Science journalist conference

Interesting post on Bishop Hill on the recent UK Conference of Science Journalists by Doug Keenan.

 "The 2012 UK Conference of Science Journalists was held on June 25th. The programme is available on the UKCSJ web site. I attended two of the sessions: the first was a session was entitled “What can journalists do to uncover scientific misconduct?”; the second was the plenary at the end. What follows is my perspective on those sessions." Doug concludes..."For me, the take-home message from the conference is that a large majority of science journalists are extremely naive about scientists. The naivety is so extreme that I suspect it must be partially willful." I think a number of ABC reporters fall into that space. I'm all for cheerleading the scientific method but ignoring its corruption is tantamount to dereliction of duty.

Missing News: Another flawed paper

Some commentary this week on a number of blogs about some informal work by "amateur" climate scientist Nic Lewis. Nic is one of the authors of a study that identified methodological problems in a paper on Antarctic warming that the ABC gave quite a deal of coverage to. They did not cover Nic's published work.

The story, while not in the published scientific press (yet?), seems worth someone looking into in more detail. Somehow we doubt ABC will take the initiative on this one.

The following from Judy Curry's site Climate Etc:
Questioning the Forest et al. (2006) sensitivity study
Re:  Data inconsistencies in Forest, Stone and Sokolov (2006)  GRL paper 2005GL023977 ‘Estimated PDFs of climate system properties including natural and anthropogenic forcings‘
"If I am right, then correct processing of the data used in Forest 2006 would lead to the conclusion that equilibrium climate sensitivity (to a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere) is close to 1°C, not 3°C, implying that likely future warming has been grossly overestimated by the IPCC. "

Press power by the bucket load

Gerard Henderson in today's Sydney Morning Herald...
  Power of the press a lot less muscular than some imagine
 "This lack of self-awareness is perhaps greater within the ABC. Some ABC journalists express concern about the possibility of a lack of diversity within Fairfax Media under Rinehart's possible influence without recognising that the ABC does not have one conservative presenter for any of its significant programs. It has one presenter who boasts about his support for the left and another on the left who declares that she is an activist. Yet no conservatives, activist or otherwise. The ABC managing director, Mark Scott, talks about the commercial media's "market failure". However, for the ABC, market success amounts to going to Canberra and getting a bucket-load of taxpayers' money. Meanwhile the ABC's uninhibited move into online news and opinion projects a market distortion into attempts by Fairfax Media and News Limited to move more of their products online. Which suggests that the ABC is a much greater threat to the private sector media than Rinehart or any other potential investor."

Gerard Henderson is the executive director of the Sydney Institute.

Missing Voices: Garth Paltridge

Garth Paltridge, former chief research scientist with the CSIRO division of atmospheric research in the Fin Review. Doubt we shall see this re-posted on ABC's The Drum.

Science held hostage in climate debate

The broad theory of man-made global warming is acceptable in the purely qualitative sense. If humans continue to fill the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, there can be little doubt that the average temperature of the world will increase above what it would have been otherwise. The argument about the science is, and always has been, whether the increase would be big enough to be noticed among all the other natural variations of climate. The economic and social argument is whether the increase, even if it were noticeable, would change the overall welfare of mankind for the worse.

Missing News: McKitrick on climate models

Nothing thus far on the ABC about this new research paper by Ross McKitrick:
McKitrick, Ross R. and Lise Tole (2012) “Evaluating Explanatory Models of the Spatial Pattern of Surface Climate Trends using Model Selection and Bayesian Averaging Methods” Climate Dynamics, 2012, DOI: 10.1007/s00382-012-1418-9

Ross has a series of articles in the Financial Post outlining the findings:
Junk Science Week: Climate models fail reality test
"Just how good are climate models at predicting regional patterns of climate change? I had occasion to survey this literature as part of a recently completed research project on the subject. The simple summary is that, with few exceptions, climate models not only fail to do better than random numbers, in some cases they are actually worse."


Climate reality check

"The three climate models consistently identified as having explanatory power were from China, Russia and a U.S. lab called NCAR. Climate models from Norway, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Japan and the U.K., as well as American models from Princeton and two U.S. government labs (NASA and NOAA), failed to exhibit any explanatory power for the spatial pattern of surface temperature trends in any test, alone or in any combination."

Missing News: Lindzen on sensitivity

Roger Peilke Snr covers the publication of a new paper by atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen:
New Paper “Climate Physics, Feedbacks, And Reductionism (And When Does Reductionism go Too Far?)” By Dick Lindzen

Don't expect to see it on our ABC.

The concluding remarks read

This paper considers approaches to estimating climate sensitivity involving the basic physics of the feedback processes rather than attempting to estimate climate sensitivity from time series of temperature. The latter have to assume a perfect knowledge of all sources of climate variability —something generally absent. The results of a variety of independent approaches all point to relatively low sensitivities. We also note that when climate change is due to regional and seasonal forcing, the concept of one dimensional climate sensitivity may, in fact, be inappropriate. Finally, it should be noted that I have not followed the common practice of considering the feedback factor to be the sum of separate feedback factors from water vapor, clouds, etc. The reason for this is that these feedback factors are not really independent. For example, in fig. 2, we refer to a characteristic emission level that is one optical depth into the atmosphere. For regions with upper level cirrus, this level is strongly related to the cloud optical depth (in the infrared), while for cloud-free regions the level is determined by water vapor. However, as shown by Rondanelli and Lindzen [30], and Horvath and Soden [31], the area covered by upper level cirrus is both highly variable and temperature dependent. The water vapor feedback is dependent not only on changes in water vapor but also on the area of cloud-free regions. It, therefore, cannot readily be disentangled from the cloud feedback.

ABC's Gergis update - a poor excuse for journalism

It seems ABC's total coverage of important news of the withdrawal of a scientific paper following the discovery of errors in its methodology uncovered by Climate Audit is as follows:

Editor's Note: Since this story was originally broadcast, errors have been identified in aspects of the data processing which may affect the results of this study. As a result, publication has been delayed and the research has been withdrawn from online publication. Professor Karoly says the data will be recalculated, peer reviewed and published in due course.


If not for our request of an update even this meagre offering would not have been undertaken. However mainstream, actual coverage of this important news by the ABC remains MISSING. One wonders if it plans to use editorial notes as a reporting tool for other important stories. Perhaps the following is an example of what we can expect from ABC news in the near future (you'll have to read the fine print). Perhaps this would save on costs?

Coverage of the withdrawal of the paper in other news outlets included the following:
Sydney Morning Herald/ The Age: Climate warming study put on hold
The Australian: Climate paper flawed, Blog scrutiny forces reappraisal
New York Times Dot Earth: Australian Warming, Hockey Sticks and Open Review

In contrast here are the ABC reports that announced the publication of the erroneous study back in May. Something does not appear to add up. But who are we to expect balance from the ABC?
5 major reports
AM 1000 years of climate data points to a warming Australia
The Science Show RISING TEMPERATURES ACROSS AUSTRALIA

AM Last 50 years were Australia's hottest study

Radio Australia Climate study shows Australia hotter

Radio National Breakfast 1,000 YEARS OF AUSTRALIAN CLIMATE DATA CONFIRMS 'UNPRECEDENTED' WARMING (this one yet to contain the update)
Not to mention an appearances on ABC News 24 and ABC Local radio

SCORE +1