Richard Hawkins
Richard has a degree in Law from the University of Nottingham, specialising in International Environmental Law (and more particularly the lack of it!). He is currently studying a part-time Masters in Energy and Environmental Studies.
Lead author of the Climate Safety report, Richard oversaw its design & production, as well as creating this site.
Posts
GeneralRichard Hawkins 12 March
Dive right in:
- SealevelGate — Real Climate cover the true IPCC sea-level scandal. Must read.
- Climate of fear, Nature editorial (free access) — “The integrity of climate research has taken a very public battering in recent months. Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight.”
- Overview of all the ‘Gates — very useful brief run-down of the last 4 months.
- Short must read: Climate Change and the Media — “What’s truly infuriating about this episode of journalistic malpractice is that, once again, it illustrates the reasons why the East Anglia scientists adopted an adversarial attitude towards information management with regard to outsiders and the media. They were afraid that any data they allowed to be characterised by non-climate scientists would be vulnerable to propagandistic distortion. And they were right.”
GeneralRichard Hawkins 21 February
MediaRichard Hawkins 18 February
Via Tamino at OpenMind:
Suppose you have a child, a son — he’s 10. You want to know whether or not he’s growing normally, so every day you measure his height with a tape measure. You’ve done so since he was 5. You even plot the data on a graph, and notice two things about it. First: the measurements show a fair amount of jitter, sometimes they’re a wee bit higher, sometimes a wee bit lower, there’s noise in the data. Second: there’s also a trend. Your kid is a lot taller at 10 than he was at 5, in fact the trend over the observed time span is upward and reasonably steady. You even do a statistical analysis, estimate the growth rate, and determine that it’s definitely statistically significant — so it’s not a false trend due to noise in the data, it’s real. Your son is growing normally.
Then you’re interviewed by a reporter from the Daily Mail. He asks, “Can you prove — with statistical significance — that your child has been growing since last Tuesday?”
Media ScienceRichard Hawkins 15 February
RealClimate have just published a really useful post discussing the IPCC and media distortion.
As well as kindly praising Tim’s analysis of the affair which you can find here on climatesafety.org, the piece includes a great summary of the IPCC and its processes:
“Assessment reports are published every six or seven years and writing them takes about three years. Each working group publishes one of the three volumes of each assessment. The focus of the recent allegations is the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), which was published in 2007.
“Its three volumes are almost a thousand pages each, in small print. They were written by over 450 lead authors and 800 contributing authors; most were not previous IPCC authors. There are three stages of review involving more than 2,500 expert reviewers who collectively submitted 90,000 review comments on the drafts. These, together with the authors’ responses to them, are all in the public record.“
They get to the real crux of the recent “scandals”, asking: Do any of them effect the basic climate science?
GeneralRichard Hawkins 12 February
GeneralRichard Hawkins 29 January
ScienceRichard Hawkins 8 December
Keep an eye on the Climate Scoreboard during the next two weeks… Note the dark blue curve in the graphic, this is the probability distribution, it shows the full range of temperature rise the current national emissions proposals would likely give rise to. Currently it’s 2–6 degrees with 3.8 degrees is the most likely outcome (according to their analysis, climate sensitivity etc.).
With my risk managers hat on, it’s hard not to notice that we could go way above 3.8 degrees… it looks like there’s a 5–10% of going over 5 degrees… the sting’s in the tail as they say!
ScienceRichard Hawkins 8 December
For those of you not following the detail of ‘ClimateGate’ here’s a nice video explaining the meaning of the two most cited “conspiracy-proving” emails. Peter Sinclair also wades in with a short video covering the affair.
While this sort of accurate rebuttal is important, it reminds me of something Randy Olson argues in Don’t be such a scientist — that scientists often obsess too much about substance and accuracy, in every sphere they operate in. Olson even suggests that a scientist’s natural response to being called a bastard would be to present their birth certificate as counter evidence!
SolutionsRichard Hawkins 21 September
There’s an emerging economic consensus — in parallel with the scientific consensus — that investing in mitigation and adaptation is good value for money.
Joe Romm points out an overlooked conclusion of a recent IIED study by Martin Parry and others on the underestimated cost of adaptation, Romm notes:
In the “aggressive abatement” case (450 ppm), the mean “Net present value [NPV] of climate change impacts” is only $410 trillion — or $275 trillion with adaptation. So stabilizing at 450 …
GeneralRichard Hawkins 1 September
