Divert, Distract, Deny: Cool times ahead - protests dim Anthony Watts @wattsupwiththat

Deniers at places like wattsupwiththat.com and elsewhere are every bit as weird and incomprehensible as the people who say they like Donald Trump for his honesty. They'd rather be lied to than have to deal with facts. (I've been distracted by this amazing behaviour from the new White House press secretary, which given the source is a zillion times worse than run-of-the-mill climate conspiracy blogs, which everyone who's sensible knows are only for nutters. One expects politicians to distract and divert, but one does not expect the White House to flat out lie to the American people and the world.)

Time to get away from the utter nutters in the White House and back to the utter nutters on denier blogs. There were the expected protests about the recent surface temperature announcement of yet another Hottest Year on Record - for the third year in a row.

Anthony Watts distracts with US temperature

Anthony Watts wrote an article ridiculing, but not disputing, the fact that last year was yet another hottest year ever in the instrumental record (archived here). It was the classic divert to distract manipulation favoured by science deniers. Anthony was trying to distract his readers from the hottest year on record. His headline was: "@NOAA data demonstrates that 2016 was not the ‘hottest year ever’ in the USA".

Desperate Deniers Part 6: David Whitehouse sez it's just a blob and ENSO

Deniers are still trickling in excuses for why they deny the world is warming, trying to dispute or downplay the latest "hottest year" - 2015. Today Anthony Watts put up an article by David Whitehouse of the denier lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, sorry, Forum (it was from the anti-science lobbying arm of the GWPF) (archived here, latest here). David chose to mimic Bob Tisdale and claim it's only got hotter because it got hotter - pointing to hot blobs and hot El Niños.

What he doesn't explain, and what no denier at WUWT has the brains to ask him, are the following:

1. What made the blob and El Niño so hot?
2. How did the blob and El Niño make the entire earth so hot when they've never done it before?
3. What about all the other hot blobs that appeared last year, didn't they make any difference?

How on earth could a blob and El Niño make the entire global mean temperature so high? The fact is that the earth was the hottest it's ever been in the last 150 years at least, and possibly in the entire time since civilisation began.

Denier Weirdness: A mock delegation from the Heartland Institute and a fake enquiry from the GWPF

The GWPF and the Heartland Institute are struggling to find a way to undermine The 21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC to be held in Paris later this year. (The GWPF is the main climate science denier lobby group in the UK, and the Heartland Institute is part of a network of denier lobby groups in the USA.)

The Mock Delegation from the Heartland Institute

The Heartland Institute claimed it was sending a delegation to the Vatican to persuade the Pope to become a climate science denier. Turns out they were just sending a bunch of deniers to hold a meeting in the Columbus Hotel in Rome, from which the "delegates" could get a view of St. Peter's Basilica, if they got a room with a view, but without any guarantee of a session with Pope Francis. There was no indication they'd tried to get an audience with the Pope - private or public.

The Heartland Institute website didn't even say who it was sending. When I clicked on the link for details, all I got was this "page not found".

The Fake Enquiry by the GWPF

The denier lobby group in the UK has taken a different tack to try to undermine the Paris talks. It has decided to set up a review into temperature records. It doesn't want to "believe" that ice is melting, that oceans are warming, that surface temperatures are going up and that climate change is happening. It also knows precious little about surface temperature, going by the terms of its review. And it doesn't care to, going by the people it has appointed to run its investigation.

Coincidentally at the same time another group has announced a review of the methods to remove non-climatic changes from temperature data, by the Task Team on Homogenization (TT-HOM) of the Commission for Climatology (CCl) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). That review is headed by Dr Victor Venema. The terms of reference and membership are listed further down.

Compare the terms of reference of the GWPF review with that of the Task Team on Homogenization. The former is nothing but a political stunt by a denier lobby group, to try to get people to doubt that climate change is happening. The latter is aimed at improving the global temperature records.

Denier weird from the Global Warming Policy Foundation and WUWT

I've been otherwise occupied the last couple of days and have missed a few items from denier land. I will make up - but not just yet.

In the meantime, here's a taster from WUWT.

Anthony Watts has an article (archived here) about how a bedraggled bunch of deniers has written a booklet for the denialist lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation. I didn't have to read any further than the first couple of sentences on page one to see that they are behaving like nutters. For example - the first chapter starts with the following quote from some Royal Society publication:

Royal Society: Yes. Earth’s average surface air temperature has increased by about 0.8◦C (1.4◦F) since 1900, with much of this increase taking place since the mid-1970s. A wide range of other observations such as sea-level rise, reduced Arctic sea ice extent and increased ocean heat content provide incontrovertible evidence of a warming Earth.

Underneath that quote, the GWPF's first sentence in the first chapter - on global warming and surface temperature:

A fuller picture: This is hardly an important question. The Earth’s surface is always warming or cooling, or on some occasions barely changing.

Profound, not! So global warming isn't an important question. Right.  WUWT and the Global Warming Policy Foundation can shut up shop.

Denier weirdness: Ignominious legacy of a climate scientist

When climate science battles ideology and loses, the results are not pretty. That seems to be the story with an elderly scientist from Sweden, Dr Lennart Bengtsson. In the past month he's emerged from relative obscurity (as far as the general public is concerned) to being a minor celebrity of denialati.

If he was trying to trash his scientific reputation he could hardly have chosen a more effective way to do it.

Lennart Bengtsson very publicly declares his ideology and joins the GWPF

Earlier this month, Lennart decided to formally declare his political leanings. Lennart joined the Board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a denier group in the UK that lobbies against the mitigation of global warming. As Greg Laden points out, that organisation mostly attracts misfit economists and failed financiers, not climate scientists. Nigel Lawson, who is the public face of the group, was probably getting some pats on the back that he had managed to entice a genuine climate scientist to align himself with them in such a public fashion.

Lennart has voiced his opinions on policy and politics on other occasions in the past. For example, he has written (h/t Marco and idunno):

It's a shame that the GDR disappeared otherwise we would have been able to offer one-way tickets there for these raving socialists. Now there's unfortunately not many orthodox countries left soon and I surely do not imagine our romantic green Communists want a one-way ticket to North Korea. But if interested I will gladly contribute to the trip as long as it concerns a one way exit. Perhaps you could arrange a Gallup study, then it can not be ruled out that I underestimated utresebehovet.

(Does anyone know what utresebehovet translates to in English?) Answer, thanks to Frank D: Literally "outward need", in context I think he means he underestimated the need of the "romantic Green communists" to get out of the "orthodox" western countries.

Lennart Bengtsson very publicly declares he'll stick to science and quits the GWPF

After joining the Board of the GWPF things started to go wrong because, although Lennart is 79 years old, he's still publishing and holds a post at the University of Reading. That made things tricky, because apparently Lennart wants to continue to publish. Lennart said that his colleagues warned him that so publicly joining the GWPF was not a good look and other scientists would probably steer clear of him. No reputable scientist would want to be associated with anyone from a science denying organisation. According to Lennart he's already had collaborators withdraw from collaborating with him although he hasn't named anyone as far as I know. So Lennart did an about face and resigned from the GWPF.

Lennart Bengtsson changes his mind again and very publicly declares ideology won his inner battle between his ideology and science

His resignation would have been the end of the matter if he'd just shut up, put his head down and continued with his research. However he chose to take a different route, which makes his resignation from the GWPF inexplicable.  He chose to go to the papers and yell and scream. He chose to politicise the situation even further.

Why quit the GWPF so you can continue as a scientist only to turn around the very next day and burn your bridges as a scientist?

Why does Lennart scream "politicisation" when it's Lennart who's the only person showing his ideology?

Lennart made an even bigger fool of himself by getting a front page spread on The Times newspaper.  And now he's made it into The Australian as well. (Lennart didn't even get top billing in the article in The Australian. He was just a footnote to a blurb about some pimply-faced script kiddie from the USA who annoyed the University of Queensland.) Lennart told a denier journalist that a paper he submitted for publication got rejected. The spin is that he was persecuted. I suppose he thought that if he could make out that scientists are ganging up on him he could play the victim card.

Now that will work with the denialiti. Over at WUWT for example, they are up in arms (archived here and here and here). It proves their "nefarious intent" conspiracy theories. They aren't interested in whether or not the paper had any merit. It's sufficient that someone they'd never heard of a month ago has come out as a martyr for the deniers' cause.

It won't work with the scientific community (or much of the general public who read more broadly). Lennart has broken the rules and revealed part of what was in a referee report on a rejected paper. Lennart decided his ideology trumped science and "came out" as a science denier. Lennart should have expected the consequences from the scientific community.

The consequences are that the IOP, the publisher of the journal in question, Environmental Research Letters, has come right out and shown that the paper was without merit. They've published one of the referee's reports in full and are seeking permission to publish the others as well. The IOP press release states:

The draft journal paper by Lennart Bengtsson that Environmental Research Letters declined to publish, which was the subject of this morning’s front page story of The Times, contained errors, in our view did not provide a significant advancement in the field, and therefore could not be published in the journal.

Lennart's "paper" didn't just contain errors, it didn't even include any research from the look of things. It was just an article about already published research.  Turns out that Lennart's so-called scientific paper was nothing more than a bit of denialist propaganda, about on par with articles by the usual quacks in Quadrant magazine (Bob Carter etc). Based on the referee's report that was published, it looks as if all that Lennart did was say "ooh, there are some differences between climate sensitivity calculations published in different papers so "something must be wrong"" (nefarious intent-style), without bothering to look at the reasons for differences. Here are some excerpts from one of the referee's reports:

The manuscript uses a simple energy budget equation (as employed e.g. by Gregory et al 2004, 2008, Otto et al 2013) to test the consistency between three recent "assessments" of radiative forcing and climate sensitivity (not really equilibrium climate sensitivity in the case of observational studies).

...The overall innovation of the manuscript is very low, as the calculations made to compare the three studies are already available within each of the sources, most directly in Otto et al.

The finding of differences between the three "assessments" and within the assessments (AR5), when assuming the energy balance model to be right, and compared to the CMIP5 models are reported as apparent inconsistencies.

...What a paper with this message should have done instead is recognising and explaining a series of "reasons" and "causes" for the differences.

...The IPCC process itself explains potential inconsistencies under the strict requirement of a simplistic energy balance: The different estimates for temperature, heat uptake, forcing, and ECS and TCR are made within different working groups, at slightly different points in time, and with potentially different emphasis on different data sources. The IPCC estimates of different quantities are not based on single data sources, nor on a fixed set of models, but by construction are expert based assessments based on a multitude of sources. Hence the expectation that all expert estimates are completely consistent within a simple energy balance model is unfounded from the beginning.

Wanting to be remembered for ideological flip-flops, flouting professional ethics and writing shoddy papers?

You've got to wonder what motivates someone who's had a decent career as an academic to decide they want to be remembered for:

• joining a science denying lobby group - then quitting it because they don't have the courage of their convictions
• flouting professional ethics not just by publicising a referee report on a rejected paper of theirs, but by misrepresenting it and the journals decision that it wasn't worthy of their journal
• letting the whole scientific community know that they write very shoddy papers
• coming out very publicly as a science denier.

Science deniers are having a bad time of it at the moment. They can't win a trick. There's more at Rabett Run and Greg Laden's blog and William Connolley's Stoat and And Then There's Physics, as well as at The Guardian.

From the WUWT comments

Yes, there was a big commotion about their new-found hero at WUWT. Here is a sample of the comments:

Frank K. thinks it's a good thing (for deniers, not Lennart, obviously) that Lennart has brought his shoddy paper to the attention of the world and says:

May 16, 2014 at 7:36 am
I think the good thing to come out of all of this is that Dr. Bengtsson’s paper will now have so much attention that it can be judged on its merits by a much larger scientific audience than if it were just quietly published by some narrowly-focused climate journal. So, I think this whole episode just backfired badly on the warmists…(heh)

omnologos links scientist Dr Lennart Bengtsson with denier bloggers, the tabloid press and the Murdoch empire. I guess that's foolish Lennart's legacy now. Omnologos says:

May 15, 2014 at 4:44 pm
First it was Delingpole. Then the Spectator. Then the Daily Mail. Then The TImes. The important aspect is that this stuff is now entering the journalistic narrative, otherwise dominated by planet-burning deathwishes.

When the floodgates will open, many journalists will suddenly do their coming out as climate skeptics. Just hang on, we aren’t too far from that date.

Bruce Cobb shows his colours as a deluded denier when he says:

May 15, 2014 at 5:13 pm
These are the end times for the Warmist ideology/religion, and they know it. Now is when the Warmanista nastiness will be at its’ height. They will stop at nothing. But, their nasty behavior is there for all to see, and damages their “cause” even further, setting it upon a death spiral.

ossqss wants to sue scientists who maintain their professional integrity and says:

May 16, 2014 at 8:25 am
And the rats begin to scatter and hide, but it is too late. They have already tripped the trap.
Justice for all, not just some, will prevail.

Is it time to crowd source legal action against these defiant bullys?

This type of behavior would not be tolerated anywhere else in society. Why has it been acceptable in the climate community? Why?

JimS is one of the few who accepts the inevitability of global warming :) and says:

May 16, 2014 at 8:50 am
AGW is so entrenched within the scientific community and political sphere, it will not go away. Just watch.

philjourdan roundly criticises Lennart's double standards (at least that's what it looks like) and says:

May 16, 2014 at 9:54 am
It is hard to maintain double standards rationally – even for people who are naturally duplicitous. Their own words are going to haunt them. But they do not have to worry about sycophants coming to their defense. No matter how contorted the justification is.

rogerknights says:

May 16, 2014 at 10:52 am
The most effective counterattack on ERL would be to list and critique the substandard warmist papers it has published. 

So far there is nothing but silence on that score.

McCarthyism my foot! Stoat has the story about Lennart Bengtsson and the GWPF...

Update: It gets even sillier!

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An elderly and decorated meteorologist from Sweden decided to cosy up to Nigel Lawson of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. (h/t Ernest Hurley). No-one is telling exactly why Lennart Bengtsson decided to join in the first place, or if they are I can't be bothered looking it up. Who in their right mind would be associated with the GWPF? Anyway, as Stoat wrote, he only lasted a week or two.

Dr Bengtsson is getting on in years (he's 79) but he is still working and publishing a lot. He has had an impressive enough career and is now a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Reading.

As to why climate scientists might not want to be associated with the GWPF, this is a sample of the sort of nonsense that Nigel Lawson and his organisation are known for. On the IPCC:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which published on Friday the first instalment of its latest report, is a deeply discredited organisation.

Nigel just made that up. The IPCC won a Nobel Peace Prize for heaven's sake! How about this GWPF article - about the man deniers love to hate. (Archived here):

IS MICHAEL MANN DELUSIONAL OR A DELIBERATE LIAR?
Date: 05/12/11
In my Weekly Standard Climategate 2.0 article I refer to Michael “hockey stick” Mann as the Fredo of the climate mafia, because of his endless bluster and the obvious embarrassment he brings to his fellow scientists.

Lennart couldn't take the heat and got out of the GWPF kitchen

Thing is, Lennart Bengtsson, or whoever wrote his letter of resignation, is blaming it on scientists behaving well instead of accepting it's he who behaved badly - or had very poor judgement. He reckons he was pressured to leave and complained the pressure was affecting his health, poor chap. He should try walking a mile in the shoes of Phil Jones or Michael Mann or James Hansen or Ben Santer.  That'd toughen him up. Here's the letter, courtesy Anthony Watts:

I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years.
Under these situation I will be unable to contribute positively to the work of GWPF and consequently therefore I believe it is the best for me to reverse my decision to join its Board at the earliest possible time.”

I think it's great if true. Climate scientists are alert to organisations like the GWPF and their shadowy benefactors.

It also looks like Lennart didn't have the courage of his convictions, whatever they were. Or maybe he was joining the Board for reasons not at all associated with global warming. Maybe he had visions of cigar and port with various privileged aristocracy after a meal in the peers' dining room in the Palace of Westminster. (For that he'd tolerate occasionally crossing paths with a physical trainer and a slightly unhinged economist.)

Most scientists are rather reserved

A scientist wrote to me recently saying (and I agree, with all of it): "most scientists are rather reserved when it comes to making resounding claims about results.  Probably a cause for alarm when a group that is otherwise reticent decides to speak up." And speaking up they are.

Now I don't know if Dr Bengtsson was "pressured" or not. If any of his colleagues did have a quiet word to Lennart, they were doing him a favour.

Deniers fail US modern political history!

Anthony Watts, among others, is up in arms that anyone would "pressure" a scientist! ha ha de ha ha. (If you're new to climate blogs, WUWT exists wholly and solely to pressure and lampoon scientists and reject science and try to delay climate change mitigation and adaption initiatives. Pretty much like the GWPF, but without its clout.)

Anthony has posted one of his longer articles (archived here). As usual it's almost all copy and pastes, since Anthony (wisely) doesn't do "original" very often.  The bits and pieces are from all over the deniosphere. Everyone in denier-ville is up in arms. If scientists voice concerns that a colleague is joining forces with a science denier organisation it's McCarthy-ism (in denier land). If a US Senator says he has a list of scientists that he wants criminally prosecuted it's not McCarthy-ism. (It's Inhofism.)

From the WUWT comments - pillory plus!

Bob Tisdale says:

May 14, 2014 at 6:27 am
Unfortunately, this is typical of the climate-science community. Pillory those who disagree with you.

LewSkannen says:

May 14, 2014 at 6:20 am
It is outrageous that he is under this pressure but I do not agree with surrendering.

jeremyp99 says:

May 14, 2014 at 6:40 am
Why am I not surprised. Any form on non-approved thinking or speaking is now seized upon and pilloried savagely. The end of the Enlightment. Welcome to the Peoples Republic of Climate Science.

thinair says:

March 17, 2014 at 8:13 pm
A mann with his head in the sand, and a wart on science, may he be swept away by the strong tides of freedom.

Peter Stroud says:

August 26, 2013 at 9:13 am
I am sure that no other branch of science has supported so many scoundrels. Mann is one of many. His work has been falsified, but he still defends it. But he is one of quite a few. However, he and his ilk are still winning where it counts. Politicians still trust every word they utter, and go about saying that AGW is the most dangerous threat the world has ever seen. Some say it is more threatening than international terrorism. We sceptics have a long way to go before the governments of the world join us. 

Steven Hill from Ky (the welfare state) says:

August 26, 2013 at 10:25 am
I am so sick of the bunch of liars that get awards for fraud….King Obama, Fat Boy Gore and the Court Jester Mann.

Steve Koch says:

February 23, 2010 at 9:57 am
The next step is to institute a class action suit against the perpetrators of the AGW fraud (i.e. Hansen, Mann, Jones, Pauchari, Gore, etc). The discovery process alone should yield mountains of muck.

Jean Parisot says:

February 23, 2010 at 10:11 am
Has anyone filed an SEC complaint (and/or it’s UK equivalent) with regards to the various AGW alarmists manipulating the market for investment products without proper disclosure of interests? 

High Treason says:

September 19, 2013 at 1:56 pm
We certainly need to continue to kick them while they are down. They must never be allowed to rise again to peddle blatant lies disguised as “science” in the pursuit of hidden political agendas.The Left, who dominate the CAGW agenda will surely rise again to install the ultra green agenda they dare not tell us about. If it were so great, why not tell us all? No, they know the People would not approve, but they do it anyway, because THEY think it is good for us. Yeah, sure. Now is the time to go on the attack and have the warmists fully exposed and their acts of treason adequately punished, and I do not mean the BS of saying “sorry.” “Sorry we lied and subverted science in the quest of destroying society and humanity to install an insane Fabian Utopia with us Lefties as the inheritors of the earth with the rest of you as our slaves.” (sob, sob) Perhaps a vote on the correct punishment as a warning to those that may try this again.I shall start the vote- extreme public torture and stripping of all assets. Big businesses that have been complicit(Bilderburg group, I am writing to you) will have to find new CEOs. Punishment is not so much retribution as a warning to those that may transgress in the future. The issue here is that the crime is the highest category of treason the human race has ever seen thus far. 

Oh, sorry - those last few weren't about Lennart Bengtsson or the GWPF, they were pillories from other articles at WUWT :(


PS There are some comments in this thread, which Ernest Hurley took off topic and which prompted me to write this article.

HotWhopper Competition: Best Name for a Denier Lobby Group (in 25 words or less)

CONTINUED: The number of comments has made the discussion difficult. I've closed this article to comments. Feel free to continue the discussion here.

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NOTE: there are a lot of comments here, mostly about another topic altogether. It's my fault, I confess. Most comments are about the long-awaited and still-to-come WUWT paper that will "prove" all the temperature data sets are "wrong". I'm finding it hard to navigate and even hard to get all the comments to load. If you have the same problem and are wanting to read the comments, scroll to the bottom of the page and check if there is a note that says "load more" or similar, and click on it.

Sou 24 April 2014

Today Anthony Watts is asking his readers if there should be a fake sceptic/denier organisation formed (archived here, latest update here).  An "official" one.  Yes, another "official" one.

I don't know why he doesn't just piggy back on one of the existing ones, except that maybe he's looking to get paid to head it up.  Or maybe he's not satisfied with the current disreputable anti-science lobby groups and envisages himself as America's version of Lord Lawson. (He does cite the GWPF as an example of what he has in mind).

Not sure that he'll get that far.  This is the response from one of his readers.  It's not a Poe, unless someone has co-opted the internet nic.

Col Mosby says:

April 19, 2014 at 10:19 am
I’m not sure, but if there is one, Christopher Monckton should be its head.

If anyone wants to give Anthony a helping hand and suggest a name for the Watts/Monckton outfit, have at it.  While you're there you could suggest some funding sources :D

More from the WUWT comments

I can't resist (archived here)

Jimbo says he wants the world to know how dangerous they are /sarc (excerpt):

April 19, 2014 at 10:51 am
...We should be careful about the name. I suggest a ‘Dangerous Global Warming Skeptics Organisation’. 

Shub Niggurath advocates a stealth approach and says:

April 19, 2014 at 10:48 am
If there is an organization, it shouldn’t have the words ‘climate’ or ‘skeptic’ in its name.

David in Cal asks what's the point - he has a point:

April 19, 2014 at 10:48 am
It won’t do any good IMHO. The Heartland Institute plays this role, but the media ignore it. Another commenter pointed to the NIPCC. The media ignore them, too. Skeptics need to find a way to get fair media coverage, but that’s easier said than done.

pokerguy sums up the obstacles and says:

April 19, 2014 at 10:48 am
A firm “no” vote here. First it feels antithetical to the free thinking ethos embraced by most skeptics. When you talk about an starting an organization, you’re implying the need for some some sort of platform on which to base it. What are its goals? What are its core beliefs? Inevitably, we’d be trying to reach some sort of a consensus of our own. I don’t see it working. 

Eugene WR Gallun wants to adopt the name of Al Gore's setup and says (excerpt):

April 19, 2014 at 7:16 pm
...A name like the following with an attached mission statement:might set the tone.
CLIMATE REALITY — The past and the present compared and shoddy science exposed.

ren votes yes and says (excerpt):

April 19, 2014 at 10:52 pm
CLIMATE REALITY — The past and the present compared and shoddy science exposed.
100% yes. 

Conspiracy theorists vote NO!

Johnny says:

April 19, 2014 at 10:30 am
No. Because such an organisation would very easily be infiltrated and corrupted and turned into something it was not meant to be.

Katou says (excerpt):

April 19, 2014 at 12:19 pm
I voted yes but on thinking about it a little further ,that might not be a good idea .Any origination can be infiltrated and taken over .  

Walter Dnes says:

April 20, 2014 at 7:20 am
I voted “NO”. An official organization can be spied on, infiltrated, and taken over by a “Manchurian Candidate”, who would go out of their way to discredit climate skepticism. Skeptics are independant by nature… otherwise they wouldn’t be skeptics. They come from many different political/religious/social backgrounds, and have different takes on what’s wrong with the CAGW worldview. I believe that we should continue attacking on multiple fronts, which gives the warmists a hard time. And an organization would divert us from productive work on our cause, to internal politics. Do not want. 

Read more here if you've got some time to waste - there are over 300 comments.  Deniers have finally found something safe they can all disagree on.

Luverly! Judith Curry supports "the GWPF objectives"

Oh, this is just luverly!  Judith Curry today:

In the midst of all this noise I wasn’t sure what GWPF was all about.  Now I have a better idea, and I certainly support their objectives.

Weirdly, Judith implies that she did no investigation before effectively endorsing the GWPF by writing a foreword to a report of theirs.

Nigel Lawson offers a sample of "what the GWPF" is all about, which I expect would delight Judith Curry, knowing her views on the IPCC.  And I wonder would Judith agree with GWPF Director Benny Peiser who seemed to be suggesting that we might be heading for an ice age?

Do you reckon she's angling for a job on the GWPF's Academic Advisory Council with science deniers: Bob Carter and William Happer and Richard Lindzen and Ross McKitrick and Ian Plimer and Matt Ridley and Nir Shaviv and Henrik Svensmark and David Whitehouse and others?

What's next? An endorsement of James Delingpole, interpreter of interpretations?

(It's more likely she's angling for a job with the GWPF's US cousin, the Heartland Institute.)

Matt Ridley in Australia tells more of his fibs, but gives Andrew Bolt little joy...

UPDATE: Anthony Watts has just posted the transcript at WUWT. Only three comments so far - see below.  I'll update if I see any more choice comments in the denier playground. (Archive here, updated here.)
(Sou: 10:45 am Tues 19 Nov 13)

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As I said in my last article, UK failed banker, politician and GWPF adviser, Matt Ridley is in Australia.  Seems he was bought by the IPA to quell the fears of fake skeptics.  He did alright with his IPA meeting reported yesterday by keeping all the bad news from them.  He didn't do quite as well today.

This morning he appeared on Andrew Bolt's little Sunday television program.  Andrew Bolt is an Australian right wing blogger with the Herald-Sun, a widely circulated Melbourne daily newspaper which is a subsidiary of News Corp Australia (Murdoch).  A while ago Andrew also managed to snag his own half hour show on Sunday Television - Channel 10. It's not much of a program.  I don't know who wastes their time watching it except for a few right wingers keen to have their ideas reflected by him.   (It was rated way, way down at number 320 here in May this year.) I think I've only watched one other episode.

Andrew Bolt prides himself on his ignorance, claiming that it makes him "objective".  In reality it only makes him look pretty darned stupid most of the time.

I transcribed the video from this morning and have inserted comments of my own.  (PS I just visited Andrew Bolt's blog about today's television program and was a bit surprised that of 115 comments, I'd say there were only about four or five about climate.  Most were about other segments of the show.)

On typhoons...

Andrew Bolt: Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines last week and killed perhaps 4,000 people. The Greens couldn't wait to exploit it like they exploited last month's fires and even accused Tony Abbott.

Sou: There's a cut to three separate very short snippets of Adam Bandt talking to the press:

Adam Bandt:  He can be expected to be referred to as Typhoon Tony.

...Many people are saying that this is the worst typhoon that they've ever seen. 

...This is what we're in store for unless we get global warming under control.

Sou: Then back to Andrew Bolt introducing Matt Ridley - my hyperlink:

Bolt: Matt Ridley is a member of Britain's House of Lords and a science writer who's latest best seller is "The Rational Optimist". He's here on a speaking tour for the IPA. Matt Ridley, thank you for joining me.

Ridley: Thank you for having me on the show.

Andrew Bolt: The typhoon in the Philippines er er what do you make of the attempts to make that evidence of the great global warming catastrophe awaiting us.

Sou: As you've seen from what Adam Bandt had to say, Andrew Bolt couldn't find anyone saying that Typhoon Haiyan was caused by global warming.  The best he could come up with was Bandt saying that "this is what is in store for us unless we get global warming under control".  Bandt's statement accurately reflects the science.  But Matt Ridley thinks even that is "ridiculous".

Matt Ridley: Well this is ridiculous. I mean storms and weather events happen.  They've always happened. There have been much stronger typhoons in the past. This isn't the strongest one that's ever recorded or anything like that. They're gunna happen whatever and to blame this on climate change is a bit like Shamanism.  It's witchdoctery. It's going back 10,000 years to try and blame every weather event on mankind.

And we don't have to just know this from basic data.  If you look at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they say there's been no trend in increasing frequency of typhoons or cyclones or hurricanes. In fact this year's been an unusually quiet one globally and even in that part of the Pacific it's been quiet. So the idea that you can stop typhoons happening by cutting carbon dioxide emissions is just absurd. We've got to tackle typhoons as an issue whatever happens to the climate.

Sou: That's what's called a strawman fallacy.  Reducing emissions won't stop typhoons from happening.  The aim is to reduce emissions so that global warming doesn't cause as much harm as otherwise.  Some of that harm may well be an increase in the ferocity of super storms and an increase in the damage they cause.  For example, even mild storms will be more damaging because of the impact of rising seas on storm surges.

Matt Ridley thinks rising seas are the main worry with global warming

Andrew Bolt: What do we have to worry about if global warming continues. I know there's been a pause in atmospheric temperature rises for fifteen years but should it continue what have we got to fear?

Matt Ridley: I personally think that we are seeing benefits from climate change.  Sorry, that's not my personal view that's what the data says.  [Sou: that's a misrepresentation. There are many more negatives than positives.]  

We're seeing benefits from climate change slightly.  Greener vegetation in the world, slightly fewer winter deaths. [Sou: many more summer deaths, more catastrophic fires, hotter droughts, heavier rains etc etc.] Things like that. Longer growing seasons. [Sou: longer bushfire seasons.] And that's likely to continue for another six or seven decades. After that, if the projections of climate change are right and on the whole they've been too warm for the last 30 years so they may not be right. [Sou: ha ha - Matt's nose grew about four inches right there!] But if they're right we will then start to see net harm.  And the one harm that really would hurt civilisation would be rapidly rising sea levels.

Fortunately the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that sea levels are not rising, are not gonna rise that fast in this century. [Sou: oops, Matt's nose grew another four inches!] Not much faster than they did in the last century.

Greenland's losing ice at the rate of two billion tonnes a year which sounds a lot but it's actually half a per cent per century. So the collapse of ice sheets, that sort of thing has now largely been ruled out by the IPCC as a risk.  [Sou: huh? Collapse of ice sheets is expected in the medium to long term.]

But we are, you know, we do have to get our act together to be ready to deal with some disasters if they happen towards the end of this century or the beginning of the next.

Sou: First up, Matt tells a big fat lie about the IPCC projections for sea level rise this century.  Except for the lowest possible under the virtually impossible to achieve RCP2.6 emissions scenario - every projection is for a substantially higher rate of rise than over the twentieth century.  Here is Figure TS.22 from page TS-122 of AR5 WG1 IPCC report (click to enlarge):

Sou: In my last article I wondered what Matt thought would happen after his 70 years "benefit" runs out.  This time he's given us a clue as to what he thinks, even going so far as to say "we do have to get our act together".  Andrew Bolt picks up on that:

Andrew Bolt: Well, when you say get our act together to be ready.  Um, we're.. obviously the world is spending trillions of dollars on various ways to so-called stop global warming. Does ..is that a sensible use of our resources?

Matt Ridley: No. I think rolling out immature and fourteenth century resources like wind power all around the world which are extremely expensive, don't cut carbon emissions very much and er on the whole keep people unable to afford the measures to adapt to climate by being so expensive ah is not the answer.

 Sou: I wonder has Matt Ridley been ordered by the GWPF (or maybe by the raving ratbag blogger James Delingpole) to run with that particular fib?  In fact the cost of electricity from wind power is very competitive in many parts of the world, as Oklahomans' recently discovered.  Even in Australia, wind power provides a lot more electricity than many people realise.

Matt Ridley thinks Japan will go back to nuclear energy?

Matt Ridley: Um Japan interestingly has just said that it's not gonna try and keep emissions as low as it was hoping by 2020.  Instead it's gonna put a lot of money into research into new energy technologies.  And that's the answer.  If we can get cheap fusion energy or cheap thorium power or even cheap ordinary nuclear power and some of the solar power developed ah by the end of the century we probably won't even need fossil fuels if we can give them up long before they run out um that's a much better approach than trying to roll out immature energy technologies now cos we've tried that and it's just not working.  We're trying it all over the world it's it's disastrously bad for people's living standards.

Sou: Oh boy! Matt Ridley has rocks in his head if he thinks that the Japanese are going to be rolling out more nuclear power plants.  Sheesh.  The aftermath of the Fukishima catastrophe is why it shut down all its nuclear power plants and is switching to gas, and the main reason why it's wanting to change it's emission reduction target.  As for Matt thinking that the Asian smog is preferable to clean energy for "people's living standards"...

No joy for Andrew Bolt's "reason"

Andrew Bolt: So when Tony Abbott gets elected on a platform of scrapping the carbon tax, is that seen as the Green's would suggest as a world-wide embarrassment or is it seen ..er ..as something perhaps ..er ..or the return of reason?

Matt Ridley: Well, I think that until now it's been assumed that you had to pay lip service to dangerous climate change.  I mean, most of us I believe that that human beings do affect the climate and probably have caused some of the warming in the past.  That's not at issue.  What's at issue is a forecast of dangerous warming which is only going to come true if certain positive feedback amplifiers happen. And if that's likely to be the case, it's always been assumed that you had to show real alarm about this in order to get elected in a western democracy.  I think  Tony Abbott has shown that's not the case and a lot of elected politicians around the world will have noticed that and will have noticed that not only was the carbon tax ah something he was ah determined to repeal, but that it was front and centre in the election campaign. So you can't say it was just a peripheral issue. So for example the Canadians have ah commented on that. And I think western European politicians will notice that and will say actually you can take a relatively rational, relatively sober approach to climate change and be elected despite what the extreme greens will throw at you.

Sou: Poor old Andrew Bolt can't win a trick.  Matt Ridley fudges and fumbles a bit, but he doesn't come out and agree with Andrew that scrapping the carbon tax is a "return of reason".  Matt avoids answering that part of Andrew's question altogether.  Instead he grudgingly says that humans do affect the climate.  

Matt doesn't answer the implied question of whether Tony Abbott's policy is the best one or not.  He doesn't come right out and contradict Andrew.  But instead of answering the question he sidesteps like the politician he is - responding in terms of the impact on politics.  

Given Matt Ridley's ideological viewpoint, it's possible that he would favour a carbon price, which is a market-based system and a charge on polluters, over the socialist approach proposed by Tony Abbott - making taxpayers cough up all the money needed to pay for emissions reductions.  And hiding the real cost in consolidated revenue.  (Tony Abbott doesn't favour transparent government).

Andrew Bolt: And er is there any other government then that er will be the next to follow us do you think? 

Matt Ridley: I'm not the one to predict ah political trends. Ah I don't think it's going to happen in a hurry in Europe. Ah um ah sorry in Britain. Um but ah there is huge disquiet in the UK about energy prices. And they're about to go up even more because of green levies and that I think is going to make politicians rethink this agenda.

Carbon is being priced around the world

Andrew Bolt asks longingly if other government's will "follow" Australia.  Follow them in what?  Getting rid of a carbon pricing scheme?  Not very likely.  What places have one and what places are planning one?  Below is a list compiled by SBS (Australia) a couple of weeks ago:

CARBON TAXES AROUND THE WORLD

CHINA (state-based action)

The Chinese Government plans to develop emissions trading schemes in seven key cities and provinces from 2013. These schemes will cover around 250 million people. The Chinese Government aims to work towards a nation-wide approach after 2015.

UNITED STATES (state-based action)

There is no nationwide carbon tax levelled in the USA, although a few states have introduced the tax. The United States Administration has not been able to secure support for legislation to set either a price or a limit on greenhouse gas emissions. However, emissions trading has operated in the power sector in nine states since 2009. California's emissions trading scheme will start in January 2013.

CANADA (province-based action)

Canada does not have a federal carbon tax, but two Canadian provinces have existing carbon taxes (Quebec and British Columbia). Alberta implemented emissions trading in 2006 and Quebec's scheme will start in 2013. A further two provinces, British Columbia and Ontario, are considering emissions trading schemes.The Canadian Federal Government has no immediate plans to implement national emissions trading.

INDIA (tax on coal)

In July 2010, India introduced a nationwide carbon tax of 50 rupees per tonne (less than $A1) of coal both produced and imported to India.

NEW ZEALAND

The New Zealand Government set up an emissions trading scheme in 2008. The scheme covered forestry initially, and was then expanded in 2010 to cover stationary energy, transport, liquid fossil fuels and industrial processes.

SOUTH KOREA 

The Republic of Korea passed legislation in May 2012 for an emissions trading scheme to start from 1 January 2015. The emissions trading scheme will cover facilities producing more than 25,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions – expected to be around 450 of the country's largest emitters.

JAPAN 

In April 2012, Japan legislated for a carbon tax of approximately ¥289 per tonne ($A3.30) by increasing existing taxes on fossil fuels (coal and LPG/LNG) with effect from 1 October 2012. Half the revenue will
fund low-emissions technologies. Japan has emissions trading schemes operating in the Tokyo and Saitama regions, covering 20 million people.

EUROPE (national-based action)

The European Union emissions trading scheme began in 2005 and now covers the 27 countries of the European Union, and three non-European Union members: Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway. Their current target is a 21 per cent cut of 2005 emissions by 2025 (Australia's is a 5% cut of 2000 emissions by 2020).

A carbon tax was proposed by the European Commission in 2010, but a carbon tax has not been agreed upon by the 27 member states. The current proposal by the European Commission would charge firms between 4 and 30 euros per metric tonne of CO2.

Several European countries have enacted a carbon tax. They include: Denmark, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK.

FINLAND

Finland introduced the world's first carbon tax in 1990, initially with exemptions for specific sectors. Manly changes were later introduced, such as a border tax on imported electricity. Natural gas has a reduced tax rate, while peat was exempted between 2005 and 2010. In 2010, Finland's price on carbon was €20 per tonne of CO2.

THE NETHERLANDS

The Netherlands introduced a carbon tax in 1990, which was then replaced by a tax on fuels. In 2007, it introduced a carbon-based tax on packaging, to encourage recycling.

SWEDEN

In 1991, Sweden enacted a tax on the use of coal, oil, natural gas, petrol and aviation fuel used in domestic travel. The tax was 0.25 SEK/kg ($US100 per tonne of C02) and was later raised to $US150. With Sweden raising prices on fossil fuels since enacting the carbon tax, it cut its carbon pollution by 9 per cent between 1990 and 2006.

NORWAY

In 1991, Norway introduced a tax on carbon. However its carbon emissions increased by 43 per cent per capita between 1991 and 2008.

DENMARK

Since 2002, Denmark has had a carbon tax of 100 DKK per metric ton of CO2, equivalent to approximately 13 Euros or 18 US dollars. Denmark's carbon tax applies to all energy users, but industrial companies are taxed differently depending on the process the energy is used for, and whether or not the company has entered into a voluntary agreement to apply energy efficiency measures.

SWITZERLAND

A carbon incentive tax was introduced in Switzerland in 2008. It includes all fossil fuels, unless they are used for energy. Swiss companies can be exempt from the tax if they participate in the country's emissions trading system. The tax amounts to CHF 36 per metric tonne CO2.

UK

In 1993, the UK government introduced a tax on retail petroleum products, to reduce emissions in the transport sector. The UK's Climate Change Levy was introduced in 2001. The United Kingdom participates in the European Union emissions trading scheme and is covered by European Union policies and measures. The United Kingdom has put in place regulations requiring all new homes to have zero emissions for heating, hot water, cooling and lighting from 2016.

IRELAND

A tax on oil and gas came into effect in 2010. It was estimated to add around €43 to filling a 1000 litre oil tank and €41 to the average annual gas bill.

COSTA RICA

In 1997, Costa Rica enacted a tax on carbon pollution, set at 3.5 per cent of the market value of fossil fuels. The revenue raised from this goes into a national forest fund which pays indigenous communities for protecting the forests around them.

BRAZIL

The state of Rio de Janeiro is exploring options to implement a state-wide cap and trade system.

SOUTH AFRICA

South Africa introduced a carbon tax on new vehicle sales in September 2010. South Africa is planning to introduce a carbon tax from 2013, starting at R120 ($A15) per tonne for emissions above a threshold. Each company will have 60 per cent of its emissions tax exempt, with higher exemption thresholds for cement, iron, steel, aluminium, ceramics and fugitive emissions as well as trade exposed industries. Agriculture, forestry, land use and waste will not be taxed.

From the WUWT comments

Added 10:55 am Tues 19 Nov 13
Anthony Watts was a couple of days late to Andrew Bolt's party.  Here are a couple of WUWT comments on the Matt Ridley monologue (archived here, updated here).


Kev-in-Uk says Matt Ridley caved in too much to the "pig-troughing climate scientists":

November 18, 2013 at 3:42 pm
IMHO, Dr Ridley was a bit too soft and concilliatory – a bit too lukewarm? It’s ok to try and get your point across by appearing calm and reasoned but the fact of the matter is that all the money spent on carbon reductions schemes have been a massive waste of time and effort as well as cash.

I for one do not believe in the ‘AGW is significant’ meme – but the pragmatic view (and incorporating the oft warmist favourite – the Precautionary Principle) the best way to stop carbon emission is to invest in renewables and nuclear ‘properly’. Put it another way, a hundred billion bucks into development of non-carbon energy would have gone an awful long way into helping – instead of producing a sh$tload of useless models, adjusted data and feeding many thousands of pig-troughing ‘climate scientists’……..

Robin says "it's all a communist plot":

November 18, 2013 at 3:43 pm
Those of us who believe based on the evidence that Sustainability is merely an update of the old Marxian need for a crisis to justify the desired structural and institutional changes will keep watching and listening for the next calamity. I spent part of the weekend reading the beginnings of the ecological Marxism theories in the 70s (as its creators called it) and their justifications that more than an economic crisis would be needed.

IPCC is holding true to the social theories regardless of the facts. Matt is a rational optimist because he believes in innovation. We need to get back to societies that foster genuine innovation of the type he describes in his book instead of sociological innovations in how we are to organize ourselves in the future. Most of us can organize ourselves far better than any bureaucrat or theorist or politician

Is Matt Ridley a Crackpot?

I have just watched a YouTube video of a lecture by Matt Ridley, who I've written about before - here and here and here.  He's in Australia and spoke to the IPA (the Institute of Public Affairs is a right wing lobby group posing as a "think tank").

The crackpot comment

In the video Matt Ridley complained that some people call him a crackpot.  I don't think he's a crackpot. He's a climate science disinformer who knows exactly what he's doing and what he wants.

He's not a crackpot but he was wrong when he claimed (citing his GWPF mate, Richard Tol) that earth will benefit from global warming for the next 70 years.  That is, until 2083.  And I expect he knows he's wrong. If he doesn't he should. He's clever enough to figure it out. (Matt didn't say what he thinks will happen after that or whether, just maybe, we should start acting now to reduce the harm after his 70 years are up.)

I'm not familiar enough with Richard Tol's work to know if he's ever found that the world will be better off with global warming for the next seventy years.  Or whether Matt or Richard have more prescience than climate scientists and know exactly how much CO2 we will emit over the coming seventy years.

Who made the world a better place - the pessimists or the optimists or both?

In the first five minutes of the video, Matt Ridley complained about what he regards as left wing pessimists who warned the world about overpopulation, famine, the hole in the ozone layer, unbreathable air, acid rain and other problems the world faced.

He spent the next ten minutes gloating that we shouldn't have been concerned about any of those things because none of them caused major problems.

He argued against government intervention.  He is very much against government intervention.

Why is the world as clean as it is today?  Why isn't the world population even greater? 

What Matt didn't admit to (does he even recognise it?) was that the reason that these are no longer the big problems that they might have been is because of people power.  Because of environmentalists and scientists and particularly because of people like Paul Erlich, who Matt seemed to think was an irrational pessimist:

• Ozone hole - addressed by the intergovernmental agreement, the Montreal Protocol
• Over-population - being addressed by international aid programs and particularly by family planning education and subsidised access to birth control - in the developed world and the less developed world
• Acid rain - being addressed by clean air regulation and pollution controls
• Smog - being addressed by clean air regulations and pollution controls

So why is Matt Ridley arguing against controls to limit the harm we are doing to the earth by polluting the air with CO2?

It was controls and government intervention that addressed all the problems he cited as not being as bad as the pessimists said they would be.  Matt must realise that but decided not to admit it.

A bit boring...

Incidentally, Matt Ridley is not a very good speaker.  His speaking voice is okay with sufficient intonation but his speech was overpopulated with quotes, rambled from one topic to another and came across as nothing but a sop to the audience.  I guess the audience liked it enough.  At least some of them stayed awake and laughed when they were supposed to.  However his talk had no coherent message that I could fathom.  He shifted from climate change and environmental issues to free trade.  I'm in favour of free trade (ie I don't favour tariffs and quotas as a rule) but I also think that societal controls are very important.  We can have both.

Rich capitalists are kind people  

Matt spent much of the latter part of his speech rationalising his approach to the world, extolling the virtues of capitalism and saying how kind all the rich people are because they are giving work to people in sweatshops. Is that what he means by "a rational(ising) optimist"?

CO2 is plant food!

Oh, and he finished up with "CO2 is plant food"!

Nigel Lawson and the GWPF is "confused and meaningless"

Credit: Tucker321

Nigel Lawson is an English politician who heads up the Global Warming Policy Foundation.  His foundation, which is funded by who knows who (probably literally), has the aim of preventing any actions to mitigate global warming.  He's getting on in years but being old doesn't explain why he couldn't give two hoots about the future of humanity.  There are plenty of old people who push for the survival of the world, not its destruction.

Yesterday he wrote an opinion piece for the Telegraph which is nonsense from one end to the other (archived here).  Richard Tol, an academic economist (and a coordinating lead author of a chapter of IPCC WGII) who advises Nigel's foundation, tweeted about it and posed the challenge to "specify the bits that are confused and meaningless". Maybe Richard advised Nigel on what to write.  One hopes not.

Here are some of the bits that are confused and meaningless.  Nigel writes:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which published on Friday the first instalment of its latest report, is a deeply discredited organisation. 

Nope.  The IPCC is not a discredited organisation, deeply or otherwise, despite the best efforts of Nigel and his cronies.  The IPCC has the support of 195 nations around the world.  That's almost 100% of the world.

Nigel continues to get it wrong, writing:

Presenting itself as the voice of science on this important issue, it is a politically motivated pressure group that brings the good name of science into disrepute.

Wrong again, Nigel.  The IPCC is apolitical, unlike your GWPF.  It is not a pressure group.  It's a small organisation that coordinates the preparation of reports about climate change.  The 195 member organisations cover the full spectrum of politics but the organisation itself is not political.

Nigel still keeps going from wrong to wronger, writing:

Its previous report, in 2007, was so grotesquely flawed that the leading scientific body in the United States, the InterAcademy Council, decided that an investigation was warranted. The IAC duly reported in 2010, and concluded that there were “significant shortcomings in each major step of [the] IPCC’s assessment process”, and that “significant improvements” were needed. It also chastised the IPCC for claiming to have “high confidence in some statements for which there is little evidence”.

There is no-one, apart from Nigel, who thinks the 2007 report was "flawed" let alone grotesquely flawed.  In fact the IPCC was awarded a Nobel Prize for its contribution to the world.  Nobel Prizes are not handed out for "grotesquely flawed" reports.

Nigel then proceeds to misquote the IAC, which did a review of the IPCC - at the request of the IPCC I should add.  Nigel deliberately leaves out the crucial first part of a sentence in order to change its meaning.  There is a vast difference in meaning between: significant shortcomings in each major step of [the] IPCC’s assessment process and

This chapter identifies and recommends ways to address the most significant shortcomings in each major step of IPCC’s assessment process, based on the Committee’s analysis of current IPCC practices, of the literature on assessments, and community input.

The latter is about identifying which shortcomings are the most significant.  It does not imply that there were significant shortcomings in the manner implied by Nigel.

---

Update: As Marco notes in the comments, Nigel Lawson is wrong on another count.  The IAC is not the 'leading scientific body in the United States', it is an international organisation created by "all of the world's science academies...to mobilize the best scientists and engineers worldwide to provide high quality advice to international bodies - such as the United Nations and the World Bank - as well as to other institutions."

Its co-Chairs are from Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. You can see the IAC Board members here.  Nigel Lawson also neglected to observe this recent statement from the IAC congratulating the IPCC:

By again bringing together so many experts from across the globe to synthesize current scientific understanding of climate change, the IPCC has demonstrated its on-going value to society. The InterAcademy Council (IAC) congratulates the IPCC on this accomplishment and expresses its gratitude to the hundreds of experts from developed and developing countries alike who volunteered their time and knowledge to this unique scientific endeavour. Their effort provides a scientific basis for decisions that policymakers around the world are making about how best to mitigate and adapt to climate change -- one of the most critical challenges facing humankind.

---

Nigel digs in deeper, invoking the "CO2 is plant food" denier meme.  That is an indicator of the depth of his denial.

He then goes on to write:

... as long ago as 2009, the IPCC chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri – who is a railway engineer and economist by training, not a scientist, let alone a climate scientist – predicted that “when the IPCC’s fifth assessment comes out in 2013 or 2014, there will be a major revival of interest in action that has to be taken. People are going to say: 'My God, we are going to have to take action much faster than we had planned.’” This was well before the scientific investigation on which the latest report is allegedly based had even begun. So much for the scientific method.

Two can play that game of "he's not qualified".  Dr Pachauri has headed up an R&D institute for many decades and is eminently qualified to chair the IPCC.  On the other hand, Nigel is just a politician, economist and treasurer of mixed success, who presumably (based on his "CO2 is plant food" throwaway) doesn't know the first thing about any physical or biological science.  Funnily enough, further in his article, Nigel touts a book he says he's written on global warming.  He's no scientist - what does he know about the subject?  Nothing, nada, zilch!

When he claims that "this was well before the scientific investigation...had even begun" he's woefully wrong.  Not only had scientific investigation already begun in 2009, but much of the research embodied in the current report was well underway and some of it had no doubt been completed.

Nigel's lack of knowledge about the earth system is further exemplified when he writes:

That is that global warming appears to have ceased: there has been no increase in officially recorded global mean temperature for the past 15 years. 

He's flat out wrong.  The "officially recorded" global mean surface temperature hit a maximum in 2010 - that's not even three years ago, let alone fifteen years ago.  Not only that but there has been an "officially recorded" increase in the heat in the oceans - down to two kilometres deep.  So he's doubly wrong.

Data Source: SkepticalScience Nuccitelli et al (2012)

Now for Nigel's mumbo jumbo:

This is not science: it is mumbo-jumbo. Neither the 90 per cent nor the 95 per cent have any objective scientific basis: they are simply numbers plucked from the air for the benefit of credulous politicians and journalists.

Nigel discounts the science because it doesn't suit his agenda.  He doesn't want the world to take any action to mitigate global warming so he comes up with a lot of mumbo jumbo to try to justify his appalling stance.  He wants the world to continue on a trajectory to six degrees of warming or worse.  He can't wait for the seas to rise one, two or six metres.  Well, he'll be dead and gone well before that happens.  But the young people today will be alive to see some of it if people like Nigel get their way.

Inconsistently, Nigel writes:

What we should emphatically not do is what Dr Pachauri, Lord Stern and that gang are calling for and decarbonise the global economy by phasing out fossil fuels.

Before the industrial revolution mankind relied for its energy on beasts of burden and wind power. The industrial revolution, and the enormous increase in prosperity it brought with it, was possible only because the West abandoned wind power and embraced fossil fuels. We are now – unbelievably – being told that we must abandon relatively cheap and highly reliable fossil fuels, and move back to wind power, which is both unreliable and hugely costly.

What he is arguing is change in the past meant prosperity but now we've got to remain stuck in the past.  That's hugely inconsistent.  He argues that in the past innovation brought good things but now the world has to stop innovating.  What a Luddite!  To continue to shift to clean energy is the only way the world has any hope of remaining prosperous.  It's probably the only way that society will survive in the future.  As for his equating modern wind turbines with old-fashioned windmills, who does he take us for?


Then Nigel goes for what is arguably the second last refuge of the scoundrel, pretending to care for developing countries.  As if!  All he cares about is maintaining what he sees as the status quo.  He wants to sell dirty coal to poorer nations so they will make cheap toys for him and his mates, while they suffer all the ills that dirty energy brings.  What he should be advocating is that developing nations bypass the pollution and filth that England and other nations suffered when they began burning coal, and invest in clean energy solutions.  Not only will that limit the damage from global warming, it will limit the huge cost of pollution and adverse health effects that go with dirty energy.

Hopefully the world won't take any notice of villains like Nigel Lawson.  He had his moment of glory many years ago.  Now he's acting like a clown.  If he's remembered in history books of the future, I hope it's for his current activities and not his past activities so that people will not repeat his sins.

Too Stupid for WUWT!

How's this for stupid.  Anthony Watts posts a stupid alarmist article from Benny Peiser of the GWPF lobby group, suggesting Earth is about to plunge into an ice age.

Then, after dozens of the stupidest comments to a stupid article, jai mitchell, who is one of the very few remaining whose comments more often than not contain actual science, gets his comment snipped with this:

In an earlier comment in the same thread, jai mitchell says (excerpt):

July 15, 2013 at 12:37 pm ...The interesting thing to me here is that since 2003, solar activity has been just about identical as the period between 1893 and 1905. and yet global land surface temperatures during this period look like ... 

and in a follow up comment links to this chart:

Which seems a useful observation to make.  So I'm finding it hard to imagine jai's deleted comment is any stupider than these:

Chad Wozniak says:

July 15, 2013 at 12:18 pm  One wonders how der Fuehrer can keep the AGW faith and still believe in “carbon pollution” in the face of all this evidence that climate is going and will keep going the other way despite continuing increases in CO2.  But the answer is simple. It is central to der Fuehrer’s objectives of destroying the economy, putting an end to constitutional rights, and making sure that Soweto residents never get to drive SUVs.

mpainter says:

July 15, 2013 at 12:30 pm  Matthew Ridley, quoted above from the “The Australian”, has put his finger on the reason that the climate alarmists will not go away. The truth is that global warming is now a cult.

Barbara Skolaut says:

July 15, 2013 at 2:38 pm “The sun is acting bizarrely and scientists have no idea why.”
The sun is being the SUN and will do what it goddam wants to, the warministas’ pathetic “models” and the “scientists’ ” lack of knowledge be damned.  I do wish they’d GROW UP.

Salvatore Del Prete says (excerpt):

July 15, 2013 at 4:35 pm  I expect a -.7 c drop for global temp. by decade end, if solar conditions are as quiet as I think they will be. Higher in the N.H High Latitudes, less in the S.H

This is what Salvatore is predicting:

David "funny sunny" Archibald says (excerpt):

July 15, 2013 at 4:55 pm We can thank the warmers for one thing. Their idiotic claims resulted in people figuring out what is actually going to happen, condensing decades of discovery in climate science down to a few short years. As a civilization, we are still going to blunder into this cold period but at least we will know what is causing it as it happens.

Jimbo the conspiracy theorist says:

July 15, 2013 at 5:52 pm  What IF we enter another Little Ice Age. What will Warmist climate scientists say? What will they blame? Co2? Cow fart methane? Soot? (see Hansen and Chinese coal despite earlier blaming soot for most of the global warming up to 2000). Rest assured they HAVE TO blame man. If they fail on co2 as the main driver of climate, they will slowly shift gear (thinking no one is looking) and try some other con job. Don’t fall for their crap.

Credit: Plognark