Monday
Dec142009
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Vested interests
Dec 14, 2009 Climate: Pachauri It has been claimed that Steve McIntyre's employer having given a lecture at a thinktank that had once received funding from an oil company amounts to a vested interest.
That's not a vested interest.
This is what a vested interest looks like.
I think this could be the next big Climategate story. Richard North looks like he has the bit between his teeth, and we all know what happened the last time he did that...(Warning - that last link is non-climatic, for those who only want climate stuff).
Reader Comments (22)
Vested Interest? I'll give you vested interest. The chair of the so-called "Independent" Review" into the Climategate scandal, Sir Muir Russell, sits on a company-sponsored "Advisory Board" to Spanish-owned ScottishPower.
(see e.g. http://www.heraldscotland.com/scottish-power-unveils-new-board-1.870449 ).
ScottishPower currently makes about £1 million a week in subsidy alone (i.e. before it sells its product) from just one of its several wind "farms", the one just by our home. It's due soon to expand its capacity by 50-odd per cent. This profiteering is justified by the "certainty" of global warming even though no one has a clue if the project will save any CO2 emissions.
(There are good scientific and engineering grounds for arguing that it will save little, if any, between now and the "tipping point" despite demonstrably mendacious claims to the contrary made by the company in planning applications.)
Russell was, of course, heavily criticised by a recent Public Inquiry for concealing information from Members of the Scottish Parliament about a £400 million overspend on its own (ugly) office block.
A conflict of interest between his duty as a "public servant" and his loyalty to unashamedly vested interests?
The very idea. Don't be absurd. The "review" may well be behind closed doors - but it'll be forthright, frank and just what the Miliband ordered.
For me the interesting aspect is how weak and deceptive the declaration is.
Sure they are confident in "the observational evidence for global warming", but what global warming? Everyone agrees it has warmed a bit since 1975 (maybe a third or a half a degree), but then it hasn't warmed any more since 1998.
Then the only apparently significant statement: they are confident in "the scientific basis for concluding that it [global warming] is primarily due to human activities". But what does that mean exactly? Do they actually conclude thus themselves or just believe there is a scientific basis for such a conclusion? And what are human activities - GHG emissions, aerosols, land use changes, all three or what? And how much is primarily, when you are only talking about half a degree to start with?
Then some palaver about what upright citizens scientists are and a couple similarly slithery statements from the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
Why don't they just say: We believe that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases have caused at least X (tenths of a degree) of warming since 1950, and will cause at least Y degrees more warming by 2050?
Because if the figures were anything substantial, half of them wouldn't sign. And to get them to sign you would have to put in figures like 0.3 degrees for both X and Y and people could see this was a crock of [expletive deleted].
You mean CRU really didn't get that funding from Shell in 1999? They sure worked hard to snag it.
Someone should tell them Steve has been retired for a few years ans therefore, has no employer.
Bishop, Is there anywhere on the net where it is possible to see graphs, one on top of eachother, where it is possible to see the change in the Worlds temperature and how it corelates to recorded solar irradience and every other proxy data and the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
I'm sure it's been done before but I can't seem to find it.
Visited the site many times but first time of posting. Can't vouch for the authenticity of the memo below it was in a zip file of data sets perportedly leaked from CRU at http://earthchangesmedia.com/
SHELL INTERNATIONAL
Mick Kelly and Aeree Kim (CRU, ENV) met with Robert Kleiburg (Shell International’s climate change team) on July 4th primarily to discuss access to Shell information as part of Aeree’s PhD study (our initiative) and broader collaboration through postgrad. student project placements (their initiative), but Robert was also interested in plans for the Tyndall Centre (TC). What ensued was necessarily a rather speculative discussion with the following points emerging.
1. Shell International would give serious consideration to what I referred to in the meeting as a ‘strategic partnership’ with the TC, broadly equivalent to a ‘flagship alliance’ in the TC proposal. A strategic partnership would involve not only the provision of funding but some (limited but genuine) role in setting the research agenda etc.
2. Shell’s interest is not in basic science. Any work they support must have a clear and immediate relevance to ‘real-world’ activities. They are particularly interested in emissions trading and CDM.
3. Robert seemed to be more interested in supporting overseas (developing world) than home/EU studentships, presumably because of the credit abroad and their involvement in CDM. (It is just possible this impression was partially due to the focus on Aeree’s work in the overall discussion but I doubt it.) It seems likely that any support for studentships would be on a case by case basis according to the particular project in question.
4. Finally, we agreed that we would propose a topic to this year’s MSc intake as a placement with Shell and see if any student expressed interest. If this comes off we can run it under the TC banner if it would help.
I would suggest that Robert and his boss are invited to the TC launch at the very least (assuming it will be an invite type affair). Question is how can we and who should take this a step further. Maybe a meeting at Shell with business liaison person, Mike H if time and myself if time? I’d like to/am happy to stay involved through the next stage but then will probably have to back off.
We didn’t cover the new renewable energy foundation.
Mick Kelly
11 September 2000
No one has the market cornered on "vested interests" better than Al Gore with his carbon credit scheme. He will soon have more money than Tiger Woods, all without ever having talent or intellect.
"Is there anywhere on the net where it is possible to see graphs,
one on top of eachother, where it is possible to see the change in
the Worlds temperature and how it corelates to recorded solar irradience "
Does this help?
More graphs than you can eat in one sitting
"Steve McIntyre's employer having given a lecture at a thinktank that had once received funding from an oil company (...)
And my neighbour, who is a Contrarian, has an aunt living in Copenhaguen, where she once upon a time had a lover who knew a consultor that occationaly in the past had been doing some work for a company that sometimes also employed former workers of a company that (...) and this is clearly connected to Big Oil.
Oops, didn't realise at first it was a joke - so this is how crazy it has become. Any fact you don't like? No cry woman, the magic voodo-word BigOil cures it instantaneously.
Thanks for that David Ncl but that's not really what I want. Rather like a childs' textbook I need several graphs which show data from different sources which fall in line with one another so it's possible to draw a line from the top to the bottom of the page to highlight, for example, how the suns' output relates to global temperatures over centuries. I'm sorry if I'm not making myself very clear.
I'll try to explain below.
Solar irradience. .....................------------.........................-----------------..................
Gllobal temperature.................-------------...............................------------.................
Measured C)2 ........................-------------------.....................------------.....................
Tree ring data. ...............-------------------..................--------------...............................
etc. etc.
Sheesh - Lord Helpus - your name is certianly apt !
how about doing your own research?
This is a complex issue - hence all the hoo-hah eh?
If it all could be boiled down to a few obvious graphs don't you think that someone may have done that by now?
Where was the claim made of this alleged confilict of interest of McIntyres?
Lord Helpus, coincidentally I found this posting and chart on another blog after I read your post here. Although the chart doesn't have all of the information you are looking for, it's a start at least.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/temperature-anomalies-v-absolute-projections/
Shelley
Richard
The Environmental Defense Fund were the ones I had in mind. I'm sure you can find it.
If you want graphs you can make your own at woodfortrees. It will take a bit of investment to learn how to use it, but it's an excellent way of exploring data and sharing it (just post the url that generates the graph you want to show).
Goodness, haven't they realized that the 'big oil' accusation died when governments started throwing billions at the AGW industry? I suspect they're in denial.
An excellent blog by James Delingpole in the DT, 14 December. "Climategate: with business interests like these are we really sure Dr Rajendra Pachauri is fit to head the IPCC?"
"the observational evidence for global warming": it's Global Warming that I'm sceptical about, not global warming. In fact, my only substantial reservation about global warming is that the climate hysterics have so doctored the temperature records that I dismiss the reported temperatures and set more store on the heap of reports of longer growing seasons and so on.
Is this editorial also the result of vested interests?
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7273/full/462545a.html
Should it be left uncommented?
Here are some more vested interests:
'Organized Crime in Charge of EU Carbon Trade, Police Say'
Link: http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/17974
Can't get more 'vested' than organised crime, methinks ....
This is worth a look
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/vast-nexus-of-influence.html
Someone needs to compose another graph. It would be very instructive.
This would be a graph of mean global temperatures for the last 20 years as presented by the Climategate crew, plotted against mean global investments in climate research.
I'm willing to bet that an increase in research funding correlates directly with graphic depictions of AGW.
In fact, I'm willing to bet that climate research funding correlates more closely than CO2 with AGW numbers.