Today’s reading comes from the Book of Daniel, Chapter 12, Verse 5: “And Daniel sayeth unto the throng, ‘People of vision, working together patiently and persistently, hast inspired their community and changeth the course of history. These leaders, recognising the threat to civilisation poseth by climate change, have successfully alerteth many of the public to … Continue reading
There is something about professional physicists that society finds very difficult. You may recall, for example, the hot water that whelmed Professor Alessandro Strumia when he took on the Athena Swan coterie at CERN, daring to suggest that male dominance within the field had more to do with personal choice and gender attributes than it … Continue reading
As someone schooled in quantum physics, I’d always looked down on climatologists such as Michael Mann. The sort of shenanigans that he and his ilk would engage in, I assumed, could not be found in the hallowed halls of a ‘hard science’ such as physics. But how wrong I was. Today, Microsoft scientists have had … Continue reading
At the end of Part 4 in this series, I speculated that the authors of AR5, Chapter 2 may have dropped the ball when developing the manifesto for the declaration of a climate emergency. Having argued forcibly that the public perception of climate change risk is based upon unreliable intuitive thinking, the IPCC went on … Continue reading
When the IPCC outlined its so-called risk management framework in section 2.3 of AR5, Chapter 2, it drew a distinction between a descriptive analysis of decision making and a normative analysis. The former, subject of Part 3 of this series of articles, makes a great deal of the shortcomings of intuitive thinking when applied to … Continue reading
In the previous article of this series I introduced the IPCC’s views on the landscape for decision making. This landscape was described in terms of climate policy choices, levels at which decisions are taken, and the categories of uncertainty that influence such decisions. Whilst I accepted that the IPCC’s taxonomy appeared fair and unbiased, I … Continue reading
In part 1 of this series of articles I argued that the recent preoccupation with extreme weather events owed more to the IPCC’s desire to create a perception of risk that was amenable to implementation of its climate change policies than it did to any enabling developments in causal analysis or cognitive science. In this … Continue reading
There can be no doubt that those who consider anthropogenic global warming (AGW) to be a problem worthy of the epithet ‘emergency’ have increasingly invoked extreme weather events in support of that view. It is not my intention here to argue whether or not such events confirm the critical level of risk posited for AGW. … Continue reading
Oxford University has recently sought to enhance its imperiously stated reputation for academic excellence by dabbling in the murky world of opinionology. I may have just made that word up, but it does feel like an apt label to apply to the pseudo-scientific number-crunching that one normally associates with the consensus-mongering intrigues of the likes … Continue reading
In November 2020 the UK government published its latest edition of the National Risk Register. The previous edition was published in 2017. There is an obvious before-and-after-Covid comparison to be made here, and so I sat down with both documents in front of me to compile some notes. This is some of what I came … Continue reading
