++++Whitewash starting++++
Nov 27, 2009 Climate This from a correspondent - no verification as yet:
1) Lord Rees (Royal Society) to be asked by UEA to investigate CRU leak.
2) Foreign Office and government leaning heavily on UEA to keep a lid on everything lest it destabilises Copenhagen.
3) CRU asked to prepare data for a pre-emptive release in past couple of days but trouble reconciling issues between data bases has stopped this.
Bishop Hill
TonyN in the comments notes this article by Roger Harrabin where the official position on the inquiry is put.
One senior climate scientist told me that the chair would have to be a person accepted by both mainstream climate scientists and sceptics as a highly respected figure without strong connections to either group.BBC News understands that senior individuals at UEA have acknowledged the potential damage to the university's reputation from the CRU affair and are anxious to clear the institution's name.
It's not going to be Lord Rees then, is it?
Reader Comments (39)
The report by Edward J. Wegman, George Mason University, David W. Scott, Rice
University, and Yasmin H. Said, The Johns Hopkins University showed that Manns work was rubbish, it also showed that the peer reviewing was not independent. Essentially none of the AGW has ever been independently reviewed.
Yet here we are several years later and Mann is still the gatekeeper. I have little confidence that they won't manage to keep the lid on this. They have, after all, come up with the answer the politicians (there pay masters) want, which is to give more power to politicians..
LOL!
So those databases were as ropey as the leaked info suggested, which again tends to confirm the genuineness of the leak.
We really need to find out who harry really is and send him at least a sympathy card and a case or two of hard liquor.
Yeah, their code and data is pretty much buggered. And since even they cannot reproduce their results it is therefore required the entire theory be thrown out.
Someone should demand they produce updated products now, let them fail and let start over.
Hilary Benn MP on R4 this morning
"The most important meeting of mankind, EVER is only weeks away in Copenhagen"
How I laughed
"Lord Rees (Royal Society) to be asked by UEA to investigate CRU leak"
Ah, so it'll all be alright then!
Interview with Lord Rees:
"What one single thing convinces you most that climate change is taking place?
The main reason for concern is that the carbon dioxide level is rising by 0.5 per cent a year and is now at a level that it has not been at for the last half a million years. I think if we knew nothing else than that, there would still be great reason for concern.
What is the most important thing you are personally doing on climate change?
I am becoming more and more conscious of the need to avoid waste. I use a small economical car, for instance.
If you were the Prime Minister, what one thing would you do about climate change?
I think Tony Blair has already played an important role leading the G8 nations on the climate change issue. I think he was right to do this and the issue is now high on the international agenda. The recently published Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change will have an impact internationally as well as help the G8 nations move further on this subject.
Do you agree with the Bishop of London that “making selfish choices such as flying on holiday or buying a large car are a symptom of sin”?
Bishops are experts in defining sins and I am not, but one change that may happen and I hope will happen over the next few years is that it will become socially unacceptable to be conspicuously wasteful.
There’s so much noise about climate change, are people in danger of becoming complacent?
It’s a difficult issue for the public because the downside is very long-term and is international, unlike pollution for instance, which people are concerned about because it affects their localities. The effects of carbon dioxide emissions are worldwide rather than local and the most severe effects will be far in the future. "
So, we'll get a nice balanced report then, just like Stern.
To investigate the leak.... um.
Right. So who's going to investigate the data?
I have serious doubts that these eminent fellows of the Royal Society will do anything except exonerate the CRU lot.
Its not so much using a thief to catch a thief - its a veritable thieves' kitchen, where they're all in it together.
But hey - they're Lords, and scientists, so it must be all right, no?
In honour of the Climate Change wonks and their recent embarrassment, I'd like to offer my opinion of the whole Global Whatever in song. . .
D
The SINGLE most important reason for AGW: fortran.
Well, he's only investigating the leak itself. Seems the AGW crows finally started thinking about information security. For as long as His Lordship authority is limited to leak plugging that shouldn't be a big problem.
I really can't see how a leading alarmist like Rees, who recently co-authored a statement on climate change with the MO and NERC, can be impartial, but then again the UK government are continually getting away with appointing their own men to "investigate" their own wrong-doings, so i guess it's par for the course
What I think is most amusing about their pre-emptive data disclosure dea is that those above clearly thought that'd be a perfectly simple thing to do - after all it must all be there, documented, squeaky clean, robust and easily replicable.
HAHHAHAHAHAAAHH
investigating the fact of the leak or the content of the leak?
I think we should be told......
Don't forget 4) Government leans heavily on the BBC to make no mention of Climategate.
In light of 2) above it looks as though it might be the leak and not the contents of the leak.
One wonders what is the timetable for all this?
I did a Google search on: ' "Lord Rees" global warming '. It shows him to be an interesting choice by the University of East Anglia, for review of the CRU 'leak'.
From the summary at intelligencesquared.com: (i) Lord Martin Rees shares his thoughts on the future and the perils facing the earth in the 'Anthropocene' epoch. (ii) High on Lord Rees' list of priorities is combatting climate change, a challenge that brings other problems in its wake. (iii) The problems of climate change are likely to be exacerbated by population growth ...
From a cache of Royal Society webpage (seemingly no longer directly available): Lord Martin Rees, the President of the Royal Society, today (22 June 2006) welcomed the publication of a report by the United States National Research Council that endorses scientific evidence showing that the global average temperature over the past few decades has been higher than for at least 400 years.
From the BBC: But Professor Julia Slingo, chief scientist of the Met Office, Professor Alan Thorpe, Nerc's chief executive, and Lord Rees, president of the Royal Society, said cutting emissions could substantially limit the severity of climate change.
From a speech by Lord Rees: High on this list are concerns about energy supply and energy security -- crucial for economic and political stability, and linked of course to the grave threat of climate change. The essential scientific basis of climate change should be uncontroversial. CO2 was identified as a greenhouse gas by Sir John Tyndall 150 years ago. It’s also uncontroversial that the measured CO2 concentration has been rising for the last 50 years. And that, if we pursue ‘business as usual’, the concentration will reach twice the pre-industrial level by 2050, and three times that level later in the century. The higher its concentration, the greater the warming -- and, more important still, the greater the chance of triggering something grave and irreversible: rising sea levels due to the melting of Greenland’s icecap; runaway release of methane in the tundra, and so forth. The IPCC studies still quote substantial uncertainty in just how sensitive the temperature is to the CO2 level, and what regions will be affected most. It is the ‘high-end tail’ of the probability distribution that should worry us most -- the small probability of a really drastic climatic shift. Global warming involves long time-lags -- it takes decades for the oceans to adjust to a new equilibrium, and centuries for ice-sheets to melt completely. So, even though global warming has seemingly already begun, its main downsides lie a century or more in the future.
Best regards
And from Delingpole's article
"First, Lord Rees – formerly Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal – is very much of the catastrophist mindset which helped launch the whole AGW scare in the first place. Five years ago, he declared:
“I think the odds are no better than 50/50 that our present civilisation will survive to the end of the present century.”
Second, he has previously suggested that there might be certain areas where frank and open scientific enquiry is not a good idea.
“He asks whether scientists should withhold findings which could potentially be used for destructive purposes, or if there should be a moratorium, voluntary or otherwise, on certain types of scientific research, most notably genetics and biotechnology.”
Well he seems like the ideal choice then :(