Friday
Dec172010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Interacademies Council redacting like fury
Dec 17, 2010 Climate: IPCC Must-read post of the day comes from Hilary Ostrov who has been trying to get hold of the submissions to the Interacademies Council inquiry into the IPCC. Having asked for the information last summer, Hilary has still not received a thing. Now we learn that the IAC is going to redact the names at the top of each submission.
Now why would they want to hide the source of the submissions?
I wonder if the 950,000 dollars they received from UNEP had anything to do with it?
Reader Comments (47)
It is patently clear that these organisations are all corrupt.
This is a legal issue: If someone submitted comments in the understanding that they would not be publicly associated with such comments, then the IAC would be liable for damages.
Why it takes so long to remove identities is beyond me. Academic publishers strip the referees' identities from tens of thousands of review reports every day.
Meet the new transparent climate establishment - same as the old opaque establishment
Your Grace, in the interest of "truth in posting", the IAC always said they were going to publish the responses with names removed. In fact, given the free-form nature of the questionnaire, I remember being somewhat puzzled as to how they would "aggregate" (the word they had used on the site) the responses - although "compilation" (the word they used in the report) seemed more reasonable.
At the time that I responded, I didn't really expect my words to see the light of day (so I published them on my own blog!)
But once I saw that they had published the names of all who responded, the removal of "indentifiers" in a "compilation" they advertised as being available seemed rather pointless.
As both you and Donna have quite rightly noted, why would they need to do this when they've published the names of those who responded?! And why is this simple process taking so very long?!
One is led to wonder if any individual's responses will be recognizable - and whether the delay means they're busy "aggregating", rather than "compiling" ... perhaps a variant of the process used by the IPCC to ensure that the "science" is consistent with the SPM - which, evidently, is published prior to the tomes of the Working Groups on which it is supposedly built.
As Alice is known to have said ... it just gets curiouser and curiouser!
Drat ... "indentifiers" should be "identifiers" ... time for new glasses, methinks!
I think 'when hell freezes over' might be a useful aphorism to use here....
Watching the activities of these bodies - IPCC, IAC, Muir Russell, Oxburgh and so on, I am reminded of a small child which covers its eyes with its fingers, in the apparent belief that if it can't see you, then you can't see it.
Question - should that be 950,00 dollars as in "950 and 00 cents" or 950,000 dollars as in "950 thousand" where the last 0 fell off ?
(Sorry for being snarky)
Jeroen B said
The link to nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com says "a full $950,000 from the United Nations Environment Programme."
Probably correct, but links to the actual source would be better.
They never learn and so never change
The IAC, IPCC etc have been very busy recently sorting out the seating plans for slap up meals in Mexico. Unlike us mere mortals, they were saved from wasting time arguing about the bills, who ate what etc, because it was all paid for by taxpayers.
They are now very busy, trying to remember, what it was that they did agree on in Mexico, apart from the fact they had a lovely time, and can't wait to do it all over again.
Expecting them to do anything useful, or even accountable is therefore unreasonable, and such requests can be ignored, especially when they are snowed in and can't get to work.
I could redact 400+ names for a few hundred dollars. But I bought some heating oil the other week so I guess I'm a shill and totally unsuitable for the job.
Hilary
Thanks for this. It was new to me that the names were to be redacted.
By the way, I don't seem to be able to get an RSS feed from your site.
Very O/T:
I've just seen the BBC's Richard Hammond (of Top Gear) on CBBC. He spent several minutes explaining to the nation's children about centrifugal force and how it held water in a rotating bucket.
"Centrifugal force" is a Shibboleth in science - it divides people with any knowledge of mechanics from the wannabees. What is worrying is that nobody involved in making the programme spotted this.
[For anyone who doesn't know: centrifugal force does not exist. The water stays in the bucket because it is changing its direction of travel because of the force of the bucket.]
Jack Hughes. Ok, but indirectly centrifugal force is keeping the water in the bucket. If the bucket wasn't forced to turn in a circle by the application of a centrifugal force (by a hand or mechanical link) , it would continue any motion in a straight line
Centripetal force.
In a small child it's endearing, because they have no power. As an analogy for some adults that have been given power over trillions, it's painfully accurate. Armstrong, Miller or anyone like you: there's a massively rich comedy seam to mine here, once you realise how much pent up laughter - and its flip-side, rage - there is to tap into.
Simpleseekeraftertruth. I stand corrected. Centripetal it is.
Re Rick Bradford.
Or Grues. They hide in the dark and do nasty things. Shine the light of truth and transparency on them and they vanish. Hopefully. These political ones may have cross-bred with some other parasite though so become more persistant. Hopefully they can be eradicated before doing too much damage and go the way of smallpox, existing only in a few well isolated labs for study.
As it's Friday...Jack, Anthony, ssat - What name would you give to the force experienced by the base of the bucket under the influence of the water?...
Anyway, there was another one on R4 recently when a little girl was being interviewed about the fun she'd had sledging. The interviewer asked who won the races down the hill and she said her dad because he was the heaviest. 15mins or so later an announcment was read out, apparently from a primary school teacher, saying the little girl was wrong and how Galileo had proved this dropping feathers and cannon balls all those years ago blah blah blah. So much for "sum of applied forces = ma."...
Why am I not surprised? Indeed, had they listed the names, I would have been surprised. They know that too soon it could come back to haunt them.
@nby
Reactive centrifugal.
@nby: Reaction.
The force from the bucket on the water is changing the velocity of the water. The water exerts a reaction on the bucket.
ssat :-) - my mileage agrees!
Jack - will the bottom of the bucket flex toward the centre of rotation or away from it?! I always understood centripetal to be the direction towards the c of r and centrifugal to be the direction away from the c of r. Hence the force changing the direction away from linear is centripetal and the reaction to this is centrifugal.
In which plane was he spinning the bucket? It would have been interesting if one of the kids had asked him "But why should the water come out?"...
not banned yet
The coefficient of friction for snow is rather complicated as I've just discovered trying to get up the Cote Madeleine on the way back from some Christmas shopping. Fortunately, a nice Gendarme was on hand who suggested driving up the verge on the wrong side of the road.
"Merci Monsieur." "Je vous en prie. Roulez doucement."
From the Bishop's Donna Laframboise hot link
'According to page iv, the four-month-long review that produced the IAC report received non-disclosed amounts of funding from the governments of:
•Denmark
•The Netherlands
•Norway
•Sweden
•Switzerland
•the UK
•and the USA
That is in addition to an undisclosed amount contributed by the UN’s World Meteorological Association and – here’s the punchline – a full $950,000 from the United Nations Environment Programme.'
Philanthropy, bribary or simply 'facilitating payment'? This web is so woven we've lost track completely of who is practicing to deceive who but undoubtedly, its 'in the public interest', not.
Returning to the IAC, here's an opportunity for a collaborative exercise to show the power of the web.
My initial submission is here
When I found out that the Russell Review were not going to look into the IPCC process, I sent my ICCER submission as an addendum and it is here.
Most people, I suspect, will be happy to to have their submissions available on the web. Those of Profs Henderson, Hughes and McKitrick were, at one stage, on the web. There are some 80 submissions from the UK including many from public authorities who under the Environmental Information Regulations ought to publish them and certainly must disclose them on request. One or two could be very interesting.
If anyone is overcome with curiosity I would urge them to use WhatDoThey Know.com so as to avoid duplication of requests and to provide a convenient repository for any submissions that are disclosed.
Then we need a helpful blogger to list the links to the public submissions.
Such an effort might encourage the IAC to finnish the job they started.
@ Dreadnought
Having driven in the days before snow became a 'once in a lifetime event', there were some simple rules.
1. Don't spin the driving wheels. To do so causes a dip below the tyre and now you have to contend with low friction and a wedge in front of the wheel. Pulling away in 2nd gear with gentle clutch control was the technique. Modern cars have anti-stall and it is possible to pull away with your foot off the throttle (accelerator).
2. Drive slowly to stay within the friction limits (MxV). If you have to brake suddenly, locking the wheels is good if there is fresh snow as the wheel will build up a wedge in front of it and slow you faster. Modern cars with anti-lock will let you down on this one but you might retain some steering.
3. If you have to tackle a climb, get up to speed before it or back-up and start on the level.
4. If you are at home - stay there.
A good tip - get in some practice for next year;-)
simple
Thanks for the advice. Better still is to go the long way round and take one's chance on meeting a huge French tractor on the narrow bit by the stud farm.
There have been lots of snow stories on French telly in the last fortnight. I love the way French snow ploughs carry red flags on their scraper blades. They look like something out of Dr. Zhivago.
Dreadnought,
Dr, Zhivago eh: that reminds me, Hilary Ostrov is waiting for Godot.
David Holland
Thanks for your post and links. I have read HSI etc, but your documents help fill even more of the gaps.
Noting the thread at WUWT, there is a new Republican senator looking into climate science, Jim Sennsenbenner (?), maybe you ought to e-mail him?
simpleseekeraftertruth
Message from Godot, says he may be late, blaming the weather allegedly
Dreadnought, would you kindly give a quick penpicture of the climate debate in France? I'm interested in the media portrayal; the government's position and its actions; whether the man in the street is interested and as best you can judge sceptical or warmist. The Great Debate's progress in England and Her colonies is very familiar; please help broaden our perspective.
The Corporate Capture of the Earth Summit
The business vision of this "new" path still centers around economic growth, with free trade and open markets as prerequisites. Meanwhile, business leaders envision linking environmental protection to profitability, through a system in which all of nature is priced and patented. This is "sustainable development" according to the global corporations. And in Rio, UNCED - made up of representatives of virtually every government in the world - came close to adopting this vision of free market environmentalism as its own.
Maurice Strong: businessman as environmentalist
The choice of Maurice Strong - a multi-millionaire Canadian businessman with interests in oil, real estate, mining and ecotourism - as UNCED Secretary-General was an early sign that the business perspective would have extraordinary clout at UNCED. In his opening speech to an UNCED preparatory conference in New York, Strong laid his philosophy on the table and called on UNCED to be compatible with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), an international trade agreement which emphasizes open markets and is strongly supported by internationally oriented companies. This emphasis on free trade is embodied in Principle 12 of the Rio Declaration and allows GATT to cast its shadow over UNCED. As Kristen Dawkins of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy says, "UNCED has bought the TNCs' plan for free trade to reign supreme over environmental protection in the New World Order. Principle 12 has the power to render environmental agreements moot."
Strong never denied close links with business during the UNCED process. At one meeting in Rio, he responded to criticism of this special relationship by saying, "How can we achieve [sustainable development] without the participation of business?"
snip
The Merchants of UNCED
"The environment is not going to be saved by environmentalists. Environmentalists do not hold the levers of economic power."
-Maurice Strong, UNCED Secretary-General
"We believe there must be further development in the whole world. We need growth to overcome inefficient behavior. It is an apparent paradox but I think once you understand what it means, you'll find out that it's true."
-Stephan Schmidheiny, chair of the Business Council for Sustainable Development
RIO DE JANEIRO - Confronted with the avalanche of green rhetoric that fell upon the Earth Summit, it was easy to lose sight of the fact that United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) Secretary-General Maurice Strong and his leading collaborator, Stephan Schmidheiny, chair of the Business Council for Sustainable Development, are businessmen first, environmentalists second. Their grip on the helm of the UNCED process culminated a decades-long evolution in their careers, a path that led through such grimy industrial landscapes as the oil fields of Canada, chemical waste sites in Nova Scotia and the steel mills of Chile. It included tenure in the executive suites and boardrooms of some of the world's largest banks and corporations.
These two merchants have left an unmistakable philosophical mark on the UNCED process, one that transcends both logic and the historical record. Despite its leading role in trashing the natural environment, big business, Strong and Schmidheiny insist, will prove the earth's salvation. And despite the fact that two of the only hedges against corporate rapaciousness have been national borders and government regulation, they claim it is precisely the elimination of these battered bulwarks that will lead to the garden of Eden. Skepticism, it seems clear, is warranted.
http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1992/07/mm0792_07.html
Oil companies and banks will profit from UN forest protection scheme
Redd scheme designed to prevent deforestation but critics call it
'privatisation' of natural resources
http://tinyurl.com/2g68w8r
Gazprom and Vitol to start trading rainforest
A scheme to trade chunks of the world's rainforest on the financial markets will sell its first credits to Gazprom and Vitol, two of the world's biggest commodity companies.
http://tinyurl.com/23l2shz
Privatize the Amazon rainforest says UK minister
mongabay.com
October 1, 2006
At a summit this week in Mexico, David Miliband, Britain's Environment Secretary, will propose a plan to "privatize" the Amazon to allow the world's largest rainforest to be bought by individuals and groups, according to a report in The Telegraph newspaper online.
The scheme, which has been endorsed by Prime Minister Tony Blair, would seek to protect the region's biodiversity while mitigating greenhouse gas emissions to fight global warming.
According to The Telegraph the plan would "involve the creation of an international body to buy the rainforest before setting up a trust to sell trees" and buyers would become "stake-holders" in the rainforest.
http://tinyurl.com/plxgy
Paulson takes on China and climate change
One thing Paulson makes clear is that it's in everyone's interest to promote clean technology and energy efficiency in China, to curb global warming. According to Paulson, if China today was as efficient in its use of energy as the U.S. was in 1970, it would save the equivalent of 16 million barrels of oil a day, or almost 10% of the world's daily oil consumption.
All of the world must learn to make do with less, he argues. "There simply are not enough energy resources to allow the world's entire population, or even the third of it represented by the Chinese, to lead the resource-intensive lifestyle that Americans currently enjoy," Paulson says.
Paulson's an environmentalist - he is the former chair of the Nature Conservancy and the reason why Goldman Sachs, under his watch, became the first investment bank to call for federal regulation of greenhouse gases
http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/19/news/economy/gunther_paulson.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008091916
http://tinyurl.com/5uxumu
At risk of pedantry, may I mention that the poster 'brent' is not me. I mean I. One of those instances where correct grammar is less clear.
Brent Hargreaves
It would have to be a personal impression based on what I see on French TV. (Their current affair programmes are rather good, being long and detailed and usually including a heated argument by members of a studio panel.)
I’ll put some notes over on Unthreaded as I think of them.
@Brent Hargreaves
I confirm what the poster Brent Hargreaves notes above.
We are two different people.
I hope no confusion was engendered. Certainly none was intended on my part.
cheers
brent
Bishop Hill wrote (to me):
OMG, I must get this fixed, Your Grace! ...
But, as I wrote in an E-mail yesterday (which I'm not sure you received), "I just tried it and it works for me. http://hro001.wordpress.com/feed/ Or are you saying that you can subscribe, but that feed isn't "behaving" as it should?!"
And while I'm here ... the latest "scene" in my Waiting for Godot (thanks for that simpleseekeraftertruth!), which I added as a Dec. 17 update to my original post:
Not one of the above 5 “media contacts” has responded to my enquiry of December 12 – nor have I heard from anyone else at the IAC. So I’ve now forwarded the entire string of correspondence to Dr. Harold Shapiro, the Chair of the IAC Review Committee in the hope that he might be prevailed upon to:
I'm sure it will not surprise anyone here to learn that, alas, nothing has appeared in my Inbox which would suggest that my wait will be over in the near (or even distant) future. IOW, this missive, not unlike those that preceded it, seems to have fallen on blind eyes and/or deaf ears.
But, for the record ... when I checked the IAC site yesterday (before sending the missive to Shapiro), any evidence of the missing "compilation" was still conspicuous by its absence. However, I did notice that someone at the IAC had found time to link to:
http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session32/ipcc_IACreview_decisions.pdf
and:
http://reviewipcc.interacademycouncil.net/PachauriStatement.html
Considering that the IAC made much ado of the "independence" of the review, the latter might give cause for the raising of a few eyebrows (regardless of content), don't you think?!
Global Green New Deal
http://www.unep.ch/etb/publications/Green%20Economy/UNEP%20Policy%20Brief%20Eng.pdf
http://tinyurl.com/2wa3mn8
UNEP Policy Brief March 2009
Another job for Wikileaks.
Hmmm.. Is this part of the supposed "Green New Deal"
California Board Endorses Forest Clearcutting in Fight Against Global Warming
SACRAMENTO, Calif.— A cap-and-trade program approved Thursday by the California Air Resources Board includes damaging loopholes that would incentivize clearcutting in the name of reducing carbon emissions. The program — adopted as part of California’s effort to reduce statewide greenhouse gas emissions — would allow industrial polluters to purchase carbon “offset credits” instead of reducing their own greenhouse gas emissions. Among the options is buying offset credits from forest clearcutting.
http://tinyurl.com/25hpflz
Those who've been following this sorry saga will be pleased to know that the "compilation" has now been published (not that anyone from the IAC bothered to let me know this!)
http://hro001.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/breaking-news-interacademy-council-publishes-compilation-of-questionnaire-responses/
Oh no. 678 pages of it....
[snip - you can make your point without trying to start a fight. Feel free to try again]
Yep, that's right, Pharos. Here are some excerpts from the responses of one person (who has served in the roles of Contributing author, and reviewer) [pp.96-101]:
And lots of other good stuff from this respondent (and others), as well - and there are 9 other instances of "hockey stick" in the document!
Kinda makes the looooong wait worthwhile ;-)
Appendix C Contributors to the review
The following individuals provided oral or written input to
the Committee:
http://reviewipcc.interacademycouncil.net/report/Appendixes.pdf
Looks like the IAC response is now out.
http://reviewipcc.interacademycouncil.net/Comments.pdf