Disappearing coastlines? Disappearing membership

This may well be the last straw for my family's long membership of the National Trust as Dame Helen Ghosh joins the CAGW activists with a vengeance.  We drafted a letter of resignation last year  because of the increasingly political stance being taken by the NT and NTS and then didn't send it.  It's still on file though, now where did I put the stamps?

TM [Link repaired]

Lindzen at the Oxford Union - Cartoon Notes by Josh

Updated on Jul 15, 2013 by Josh

The Oxford Union debate with Richard Lindzen was one of the most fun Climate Science events I have been to recently. Here are my cartoon notes to add to the Bish's post and other comments.

Click to read more ...

The handy All Weather is Extreme Climate Barometer - Josh 192

Click image for larger version

Cartoons by Josh

The green agenda

Brussels has placed itself on a collision course with Britain's ruling Conservative party by issuing a blunt warning on the dangers of stifling the green agenda.

As David Cameron faced pressure from the Tory right to adopt a more confrontational approach to the EU, Europe's environment chief spoke out against critics of environmental regulations for making "untrue" claims.

Janez Potočnik, the European environment commissioner, told the Guardian that for politicians to suggest that green legislation was a burden was "very unhelpful, because it is untrue".

http://www.euractiv.com/climate-environment/uk-tories-warned-eu-stifling-gre-news-515259

Personally, I'm all for a bit of green agenda stifling.

Edinburgh lecture

From Climate Change to Climate Justice. Professor Alan Miller.

This lecture is taking place in Edinburgh tonight. Any takers?

http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/biomedical-sciences/changing-world/lectures/2012-091012

Bizarre science - Josh 141

A review of the Wellington debate

These are the impressions of the global warming debate held at Wellington College of commenter Atomic Hairdryer.

The Wellington Squared debate, a sceptic's view (link)


Motion to be debated was

"The prophets of global warming are guilty of scaremongering"

The venue was interesting. An imposing college built as a monument to Wellington for his services in that old British tradition of warring with the French. The debate itself was held in the chapel, which may have been appropriate given global warming as a religion and prophets but was a somewhat awkward arrangement. The pews were at 90 degrees to the altar where the debaters and screen was placed so not as comfortable as the RI.

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Richard Lindzen in the Boston Globe

Richard Lindzen has a pop at Kerry Emmanuel's Boston Globe op-ed in a letter to the paper's editor.

KERRY EMANUEL’S Feb. 15 op-ed “Climate changes are proven fact’’ is more advocacy than assessment. Vague terms such as “consistent with,’’ “probably,’’ and “potentially’’ hardly change this.

Intelligence squared debate on scaremongering

This looks interesting: a debate on global warming scaremongering at Wellington College (a very posh school, if you are an overseas reader), which will take place on Sunday.

They told us the polar bears were going to drown; they told us the Himalayan glaciers were going to melt by the year 2035. Now we learn both claims are untrue. They assured us they were engaged in unbiased science. And then we read their emails and found that they'd deliberately suppressed inconvenient facts. What are we to make of these disclosures? Are they just minor scratches on the solid structure of climate change theory, or are they emblematic of something far more troubling? Can we still trust the climate change experts or have they been guilty of exaggerating the threat in order to draw attention to their cause?

The speakers are David Davis MP and Prof Philip Stott versus Mark Lynas and David Aaronovitch.

It's worse in context

One of the delights of rising visitor numbers is that you start to get noticed by a whole lot more people who disagree with you and who come over to stick the boot in. The attention is always welcome although I'm sure there will be a certain kudos among those people who stuck the boot in (in the nicest possible way) when nobody had heard of me (hi Frank!).

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The shorter Guardian

Climatologists are not scientists. People who said so are evil.

Link

Sir David King, conspiracy theorist

Sir David King says that some climate scientists have been overstating things:

Some science we stand on as totally solid and valuable but when we do it with something as complex as climate change we can get ourselves into difficulties so I am very annoyed with some of my colleagues for not following the scientific process," he said. "I have been irritated by some of my colleagues who have overstated the science.

It's funny, but I can't think of a single occasion on which Sir David has spoken of these concerns before, but I guess it's good to know now.

But the remarkable thing about King's interview is that he doesn't seem to have learned the lesson of his earlier utterances about foreign intelligence services being behind the climategate leak/hack, again bringing up national security as an issue for consideration in the climate debate:

He even suggested that British intelligence may have knowledge of who is behind the campaign.

"It is a security issue. We are talking about something that the British Government among others believes is putting our people at risk".

I was talking to an off-duty policeman in the pub last night, trying to get a perspective on why the National Domestic Extremism Team might be involved in the climategate investigation.  He thought the "nothing better to do" explanation was possible, but was also attracted to the "policing-overkill-covers-backsides" theory. And having now read Sir David's comments, I wonder if he's right. If the people in power in London are going to tie themselves up in conspiracy theories over the motley band of global warming sceptics being funded by vested interests and foreign powers then it's hardly surprising when anti-terrorist forces are used to against concerned, but law-abiding citizens.

GISS wants to switch to freeware

According to the folks at ClearClimateCode, Reto Ruedy of NASA's GISS laboratory has indicated that GISS intends to start using the CCC version of GISS's global temperature index code at some point in the future.  This is a tribute to the skills of the CCC guys and says something fairly damning about how the funding that has been poured into GISS by the American taxpayer has been spent.

Scientifically though, it's the right thing to do.

NZ climatologists lose their calculations

In a horrifying echo of CRU's loss of its temperature data, climatologists in New Zealand seem to have lost the calculations they use to adjust their temperature data.

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has been urged by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC) to abandon all of its in-house adjustments to temperature records. This follows an admission by NIWA that it no longer holds the records that would support its in-house manipulation of official temperature readings.

The killer point here is that the raw data has no trend, while the adjusted data shows warming. Funny that.

(H/T Tom Fuller)

Weaver still on board

A few days ago I reported that uberwarmer Andrew Weaver was jumping the global warming ship, calling for the resignation of Raj Pachauri and institutional reform of the IPCC. He has now issued a clarification, in which he says he still believes in global warming.

It's as if the first officer elects to sink with the captain.

(H/T Frank O'Dwyer in the comments)