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Michael Mann, hounded researcher

Originally posted at Skeptical Science

Here is a translation of  recent article (December 25th, 2011) in the French newspaper Le Monde by science journalist  Stéphane Foucart. He reports on a talk that Michael Mann gave at the 2011 AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco, in which Mann introduces his forthcoming book  The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. Foucart interviews Mann and discusses the background of the Hockey Stick and Climategate controversies. What is refreshing is the absence of the false balance, both-sides-of-the-story, style of reporting that is found so often in English language newspapers.

Original article (in French) from Le Monde by Stéphane Foucart

In early December, at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (the annual grand gathering of the bigwigs of the geoscience world), Michael Mann introduced his forthcoming book to his peers. The lecture was entertaining and the audience laughed heartily.  The American climatologist, Director of the Earth System Center at Pennsylvania State University, cracked numerous jokes and made many witty asides. He scoffed at the anti-science of the Republican politicians and mocked their ridiculous statements on climate change; everybody laughed out loud.

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World Energy Outlook 2011: “The door to 2°C is closing”

Originally posted at Skeptical Science

If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re heading

These words come from the Executive Summary of the World Energy Outlook 2011 (WEO11), just published by the International Energy Agency(IEA). The study incorporates the most recent data on global energy trends and policies, and investigates the economic and environmental consequences of three scenarios over the 2010 to 2035 time period. This is an important document that should be widely read but, unfortunately, the full report costs €120 for a single-user 650-page pdf.  Some key graphs and fact sheets are provided for free.

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Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study: “The effect of urban heating on the global trends is nearly negligible”

Originally posted on 21 October 2011 at Skeptical Science

A paper submitted for peer review by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study (BEST)finds that urban heating has an influence on global temperature trends that is “nearly negligible” and that what effect has been observed is even slightly negative, which is to say that temperature trends in urban areas are actually cooler than the trends measured at rural sites, and that the Earth’s land surface has warmed approximately 1°C on average since 1950.

The Urban Heat Island Effect

It has long been observed that temperatures in cities are higher than in the surrounding countryside, caused, in part, by human structures that reduce albedo and evapo-transpiration, as well as by the effects of waste heat emissions, McCarthy et al 2010. Even though most (99%) of the Earth’s surface is not urbanized, some 27% of the Monthly Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN-M) temperature stations are located in cities having populations of more than 50,000. Since urbanization has grown dramatically over the past few centuries, it seems reasonable to ask how much of the observed rise in global temperatures is due to urbanization. For example, McKitrick and Michaels claimed in 2007 that about half of the recent warming over land is due to urban heat island effect, although this result  was disputed bySchmidt in 2009.

Several studies have looked in depth at possible heat island contamination of land temperature records. For example, Hansen et al in 2010 used satellite measurements of night lights to remove possibly affected urban sites from the temperature records. Allowing for urban effects reduced the global temperature trend over the period 1900-2009 by 0.01°C. Menne et alperformed an analysis on US surface temperature records and found only very small effects due to poor siting of temperature stations. They reported that poorly-sited stations did show some small positive bias in recorded minimum temperatures but there was a small, but slightly larger, negative bias in recorded maximum temperatures, resulting in an overall small residual cool bias.

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The Ridley Riddle Part One: The Red Queen

Originally posted at Skeptical Science on 30 July 2011

This is a three-part series on science writer, businessman and climate contrarian Matt Ridley. The first section looks at his science books and is critical of his latest book, The Rational Optimist; the second scrutinizes one of his blog posts on climate change and shows that his avowed lukewarmer stance is built on shaky scientific foundations; the final part examines Ridley’s history as a businessman, drawing parallels between his role in the credit crunch and his approach to climate change.

Sometimes, it’s easy to dismiss climate change contrarians as being a little slow when it comes to truly understanding science, but it’s not possible to do that with Matt Ridley, who has a well-earned reputation as a first-class science writer.  He is on the Academic Advisory Council of the contrarian Global Warming Policy Foundation, along with Robert Carter, William Happer, Richard Lindzen, and Ian Plimer. As well as being the author of several excellent science books, he’s a journalist, a businessman, and has a D.Phil. in Zoology from Oxford. And he runs a blog that, among other things, takes a skeptical stance on the mainstream science of climate change.

Why such a talented science writer should have come to reject the scientific consensus on climate change is the Ridley Riddle that this series of posts will attempt to answer.

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The Ridley Riddle Part Two: The White Queen

Originally posted at Skeptical Science

In 2010, David MacKay wrote a letter to Matt Ridley in response to an op-ed article by Ridley published in The Times. MacKay’s letter and Ridley’s reply to it are both posted on the Ridley’s Rational Optimist blog. In this article, I am going to focus on Ridley’s reply, not because it is a particularly interesting or original addition to the skeptical canon, but because I believe it is revealing about the mindset of a climate contrarian.

David MacKay is a physicist but not a climate scientist. He is the author of the book Sustainable energy – without the hot air, which examines the daunting challenge that the United Kingdom faces in decarbonizing its energy supply. It’s a must-read, entertainingly written, easy-to-understand work, and can be downloaded for free.  MacKay was appointed in 2009 to be Chief Scientist at Britain’s Department of Energy and Climate Change. His letter to Ridley raises points that will be familiar to regular readers of Skeptical Science; he cites recent evidence of climate change and discusses the analogue of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum and the central question of the likely range of climate sensitivity. MacKay also mentions that his personal and professional contact with climate scientists bears no relation to the way they are often negatively depicted on contrarian blogs.

There are three main elements of Ridley’s reply that I want to focus on in this article but, first, I’ll simply list in point form some of the other arguments that comprised the rest of Ridley’s Gish Gallop, along with rebuttal links and brief comments.

Giddy-Up  

  • Warming Island. See Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth article for a good review and anSkS blogpost.
  • Speleothem temperature records (from Watts Up With That).  A rough and ready analysis by Willis Eschenbach that shows that some temperatures over the past 10,000 years were hotter than today. Whether reliable or not, these results are consistent with mainstream science, as reported by the IPCC AR4.

Regional temperature variations from pre-industrial levels plotted against latitude and time before present. IPCC Continue reading →

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The Ridley Riddle Part Three: Like a Northern Rock

Originally posted on 12 August 2011 at Skeptical Science

This article will look at Matt Ridley’s involvement in the collapse of the British bank, Northern Rock, in 2007. I am not the first to attempt to link this business disaster with with his views on climate change; George Monbiot wrote an article, The Man Who Wants to Northern Rock the Planet, remarking, among other things, on the contradiction between Ridley’s small-government libertarianism and his begging the Treasury for a bail out of his company.

The rise and fall of Northern Rock

Matt Ridley was the non-executive Chairman of Northern Rock, a British bank that, in 2007, was the first in over a century and a half to experience a run on its deposits. British banks had all survived two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the end of the British Empire, until Northern Rock failed. Ridley had served on the Northern Rock board of directors since 1994 and was appointed Chairman in 2004. A previous Chairman of the bank was his father, Viscount Matthew Ridley.

Northern Rock’s depositors responding rationally but not optimistically to market signals.Source

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