BPSDB
Over at ClimateSight, in the middle of a long but highly readable post entitled Credibility in a Bewildered World, there is this:
And a controversy really sells. For example, would you rather pick up a newspaper with the headline “Another Study Confirms What Everyone Already Knew”, or “Scientists Locked in Epic Battle over Question of Global Warming”? We are naturally drawn to controversy. It’s so much more interesting to readers.
Possibly that was the inspiration for a remarkable article entitled What happened to global warming? by Paul Hudson on the BBC just over a week ago (it was remarkable because it was published by the BBC, and apparently penned by a “Climate correspondent”).
Needless to say, it was picked up all over the world – in fact it was the most popular article on the BBC’s Science & Environment website for three days running, which takes some doing. It could probably have done so for longer, but the BBC chopped the link to it after three days (which is also unusual in itself – popular articles tend to sit around for a while longer than this).
Quite how the article ended up where it did is in itself a bit of a mystery, as Leo Hickman explains in the Guardian.
However, all of the above is a bit of a preamble – what I’m really interested in is Hudson’s choice of “solar scientist” Piers Corbyn as one of his named “sceptics” (the other was Don Easterbrook – what is it with geologists?).
What is interesting about Hudson’s choice is that Corbyn doesn’t have much of a track record.
He runs a UK company called WeatherAction that predicts the weather – for a fee. Fees range from £12 for a single 30 day forecast up to £550 for a 12 month subscription.
Fair enough – if he thinks he can do better than the UK’s Met Office – and if he can find punters willing to pay for his services – good luck to him.
I personally wouldn’t subscribe on two grounds:
- I am not that obsessed with the weather
- I would be reluctant to pay for a service unless I was pretty sure that it was the best
How good are Corbyn’s forecasts?
William Connelly wasn’t impressed.
Corbyn claims to have made around £20,000 from betting on weather ( in a 12 year period) before he was “banned” from the bookmakers William Hill. He claims a 40% return on his bets.
This cannot be verified, but to be honest I doubt if William Hill (a major UK gambling organisation) would be unduly worried about a punter winning an average of around £1600 a year.
So Corbyn is a weather forecaster – but of course weather is not climate. How much does he know about the climate?
He doesn’t appear to have published anything in the literature. However he is one of the regulars at The Heartland Institute conferences. This is handy, because they put their presentations up on their website – Corbyn’s latest PowerPoint presentation is here (they also have audio and video links if you prefer – I didn’t bother with them).
A lot of it is the usual stuff (CO2 is good for plants, etc.) and his sources include Joe D’Aleo.
According to Corbyn, the climate is mostly driven by the 22 year Hale solar cycle (although Solar -Lunar magnetic modulation, whatever that is, apparently also has an effect). Apparently global temperatures peak two years after each odd cycle maximum, and reach their lowest two years after each even cycle maximum. To get this to work he uses two year averages(!). This means that by his reckoning global warming didn’t stop in 1998 – it stopped in 2002/2003. He also says that we should expect temperatures to fall through to at least 2015 (slide 28), although below this he then extends it to 2030 or possibly 2040.
Landscheidt springs instantly to mind – indeed Corbyn uses one of the diagrams that Landscheidt used early on in his presentation.
I’m fairly sure his correlation isn’t very good – if I can find the time I’ll look into this a bit more. But slide 27 is interesting. Because 1964 & 1965 were cold, it just allows him to claim that temperatures are highest at even cycle maximum plus 2. If you just look at the previous Hale cycles, the warmest period (by a long way) is the solar minimum on the even cycle. 
It is also curious that he hasn’t included cycles 22 & 23 in his charts. Ignoring the last couple of decades seems an odd thing to do.
In fact, there’s quite a lot of interest in solar variability and the Earth’s magnetic field. If you want to know more you could read this post at Real Climate (especially the section titled “Solar variability and climate: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”.
Near the end of his presentation Corbyn comes up with this (in my view, a hilarious classic):
Doubling CO2 increases CO2 Greenhouse heating of Earth’s surface by 3.8 W/m2. It also increases plant growth & therefore transpiration heat removal (cooling) by 43% to 45%. Now, 44% of 8.6 = 3.8 W/m2
3.8 – 3.8 = 0 So CO2 increase has no net effect on world temperatures.
Which reminds me – at no point in his presentation does Corbyn offer any credible explantion of why the world has warmed as much as it has in the last 30 to 40 years.
As mentioned earlier, Corbyn is a gambler.
According to Nature (via Deltoid) Corbyn is “happy to bet loads of money”, but the story from James Annan is rather different (it is worth following this link just to read Corbin’s comment).
So – should Hudson have chosen Corbyn as an example of a “skeptical” scientist?
In my view, no. Corbyn does have a degree in Physics – but he hasn’t published anything in the literature since graduating, and his solar analysis techniques are a secret (understandably, since he makes his living out of them).
But then, readers of tea leaves don’t publish their techniques, either. Hudson should have had tried harder.
S2
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So is betting on the weather, now an acceptable scientific method for verifying a theory is correct?
heh, heh, heh…
Why is it always the weathermen?
What’s even more astonishing than the factual inaccuracies of the story (It’s cooling- wrong, the models don’t predict periods when maximum temperatures don’t rise for a decade or so-wrong, Mojib Latif said expect 20 years of cooling- wrong, It’s the sun- wrong, it’s the PDO- wrong) is that it got past the BBC editors onto the BBC Science and Environment pages, and that the BBC still continues to defend it.
The author is ill-informed and out of his depth, but there’s something gone badly wrong at the BBC editorial department.
It’s worth following the links from Paul Hudson’s wikipedia page to some of his other stuff (presentation, quotes, etc.).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hudson#Climate_change
Makes the whole piece a little puzzling.
E.g.:
“Our climate’s changing – and it’s changing fast. Carbon emissions from transport, business and our homes are making things a lot, lot worse.
“In other word’s, we’re all responsible,” says Paul.
Prompted by Hudson’s latest inanity, I’m adding a couple of Corbyn’s recent public predictions. They both come from Richard Black’s blog at the BBC (Richard has a long history of commentary, and is about as unbiased and impartial as they come).
Nope. It’s been pretty wet, but no storm surges, no tidal flooding and no blizzards (in fact it has been milder than usual).
There’s no signs of it yet. We’ve had a couple of frosty mornings here (which I love), but I suspect that November is (locally) going to be one of the warmest on record.
Just for the record, I’ll post an update in March.
Now that we’re into January after one of the coldest Decembers in decades in much North America, Europe and East Asia, and with large areas all three regions now in the grip of simultaneous bouts of severe inclement weather that Eberneezer Scrooge refused to conduct business in (I’m typing this in the cold, snowy hills north of Kyoto), would you concede that there have indeed been some signs that Mr. Corbyn’s forecast for the UK winter has turned out rather well? [1] If only the local councils had coughed up the dosh for his forecasts, they might at least have had the foresight to stockpile enough salt to keep the British roads open.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8462890.stm
Roger Harrabin:
“Some other forecasters say he (Corbyn) has major forecasting successes but equally large failures which he does not mention.”
“I have been asking him for several months to offer independent corroboration of his forecasting successes but none has been supplied.”
[...] to global warming? http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2009/10/what_happene … Hudson’s choice http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2009/10/18/hudsons- … as if they were anything but lying frauds is [...]