So much for "climate science"

At WUWT, there's a cracking paper on climategate and the state of science by Jerome Ravetz, Professor of Philosophy of Science at Oxford. Stuffed with good points, and talking of 'certain' climate science in the past tense.

Enjoy.

Rocky road ahead for Greece

Much excitement in the media this morning that Germany may, in some undefined way, bail out the Greek economy.

Leave aside the unfairness to Ireland, which has taken stern measures to get itself out of trouble.

If Germany does stand behind Greece somehow, it's pretty clear that they will impose economic austerity of Teutonic severity. Will Greeks accept it? Some reports suggest that small businesspeople in Greece may understand the need for retrenchment. But what of the Greek public sector? The unions? The farmers?

This is not just about rolling over the next few tranches of Greek debt. It is about stopping Greece from piling up even more. Can that be made to stick? It's a very big ask. And once any German guarantee for Greek debt is in place, it's hard to see how it could be withdrawn.

Sweden and the UK are suggesting the involvement of the IMF. Why? They have experience but no magic wand. Their recipe is to retrench and devalue. But Greece fiddled its way into the eurozone for the money. Now it can't devalue.

Any optimism here looks extremely premature.

What next for 'global warming'?

The big political UK news over the weekend, picked up by Philip Stott, was of growing climate scepticism among Tories - and not a moment too soon.

Most Conservative MPs, including at least six members of the shadow cabinet, are sceptical about their party's continued focus on climate change policies, it has been claimed.

The wider global warming debate (let's not fool ourselves that we're discussing 'climate change', this is about global warming) has reached the stage where errors are being found - Amazongate, glaciergate, floodgate etc. The warmists maintain that each of these is an isolated error, with the fundamental case for global warming remaining unaffected.

These are like body punches landed on a strong boxer. They may wear the boxer down slightly, but he is still on his feet. The audience, seeing the blows land, may shake their heads a bit, but he still stands. His supporters cheer him on as he stands, his ample frame soaking up the isolated punishment.

Bodyblows are fine, but what's required are blows to the head. This means temperature data, showing that the temperature records are so unreliable that there is no uncontroversial global warming, and that what there is cannot be uncontroversially attributed to CO2.

This is a more complex narrative than we've seen so far, but there are plenty of good writers who will be able to popularise it for a wider public.

The temperature records do look highly questionable. If so, it's only a matter of time.

To take a few examples, we know that temperature stations were disappeared from the datasets during the 1990s; thanks to Anthony Watts we know plenty of US surface stations are unsuitably sited; and we know that scientific software has got a poor reputation for error, with some of the major problems with the UEA Climatic Centre's software having been embarrassingly described in the climategate leak.

This is not a matter of duff citations for individual alleged consequences of global warming: the temperature data obviously goes to the heart of the global warming case. And as for tinkering with the traces of CO2 in the atmosphere - as Stott observes:

There can be no predictable outcomes for fiddling at the margins with one single human factor in a system such as climate, the most complex, coupled, non-linear, semi-chaotic known.

But the most powerful counter-punch the sceptics can land is to be able to ask: What global warming?

Public opinion tilts against AGW

A straw in the wind, maybe, but this poll should worry Ed Miliband, who wants his AGW message sold to us. It should also worry Dave Cameron - if he cares what anyone else thinks.

The proportion believing in AGW has slumped from 41% to 26%.

25% don't believe "climate change" is happening at all. Any scientist will tell you the climate is always changing, so what has gone wrong here? There's no mystery: the warmists some time ago conscripted the phrase "climate change" to stand in for the more easily mocked "global warming". They say "climate change" when they mean "global warming", and this 25% have smelled a massive decomposing rat.

In fact January sea surface temperatures were very warm, while just a few days later we have huge snow storms working up the eastern coast of North America. Confused about what "global temperature" means? The scientists seem to be too. Amazingly the earth and its atmosphere do not warm and cool uniformly everywhere.

The two middle statements in the poll are fairly similar. Put them together and we have a powerful 48% accepting that the climate is changing, but it may not be, or it definitely is not, caused by humanity.

And this is pretty much where we seem to be now. There's some sign that temperatures may have been rising a bit, but there's no rigorous persuasive science showing the man is the most likely cause. None. Indeed, maybe land temperatures at least are dipping. We don't know what's gong to happen over the next few months, let alone the next few years or the next few decades.

If there's no clear temperature trend, all the modelling, the climategate, the Amazongate, the glaciergate, the Pachaurigate and so on fall away. People are being asked to make themselves poorer on the basis of a rickety theory only 26% of us believe in - hardly any more than believe that climate change isn't happening at all.

Much talk about how the MSM are running to catch up with the bloggers. Watts Up With That, Bishop Hill, and Richard North are among those who have been particularly clear - so much so that mistakes and omissions in the Guardian's series of articles and in Simon Jenkins' latest piece leap off the page. Yet pointless to fisk at their edges - the central message is to leave the AGW missionaries ever more isolated.

Interestingly the pollster comments that

people ... are influenced by all the voices they hear, what they read and what people they know are talking about.

And here the constant ramming home of the AGW message has been counter-productive. Our household, for instance, became affronted by the uniform preaching of the certainty of AGW. So we drop the occasional AGW barb into conversations with people we would never talk regular politics with. I'm sure we're not the only ones.

Considering that newspaper coverage has only recently become even-handed, press influence doubtless has the capacity to depress the numbers of believers further. Pachauri's departure would not affect the case for AGW one iota, but he could become a symbol of rottenness in people's minds however rapidly he was disowned - which he will be if his time comes. "No smoke without fire", people will think.

We are being told to make huge changes to our lives on the basis of a threadbare scientific theory based on rickety measurements - a scare, if you like.

The government is throwing huge amounts of our money at the carbon non-problem, with the connivance of Opposition parties. Those sums could be used to tackle real problems - if we actually had that money to spend. But we haven't.

The science blogs need to keep up the barrage of questioning and facts. If the AGW edifice deserves to fall, let it fall soon.

Apparently most of the British people won't be surprised.

So far it's Scotland's coldest winter since records began

The average temperatures in January and December were the coldest in Scotland since 1914 - the year that data was first logged.

How we went to war without the cabinet

Sue Cameron in yesterday's FT lays out how papers containing inconvenient truths about the illegality of a prospective Iraq war were kept from cabinet - the worst case of sofa government so far. Blair invisibly removed the checks and balances on his power and no one uttered a squeak - not even the sainted Cook, who only walked when the die was cast.

Read her and blanch. Seems we are now an elective one-man dictatorship.

Her postscript about a more recent Brown proposal is pertinent, though hardly recent. I wonder who whispered that parallel in her ear.

Greece stumbles predictably nearer the edge

Greece edges closer to the abyss today as unions there start to react to first sightings of government reform proposals approved by the European Commission. Is Wall Street right that the numbers make Greek capitulation somehow inevitable, or are EU watchers right that politics will prevail over economics?

This blog thinks the numbers will prevail. The Greek people will never accept the measures needed to stabilise the Greek debt. And even if they did - which they won't - the Greek economy would become headed into a spiral of contraction.

Financial fortunes will be made, and the markets will move along to the next economy in line. The financial support needed will be just too big for German politicians to be able to smuggle past their voters.

It's the temperature, stupid

Only on Saturday Lord Leach wrote that "the surface temperature record is deeply flawed: not just the discredited 1,000-year “hockey stick” that was the iconic centrepiece of Al Gore’s film, but also the more recent data". And, he added, "the temperature record certainly suggests no immediate cause for alarm". 

Now The Guardian has written about the study that Phil Jones co-authored claiming that urbanisation in eastern China had a minimal effect on the temperatures there. It was cited by the IPCC. But, strange to relate, his co-author had lost the data the study was based on. The chinese scientist he got it from has lost most of her records too. And did Prof Jones ever see any of the data at all? That question seems to hover in the air.

This is deeply puzzling to a PPE graduate. If you were going to analyse the data, would you not first put it on a computer? Then it gets backed up and archived, and it's hard to see how it could get completely lost.

Then, later on, nn 2008, Jones prepared a paper for the Journal of Geophysical Research re-examining temperatures in eastern China. It found that, far from being negligible, the urban heat phenomenon was responsible for 40% of the warming seen in eastern China between 1951 and 2004. As The Guardian's man says, this "raises serious new questions about one of the most widely referenced papers on global warming, and about the IPCC's reliance on its conclusions".

But, he adds, this "dramatic revision" of the estimated impact of urbanisation on temperatures in China does not change the global picture of temperature trends. Indeed not.

Nor does the news (via Bishop Hill) that New Zealand's 'leading' climate research unit, NIWA, "does not hold copies" of the original reports documenting adjustments to New Zealand's weather stations. The raw data disclose no measurable change in average temperature over a period of 150 years. Their graph of the same 150-year period shows a sharp warming trend, but that's "adjusted" data, and they can't document or justify the adjustments. So it's no warming for New Zealand then.

There's certainly more to come on temperature data. It's the flaws in the temperature records that will sink the AGW agenda.

Pachauri's an irrelevance now. 

Update: Bishop Hill points out that UEA have issued a press release contradicting the Guardian story. Game on.

How long can Greece stay afloat?

After writing a wacky article wondering whether Germany might leave the €uro rather than bail out club med, Ambrose is back on firmer ground today on this unfolding drama.


Investor flight from Southern European debt markets has begun to subside, he writes, as EU political leaders move closer to some sort of rescue for Greece, but it remains far from clear whether the Greek people will accept Europe’s increasingly draconian terms.

Germany's foreign minister says Greece has the "full backing" of his country and other EU partners, but the EU would not tolerate any delay in carrying out spending cuts.

The EU's draft of measures is calling for cuts in "average nominal wages" across the entire public sector, says Ambrose. That alone would be enough to bring the demonstrators onto the streets. But they also want pensions cuts ... a rise in the retirement age ... a fuel levy ... luxury taxes.

Cue torching the streets. In classic Greek style Mr Papandreou "hopes to rely on growth to do much of the work. Brussels has made short shrift of that illusion".

So far the Greek drama has played out slowly. But the pace may quicken, and soon. The political dialogue among the men in suits has been slow and serious. But the Greek people are predictable only in their ability to flare up suddenly.

At some point Mr Papandreou - elected on a manifesto to increase state spending - will have to take at least some of these measures to the Greek nation if he is not to lose all credibility in the corridors of Berlin.

That's when the fun will really begin. And once it does, bailing Greece out will fast become politically impossible for the German government.

No wonder Mr Papandreou is not rushing to get into the endgame.

Temperature data will sink Miliband

Richard North seems to have eaten something that disagreed with him last night. He rightly castigates Ed Miliband for minimising the IPCC's failings (he's a politician, what do you expect?), and then explodes that "for a graduate in philosophy, politics and economics to presume to lecture us in basic physics is an arrogance beyond measure". Hey, we can read, you know.

Mind you, with advisers like David King, anyone might struggle.  He's made himself look stupid in print this morning, claiming that climategate "was probably carried out by a foreign intelligence agency", by a team of skilled professionals, either on behalf of a foreign government or at the behest of anti-climate change lobbyists in the United States. He reasons that "the emails date back to 1996, so someone was collecting the data over many years. It looks like possibly the work of an intelligence service." It might be Russians, he says, but concludes: "Right now, the American lobbyists are a very likely source of finance for this, so the finger must point to them". And he reaches this conclusion how? He "did work with our [intelligence] agencies, and the American agencies". They must have been glad to be shot of him.

Back to Miliband. The trouble is that he seems to have spent Sunday spouting nonsense all over the place. If he really wants a summary of the "basic physics", he could do worse than look over a recent letter to The Times from Lord Leach, where he says, "The basic physics tells us that greenhouse gases have some warming effect".

So far so good for the desperate minister, but then Leach adds:

How material, how lasting, how much offset or accentuated by natural influences is unknown at this stage of scientific understanding — the temperature record certainly suggests no immediate cause for alarm.

Computer models will not give us the answer. They can only regurgitate what is programmed into them.

Oh dear. Mr Miliband must be hoping that Labour lose the election, so that in Opposition he can put global warming climate change behind him and work up another special subject.

Just in case he should be tempted to press on with this one, he should recall that rising temperatures are key to the whole global warming climate change enterprise. If they're not rising, or rising exceptionally, why fuss at all?

As North puts it:

Clearly, this pathetic excuse for a human being simply does not have the intellect to perceive that the "temperatures" to which he refers are artifices, constructs which are calculated from adjusted raw data, of dubious provenance, subject to multiple errors, distortions and, most likely, fraud. They are no more real than was Luke Skywalker flying in his X-wing fighter into battle against the Death Star.

Or in Leach's words, "the surface temperature record is deeply flawed: not just the discredited 1,000-year “hockey stick” that was the iconic centrepiece of Al Gore’s film, but also the more recent data".

Miliband is throwing up chaff to divert the incoming attackers: detail about the IPCC process (boring to most people),  "mistakes" by the IPCC (boring to most people), hacked emails (boring to most people).

He is happy to draw fire onto those peripheral issues. What he must dread is a skilled populariser getting their teeth into the temperature records. Then it really will be curtains for AGW.

AGW debate pithily summarised by Lord Leach

During an excellent if  too optimistic overview, Philip Stott refers to "a brief, but seminal, critique of the ‘science’ from Lord Leach of Fairford".

Read (both) and enjoy.

Why does the excellent Prof seem too optimistic? The media may be teetering, but the politicians have invested too much in AGW to draw back without loss of face, and foolishly left themselves no exit route. All the frontbenches accept AGW as an article of faith, Brown, Miliband and Cameron especially. They have said in terms that the science is settled. Brown has called AGW doubters flat-earthers, Miliband is actually choosing this moment to bang the drum for AGW.

Government is busy doling out our money to foreign governments, and to domestic projects in the UK. I am trying to follow this in a new blog, Carbonballs, and it is frightening how many ways the government machine is finding to toss away money that we don't have. Looking on the bright side, though, it does suggest that substantial easy savings should be available once those in power can swallow their pride.

Only attacks on the temperature records will hole AGW below the waterline. Vested interests will be desperately baling - this could sink careers. The theory may be on its last legs, but powerful politicians and campaigners will be very, very reluctant to let their latest scare die. They think retraction would make them look stupid.

Too late, guys, I'm afraid!

It's the temperature, stupid

Pachauri will be made to go for the greater good of the global warming cause. As much blame as possible will be heaped on him. He will be painted as a dillettanté, with his silly novel used as evidence. And we will be told the IPCC can now move forward without him.

Just as we are told glaciergate and amazongate don't damage the core case for manmade global warming climate change, so we will be told Pachauri's departure won't damage the work of the IPCC.

So sceptics mustn't concentrate too much fire on Pachauri. Amazongate's in the bag. So is glaciergate. And indeed mountaingate. But the Milibands can say it's only collateral damage, the core case isn't affected.

Of course the extent of CO2's role in any warming is - to put it kindly - unproven. But you can't deliver a simple knock out blow to this theory that can be explained in two simple paragraphs.

The key questions now are: has it been warming at all? And if so, has it been exceptional?

Temperatures are now the key. If it hasn't been warming, global warming climate change is finished. Of course this is where climategate comes in. It looks murky, and why labour to hide something unless you have something to hide?

All the temperature datasets look highly questionable. Keep explaining problems with the temperature data in ways that the lay public can understand. Goodness knows there are enough. One problem at a time. Get one problem into the public consciousness and then move on to the next one.

Make the notion of problems with temperature data familiar. So familiar that people start to shake their heads when they read of a new one.

In politics "it's the economy, stupid". And in AGW, it's the temperatures.