MP David Davies With Some Home Truths
By Paul Homewood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytzTMqs8XKA#action=share
You may have seen the video of MP David Davies in yesterday’s House of Commons debate on Climate Change.
If not it is definitely worth watching, as it was quite unusual in that Davies actually knew what he was talking about.
In the middle, however, he is interrupted by a Labour MP who said:
The hon. Gentleman keeps quoting the IPCC, but does he not recognise that one of the IPCC’s recent reports said that 100% of the climate change—the warming—over the past 60 years was due to humans and that the IPCC was 95% convinced about the argument overall. The IPCC has been very clear on this point.
The well informed Davies quickly put him in his place:
Let me read out something for the hon. Gentleman. Under the title “Summary for policymakers” on page 17, fourth paragraph down, the IPCC says:
“It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together.”
What that means in simple English is that slightly more than half of the increase that has taken place in the second half of the 20th century is down to man. The overall increase over the past 250 years is 0.8 °C, but in the second half of the 20th century, the increase was about 0.5 °C. What the IPCC is saying in this report is that slightly over half of that is likely to have been man-made.
Hansard tells us that the misinformed MP was Stephen Doughty, MP for Cardiff South.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Davies is half competent, unlike most of the H of C & most of the H of L
When it comes to the climate debate we are faced with people who exhibit symptoms of mental illness or willful ignorance. Treat them accordingly.
I liked the put down of the (opposition?) lady MP:
“I’m happy to give way to the Honourable Lady if she wants to correct me on something, if she knows about it”
She obviously didn’t know about it as there was no interruption or giving way.
You wonder where the opposition MP got the information from. Or were they deliberately making it up to try and derail Davies?
Probably from Greenpeace as obviously none of them have read even the summary for policy makers let alone the full IPCC report.
From memory, I believe that IPCC said that it was 95% certain that over half of global warming was caused by human activity.
What most “warmists” saw (and what all of the publicity concentrated on at the time) was the 95% bit and not the “over half” bit.
I believe this was deliberate obfuscation by the IPCC.
This might have been in the AR4 of 2007, not the AR5 of 2013/4.
The major change on tune between the two reports is in the time period. In AR3 of 2001 there was a lot of inference that all the warming from 1750 was human caused. In 2007 the Hockey Stick was in its dying gasps, so there could still be a claim that at least the twentieth century warming was human caused. Or more exactly greater than 100% of warming was human caused, due to increased aerosols artificially suppressing the warming. So human caused warming was probably greater than 1 degree, with more in the pipeline. Now the aerosol impact is recognized as limited there is not much left.
There is a good reason for concentrating on post 1950 data. In the early twentieth century there was a significant warming period. In continuous data sets the raw data in many places – including in the Arctic where the greatest temperatures rises took place – the earlier warming was a very similar magnitude to the late twentieth century warming. But in the homogenized data the relative magnitude of the earlier warming to the later warming becomes smaller in size. As a result, the human signal becomes greater, enabling the IPCC to still claim at least 0.25C of warming due to human causes.
But if you take in account four things this homogenisation effect looks to be a bias. They are:-
1. There are huge variations in warming trends. For instance, recent homogenized trends show more than 4C of warming in NW Alaska, and -1 to -2C of cooling in the Great Lakes.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/nmaps.cgi?sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=0112&year1=2014&year2=2014&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=250&pol=rob
2. Homogenisation is to make the data more homogeneous, with the assumption that inhomogeneities are due to measurement biases, not due to natural variations in climate or weather patterns.
3. The GHCN/GISS method is by pairwise adjustments. That is by comparing the data trends of a particular station with those surrounding it. Differences are suppressed, to let the commonalities (the generalized trends) be brought to the fore.
4. In many parts of the earth’s surface the the coverage of temperature data vastly increased post 1950, peaking in around 1970. In Europe and USA this did not make a great difference, but in South America, Asia and Africa this made a vast difference. In South America for instance, there are around ten times as many temperature stations as in 1900. Similarly post 1950, the number of sea temperature measurements increased as global trade increased, though coverage remains poor. There is no data for the Arctic and very little for the Southern Ocean. The North Atlantic and the Mediterranean have more data than the Pacific Ocean, yet a fraction of the area.
The result of lower data of coverage will be (ceteris paribus) to increase the trend differences between adjacent temperature stations. Pairwise adjustments (which use an iterative process) will cancel the larger differences. So in areas with similar coverage over the twentieth century (USA and Europe) warming trends will be less dissimilar similar than areas where data coverage increased many times post 1950.
Paul – when trying to locate you – USA or Britain, for reference to your work which I am quoting in an article, I saw this on David Davies. Way back in 2009, when my book ‘Chill: a reassessment of global warming theory’ was published, he read it and called me into his office in Westminster. He had copious notes and I found him one of the most intelligent and committed politicians I have met – a man of real integrity. I am not a Conservative – and its a pity that his qualities are not embraced by their leadership (as you may know he rebelled as Shadow Home Secretary when the vote came on extending the time suspected terrorists could be held without charge).
I can’t see anywhere on your blog where you are based! If you would be so kind – my email is on my website at http://www.ethos-uk.com, please let me know.
BTW I also have looked in detail at the Arctic data – some time back, and now have to try and disentangle the data sets to try and see what has changed – I will mail you if I can find your email!
Agh – I got the wrong David – the MP I met was in the same party, but was David Davis! Clearly, they talk to each other!