UPDATE: 9:50AM 2/28 Professor Kelly responds in comments. It seems the Times saw fit to remove an important portion of his first paragraph. I’ve highlighted the missing text in red. Gobsmacking that they couldn’t handle this one sentence but left the rest untouched – Anthony
M J Kelly Submitted on 2012/02/28 at 9:13 am
If I told you that the first sentence of my letter was edited, your readers might be mollified.
I wrote:
Andrew Motion (report, Feb 23) is correct to castigate climate change deniers, as the climate has always been changing, but he is profoundly mistaken in linking all those who oppose the current climate science orthodoxy into one group.
Michael Kelly
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This is a rather strong condemnation of the state of affairs in Climate Science. Professor Michael J. Kelly of the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering has written a scathing letter to The Times about rightfully criticizing “deniers” and lumping everyone else who questions climate science conclusions into that same meme. Most people I know of agree that CO2 has some impact, but the magnitude and feedbacks are the real issues of debate. Ben Pile has this to say in his summary of the Fakegate:
The myth of the climate change denier exists in the heads of environmentalists, and seems to prevent them entering into conversation with anyone that dares to criticise environmentalism. The crusade of ‘communicating’ climate change is not a project that involves an exchange of views. To criticise environmentalism is to ‘deny The Science’, no matter how incoherent the environmentalist’s grasp of science or how lacking his or her sense of proportion.
Kelly, in his letter to the times, says what we’ve been saying for a long time; the models and the effects have been grossly oversold, and real-world observations don’t match the sales brochure. He writes:
Sir, Andrew Motion (report, Feb 23) is correct to castigate climate change deniers, but he is profoundly mistaken in linking all those who oppose the current climate science orthodoxy into one group. The interpretation of the observational science has been consistently over-egged to produce alarm. All real-world data over the past 20 years has shown the climate models to be exaggerating the likely impacts — if the models cannot account for the near term, why should I trust them in the long term?
I am most worried by the billions of pounds being misinvested and lost as a consequence. Look out to sea at the end of 2015 and see how many windmills are not turning and you will get my point: there are already 14,000 abandoned windmills onshore in the US. Premature technology deployment is thoroughly bad engineering, and my taxes are subsidising it against my will and professional judgment.
Professor Michael Kelly
Prince Philip Professor of Technology, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge
Source An Englishman’s Castle via “The Times“, subscription required
major hat tip to Bishop Hill
Looking a bit further, I think that _Jim has found the true source, the Feb 15, 2010 American Thinker article http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/wind_energys_ghosts_1.html by Andrew Walden, the editor of Hawaii Free Press. http://hawaiifreepress.com/AboutHFP/tabid/64/Default.aspx
Yup; found the same thing here … a post (still) apparently stuck in the spam filter would bear that out … still a little hesitant to post another link in fear it too will land this post in the spam filt …
Well, here goes: A ‘period piece’ from back in 1999 talking about the subsidies and ‘bubble’ in wind farms and the xx,000 of defunct wind generators: http://www.wind-works.org/articles/99rush.html “The Great Wind Rush of 99”
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Sir, Andrew Motion (report, Feb 23) is correct to castigate climate change deniers…
Is this Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate? If so, presumably, this makes him a “climate change expert.”
I have had my words unscrupulously expurgated from the middle of a quote to suit the message an editor wanted to make, so I empathize with Dr. Kelly.
re earlier comment;
Make that “former Poet Laureate” (up to 2009)
What’s your timeline going back? 5 years? 10 Years?
Or a full 26 years back to 1985?
We’ve all been to this rodeo before (‘renewable’ energy et al), with the (wind) activities in the 1980’s growing out of the late 1970’s and with the 1979 energy crisis in particular …
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I find it astonishing – and disturbing – that the Times should edit Professor Kelly’s letter in the manner they appear to have done. It’s not a long letter, and they have removed just 7 words. But the removal of those words, which qualify the previous sentence, substantially changes its meaning. Is this the sort of depth to which warmist newspaper editors will now stoop? If I sent the Times a letter saying, “I don’t believe in global warming,” would they have no compunction in removing the “don’t” from the published version?
Also, what the heck has Andrew Motion got to do with climate change? He’s a poet, isn’t he? Isn’t it scraping the barrel a bit to get poets to castigate climate change deniers? Are they going to drag in rock stars and footballers and celebrity chefs next?
@terry Oldberg who said:
“The IPCC is mute on the magnitude of the averaging period. If the magnitude is taken to be the 30 years that is canonical in climatology then the real-world data of the past 20 years cannot have shown a climate model to be exaggerating the likely impacts, for the duration of an independent statistical event can be no less than the averaging period and thus an independent event of a duration that contains the past 20 years cannot yet have been observed.”
Fwew! Take a breath!
“Furthermore, none of the IPCC models make the predictions that they would be necessary to the falsification of them. They make “projections” but the concept that is referenced by this word is materially different from the concept that is referenced by the word ‘predictions.'”
What I get from your comments is that the output of the IPCC is meaningless and useless and should be ignored.
Looks like you’ve fallen for their trap. It’s their theory. They need to explain how it works, what will demonstrate the theory is accurate, ~what will falsify the theory~, and the experiments and data that support the theory but do not falsify it.
No one is under any obligation to come up with an alternate theory.
Lies, damned lies and edited letters
“as the climate has always been changing”
This is essential. It has been my point for at least 10 years. Many people don’t realize the power of words – they can have a kind of hypnotic effect. It can even erase years of good education so people forget that climate always changes. I call it a linguistic hockey stick. No wonder it was edited.
TomB is right. If the end of your proof is “1 = 0” — I don’t have to do a detailed analysis to mark this proof wrong, and tell you to go find your invalid assumption or illegal step.
The data don’t match the projections or predictions of the models. I’ll mark this as “failed” with little compunction to unscramble their logic.
Gendanken experiment: Imagine building a model with various noisy inputs. For example the temperature, pressure, solar irradience, and db level sitting on a park bench. Then flip a coin 10 times and track the percentage heads. Using a SV decomposition create a set of weights correlating the coin tosses historically to the sample inputs. Be amazed at the correlation you can get, especially as you increase the number of input variables (gender percentage of observed people, number of flying birds, swimming birds. Amazingly the more inputs you get the farther back you can hindcast… awesome. You must really be on to something!
Now, predict the next 10 coin flips…. 🙂
The Time omitted that portion of the opening sentence because THEY (like all Greenies) are the real deniers. They deny that climate has always changed. Sorry to state the bleeding obvious – just adding my tuppence for the record, for what little it is worth.
Texas has something like 7,000 wind turbines installed. Almost all of these were relatively recent installations of the very big, more modern turbines that cost more than a million dollars a pop. So that’s $7 billion in hardware alone (not including the associated transmission infrastructure). These twirling whirligigs make a lot of money for a variety of special interests. All the land owners collect a piece of “money for nothing” just for having the eyesores on their property. The owners of the windfarms are awash in (taxpayer) subsidy money. The utilities don’t really care that they are forced to buy the overpriced output of windfarms – they just pass the expense on to consumers. The manufacturers of wind turbines have made out quite well. But the whole operation runs on a sea of government subsidies and crony capitalism. Don’t think for minute that politicians don’t have their snouts in the trough.
A good friend of mine lives in Amarillo and has occasion to drive throughout the Panhandle of Texas. He reported to me that on any given day at least 1/3 of the turbines are not turning. Another thought occurred to me last Summer when Texas has that withering hot weather. I suspect it may have been physically impossible to service a lot of these wind turbines last Summer. If it’s over 100 d F outside, can you imagine the temperature inside one of those towers? Who can climb up 300-400 feet of ladder in that kind of heat? These spinning eyesores are expensive and difficult to service and like all mechanical gadgets (like cars) require regular maintenance and oil changes. Their failure rate has been grossly understated by the wind industry.
I’m not an engineer (although my father was), but one of my best friends is a mechanical engineer and a Distinguished Scientist at Sandia National Labs. We have discussed wind power. If you accept the fact that anthropogenic CO2 is not a problem or that mitigation thereof will not affect climate in any significant way, then wind power is probably one of the DUMBEST methods of generating electricity on the commercial level. Wind power is low density, diffuse and intermittent as well as extremely expensive and labor-intensive. It places strain on the grid and requires spinning back-up. It’s idiocy! Only a crony capitalist or a politician could love this scam.
I too, doubt the claim of 14,000 abandoned wind turbines. But I’d be willing to bet a month’s salary that at any given time there are at least 14,000 wind turbines in the US that are not producing ANY electricity.
Following form my last comment – “The Time” is alternatively known as “The Times.”
D’oh.
Note to self: must proof read more thurrily.
@jim
not sure what your question is. read my whole comment. I don’t think 14000 have been “abandonded”. period. We do not need made-up statistics to prove wind is bad. The facts will do just fine. trouble is, when one wrongly cites made-up statistics, people will also start to question the facts because the source is not credible.
There are surely two underpinnings to the notion of an unchanging climate until man came alomg. The first is the hockey stick and the second the Met office-a prime contributor through the Hadley centre to the IPCC assessments, who assert:
“Before the twentieth century, when man-made greenhouse gas emissions really took off, there was an underlying stability to global climate. The temperature varied from year to year, or decade to decade, but stayed within a certain range and averaged out to an approximately steady level.”
I have asked the Met office where their information came from but they steadfastly refuse to say but I suspect they are still wedded to the hockey stick view of the world.
tonyb
Wind Turbines South Point Hawaii – note in the early part of the vid a number of non-functioning wind turbines:
The comment that sounds like ‘Texas’ in the beginning is actually about the Cactus they spotted …
That’s a really nice letter by Dr Kelly. The editing is shocking; it changes the interpretation of the first sentence. It seems newspapers are still unwilling to honestly present one side of the debate.
The climate always changes, is known by all sceptics and are those that particually argued this case in the first place. (but we know that) Just that the science was always against the pro AGW alarmists , so falsely spin this around to claim sceptics deny climate change to try and discredit them. My observations over the years have well noticed that whatever the alarmists do they then blame this behavour on the sceptics, when they have never done such a thing.
The omitted statement by The Times makes earlier comments inapplicable. Should this be a new topic?
I agree with MSG!
The removal of something as innocuous as ‘the climate has always changed’ is the absolute key to this story. Given WUWT’s team of most excellent sleuths and sources it should be possible to discover who owned the leaden hand that deleted this.
Name and shame.
Welcome to the Gleikman School of Journalism Ethics. And MSM wonders why MSM is dying, sheesh!
“Gobsmacking that they couldn’t handle this one sentence but left the rest untouched – as the climate has always been changing” . So that Dr. Kelly’s actual statement is”
“Andrew Motion (report, Feb 23) is correct to castigate climate change deniers, as the climate has always been changing….”, and it appears that the offending Editors themselves are climate change deniers.