The fat lady’s not yet in the building, but her limo’s outside the theatre. There’s another five or six weeks of melting to go, but there’s more than just sea ice melting in the Arctic, and more than my few meagre wagers riding on how summer turns out ‘oop North. Here’s a compendium of interesting recent stuff…
Tag: IPCC
When Gray turns to blue/Flung a dummy
In a dramatic announcement today, Vincent R Gray, the retired coal researcher and diligent proof-reader of IPPC Working Group Reports (he’s inordinately proud of the fact that he submitted over 1,800 comments to the fourth report) has resigned from the Royal Society of New Zealand because of its recent statement on climate change. Given that Gray has been criticising the IPCC view of climate science for 18 years and is a vocal member of the NZ C”S”C, this is perhaps no surprise, but the statement he has issued as a riposte to the Royal Society is a minor classic of its genre. Vincent doesn’t so much spit the dummy as hurl it into low earth orbit, and uses pretty forthright language as he does so.
[Hat tip: Sam Vilain in a recent comment]
Is there life after breakfast?
Morning Report is a breakfast fixture chez HT. As a way of keeping in touch with the news, it has no equal. By some strange whim of editorial decision-making(*), this morning they decided to give Bob “The Great Communicator” Carter a chance to trot out his “I am the balanced middle of this debate” line, and rubbish mainstream climate science (stream, podcast). Perhaps it was intended as some sort of balance to items on the G8 and carbon targets. Sean Plunket does his best to skewer Carter on his framing of the issue, but Bob smoothly denies what he’s just said (describing the IPCC as “extremist”), and then goes on to misrepresent the real science. Plunket doesn’t call him on that – which is not surprising, given that he’s a radio journalist rather than a climate specialist – and so Carter achieves his main aim: sowing seeds of doubt in the minds of the radio audience, creating the illusion of substantive scientific debate, and thus providing cover for those who want to do nothing.
But Morning Report’s biggest mistake was to fail to identify Carter as a leading member of the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition. He’s not in the balanced middle, he’s way out in crankdom, and that should have been pointed out.
[* I find that Bob gave a talk in Christchurch last night.]
Look out, here comes tomorrow
Hot off the presses: NIWA’s latest projections for the climate of New Zealand over the coming century were released this morning as part of a new MfE guidance manual (here, PDF) for local government. Based on IPCC modelling for AR3 and AR4 downscaled to local climate, plus early work with NIWA’s new regional climate model, the picture is broadly similar to earlier results: modest warming everywhere, a reduction in frosts and more hot days, increased frequency of droughts and heavy rainfall events, and steady sea level rise. NIWA’s press release is available at Scoop (link to full .doc here). At the same time the Ministry of Agriculture has released its latest EcoClimate report, which takes the new projections and assesses their impact on key agricultural sectors. I’ll be picking through these reports, and the associated coastal hazards guidance over the next few days, but here are a few of the headlines:
Your cheatin’ heart(land)
You’re a senior New Zealand climate scientist. You shared in the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the IPCC last year. As a young scientist in the 1970s you did ground-breaking work on warming in New Zealand, and wrote a seminal paper in Nature pointing out that cooling experienced in the northern hemisphere might be due to aerosols. You wrote the first book on what global warming might mean for New Zealand. And then your name appears on a list of “500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares” published by the Heartland Institute. Would you not be a trifle irritated?
Jim Salinger (for it is he! – excellent Herald profile here) and four other NZ scientists who found their way on to the Heartland list issued their response last night (pers comm):
The five scientists concerned are Associate Professor Chris Hendy (University of Waikato), Dr Matt McGlone (Science Team Leader, Landcare Research), Dr Neville Moar (retired DSIR,), Dr Jim Salinger (Principal Scientist, NIWA) and Dr Peter Wardle (retired DSIR, FRSNZ). Other eminent scientists around the world, also included in the list of 500, have publically distanced themselves from the Heartland statement. While the Heartland Institute is entitled to make what it will of their research, these scientists strongly object to the implication that they support Heartland’s position. The scientists fully endorse the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as to global warming and its causes.
There’s good coverage by Angela Gregory in the Herald this morning, plus Hard News & Stuff, and Morning Report has an interview (6:16am, podcast available), including a remarkable effort by Owen Mcshane of the NZCSC to defend the list. DeSmogBlog broke the story about the Heartland list, and has been documenting the reaction from scientists on it. Meanwhile, the Heartland Institute has made a small change to the heading of the list, but refuses to remove it from their web site.
This is the same Heartland Institute whose President, Joseph L Bast, sent a letter to The Listener (scroll down this page) demanding that Dave Hansford stop writing about climate. He wrote:
I don’t know how writers like Hansford sleep at night. If he has even a shred of personal integrity, he should apologise for his attacks on the growing number of scientists who say the threat of global warming has been over-sold, and promise to never again write on this subject. And his publisher should accept nothing less.
Bast defends his actions over the list in equally bombastic fashion (here):
Many of the complaining scientists have crossed the line between scientific research and policy advocacy. They lend their credibility to politicians and advocacy groups who call for higher taxes and more government regulations to “save the world†from catastrophic warming … and not coincidentally, to fund more climate research. They are embarrassed — as they should be — to see their names in a list of scientists whose peer-reviewed published work suggests the modern warming might be due to a natural 1,500-year climate cycle.
Well, Mr Bast, I’ve got news for you. The embarrassment should be yours. You are happy to claim the moral high ground when making thinly-veiled attempts to get rid of a journalist prepared to point out the inconvenient truth about your organisation and its funding of sceptics in NZ and around the world. But when you professionally smear a group of respected scientists – and then deepen the smear by questioning their ethics – you cross the line from advocacy to desperate defamation. To coin a phrase, you should apologise for your attacks on respected scientists, and promise to never again write on this subject. And stay out of New Zealand.
But I’m not holding my breath.
(Hat tips to JS, cindy, Deltoid, International Journal of Inactivism)