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”:
Apparently alarmist have problems with words. Warm does not require warmING. It does require warmED. To use Yeo’s example, when he was driving 90, was he still accelerating? He was driving faster than ever, but he was not accelerating.
per richard courtney et al – I would say that the impact of “climate mitigation” policies is to reverse social and economic progress, destroying the energy basis of economic growth and the gains made by the working and middle classes over the past two centuries. It would be extremely helpful if American champions of the working class realized this, rather that subsume climate politics into their anti-capitalist cant.
Also on youtube
Ken Hall says: @ur momisugly January 30, 2014 at 12:17 pm
Correct wws. The current Conservatives are nothing like the Conservatives under Thatcher….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
In the states we call them RINOs (Republican In Name Only)
However please remember the ‘Socialist’ vs ‘Conservative’ crap is just the propaganda used to keep us fighting among ourselves while Big Government and Big Business (who are actually ‘socialists’) promote ‘Neo-Corporatism’ or ‘Fascism’ or the ‘Third Way’ or ‘Neo-Feudalism’ or ‘Sustainability’ or ‘Communitarianism’ or Agenda 21 or whatever the newest phrase is for the latest flavor of totalitarianism.
Ever notice that no matter who is elected the ‘Agenda’ of the wealthy elite is alway advanced?
pierre charles:
Thankyou for your excellent post at January 30, 2014 at 12:57 pm.
Exactly so.
I provide this link to your post
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/30/a-report-on-the-ar5-hearings-unsettling-the-settled-science-of-climate-change/#comment-1554937
and also this link to the equally excellent post of Mr Green Genes
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/30/a-report-on-the-ar5-hearings-unsettling-the-settled-science-of-climate-change/#comment-1554897
Together those two posts say all that really needs to be said about the side-track, so the thread can ignore it from now on.
Richard
Think of Viz does politics
Now that is exposing your age. 🙂
@wws Tim Yeo would not comprehend a socialist ideology if you slapped him with it. He is a committed Tory establishment figure firmly of the old-school right-wing
HE IS A TROUGHER !! Dyed in the wool is almost an insult to real tories.
Solar influence on glaciation in Greenland
Anthony, in your spat the other week with Rog you said you had pretty well rejected “barycentric” discussion of solar activity. I have no axe to grind here, but my current thinking is that the unexplainable is perhaps best explained by variations in solar activity (magnetic field, TSI, spectrum) that is way outside of the past 34 years of satellite measurements. And this needs to be reconciled with the 41,000 y and 100,000 y cycles. I’m very interested to know what your current favoured hypotheses are.
Sorry, don’t read these pages every day, too much to keep up with, but I’m very interested to know your opinion on climate drivers on all relevant time scales.
richardscourtney says:
January 30, 2014 at 12:37 pm
“The insistence of the US ultra-right that the AGW-scare is “left wing” and “socialist” hinders those of us who are “left wing” and “socialist” from opposing the AGW-scare. ”
That makes no sense at all.
DirkH says:
January 30, 2014 at 1:23 pm
“That makes no sense at all”
To clarify: The Left has by and large not arrived at the conclusion that CO2AGW is real because the evil right made them do it. Rather, they have erroneously mistaken CO2 for all the evil chemicals we started to control in the 70ies, and with good reason at the time. Assuming in their cluelessness that anything coming from a smokestack or exhaust pipe must be equally evil, they all blindly followed their leaders, who, being slightly more cunning, instigated the whole affair as a vehicle of change, like the Left has always used groups or causes as vehicles of change, a tactic that is familiar to them since at least Marx.
So don’t blame the evil right for your Frankfurt School tactics on the left. Blame Marx, Engels, Adorno, Markuse, Horkheimer, Münzenberger, Gramsci.
It is very cold forecast for the U.S. in February.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat_a_f/gif_files/gfs_t100_nh_f00.gif
What determines the temperature in the stratosphere? The amount of ozone. What determines the amount of ozone? Working Sun. Is that so hard to understand?
ren says:
January 30, 2014 at 1:37 pm
——————————————-
You need to fill in the blanks for us arm-chair climate scientists.
1. Colder stratosphere leads to colder surface temperatures?
2. Less ozone leads to colder stratosphere?
3. Lazy sun leads to less ozone?
4. What is a lazy sun? Less radiation , less solar magnetic activity, both?
Evening All
I watched the whole thing live. With the exception Yeo (who clearly had an agenda) The Scottish chap (I’m crap with names) ripped into the Met office chap, and Professor Myles Allan (the chap on the left?) and to me, he squirmed. The chap in the middle, Professor Sir Brian Hoskins(?) Repeatedly said “I wasn’t involved with that” or “I wasn’t in that meeting”. Which gave me the impression that he has trying to distance himself from the AR5 report as often as he could.
After Dr Peter Stott from the Met office explained that they now believe that aerosols had a great cooling effect than first thought. The Scottish chap asked him if he had run the models again with the new information, to which he squirmed and eventually admitted that they haven’t. When asked why, Prof Myles Allan said they can take years to run!!
In my opinion Professor Richard Lindzen shot himself in the foot a bit with his intellectual snobbery about the best & the brightest doing math & hard sciences. BUT out of that he made it clearly known that climate science practically didn’t exist before 1980. Something which the CAGW crowd frequently don’t mention. Another thing that he mentioned, which I thought was rather interesting was that 58% of the authors in the AR4 report did not want to be a part of the AR5 report. No further details were mentioned as to why.
In my opinion two of the MP’s did ask serious questions of the CAGW bods. I also thought that Prof Myles Allan *tried*, (but the salesman smarm did him no favours IMHO) to give the “settled” science bit that people weren’t now talking about the lack of climate change but where the readings where within the climate models. He failed to mention that 18 out of the 20 where wholly incorrect, and of the remaining two the recorded temperatures were at the bottom of the scale.
On another positive note, Nicholas Lewis pointed out that the IPCC figure were out three fold. The actual figures were 0.1 and the estimated figures were 0.3 regarding the ocean temperature rises. He also pointed out that the IPCC’s “the temperature gains are hiding in the deep ocean” lacked data to support this theory.
Donna Laframboise gave clear and concise answers, and to me, she looked as if she had been told to rein in some as she clearly had a lot more that she *could* have said. She did make the point that 60% of the papers in AR4 were not peer reviewed. Which was glossed over by Tim Yeo.
Sorry if my ramblings aren’t in the order they were spoke about in the meeting, and I’ve probably got a few names round the wrong way. But on the whole, I thought that with the exception of Tim Yeo’s stupidity, there were appropriate questions asked. Wether or not this was just a circus show just for the public remains to be seen. However, I am rather surprised that there has been an absolute lack of reports on this debate.
In case any non UK skeptics don’t know why he is known as “Trougher Yeo” (as in pigs with their nose in the trough) and why he may be so keen on green, you need to read this;
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100144779/just-why-is-tory-mp-tim-yeo-so-passionate-about-green-issues/
Apparently it’s ok that he has received all the money from the green company’s “because he has declared it” !
DirkH:
This is a response to the stinking piles of excrement you have posted at January 30, 2014 at 1:23 pm and January 30, 2014 at 1:30 pm.
What I wrote made perfect sense. READ IT.
I did not “blame” the right for anything other than what I wrote. READ IT.
And the rest of your steaming ordure has no relation of any kind to what I wrote.
The important issue is as I said in response to pierre charles. I will copy it here because your display of reading difficulties indicates you would have problems finding it.
But you could not “ignore the side-issue” because you saw it as yet another opportunity to disrupt a thread with your prejudiced bollocks. This thread is about the AR5 Hearing and it is not merely another excuse for you to proclaim your political prejudices.
Richard
“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.”
Weeeelllll, 2013 was hotter than the 2001-10 avg (just). But the “hottest evah” meme is dead. 2002-11 was below 2001-10; 2003-12 was lower still. 2004-13 just closed lower again. (HadCRUT4 – it’s more pronounced in others) Keep that stat handy.
Well, Richard, claiming that the Right makes the Left believe in CO2AGW is a bit idiotic, and that’s what you did. The Left; they have all the big brained intellectuals, like Noam Chomsky. Shouldn’t they be able to think a problem through on their own?
Nighty-night; I see I irritate you.
Sean P Chatterton:
Thankyou for your good report at January 30, 2014 at 1:45 pm.
I think you may want to read the thread on the ‘Live Link’ which is here.
The impressions of viewers and discussion of the Hearing are in the thread. They are below the ‘live reports for people unable to get the live stream’ which you probably want to scroll down past.
Richard
I didn’t watch the videos but from what is in the post, the exhange went something like this (It’s 12:45 pm and Yeo works for a company that makes sunglasses):
Yeo pressed Lindzen to get a Yes to the question, “Was 11:30 am to 12:30 the brightest hour of the day?”
Lindzen: (Eventually) Of course it was.
Yeo: It’s interesting you’re using that as evidence that somehow brightening has stopped. That we’ve just gone through the brightest hour of the day and that this is actually evidence that global brightening 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 minutes.
DirkH, please continue to comment. RichardCourtney is not a moderator, and is not applying any of the written policies for WUWT, which are provided under About/Policy. He has invented his own blog rules and is also enforcing them.
Any objective observer knows that you have followed policy, eg: “Respect is given to those with manners,” and “The idea of the blog is to learn, discuss, and enjoy the interaction. Please try to keep that in mind when making comments.” Also, you have never “dominated a thread with excessive posting.”
Your perspective and knowledge of history are esp. important right now.
DirkH:
Don’t flatter yourself. You don’t “irritate” me. Your untrue twaddle which side-tracks threads infuriates me. And, as a matter of historical fact, the right-wing Margaret Thatcher started the political AGW-scare; see this.
Hopefully you have cleared off so the thread can now return to its subject.
Richard
If you are in Port Moresby you might be interested in this .
DirkH says:
January 30, 2014 at 1:30 pm
===========================
Once more with feeling …
This is NOT a left vs. right thing, at least not in the UK (which is, after all, the country at the centre of this thread).
Sigh.
PS I’m a libertarian so I don’t tend to get involved in left vs. right arguments as a rule as I believe that they fundamentally miss the point. I am, however, happy to make an exception in this case so I can point out the irelevence.
Steve from Rockwood says:
1 Colder stratosphere is colder surface leads Temperatures?
2 Less ozone leads a colder stratosphere?
3 Lazy sun leads is less ozone?
4 What is a lazy sun? Less radiation, less solar magnetic activity, both?
The amount of ozone over the polar circle depends on the UV and cosmic radiation? Therefore, the amount of ozone depends on the magnetic field of the Earth. Cosmic rays will reach unheard of, as in 2009 and 2010.
Is it contrary to the observations?
jai mitchell commented that I posted…
“…a link to a graph that doesn’t show global temperatures (but rather only central Greenland temperatures) and doesn’t show a link that has a time scale of ‘decades’ but rather shows a time scale of thousands of years. pretty darn sloppy, is this how you try to be accurate on things like, say, dinner dates?”
Aside from jai’s need for a dinner date [unlike me: I have been married since before the Civil War], let me point out that I’ve posted many links proving that both hemispheres show concurrent warming and cooling. Therefore, the Greenland record is also a global record. [I will post links showing the clear correlation between the NH and the SH again for jai, if he asks.]
Regarding jai’s clumsy attempt to show cherry picking [obvious projection], I posted the longer time scales specifically because another commenter had said the record only went back 130 years. But the record goes back far longer than that.
Usually, I am the one attacked for showing shorter time scales, so I keep a folder of time scales from hundreds of years, to hundreds of thousands of years, and everything in between. I will also post those links if jai wishes.
jai mitchell has never risen early enough to catch the worm in this forum. He is always playing catch-up because he’s not the early bird type. More like Chicken Little ☺.