing?” I don’t actually remember what the lesson was that day, so I think he probably got that one slightly wrong - although I recall that the discussion immediately following this was to do with selective attention.

The only bad thing about Mr Davidson, by today’s standards at least, was that he was a denier. He denied the classical paleontological ideas of the day about dinosaurs, and particularly that they were cold blooded. Despite thousands of scientific papers proving that dinosaurs were cold blooded, he went against the consensus. He believed in the theories proposed by a minority of scientists such as Bob Bakker (whose personal grooming he appeared to dislike) and Adrian Desmond who were saying that dinosaurs - at least some of them, the very big ones, were actually warm-blooded. Endothermic, just like you and me.

As we know today, Desmond and Bakker were right, and the consensus were wrong. I’m quite pleased about that. I liked Mr Davidson a lot, and I’d have hated to think he was both a denier AND wrong. And I guess being right means he wasn’t really a denier after all - just either very astute, or very lucky to have backed the right choice.

The polar bear has long been a totem for AGW. I have a feeling it might soon become a totem for AGW-scepticism.

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