The Policy Lass

I want to spend some time on climate change policy for a while — an issue I have so far tried to avoid, despite the fact I am a “policy lass” to quote Kenneth Fritsch.

Climate change policy is a complex matter fraught with many intricacies.  It’s not my area of expertise and so I have been trying to educate myself first before I ventured into policy.  I am not claiming to be prepared adequately to do so, but there has been so much posted recently about climate policy that I thought I would weigh in.

Note that this post is a work in progress. I will likely be revising it as I go.

To the uninitiated who might be unaware of the recent controversies over climate science, global warming policy would appear at first glance to be a no-brainer.

The science shows that burning of fossil fuels has led to an increase of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and an enhanced greenhouse effect that has resulted in increased warming over the past half-century.  The science, when put into models, suggests that the potential for temperature increases to levels not experienced by modern human civilization and with significant negative effects is possible if we do nothing to limit the release of greenhouse gasses from the burning of fossil fuels.

It seems obvious that we must take action to limit and reduce the release of greenhouse gasses into the environment and switch away from fossil fuels to renewables and clean forms of energy.

Simple right?  The science is clear, although uncertainties remain. Continue reading →…

Over at CA, Steve McIntyre has a post up about his trip to the PDAC.

The Prospectors and Developers Association Convention is a big deal in the world mineral exploration business. I’ll be going to it this week. It’s in Toronto every year around this time and started yesterday. Hundreds of exploration companies are in town, with presentations from all over the world. Yesterday, I chatted with a company with a gold prospect in Yakutia (Indigirka River), a district that we know from tree ring proxies. Continue reading →…

Thanks to Willard’s necessary-reading Neverending Audit website, I came across (once again) the thread at CA on stripbark: Miracles and Strip Bark Standardization and the infamous CB.  Oh, and yes — this was the thread on which the CRU hack was announced…

ETA: I realize I’ve already mentioned this thread before but damn, it all seems to blend into one big mash after a while…

It's a miracle!

Here’s the post by Rob Wilson that starts the fun and games:

Rob Wilson

Dear All,

Please do not take this the wrong way, but the depressing amount of ignorance on this current thread makes it hardly worth the effort to respond. Two quick points:
1. The linear aggregate model is a purely conceptual model – something ideal for teaching to undergraduates to highlight all the environmental factors that can affect tree growth.
2. w.r.t. scarred trees (fire, glacier, avalanches etc) – one would never use tree-ring data from a scarred tree for a dendroclimatic reconstruction – or at the very least one would use a measured radius where the rings were not affected by the accelerated growth around the scar.

There is a wealth of literature on these issues.

Rob Continue reading →…

I’ve been reading up on the early days of the whole shebang, starting with the early correspondence between McI and Mann.

Here’s a CA post that refers to correspondence between McI and Mann re data.

Mann told Antonio Regalado of the Wall Street Journal that he would not be “intimidated” into releasing source code for MBH98.

Here is an account of correspondence with Mann and with the U.S. National Science Foundation:

Even before publication of MM03, we politely requested clarification on issues in MBH98. This was a source of controversy in late 2003. Here is a record of correspondence with Mann which we made available some time ago.

After publication of MM03, Mann argued that MM03 contained an incorrect implementation of a stepwise principal components procedure (which was not documented in MBH98) . Details of this procedure have continued to drift in, with the first listing of the number of PC series retained in each calculation step/tree ring network combination provided in the July 2004 Corrigendum SI. This listing was inconsistent with prior information. Continue reading →…

I’m trying to compile a list of the following:

1. everything Steve McIntyre has asked for over the years
2. what was publicly available
3. where
4. when
5. what he has been told by CRU/Hadley/NOAA/NASA, and
6. what FOI responses have been, and
7. his comments on each either on his blog or elsewhere.

Continue reading →…

Here’s an interesting bit from The Guardian:

Evidence from a respected scientific body to a parliamentary inquiry examining the behaviour of climate-change scientists, was drawn from an energy industry consultant who argues that global warming is a religion, the Guardian can reveal. Continue reading →…