Random Thoughts on a Referendum

It appears, then, that the Eatanswill people, like the people of many other small towns, considered themselves of the utmost and most mighty importance, and that every man in Eatanswill, conscious of the weight that attached to his example, felt himself bound to unite, heart and soul, with one of the two great parties that divided the town—the Blues and the Buffs. Now the Blues lost no opportunity of opposing the Buffs, and the Buffs lost no opportunity of opposing the Blues; and the consequence was, that whenever the Buffs and Blues met together at public meeting, town-hall, fair, or market, disputes and high words arose between them.

The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens

Disclaimer

This is going to be a chaotic outpouring of some of my thoughts on tomorrow's referendum. It isn't going to change anyone's mind - it probably won't even be read - it's simply me getting somethings out of my system.

How I'm Voting

I will be voting for the UK to remain in the EU. There was never any real doubt in my mind on this and nothing in the so called debate of the last few months has given me any reason to change my mind. The fact is that I have always considered myself to be a European. I'm proud to be English, but proud that England is part of the United Kingdom, and proud that the UK is part of the European Union. I feel that unity is better than division, and fear that leaving the EU will be very divisive and only lead to more division.

None of this means that I think everything England, the United Kingdom, or the European Union does is for the best, just that it's better to be part of something bigger than yourself.

But whilst I hope that we will remain in the EU, I fear that whichever side wins, the loser will be democracy, the UK and the EU.

About the Referendum

This referendum is and has always been a bad idea. There are times when a referendum makes sense. If a party wants to take an action, such as leaving the EU, that will have profound effects on the country it's fair that it should ask the people for a mandate via a referendum.. But this is not such a referendum. No mainstream party wants to leave the EU. David Cameron doesn't want to leave the EU - the only reason for the referendum was as a sop to elements of his party that were threatened by UKIP. So we have the Prime Minister, a year after winning an election, asking the country if he should do something he doesn't want to do, and has no need to do.

It's difficult to have a referendum on our future as a nation without it becoming very divisive and bitter. It's like a civil war - you are not fighting an enemy, you are fighting your own country. It's brother against brother, fathers killing sons, sons killing fathers. The problem is whatever the outcome the wounds will still be there, and worse may follow.

To go or not to go, that is not the question

With these dissensions it is almost superfluous to say that everything in Eatanswill was made a party question. If the Buffs proposed to new skylight the market-place, the Blues got up public meetings, and denounced the proceeding; if the Blues proposed the erection of an additional pump in the High Street, the Buffs rose as one man and stood aghast at the enormity. There were Blue shops and Buff shops, Blue inns and Buff inns—there was a Blue aisle and a Buff aisle in the very church itself.

One of the problems with this vote is that the question being asked is very simplistic, just the two options Remain a member of the European Union or Leave the European Union, but the actual question is much more nuanced than that. I think it was the leave supporters who were very insistent that the question should be very simple, but the result is that no-one knows what a leave vote actually means. What type of brexit will we get?

A vote for Remain at least is straightforward - nothing changes, (except for all the bitterness, recriminations). But a vote to leave could mean anything, and anyone voting to leave won't get to make the decision of which sort of exit will be negotiated.

There are two questions regarding a leave vote: The first is how much do we actually leave. A vote for leave won't suddenly mean we are no longer a member of the EU, there will have to be years of negotiation before it's settled, and whoever is doing the negotiating will get to choose from arrange of options, going from complete isolation, to remaining in the EU for trade purposes, but giving up any ability to control the EU.

The second problem is what we will do with all this new found freedom once we leave. We currently have both the extreme right and left wings of the political spectrum both thinking leave will be a good thing. They cannot both be correct. To some the EU is literally a communist state, to others it's full of capitalist parasites, forcing privitisation and destroying workers rights. Piers Corbyn (of termite fame) wants a Lexit, a left wing exit. But that won't be an option on the ballot, the only option is leave or remain, and you can bet that a vote for leave will be interpreted by Johnson, Gove or Farage as a Rexit.

If Leave win I suspect there will be a lot of disappointed leavers at the end.

The Standard of Debate

Of course it was essentially and indispensably necessary that each of these powerful parties should have its chosen organ and representative: and, accordingly, there were two newspapers in the town—the Eatanswill Gazette and the Eatanswill Independent; the former advocating Blue principles, and the latter conducted on grounds decidedly Buff. Fine newspapers they were. Such leading articles, and such spirited attacks!—'Our worthless contemporary, the Gazette'—'That disgraceful and dastardly journal, the Independent'—'That false and scurrilous print, the Independent'—'That vile and slanderous calumniator, the Gazette;' these, and other spirit-stirring denunciations, were strewn plentifully over the columns of each, in every number, and excited feelings of the most intense delight and indignation in the bosoms of the townspeople.

Look Who Want Out

To bring this blog back to science; if I was in any way tempted to vote Leave, the fact that just about everyone of the most idiotic climate skeptics also want to leave, would surely be enough to put a reasonable doubt in my mind. When the likes of Piers Corbyn, Christopher Monckton, Steve Goddard, Anthony Watts, Jo Nova, James Delingpole are all cheering on an exit, one has to assume they see some benefit to their cause. That said, I suspect the reason has less to do with any possible change in UK energy policy, and more to do with the correlation between Euro and Global Warming conspiracies.

It may or may not be a coincidence, but so much of the debate seems to echo the climate change arguments. There's the constant repeating of statistics that have been debunked (the 350 million a week we will be supposedly saving for example). There's the experts know nothing type of arguments. There's the dismissal of any argument that goes against you as scaremongering, or the result of EU bribery.

The Gazette warned the electors of Eatanswill that the eyes not only of England, but of the whole civilised world, were upon them; and the Independent imperatively demanded to know, whether the constituency of Eatanswill were the grand fellows they had always taken them for, or base and servile tools, undeserving alike of the name of Englishmen and the blessings of freedom. Never had such a commotion agitated the town before.

The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel

Finally, what really concerns me about the referendum, and especially the Brexit side, is the attempts to define the debate in terms of Britishness, and argue this as a choice between being pro-British and anti-Europe, or pro-Europe and anti-British. As I said at the start, I consider myself to be both pro-British and pro-European. If we remain there will still be a United Kingdom, if we leave it could well mean the end of the UK, as Scotland at least, and possibly the other non-English sections of the kingdom will be pressing for their own independence votes.

My big fear from all this is that with so much at stake, and the constant mantra of brexit of take back control, that aftermath will be filled with accusations that the other side were unpatriotic, sold out our country's future, and was even an act of treason. Things could get nasty in the days after the referendum, and possibly for a lot longer.

Christopher Monckton on Speed

Several months after Christopher Monckton of Brenchley last had a post on WUWT concerning the 18 years of pause, he's returned with a new post - Introducing the global warming speedometer. This is much shorter then his previous reports, and fails to mention the Great Pause at all, instead concentrating on a new graph, which he describes as

A single devastating graph shows official climate predictions were wild

Actually, it isn't really new - just a straightened up version of the dial graphs he featured in his previous posts. Those graphs showed the warming rates of various data sets, but now he's dropped all data except the two satellite sets that show the least warming.

I'm not keen on the style of graph; it's rather distracting and presenting the data on a circular dial makes no sense, except to make it look like a speedometer. But, in any event, a speedometer is a lousy metaphor for changing temperatures. A car's speedometer shows the instantaneous speed of a car, but that isn't a useful concept for temperature records, that change greatly from month to month. So the speedometer in Monckton's graph is showing a rate of change averaged over a longer period. But then you have to decide what length of time you are taking for the average. For Monckton's graph he's chosen to start in 2001. Odd, as last time he was insisting the Great Pause starting date was calculated, and not plucked arbitrarily from the ether, which he implied was the defining point of the end-point fallacy. Now he seems to plucking the start date out of the ether.

Monckton's Omissions

Here's my own version of the details of Monckton's speedometer, flattened out to make it easier to read.

It's trying to show the disparity between IPCC projections compared with real observations. That is the two satellite sets showing temperatures in the lower troposphere - RSS 3.3, ignoring the newer RSS 4.0 and older UAH 5.6, both of which shows considerably more warming.

He shows the warming rate over a 15 year and 4 month period, and claims

Fifteen years is long enough to verify the predictions from IPCC’s first three Assessment Reports against real-world temperature change measured by the most sophisticated method available – satellites.

But he's wrong as can easily be seen by looking at the confidence intervals for these 15 years using this handy tool. RSS 3.3 shows only 0.36 °C / Century warming, but with a 2σ confidence interval of ± 2.26 °C / Century. We cannot say with any degree of confidence that the real rate of warming isn't in the IPCC's 2001 predictions, or even their 1990 predictions.

Here's the previous graph showing the rates of warming since 2001 for more data sets with their 2σ confidence intervals marked.

The Missing Heat

The IPCC figures Monckton uses are projections for the period 1990 to 2025, but Monckton compares this with the 15 years from 2001 to present. He's implying that this slower rate will continue until 2025, which is dubious given the uncertainty in the trend, but he's also effectively tracing that lower rate back to 1990, and in so doing effectively hides much of the warming that has already occurred during the first decade of the IPCC's projection.

This graph illustrates the problem. It shows Monckton's preferred satellite data from 1990, the start of the forecast period. The green line shows Monckton's trend starting in 2001, the blue line shows the trend from 1990. The trend of speed since 1990 is 0.98 °C / Century, twice the speed Monckton uses, and very close to the lowest IPCC projection. (If you include May's figures the rate is now 1.19 °C / Century, within the lower bound.)

But the IPCC were not making a claim about the rate of change but the total change over a 35 year period.

Monckton uses projections from the first three IPCC reports (1990, 1995 and 2001). The 1990 report was based on simpler models and later reports have shown less warming, so I'll stick with the 2001 projections.

The values Monckton uses come from page 8 of the IPCC 2001 Synthesis Report:

For the periods 1990 to 2025 and 1990 to 2050, the projected increases are 0.4 to 1.1°C and 0.8 to 2.6°C, respectively.

Climate Change 2001: Synthesis Report - Summary for Policymakers.

Monckton translates this as:

IPCC (2001), on page 8, predicted that in the 36 years 1990-2025 the world would warm by 0.75 [0.4, 1.1] C°, equivalent to 2.1 [1.1, 3.1] C°/century. This predicted interval is 4.5 [2.3, 6.6] times observed warming since January 2001.

Introducing the global warming speedometer - Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Aside from thinking that 1990 - 2025 is a 36 year period, when it's 35, he makes a couple of dubious changes. He says that the IPCC predicted the world would warm by 0.75 °C by 2025, when they only give a range of values. He's taken the mid point of the range as the expected amount of warming. But this assumes the projected range is symmetrical, which is unlikely if you look at the 1990 reports estimates.

Then he converts the projected warming into a rate of warming. The IPCC only say that 2025 is expected to be 0.4 to 1.1 °C warmer than 1990. This should be measured using an average of annual temperatures centered on those two dates - I'll use 20 year averages as this is the method specified in later reports. So the true measure will be to take the average temperature between 2016 - 2035 inclusive, and see if they are between 0.4 and 1.1 °C above the average temperatures for 1981 - 2000. We won't know for certain if this projection is correct until 2035, but how far off are they at the moment?

Here is a graph showing the running 20 year averages for Monckton's preferred temperature set, relative to the 1990 average.

This goes up to 2005, the year centered on the 20 years from 1996 to 2015. The average in 2005 is 0.207 °C warmer than it was in 1990. That's more than halfway to the lower bound of the IPCC's projection, even though we are less than halfway through the projection period.

Translating this into Monckton's speed, we have a rate of warming since 1990 of 1.38 °C / Century, well within the IPCC's projections. Using the Hadley Centre's surface data, which is what the IPCC are referring to, the rate of warming since 1990 is 1.80 °C / Century - exactly in line with the IPCC's 1995 projection, and well within the 2001 projections.

The following graph shows the rolling 20 year averages, both for Monckton's satellite averages, and for HadCRUT4, along with a representation of the range of projections from the IPCC 2001 report.

None of this guarantees that the IPCC projections will be met. If temperatures continue to rise in line with Monckton's speedometer, the 2025 figure would be 0.31 °C above the 1990 value. A bit short of the IPCC's lower bound of 0.4 °C, but much higher than Monckton is implying