Sunday was speaker orientation and the evening reception/dinner. I met up with Willis Eschencbach, watched and listened to him play the piano in the lobby. I took some photos with my cellphone camera, but they turned out badly. Willis and I had an interesting talk with Gary Sharp about Tuna acting as ARGO buoys.
Apparently the Tuna have a daily habit of feeding near the surface, then diving deep, repeating the process later in the day. Just like the ARGO buoys dive then float to the surface, so do the Tuna.
Somebody (and I don’t recall who) is fitting Tuna with temperature loggers that take a measurement every 20 seconds. Gary says that prelim tunatemp data isn’t showing different than ARGO.
That prompted me to recall a old TV jingle (being in TV for 25 years my head is full of them) that some readers may remember but I added a twist when I recited it at the table with a musical lilt.
Ask any Tuna you happen to see, where’s the global warming? It’s not in the sea!
I thought Willis might need resuscitation he was laughing so hard.
I had an afternoon meeting where I saw some extraordinary data cleaning and homogenization methods applied to surface temperature data to clean up the train wreck that it is now. It was quite impressive and far better than anything I’ve seen from NOAA or NASA. It makes their QC look like, well, Tuna salad. Or maybe a PBJ sandwich.
I met many people, including Donna Laframboise of Toronto who runs “no Frakking Consensus“who seems much younger in person than shown in her photo. I met with E.M. Smith (Chiefio) and Verity Jones (Digging in the Clay) also, and sat with them along with Joe D’aleo at the dinner reception.
Steve McIntyre gave his keynote presentation on the “trick” at dinner, along with Apollo 17 astronaut and Geologist Dr. Harrison Schmitt who talked about his views on current science. Both were well received. It was carried on live video streaming. PJTV is providing live video coverage (streaming and otherwise) at the PJTV CLIMATEGATE 2010 MICROSITE.
Bob Carter gave me his new book to read Climate: the Counter Consensus.
I gave a couple of interviews today. The interview I had in the evening after the keynote dinner with an independent crew working for BBC on some documentary on “The Skeptics” was unscheduled. They caught me in the grand hall asking if it could do an interview. It started out pleasant enough, but soon deteriorated. They had no organization at all and had no idea where to shoot it. They suggested we shoot the interview in my room, because they wanted to have me set in front of my computer. I thought that was more than a bit forward and suggested the foyer, we got there, setup and then after starting decided they didn’t like the setting. They they suggested that we go to the media room (which they apparently just discovered) so they tore down and went there.
After a couple of false starts the questions started coming. I started to wonder where they were going with this, and when they started asking about what I thought about Dr. Phil Jones “wanting to commit suicide” I realized that it wasn’t going to be factual, but more emotionally spun. I told them flat out that question and what went on in Dr. Jones mind/intent wasn’t something I could or would comment on since I have no information beyond the press report.
These two independent filmakers were just kids, early 20’s and were struggling to come up with questions. They kept trying to get me to use the word “fraud” as applied to Dr. Jones. There were about five attempts to do so in questions, asking essentially the same question over and over again in different ways.
They also asked why climate skeptics are so “angry” and why there are so many nasty comments on forums. I pointed out that they should visit some of the entertainment forums where people talk about celebrities like Britney Spears etc if they wanted to see some real vitriols, and that nasty comments are a part of the blogosphere, particularly when anonymous commenting is involved. Alarmists make a lot of nasty comments. Look up dhoghaza and Joe Romm.
The capper came at the end when they asked me to sign a release form. I was shocked, because standard procedure is to have the interviewee look over and sign the release form before the interview.
Reading it was like reading no other release form I’ve ever seen. It had a clause that said “gives us the right to use your content however we see fit” which concerned me because usually an interview for a documentary is limited to that venue. For all I know they may put me on a political comedy show.
Then there was something I’ve never encountered in all my years of television. An oath of “honesty and factual accuracy” was in the release. While I certainly thought I answered honestly and factually, this clause concerned me. When somebody interviews me on a contentious subject like climate, I’m giving my opinion. Opinions are almost always disputed. I was sure mine would be. To have such a clause connected to one’s opinion is just insane because then someone can hold up anything and say “but scientific consensus says..etc…etc…so Mr. Watts lied and violated his contractual oath in the release form”. It’s not a court of law, it’s an interview. Jeez Louise!
The release was obviously written by amateurs, and I refused to sign it. They then admitted that “it’s being revised to ‘simplify it’ and ‘could we send you a revision?’. I said I’d look at it, gave them my card with email address, told them that I thought they had the process backwards and that I was unhappy with being confronted with flawed legal language after giving a good faith interview, and left.
My impression is that whoever hired these two kids for the BBC is in for a peck of trouble down the road. I doubt the documentary on skeptics will be little more than a slam job. We’ll see if they try to use me even though I have NOT signed the release.
That’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back.
Ed Caryl
Ed, sorry but your are wrong. The BBC has moved a very long way from its original high standards of impartiality and professionalism. Every program now has a climate change element to it and based on the false premises it has been advocating for some years.
Naw, R Gates; Tilo’s correct. Kelvin’s kabooming equinoctially and the rate of heat loss over the last month is unprecedented in recent monitoring.
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I recall a spur-of-the-moment interview with Monkton on the “Climate Wars” series. Monckton was caught in a hotel lobby, and compared poorly to the quiet office environment granted to other interviewees. It gave the impression of contrary opinion on the informal fringe.
They could spin your interview into something along these lines:
Narrator: “Anonymous climate sceptics gather around blogs like ‘Watt’s Up With That’. The debate is acrimonious, as the blog owner explains”
Watts: “you should visit some of the entertainment forums where people talk about celebrities like Britney Spears if you want to see some real vitriol … nasty comments are a part of the blogosphere, particularly when anonymous commenting is involved”
Narrator: “These types of comments have driven respected scientists who are the target of the hateful comments to consider suicide”
Watts: “what goes on in Dr. Jones mind isn’t something I could or would comment on since I have no information beyond the press report”
I hope it doesn’t go that way. But it would be worth preparing yourself.
Anthony – if you get the opportunity could you please inform the video director that watching a speaker talking about a chart is not as interesting as seeing the chart he’s talking about!!!
R. Gates
“The only thing “dramatic” is your characterization of a normal cooling phase after an El Nino.”
Don’t consider it dramatic if you like. I consider a change from subsurface equatorial water anomalies being mostly warm or hot to being mostly cool or cold as dramatic. I don’t care if it’s happened before. I also think that the amount of subsurface cool water that has developed, and is continuing to develop, serves as an indicator that we will not go to ENSO neutral conditions, but rather to La Nina conditions. And if we do get La Nina condition, then we are heading for 14 years of no global warming. I consider that more dramatic than a chunk of ice breaking off Antartica. Now there is something that is dirt ordinary.
Anthony, You just enjoy the conference.
All that talking about Tuna, you just got a couple of bottom feeders excited there.
We in the UK are sort of eyeing the remit of our funding of such creatures at the moment, we’ll just add it to the list.
The BBC abandoned any semblance of balance and impartiality in its climate change reporting years ago. A while back its science coverage in the news was run by a qualified scientist called David Whitehouse (a PhD) and very good it was too. But I guess that it was hard being a scientist among the english graduates of this world (such as Roger Harrabin) and their science coverage has been going downhill ever since, to the point where its reputation has been severely damaged. the BBC trust has been so concerned by BBC News poor science coverage that it has called for a special report. I bet that, like the CRU enquiries, will be another whitewash.
My husband answers questions for the press as the representative of his trade association. I won’t give the details except to say it’s not oil, but it is in an industry
that comes under alot of scrutiny from the press. A few years ago, he was interviewed
by BBC’s Jonathan Bell. Bell asked him lots of leading questions, essentially trying to prove his agenda. Unfortunately for Bell my husband was not able to substantiate Bell’s claims.
The kicker is this, the next day as Bell made his report on the BBC, he just trotted out his “facts” regardless of truth. You see they don’t want the whole story only what serves the narrative.
PBS frontline, cut and slice the story to our satisfaction. NPR was pretty much the same. After a two hour interview, the reporter didn’t even get the name right. Now he reserves the right to see and amend any final product before he will agree to any interview.
bbc propaganda on bbc2 as i write (springwatch signs of change with chris packham)
I guess you could try contacting the New PM Mr Cameron, since his party were firing guns into the sky about the BBC in the lead up to the election. And his guru, Archie Norman is now running the main commercial competitor, so he may be prepared to listen to your issues in a friendly way…..
Maybe it’s time for a counter ‘contract’ to be signed by all BBC reporters. in which the rights of someone like yourself are encapsulated in a legally robust document……..?
Tuna are unique fishes. They have no swim bladder which in other fish can cause barotrauma when suddenly changing depth in the water column.
Also tuna are effectively warm blooded. This allows them to operate over a wide range of temperatures like when diving below thermoclines. Swordfish are also deep divers but they have a method of warming just the blood coming to their brain. So after a sustained deep dive swordfish are often seen sunning themselves on the surface of the water in a stupor and are easily approachable.
Great idea tagging these fish with sensors. We have lots of needs to better understand the life cycles of these fish and here is an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.
Love the Charley Tuna ditty!
REAL “TUNAMOMETERS”. This is not a joke. The following is the FAO paper on Fish catches related to temperatures:
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/005/y2787e/y2787e00.pdf
If you don´t want to read all the document see graph at page 50:
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/005/y2787e/y2787e08.pdf
What it is remarkable that this is a document from UN´s FAO and it forecasts temperatures to 2100, it openly contradicts IPCC non-sense.
They were probably trying to get a rough doc together to pitch to the BBC, and also using the BBC name to get interviews which they would not have got otherwise.
I have just watched the BBC Springwatch programme. Look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/springwatch .
How on earth do you counter this?
I lost count of the number of times that the presenters stated categorically that runaway Global Warming is an undisputed fact, accepted by the “vast majority of scientists”, and that it is almost certainly caused by human produced CO2.
eric anderson says:
May 17, 2010 at 8:23 am
“OT, but someone needs to respond to Krugman’s column, How Will They Spin This?
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/how-will-they-spin-this/
re new GISS release showing hottest 12 months on record.
I guess my first response would be to ask, “What were the raw temperature readings?”
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These were satellite readings of the troposphere.
Remember the oceans cover 70% of the earth. The readings show heat moving out of the ocean and into the atmosphere as it heads for outer space. (Yeah, Yeah CO2 might bounce a little back but the thunderheads whisk that heat up pretty fast)
The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) shifted from the cool phase to the warm phase around 1976, and has recently switched back to the cool phase. El Nino (hot) has switched into neutral. The result of this “heat transport” into the atmosphere is “The decrease in upper ocean heat content from March to April was 1C – largest since 1979″
In other words we are looking at a downturn in ocean temps for about 30 years. Add a solar funk and volcanoes and I doubt anyone will be worried about “Global Warming” 5 to 10 years from now.
I have just spent several minutes trying to get onto the “Blog” part of the Springwatch pages without success. Has anyone else tried and how did you get on?
Is this an opening salvo in the 2012 Democratic primary? Bill Clinton calls CO2 plant food.
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Kudos to Anthony, getting infomation out during conference, not easy.
As for the Beeb Dweebs, seems if one wants to present a formal case against the AGW theory, one needs their own media branch.
The Net has made that easier, cheaper, immediate and now days vital. A non partisan, impartial documentary, unbiased documentary would be corporately unwelcomed in this world of failed rockstar journalism and the media circus. My gut feeling is people are hungry for old school reporting, sans spin, glitter, glam and BS.
Anyone got an idea about a budget for such? Despite the ecnomic times, I reckon the WUWT crowd could pony up enough to put one together. We could create a small production house called the “Better Broadcasting Company”, and invite David Bellamy to host it. That would twist some knickers.
eric anderson says:
May 17, 2010 at 8:23 am
OT, but someone needs to respond to Krugman’s column, How Will They Spin This?
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/how-will-they-spin-this/
Eric, that was a trip into the ninth circle of Hell, the comments were beyond Post Normal, many were just Postal. Its like some kind of Post Modern Climate Jihad, almost like a Green Radical Islam, “Kill the unbeliever!”, “Burn the Heretics!”.
Plus his graphics suck, anyone can use a chart to back an argument, if Paul wants to know how Skeptics would spin this, …we wouldn’t, because we DON’T.
R. Gates says:
May 17, 2010 at 10:59 am
Tilo Reber says:
May 17, 2010 at 10:14 am
If what is happening below the surface in the equatorial Pacific is any indication of what will happen at the surface, I think that we are about to undergo a dramatic change. Here is the latest NOAA report. Take a look at page 11.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
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No, not really Tilo. The only thing “dramatic” is your characterization of a normal cooling phase after an El Nino….
Overall, ocean heat content globally remains high:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
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That graph is old it ends in January. There was a drop of 1C/month from March to April 2010. The chart does show parts of the 60 year cycle and that we are now headed back down in heat content of the ocean.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/07/the-decrease-in-upper-ocean-heat-content-from-march-to-april-was-1c-largest-since-1979/
David, UK says:
May 17, 2010 at 11:08 am
The BBC has been in the ranks of the alarmists since forever…..
So please, my American friends, don’t be in any doubt as to the BBC’s agenda.
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Thanks to the internet we are now aware that the BBC pensions are invested in carbon trading…. Talk about vested interests!
And in the mean time, the BBC is once more peddling its propaganda as often as it can now that it thinks that the Climategate scandal is subsiding. I have just seethed through watching a one hour programme in which the presenter, Chris Packham, has given his personal take on Climate Change. The only evidence he presented was that spring was coming earlier in the UK by an average of 11 days and that it must be anthropogenic because the majority of scientists and in the same breath, politicians think it is so. It shows the level of confidence that the BBC has in its absolute control of the propaganda war in that we have just experienced a series of cold summers and winters culminating in the harshest winter in many years and the BBC glibly passes this off as just weather.
You could have driven a juggernaut through the arguments, but without a right of reply, the BBC just gets away with murder. It makes your blood boil at the injustice of it all.
Why AGW has become a dogma and corrupted the scientific method:
There has formed an opportunistic cabal comprised of Big Business (Cap’n Trade), Big Government (carbon tax), Big Science (billions for research), Big Eco-Green (billions for wind and solar), Big Media (Gore/Suzuki and a new global warming apocalypse story every day) , Big Socialism (IPCC and U.N. wealth re-distribution) money, money, money follow the money. AGW has now become a holy cause formed out of the un-holy alliance outlined above.
I laud those who take on the money machine of this scope (I’ve never seen anything like it), good luck your going to need it.
Somebody (and I don’t recall who) is fitting Tuna with temperature loggers that take a measurement every 20 seconds. Gary says that prelim tunatemp data isn’t showing different than ARGO.
QUESTION: Do they have to account for the tuna’s “body heat bias” and does that “body heat bias” fluxuate with the depth of the dive (think wind chill or in this case, “water chill factor”)?
Since you didn’t do any bomb throwing and didn’t give them permission to manipulate what you said into what they wanted you to have said, I doubt you will ever hear from them again.