It should be welcomed that the Met Office is engaging with critics of climate science.
We hear a lot these days about the need for scientists – particularly climate scientists – to engage more with the public and better communicate their findings. Without such dialogue, their work can be misunderstood or, worse, misrepresented. Just saying, "I let my science do the talking", no longer cuts it in the rough'n'tumble world in which we now live of cherry-picked soundbites, online echo chambers, and bruising culture wars. Scientists need to not only explain their work, but defend it, too.
I think we should applaud the fact, then, that there now appears to be more of what I call "Rapunzel" scientists; those that choose to (metaphorically, at least) let down their long hair and allow us to climb up into their ivory tower to converse with them and to see how they operate. Many scientists now publish their own blogs and an increasing number are taking to Twitter.
A good example is Professor Richard Betts, a climate scientist who is head of the climate impacts research team at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter and a lead author on both the 4th and 5th Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in Working Groups 1 and 2. By being positioned at the heart of both the Met Office and the IPCC, he is a scientist placed very much under the scrutiny of climate sceptics.
But rather than defensively pull up the drawbridge, he routinely posts explanatory comments on blogs that are hostile to climate science and engages in debates on Twitter with sceptics.
In London, about 2 thousand 800 experts from various countries meet in the conference Planet Under Pressure.
Russian scientists say that the cycles of waxing and waning of ice in the Arctic show that continued global warming "is a myth" and the current climate cycles will follow a period of global cooling towards the end of this century.
Recent studies have observed alternating cycles of growth and decline in Arctic ice mass, said yesterday in Novosibirsk, Russia, Nikolai Dobretsov scholar, president of the Scientific Board of Natural Sciences of Russian Academy of Sciences.
"The ice minimum was recorded in 2007. Between 2008 and 2011, and it seems in 2012, the ice has grown back. The winters in the Arctic are getting colder. It is obvious that continued global warming is a myth, "said Dobretsov at a press conference, quoted by Interfax.
Research by Russian scientists show that the mass of ice in the Arctic rises and falls cyclically, so it's natural that heating phase followed by other stages cooling.
"By the late start global cooling, not warming, are the latest forecasts," said Russian scientist.
Revised part 1 of 2 Campaign to Repeal the Climate Change Act Prof Richard S. Lindzen Seminar Held at the UK House of Commons on the 22nd February 2012
Professor Richard Lindzen is one of the world's greatest atmospheric physicists: perhaps the greatest. What he doesn't know about the science behind climate change probably isn't worth knowing. But even if you weren't aware of all this, even if you'd come to the talk he gave in the House of Commons this week without prejudice or expectation, I can pretty much guarantee you would have been blown away by his elegant dismissal of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming theory.
Dick Lindzen does not need to raise his voice. He does not use hyperbole. In a tone somewhere between weariness and withering disdain, he lets the facts speak for themselves. And the facts, as he understands them, are devastating.
Here is how he began his speech, which was organised on behalf of the Campaign To Repeal the Climate Change Act:
Stated briefly, I will simply try to clarify what the debate over climate change is really about. It most certainly is not about whether climate is changing: it always is. It is not about whether CO2 is increasing: it clearly is. It is not about whether the increase in CO2, by itself, will lead to some warming: it should. The debate is simply over the matter of how much warming the increase in CO2 can lead to, and the connection of such warming to the innumerable claimed catastrophes. The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal. The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak – and commonly acknowledged as such. They are sometimes overtly dishonest.
You can read a full version of his speech here. The Bishop has it up here.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of chairing a packed meeting in the Palace of Westminster (don’t tell the Clerk of the Parliaments), at which Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT spoke even more brilliantly than usual on “global warming”, and engagingly answered many questions from Parliamentarians and the public.
Afterwards, Dick went to brief a Cabinet Minister (who shall be nameless, but he is a good egg, and privately regards catastrophic manmade “global warming” as nonsense). The Minister indicated – in effect, and with scarcely-concealed regret – that the party line set by David Cameron in response to various opinion polls, focus groups and other such artifices for identifying and following a consensus rather than setting a lead, and not the objective scientific and economic truth, was likely to remain the basis of UK climate policy.
In reality, orders issued to our elected nominal “government” by the hated, unelected Kommissars of the EU, our true government, who have exclusive competence to decide and dictate the UK’s environment and climate policies, are and will remain the basis of UK climate policy, regardless of what (or whether) Cameron and his vapid focus groups think (if “think” is the right word). Government of the people, by the people, for the people has perished from this once-free, formerly-democratic corner of the Earth. We have all the trappings of democracy and none of the reality.
At a public meeting in the Commons, the climate scientist Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT made a number of declarations that unsettle the claim that global warming is backed by “settled science”. They’re not new, but some of it was new to me.
Over the last 150 years CO2 (or its equivalents) has doubled. This has been accompanied by a rise in temperature of seven or eight tenths of a degree centigrade.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change attributes half this increase to human activity.
Lindzen says: “Claims that the earth has been warming, that there is a Greenhouse Effect, and that man’s activity have contributed to warming are trivially true but essentially meaningless.”
He said our natural body temperature varies by eight tenths of a degree.
Updated below with MUST READ comments from Piers Corbyn
There is a meeting scheduled for Monday 23rd January by Dr David "snow will become an increasingly rare event" Viner. This looks to be an open event and ALL are welcome, see below for more information, lets hope there is a debate and both sides can take part...GR
Environmental expert and Nobel Peace Prizewinner Dr David Viner is in Cambridge UK next week telling allcomers: “I don’t believe in climate change.”
Dr Viner is keynoting a free event – the first in a series of lunchtime seminars – organised by the Global Sustainability Institute, based at Anglia Ruskin. It takes place on Monday (January 23) from 1pm in the Helmore 201 building on the Cambridge campus in East Road.
Dr Viner, a principal consultant at Red Kite Enterprise and Environment which helps businesses identify environmental threats and opportunities, said: “I will outline the current state of the science and the subsequent pathway that we are likely to follow.
“This will demonstrate why simply believing in climate change is not a sensible approach to tackling the biggest global issue to date and why a far more pragmatic realistic and less emotional approach is required.
The ICCC-6 conference main session talk videos are now available online. The one talk and follow-on Q&A that was particularly impressive and right on the nail was Bob Carter's.
Click source for MUST SEE VIDEO LINK to see the Main session Talk
Check back to this page on June 30 starting at 8:15 a.m. as we broadcast live the full proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Climate Change.
Click source from 30th June for a MUST SEE LIVE VIDEO STREAM
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It should be welcomed that the Met Office is engaging with critics of climate science.
Professor Richard Lindzen is one of the world's greatest atmospheric physicists: perhaps the greatest. What he doesn't know about the science behind climate change probably isn't worth knowing. But even if you weren't aware of all this, even if you'd come to the talk he gave in the House of Commons this week without prejudice or expectation, I can pretty much guarantee you would have been blown away by his elegant dismissal of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming theory.
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