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Apr 24, 2013 Climate: MetOffice Climate: Statistics Josh Politicians Apr 24, 2013 Climate: MetOffice Climate: Statistics Josh Politicians 
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Reader Comments (32)
I am sure Julia Slingo will also hold up her honorary PhD as well.
As Julia Slingo might say: "Is that a Hockey Stick behind the jar, or, are you just pleased to see me?"
Brilliant. I can't tell my Mann from my Schmidt, but that must be Schmidt.
I am sure Julia Slingo will also hold up her honorary PhD as well.
Apr 24, 2013 at 11:23 AM | Unregistered CommenterConfusedPhoton
I think it is a DSc. Which is even more despicable.
His Mannhood is hidden by his pot.
Brilliant, as always, Josh.
And with the climate alarmists producing such a constant stream of "adjusted" material, you are going to be kept busy.
I look forward to more:-)
Stephen Richards
DSc? - My god it is worse than I thought!
Your Grace
You are treading a fine line with such content.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10013914/WiFi-porn-in-public-areas-to-be-blocked.html
This is a family channel............surely our children should not be exposed to MannBearSchmidt in 'a state of nature' without parental supervision.
Statistics and their use and misuse in climate circles, have appeared elsewhere recently:
http://www.sintef.no/upload/Teknologi_og_samfunn/Teknologiledelse/SINTEF%20Report%20A24071,%20Consensus%20and%20Controversy.pdf
''It goes up a little bit, down a little bit and wobbles about a lot. But it's had no statistical significance for over fifteen years.'
A perfect GCM based hindcast of the model originally employed by Michael Angelo for his David.
Good one Josh.
Do you reckon the Peeping Tom (whoever he is), is getting an eyeful or is he in for a miniscule disappointment?
Peter Walsh - that is Julia holding the poster. Shares her name with the Aussie prime minister, she of no carbon tax on my watch. I hope Ms Slingo isn't Welsh as well. We have enough to live down with Gillard and Houghton.
Brilliant as usual Josh.
Could you give a reference - to pin down PhD vs. DSc and earned vs. honorary?
She was a genuine professor so it's likely she had an earned PhD. And someone with a PhD from a particular univeristy can normally submit a bound volume of published work (published subsequent to the PhD) to be considered for the award of DSc. Such a DSc would be counted as earned rather than as an honorary degreee.
I think in the past it was regarded as poor form for someone with an honorary doctorate to describe themselves as "Doctor xxx". These days, who knows.
Explains "hide the decline".
Martin A, see http://www.bristol.ac.uk/pace/graduation/honorary-degrees/hondeg10/slingo.html
G Watkins
thanks for the info, I have read a lot about Slingo, just didn't recognise her this time.
As for Gillard, I hope the Aussie electorate rip her gizzard out on 14 Sep.
Let's hope she gets done to her and her crap Labor party what happened to Labor in Queensland last year.
Julia Slingo did earn a PhD; the link Jonathan Jones cites says:
It was while she was in the US that she completed her PhD, externally, in the Physics Department at Bristol University. The topic was atmospheric physics, and it was a thesis completed through a series of published papers.
Anybody know which papers?
Looks like a very camp version of Long John Silver's panto wooden leg. I think he's just swallowed the parrot and Julia's having kittens what comes next.
Thomas Gibbon,
At a guess, papers 99-106 listed here.
'...it was a thesis completed through a series of published papers...' Julia must be one step above Einstein, Dirac, etc. - pedestrian non-climatologists who went to the bother of writing theses.
Though if you have no thesis - you don't have to worry about contradicting your thesis later, like Marcott (very inconvenient). I wonder if Julia had a moment for a thesis defence?
Immoral Urnings?
AC1
"Immoral Urnings?"
Yo dude! Just how much does a soothsayer "urn"?
BTW try a Google search on "senna the soothsayer" and see who comes up No1!
Josh, that vase is far too flattering ... it could be simply removed and allow the 'tummy flap' to provide the necessary vanity obstruction.
@Thomas Gibbon
Prof Valdes descibes her as "honorary graduand" so I suppose, to be picky, her PhD is in fact honorary.
It probably doesn't matter too much. Nobel Prizes are in a sense "honorary" and we now all know how much that means.
The DSc oration sets it out clearly.
Slingo was awarded a PhD on the basis of a submitted set of published papers by Bristol University, the university where she obtained her BSc. This is a time honoured path to obtaining a PhD for someone with a substantial record of research publication and who did not obtain a PhD as a research student by submitting a thesis. The set of published papers will have been assessed by an external examiner, similar to the assessment of a PhD thesis.
Someone with a PhD can submit a collection of research papers, published subsequent to the PhD, for a DSc. I think this is the normal route to earning a DSc.
But Slingo's DSc is an honorary award: "Madam Chancellor, it is therefore my great pleasure and honour to present to you Professor Julia Slingo as eminently worthy of the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa."
So she has:
- An earned PhD (obtained by submitting published papers)
- An honorary DSc.
ZT @11:18, many countries award PhDs on the basis of published papers. I don't think most people would consider that this is an inferior way to earn a PhD compared to the more standard route involving writing a thesis. And certainly it does not necessarily mean that one does not have to undergo a PhD examination. I don't know what the rules were back in the 80s, but I was myself recently one of the examiners for a PhD viva voce exam in Bristol for a person seeking the award of a PhD based on published papers. In some ways, this route is more demanding because you need a fair number of papers in international journals - many 'standard' PhD candidates may have no published papers at all when they defend their thesis, and only one or two papers get published afterwards. And your concerns about "contradicting your thesis" later seem a bit churlish also - the papers in this case are the thesis, and they can be contradicted afterwards, just as a regular thesis can be.
LevelGaze @12:47, Julia Slingo was awarded an honorary degree by Bristol in 2010, but she already had a PhD from the 1980s, as mentioned in the speech that Paul Valdes gave in the ceremony when she was awarded her honorary degree. You can see here that she was also awarded an honorary degree by Reading in 2011 - this does not mean she doesn't have a regular degree.
Anyway, this discussion of her qualifications seems petty to me, as is most credentialism. Steve McIntyre's foes complain that he is a 'retired mining consultant' - he doesn't have a PhD, but does that matter? How about our host? I'm not aware that he has a PhD. Does that mean I should never read anything he writes? On the other hand, many people who do have PhDs are occasionally wrong. The real question should be whether Julia Slingo is making sure that the Met Office is providing honest, balanced, scientific advice to government in her role as its chief executive.
(Whoops cross-posted with Martin!)
This is now becoming as unproductively nit-picking as the argument over whether Monckton is really a "Lord" or not. For my money I think he is.
Anyway.
From what I can make out, Slingo is:
1969 BSc Bristol
Sometime 1986-90 PhD Bristol (external). Whether that involves a succesfully defended thesis or not, I don't know but I can't find a reference to a thesis on the Web.
2010 DSc Bristol (honorary)
2011 DSc Reading (honorary)
The OBE doesn't count since it just stands for Other Buggers' Efforts.
I'm bored, can we drop it now?
Just to set things straight.
1. I have known a number of useless fools with PhD's
2. I have known brilliant, productive, original researchers without PhD's
I agree completely that the letters after a person's name should play no part in assessing their work.
However, a comment in this thread had implied that Slingo's PhD was merely an honorary one. In that case, for her to present it as a qualification would have been poor form. So I think it was worth establishing whether or not the implied accusation was true.
But now it is clear that she has an earned doctorate, so that is one item less for her charge sheet.
Not doing any slinging off here, but from the titles of the papers submitted for the PhD, did anything useful ever come out of them? They look quite narrow in scope and we still do not know much about cloud effects on climate. Or from models.
The handful of fully-fledged D.Sc. scientists that I have known were impressive people. I think it debases the D.Sc. to hand it out honoris causa. Too much political correctness involved, or influence, rather than the honest sweat of the brow.
At the risk of seeming churlish (thank you Jeremy) I wonder why anyone would bothering to do a PhD in climatology? Why not simply churn out a set of pal review papers and have the University of Bristol hand you a PhD? (Avoiding much tedious drudgery). Perhaps Bristol University is a feeder school for the mighty intellectual power houses of the Met Office and the CRU?
The issues should be not about her PhD (which she does seem to possess as an earned degree) but with how she practices and describes science, especially when presenting summary results to Parliament and to the public. I just noticed this item at CA from 2010, in which she provides totally evasive and misleading answers to Parliament and then to Steve McIntyre:
Slingo to McIntyre in March 2010
Behavior typical for many politicians, but not what should be expected or countenanced from any scientist, never mind one in such a prominent position on the public payroll.