Guided Missile

Sir Patrick Vallance has backed calls for a "very powerful" science minister in Cabinet as a damning report into the national response to Covid is published. The Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, in an interview with BBC Radio 4, said science needs to shape policy, especially as world leaders gear up to tackle climate change. He said that integrating science and politics "has got to be the primary aim", and added: "Science needs to be everywhere, it can't sit as if it's one thing off to the side. I've got nothing against the idea of a very powerful science minister, what could be wrong with that, and cabinet positions that speak for science? Don't think that science gets concentrated in one place. Science applied to policy is relevant everywhere it can't be hived off."

Made glorious summer by this sun of York; And all the clouds, that lour'd upon our house, In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. Walking around the garden, I noticed a lot of pine cones which, to people that count tree rings, mean a cold winter to follow. I cast my mind back to the end of 1978 and events that heralded the career of the greatest British politician of our generation and the end of the worst. So many parallels to current events and a cold winter could have a similar seismic effect. In 1978, a mild autumn turned cold on the morning of 25 November when temperatures recorded at Heathrow Airport dropped from 14 °C to 0 °C overnight, with some snowflakes. Throughout most of the following month, the cold lingered, only for temperatures to rise well above 10 °C around Christmas. On 30 December, the temperature dropped again, along with rain that soon turned to snow; the next day 1978 ended with Heathrow recording a high of only −3 °C (27 °F) amid steady snowfall. The effects were more severe outside of London. Ilfracombe and other towns in North Devon could only be reached by helicopter as many roads could not be adequately cleared. The Royal Automobile Club blamed local councils, who in turn pointed to unresolved issues with their unions and staff shortages; even around London local authorities were only able to clear main roads. Two Scottish trains near Stirling were stuck in the snow, leaving 300 passengers stranded; rail transport difficulties were exacerbated elsewhere in the country by a strike. Tanker drivers had also gone on strike in some areas from 18 December, causing some homeowners to have difficulties keeping their homes heated and limiting petrol supplies. Only three League football matches could take place over the New Year's holiday, and all rugby contests were cancelled. Three men drowned after falling through the ice on the Hampstead Heath pond in London. Early in the New Year an unofficial strike of lorry drivers began. With petrol distribution held up, petrol stations closed across the country. The strikers also picketed the main ports. The strikes were made official on 11 January by the TGWU and 12 January by the United Road Transport Union. With 80 per cent of the nation's goods transported by road, roads still not completely cleared from the earlier storm, essential supplies were put in danger as striking drivers picketed those firms that continued to work. While the oil tanker drivers were working, the main refineries were also targeted and the tanker drivers let the strikers know where they were going, allowing for flying pickets to turn them back at their destination. More than a million UK workers were laid off temporarily during the disputes. Bitter winter weather returned after a week of milder temperatures on 22 January. Freezing rain began falling across England at noon; by midnight temperatures dropped further and it turned to snow, which continued falling into the next day. Once again roads were impassable in the south; in the north and at higher elevations areas that had not yet recovered from the storm three weeks prior were newly afflicted. A month earlier the public sector unions had set that day as the biggest individual day of strike action since the General Strike of 1926 and many workers stayed out indefinitely afterwards. With many in the private sector having achieved substantial rises, the public sector unions became increasingly concerned to keep pace in terms of pay. The government had already announced a slight weakening of the policy on 16 January, which gave the unions cause for hope that they might win and use free collective bargaining. Train drivers belonging to ASLEF and the National Union of Railwaymen had already begun a series of 24-hour strikes, and the Royal College of Nursing conference on 18 January decided to ask that the pay of nurses be increased to the same level in real terms as 1974, which would mean a 25 per cent average rise. The public sector unions labelled the date the "Day of Action", in which they held a 24-hour strike and marched to demand a £60 per week minimum wage. It would later be recalled as "Misery Monday" by the media. The strikes appeared to have a profound effect on voting intention. According to Gallup, Labour had a lead of 5 percentage points over the Conservatives in November 1978, which turned to a Conservative lead of 7.5 percentage points in January 1979, and of 20 percentage points in February. On 1 March, referendums on devolution to Scotland and Wales were held. That in Wales went strongly against devolution; that in Scotland produced a small majority in favour which did not reach the threshold set by Parliament of 40 per cent of that electorate. The government's decision not to press ahead with devolution immediately led the Scottish National Party to withdraw support from the government and on 28 March in a motion of no confidence the government lost by one vote, precipitating a general election, which Margaret Thatcher won. In 2008, a Times piece raised the spectre of the Winter of Discontent in warning Labour, then in government with Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, not to allow the TUC to set the party's agenda again. Five years later, at the first Margaret Thatcher Annual Lecture given after her death, Boris Johnson lamented that British youth were getting an overwhelmingly negative impression of the late prime minister from "Russell Brand and the BBC" that those old enough to remember what came before her election did not. "In 1979 Red Robbo paralyzed what was left of our car industry and the country went into an ecstasy of uselessness called the winter of discontent: women were forced to give birth by candle-light, Prime Minister's Questions was lit by paraffin lamp and Blue Peter was all about how to put newspaper in blankets for extra insulation." We will not be in a climate crisis this winter, we will be in an energy crisis. It will be caused, not by striking workers, but by a failing energy policy.

Britain did not lock down sooner because ministers failed to challenge poor scientific advice, the first major report into the Government’s pandemic response has concluded. The error led to "one of the most important public health failures the UK has ever experienced" and resulted in a higher death toll, MPs said. The most successful part of Britain’s Covid-19 response was the vaccine programme, which is estimated to have saved 112,000 lives in England alone and protected nearly 50 million people in the UK.

Congratulations on setting a new record for ad hominem attacks in one thread. As this getting boring now, I will no longer humiliate you. You must have a motorway to block, somewhere.

Actually, if you'd read the paper, you would have seen that my extract cites not only the McKitrick and Christy study, but these: Pielke, R.A., Sr.; Wilby, R.; Niyogi, D.; Hossain, F.; Dairuku, K.; Adegoke, J.; Kallos, G.; Seastedt, T.; Suding, K. Dealing with Complexity and Extreme Events Using A Bottom-Up, Resource-Based Vulnerability Perspective. In Extreme Events and Natural Hazards: The Complexity Perspective; Sharma, A.S., Bunde, A., Dimri, V.P., Baker, D.N., Eds.; Copyright by the American Geophysical Union, Geophysical Monograph Series; American Geophysical Union: Washington, DC, USA, 2012; Volume 196. IPCC. Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. In Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Stocker, T.F., Qin, D., Plattner, G.-K., Tignor, M., Allen, S.K., Boschung, J., Nauels, A., Xia, Y., Bex, V., Midgley, P.M., Eds.; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 2014; p. 1535. McKitrick, R.; Christy, J. Pervasive warm bias in CMIP6 tropospheric layers. Earth Space Sci. 2020, 7. Wang, Q.; Cheng, L.; Zhang, L.; Liu, P.; Qin, S.; Liu, L.; Jing, Z. Quantifying the impacts of land-cover changes on global evapotranspiration based on the continuous remote sensing observations during 1982–2016. J. Hydrol. 2021. Burgess, M.G.; Ritchie, J.; Shapland, J.; Pielke, R., Jr. IPCC baseline scenarios over-project CO2 emissions and economic growth. Environ. Res. Lett. 2020. Pielke, R., Jr. Economic ‘normalisation’ of disaster losses 1998–2020: A literature review and assessment. Environ. Hazards 2020, 20, 93–111. Pielke, R., Jr.; Ritchie, J. Distorting the view of our climate future: The misuse and abuse of climate pathways and scenarios. Energy Res. Soc. Sci. 2021, 72, 101890.

You said: Bold type added. You linked it, I have Badgerx16 on ignore. The wanker emoji was directed at whoever is behind the website you linked. I think there is a general misunderstanding of the term ad hominem. Calling you a total fraud is fair comment, as Michael Mann discovered when he sued Timothy Ball for libel when Ball suggested Mann should be jailed for fraud. Mann failed to prove that was untrue, because he was unable to provide data that supported his "hockey stick" graph, much like you have been unable to supply data to support your assertion that an increase in CO2 from 300-400ppm caused an increase of 1C in global temperature over the century. If I called you a wanker, then that is an insult. If I called your scientific argument a bad one because you are a wanker, that is an ad hominem attack. I hope that helps...

HTH

Listen mate, if you read that website, you'll be able to discern that the paper it refers to,had not even been published, at the time the author had been ripping it's authors to bits. Like I said, you're not as clever as you think, are you?

Despite a relatively recent publication, the R. McKitrick, J. Christy paper (2020) has so far been cited an impressive 6 times. Michiya Hayashi, Hideo Shiogama, Seita Emori, Tomoo Ogura, Nagio Hirota, The Northwestern Pacific Warming Record in August 2020 Occurred Under Anthropogenic Forcing, Geophysical Research Letters, (2021). Stephen Po-Chedley, Benjamin D. Santer, Stephan Fueglistaler, Mark D. Zelinka, Philip J. Cameron-Smith, Jeffrey F. Painter, Qiang Fu, Natural variability contributes to model–satellite differences in tropical tropospheric warming, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (2021). Cheng‐Zhi Zou, Hui Xu, Xianjun Hao, Qiang Fu, Post‐Millennium Atmospheric Temperature Trends Observed From Satellites in Stable Orbits, Geophysical Research Letters, (2021). Xiaoqing Luo, Jianjun Xu, Kai Li, Discrepancies of Upper Troposphere Summer Thermal Contrast Between Tibetan Plateau and Tropical Indian Ocean in Multiple Data, Frontiers in Environmental Science, (2021). Pascal Richet, The temperature–CO₂ climate connection: an epistemological reappraisal of ice-core messages, History of Geo- and Space Sciences, (2021). Roger A. Pielke, Jimmy Adegoke, Faisal Hossain, Dev Niyogi, Environmental and Social Risks to Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health—A Bottom-Up, Resource-Focused Assessment Framework, Earth, (2021). I didn't bother to read all of the citations, apart from the latest, which cites it at 34. An interesting quote from this paper below : Limited skill? I should think so and it is good that the IPCC's models are being challenged by other researchers. It's the way science operates, not like some minor religious cult. Still keep drinking the Kool-Aid guys.

Where do I start: Nice to see you've accepted a review of a paper the author hasn't even read. Classy...

Ssourced, validated information? Yeah....

Red, green & blue, really??? Impressive publication, mate. You are really brainwashed, aren't you? I was looking for the peer review of the paper you referenced, but the website you quoted didn't even review it. Talk about your professional credibility being shot to hell. You thought Dr. Christy was an economist, then, after it is obvious you've never heard of him, you desperately try and shit on his reputation. Mate, you're a total fraud.

I see our resident climate expert has fled this thread after leaving the above rabbit dropping. It's one thing patronising a village idiot like me, but it appears that he doesn't much like the opinion of experts in his field. The paper (McKitrick and Christy (2020), which was referenced in my post above, found a significant warming bias globally in the newest climate models and has been cited by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) as among the top 10% most downloaded papers in 2020 from its journal Earth and Space Science. “Pervasive Warming Bias in CMIP6 Tropospheric Layers” was co-authored by Dr. John Christy, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science who is also Alabama’s state climatologist and director of the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). The article “helped raise the visibility of Earth and space sciences and inspired new research ideas,” according to AGU. Dr. Christy, was appointed to serve on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board. “This was a pleasant surprise for Ross McKitrick and me,” he says. “Ross is an econometrician at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, with terrific statistical skills. I worked on assembling the observational datasets and converting the raw climate model output into a metric that matched what is observed from satellites and balloons.” The scientists examined and updated historical data focusing on 1979-2014 from the newest Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Version 6 (CMIP6) climate model and found that what previously were excessive warming rates modeled only in the tropical troposphere are now being excessively modeled globally. All of their model runs warmed faster than observations in the lower troposphere and mid-troposphere, both in the tropics and globally. “Our work demonstrates clearly that these policies are based on exaggerated notions of climate change,” Dr. Christy says. “In other words, we show that the models are too sensitive to the extra greenhouse gases that humans are placing into the atmosphere as a result of enhanced economic development, and so are not dependable for major energy-policy initiatives.”

I read the study. Particularly this part: Not a ringing endorsement for climate modelling, nor is your refusal to cite a study that proves any increase in CO2 forces climate change. At the risk of repeating myself, the IPCC stated this: The penny has dropped for me about the same time I sold my completely impractical electric car, what a complete load of bullshit this climate "emergency" is. It was re-enforced by the worlds elite listening to every word an uneducated and autistic girl has to say about our planet. "Rainman" was a movie, FFS. All I can say is good luck with your profession and the money you earn from it. I promise I won't lose any sleep over the inaccurate modelling you guys come up with, nor a couple of degrees of warming we may face over the next 100 years. Personally, I think any increase in temperature and CO2 will be a good thing for our ecosystem.

I notice you provide no comment on the observed temperatures from balloon and satellite data being much lower since 1975 than that predicted by every model apart from the Russian one. You have nowhere to go in respect to the observed data sources. It is not surprising that McKitrick deliberately ignores a study that doesn't form the basis of the IPCC data models. Those happen to be the models that inform governments globally on whether they spend $35 trillion to reach zero carbon. He's an economist, used to dealing with complex data sets and is well qualified to inform the taxpayers whether there is a cost benefit in spending this massive sum. I happen to think that no one has proven that an increase in CO2 causes, or is caused by, global warming. That is really the only question to answer and you have avoided that key point, but resorted to an arrogant approach whenever anyone challenges your view. There is no way you will change your opinion on this matter, whatever the evidence, but I am willing to bet you have never owned an electric car, nor installed a heat pump. As a taxpayer, I'm not happy paying the bill for your theories, if you're not prepared to.

I'll ignore your patronizing tone and focus on a couple of details. One is the main one from the study you referenced from Imperial in which it is admitted that: It appears the way this long standing discrepancy is dealt with, is to alter the data, as usual: What this study hasn't done is removed "the long-standing discrepancy (that) exists between general circulation models (GCMs) and satellite observations". I know the difference between "tropical tropospheric warming with observed GMST". Compared to the difficulty I had with quantum mechanics, it's not that hard. Are you trying to say there is no connection between tropical tropospheric warming and observed GMST? As far as 0.8C warming in the last 30 years, it may be a large increase to you, but it isn't to me. Sorry about that. As you are obviously a genius in this field, can you provide proof that this is down to the increase in CO2 concentrations from 0.03% to 0.04%, an increase I also happen to think is not much. No one has been able to prove to me this increase is causation, not correlation. I'd appreciate the patronizing tone to be dialled down a bit, mate. You're nowhere near as clever as you think you are and some humility may help you to learn, as would a more open mind to studies that may not agree with your mindset.

Obviously the publication I cited is not a peer reviewed paper, it's a literature review. Reserve your comments to the data and papers cited, please. I am particularly interested in why you think the actual balloon and satellite data in the graph is unrepresentative and the IPCC models are representative, of the degree of observed global warming.

Equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) is an estimate of the eventual steady-state global warming at double CO2.

Mind you, sometimes you need an ad hominem attack, when it calls for it:

Obviously I copied and pasted a lot of it. Rather like your misleading graph, numb nuts. I'm surprised that there is anyone that who wanted a more detailed document, but if you insist, here it is, references and all. I am willing to bet a pound to a pinch of shit that rather than discussing the content of the paper and it's references, posters replying to this thread will concentrate on ad-hominem attacks. They have nothing else besides that and blocking a motorway somewhere.

In its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), the IPCC used the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) models to project future warming and the associated climate impacts. In the interests of science, I thought it may worthwhile for the curious to take a look at the accuracy of these models versus digital measurements via weather balloons and satellites, taken in the period since Saints won the FA cup, i.e. a long time ago: Solid red line—average of all the CMIP-5 climate models; Thin colored lines—individual CMIP-5 models; solid figures—weather balloon, satellite, and reanalysis data for the tropical troposphere. A careful look at the figure above reveals that only one of the 102 model runs correctly simulates what has been observed. This is the Russian climate model INM-CM4, which also has the least prospective warming of all of them, with an ECS of 2.05°C, compared to the CMIP5 average of 3.4°C. The literature drawing attention to an upward bias in climate model warming responses in the tropical troposphere extends back at least 15 years now (Karl et al., 2006). Rather than being resolved, the problem has become worse, since now every member of the CMIP6 generation of climate models exhibits an upward bias in the entire global troposphere as well as in the tropics. The IPCC is nearing completion of an upcoming (2022) Sixth Assessment Report, and a new suite of models, designated CMIP6, is being released. Will those be an improvement? No. As shown by McKitrick and Christy (2020), the CMIP6 models are even worse. Of the two models that work, the Russian INM-CM4.8 has even less warming than its predecessor, with an ECS of 1.8°C, compared to the CMIP6 community value of around four degrees. The other one is also a very low ECS model from the same group, INM-CM5. The model mean warming rate exceeds observation by more than four times at altitude in the tropics. As far as a climate emergency, caused by any extreme weather events allegedly due to the increase in CO2 concentrations, it is worth looking back further. Since the 1920s, global CO2 concentrations increased from about 305 parts per million to more than 410 ppm, and average global temperatures increased by about 1°C. Yet, globally, the individual risk of dying from weather-related disasters such as hurricanes, floods, and drought decreased by 99 percent. There is an increasing body of evidence that global warming and increases in atmospheric CO2 levels are actually beneficial. In a recent paper by Dayaratna et al. (2020) three forms of evidence indicate that the CO2 fertilization effects are significant: First, rice yields have been shown to exhibit strong positive responses to enhanced ambient CO2 levels. Kimball (2016) surveyed results from Free-Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) experiments, and drew particular attention to the large yield responses (about 34 percent) of hybrid rice in CO2 doubling experiments, describing these as the most exciting and important advances in the field. Experiments in both Japan and China showed that available cultivars respond very favourably to elevated ambient CO2. Furthermore, Challinor et al. (2014), Zhu et al. (2015) and Wu et al. (2018) all report evidence that hybrid rice varietals exist that are more heat-tolerant and therefore able to take advantage of CO2 enrichment even under warming conditions (2013). Second, satellite-based studies have yielded compelling evidence of stronger general growth effects than were anticipated in the 1990s. Zhu et al (2016) published a comprehensive study on greening and human activity from 1982 to 2009. The ratio of land areas that became greener, as opposed to browner, was approximately 9 to 1. The increase in atmospheric CO2 was just under 15 percent over the interval but was found to be responsible for approximately 70 percent of the observed greening, followed by the deposition of airborne nitrogen compounds (9 percent) from the combustion of coal and deflation of nitrate-containing agricultural fertilizers, lengthening growing seasons (8 percent) and land cover changes (4 percent), mainly reforestation of regions such as southeastern North America … Third, there has been an extensive amount of research since Tsingas et al. (1997) on adaptive agricultural practices under simultaneous warming and CO2 enrichment. Challinor et al. (2014) surveyed a large number of studies that examined responses to combinations of increased temperature, CO2 and precipitation, with and without adaptation. In their metanalysis, average yield gains increased 0.06 percent per ppm increase in CO2 and 0.5 percent per percentage point increase in precipitation, and adaptation added a further 7.2 percent yield gain, but warming decreased it by 4.9 percent per degree C. Based on Challinor et al.’s (2014) regression analysis, doubling CO2 from 400 to 800 pm, while allowing temperatures to rise by 3°C and precipitation to increase by 2 percent, would imply an average percent yield increase ranging from 2.1 to 12.1 percent increase. For those that have read this far, I hope that a presentation of real science, rather than climate science, will provide a counter-balance to the hysterical utterings of politicians, pseudo scientists and untrained politicians.

The 1998–2012 hiatus shows a rise of 0.05 [–0.05 to +0.15] °C per decade, compared with a longer term rise of 0.12 [0.08 to 0.14] °C per decade over the period from 1951 to 2012. The appearance of hiatus is sensitive to the start and end years chosen: a 15-year period starting in 1996 shows a rate of increase of 0.14 [0.03 to 0.24] °C per decade, but taking 15 years from 1997 the rate reduces to 0.07 [–0.02 to 0.18] °C per decade.