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”:
jai mitchell says:
“I …plotted the GISP2 data in excel to check your claim about how fast the temperature has warmed. In the GISP2 graph the largest warming happened during the younger dryas from 11,857 years before present (1950) and 11,258 before present. in this largest jump the temperature record went up by 12.84 degrees over the course of 599 years or an average rise of 2.14 degrees per century.”
Well, that’s wrong. According to Richard Alley, not only has the temperature changed by tens of degrees, it changed that much in a decade or two, not in 599 years.
Next, jai mitchell writes:
“The reason that this is significant is because the Greenland temperature change that you show is about 3 times the global average. so, when the younger dryas went up by 12.84 degrees, the global average temperature went up by a little over 4 degrees.”
Sorry, that is not significant. Why not? Because global warming occurs mostly at night, and in winter, and in the higher latitudes. So it is to be expected that global warming occurs more in Greenland than the global average.
But that was not the point, which was: global warming happens in both hemispheres at the same time. There is excellent correlation. Ignoring that fact is simply changing the subject.
=============================
Martin asks:
“Is the “NOW” on that graph 2013 or 1950 or 1860?”
The chart covers too big a time scale to tell. But look at “Today”. That should answer your question.
If it doesn’t, maybe this chart will. Notice that there are at least twenty “hockey stick” rises like Michael Mann’s hockey stick chart. They all occurred before CO2 had risen, therefore, CO2 does not have the claimed effect.
If you live in those areas time to buy a wood stove….
Nope … EPA has banned those as well
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2014/01/29/epas-wood-burning-stove-ban-has-chilling-consequences-for-many-rural-people/
Gail Combs says at January 31, 2014 at 4:37 pm… as it happens I agree with you about the benefits of a Mixed Economy. But I’m not totally convinced I am right. Economics is complicated.
However, I am totally convinced that a 1-dimensional political spectrum is too simplistic to be helpful.
Even the Political Compass is open to abuse.
Mod:
I am disappointed that you say to me at January 31, 2014 at 3:58 pm
Say what!?
Check the thread. Throughout the thread I have been fighting to keep the thread on its important topic against the onslaught of a succession of ultra-right wing cranks trying to displace the topic with untrue and irrelevant propaganda.
uk(us) is merely the most recent of those trolls. And I get told to stay on topic!
Richard
RACookPE1978:
In your irrelevant, off-topic and untrue post at January 31, 2014 at 3:58 pm you conclude
NO!
Were we all saints, people would all be good. We are not, thus some people fail. Kill. Hurt. Harm. Limit improvement to what the government allows, wants, and desires. More government.
And evil people pretend that people will be good if the good people who are socialists are opposed.
Now can we return to the subject of the thread, please.
Richard
A. Scott:
re your post at January 31, 2014 at 11:49 pm.
I fail to understand the relevance of regulations concerning wood burning stoves in the US to the subject of the UK HoC DECC Select Committee Meeting on the IPCC AR5. Please explain.
Richard
richardscourtney says:
February 1, 2014 at 1:40 am
“I fail to understand the relevance of regulations concerning wood burning stoves in the US to the subject of the UK HoC DECC Select Committee Meeting on the IPCC AR5. Please explain.”
Must be all the wood smoke drifting across the Atlantic or something 🙂
Friends:
Another view of the Committee Hearing is provided by The Register here.
Richard
I watched this questions and answers ‘sit-com’ – the committee for Energy and Climate Change – with Lindzen, Laframboise & Co making the big mistake by not appreciating they were addressing politicians who are ignorant of the finer details of the IPCC, its processes and the climate science of dangerous man-made global warming.
The Committee’s questions needed to be answered with the utmost simplicity and clarity. Whilst I believe Lindzen, Laframboise & Co probably thought they did, most of their answers simply went way over the heads of the committee members because their responses to questions were not given in simple terms appropriate for these uniformed politicians.
For example, when Donna Laframboise explained how certain authors are closely affiliated with environmental activist groups like Greenpeace and WWF, the committee simply could not understand the importance (in preparing a global scientific report) of important concepts of independence, objectivity, impartiality and transparency, and why persons who have shown their ‘green beliefs’ will necessarily be biased because they could hardly reflect anything in the report that would expose their own views as being wrong. An independent minded person, however, would have no difficulty referring to all sides of an issue.
Well, maybe the last 17 years includes the highest Anomalies on record; well in the last 130 years; but that is a far cry from saying the Temperatures have been the highest on record, or the last 130 years.
What you say, The Temperatures, and the anomalies give the same information.
Well great; then let’s stick with the Temperatures then; we do have an SI unit of Temperature; there is no unit of anomaly.