Thread: Any doubts about Climate Change?

Little more on the hiatus that never was, from a site run by a climate scientist.

NOAA temperature record updates and the ‘hiatus’

In a new paper in Science Express, Karl et al. describe the impacts of two significant updates to the NOAA NCEI (née NCDC) global temperature series. The two updates are: 1) the adoption of ERSST v4 for the ocean temperatures (incorporating a number of corrections for biases for different methods), and 2) the use of the larger International Surface Temperature Initiative (ISTI) weather station database, instead of GHCN. This kind of update happens all the time as datasets expand through data-recovery efforts and increasing digitization, and as biases in the raw measurements are better understood. However, this update is going to be bigger news than normal because of the claim that the ‘hiatus’ is no more. To understand why this is perhaps less dramatic than it might seem, it’s worth stepping back to see a little context…

Global temperature anomaly estimates are a product, not a measurement

The first thing to remember is that an estimate of how much warmer one year is than another in the global mean is just that, an estimate. We do not have direct measurements of the global mean anomaly, rather we have a large database of raw measurements at individual locations over a long period of time, but with an uneven spatial distribution, many missing data points, and a large number of non-climatic biases varying in time and space. To convert that into a useful time-varying global mean needs a statistical model, good understanding of the data problems and enough redundancy to characterise the uncertainties. Fortunately, there have been multiple approaches to this in recent years (GISTEMP, HadCRUT4, Cowtan & Way, Berkeley Earth, and NOAA NCEI), all of which basically give the same picture.

Once this is understood, it’s easy to see why there will be updates to the historical estimates over time: the raw measurement dataset used can be expanded, biases can be better understood and characterised, and the basic statistical methods for stitching it all together can be improved. Generally speaking these changes are minor and don’t effect the big picture.

Ocean temperature corrections are necessary and reduce the global warming trend

The saga of ocean surface temperature measurements is complicated, but you can get a good sense of the issues by reviewing some of the discussion that followed the Thompson et al. (2008) paper. For instance, “Of buckets and blogs” and “Revisiting historical ocean surface temperatures”. The basic problem is that method for measuring sea surface temperature has changed over time and across different ships, and this needs to be corrected for.

The second panel is useful, demonstrating that the net impact of all corrections to the raw measurements is to reduce the overall trend.

The ‘hiatus’ is so fragile that even those small changes make it disappear

The ‘selling point’ of the paper is that with the updates to data and corrections, the trend over the recent decade or so is now significantly positive. This is true, but in many ways irrelevant. This is because there are two very distinct questions that are jumbled together in many discussions of the ‘hiatus': the first is whether there is any evidence of a change in the long-term underlying trend, and the second is how to attribute short-term variations. That these are different is illustrated by the figure I made earlier this year:

much more in the link above

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Obama Regime Scientists Fiddle With Climate Data To Erase The 15 Yr Global Warming Hiatus

Tisdale and Watts wrote on the science (?) blog Watts Up With That.

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Obama Regime Scientists Fiddle With Climate Data To Erase The 15 Yr Global Warming Hiatus

The Daily Caller

Sea ice extent in Antarctica last month set a new record high for the month of May, according to data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center

Meanwhile Arctic sea ice extent in May was the third lowest on record but essentially the same as it was a decade ago – marginally above the levels recorded in 2004 and 2006.

NSIDC data shows average sea ice extent around Antarctica reached 12.10 million sq. km. in May – some 12 per cent above the long term average for the period from 1981 to 2010 of 10.79 million sq.km. May sea ice extent in Antarctica is growing at a rate of 2.9 per cent per decade, according to NSIDC data.

Meanwhile Arctic sea ice extent in May was 12.65 million sq. km, some 5 per cent below the long-term average for the period from 1981 to 2010 of 13.38 million sq. km. but broadly in line with the sea ice extent reported a decade ago and just 2 per cent below the average over the period from 2005 to 2015.

Over the last ten years, the extent of Arctic sea ice in May has remained within the range 12.61 million to 13.4 million sq. km. notwithstanding the fact that the linear rate of decline in sea ice extent for May through 2015 over the satellite record is 2.3 per cent per decade and that May sea ice extent has now declined for four years in a row.

Here is the data from NSIDC for Arctic sea ice extent (measured in millions of square kilometres) for each May over the last decade:

Year Arctic sea ice extent (million km2)

2005 12.99
2006 12.61
2007 12.88
2008 13.18
2009 13.40
2010 13.11
2011 12.81
2012 13.11
2013 13.08
2014 12.77
2015 12.65

Average Arctic sea ice extent for May over the period 2005-2015: 12.96 million sq. km.
Antarctic Sea Ice Sets New High In May

NSIDC historic Antarctic sea ice extent data for May here. ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/N.../S_05_area.txt

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

It means K. hazz that some of us are still skepticle re this Globul Warming junk science and have to reiterate the point until some of y'all realize you've been duped.

skeptical like the members of the flat earth society or those who have faith that tobacco, asbestos, ddt and hiv are harmless.

There is a line between skeptism and being a fool, the difference wether or not you have any interest in the truth. The reaility is you are rather like that poor fool, paul karason.... who belived that drinking silve was good got you and its was a big pharma/government conspirisy that prevented you from having access to it. And continued to belive this even after it did this to his skin:



Like you a first grade fool, living in his own little delusion. ultimatly he only fucked up his own skin and life. The problem is that with you denialism, you, your fellow fools and the kock brothers et. al. are tryign to do the the planet what karason did to his skin.

the real shame is that because ive used more than six words to explain this, it will have flown right over your head.

booners your not a skeptic, your a fool

In a world where accusations like this fly by like pigeons in the park, it was about time someone but some work into research before making a claim such as this one. This is not some unsubstantiated assertion, or some crazy scientist’s statement – this is backed up by numbers. Let’s look at the matter in depth.

Exxon Mobil is not only the world’s largest private oil company, but also one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world, having been ranked either #1 or #2 for the past 5 years. They are also (of course) denying climate change, and there has been a rumour going on that they have been paying or offering some kind of reward to researchers who also deny climate change. But until now this was only an unconfirmed rumour.
A recent analysis conducted by Carbon Brief investigated no less than 900 published papers, all of which cast doubts on climate change, or even speak against it. After concluding this investigation, they found that 9 out of 10 of the most prolific ones had some sort of connection with Exxon Mobil. You can find a link to these papers at the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
The results showed that out of the 938 papers cited, 186 of them were written by only ten men, and foremost among them was Dr Sherwood B Idso, who personally authored 67 of them. Idso is the president of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, an ExxonMobil funded think tank. The second most prolific was Dr Patrick J Michaels, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, who receives roughly 40% of his funding from the oil industry.
This goes in parallel with the ‘work’ of the Koch industries; even though you probably haven’t heard of them, Koch industries is the second largest privately held company in the US, and in the past 50 years, they have invested more than 50.000.000 dollars in spreading doubts about climate change, according to Greenpeace.


The thing is, you don’t have to convince people that climate change isn’t happening – all you have to do is cast some doubt on that, and people will no longer be certain, and this is a strategy that has been successfully tested by tobacco companies, almost at the same level, and coffee companies, at a much lower level. Basically, you keep the public confused about the idea, and a confused public is much, much better than a public who is against you.
Other prolific authors of climate-change denying include Willie Soon, John R. Christy and Sallie L Baliunas who are all associated with the George C. Marshall Institute, whose website asserts that “…efforts to reach agreement on inferences about human influence on the climate system that can be drawn from science and policy prescriptions for addressing the climate change risk have been controversial.”.
Of course, in order to be totally (and more) correct, you have to give them the benefit of a doubt; but the numbers are extremely suggestive in this case. In addition to this extremely active group of climate change deniers, three extremely respected and esteemed researchers have individually complained that their research has been misinterpreted and/or miscited by climate change skeptics in order to bolster their own beliefs. CarbonBrief also contacted a few of them, and here’s what they got from Professor Peter deMenocal, of the Earth Institute, Columbia University, told the Carbon Brief when asked about the inclusion of his paper on the list:

“I’ve responded to similar queries over the years. No, this is not an accurate representation of my work and I’ve said so many times to them and in print.”I’ve asked Dennis Avery of the Heartland Institute to take my name off [another similar] list four times and I’ve never had a response. There are 15 other Columbia colleagues on there as well … and all want their names removed.”

The thing is, a significant amount of these studies don’t focus on human driven climate change, which is why it’s extremely easy to misquote their results. If you take for example an article written by Professor Richard Zeebe, University of Hawaii, you’d find an interesting conclusion: feedbacks such as increases in other greenhouse gases were responsible for a substantial part of global warming, alongside the direct impact of carbon dioxide. Here’s what Professor Zeebe had to say:

“Using our paper to support skepticism of anthropogenic global warming is misleading.”

This kind of papers contributes to the general scientific treasure of the world; it has to be said, Earth has had significant climate changes throughout it’s 4.5 billion year history, and we are still broadening our understanding about how these long term climate changes occur. It’s a delicate problem to separate these natural tendencies from the anthropic driven changes, mostly carbon emissions. But climate skeptics didn’t only misinterpret this.
A paper by Meehl et al, also placed on the list, discussed the effects of the 11 year solar cycle on the tropical Pacific. The author of the paper, Gerald Meehl, of the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), said:

“It’s odd that our 2009 paper is on a site about global warming. Our paper addressed specifically the climate system response to the 11-year solar cycle. Thus it is about decadal timescale climate variability. “It said nothing about long-term warming trends, and in fact, in the last sentence of the paper, we state, ‘This response also cannot be used to explain recent global warming because the 11-year solar cycle has not shown a measurable trend over the past 30 years.'”.

Energy and Environment

So where does this lead us ? Let’s be fair.
There are a few researchers for which I have every bit of respect who are climate change skeptics; they wrote papers, they make some claims and back them up with scientific evidence, and overall, they greatly contribute to scientific progress. Richard Lindzen is one of them. Richard Muller is another great example – he set out to disprove human driven global warming, and surprisingly found data that backs it up. A great example of a researcher !
But what about the others, the one who get their funding from oil giants and then write dubious papers, misquoting other people’s work and misinforming the general public ? I may be out of line, but in my book, these are not researchers, they are puppets.
Let’s take a look at the citations given by the Energy and Environment journal, compared to the Journal of Climate, and you tell me which one is better (charts made by SCImago):




Citation statistics for Energy and Environment



What does this tell us? CarbonBrief again puts it best:

It’s clear that E&E’s papers are cited relatively infrequently – suggesting the inclusion of a substantial number of them on the ‘900+’ list does not demonstrate widespread disagreement with the scientific consensus on climate change, but rather that these views are confined to a small climate skeptic lobby.


9 out of 10 top climate change deniers linked with Exxon Mobil

Even more about the hiatus that never was,….

What you need to know about the NOAA global warming faux pause paper

The study shrunk the surface warming slowdown and drew out the anti-science conspiracy theorists

Last week, a paper out of NOAA concluded that contrary to the popular myth, there’s been no pause in global warming. The study made headlines across the world, including widely-read Guardian stories by John Abraham and Karl Mathiesen. In fact, there may have been information overload associated with the paper, but the key points are relatively straightforward and important.

1. Rapid Global Warming Continues

Arguments about short-term temperature changes only deal with the Earth’s surface temperatures, which account for just 1–2% of the overall warming of the planet. More than 90% of that heat goes into the oceans, and as my colleagues and I noted in a paper published 3 years ago, if anything that warming is accelerating, building up heat at a rate faster than 4 atomic bomb detonations per second.

If you carefully cherry pick start and end dates, you can find a period around 1998–2012 during which the warming of surface temperatures slowed a bit due to temporary natural cooling factors (like more La Niñas), just like it sped up a bit during the 1990s due to temporary natural warming factors (like more El Niños). But these are just wiggles on top of the long-term human-caused global warming trend. As Michael Mann put it,

there never was any “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming. There is evidence, however, for a modest, temporary slowdown in surface warming through the early part of this decade.

2. The Surface Warming Slowdown is Probably Over

This is a tough pill to swallow for those who have misused the short-term slowdown in global surface warming to argue against climate policies, but it’s likely over. 2014 was the hottest year on record, and 2015 looks likely to break the record again.

These slowdown-based anti-policy arguments have been made by everyone from Republican presidential candidates to political think tanks to science-denying blogs. It’s a simple argument – if we pretend the surface warming slowdown can continue indefinitely, then global warming is less of a concern and we don’t need policies to stop it.

Since we’ve always known the slowdown was temporary, these were never credible arguments, but they nevertheless helped to delay efforts to curb global warming. After the publication of this NOAA paper, and possibly two consecutive record hot years, it seems unlikely that these arguments will be considered credible any longer.

3. The Most Common Denial Response: Conspiracy Theories

Social science research has shown that conspiracy theorists are more likely to reject scientists’ conclusions about climate change. It’s a logical connection – given that 97% of climate scientists and their research agree on human-caused global warming, the easiest way to deny that reality is to accuse all those scientists of being part of a vast conspiracy. Otherwise it’s difficult to justify rejecting the conclusions of 97% of experts.

Thus it’s not surprising that those in denial are accusing the NOAA scientists of conspiring to fudge the data to make the slowdown disappear. For example, Anthony Watts, who runs a climate science denial blog, wrote an email to one of the authors of the NOAA paper, telling him,

In my last telephone conversation with you, I stated (paraphrasing) that “I believe you folks aren’t doing anything fraudulent, but you are doing what you feel is correct science in what you believe is a correct way”.

After seeing the desperate tricks pulled in Karl 2015 to erase “the pause” via data manipulation, I no longer hold that opinion. You needed it to go away, so you prostituted yourselves, perhaps at the direction of higher ups.

In fact, accusing the NOAA scientists of fraudulently ‘manipulating data’ for the benefit of the Obama administration was a common theme in the climate science-denying blogosphere. But there’s a glaring flaw in this particular conspiracy theory.

4. The Adjustments Reduce Global Warming Estimates!

This is clear from the bottom frame in this figure in the NOAA paper.

According to the raw, unadjusted data, global surface temperatures warmed about 0.9°C from 1880 to 2014. According to the new NOAA analysis, they warmed about 0.8°C during that time. That’s a bit more than in the previous version of NOAA’s data set (0.75°C), but the net effect of these adjustments is to reduce the overall estimated warming as compared to the raw data!

5. The Adjustments are Important

Contrary to the conspiracy theories, climate scientists process the raw temperature data for an important reason – to remove biases that don’t represent real temperature changes. The big one in the new NOAA analysis deals with changes in the ways ocean temperatures have been measured. They’ve been measured from water samples in insulated buckets, uninsulated buckets, from valves in ships’ hulls, and from instruments on buoys. As Zeke Hausfather explains,

A number of studies have found that buoys tend to measure temperatures that are about 0.12°C colder than is found by ships at the same time and same location. As the number of automated buoy instruments has dramatically expanded in the past two decades, failing to account for the fact that buoys read colder temperatures ended up adding a negative bias in the resulting ocean record. This change is by far the largest single factor responsible for changing global temperatures in the past 17 years compared to temperatures found in the prior NOAA record.

While this adjustment happens to have reduced estimates of the 1998–2012 surface warming slowdown, it’s important to account for changes in the way ocean temperatures have been measured. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s science.

6. The Slowdown and Anti-Policy Arguments are Fragile

The latest changes to the NOAA data set were quite small (compare the black and red lines in the top frame of the figure above). As NASA GISS director Gavin Schmidt noted at RealClimate, if such minor changes are all it takes to make the so-called ‘hiatus’ go away, then it was really quite fragile to begin with. As were any hiatus-based anti-policy arguments.

The bottom line is that the Earth continues to warm dangerously rapidly, and short-term wiggles in global surface temperatures are no reason for complacency. When those who believe otherwise are forced to resort to baseless accusations of fraud and conspiracy theories, it’s time to stop listening to them.

When those who believe otherwise are forced to resort to baseless accusations of fraud and conspiracy theories, it’s time to stop listening to them.

most rational people don't

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Dr. Philip Lloyd

It looks as if Anthony has been dredging for articles and has resurrected another science denier at WUWT. He's got a guest post by Philip Lloyd, a petrochemical engineer from Cape Town, South Africa. I hadn't come across him before, but he's previously chosen WUWT to express his denial of climate science.

Who is Philip Lloyd?

Philip Lloyd is Managing Director at Industrial & Petrochemical Consultants (Pty) Ltd (profile archived here). He also lists himself as a Professor at Cape Peninsula University of Technology. This latter may be just an honorary post. My research suggests so but is not definitive.

Philip Lloyd describes himself as a "senior engineer" with the following specialties: Energy, petroleum industry, mining industry, extractive metallurgy, climate change.

Climate change you might ask? It turns out that, outside of his home country at any rate, the closest he has brushed with fame when it come to "climate change", apart from his two WUWT articles, is as Coordinating Lead Author of a chapter of an IPCC report.

Which report? Well it's a 2005 report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage.

Which chapter was he coordinating lead author of? It's not exactly a chapter, it's an Annexe. And it's not the first Annexe, it's Annexe II: Glossary, acronyms and abbreviations

Read on for more...


Philip Lloyd, science denier


Back in January this year Philip Lloyd wrote at WUWT (archived here):

Where the sceptic differs from many other scientists is in ascribing the warming to human activities – specifically, the burning of fossil fuels and the concomitant rise in the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere.

This is truly weird, given that Philip Lloyd has a career in the coal mining industry. He even has a PhD in Chemical Engineering. So you'd have thought he would know that burning fossil fuels yields carbon dioxide. Well, it seems he might have got that far, but that's about as far as he's got. He wrote:

A prime difficulty with the anthropogenic warming thesis is that it is not known how much of the warming is natural and how much might be caused by carbon dioxide.

Philip is wrong of course. It is known. Certainly enough to warrant action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In today's article (archived here), Philip goes on about changes between the first and final IPCC drafts, as if early drafts shouldn't have been amended. He's all hot and bothered about the corrected chart that I and others have discussed before. He reckons it shouldn't have been corrected!

Philip talks about the tropospheric "hot spot" and wrongly says:

None of these methods have managed to find any evidence of warming at anything like 0.6 degrees Centigrade per decade. The thermometers suggest slight cooling; the satellites slight warming. This huge discrepancy between model and measurement has been the subject of intense discussion since the 2007 Assessment. ...

...This time I read out to the IPCC the actual papers from the peer-reviewed literature that they should have been using: -

and listed five papers that he says the IPCC should have referenced papers, including this one:

Allen, Robert J. and Sherwood, Steven C. (2008) Warming maximum in the tropical upper troposphere deduced from thermal winds. Nature Geosci 1 (6), 399- 403, http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v...l/ngeo208.html,

The abstract for the Allen and Sherwood paper shows that Philip Lloyd lied when he wrote "none of these methods have managed to find any evidence of warming at anything like 0.6 degrees Centigrade per decade:

Climate models and theoretical expectations have predicted that the upper troposphere should be warming faster than the surface. Surprisingly, direct temperature observations from radiosonde and satellite data have often not shown this expected trend. However, non-climatic biases have been found in such measurements.

Here we apply the thermal-wind equation to wind measurements from radiosonde data, which seem to be more stable than the temperature data. We derive estimates of temperature trends for the upper troposphere to the lower stratosphere since 1970. Over the period of observations, we find a maximum warming trend of 0.65 plus minus 0.47 K per decade near the 200 hPa pressure level, below the tropical tropopause. Warming patterns are consistent with model predictions except for small discrepancies close to the tropopause. Our findings are inconsistent with the trends derived from radiosonde temperature datasets and from NCEP reanalyses of temperature and wind fields. The agreement with models increases confidence in current model-based predictions of future climate change.

I checked and that paper was indeed cited in the IPCC AR5 report in the section on upper air temperatures (p 2-41). So that paper was cited in AR5. Not only that, it doesn't find what Philip wanted it to find. Huh! so much for his complaints.

So I check Philip's other references to see if they were cited in AR5. It turns out that three of of his list of five papers were cited:

Cited twice in Chapter 9 in the section on tropical troposphere temperature trends (page 9-30)

Douglass, D. H., Christy, J. R., Pearson, B. D. and Singer, S. F. (2008), A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions. Int. J. Climatol., 28: 1693–1701. doi: 10.1002/joc.1651

Cited in Chapter 2 (page 2-40) in the section on upper air temperatures:

Titchner, Holly A., P. W. Thorne, M. P. McCarthy, S. F. B. Tett, L. Haimberger, D. E. Parker, 2009: Critically Reassessing Tropospheric Temperature Trends from Radiosondes Using Realistic Validation Experiments. J. Climate, 22, 465–485. doi: An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie

I only found one citation from the dubious "journal" Energy and Environment and it wasn't the Singer et al paper. So sad (Will that single citation provide ammunition for Donna Laframboise to allege that AR5 WG1 didn't stick solely to peer reviewed literature?)

So apart from the E&E "paper" by Fred Singer, the only reference not cited from Lloyd's list (hey, not that Lloyd's List!) was this one:

Lanzante, John R., Melissa Free, 2008: Comparison of Radiosonde and GCM Vertical Temperature Trend Profiles: Effects of Dataset Choice and Data Homogenization. J. Climate, 21, 5417–5435. doi: An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie;

However other similar papers from Lanzante and Free were cited more than once in AR5. For example, among others:

• Wang, J. S., D. J. Seidel, and M. Free, 2012c: How well do we know recent climate trends at the tropical tropopause? J. Geophys. Res.-Atmos., 117.
• Free, M., D. J. Seidel, J. K. Angell, J. Lanzante, I. Durre, and T. C. Peterson, 2005: Radiosonde Atmospheric Temperature Products for Assessing Climate (RATPAC): A new data set of large-area anomaly time series. Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, 110.
• Free, M., and J. Lanzante, 2009: Effect of volcanic eruptions on the vertical temperature profile in radiosonde data and climate models. Journal of Climate, 22, 2925-2939
• Seidel, D. J., and J. R. Lanzante, 2004: An assessment of three alternatives to linear trends for characterizing global atmospheric temperature changes. Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, 109.

How's that for "making up stuff". Philip Lloyd is a very suitable contributor to WUWT.


Who is Philip Lloyd?


So who is Philip Lloyd? The WUWT article states (archived here):

Professor Philip Lloyd is from the Energy Institute, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town S.A.

I dug deeper and, thanks to Tim Lambert, found that he was one of Senator Inhofe's quoted "skeptics". In the 2008 Senate Minority Report (the one purportedly listing 650 "skeptics" but actually only three or so from the IPCC) he is mentioned as follows:

CO2 is insignificant, says "Nuclear Physicist" Philip Lloyd

Oh, and this "nuclear physicist" and coal mining consultant claims to have studied the ice record in detail!

Nuclear Physicist and Chemical Engineer Dr. Philip Lloyd, a UN IPCC cocoordinating lead author on the Technical Report on Carbon Capture & Storage, was in charge of South Africa’s Chamber of Mines’ Metallurgy Laboratory and was a former professor at University of Witwatersrand where he established a course in environmental chemical engineering. Lloyd has served as President of the South African Institution of Chemical Engineers, the Federation of Societies of Professional Engineers, and the Associated Scientific and Technical Societies of Southern Africa. Lloyd, who has authored over 150 refereed publications, currently serves as an honorary research fellow with the Energy Research Centre at the University of Cape Town. Lloyd rejects man-made climate fears. “I have grave difficulties in finding any but the most circumstantial evidence for any human impact on the climate,” Lloyd wrote to EPW on January 18, 2008. “The quantity of CO2 we produce is insignificant in terms of the natural circulation between air, water and soil. I have tried numerous tests for radiative effects, and all have failed. I have tried to develop an isotopic method for identifying stable C12 (from fossil fuels) and merely ended up understanding the difference between the major plant chemistries and their differing ability to use the different isotopes. I have studied the ice core record, in detail, and am concerned that those who claim to have a model of our climate future haven't a clue about the forces driving our climate past,” Lloyd wrote. “I am particularly concerned that the rigor of science seems to have been sacrificed on an altar of fundraising. I am doing a detailed assessment of the IPCC reports and the Summaries for Policy Makers, identifying the way in which the Summaries have distorted the science. I have found examples of a Summary saying precisely the opposite of what the scientists said,” he concluded.

Next question - who or what is EPW? Did Lloyd write a denier letter to Economics and Politics Weekly back in 2008? Maybe Inhofe could quote WUWT next

I searched Google Scholar for his "150 refereed publications". I found only 20 items listed in Google Scholar going back nearly fifty years, of which several were obviously not "refereed". He didn't have any publications listed in the IPCC carbon capture report he co-authored.


Philip Lloyd - Coordinating Lead Author of an IPCC report


Philip Lloyd was touted in Senator Inhofe's minority report as a Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC . I went through all the main reports and couldn't find his name - not in any one of them. Not as an author nor in the list of references. I extended the search and discovered he was listed as an author in the 2005 IPCC Special Report: Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage:

• Chapter 5: Underground Geological Storage - one of the 21 lead authors (working under two coordinating lead authors)
• Annex II - Glossary, acronyms and abbreviations - Coordinating lead author!

He was a lead author in Underground Geological Storage. Fair enough. But the effort he must be most proud of his role as Coordinating Lead Author of the Annex of Glossary, acronyms and abbreviations!!!


What did Philip Lloyd do at MIT?


In Philip's LinkedIn profile (archived here) he claims education at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But when I looked down his profile further it didn't list any degree of any kind from MIT. All it said was "Nuclear engineering". He listed his qualifications as follows:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Nuclear engineering
1962 – 1965
Activities and Societies: Fellow School for Advanced Studies, Outing Club, Choral Society

University of Cape Town
PhD, Chemical Engineering
1959 – 1961
PhD thesis on uranium solvent extraction
Vice-president of SRC 1960-61 and de facto president because president generally absent from campus
Activities and Societies: Students Representative Council

University of Cape Town
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Chemical Engineering
1955 – 1958

University of Cape Town
BSc, Chemical Engineering
1954 – 1958

Activities and Societies: Mountain & Ski Club, Yacht Club, Photographic Society, Classical Music Society

Interesting. Did he get two PhDs in Chemical Engineering at the University of Cape Town or was that a slip? And what did he do at MIT apart from singing in a choir? Was that a post-doc position? Did he start something and not finish?


My BS antennas are quivering. This chap was a student politician and is still one today (look at his "I was really effectively the SRC president because the real president was away a lot"!) Shades of 60 year olds whose greatest academic award was given while they were in high school, so they still boast about it.


Philip Lloyd proudly proclaims his Nobel Prize - more than once


And there's more. Philip Lloyd, in his LinkedIn profile, when he mentions his role at the IPCC, proudly claims to have been part of team sharing the Nobel Peace Prize:

Contributor
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
December 2007
Part of team sharing Nobel Peace Prize

Padding and self-promotion to the extreme


It's not the only place where he boasts of his Nobel Prize. I found this paragraph in a press release from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (archived here). (Did he write this himself?)

It’s certainly not the first time Lloyd’s scooped such prestigious recognition. In 2007, Lloyd’s contributions to carbon capture and storage were acknowledged by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) as sufficient for him to form part of the nominated Nobel Peace Prize team, together with former United States president Al Gore.

That's what I call ironic promotion for a climate science denier! (Am I correct in recalling Anthony Watts mocking Michael Mann for saying that he contributed to IPCC's efforts that resulted in it being awarded the Nobel Prize? When is he going to blast Philip Lloyd for doing so?)


(I checked, and the SANEA did give him the Energy Award for a lifelong contribution, back in 2010.)


By the way, here is the website of the Energy Institute of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. (I had to search directly because there is no link from this page in the list of Research Centres in the Engineering Department.) You'll see it is proudly supported by Eskom and the Fossil Fuel Foundation:

When I went to the Eskom website, this is what I found:

Incidentally, I don't know what the policies of the Fossil Fuel Foundation are or it's attitude on climate change. However I did come across a transcript of a speech by a guest speaker who spoke about climate change in realistic terms.


Just another nutty denier?


Philip Lloyd comes across as just another science denier, albeit one who wouldn't appear as an utter nutter if he stuck to his real accomplishments and didn't pad them so much. Ironically, he is a science denier who boasts a Nobel Prize from his contribution to the IPCC while making out that the IPCC reports are a load of crock. He opened his article with the following:

People have the nasty habit of giving their opponents names. Those who are convinced that humans are wrecking the world by burning fossil fuels call those who don’t believe them “denialists.” It implies that they are close to the Holocaust deniers, and so are clearly beyond the pale.

I have come to the conclusion that they are wrong. The true denialists are those who believe in global warming, and who will go to any lengths to deny the evidence against that position.

Philip Lloyd, no matter how much you deny the fact - you are a climate science denier

HotWhopper: Resurrecting an Inhofe Science Denier at WUWT - Nobel Prize Winner, MIT-educated Philip Lloyd