History in the (re)making?

One year on and there's been a slew of articles revisiting the events of the past year. I was going to ask what has prompted this little flurry, but it's obviously the anniversary thing. With increasing pressure for a public inquiry, it seems that some of the key players have been trying to position themselves favourably, so let's have a look at what's been written, versus what the contemporaneous documentation actually says. SAGE minutes can be found here, I think (I downloaded the relevant docs a while back).

The first article I noticed was Laura Kuenssberg's “Inside Story”. She “talked to more than 20 of the people who made the life and death decisions on Covid”. The relevant passage that I am interested in concerns the decision making around mid-March:

“13 March, the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) committee concluded the virus was spreading faster than thought.

But it was Downing Street "modellers in the building", according to one current official, who pored again over the numbers, and realised the timetable that had only just been announced was likely to result in disaster.

The next morning, a small group of key staff got together. Simple graphs were drawn on a whiteboard and the prime minister was confronted with the stark prediction that the plan he had just announced would result in the NHS collapsing under the sheer number of cases.

Several of those present tell me that was the moment Mr Johnson realised the urgency - that the official assumptions about the speed of the spread of this new disease had been wrong.

[...]

On 16 March, the public were told to stop all unnecessary social contact and to work at home if possible.

[...]

For many inside government, the pace of change that week was staggering - but others remain frustrated the government machine, in their view, had failed to move quickly enough.”

The narrative being presented here of ponderous government is significantly misleading.

The govt claimed at the time to be paying close attention to the scientific advice from SAGE, and the specific change to SAGE's assessment on the 13th March was not that the disease was spreading any more rapidly, but merely that the number of infections was higher than previously thought (due to greater importation from abroad). This is a key distinction that anyone numerate should be able to grasp readily. To quote from SAGE minutes on the 13th:

“Owing to a 5-7 day lag in data provision for modelling, SAGE now believes there are more cases in the UK than SAGE previously expected at this point, and we may therefore be further ahead on the epidemic curve, but the UK remains on broadly the same epidemic trajectory and time to peak. 

[...]

SAGE was unanimous that measures seeking to completely suppress spread of Covid- 19 will cause a second peak.”

Changing the estimate of the number of cases just brings the peak forward by a few days. Even a factor of 2 is only a single doubling time which they thought to be about 5-7 days at that time. Changing the estimate of the growth rate could (and in fact did) change the timetable and urgency much more significantly, but this didn't happen for another week and a half.

It is not clear who “the modellers in the building” refers to in Kuenssberg's piece, but they are clearly not SAGE. Maybe Cummings had run a few numbers on a spreadsheet but since SAGE was supposed to be an assembly of world-leading experts, it would hardly be appropriate to discard their analyses in favour of his. For that matter, I had also blogged that the mitigation plan was likely to overwhelm the NHS (a conclusion that I reached around the 9th March based on some very simple calculations) but I wouldn't expect Johnson to listen to me either. SAGE minutes are very clear that they still believed the doubling rate to be 5-7 days right up to the 18th March and had described any overload on the NHS as being some way off (albeit a looming problem that would need addressing at some time in the future). They were unanimously (see above) opposed to suppression at this point.

On the 16th, the SAGE meeting changed its advice somewhat and suggested that some social distancing measures (but not school closures) should be implemented promptly:

“SAGE advises that there is clear evidence to support additional social distancing measures be introduced as soon as possible.

[...]

SAGE will further review at its next meeting whether, in the light of new data, school closures may also be required to prevent NHS capacity being exceeded.”

Clearly there was some increased urgency here but NOT any indication that the NHS was under immediate threat, in direct contradiction to Kuenssberg's unattributed claim above that “the prime minister was confronted with the stark prediction that the plan he had just announced would result in the NHS collapsing under the sheer number of cases.” I'm not saying it is impossible that anyone said such a thing, but if they did, they were an isolated voice and certainly not representative of SAGE as a whole.

Immediately following the SAGE meeting on the 16th, the Govt did of course request that people avoid all unnecessary social contact. Admittedly, this instruction had neither legal force nor economic support at that point but SAGE was obviously reasonably satisfied with the adequacy of this plan as can be seen from their minutes of the 18th (at which time they also recommended school closures):

“SAGE advises that the measures already announced should have a significant effect, provided compliance rates are good and in line with the assumptions. Additional measures will be needed if compliance rates are low.”

So it was only in the case of poor compliance that additional measures would be required.

There was no SAGE meeting between 18th and 23rd, which was unfortunate in the circumstances (21-22 being a weekend). On the 23rd, SAGE finally realised that they had got the R number wrong and that as a result the doubling time was much shorter than had been previously believed, making the situation quite desperate. Specifically, the SAGE meeting of the 23rd concluded: “Case numbers could exceed NHS capacity within the next 10 days on the current trajectory” and this statement must be understood in the context of the immediately preceding 20th March SPI-M meeting which noted both: “Any measures enacted would take 2-3 weeks to have an impact on ICU admissions” and also: “If the higher reproduction number is representative of the longer term, then it is likely that additional measures will be required to bring it below one”.

Thus SAGE's underestimate of the R number didn't just mean that the epidemic was coming faster and harder than previously thought: another consequence is that actions that would have been adequate for R=2.4, might not be adequate for R=3. It is quite understandable that this caused alarm within SAGE, but it only happened on the 23rd.

The Govt imposed a legally-enforceable lockdown with much more far-reaching restrictions immediately that evening (23rd March).

Moving on to the next article, in the Guardian, a hagiography of Patrick Vallance:

“But it now seems clear that Boris Johnson, and his advisers, were slow to heed Vallance’s early advice.

Before the 16 March press conference, Vallance chaired a meeting of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) in which a collection of experts had advised that the first lockdown should begin immediately.

Johnson did not announce the unprecedented national lockdown until a week later on 23 March in a primetime TV address to the nation.”

This is simply not true as documented above. SAGE asked for relatively modest action around the 16-18th, and the Govt responded promptly. SAGE explicitly assessed on the 18th that the actions were probably adequate and it was only on the 23rd when they realised that they had got the doubling time wrong, that they suddenly realised they had a much larger and more urgent problem on their hands. Vallance also got this wrong in his appearance before the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology. 

Most recently, a podcast on the Guardian consisting of an interview of Neil Ferguson. He points very firmly to the data about higher case numbers due to greater importation being what drove the accelerated decision making in mid-March (NB this view is very different from Vallance who very emphatically linked the change in policy advice to the revision of the estimated doubling time - it is simply not possible for both Ferguson and Vallance to both be correct about this). Ferguson mentions this being discussed in the “first weekend in March” which I'm sure must be a simple slip as this would be 7-8th March whereas on the 10th and even 13th SAGE seems pretty sanguine about the situation and does not suggest any need to take immediate action. Assuming he meant the 14-15th March instead, this is far more consistent with SAGE as the minutes of the 16th do certainly suggest some some action should be taken in the light of the new data:

“The science suggests additional social distancing measures should be introduced as soon as possible.”

When asked specifically (at 11m20 in the podcast) “were scientists telling ministers to go earlier?” Ferguson firstly points again to the surveillance data as escalating the decision making process, and then coyly says it was entirely in the Govt's hands as to what actions they took. He could have said, but chose not to, that the Govt followed SAGE's advice promptly and to the letter. And the interviewer didn't pursue the point. While the improved surveillance data undoubtedly played a role in the process, the urgent advice for the most stringent controls only came on the 23rd as a result of the revised estimate of doubling time. You only have to glance at the SAGE minutes to see that they were not shy about offering policy advice throughout the outbreak.

At 16m40 onwards the interviewer says, with reference to the situation in September after schools reopened: 

“...once again the advice from scientists was to lock down. But that advice was not heeded. Did that delay once again lead to a higher death rate than we might have seen?”

Without getting into the September story here, any delayed response from the Govt (which I don't dispute was evident in the autumn) could only “once again” have resulted in a higher death rate if there had also been a delayed response to advice to lock down in March. Which there was not, according to the evidence I have outlined.

no comment

The bet - final outcome

You may be wondering what had happened with this. As you will recall, some time ago I arranged a bet with two Russian solar scientists who had predicted that the world was going to cool down. The terms of the bet were very simple, we would compare the global mean average surface temperature between 1998-2003 and 2012-17 (according to NCDC), and if the latter period was warmer, I would win $10,000 from them, and if it was cooler, they would win the same amount. See here and here for some of the news coverage at the time.

The results were in a while ago, and of course I won easily, as the blue lines in the graph below show. It was never in much doubt, even though their choice of starting period included what was then the extraordinarily hot El Nino year of 1998. In fact the temperature in that year just barely exceeded 2012 (by less than 0.01C) and all subsequent years have been warmer as you can see from the black dashed line before. It seems unlikely any of us alive today (or indeed over the next few centuries at least) will ever see such a low temperature again.

So this should be the point at which I ask my blog readers for ideas as to what to spend the $10,000 on. I was hoping to do something that would be climatically and environmentally beneficial, perhaps something that might garner a bit of publicity and make a larger contribution. But they are refusing to pay. More precisely, Bashkirtsev is refusing to pay, and Mashnich is refusing to even reply to email. With impressive chutzpah, Bashkirtsev proposed we should arrange a follow-up bet which he would promise to honour. Of course I'd be happy to consider such a thing, once the first bet is settled. But it looks unlikely that this is going to happen.

It was obvious of course that this settlement risk was the biggest uncertainty right from the start. I had hoped they would value their professional reputations as worth rather more to themselves than the sums of money involved. On the other hand a certain amount of intellectual dishonesty seems necessary in order to maintain the denialist mindset. Of course it could be argued that it's unfair to tar all denialists with the same brush, maybe I was just unlucky to come across the only two charlatans and the rest of the bunch are fine upstanding citizens who just happen to suffer from genuine misunderstandings. Who wants to bet on that?

That IPCC thing

Hello faithful blog readers. After a long absence I'm going to try to post some things again. Got a small backlog of ideas to write about and a little bit of free time to work at them.

I'll start with the tedious 1.5C nonsense since I can sense that you are all (both?) desperate for my opinions. The simple and efficient way for the IPCC to have responded to the stupid proposal from politicians that, having made no progress towards limiting global warming to 2C, they would instead really really try really really hard to limit it to 1.5C honest guv we really really mean it this time, would have been to say "No you won't, you are just pretending. Now go away and do something constructive rather than delaying and passing the buck". That would have saved a lot of money and CO2 emissions. But instead, we get lots of meetings, papers, scientists pontificating on the radio and ridiculous misrepresentations(*) like the Grauniad saying we have 12 years to save the planet. Back in 2008 we had less than a decade, so that's a step in the right direction.

What. A. Waste. Of. Time. And. Effort.

Perhaps Douglas Adams put it best when he said

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."

(*) misrepresentation of the reality. I really don't much care whether it's the IPCC's fault for inviting this sort of interpretation, or the Grauniad for being clueless, or someone in the middle causing confusion. It's a gift to denialists either way.

Is the Food Standards Agency fit for purpose?

Fans of Betteridge's Law will already know the answer....

This is about the latest food scare of course. Toast and “overcooked potatoes” which was later revealed to refer to roasted potatoes (and well-fried chips) are the supposed culprits this time. It's not the first time we've been warned about acrylamides, and probably won't be the last. It's all nonsense, sadly. The basic problem with the FSA approach is that it identifies and publicises chemicals as being likely to be a cancer causing agent, without any(*) consideration of the dose required. As David Spiegelhalter's excellent article explains, a typical human diet contains around 100th of the dose that has been observed to lead to a modest increase in the rate of tumours in animals. And despite all the studies that have been done, no-one has found any link between acrylamide and tumours in humans. But that doesn't stop the FSA generating scare stories about how we shouldn't toast bread properly, or roast our potatoes (I heard someone recommend 45 mins in a cool oven which would just produce soft greasy pallid lumps).

Incidentally, that article probably doesn't blow DS's horn sufficiently for people to realise how authoritative an expert he is. He is Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge. When he writes about something, he's probably right.

Anyway, I'm going to keep on roasting.

* not strictly true as a careful reading of David Spiegelhalter's article reveals. But the margin of safety has to be astronomical, rather than merely huge, in order for them to discount it.

"untrue" that excessive calories caused obesity

So according to the National Obesity Forum (as reported by the BBC), it is

"untrue" that excessive calories caused obesity.

There's usually a gram of truth underlying each new bit of dietary advice that pops up in the news every 5 minutes. But it's generally buried under a mountain of hyperbole. It now seems clear that the anti-fat advice that I grew up with was somewhat exaggerated. However, does the NOF really expect us to believe that this fine fellow:

built up his fine physique through a strenous regime of cold showers and beatings alone? Incidentally, he's not one of the really fat ones, but he won the one tournament that we went to.

Nothing about this on the NOF website, which seems a bit odd.

Trivial pursuits

So for some reason I got invited to participate in the latest Bray and von Storch survey of climate scientists, having not (IIRC) been asked previously. I barely got started on the meat of it before giving up. Screeds of hopelessly vague multi-choice questions with no context, like: how well do you think climate models can deal with clouds (answer from "very adequate" to "very inadequate"). Can or do deal with? Adequate for what? I'm not impressed.

More interestingly, I swapped a couple of emails with the author of this article over the past couple of weeks while he was writing it. Seems that I didn't say anything quotable enough to get quoted in it, but it looks pretty good to me.

Edit: Oops, first time round I was focussing on the quotable quotes to see if I disagreed with them. On a more careful re-read the author seems to think the last glacial maximum was only 1C colder than the present. No, it was 4C colder (than pre-industrial, ie 5C colder than now).

Climate change by numbers

...is the title of an interesting TV programme that was on BBC 4 last night. It is quite amazing that they dared to show such a maths/stats/science-heavy program at prime time, albeit on a minor channel, so I will start by commending them for that (the inevitable grumbles follow later). The three numbers they featured were the 0.85C warming since 1880s, 95% confidence that anthropogenic influence had caused most of this, and the 1 trillion tonnes of carbon that would take us to about 2C warming. I think it was originally planned to be three 30 minute programmes, but they ran it all together as one long piece, which seemed to work well to me.

I think they told the stories in an engaging manner, there was also lots of interesting historical stuff about how our understanding of the climate system has developed, which was mostly very well done and would probably have been even more interesting had I not already known it! But of course I was hardly the target audience.

In fact one of the researchers making the program contacted me last year to talk about Bayesian vs frequentist approaches to detection and attribution, specifically the IPCC's statement attributing most of the warming of the last century to anthropogenic effects. Unfortunately I wasn't able to be very encouraging about the idea of explaining the differences between Bayesian vs frequentist approaches to the general public, after all most climate scientists struggle with this question as is demonstrated by the IPCC's misrepresentation of D&A results! I've written on this (really must update my web pages, that link won't last for ever...or will it?) but the argument has little traction even in the climate science community because most people are quite content to continue in their comfortably-erroneous way.

Anyway, the Bayesian thing didn't make it into the transmitted programme, which I was neither surprised nor disappointed about, as I really can't see how to present it in such a way that the general public would get anything out of it. And the traditional misrepresentation of the probability of observations more extreme than observed given the null, as the probability of the null given the observations, was heavily featured (that's basically where the 95% comes from). Sigh. But what I really want to grumble about most strongly was the garbled and nonsensical representation of Kalman filtering in the first section, which, contrary to the claims in the programme, is not a method to check observations against each other and has not been used for temperature data homogenisation. The Kalman filter is actually used for updating a model prediction with new observations, and this is how it was used for space navigation. That is, based on current estimates of velocity and position at time t1, the equations of motion are used to predict the new position and velocity at subsequent time t2, and then imperfect observations of the position at t2 are used to update the estimates of position and velocity, and so on ad infinitum.

Ok, pedants may observe that NCEP has pioneered the use of an ensemble Kalman filter for its 20th century reanalysis project, but this is somewhat tangential to climate change and their results, interesting as they are, have their own homogenisation problems and are are hardly central to the debate on global warming. Ironically, Doug McNeall (who was involved as a scientific consultant, I'm not blaming him for anything in particular though) tweeted a link to the wikipedia page on Kalman filtering, which is a much better resource for anyone interested in learning more about the topic. Anyway, I'm really baffled as to where this bit came from - maybe they just couldn't resist a link to “rocket science” :-) Or did someone think “filter” might be related to filtering out bad data? Well, it isn't.

The “pixel sticks” were very clever, but I don't really think a line graph is improved by drawing it on wobbly axes, expecially if a straight line trend is then drawn through the data! I wonder if Doug will feature that on his Better Figures blog :-) And as for the presenters spending most of their time walking away from the camera...I'm probably sounding like a grumpy old man so I'd better stop. As I said, I think it was pretty good overall, but if you want a mathematical/statistical program that really doesn't make any concessions to dumbing down, and that does cover climate change (and Bayesian statistics) on occasion, I strongly recommend “More or Less” on Radio 4.

Update: Oh, this is interesting. It's a blog post about the programme from the mathematician (Norman Fenton) who presented the 95% section. Turns out he is actually a Bayesian who clearly understands how that number is tarnished by prosecutor's fallacy, and he argues that the scientific debate would be improved by a greater use of Bayesian methods!

The importance of priors!

I was amused to see the different publicity, and reaction, to two pieces of research recently. The first was that silly article about running, which claimed that too much running is bad for you. Interestingly, that BBC page seems to have changed from the tautologous "too much" to the term "running hard", which if anything makes it worse, becaue too much being bad is just a definition of what too much means, whereas running hard...well that's where the research falls down. It only took a couple of mins to find the relevant paper, which shows...huge error bars on estimated risk for hard runners, such that the confidence interval on the hazard ratio actually goes below 1 (at which point running hard is good for you!). The underlying problem is that study was small, there were only 36(?) runners in this group, and this simply isn't enough to show conclusively what the health effects would be. I believe that More or Less has dealt with this, though I haven't listened to it yet.

Then just yesterday, David Spiegelhalter drew my attention to a study on the effects of alcohol, which claimed that modest drinking had no benefits (in opposition to the widely held view that it did). He explains that the study was again underpowered, such that any modest effect would by construction not be "statistically significant". The underlying problem is that, as Andrew Gelman often mentions, where an effect is probably small (but non-zero) and only weak studies with small samples are used, any "significant" result will necessarily be a huge overestimate of the effect (ie, if the true value is x but the error bar is ±10x then only estimates that come out to as much larger than x, and perhaps even with the wrong sign, can be reported as significant), and any realistic estimate close to the true value of x will be found "insignificant" and therefore be liable to being discarded or denied by silly scientists.

One obvious solution is to use a Bayesian approach with a reasonable prior, which in both cases would have found that the new data were insufficient to overturn what was previously believed to be the case...but that won't publish high profile papers or sell newspapers.

Chris Johnson and the case of the amazing disappearing post

As if this blog wasn't quiet enough, someone has been trying to reduce the post count even further. Reader may recall a brief blogstorm concerning a so-called journalist Christopher Johnson, who was unceremoniously refused entry to Japan when he did not have a valid working visa. Unfortunately, many of the original articles written by Johnson have been deleted, but you can get the gist of it (including the evidence of him covering his tracks) from the various links in the two posts I made previously.

Anyway, time passed....and then without any warning or explanation, the second blog post vanished. However, this only happened on the .ca domain which I just linked to there (ca means Canada, where Johnson appears to be a citizen and resident). Amusingly, I wouldn't have even noticed this had it not been for Johnson emailing me a few weeks ago to crow about it, as the post is still visible on the jp, uk and com domains which I tend to use.

The link from the deleted page to chillingeffects was not informative when I first looked at it - saying merely that the document was not available yet - so I wrote to them to ask about it. As if by magic, a letter from one Chris Johnson came on-line a few days later. I've got no idea when the page deletion happened, but the letter itself is dated Sept 2012, so it might have been almost 2 years ago. His letter refers to a number of pages, some of which (youtube videos) have vanished and others (japanprobe.com) which have not. Canada is reputed to be one of the most obliging jurisdictions for defamation cases (along with the UK), but according to wikipedia, it is established in Canadian law that publishing links even to defamatory material is not itself defamatory, so I think he'll have a tough time arguing for this post to be deleted.

I'm not sure whether or how this is related to the "right to be forgotten" in which Google has agreed to requests to wipe results from its search engine (e.g. see this Guardian article today). Johnson's letter as printed does not actually ask for any specific action, but it does refer to google search results. However, rather than merely censoring search results, Blogger (which is of course part of Google) has just deleted my page without warning or explanation. But in both cases, it seems that the Streisand effect may well come into play...

Sawyer's "remarkably accurate" forecast

Spotted this in the Guardian, not sure what provoked it, but never mind. The claim is that a paper published in 1972 made a remarkably accurate prediction of 0.6C, and this proves we've understood the climate system really well for a long time.

Well.

For starters, it should be pretty obvious that if people published enough random papers, some would (with hindsight) turn out to be close to correct. That in itself would hardly prove prescience, although it might be hard to refute a claim by the lucky one. See also investment analysts who claim to be able to "beat the market"...

But I'm not going to go looking for all the silly forecasts that were wide of the mark, which there surely were - people are still churning them out, remember Lovelock's few remaining breeding pairs of humans, or Bryden's AMOC shutdown, or Keenlyside's cooling? - but merely evaluate the Sawyer paper on its merits. Found courtesy of wmconnolley.org.uk the paper doesn't really seem to have much original research, but repackages other work in what looks more like a commentary. He uses Manabe and Wetherald's climate sensitivity estimate of 2.4C, and a predicted increase in CO2 of 25%, to get a warming of 0.25*2.4 = 0.6C by the end of the (20th) century.

While the final number ended up pretty close, there are a number of assumptions/approximations/errors (take your pick) in that calculation. Firstly, there are other forcings! The IPCC AR5 lists other factors which in total magnitude exceed the CO2 effect, though the positives and negatives broadly cancel. But Sawyer doesn't consider them at all. Secondly, the logarithmic effect of CO2 means that a 25% increase should equate to a 32% of the effect of a doubling, which would work out at 0.8C...not a huge difference in forecast, but a big difference in level of understanding! Lastly (perhaps) there is also the small issue of equilibrium versus transient response - the thermal inertia of the ocean means there's a chunk more warming in the pipeline, probably about a third as much again. All these values have substantial uncertainty even now, of course - and although I'd say the the 2.4C sensitivity value still looks pretty good, others disagree and at best it was a lucky guess to get it right back then.

So all in all, it looks like he made a number of significant errors which end up cancelling out, thus resulting in a forecast that hit the bullseye much more closely than can have been reasonably expected.

Yet more sensitivity

This really does seem to be the story that runs and runs...here's another article in the NYT recently, this time by Justin Gillis, who summarises my views accurately (take note David Rose)

There is also this paragraph, which piqued my interest:

Several scientists say they see reasons to doubt that these lowball estimates will in fact stand up to critical scrutiny, and a wave of papers offering counterarguments is already in the works. “The story is not over,” said Chris E. Forest, a climate expert at Pennsylvania State University. 

I don't have any idea what the "wave of papers" is, although the recent splash about increased ocean heat uptake might have some impact. But several people - Forest prominent among them - have argued for some time that the models already take up too much heat, which suggests to me that while the new data on this might help to close the gap, it is unlikely to show models not mixing enough (which would be one route to arguing that sensitivity is actually high).

The great David Rose con no. 9234: The hard proof that finally shows that he makes stuff up.

I know that in this context, late is probably little better than never, but the Daily Lies has now corrected Rose's fabrication concerning my opinions.

The modified article no longer has the offending content, and at the bottom they have added:

An earlier version of this article said climate scientist James Annan was predicting the true rate of global warming as about half that predicted by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007. In fact the UN’s prediction was a probable warming range of 2°C- 4.5°C if CO2 levels double, with a most likely figure of 3°C. Dr Annan now predicts a range of 2°C- 4°C with 2.5°C most likely. We are happy to set the record straight.

Which is good enough for me.

Economist in making sense shocker

Via Stoat, I find the Economist has been saying stuff about climate sensitivity. Somewhat to my surprise given my recent experience of the media, it seems to make a lot of sense. That could just be because it says

"Work by Julia Hargreaves of the Research Institute for Global Change in Yokohama, which was published in 2012, suggests a 90% chance of the actual change being in the range of 0.5-4.0°C, with a mean of 2.3°C"

which is referring to this, but the rest of the article seems mostly pretty good too. I do wonder about: "Nic Lewis, an independent climate scientist, got an even lower range in a study accepted for publication: 1.0-3.0°C, with a mean of 1.6°C." I've not heard anything from him for some time, and I wasn't convinced last time. But the overall message of a lowering probability of a high sensitivity is hard to deny. Unless you are Reto Knutti, that is, in which case "my personal view is that the overall assessment hasn’t changed much". Of course he was only speaking personally there, and what matters in his role as IPCC lead author, is what the (credible) literature actually says.

Elitism

As possibly the worst member of the most heavily-beaten Isis (reserve) crew a couple of decades ago, I feel strangely motivated to comment on recent events, though obviously all the good jokes have already been taken - perhaps the best being Stephen Nolan on BBC Radio 5 invoking the ghost of the Mumbai attacks in a desperate attempt to talk up the significance of the occasion. It must surely be the first time that one of the crews has proved themselves to be fastest on the day not just once, but twice, and still lost. However, the fault for that must be placed squarely at the hands of the cox who seemed to take the concept of rowing through the opposition a little too literally. Breaking a blade was bad luck of course - I was once in a boat that managed to achieve this, but it took a head-on collision at full speed, so I'm not really sure how it could have happened with a simple clash.

As for that middle-aged colonial with a degree in "contemporary urbanism" and dodgy taste in facial hair, it seems like he already has most of the attributes that are required for a place in one of the boats. Apart from the ability, intelligence, and determination, that is.

Do Panic!

It's funny watching this from afar. It would be funny watching it close up, so long as I didn't happen to be in urgent need of petrol :-)

Not sure if it's entirely fair to blame the Govt - I'm sure that no-one pays a blind bit of notice to anything Francis Maude usually says, so he can't have expected to be taken so seriously this time. The press is having a field day of course, accusing everyone but themselves. And it's so much more fun than talking about corruption at the heart of Govt, tax cuts for the rich, or the flatlining economy. It's just one of those "tipping points" (did I really say that?) where we can all have a jolly good laugh and no-one is really to blame.

Better hope the ATM-fillers don't talk about striking or the banks would be cleaned out in minutes.


(Hat tip to Helen for the picture, hat tip to the CTC for encouraging a bit of panic bicycle buying)

The "Gaijin Gulag" at Narita

A bit of a bizarre story has been doing the rounds. Initially on Debito, I assumed it would soon fade, but it was picked up by an Economist-hosted blog, which apparently means it is important and worthy of discussion just about everywhere. What happened is that some "Tokyo-based" freelance Canadian journalist was barred from (re-)entry into Japan late last year - he insinuates it was on the strength of some critical Fukushima-related articles - then bullied and threatened by some shady security forces in the bowels of Narita Airport, and finally forced at gunpoint (his words) into buying an overpriced one-way ticked to Canada, leaving home, girlfriend and pet dog in Tokyo. This was all described in extraordinary hyperbole on his own blog (which incidentally has been repeatedly altered in various materially important ways), then highlighted on Debito, and it went downhill from there.

It all sounded a bit odd, and people started asking of the author...so what was your actual visa status? This was met with volleys of vitriolic abuse and evasion. "I first had a work visa for Japan in 1989, and my last renewal began in 2008", he claimed, "I have never overstayed". But work visas only last three years (at most). Eventually, he wrote on his blog that it was in the process of renewal, but then he deleted that bit again. If (and it seems like a big if at this point) he actually did have a viable renewal application underway (not a trivial matter for a freelance journalist, work visas typically require a Japanese sponsor, and are rather specific as to the nature of the work), and had also been told it would be ok to travel with this status, then he would seem to have a leg to stand on, but his repeated evasion and misleading statements make it hard to take his story at face value. At any rate, his subsequent treatment is the responsibility of the (Korean) airline he flew in on, not Japanese immigration. Not that this would justify the treatment, but it does suggest that it may not be such an imminent threat to those of us who are actually living here with proper visas which authorise us to work in our jobs. That's not to say everything is great in Japanese immigration. It's pretty horrible everywhere, though.

His various blogging and commenting on Twitter, Debito and elsewhere gives the impression that he's a bit of a Walter Mitty fantasist, full of stories of his war experience and name-dropping his more famous "colleagues". He boasted about what a great contribution he made to Japan after the Fukushima accident (er, though it was also apparently this coverage that marked him out for expulsion): "But I didn’t flee Japan like thousands of foreigners after the March 11 disasters. I made personal sacrifices to tell the world about the plight of disaster victims, to generate sympathy for Japan. I earned income from sources outside Japan, and spent it inside Japan."

Google tells a different story, that he bravely filed his first-hand reports from Shizuoka, stoking the foreign media hype that many of us were so critical of at the time:

"I'm one of the last people I know to leave Tokyo," Johnson told CTV's Canada AM. Well, it seems like he has gone for good now.

Not so fast!

It seems that reports of the death of global warming have been somewhat exaggerated. Thanks to commenter doskonaleszare on the previous post, a graph of the forthcoming updated HadCRUT4 data set has been located here, and here it is reproduced for your convenience:

Blowing up the right hand end, with a horizontal line to guide the eye:

Red is the new HadCRUT4 blue is HadCRUT3. It is quite clear that in the new data set, the 2010 value exceeds the 1998 value (as indeed does 2005), in line with the NCDC and GISS analyses. This seems to be attributed to the use of a larger set of high-latitude observations, which was long recognised to be a weakness with HadCRUT3.

The Whitehouse bet

I hear that David Whitehouse is crowing about winning the bet we had over global temperatures. I can't say I blame him - but he had better make the most of it, as the nature of the ongoing warming trend is such that it will not be long before the 1998 temperature estimate is unambiguously beaten in all three of the major temperature analyses. It already has been in two of the data sets, of course, but we did agree to use the Hadley centre analysis. (UPDATE but thanks to commenter doskonaleszare have a look at this!)

More or Less covered this yesterday (you can listen on line, or get the podcast), as they did with the original bet. Tellingly, you can hear that David Whitehouse was not prepared to bet against a record over the next 4 years on the same basis. So even though he continues to bluster about a standstill in temperature, he obviously doesn't really really believe it. Here are the three data sets (offset for clarity), with the simple linear trend (dotted lines with associated decadal trend value) over the last 20 years. I estimated observational values for 2011, as they are not actually published yet. It is is quite clear that even with the supposed halt in warming, the trend continues to be positive, and the 1998 value (dashed line) will be regularly exceeded in a few years by all measures.

That said, there is little sign of the acceleration in warming that most models had predicted, and it increasingly seems that the Smith et al forecast (for example) was a bit excessive. This new paper also suggests that the transient response of a modern model (albeit a particularly sensitive one) has to be significantly downscaled to match observations. Mind you, that paper also has a worrying discrepancy between the results obtained with 1900-2000, versus 1850-2010 data. Normally one would expect the latter to be broadly a subset of the former - more data means closer convergence to the true value - but the two sets of results are virtually disjoint, which suggests something a bit strange may be going on in the analysis (cf Schmitter et al with the land-only versus land+ocean results). But just a glance at the first figure shows a striking divergence between model and data over the first decade of the 21st century (compared to the close agreement prior to then). Something isn't quite right there.

New leak?

Some people might be surprised to hear me say it, but I think this new leak provides damning evidence of shoddy behaviour. There is clearly inept leadership at the heart of the organisation, plenty of back-biting, and the way in which junior and more conscientious colleagues who refused to toe the party line were bullied and ridiculed is shameful. Many of these people who I had trusted to do their honest best are clearly motivated far more by money than the desire to do their jobs properly. There certainly isn't much evidence of the sort of ethos that we are entitled to expect from people in their position.

I find the whole thing truly shameful, and call upon all those involved to resign. It's time for a new broom.

More details can be found here.