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Leading climate blogger Steve McIntyre says policy makers are failing to prepare the public for climate change and have become obsessed with "petty acts of virtuous behaviour" instead. He also told The Register that computer scientists should form "tiger teams" to produce engineering-grade analysis of climate models, to counter skepticism about the mathematical modelling.

McIntyre was on a rare visit to London and gave a talk at the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, an event hosted by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Ten years ago, the retired Canadian mining consultant tried to reproduce Michael Mann's Hockey Stick graph, which attempts to reconstruct global temperatures over the past millennium and featured prominently in a report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001.

But anyone expecting fulminations against the climate establishment doesn't know his work. McIntyre is agnostic, and apart from some measured laconic asides, his talk was, like his writing, technical and practical.

Policy makers in the US and the UK are not guided by reality, thinks McIntyre: "If you're a policy maker, you have to take as a base case that India and China are going to increase carbon dioxide emissions, and one of the IPCC base cases of CO₂ emissions is going to come to pass. You would be negligent to ignore it - we can hope it will be less severe, and we can hope skeptics are right - but you have to assume that the IPCC advice is accurate. That doesn't leave a whole lot of [room to] manoeuvre."

In five years China's CO₂ emissions have doubled, he pointed out. Even if the USA reduced CO₂ emissions to zero, China's output today is greater than the USA's emissions in 2005.

The Copenhagen summit in 2009 ended any hope of a binding global agreement on CO₂ abatement that emerging and fastest-growing economies would agree to - but the new reality hasn't sunk in yet.

"The entire rationale of policy in US and Europe has been to ignore what's happening in China and India and hope that petty acts of virtuous behaviour in both countries will cure the problem," he said. "Even if you install windmills you're not going to change the trend of overall CO2 emissions."

McIntyre said he thought the reason for the "tremendous acrimony" in the climate blogosphere was a response to this: "Nobody knows what to do."

"Policy makers can assume what changes are most likely, and equip society to be resilient to those changes. If resources are limited, then expenditures on acts of petty virtue - that may make microscope changes, that have no impact on climate - should be put under the microscope to see if they make best use of social resources compared to adaptation," he said during his talk on 16 August.

This led to some vigorous questioning: several audience members were surprised to hear McIntyre recommend the IPCC to policy-makers when he'd done so much to demonstrate its work provided a poor empirical base for policy-making. We'll return to that after a recap of his talk, which was entitled a Year in Review. This will be an abbreviated summary, with the presumption McIntyre will publish the full presentation.

Drivel and hippies

Recently McIntyre had been examining two IPCC reports: the May 2011 report on renewables (SRREN - Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change) by IPCC Working Group 3, and this year's report on climate extremes, SREX, by Working Group 2.

McIntyre said the publication of SRREN had followed the "despicable IPCC practice" of issuing an alarmist press release "that had the opportunity to run around the world" six weeks before issuing the report. The press release claimed that 80 per cent of the world's energy needs could be met by renewable energy by 2050.

It transpired that the 80 per cent figure was based on a Greenpeace study, a Greenpeace activist was lead author of the chapter assessing the Greenpeace study, and no due diligence on this scenario had been performed.

Bill Gates had described the development of a cheaper-than-coal renewable energy source as a miracle, something McIntyre interpreted to mean "very difficult but not impossible". He agreed with NASA's Jim Hansen that the cancellation by Al Gore, along with Bill Clinton, of the United States' nuclear energy research program was an error. "I don't view [nuclear] as a magic bullet," said McIntyre, but nuclear research should be reinvigorated.

Instead, McIntyre had examined the SREX dossier and found it largely wanting.

Asked by climate scientist Richard Betts of the Met Office, an IPCC author, if he saw more hope for the UN panel, McIntyre replied: "Much of the report was drivel, probably most of it. The fact there are a few sensible observations aren't enough to repay the effort."

McIntyre typically pulls no punches: he has in the past criticised the integrity of the paleoclimatologist community's temperature reconstructions, revealing on his blog cherry-picked data, upside-down data, and statistical methods that create hockey-stick shapes from red (random) noise.

His answer was a neat summary of the McIntyre bullshit detector: you shouldn't need to resort to trick-cycling to produce evidence of change within Earth's climate.

"As a general philosophy, I think any signal should be strong enough to show up using very simple methods," he said. "Simple methods are all that is required to extract signals. If you have to use methods that are trickier than that - then in the hands of inexperienced or opportunistic scientists you can get results don't make a whole lot of sense."

He went on to lament: "The use of weather disasters to motivate politicians is common practice. [The SREX report] read as a combination of the worst features of management consultancy reports combined with academic sustainable development literature, as edited by international climate bureaucrats."

Ouch.

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