Video of the session 2 follows.
The committee for Energy and Climate Change must be in line for an award. Its performance this week was exceptional.
The mental level of Yeo’s committee is – well, the climate debate is so rancorous let’s try for decorum.
Suffice it to say that John Robertson’s questioning would have been a credit to a clever dugong. Albert Owen nearly grasped the idea that that a Greenpeace activist in charge of an IPCC Chapter might lack objectivity. And Tim Yeo’s chairing was as good as a golf club captain in a Saturday night lock-in.
The committee had just received three mainstream climate workers and now, to say they had looked at all sides, they had three sceptics.
No doubt their sceptical remarks are contentious, their facts arguable and their conclusions unusual – but the three of them certainly gave the lie to the claim that “the science is settled”.
Richard Lindzen, a professor at MIT, in his low-key, diffident manner, looked placidly into the committee’s apocalyptic future. How that annoyed them.
The Chairman asked a number of leading. loaded or frankly loopy questions .
Such as:
“So, you think the report should be compiled on a more slipshod basis?”
And:
“Are you saying the Government is deliberately appointing scientists who aren’t as good as others?”
And, here’s an exchange worth quoting at length.
Yeo pressed Lindzen to get a Yes to the question, “Was 2000 to 2010 the hottest decade on record?”
Lindzen: (Eventually) Of course it was.
Yeo: It’s interesting you’re using that as evidence that somehow global warming has stopped. That we’ve just gone through the hottest decade of all time (sic) and that this is actually evidence that global warming is not taking place.
Lindzen: You’re saying something that doesn’t make sense.
Yeo: Oh, so it is continuing!
Lindzen: How shall I put it? On a certain smoothing level you can say it’s continuing. It hasn’t done anything for 15 years.
Yeo: Except we’ve just had the hottest-ever (sic) decade . . . If I was clocked driving my car at 90 mph, faster than I’d ever driven it before, I don’t find that convincing evidence I haven’t broken the 70mph speed limit.
It dawns on Lindzen the chairman has special needs. He explains how a 16-year smoothing average means one thing, how a pause and plateau means another.
Yeo responds: Just because we’ve had the hottest decade on record doesn’t seem conclusive proof that global warming has come to an end.
After a chorus of contradiction:
Yeo: I thought Professor Lindzen was saying the upward trend has come to an end.
Lindzen: (quite sharply, for him) No! I never said it’s come to an end! I said for 16 years it hasn’t increased!
Yeo: I don’t think we’ll get much further on this. I’m happy to be judged by what’s on the record.
I bet he won’t be.
Read more here: SKETCH: Unsettling the “Settled Science” of Climate Change
Now compare that with what the execrable Bob Ward ( who’s paid by “Big Climate” to have an opinion, unlike Donna Laframboise who paid her own way there, and asked for help from the skeptic community to defray travel costs) had to say about it:
For example, Donna Laframboise, the world’s leading producer of conspiracy theories about the IPCC, was asked by Mr Stringer why she thought the organisation should be abolished. Her reply was extremely misleading: “When the IAC [InterAcademy Council] reported in 2010 it said that there were significant shortcomings in every major step of the IPCC process. That is not a mild criticism. That suggests that there are serious reasons to be very careful about the conclusions of the IPCC process.”
Conspiracy theories? He must be talking to Cook and Lew. Ward’s rant, complete with all the denigrating labels necessary for his craft, is here: http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/Media/Commentary/2014/Jan/Blog-on-Select-Committee-Hearing.aspx
You can watch the session here, thanks to reader “Jabba the Cat”:
I think the skeptical view was for once well articulated. Unfortunately, it is complex, and the general public would not be able to understand what was being said most of the time. The panel should have understand though, that the best policy is to do NOTHING.
Professor Lindzen could have easily put Yeo in his place, had he responded thusly:
“In a good dictionary, please look up ‘warm,’ and ‘warming.'”
LOL! Oh yes, 2000 – 2010 was the hottest decade “on record,” and the record goes back to only 130 years.
No one in the general public is paying attention to any of this nonsense anymore, they’re tuning all of it out. Nobody but the True Believers and the Committed Skeptics even knows that hearings were held, or cares.
Ah, Guido. So negative all the time.
OK. Rt Hon John Robertson’s contribution was embarrassing and Tim Yeo needs incarcerating on grounds of feeble-mindedness as well as corruption. Agreed.
But the rest of the committee were OK.
Rt Hon Graham Stringer was particularly on the ball. He seems to know about Bayesian statistics than the two FRSs on the panel. And he wiped the floor with Prof Myles Allen (for what that’s worth).
It is interesting how hard they are working to try to keep the general public from realizing there has been no warming for 15-17 years. It means the CO2-connected temperature meme is accepted behind the scenes as having been broken and they are trying to make sure people don’t find out. That is what a conspiracy looks like: concerted effort to mislead and hide with many hundreds of like-minded co-conspirators willing to pitch in with bilge, wails and howls on cue.
It doesn’t seem to bother them in the least they are sounding more desperate each time.
Re the hottest decade: Well 11 more years of what we have now and the hottest decade (assuming the 1930’s are not un-revised to their former glory) will be behind us. Maybe by then they will have implemented whatever their crafty plan is, though it hasn’t gone too well thus far.
Donna is now a top flight skeptic? Because she wrote a book? Isn’t putting journalists in places where scientists should be how we got into this CAGW mess? I think an IPCC ex-reviewer who left in disgust over the corruption, scientific fraud and deception would have been a better choice. Oh…right.
M Courtney:
In your post at January 30, 2014 at 11:09 am you comment
So, Myles Allen is a floor cloth? Ah, I knew there had to be a use for him.
Richard
Question: Are solar cycles important?
Lindzen: It is pretty clear that actual solar variability is small.
(as reported by JC’s blog)
Hmmm…
According to the latest Stamford-WSO data, its polar field is moving back into ‘negative’ polarity.
Note the extensive coverage in the international press/media of this hearing….
/sarcasm
JimS says:
“…the record goes back to only 130 years.”
Actually, the record goes back much farther. There are numerous ice core records from both hemispheres, which go back hundreds of thousands of years.
The planet has been warmer, and [much] colder in the past. Current temperatures are very mild, and they are certainly not unusual. The temperature fluctuation over the past century and a half has been an amazingly steady and low ±0.8ºC.
But prior to that time, global temperatures have varied by tens of degrees, within only a decade or two. If that happened now, there would be mass global starvation.
People just do not understand how good the present climate is.
I think what Lindzen should say is that it has certainly not increased as fast as was projected, and that most skeptics agree that that there should be increases/record decades. Basically that the pause should be making the skeptics to luke-warmers mainstream rather than the CAGW high sensitivity crowd on which the UK has been basing policies.
wws says:
January 30, 2014 at 11:09 am
This is more important than anything anyone on either “side” may have said.
dbstealey says: @ur momisugly January 30, 2014 at 11:26 am
…..The temperature fluctuation over the past century and a half has been an amazingly steady ±0.8ºC……….People just do not understand how good the present climate is.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yes! Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillations, Bond events and Heinrich events that cause global temps to change 16C and 8, 10C in dramatically short times.
Richard B. Alley of the U.Penn. chaired the National Research Council on Abrupt Climate Change. for well over a decade. In 2002, the NAS (alley chair) published a book “Abrupt Climate Change”:
. From the opening paragraph in the executive summary:
“….Recent scientific evidence shows that major and widespread climate changes have occurred with startling speed. For example, roughly half the north Atlantic warming since the last ice age was achieved in only a decade, and it was accompanied by significant climatic changes across most of the globe. Similar events, including local warmings as large as 16°C, occurred repeatedly during the slide into and climb out of the last ice age….”
In his book, The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future Richard Alley, one of the world’s leading climate researchers, tells the fascinating history of global climate changes as revealed by reading the annual rings of ice from cores drilled in Greenland. In the 1990s he and his colleagues made headlines with the discovery that the last ice age came to an abrupt end over a period of only three years….
Special needs, LOL!
Thinking about this hearing I came up with three findings that need to be remembered (and which were overshadowed by the looming idiocy of Tim Yeo).
1 Myles Allen doesn’t think climate sensitivity is the important factor in Climatology. That needs following up on because if sensitivity to CO2 isn’t important then…
2 Myles Allen informed the committee that the science comes before the political input. This is wrong with respect to the SFPM and he wasn’t helped by his fellow panellists (who knew). Hiding the politicisation of the IPCC was a theme for the non-sceptics; it was far more important than the chances of the world ending.
3 When the UK’s mainstream climatology elite were asked about the IPCC AR3 and the Hockey stick the answer was “mistakes were made…” It seems to me that the MWP is back in, Michael Mann is way out and anything will be jettisoned to hold the IPCC close.
Just a comment for everyone who reads WUWT who ISN’T a Brit…Mr Time Yeo is seen here as an arse. For which, read Guido’s blog http://order-order.com/tag/tim-yeo/
Spot the sneaky insertion? From the “hottest decade on record” to the “hottest decade of all time” bull faeces. Good old Tim should have been reminded about the Holocene Hypsithermal.
Here is the real Tim Yeo.
I’m driving a car at 40 mph and then accelerate 70 mph.
Now I’m driving for a time with my speed fluctuating between 70 and 75 mph.
Am I still accelerating, since my most recent miles were travelled at my
highest speeds?
Yes, because I’m using kph as a proxy, and the numbers are worse than we thought.
Let’s not let this turn into a report of Tim Yeo’s failings. He is not important to the debate on climate science in the UK.
The hearing was.
And no-one has time to list or even read all of Tim Yeo’s failings.
Let’s just hope the deselection passes and he can flow out of Parliament in one bowel-like motion
Here’s a new set of stairs. I walk up a few steps and stop. I am now the highest I’ve ever been on those stairs. That has *no predictive value* on what I will do next.
Yeo as well as being an idiot, is chairman of a renewable energy company (cannot remember the company’s name) and like everyone else who promotes AGW stands to lose thousands of £’s if said AGW is disproved.
The people who promote AGW, despite all the mounting evidence that it is not happening are :
a) Making lots of money from it.
b) Socialist control freaks
c) Hypocritical socialist control freaks making lots of money from it
From:
http://order-order.com/2014/01/30/sketch-unsettling-the-settled-science-of-climate-change/
I pull this quote:
“She [Donna Laframboise] also suggested that the review editors should be chosen by and report to people outside the IPCC. That the summary-writing process should be televised. And that the scientists involved shouldn’t all be appointed by governments.”
==============
If indeed, this is a threat to mankind’s future, shouldn’t the process be televised ?
Why is it hiding behind closed doors ??
Donna is gonna smoke’em out, we’re lucky to have her.
Friends:
This is a momentous and historic moment because I write to completely agree with M Courtney when he writes his three points at January 30, 2014 at 11:37 am here.
And, to avoid WUWT regulars writing to check, yes, this agreement is from me astonishing as it may seem.
Richard
Lindzen should have asked Yeo at what age he stopped growing and if he considers himself to be still growing, because his height over the last decade is as high as it has been during his life?
What part of NOT WARMING ANYMORE do these people not understand? There has been no warming at all this decade, or this century or even this millennium so far, in spite of more CO2 being pumped out this decade than in any previous decade since man walked on earth.
Any non UK readers that follow the link to Guido’s site should be forewarned that Anglo Saxon language is fully accepted within the moderation of the comments. Think of Viz does politics.