Bishop Hill Jun 9, 2011 Bureaucrats Quotes A visiting journalist once asked the director of a famous research institute: " How many scientists work in your laboratory?"
The director reflected for a moment and then replied "Less than half".
From Nigel Calder's Technopolis
Bishop Hill Jun 9, 2011 Bureaucrats Climate: Sceptics Sue Cameron, writing in the FT takes a look at Andrew Turnbull's report for GWPF.
Calling for “an end to alarmist propaganda”, Lord Turnbull says: “I am disappointed that so many of my former colleagues in the civil service seem so ready to go along unquestioningly with the consensus.”
So is he right? “It’s simply not true – Andrew’s got it wrong,” protested one senior figure. He added that officials covering transport, business and energy were being “very forceful” about curbing the greener instincts of Chris “Nul Points” Huhne, the climate change secretary.
Let us hope he is right that some senior officials are taking a sceptical view of the green agenda. Whether Lord Turnbull’s suspicions about his former colleagues are misplaced or not, he is right to call for more open-mindedness in Whitehall and less reliance on the prevailing orthodoxy.
H/T Benny Peiser
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More in the Mail, with Turbull and Benny Peiser taking aim at the government's green policies. They've got a picture of the wrong Lord Turnbull though.
(H/T Matthu)
Bishop Hill Jun 8, 2011 FOI Royal Society Cameron Neylon is tweeting from today's ROyal Society meeting on "Science as a public enterprise". A couple of BH readers are there, so I hope to get some more detailed reports of what was said too.
Here are some highlights from the twitterers
"The focus on publication - of paper and data - is too narrow."- William Dotton, OII
Bishop Hill Jun 8, 2011 Books Climate: Sceptics This is a guest post by Matt Ridley
Dan Gardner’s superb book `Future Babble’ examines why expert predictions so frequently fail, and why we believe them anyway. I strongly recommend it. Gardner devotes very little of the book to climate change, and makes clear that he does not want to be thought too sceptical about it. This is standard procedure in the world of non-fiction these days: Tim Harford in Adapt likewise avoids pursuing the logic of his argument as far into the climate debate as he might. You can, of course, kiss good bye to good reviews, or even reviews, if you stray too far from the true faith on this subject these days. Even lukewarmers like me regularly get called `deniers’.
Bishop Hill Jun 6, 2011 Climate: IPCC Pielke Jnr looks at the dilemma facing the IPCC - should its new policy on conflicts of interest apply to participants in the upcoming Fifth Assessment Report?
The challenge faced by the IPCC is significant. Under the adopted policy it is inconceivable that its current chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, could continue to serve. Presumably, other participants would also fail to meet the high standards of the new policy. This would mean major change in the organization.
Bishop Hill Jun 6, 2011 Climate: Sceptics Climate: other Aynsley Kellow posted these remarks in the comments on the posting on Goot's paper on the climate consensus. I thought they were important enough to bring upstairs as a header post.
I found it difficult to read this piece, especially because the matter of how many climate scientists can dance in agreement on the head of a pin is irrelevant to any argument about climate science. Since Galileo, the fallacy of argumentum ad populum has been well established, and it is rather surprising that Murray would be engaged to explore whether the fallacy holds in this particular case.
Bishop Hill Jun 6, 2011 Climate: Surface This is a guest post by Doug Keenan.
Two months ago, I published an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal. The piece discussed the record of global temperatures, illustrated in the figure.
Bishop Hill Jun 5, 2011 Climate: Parliament I chanced upon the (unrevised) transcript of an evidence session in front of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on the subject of nuclear power.
I found myself with a vague feeling of unease having read it. This may have been something to do with the fact that the session involved evidence from Sir John Beddington, who appears to have coordinated the Climategate whitewashes. He was speaking to, among others, Lord Oxburgh, the head of one of the whitewashes in question, and Lord Willis, who headed another.
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An amusing quote about two members of the House of Commons SciTech committee that looked (sort of) at Climategate.
Within our own party's recent history both Evan Harris and Phil Willis were much talked up because of their previous lives as a GP and headteacher respectively. But, though they are both good eggs, when the former was health spokesperson and the latter education spokesperson, I had the uncomfortable feeling that Lib Dem policy on health was being dicatated by the BMA on the one hand and the NUT on the other.
It's not obvious to me that Harris and Willis were working for the BMA (British Medical Association) and the NUT (National Union of Teachers) during the Climategate inquiry, but they were certainly not working on behalf of the public.
Bishop Hill Jun 5, 2011 Climate: Sceptics Mike Kelly has a letter in his hometown newspaper. This appears to be a response to a critique of some kind and makes some interesting points.
Can I plead for temperate language in this debate as trillions of dollars are at risk of being misinvested?
I am involved in another area of controversy, namely nanotechnology, and when you add in controversies in biomedicine, there is enough around to suggest that the scientific process is being corrupted, and is in need of reining in. You will see my views on this when the Royal Society publishes the evidence it receives in its study of ‘Science as a Public Enterprise‘.
Engineers take legal liability for their work, and can be sued if they are wrong. This should also apply more widely to those who pronounce in the public domain on matters of policy. This would then confine statements to a more measured and nuanced standard.
(H/T Andyscrase)
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Bishop Hill Jun 5, 2011 Bureaucrats Christopher Booker reports on an official inquiry into the dangers of white asbestos - a subject on which CB has been writing for many years.
An all-too-familiar trick when the establishment faces awkward questions on some controversial matter is to set up a committee packed with people who can be relied on to avoid the real points at issue and come up with the answer it wants. The Climategate inquiries were all examples of this technique. Another was the recent inquiry, headed by the Government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir John Beddington, into the claim that thousands of people die every year from exposure to white asbestos.
I wonder if CB realises just how central Sir John was to the Climategate whitewashes?
(H/T Matthu)
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Updated on Jun 4, 2011 by
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Phelim McAleer has an interesting post about the movie Gasland, in which residents of a US town are famously shown igniting their tap water. The insinuation is that this is something to do with fracking activitiy in the shales thousands of feet below the ground.
Bishop Hill Jun 4, 2011 Climate: HSI Climate: Models Climate: Sceptics Murray Goot of Macquarie University reviews papers on the scientific "consensus" on climate change. This is a reasonably balanced piece and not just because it mentions The Hockey Stick Illusion a couple of times.
In essence Goot's papers looks at the Oreskes and Anderegg papers as well as considering the polls of climatological opinion run by von Storch and Bray and concludes that there is a consensus that the majority of recent warming is down to CO2.
Bishop Hill Jun 3, 2011 FOI Royal Society Tickets are now available (free) for the Royal Society's Townhall Meeting on openness in science featuring Paul Nurse and Geoffrey Boulton.
This will be at the Southbank Centre in London on 8 June at 2:30pm.
Bishop Hill Jun 3, 2011 Climate: Parliament 
H/T to Patagon for pointing us to an English translation of the WGBU report and for making these excerpts from it.
Sustainable strategies and concepts must be developed for this in order to embed sustainable global development in transnational democratic structures, to formulate answers to the 21st century questions regarding global equity and distribution of resources, and, not least, to be able to claim world-wide legitimacy.
