NEWSFLASH! Action on climate change voted bottom of world’s priority heap

Back in March of this year, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) announced an “innovative initiative” in which participants from around the world are invited to vote on what the priorities should be in a post-2015 world.

When I first stumbled across the “For information media • not an official record” of a March 13 Press Conference (and standard photo-op and exhortation from Ban Ki-Moon), I was concerned that this might have been another opportunity missed. Here are some excerpts from the Press Conference (note the use of past tense … all emphases mine -hro):

PRESS CONFERENCE ON ‘MY WORLD’ INITIATIVE FOR POST-2015 DEVELOPMENT AGENDA

People from around the world had an opportunity to join the global conversation to shape the future development agenda by participating in an innovative initiative known as MY World, Olav Kjørven, Assistant Secretary General and Director of the Bureau for Development Policy at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), said today at a Headquarters press conference.

“There’s been something really important missing in the way we at the United Nations and at the global level have been deliberating and deciding on issues over the last decade, and that something has been you — people all over the world,” he told correspondents, adding that the era of making decisions about global issues behind closed doors with little citizen involvement was coming to an end.

Whoah! No more decisions about “global issues” being made behind closed doors?! Has anyone sent this memo to the powers that be at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)?! But I digress … this non-official record continues:

[Head of Growth at the Poverty and Inequality Programme at the Overseas Development Institute's Claire] Melamed said MY World allowed people’s voices to be heard as they chose, in an interactive way, those issues that would make the most difference in their lives. Global citizens were being asked to vote on the six most important issues from a list of 16 options put together with the help of non-governmental organizations, United Nations agencies and a range of citizen opinion polls.

“We are collecting an incredibly rich source of information about what people want,” she said. “We’re able to look at what men want, what women want, what people of different ages want, how the choices people are making vary in all kinds of different ways. We can look at particularly what some of the poorest people think and compare that with richer people in their own countries.”

According to MY World’s website, votes can be submitted online, and in some countries, by mobile phone or through offline ballots. Ms. Melamed added that organizers of the survey were also going out in a traditional way, on bikes and on foot, in certain remote areas, gathering information from people who do not have access to the Internet or mobile phones.

[...]

As examples of civil society partnership, [Corinne Woods, Director of the United Nations Millennium Campaign] noted that boy scouts had been mobilized in several countries to spread the message and get people to connect and vote. In Nigeria, the Government was supporting many thousands in the national youth core as they visited villages to mobilize votes. Mass media companies such as Viacom, MTV, Nickelodeon, and BET were involved in a major online mobilization.

The text appended to Ban’s March 12 photo-op reinforced my initial impression of an “opportunity missed”:

Results from the survey will be shared with Mr. Ban, his High-level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, and world leaders.

[...]

Yesterday, Mr. Ban met with four youth volunteers who are capturing communities’ development priorities and called on the public to make a difference on the issues that impact their lives the most.

These inputs, along with those from across the UN system and beyond, including the outcomes of consultations going on worldwide and the voices of businesses, academia and the scientific community, will feed into the work of the Panel, which will present its report in May.

“Our goal must be a single, coherent global agenda that can be every bit as successful in inspiring and mobilizing people as the MDGs have been,” Mr. Ban noted in remarks today [...]

So we know that The Report of the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda was presented with much fanfare at the end of May; but I thought it would be interesting to see what the results of this “innovative initiative” might have been!

Much to my surprise, I found that voting is still open to all until 2015! From the Methodology page:

When and where will this all happen?

From now until 2015, we want as many people in as many countries as possible to be involved: citizens of all ages, genders and backgrounds, particularly the world’s poor and marginalized communities.

MY World will be available from early December 2012, so countries hosting national consultations can take it into account. However, the global launch of MY World is scheduled for late January 2013 (at that time a comprehensive communication toolkit will be available for all).

This page also lists the sixteen choices (from which a voter may select only 6), of which two in succession were quite interesting:

Reliable energy at home

Action taken on climate change

If you decide to vote, you’ll see that each of the choices has an explanation. There is good news and bad news on the “Reliable energy at home” front. They’re not talking “renewable”, but:

This means that all family members should have reliable and affordable electricity or other sources of energy at home for lighting, heating and cooking. More of that energy should be sustainably generated

but they slipped in “sustainable” (without defining it!) … And here’s the (somewhat predictable) explanation they provide for “Action taken on climate change”:

This means that governments should take on binding commitments to reduce carbon emissions to levels which can keep the global temperature rise below 2 degrees, and invest in adaptation measures particularly involving vulnerable communities

Here’s a screen-capture of the results after I voted:

Results* for All countries June 16, 2013

* Note: Customizing the results is a little fiddly – I had to select All a few times before the numbers changed from those for an apparently randomly selected specific country; and I’m fairly certain that the Total was actually 700K+ before I voted (as opposed to the 621K+ after I voted. Minor detail :-)

But in playing around with their interactive platform, I did notice that “A good education” consistently ranked in first place, followed by equally sensible choices. And “Action taken on climate change”, of course, for most parameters was 16th (or 15th).

Cast your votes and spread the word, folks; so that we can keep “Action taken on climate change” where it belongs: off the table (or at least at the bottom of the priority heap)!

And in other news … speaking of keeping “action on climate change” off the table …

It seems that U.K. Prime Minister, David Cameron (who was one of the three Co-chairs of the High Level Panel of Eminent Persons) may well have seen the writing on the virtual wall!

Cameron is the President of the June 17-18 G8 Summit; and his agenda includes no mention of “climate change” [H/T The GWPF]. OTOH, this may be a spoonful of sugar to help some bitter “global” taxing and reporting medicine go down:

UK’s G8 agenda – trade, tax, transparency

PM David Cameron is determined to achieve change issues which are critical for growth, prosperity and economic development across the world.

In an article for the Wall Street Journal, David Cameron explains that the UK G8 Presidency will focus on achieving action on tax, trade and transparency:

Britain and America have a proud history of working together to meet the great challenges of the day. Ours is a partnership without parallel, rooted in our values of freedom and enterprise – advancing not just Britain’s and America’s interests but the good of people around the world.

Today, our greatest challenge is to restore strong and sustainable growth to the world economy.

When times are tough, some want to put the barriers up, to look inwards, and to protect themselves from the world. But Britain and America stand for a better way. We have a precious opportunity to transform the global economy—not by less openness and less free trade, but by more. And we must do everything possible to seize it.
[...] (emphasis added -hro)

Do read the whole thing but in the meantime, here are some word-counts to consider:

Climate – 0
Green – 0
Sustain* – 2
Transparen* – 7
Global – 9
Tax* – 21

And don’t forget to vote so that we can keep “action on climate change” where it belongs:-)

Pachauri’s great expectations (July 2009) vs reality (June 2013)

[Please note UPDATE within text below -hro]

Rajendra K. Pachauri is the (somewhat unwanted and some would say unqualified) Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC’s much vaunted – and daunting, if not positively scary – Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), the first volume of which (or rather, the first wave of Press Releases touting its “objective, transparent and inclusive” Summary for Policy Makers [SPM]), is the contribution of Working Group I (WGI), “The Science”, is due to be (sort of) completed and “approved” in September of this year.

As I had noted in a post two years ago, Pachauri’s 2009 “vision” for AR5 included the following:

Based on an approach that is open, thorough, and scientifically rigorous, the contributions of the IPCC are widely recognized as the authoritative source of scientific information on climate change and as key foundations for negotiations and decisions related to implementing the UNFCCC.
[...]
In addition to being authoritative assessments, the IPCC reports are powerful motivators for research. New research on many of the understanding gaps identified in the AR4 is underway and advancing, with both the scientific community and the world’s governments strongly supportive of a successful next IPCC assessment, the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5).
[...]
Climate change needs to be assessed in the context of sustainable development, and this consideration should pervade the entire report across the three Working Groups.
[...]
T]he IPCC AR5 is being taken in hand at a time when awareness on climate change issues has reached a level unanticipated in the past. Much of this change can be attributed to the findings of the AR4 which have been disseminated actively through a conscious effort by the IPCC, its partners and most importantly the media. Expectations are, therefore, at an all time high as far as the AR5 is concerned.

I doubt that anyone would dispute Pachauri’s contention that the IPCC reports are “powerful motivators for research” – although in doing so, this “motivator” appears to have given “research” a bad name! But I digress …

In the interim, the IPCC (and its “main client“, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC]) has had more than a few setbacks. Not the least of which was Climategate; as Fred Pearce had noted in December 2009:

I have been speaking to a PR operator for one of the world’s leading environmental organizations. Most unusually, he didn’t want to be quoted. But his message is clear. The facts of the e-mails barely matter any more. It has always been hard to persuade the public that invisible gases could somehow warm the planet, and that they had to make sacrifices to prevent that from happening. It seemed, on the verge of Copenhagen, as if that might be about to be achieved.

But he says all that ended on Nov. 20. “The e-mails represented a seminal moment in the climate debate of the last five years, and it was a moment that broke decisively against us. I think the CRU leak is nothing less than catastrophic.” [emphasis added -hro]

While they have certainly made a valiant attempt to pretend otherwise, it’s difficult to imagine that the IPCC and its inner circle of scientists, activists and water-carrying journalists were not concerned about the 2011 release of a second tranche of emails (CG2) – or by the more recent release of the key to unlock the remaining emails contained in a password-protected file in CG2.

There have been leaks of drafts of various WG reports which the IPCC is powerless to prevent. But perhaps most disappointing of all for an organization which very much depends on visual icons to convey an escalating chorus to accompany each recycling of an “it’s-worse-than-we-thought-we-must-act-now” mantra, it has had to watch as one potential icon after another was shot down in flames of post-peer-review analysis of the statistical gymnastics invariably (and unkosherly) exercised by the papers’ respective authors.

First, Steig et al‘s glorious living colour Nature cover story turned out to be naught but “artifacts” which did nothing to “advance the science” – and was more deserving of a big yawn than the fanfare and attention it had succeeded in garnering.

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)’s well-dressed word-salad that emerged from last year’s Rio+20 confab, pretty well sidelined the IPCC in favour of what was no doubt deemed to be a more “sustainable” sibling, the IPBES which has been waiting patiently in the wings for a few years now.

Australia’s Joelle Gergis (another in a long line of activist scientists) and her colleagues did their best to resurrect Michael Mann’s notorious hockey-stick. The madness in their methodology evidently failed them.

Marcott et al‘s attempted hockey-stick extension didn’t work out either – unless the IPCC is prepared to accept over-hyped Press Release headlines (endorsed by the U.K. Met Office for two full months) as suitable “evidence”.

PAGES 2K was another of those just-in-time submissions of potential iconic value, that if the IPCC has developed any respect for its audience it will ignore (but I’m not counting on that!)

Oh, and yet another icon of the doom and gloomers, the polar bears are doing just fine, thank you very much.

But meanwhile, back at the ranch, a “jewel in the crown, of British science and global science” (aka the U.K. Met Office), and a self-declared mainstay of the IPCC, appears to have backed itself into a rather uncomfortable corner.

During the past seventeen years, it has become quite evident that the projections (and predictions) of the climate modellers have failed to accord with reality. This has not been helped by the failure of Mother Nature to cooperate with the weather forecasting provided by the Met Office (using the same unreliable models and high-priced computer power). In fact, the Met Office has become so, well, alarmed that according to the U.K. Guardian‘s Leo Hickman (not the most reliable of sources, I agree) they have decided to convene a one-day workshop:

Met Office brainstorms UK bad weather

Climate scientists and meteorologists are meeting next week to debate the causes of UK’s disappointing weather in recent years

Washout summers. Flash floods. Freezing winters. Snow in May. Droughts. There is a growing sense that something is happening to our weather. But is it simply down to natural variability, or is climate change to blame?

To try to answer the question the Met Office is hosting an unprecedented meeting of climate scientists and meteorologists next week to debate the possible causes of the UK’s “disappointing” weather over recent years, the Guardian has learned.

Tuesday’s meeting at the forecaster’s HQ in Exeter is being convened in response to this year’s cool spring, which, according to official records, was the coldest in 50 years. [emphasis added -hro]

UPDATE 06/17/2013:

A twitter conversation with Richard Betts and others, in which I had indicated that I would update this post accordingly, resulted in confirmation (albeit quite silent!) of my view that Hickman is not the most reliable of sources:

@richardabetts @omnologos @clim8resistance @TheGWPF So mtg not "unprecedented", nor *about* "disappointing weather" nor *about* cc vs nv.>>—
Hilary Ostrov (@hro001) June 16, 2013

@richardabetts @omnologos @clim8resistance @TheGWPF >In short, Hickman's kinder, gentler hype was wrong – again. And from yr earlier T's >>—
Hilary Ostrov (@hro001) June 16, 2013

 

[End update]

The world waits with bated breath for the outcome of this “unprecedented meeting”. Will these “experts” be able to conjure up a new, improved icon for the IPCC?! A mirabile dictu “statement” that will rescue the IPCC from its quandary? Who knows, eh?!

Then again, perhaps this workshop is an attempt to bolster the claims of the Met Office in its April 2013 submission of “evidence” (pdf) to a forthcoming hearing of the U.K. parliament’s Science & Technology Committee, Select Committee which is holding an inquiry into “Climate: Public understanding and policy implications”

In their evidence, a 2,000+ word submission, “trust” is mentioned no less than thirteen times, and the context in each instance is self-declared “trust” in the Met Office – and/or in the IPCC.

One of the questions asked by the Select Committee was:

Which voices are trusted in public discourse on climate science and policy? What role should Government Departments, scientific advisers to Government and publicly funded scientists have in communicating climate science?

The Met Office responses included the following (all emphases in quoted text below are mine -hro):

The availability of objective science interpretation from a trusted, authoritative and transparent source is crucial to ensure that confusion about the science is dispelled, questions are answered and erroneous reporting is identified as such by the public and can be challenged.

I’m not sure how “trusted, authoritative and transparent” a source the Met Office might be if it takes two full months and three iterations of text to remove an erroneous and highly misleading title from a blog post. But, YMMV.

Transparent and open scrutiny of science, both within the formal peer-review process and by wider audiences, allows real progress in understanding to be made, and advice to be given – whether to policy makers or in wider communications. This independence and transparency is essential for confidence to be maintained in public scientists and institutions such as the Met Office and the Met Office Hadley Centre. Indeed, impartiality is consistently cited as a key driver behind the responses of “trust a lot” in a quarterly survey by the Met Office to measure levels of public trust.

No doubt it was in the interest of “transparent and open scrutiny of science” that the Met Office has refused David Holland’s request for details of the IPCC’s zero-order draft – or to even permit the appropriate official to participate in the tribunal hearing. Again, YMMV, but I cannot say that I would be inclined to “trust” even a little (let alone “a lot”) an organization which demonstrates its commitment to “transparent and open scrutiny” in such a manner.

As for the trusted ties that bind the “independent” and “impartial” Met Office and the IPCC, the Met Office declared:

9. Policy makers, decision makers and the public at large need access to a trusted source for the latest scientific advice on climate change. The World Meteorological Organization under the auspices of the UN therefore set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. The UK followed closely in setting up the Met Office Hadley Centre to focus on policy relevant science developing its own climate models and using these and those from other institutions to produce projections of future climate.

10. The IPCC has a role in communicating climate science findings. It reports roughly every 5 years on the latest science relevant to policy associated with the physical science, the impacts of climate change and economic and technology implications. The UK led working groups in 4 out of the 5 IPCC Assessment reports, with technical support units being hosted at the Met Office Hadley Centre. The UK also makes a significant contribution to the IPCC providing a large number of lead and convening authors as well as contributing authors. The IPCC Assessment reports form the basis of climate change negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and of policy development in the UK. The reports are publicly available on the web (and in printed form) together with review comments and the response of authors. Climate science is therefore unique in science in having a single trusted source for the latest policy relevant science.

11. Communication is developed from this for specific audiences and for the public. The scientists and institutions that contribute to IPCC (including the Met Office) update their science and related communication between reports so that there is access to the latest science.

Amazing, eh?! And the beat goes on. As Donna Laframboise noted in a recent post, in the spirit of “transparency” there will be yet another IPCC gathering behind closed doors (this time in Sweden) in September to negotiate and “approve” the text of the SPM for WG1′s contribution to AR5.

The process, evidently, is the same as that which was followed in the “approval” of the SPM of the Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRREN).

So the “line by line” negotiation and “approval” of the text of the Summary for Policymakers derived from “The Science” compiled by WGI will be conducted not by “all the governments of the world” – but only by those “national delegations” who might accept the invitation to participate in the proceedings of the “12th Session of the Working Group I (23 – 26 September 2013)” which will precede the “Thirty-Sixth Session of the IPCC (26 September 2013) at which the “Provisional Agenda” indicates:

3. ACCEPTANCE OF THE ACTIONS TAKEN AT THE TWELFTH SESSION OF WORKING GROUP I

IOW, the IPCC Plenary will rubber-stamp whatever was decided during the previous four days – by whichever “national delegations” might have attended. The next two items on this “Provisional Agenda” for the IPCC Plenary, btw, are the important stuff in which the delegations from the “governments of the world” might (or might not) have some independent unscripted input – and conduct some actual decision making activities:

4. OTHER BUSINESS
5. TIME AND PLACE OF THE NEXT SESSION

Donna noted in her post:

[The SPM] is supposed to be a summary of the contents of Part 1 of the forthcoming IPCC assessment (the previous assessment was released in 2007). Authored by the IPCC’s Working Group 1, this is the portion of the report that concentrates on hard science. This is the place in which the IPCC is supposed to answer the question: What does the most reliable climate research tell us is happening?

Considering that the Co-Chair of WG1 is Thomas Stocker, I’m inclined to suspect that much of the “political” (i.e. green) paint-job on this SPM will have been completed long before it is subjected to any line by line “approval” at this four-day session of WGI. Stocker has previously declared that the planet would be better off if gas prices tripled or quadrupled. He was also a key person in “disappearing” the “rule” that non-peer-reviewed material should be flagged in the references.

So, Pachauri’s great expectations for AR5 in 2009 may well be realized. A brigade of psycho-babblers, such as Stephan Lewandowsky and his sidekick protégé John Cook, has certainly been doing its best to bolster support for his “vision” with their own statistical gymnastics and bogus “surveys” intended to tarnish skeptics.

But the reality in 2013 is … more and more people are recognizing that, as Walter Russell Mead noted, the wheels are falling off the policies driven by “The Science” of the IPCC. In short, Pachauri’s “vision” is simply not … sustainable!

CBC continues to flog IPCC-nik Andrew Weaver’s mythical “Nobel” laurel

As I have documented (here, here and here) previously, during – and after – IPCC-nik, Andrew <we are the vote> Weaver’s campaign as a Green party candidate for election to the British Columbia provincial legislature, Canada’s taxpayer funded national broadcaster, the CBC, has been one of his greatest cheerleaders.

Their “reporters” repeatedly made the false claim that deep-green-heart-on-sleeve Weaver is a Nobel award-winning scientist. He is also very much an alarmist-activist who cannot by any stretch of the imagination (or the English language) be considered to possess the “objectivity” required of an IPCC Lead Author.

On April 25, 2013 Weaver was among the first of many who “endorsed” the over-the-top alarmism cobbled together by the grandiosely named “Millennium Alliance for Humanity & the Biosphere” (MAHB), as noted in my post, a few days ago. Whether or not Weaver and/or any of his co-endorsers had actually read the text of this “Statement” is an open question.

The endorsements of the first 16 signatories were dated April 23; three more signed on April 24, and Weaver and his fellow non-Nobel award winning climate modeller, Michael Mann, were among the 54 whose “endorsements” are dated April 25.

Strangely, Weaver – many of whose mundane tweets since October 2012 – might have been better left on the cutting-room floor – did not choose to let his “approved” followers and groupies know about this endorsement. Oh, well, perhaps he was too busy basking in the afterglow of his April 24 performance for CBC’s The National:

But I digress … back to the CBC’s myth-making endeavours in support of BC’s Mr. GreenDreams, aka Andrew Weaver.

Not content with having featured him in such a glowing light during the election campaign, following the election on May 14, the powers that be at the CBC (for reasons perhaps best known only to themselves) decided to send Jian Ghomeshi – whose radio program Q is heard every weekday morning – on a “special” (i.e. for all intents and purposes, previously unannounced) mission to Victoria on May 22. To the surprise of all, Andrew Weaver was among the featured interviewees on this program, broadcast on May 24 – and if the audience applause is anything to go by, it sounds like it was very well-stacked with Weaver groupies.

If one were feeling charitable, one might forgive Weaver for the CBC’s previous repeated false assertion to the effect that Weaver is a “Nobel award winning scientist”. However, there is absolutely no excuse for his failure to correct Ghomeshi’s recitation of this laurel on which Weaver knows he has no right to rest – even if Ghomeshi’s research is so shoddy that he does not.

But don’t take my word for this, you can hear it for yourself. Ghomeshi’s intro of the Weaver segment begins at 0:12:37

http://www.cbc.ca/q/popupaudio.html?clipIds=2387316677

WWF-Russia rolls out scare-machine in advance of IPCC’s AR5

Last December, on the heels of a pronouncement from former United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) head honcho, Yvo de Boer, I had asked the question: Where’s the scare in AR5? The UNFCCC is the “main client” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

de Boer had told an Australian newspaper that:

his conversations with scientists working on the next report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested the findings would be shocking.

“That report is going to scare the wits out of everyone,” Mr de Boer said in the only scheduled interview of his visit to Australia. “I’m confident those scientific findings will create new political momentum.”

This wasn’t quite the equivalent of Andrew <we are the vote> Weaver’s 2007 “barrage of intergalactic ballistic missiles“, but it was close.

As far as I know, de Boer declined to answer the question. And in the meantime, the dedicated alarmists have been doing their best to pretend that the mounting evidence of failed projections of IPCC reports past doesn’t matter – and they seem unable to meet the challenge of coming to grips with the almost daily collapse of yet another of their Big Green Dreams.

I don’t know if there’s any rivalry between Greenpeace (for whom Weaver might well be considered a PR agent), and WWF; but if the claims of Alexei Kokorin, head of WWF-Russia are to be believed, one might conclude that Korkorin Kokorin has actually surpassed Weaver in the over-the-top Big Scares ‘R Us department.

There’s a Norwegian NGO (that I’d never heard of before) called Bellona. Someone from Bellona interviewed Kokorin [h/t GWPF]. To my ears this sounds an awful lot like “next chorus, next verse, a little bit louder and a whole lot worse”:

Climate experts to announce global climate time bomb will go off by 2040, says WWF’s Kokorin

MOSCOW –The upcoming fifth climate change report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is believed to reveal new, and gruesome, scientific data: Natural and anthropogenic factors contributing to global climate change will escalate in the 2040s, causing ever more devastating effects on the planet. The “climate time bomb” is set to go off – unless humankind does something about it.

Andrei Ozharovsky, 21/05-2013 – Translated by Maria Kaminskaya

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading international body for the assessment of climate change, is working toward a future release of its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), due for finalization in 2014. Compared with previous reports, the IPCC site says, “the AR5 will put greater emphasis on assessing the socio-economic aspects of climate change and implications for sustainable development, risk management and the framing of a response through both adaptation and mitigation.” Last week, the report was sent out from Geneva for closed-access perusal by the governments of the IPCC member states.

[...]

The climate time bomb

Bellona: Can we speculate as to what will be said in this report?

Alexei Kokorin: The main thing that is expected to be there is data saying that the climate “time bomb” may blow up sometime around 2040. Whereas earlier it was believed that man’s impact on the climate was gradual, and that the situation was deteriorating in a gradual way, now – in contrast to the previous report, which was being put together seven years ago – much more information has been obtained on ocean cycles and other natural fluctuations. Scientists have realized that today, in the 2010s, man’s impact is being mitigated by natural cycles that are offsetting the impact made on the climate by man. This situation will hold for about another twenty years. But it is completely clear that after that, this mitigation will yield to escalation.

We are having a sort of a breather now, but soon enough, we’ll see an onslaught of both – both natural and man-made processes that are causing the rise in temperature.

And temperature will surge dramatically. Yes, temperature rise will then slow down again, sometime in the 2070s, but it will soar up again after that. Understanding this is what makes this new knowledge principally different from what was known seven years ago.

A “respite given by nature”: a lucky break to turn the crisis around

Bellona: What must be done in this situation?

Alexei Kokorin: When you’re told that in the past fifteen years, the temperature of surface air on the planet has not been rising, this should not in any way be construed as proof that humankind’s impact on the climate has ceased. Scientists know it hasn’t. They know it’s because of how natural fluctuations are superimposed on the impact made by man. This is just a respite that nature gave us. And we must use this respite not for wishful thinking and inaction, but for reducing emissions, because after this respite, a double effect will ensue. [emphasis added -hro]

I suppose it’s possible that Kokorin was not quite as alarmist in his responses as “direct action” activist Bellona’s report indicates – and/or that nuance got lost in translation.

When the Second Order Draft of Working Group I (WGI)’s report was leaked last year, as I had noted in my post, Dr. Judith Curry had remarked that:

“The extreme overconfidence of many of their conclusions is bewildering”

One would think that – particularly in light of the InterAcademy Council’s recommendations – the IPCC might have at least learned one lesson. And, who knows, perhaps they have. If Kokorin’s claims are actually found in the report, it will certainly be interesting to read the Lead Authors’:

traceable account of the steps used to arrive at estimates of uncertainty or confidence for key findings.

Then again, perhaps this will turn out to be a false alarm from Kokorin whose “speculations” may well be nothing more than echoes and embellishments of de Boer’s.

Oh, well … time will tell;-)

CBC honks for IPCC-nik Andrew Weaver AND censors comments

In my previous post of May 8, I had posed the question: CBC censoring again – or honking for IPCC’s Andrew Weaver?

And I believe that the CBC has now provided the answer. Well, actually wrt the “honking” this was provided sooner than I had thought – and broadcast on National TV (h/t Alex Cull in his comment).

Alex’s link is to a segment of the April 28 National News. Here’s a screen capture from that segment:

The adulation and glorification inherent in Wendy Mesley’s introduction (with the following long-lingering image in the background):

before the cutaway to the main event of Chris Brown’s report, included a statement that the BC Greens are turning to “star power“. And we all know how very impressed the CBC is with green “star power”! Check out today’s Sunday Edition on CBC radio. which includes a 30+ minute segment with hypocrite-extraordinare, Al Gore who’s currently flogging his latest fact-free predictions of doom and gloom (not to mention bad-mouthing Canada’s oil-sands deposits, which no doubt delighted Weaver!) But I digress …

In his April 28 “report”, Brown reinforced (by accident or design) Mesley’s intro. He described Weaver as a “climate change superstar“. And – for reasons perhaps best-known only to himself, to Weaver and to the cameraman (if not the CBC editor(s) who scrupulously vet all stories before they go on air) – provided viewers with yet another glimpse of Weaver as “Nobel-award winning” scientist:

I didn’t count how many seconds the camera lingered on the above before panning down to:

[Sidebar: A funny thing happened on the way to capturing the Mesley-Weaver image above. You will notice that the other three images (which I had captured yesterday) are ... uh ... framed by the red banner "CBC Television" above - and by a "footer" which indicated that this was from the April 28, 2013 3:17 segment of  The National, followed by:

Green Weaver

Global warming expert Andrew Weaver is running for the Green Party in the upcoming provincial elections in B.C.

Yet when I went back earlier today to capture the Mesley-Weaver medley, the banner and footer were nowhere in sight! Now this certainly wouldn't be the first time that the CBC has engaged in undated and undocumented now-you-see-it-now-you-don't posting behaviour, as Morley Sutter has noted in a comment on my previous post. But it is somewhat odd, don't you think?! End Sidebar]

How strange that the CBC seems incapable of basic fact-checking regarding Weaver’s unearned “Nobel” laurels. As Donna Laframboise had reported last October:

The facts are as follows: Weaver is merely one among thousands of scientists who contributed their time to the preparation of IPCC reports over the past two decades. The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Al Gore and to the IPCC. The IPCC is an intergovernmental body. Its membership consists of nations – not individuals.

Weaver’s Nobel claim is spin. Self-aggrandizing, inaccurate, misleading spin.

See also Laframboise’s follow-up post in which she provides photographic evidence of Weaver’s bobbing and weaving around his unearned “Nobel-winning” laurels:

Last October when he announced his “reluctant” [see below!] candidacy, Lavin Agency’s bio of Weaver was headlined as follows:

Lead Climate Scientist & Co-winner of Nobel Peace Prize

By January of this year, this billing had … uh … evolved to:

Lead Climate Scientist & Member of Nobel Peace Prize-winning Panel

But this new improved billing is an instance of Weaver engaging in “Self-aggrandizing, inaccurate, misleading spin”.

If he had any commitment towards truth in self-advertising, rather than puffing up his image with such unsustainable claims as:

“his groundbreaking work in the field – in the trenches – of climate science [and that he is one who has] re-energized a new generation of discussions on climate change and sustainability”

Weaver would have acknowledged that the “trenches” in which he works are primarily high-priced computer simulations. He would further have acknowledged that his “new generation of discussions” includes slamming the virtual door in the face of those who dare to question his claims and assertions, or who might not agree with his prescriptions for what he calls “the action we need”.

And speaking of Weaver’s “Self-aggrandizing, inaccurate, misleading spin” consider the following excerpts from Weaver’s recent exercise in Huff-Po self-puffery:

Andrew Weaver.Professor and Canada Research Chair, University of Victoria

I Joined the Green Party Because I’m a Scientist

Posted: 05/08/2013 11:43

[...] I guess, despite being a climate scientist whose work is recognized around the world, according to Megan Leslie, that means I am not concerned about climate action.

The reason I joined the Green Party of BC was not because I was yearning for power, or willing to parse the truth and join in the hyper-partisan spin of the major parties. I joined the Green Party because it is the only party to consistently support climate action — carbon pricing, an end to fossil fuel subsidies, aggressive efforts in energy efficiency and demand-side management and the steady expansion of renewable and green energy. These steps would improve our economic performance, create tens of thousands of new jobs across Canada, while preserving a sustainable world for our children.

The only time a major party was willing to call for a tax shift, to reduce income taxes and increase pollution taxes, was in 2008 under Stephane Dion’s Liberal leadership. [...]

What Canadian politics needs is a party that is more interested in respectful debate and dialogue, in pressing for climate action as a daily commitment, than parties that swing with the winds of political expediency.

I never imagined I would be a candidate for any party. As a scientist, I am way outside my comfort zone. But when I look at my children and imagine what their future will be if we continue with politics as usual, I realized I could no longer sit on the sidelines.

The decisions being made in Victoria and Ottawa are too important to be left to the politicians. [...]

Greens understand we will not be forming government any time soon. But we equally believe it is critical to have representatives in our legislatures who will support other parties when they have a good idea, criticize those who twist the truth, condemn those who block action, and work to promote cooperative, positive decisions to reduce greenhouse gases. Let’s stop pointing fingers and work together to get the action we need. [emphasis added -hro]

Well, I suppose his current claim that he “joined the Green Party because [he's] a scientist is somewhat consistent with his telling CBC’s Brown that his decision to “engage” in the political process because he believes that it’s the “final thing a scientist can do”. But, to my mind, this is considerably at odds with his earlier claim that he has “a passion for politics“.

Indeed, some might ask: was he lying then, or is he lying now? But I couldn’t possibly comment!

As for Weaver’s singing the praises of Stephane Dion’s “green shift” platform … perhaps he has (conveniently?) forgotten that Canadian voters resoundingly rejected Dion’s green dreams. Then again … considering his claim during his prime-time-live April 28 CBC interview, that fellow greenie and Federal MP, Elizabeth May, has far more “influence than 100 backbenchers” perhaps Weaver doesn’t really give a damn what Canadian voters might think – or how they might have chosen.

And please spare us this ludicrous appeal for “respectful debate and dialogue”. Unless Weaver and/or one of his fans would care to tell us what exactly is “respectful” about his rants against PM Stephen Harper, as noted in the Apr. 28 video and in a Nov. 2010 Victoria Times-Colonist interview which I had documented here:

The UVic climatologist, sputtering words like “unbelievable” and “dictator” and “shocking affront to democracy,” says he hopes the opposition will force Harper’s minority government to fall. “He’s got to get kicked out. This is Canada, not Zimbabwe . . . or maybe it is.

In that November 2010 post, I had concluded by observing:

Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to Weaver that he needs to make a choice: Does he want to be known as a thoughtful, respected scientist or an incoherent environmental activist/advocate who is only capable of mindlessly mouthing echoes of Michael Mann’s mantras?

It would seem that in the interim, Weaver has definitely opted for the latter. Ironically, shortly after Weaver first launched his campaign last October (long before he slammed the virtual door in my face!) when I had asked him via twitter [see my Update to this post] to give me one good reason that I should tell my friends in his riding, Oak Bay-Gordon Head, to vote for him, Weaver had responded:

Ensure evidence forms the basis decision-making rather than decisions forming the basis of evidence-making

Wow! What a slogan, eh?! Too bad that all the evidence to date, strongly indicates that for Weaver, his “decisions” as to what the Province (if not the country!) needs – as embodied in his litany of policy prescriptions and dutiful recitation of the latest and greatest scary stories (not the least of which are his rapidly escalating extinction fictions) – have no basis in empirical evidence. Regardless of what his computer-simulations “in the trenches” might show.

So, I can only suggest to my friends in Oak Bay-Gordon Head … Do be very careful out there when you’re casting your vote on May 14.

As for the CBC’s comment-censoring practices … I believe that the evidence is now in: Yes, they do censor comments for no valid reason.

But – before I write to the Ombudsman, regarding their failure to correct the false claim that Weaver is a “Nobel-winning” scientist – I would invite a representative of the CBC to provide me with chapter and verse of their Submission Guidelines in accordance with which the “moderator” was acting (and which I must have “violated”) when rejecting my post, repost and subsequent comment, as I had documented in my previous post, and updates thereto.

PAGES2K’s Progress and NatureGeoSci‘s peer-review lite

No research paper can ever be considered to be the final word, and the replication and corroboration of research results is key to the scientific process. In studying complex entities, especially animals and human beings, the complexity of the system and of the techniques can all too easily lead to results that seem robust in the lab, and valid to editors and referees of journals, but which do not stand the test of further studies. Nature has published a series of articles about the worrying extent to which research results have been found wanting in this respect. The editors of Nature and the Nature life sciences research journals have also taken substantive steps to put our own houses in order, in improving the transparency and robustness of what we publish. Journals, research laboratories and institutions and funders all have an interest in tackling issues of irreproducibility. We hope that the articles contained in this collection will help. [emphasis added -hro]

CHALLENGES IN IRREPRODUCIBLE RESEARCH

It is certainly not entirely clear from the above whether or not the Nature Group’s climate science related journals fall (perhaps conveniently?!) outside this new, improved umbrella. The absence of any mention of the “complex system” known as “climate” suggests that it will continue to be given an exemption from such enhanced scrutiny.

When one considers all that has come to light since Climategate in November, 2009, it is somewhat of an understatement to suggest that Nature‘s pattern and practice wrt the “transparency and robustness” of the climate science they publish – along with that of Science – is not a record of which either could or should be proud.

Which brings me to some facts that came to light during the discussion on my recent post.

Readers will recall that my post was precipitated, in part, by a tweet I had spotted from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Lead Author and U.K. Met Office’s head of “climate impacts”, Richard Betts. The implicit content of Bett’s text (i.e. the subtext) found in his brief … uh … assessment strongly suggested that Betts had failed to see that which was in black and white in front of his very eyes.

According to Betts, Steve McIntyre had evidently committed the unforgivable sin of (… wait for it! …) speculation. Here (again) is the text of Betts’ tweet:

Steve McIntyre’s comment about “pressure” on Nature to accept PAGES2K seems to be entirely speculation.

Here’s McIntyre’s apparently sinful text:

The PAGES2K article has its own interesting backstory. The made-for-IPCC article was submitted to Science last July on deadline eve, thereby permitting its use in the Second Draft, where it sourced a major regional paleo reconstruction graphic. The PAGES2K submission used (in a check-kited version) the Gergis reconstruction, which it cited as being “under revision” though, at the time, it had been disappeared.

The PAGES2K submission to Science appears to have been rejected as it has never appeared in Science and a corresponding article is scheduled for publication by Nature. It sounds like there is an interesting backstory here: one presumes that IPCC would have been annoyed by Science’s failure to publish the article and that there must have been considerable pressure on Nature to accept the article. Nature appears to have accepted the PAGES2K article only on IPCC deadline eve.

So, far from being the revelation Betts had implied, McIntyre had made it quite clear that he was “speculating” – well, clear at least to one who chooses to read rather than “skim” before commenting.

McIntyre dropped by this (usually very) quiet little corner of the blogosphere, to clarify his initial observations for Betts’ edification. His comment included:

One reasonable review response might well have been that the authors should publish their regional reconstructions in specialist journals. And that the authors should publish a detailed analysis of the methodologies in a specialist journal. It seems entirely possible that Science might have taken that position in rejecting the article.

Without the looming IPCC deadline and the prominent use of PAGES2K results by IPCC, I believe that it is entirely reasonable that Nature would have taken a similar position (to my interpretation of Science) and told the authors to split the article up into manageable review pieces. Do I believe that Nature recognized the need for very rapid acceptance and selected reviewers who also recognized the problem? Yes.

Without a set of quality control standards for academic peer review, it is impossible to say whether this process met or did not meet standards. I therefore am not moralizing about whether something was “amiss” in this case. However, I recommend that readers should not presume that the journal peer review constituted serious due diligence of the PAGES2K article.

Richard Betts’ implied that it was somehow “unhealthy” to point this out. I disagree. [emphasis added -hro]

Betts may well have missed this during the course of his daily skim, because he did not respond. His (presumed) friend, fellow scientist Oliver Bothe – known as @geschichtenpost on twitter – did respond, as he subsequently announced to his twitter followers:

Come to work, get DM on twitter, lose nearly three hours of work time. Argh. Well, da code does da work. replied to
http://hro001.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/questions-for-a-jewel-in-the-crown-of-u-k-and-global-science/
…

Some might <<gasp>> speculate that there is some connection between the DM [DM = Direct Message, i.e. a private message via twitter], the nearly three hours lost and Bothe’s (quite lengthy) response to McIntyre’s comment noted above. But I couldn’t possibly comment. Bothe began his reply as follows:

To start, yes I am generally unhappy with Steve McIntyre’s speculative tone that to me often implies the accusation of scientific misconduct or corruption of peer review where to me everything is in the scope of peer review (not only in climate science but in science generally). I would like to see his post-publication review submitted as comments to journals and I would appreciate if the journals would consider him as reviewer for reconstruction and proxy-papers.

What Bothe may not realize is that, in this instance, the timing is such that even if McIntyre were inclined to submit his post-publication review as a comment to one or more journals [h/t Jonathan Jones via Bishop Hill], the IPCC “rules” are such that his comments can be ignored, just as they can (according to the IPCC’s new, improved “rules”) when posted on a blog.

Bothe noted (inter alia):

On Steve McIntyre’s comment on peer review in general. Yes, I think he’s right there. But the definition of peer-review is not a priori to try to replicate the results. Maybe Paul Matthews can comment whether mathematical peer review tries to follow each step in a paper and Jonathan Jones may comment on how this is done in the physical sub-fields he’s involved in. The task to ensure the possibility of replication lies with the author. The reviewer highlights gaps. At least that’s my impression. Should that be changed? No. The replication of results is part of the post-publication evaluation and failure to do so should be communicated in comments and possibly lead to retractions or corrections.

Put differently: The authors have to describe their methods so well that an informed reader can replicate their results with her prior knowledge and access to the data. Ideally the authors provide their code (well that should be requested). The reviewers have to check that the description allows the informed reader this replication.

So I am sure that the paper was subject to peer review as tense as average in science. Could it be more thorough. I would say peer-review can always be more detailed.

To my mind, while I don’t disagree with Bothe, is it not then the case that the IPCC’s past (although one hopes not future) claims of reliance on “all peer reviewed literature”, in addition to being false, fails to take into account this built-in deficiency in both the peer review process and the IPCC process – not to mention the myth of the glory, sanctity and superiority of “peer review” as the be-all and end-all of valid “science”?

Bothe had also written:

[In response to McIntyre's:]

One reasonable review response might well have been that the authors should publish their regional reconstructions in specialist journals. And that the authors should publish a detailed analysis of the methodologies in a specialist journal. It seems entirely possible that Science might have taken that position in rejecting the article.

To add speculation to speculation. I assume that the consortium asked Science whether they would be interested before formal submission. That’s common and even encouraged by the glamour-journals. And I can say that the idea was, in principle, to publish the reconstructions in specialist journals and to submit this synthesis paper to one of the “Letter”-journals.

OK, I think I get it, now. Bothe’s presumptions, assumptions and speculations (and, presumably, those of Betts) are kosher; but those of McIntyre – for some reason perhaps best known only to themselves – are not.

Nonetheless, in light of Bothe’s “submit this synthesis paper to one of the ‘Letter’-journals”, I do wonder if Nature Geo-Science is deemed to be a “Letter”-journal and is therefore somewhat lower on the academic publish-or-perish-but-let’s-be- sure-we-meet-IPCC-sweepstakes-deadline totem-pole than others in the Nature and/or Science respective (but, nowadays, decreasingly respected) family of publications.

Moving right along …

[McIntyre had also written:]

Without the looming IPCC deadline and the prominent use of PAGES2K results by IPCC, I believe that it is entirely reasonable that Nature would have taken a similar position (to my interpretation of Science) and told the authors to split the article up into manageable review pieces. Do I believe that Nature recognized the need for very rapid acceptance and selected reviewers who also recognized the problem? Yes.

[To which Bothe had responded:]

Again speculation to speculation. I think the synthesis provided by the PAGES2K consortium perfectly fits the scope of a progress-article in Nature Geoscience. McIntyre’s last question has to be answered with yes, but do I think that prevented a thorough peer review? No. See list of possible alternatives above. [emphasis added -hro]

A few days later, McIntyre responded to Bothe. His reply included the following:

Dr Bothe’s comment about a “Progress Article” was an interesting one. He said: “I think the synthesis provided by the PAGES2K consortium perfectly fits the scope of a progress-article in Nature Geoscience.”

I confess that I had not previously paid note to the fact the PAGES2K article was published as a “Progress Article”, rather than a research article. Nor indeed had I been previously aware of the differences between the two in academic terms. However, given Dr Bothe’s belief that PAGES2K “perfectly fits” the definition of a “Progress Article”, here is Nature’s policy on Progress Articles
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/authors/content_types.html

When the discussion is focused on a developing field that might not yet be mature enough for review, a Progress article is more appropriate. Progress articles are up to 2,000 words in length, with up to 4 display items (figures, tables or boxes). References are limited to 50. Reviews and Progress articles are commissioned by the editors, but proposals including a short synopsis are welcome.

Reviews and Progress articles are always peer-reviewed to ensure factual accuracy, appropriate citations and scholarly balance. They do not include received/accepted dates.

Curiously, although the Policy states that Progress Articles “do not include received/accepted dates”, Nature Geoscience, in apparent violation of this policy, stated that the the PAGES2K article was “Received 9 December 2012; accepted 11 March 2013; published online 21 April 2013″. Reasonable people may differ on why Nature Geoscience violated this particular policy, but I presume that they wished to demonstrate that the article had been “accepted” prior to the IPCC deadline of March 15. (It is also possible that Nature doesn’t actually observe the stated policy.) [emphasis added -hro]

As McIntyre subsequently noted, “… Nature has disregarded its policy on Received/accepted dates on Progress Articles on other non-climate related occasions.”

However, this was not the only part of the Progress Article policy (and/or practice) that Nature Geoscience appears to have waived in this instance. Yes, the number of references is exactly 50 – and by my count there are only 4 display items.

But the word count is a completely different kettle of fish! At 3,617 (including the 167 word abstract, but excluding all headings and narratives included in the 4 display items), this significantly exceeds the 2,000 word limit for a Progress Article.

And it looks as though the answer to my earlier question to Richard Betts:

Or do you have any evidence that this presumed “*extra* care” included the due diligence required? IOW, did the review include any objective examination of the underlying data and methodologies by reviewers whose understanding of (and expertise in) statistics matches that of Steve and/or other contributors to Climate Audit?

a question that he did not answer in his reply, btw, is – in all likelihood and with a high level of confidence (by IPCC standards) – a definite “No”, he has no such evidence. Nor is there any evidence of his presumed “*extra* care”.

Consequently, my vote on the validity of various parties’ respective speculations, presumptions and assumptions goes to McIntyre, who had concluded his response to Bothe as follows:

Dr Bothe said that PAGES2K “perfectly fit” the definition, a definition which recommends Progress Articles for “a developing field that might not yet be mature enough for review”. I’m surprised to learn that this is Dr Bothe’s position. My own position is that the field is “mature enough for review” and that PAGES2K therefore did not qualify for the lesser due diligence of a Progress Article – particularly when it was known that IPCC planned to use it.

Now that Dr Bothe has drawn attention to the curious fact that PAGES2K was published as a “Progress Article”, I think that it is entirely possible that one or more of the Nature reviewers, like the Science reviewers, may have recognized the impossibility of careful review of seven reconstructions using multiple methods and that someone therefore had the bright idea of circumventing the problem by labeling PAGES2K as a “Progress Article”, thereby lessening the review burden. Speculation on my part, but perhaps Dr Bothe can ask the authors whether my speculation is correct.

I had closed my earlier comment with the observation “I recommend that readers should not presume that the journal peer review constituted serious due diligence of the PAGES2K article.” Given that Dr Bothe has pointed out that the PAGES2K was merely published as a “Progress Article”, the recommendation seems even more appropriate. [emphasis added -hro]

Has either Betts or Bothe had the courtesy to respond to McIntyre’s reply to Bothe? Not bloomin’ likely!

I’ve no way of knowing whether Bothe has even returned to the thread in the interim. Who knows, perhaps he’s received another DM that is keeping him somewhat preoccupied. Betts, OTOH, seemed to think it was far more important to justify his depiction of McIntyre as “tenacious”. It was evidently my fault for suggesting that the logical solution to the editors’ dilemma would have been to invite McIntyre to be a reviewer. Betts had concurred with my suggestion but then proceeded to … uh … speculate as to why they had not followed this logical path of least resistance. Go figure, eh?!

This is a slight improvement over divergence from Betts’ previous speculation via twitter:

Steve has scientific disagreements, but clearly the reviewers didn’t share those views.

In light of all of the above, it seems to me that whatever their “views” might have been, the reviewers were far from being on the same … uh … page as Steve; i.e. they weren’t even examining that which he has been analyzing. But I digress …

Following a few more tweeted questions and speculations all around, I had eventually responded to Betts:

Hmmm … so review(s) we will never see trump one that we can. [...]

EPILOGUE:

In the meantime, McIntyre has identified additional flaws in the statistical underbelly of PAGES2K. However, a few hours ago, Paul Matthews reported, via Climate Audit:

Nature Geoscience has just announced a ‘Journal Club’, involving a live discussion of the PAGES2k paper on Google+ on May 9th.

See their tweets – they are inviting questions.

Also, they say that the PAGES2k is available free to download to anyone from now until May 10th.

Hmmm … I wonder if this is a customary practice for a mere Progress Article?

Oh well … never a dull moment in the climate change game, eh?!

Questions for a “jewel in the crown” of U.K. (and global) science

The Met Office is a jewel in the crown, of British science and global science. As a nation we should be more aware of that, and proud of it, than we are. [...] Your excellence is an asset for British diplomacy, enhancing our soft power leverage on climate change all over the world.

John Ashton, “Climate Change and Politics: Surviving the Collision“
Met Office, Exeter, 11 April 2013

I don’t know whether the U.K. Met Office’s Richard Betts was in the audience or not when E3G’s Ashton, who is “equally at home in the worlds of foreign policy and green politics”, delivered his epic exhortations to the troops at the Met Office on April 11. But I do know that he’s a nice guy; a climate scientist who – unlike his colleague Myles Allen – has sense of humour:

Be sure to visit http://www.cartoonsbyjosh.com

Thanks Josh. Fame at last :-) I’ll print that out and put it over my desk on Monday. Jan 7, 2012 at 12:52 PM | Richard Betts

Betts is also a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s forthcoming 5th Assessment Report (AR5), Working Group II, Chapter 4 (WGII, Ch4). He’s definitely not a newbie to the IPCC process, having served in the same capacity for AR4′s WGI Ch2, and as a Contributing author for WGI’s Ch7 & Ch9 and WGII’s Ch3. Oh, yes, and a stint as an Expert Reviewer of WGI, Ch11.

So I found it somewhat odd, the other day, when I noticed that Betts had chosen to tweet the following:

@etzpcm @mammuthus @thirstygecko Steve McIntyre’s comment about “pressure” on Nature to accept PAGES2K seems to be entirely speculation

I cannot imagine that Betts was oblivious to the history of documented problems that preceded the publication of this just-in-time paper (with no less than 77 co-authors). But he has indicated to me in the past that his preferred mode of reading blogs is to “skim”. Consequently, he may well have missed the full context of Steve McIntyre’s observation:

The PAGES2K article has its own interesting backstory. The made-for-IPCC article was submitted to Science last July on deadline eve, thereby permitting its use in the Second Draft, where it sourced a major regional paleo reconstruction graphic. The PAGES2K submission used (in a check-kited version) the Gergis reconstruction, which it cited as being “under revision” though, at the time, it had been disappeared.

The PAGES2K submission to Science appears to have been rejected as it has never appeared in Science and a corresponding article is scheduled for publication by Nature. It sounds like there is an interesting backstory here: one presumes that IPCC would have been annoyed by Science’s failure to publish the article and that there must have been considerable pressure on Nature to accept the article. Nature appears to have accepted the PAGES2K article only on IPCC deadline eve.

In light of the above, it struck me that Betts’ tweet was “entirely” superfluous and hardly worth mentioning. In my view, it was the least important part of McIntyre’s posts on this paper.

I don’t often engage in “debate” via twitter, because I consider it to be a truncated version of the pre-web Internet Relay Chat, which was always far from conducive to dialogue. But I made a rare exception to my usual mode of lurk ‘n learn, and replied to Betts:

@richardabetts @etzpcm @mammuthus @thirstygecko @geschichtenpost Science rejected; Nature eve of IPCC deadline acceptance pure coincidence?!

To which Betts responded, in what appeared to me to be a total non sequitur:

@hro001 As I asked @etzpcm are you suggesting the review process at @NatureGeosci was not sound? @mammuthus @thirstygecko @geschichtenpost

So I gave my head a shake and replied:

@richardabetts @etzpcm No, but why is this even worth discussing?! “Easy, superficial excuse” to avoid Steve’s *main* points, p’haps?!

Which, evidently, led Betts to conclude:

@hro001 @etzpcm OK that’s good then. It was SM who seemed to query review process, but if it’s not an issue, great!

So, now you know why – for the most part – I view twitter as a considerably less than optimal platform for “dialogue”: The answers one receives quite often bear absolutely no relationship whatsoever to the question(s) one might have asked!

This is not the first series of disconnects I’ve seen emanating from Betts’ keyboard; nor, I suspect, will it be the last! Precision in posting is not what I would call his forté. But I digress …

Not mentioned in Betts’ Met Office bio is that he is also a member of the fairly recently formed “My Climate and Me” team.

If you scroll down the page, you’ll find a post dated March 12, 2013 with an outdated and very misleading title. Here’s a screen capture:

From My Climate and Me April 23, 2013

 

I don’t know how long the original post remained on the site, before they got around to taking it down, but I have yet to see a reasonable explanation from this “jewel in the crown, of British science and global science” as to why:

• they chose to post without examining the so-called “science” on which the press release was based
• they have chosen to leave this clearly alarmist “headline” intact, some six weeks after it was firmly established that it is not supported by the underlying paper

When asked about this Marcott et al paper (of which one of the co-authors just happened to be a fellow AR5 IPCC Lead Author), Betts’ first response [Mar 25, 2013 at 10:44 AM] was:

Don Keiller, Pharos, ZT:

I’m afraid Marcott et al is not a particularly high priority for me. I can see it’s of huge interest to readers of this blog, since it’s about palaeoclimate reconstructions and hockey-stick shapes, but there’s much more to climate science than that. If my aim was to try to convince the public one way or another on whether climate change is an urgent issue or not, then I might be more motivated to read up on it as it clearly is quite pertinent to the public debate there. However, this is not my aim, so Marcott remains merely of academic interest to me. As I say above, I’m more interested in improving the ability to assess the impacts of climate change and variability over the next few years to decades, and an 11,000 year reconstruction does not seem to be especially helpful there. [emphasis added -hro]

I’m not entirely sure how one might hold or maintain a “merely … academic interest” in a paper one has not been “motivated to read up on”. Nor does Betts’ apparent lack of interest in “paleoclimate reconstructions and hockey-stick shapes” quite square with his (relatively) instantaneous flight into the twitterverse with his superfluous “entirely speculation” tweet (about another just-in-time IPCC paper on “paleoclimate reconstructions and hockey-stick shapes”) But what do I know, eh?! I’m not a busy climate scientist!

For the record, when push eventually came to shove, Betts opted to praise with faint damnation [Apr 15, 2013 at 5:27 PM]:

Don

My (non-palaeo expert) view on Marcott is that it is an interesting attempt to reconstruct temperatures over the last 11000 years or so, but its significance has been over-sold. It does not appear to support claims of “unprecedented rates of warming” because the time resolution is too low. [emphasis added -hro]

<Sigh> Much as I dislike sounding like a broken record …

I have yet to see a reasonable explanation from this “jewel in the crown, of British science and global science” as to why:

• they chose to post without examining the so-called “science” on which the press release was based
• they have chosen to leave this clearly alarmist “headline” intact, some six weeks after it was firmly established that it is not supported by the underlying paper

In short, why is this “jewel in the crown, of British science and global science” participating in the passive perpetuation of the “over-selling” of an ‘apparently unsupported claim’ of “unprecedented rates of warming”?

And speaking of the Met Office and participation in the passive perpetuation of overselling hockey-sticks …

There’s another poster, “Marion” in this same thread at Bishop Hill, who had observed [Apr 19, 2013 at 3:22 PM]:

[...] the Met Office [...] produced in October 2009 the booklet entitled “Warming, Climate Change – the Facts” with the super-exaggerated hockey-stick on Page 4.

http://people.virginia.edu/~rtg2t/future/gcc/UK.Met.quick_guide.pdf

Betts’ response [Apr 19, 2013 at 7:31 PM]:

Marion

The brochure you link to is no longer used by the Met Office – it’s not on the website any more (which is why you had to link to a copy kept by elsewhere) and paper copies are no longer distributed. We accepted that there were errors in it, eg. the graph you mention didn’t show the uncertainties properly.

I’m not quite sure what Betts expected readers to do with this response. But I’ll take a wild guess and suggest he was hoping that his response would make this particular issue go away! However, as I subsequently posted …

I hadn’t actually seen this brochure before (although now that I have, I do recall seeing something shorter but similar on the Met Office site some years ago, and as I recall it was introduced by Julia Slingo and written by Richard Betts). But a very funny thing happened on my way to pasting the title above … after I had carefully selected the title with my mouse, my cat decided to intervene and instead of copying, I found myself searching Google for the selected text, which returned:

About 55,400 results (0.37 seconds)

It was even on e-bay! Well, at least for a while, but alas:

Item 360227229693 is no longer available.
50 items found similar to ‘WARMING CLIMATE CHANGE THE FACTS MET OFFICE

In light of this, perhaps Richard could tell us:

a) when were the errors recognized?

b) when was this (coincidental, I’m sure) just-in-time for Copenhagen document withdrawn from “paper” circulation?

But most importantly:

c) where on the Met Office website might one find the list of errors and omissions – and/or the replacement recitation of alarmist propaganda brochure?

As of this writing, my questions remain unanswered. And because that thread is no longer on the “front” page at Bishop Hill they can quite easily be overlooked, which is why I thought I’d post them here.

And in the meantime … “a jewel in the crown, of British science and global science”?! Really, Mr. Ashton! In light of the above, freebie papier maché ring at the bottom of a very expensive CrackerJack box strikes me as being somewhat closer to an appropriate metaphor for the U.K. Met Office;-)

P.S. Here’s a copy of that no longer on the Met Office website brochure (pdf). Be prepared to be very afraid of the dreaded CO₂ … and watch out for the peas under the thimbles ;-)

UPDATE: Richard has responded via comment below

The (un)sustainability of all climate all the time

[04/23/2013: Please note update, below -hro]

A few days ago, I was taking stock of the many framings of climate. I was also wondering about the various and sundry footprints with which enviro-activists are so concerned. Here, thanks to wordle, is an illustration of what I found:

I very quickly realized that I had forgotten “climate disruption”, so please imagine it included in the above; and I’ve no doubt that there are others I might have missed. But what I had never heard of until yesterday was “climate insecurity”.

There’s a chap by the name of John Ashton who recently delivered [h/t Tom Nelson] a rally the troops speech to the somewhat self-beleaguered of late, U.K. Meteorological Office (fondly known in climate concerned circles as the “Met Office”).

Climate insecurity (whatever this is supposed to mean) is obviously very much on Ashton’s mind, as he mentioned it no less than three times during the course of his 4,986-word peroration, which he had entitled, “Climate Change and Politics: Surviving the Collision”. Oh, and his total “climate” count was no less than 42, and included such memorable turns of phrase as “climate-exposed business sectors” (perhaps he had the UNEP’s B4E in mind?) and “climate diplomacy”.

The latter is something about which, presumably, Ashton knows a fair bit, because his previous day-job (2006-2012) was that of “Special Representative for Climate Change for three successive UK Foreign Secretaries”.

Along with the requisite alarmism, there’s an awful lot of ponderous, pompous and/or presumptuous propaganda in Ashton’s speech; for example:

[...] here is a challenge that is Promethean. We have stolen the secret of fire for our own use, unleashing punitive forces inherent in the system of which we are ourselves part. Dealing with this is imperative, because if we don’t the consequences could soon become unmanageable, perhaps even jeopardizing the system conditions within which civilization itself can flourish.

And as we look more deeply into the picture, it urges us to summon a response that is transformational, because the entire modern economy is organized around the energy system. Making that system carbon neutral will reconfigure the economy, and the power relations embedded within it. Furthermore we must accomplish this urgently, in little more than a generation, while building resilience to the climate insecurity we can no longer avoid.

Promethean, imperative, transformational, urgent. [emphasis added -hro]

Not unlike the UNEP, Ashton is obviously very big on “transformative/transformational” (eight mentions in his speech at the Met Office). But what is curiously and conspicuously absent is any mention of “sustainable” … as in “sustainable development”.

Ashton is one of three founding directors of a group called E3G, and served as the first Chief Executive of E3G in 2005-06. Ever heard of this group before? No? Neither had I! So here’s the scoop:

E3G is an independent not-for-profit organisation, established in 2004, that works in the public interest to accelerate the global transition to sustainable development.

We build coalitions to achieve carefully defined outcomes, chosen for their capacity to leverage change. E3G founders had been working together and developing their shared thinking for several years before the organisation was constituted in 2004.

[...]

E3G makes things happen. We work to deliver outcomes with strategic significance for the transition to sustainable development. [emphasis added -hro]

UPDATE: Alex Cull notes in a very enlightening comment below, there’s at least one, no doubt, “carefully defined outcome” that Ashton – presumably on E3G’s behalf – was not able to “make happen”. Alex concludes:

Whatever the cause, it looks very much as though Ashton and the Qataris had an irreconcilable difference of opinion and that on this occasion, British “climate diplomacy” did not “catalyse transformational change” but hit the buffers of geopolitical reality instead.

In 2004, Ashton made an appearance in the Climategate (CG2 2428.txt) emails. In response to an E-mail, about “getting the idea into [then Prime Minister] Blair’s mind”, Ashton had opined:

cc: “Mike Hulme” , “John SCHELLNHUBER”
date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 10:47:57 +010 ???
from: “John Ashton”
subject: Re: Moving this forward
to: “Peter Read” , “John Shepherd”

John, John and Mike heard much of my argument at the Tyndall Assembly. But I should clarify it a little in the light of Peter’s message.

The problem at present is not the absence of propositions that offer stabilisation and that are scientifically, technologically and economically, credible. Two such broad propositions are biomass energy and capture and storage: both deserve attention within a portfolio of possible responses.

[...]

That is, I am sure, why [Blair's] recent speech concentrated on putting across, more starkly than he has done before, the scale and urgency of the challenge. Abrupt climate change is a crucial piece of that jigsaw – and you can make more impact with it at present by simply highlighting the danger without going too far into any particular set of responses.
[...] [emphasis added -hro]

His E3G bio indicates that Ashton has a long history of having moved virtually effortlessly through the NGO/Government revolving door:

John is one of a new generation of diplomats equally at home in the worlds of foreign policy and green politics. Before moving outside government to establish E3G in 2005, John had a distinguished career in the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, including founding and leading its Environment Policy Department.

A major theme of John’s career has been China. He speaks Chinese. He was an adviser to Governor Chris Patten in Hong Kong from 1993-7. His first diplomatic assignment, from 1981-4, was as Science Attaché in the British Embassy in Beijing. He also has experience at high level on a wide range of European and global issues, including as a political officer in the British Embassy in Rome from 1988-93.

John was the first Chief Executive of E3G in 2005-06, before returning to the UK Foreign Office as the Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative for Climate Change. His role supported Ministers in building a stronger foundation for an effective response to climate change. He had the personal title of Ambassador with direct access to the Foreign Secretary. John played a key role in designing the FCO’s climate change network and strategy, with its focus on climate stability as a precondition for security, prosperity and equity, and on strategic political engagement with the emerging and other major economies. [emphasis added -hro]

One of the other “founding directors” – and the current Chief Executive – is Nick Mabey. If that name rings a bell, it probably should. Mabey hails from the WWF – and he even had a role in promoting Mike Hulme and Joseph Alcamo’s pre-Kyoto “Statement”.

Like Ashton (and many others in this “gently” grown E3G crop of propagandists), Mabey’s bio indicates that he, too, has passed through the NGO/Government “revolving door”:

Nick was previously a senior advisor in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit leading work on national and international policy areas, including: energy, climate change, countries at risk of instability, organised crime and fisheries. Nick was employed in the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Environment Policy Department, and was the FCO lead for the Johannesburg Summit in 2002 [...]

Before he joined government Nick was Head of Economics and Development at WWF-UK. He came to WWF from research at London Business School on the economics of climate change, which he published as the book “Argument in the Greenhouse”.
[...]
Among other appointments Nick is currently on the advisory board of Infrastructure UK, the independent commission reporting to the UK Conservative Party on the design of a Green Investment Bank, and the Advisory Council of the European Technology Platform for Zero Emission Fossil Fuel Power. [emphasis added -hro]

So, it should come as no surprise that movers and shakers at E3G (which evidently stands for Third Generation Environmentalism Ltd) receive funding from WWF as well as from the U.K.’s Department for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and Department for International Development. Big Oil (represented by Shell) is also on E3G’s funding roster.

Readers who have been following the various interwoven threads of this ongoing saga will have noted the (coincidental, I’m sure) inclusion of John [aka Hans Joachim] Schellnhuber in the recipient list of Ashton’s E-mail, above. It was thanks to Germany’s Schellnhuber that the “dangerous” 2°C first entered the propaganda scene. As he told Der Speigel‘s Marco Evers, Olaf Stampf and Gerald Traufetter in April 2010:

a group of German scientists, yielding to political pressure, invented an easily digestible message in the mid-1990s: the two-degree target. To avoid even greater damage to human beings and nature, the scientists warned, the temperature on Earth could not be more than two degrees Celsius higher than it was before the beginning of industrialization.

[...]

Rarely has a scientific idea had such a strong impact on world politics. Most countries have now recognized the two-degree target. If the two-degree limit were exceeded, German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen announced ahead of the failed Copenhagen summit, “life on our planet, as we know it today, would no longer be possible.“

But this is scientific nonsense. “Two degrees is not a magical limit — it’s clearly a political goal,” says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “The world will not come to an end right away in the event of stronger warming, nor are we definitely saved if warming is not as significant. The reality, of course, is much more complicated.”

Schellnhuber ought to know. He is the father of the two-degree target.

“Yes, I plead guilty,” he says, smiling. [emphasis added -hro]

More recently, Schellnhuber has declared [h/t dennisA]:

04/17/2013 – The preparations for the next climate agreement that is supposed to be reached in 2015 are already taking shape – and civil society [aka NGOs -hro] is being asked to accompany and support the EU’s development/decision process.

On invitation by Connie Hedegaard, the EU´s Commissioner for Climate Action, a number of experts and decision makers meet at a stakeholder´s conference in Brussels today.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, has been asked to hold a keynote on the state of play in climate science.

The conference in Brussels was organized to shape the EU’s input into negotiations on a new international agreement to protect the global climate system.

“This is the starting signal for the hardest stage on the path to the world climate agreement 2015,” Schellnhuber says. “When it comes to the facts of climate change, there has been a lot of confusion in the public debates recently, which interested circles seek to exploit and deepen.

“Now it is up to science to bring light into this darkness and to draw a realistic picture of the challenges ahead for the public in Europe. On this basis citizens can make informed decisions.” [emphasis added -hro

Seems to me that those in the Ashton/Mabey/Schellnhuber circles of influence (not unlike BC's Andrew Weaver) have no qualms about putting the enviro-advocacy cart ahead of any evidentiary horses.

Do they care - or even realize - that the graphic images and icons (polar bears and hockey-sticks) based on flimsy "science" they have constructed to support them are being unravelled almost as fast as they come off the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s just-in-time assembly-line?

It was these flimsy "science" constructions, reconstructions (and rapid deconstructions, thanks to people such as Climate Audit's Steve McIntyre, Bishop Hill's Andrew Montford and Polar Bear Science's Susan Crockford) that were running through my mind when I came across the following video [h/t Digging In The Clay's Verity Jones]. The music isn’t exactly what I would have chosen (so you may want to turn down your speakers), but the images are quite compelling, wouldn’t you agree? ;-)

Alternatively, from a (turn up your speakers) musical perspective, the following [h/t my Dad] offers an equally amusing depiction of “footprints” and these inter-related enviro-activists’ endeavours. Enjoy :-)

UNEP now pushing nature onto business balance sheets

A few years ago, I wrote about the birth of a new kid on the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)’s alarmist block: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s younger “sibling”, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

They were singing their favourite tune (i.e. the money song) even then (all emphases in quoted text throughout this post are mine -hro):

Developing nations say more funding is needed from developed countries to share the effort in saving nature. Much of the world’s remaining biological diversity is in developing nations such as Brazil, Indonesia and in central Africa.

So I can’t say I was entirely at all surprised to read in the latest and greatest UNEP Press Release (complete with requisite picture of doom and gloom):

OMG, it must be worse than we thought

New Study Shows Multi-Trillion Dollar Natural Capital Risk Underlining Urgency of Green Economy Transition

Mon, Apr 15, 2013

The report shows that the scale and variation in impacts provide opportunities for companies and their investors to differentiate themselves by optimizing their supply chains and investment strategies

[...]

Dr. Dorothy Maxwell, Director of the TEEB for Business Coalition states, “Understanding natural capital risk and opportunities is essential for businesses to position themselves in an increasingly resource constrained world.”

The report shows that the scale and variation in impacts provide opportunities for companies and their investors to differentiate themselves by optimizing their supply chains and investment strategies. Some recommendations for companies include implementing processes to measure and manage natural capital used; strengthening business models to mitigate exposure to global risks such as water scarcity, volatile energy and agricultural prices, rising GHG emissions and climate change impacts.

Pavan Sukhdev, Chair of the Advisory Board of TEEB for Business Coalition states, “We need undoubtedly to change how we do business, but we cannot manage what we do not measure – and at present only a handful of businesses measure their externalities. Resolving this is at the heart of the green economy and sustainability itself.”

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director, UN Environment Programme (UNEP) states, “Forward-looking companies are already recognizing that the key to competitiveness in an increasingly resource-constrained world will hinge in large part on escalating natural resource efficiencies and cutting pollution footprints-the numbers in this report underline the urgency but also the opportunities for of all economies in transitioning to a Green Economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication.”

Now, according to Steiner, we need to add a “pollution footprint” to our “carbon footprint”; although I’m not sure if our “pollution footprint” supercedes or subsumes what Sukhdev had previously called our contributions to the “global ecological footprint”.

There are “opportunities” in this particular “urgency”. What’s not to like, eh?! Mind you I’m fairly certain that I’ve heard this line (or a facsimile thereof) before. Yes, I remember now! It was a quote from the IPCC’s Chair, Rajendra Pachauri when he was talking to the NZ Herald in 2008:

Business should be thinking about the response to climate change not as a threat but as an opportunity.

Never let it be said that the UN does not encourage “recycling” – at least of slogans and buzz-phrases!

TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, in case you were wondering what this acronym stands for; tagline, btw, is “making nature’s values visible”) is the “new testament” of the Climate Bible – and was evidently “inspired by” Nicholas Stern, a member of the TEEB advisory board, whose infamous and discredited Stern Review has contributed to landing the U.K. into the mess in which it now finds itself. But I digress …

Do you suppose there is any any difference between Sukhdev’s “green economy” and Steiner’s “Green Economy”? Or perhaps more to the point, I suppose, would be whether or not the powers that be at the UNEP have finally succeeded in defining what they actually mean by this slogan term.

They certainly didn’t seem to have a … hmmm … consensus … during the run-up to Rio+20. As the Secretary-General of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) had observed during the course of a “High Level” meeting (the minutes of which UNEP’s Steiner had decided should not be for public consumption):

there was as yet no common agreement on a definition of the green economy.

This assertion did not come out of the blue, and could well have derived from another participant’s observation that:

reaching a common understanding on the meaning, scope and implications of the green economy had been generating considerable debate. Many agreed that the [Rio+20] Conference should first clarify what the green economy was not, in order to help define what it could be.

Sukhdev had coined his brilliant mantra (his word, not mine), “we cannot manage what we do not measure” some years ago. And no doubt he’s been flogging it far and wide – including, I suspect, during Stewart Elgie‘s so-called ‘charitable initiative’, Sustainable Prosperity (SP) generously hosted 2010 “three city speaking tour” by Sukhdev here in Canada.

SP’s Elgie showed remarkable forethought when he set up shop in Ottawa. As I had noted last June:

What kinds of changes does Sustainable Prosperity want?

We are seeking changes in policy – federally, provincially, and locally – to implement EPR across Canada. EPR means a change in the rules of the game, and a levelling of the playing field, so that cleaner goods and services become cheaper. EPR policies, also known as “market based instruments” (MBI) or “economic instruments,” include tax shifting, cap-and-trade emissions reductions, and developing markets for ecological services.

Fits right in with Sukhdev’s thinking, just like a dirty old shirt, eh?! And whatever SP wants, Elgie (as we have seen) mistakenly seems to think SP should get!

But wait … there’s more. I’m not sure what might have happened to IPBES – which is supposed to be assessing the “science” behind these new-fangled money-making-mechanisms opportunities. But according to the UNEP’s “Notes to Editors” in this Press Release of April 15 (here comes the scary stuff):

Background

Planetary boundaries are being approached at a reckless pace, and some argue that global biodiversity, nitrogen and climate thresholds have already been breached. Global economic direction and resource use is the underlying cause of this.

Corporations today account for two-thirds of our economy and resource use, and most of the global stressors of planetary boundaries (emissions, freshwater use, land-use change, chemical pollutants, etc) are in reality the negative externalities of “business as usual”.

These externalities have grown too large to ignore, and are estimated at close to US$2.1 trillion for the top-3,000 listed corporations (UN Principles for Responsible Investment, 2010).

To mainstream the measurement and management of externalities in business, the “TEEB for Business Coalition”, a global coalition of pioneering organizations on natural capital, was formed in 2012. It aims to create awareness of this issue amongst decision makers in business and support scaling ‘best-of-breed’ solutions from leading corporations to value, manage and report their externalities.

About the TEEB for Business Coalition – http://www.teebforbusiness.org

Launched in November 2012, The TEEB for Business Coalition is a global, multi stakeholder platform formed to develop and support the uptake of natural capital accounting in business decision-making. The vision of the TEEB for Business Coalition is to support a transformative shift in corporate behaviour to preserve and enhance rather than deplete natural capital.

Everything is just sooooooo “transformative” in UN-speak, these days! And isn’t it amazing that this group should have produced an 86 page report (pdf) in such a short period of time. Well … actually, this group did not produce the report. It was evidently contracted out to an organization called TruCost. When I did a brief scan of the report, my eye stopped at “Munich Re”:

Reinsurance company Munich Re reported that crop losses have been US$20 billion.¹¹

So I followed the link to the reference:

Munich Re press release, Natural catastrophe statistics for 2012 dominated by weather extremes in the USA, 3 January 2013:
http://www.munichre.com/en/media_relations/press_releases/2013/2013_01_03_press_release.aspx
, accessed 13 March 2013

Now I wonder why this rings a bell … Sounds remarkably like an episode of “science” by press release that Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. recently deconstructed. His conclusion:

Misleading public claims. An over-hyped press release. A paper which neglects to include materially relevant and contradictory information central to its core argument. All in all, just a normal day in climate science!

I also found one reference to the “Stern Review” and two to the “Stern Report” – although I believe the “Report” and the “Review” [pls. see above] are one and the same. These findings do not augur well for the validity of TruCost’s report. My layperson’s “elevator speech” (well tweet, actually, to Dr. Richard Tol and Pielke both of whom know far more about this kind of stuff than I do) on TruCost’s report:

I saw apples, oranges. assumptions and bafflegab amidst lots of uncertainties. wd appreciate yr “translation”

Incidentally, my scan of the 90+ references strongly suggests that this report is far from being rife with citations from “peer-reviewed” literature.

But the important thing, I’m sure, is that this report is just in time for:

The 8th annual B4E Global Summit in Delhi, 15-16 April is co-organised with the Confederation of Indian Industry and The Club of Rome in partnership with CNN, The Climate Group, Carbon Disclosure Project, World Agroforestry Centre, and other partners.

According to the B4E (how catchy is that, eh?!) website:

Under the theme ‘Emerging Market Leadership for Global Green Growth’, the 7th annual B4E Global Summit in Delhi will look at the role of emerging markets in driving the world’s transition to a global green economy, one of the greatest economic opportunities of our time.

Leaders from business, government and the NGO community will gather to explore inclusive green business models, innovation in finance and technology and propose industry commitments to action.

Two ingredients one can invariably count on in any UNEP sponsored meeting: the presence of NGOs and calls for “innovation in finance”. And who knows, perhaps scheduled speaker Ashok Khosla, President Emeritus, The Club of Rome will be able to come up with a definition of “green economy” (or “Green Economy”).

Stay tuned, folks ;-)

UPDATE: The U.K. Guardian is (predictably) onside, via their “Sustainable Business” blog:

Putting environmental impact on the balance sheet

Until now, “environmental externalities” have never made it onto the balance sheet, doing so would reveal many industries are generating huge net losses
[...]
Until now, these so-called “environmental externalities” have never made it onto the balance sheet. But what if that were to change? That’s the question raised in a new report released today by the TEEB Coalition for Business. The answers make for alarming reading.

[...]

The calculations represent one of the most comprehensive and geographically wide-ranging attempts at monetising natural capital to date.

[...]

The results are illuminating. For one, the numbers are colossal

[...]

Sceptics will no doubt be quick to question the maths. Alastair MacGregor, chief operating officer of Trucost, admits that there are methodological and data shortfalls. [...]

Yet MacGregor insists that the numbers are as robust as can be expected for what is still a very new accounting science. Trucost’s conclusions are based on 12 years’ of data on quantitative environmental disclosures from thousands of companies. “There’s still a need for more primary research around environmental valuations so that we can build up models that can be applied globally“, he concedes, expressing his hope that today’s report will act as a “catalyst” for just that.

Apart from the world’s nascent carbon markets, monetising non-financial externalities still remains a largely fictitious pursuit. Ecosystem services need to take on a fungible, tradable form if they are to have financial value in real, cash-in-hand monetary terms. Until then, it’s Monopoly money we’re talking about.

Just because natural capital costs are unpriced doesn’t mean they go away. The impacts of erratic weather provide a good example.

And of course, business has never had to deal with the “impacts of erratic weather” before, right?!

IPCC-nik Andrew Weaver riding waves of suspect Tides?

As readers of this blog will know, Andrew Weaver is the Deputy Leader of the BC Green Party – and also a candidate in the forthcoming Provincial election. He’s also very much a green-heart-on-sleeve activist, and supposedly an “objective” Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s forthcoming 5th Assessment Report.

In my previous post I had observed that he was, in effect, a “midwife” at the birth of BC’s over-hyped and under-performing carbon offsets scheme.

Before he slammed the virtual door to his twitter-feed, I had posed some questions that he declined to answer (for example, here, here and here).

And now it seems that he and his party have the (not surprising) support of (at least) one of the tentacles of the Tides Foundation [h/t Tom Nelson]:

Green Party Leads the Way to Effective Climate Policy

Clean Energy Canada at Tides Canada today released a B.C. Climate Leadership Position Summary indicating where the major political parties planning to run candidates in the British Columbia May 14 provincial election stand on the carbon tax. Of the major parties in BC, the Green Party was noted as the only one fully committed both improving and expanding the carbon tax program.

“We are delighted that Clean Energy Canada has recognized our strong leadership position on climate change and our commitment to working to make the carbon levy an effective solution for carbon emissions reduction,” said Dr. Andrew Weaver, Deputy Green Party Leader and candidate for Oak Bay-Gordon Head.

“It is exciting that we’re starting to see a recommitment to climate leadership,“ said Merran Smith, director of Clean Energy Canada at Tides Canada.

Considering the many questions about this organization’s foreign funding and activities, if I were a candidate for election, I doubt that I’d be touting an endorsement from such a tainted source.

But then, I’m from a different generation: I learned how to use critical thinking skills and exercise sound judgment. Qualities that have not been in evidence from the utterances of alarmist-activist Andrew <don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater> Weaver. Or Andrew <barrage of intergalactic ballistic missiles> Weaver if you prefer.

But on a somewhat related – and far more realistic – note, here’s an interview with Ross McKitrick speaking about his recent report on Ontario’s Green Energy Act – and the follies contained therein.

Ross McKitrick on his recent report on renewables

You can read his report here

And you can also read an amusingly predictable “response” from the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CANWEA) here. One of CANWEA’S complaints:

The report relies excessively on the widely criticized 2011 Annual Report by the Auditor General of Ontario [emphasis added -hro]

I guess CANWEA wasn’t too happy with the Ontario AG’s findings which included (p. 97 of this pdf)

• no independent, objective, expert investigation had been done to examine the potential effects of renewable-energy policies on prices, job creation, and greenhouse gas emissions; and
• no thorough and professional cost/benefit analysis had been conducted to identify potentially cleaner, more economically productive, and cost-effective alternatives to renewable energy, such as energy imports and increased conservation.

Sounds like yet another environmental advocacy cart way ahead of any evidential horses with not a qualified “driver” in sight.

So what is it with these green dreamers and their assumption that they know better than Auditors General, eh?!

One can hardly wait for the wrath of the green dreamers to descend on The Economist. How dare they publish an article (as they did on April 6) in which they concluded:

Environmental lunacy in Europe

A fuel and your money

Over the past few years, scientists have concluded that the original idea—carbon in managed forests offsets carbon in power stations—was an oversimplification. In reality, carbon neutrality depends on the type of forest used, how fast the trees grow, whether you use woodchips or whole trees and so on. As another bit of the EU, the European Environment Agency, said in 2011, the assumption “that biomass combustion would be inherently carbon neutral…is not correct…as it ignores the fact that using land to produce plants for energy typically means that this land is not producing plants for other purposes, including carbon otherwise sequestered.”

Tim Searchinger of Princeton University calculates that if whole trees are used to produce energy, as they sometimes are, they increase carbon emissions compared with coal (the dirtiest fuel) by 79% over 20 years and 49% over 40 years; there is no carbon reduction until 100 years have passed, when the replacement trees have grown up. But as Tom Brookes of the European Climate Foundation points out, “we’re trying to cut carbon now; not in 100 years’ time.”

In short, the EU has created a subsidy which costs a packet, probably does not reduce carbon emissions, does not encourage new energy technologies—and is set to grow like a leylandii hedge.

Green dreamers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose! Well, nothing but the respect and blind obeisance of those who choose to investigate and think for themselves.