A curriculum for.... what?

I've recently been involved in setting up the new school council at my children's primary school. This is essentially the old school board reformulated and somewhat emasculated. It's been an interesting experience. During our discussions we touched upon the new Scottish curriculum - the "Curriculum for Excellence" as it's optimistically entitled.

The game is rather given away by the title, IMHO. I take it as one of life's cardinal rules that one should never trust anyone or anything that has applied to it this kind of trumpet-blowing epithet. A banker will look after your money, a "banking professional" will probably steal it. Steer clear of "nursing professionals" - you will find a nurse much more effective. Never eat at a restaurant which says that it serves "Good Food".

So we can be fairly certain that the Curriculum for Excellence is not a curriculum for excellence.  But what is it a curriculum for?

Let's take a look at an example of what Scottish children will be learning in the future. It covers the whole of the 5-14 curriculum by level:

Early years

I have collected and sorted materials which can be recycled.

Level 1

Through my experience of different materials which I use, I can talk about the need to conserve Earth’s resources at home and in school and what I can do to help.

Level 2

I can assess the sustainability of my school environment and by helping to create and carry out an action plan to make improvements I can record how my responsible actions make a difference over time.

I can give a presentation to demonstrate my understanding of the importance of the water cycle in nature.

I can talk about the importance of water supplies to people all over the world and can demonstrate ways to clean and conserve water.

Level 3

By carrying out a variety of chemical reactions I can show how different environmental conditions can impact on the sustainability of Earth materials to help understand the importance of conservation.

I can apply my knowledge of pH to monitor the environment and demonstrate ways to overcome extreme levels. I can recognise the significance of pH in everyday life.

Level 4 

I can collect and analyse experimental data on rates of reaction and use this to discuss the use and sustainability of Earth materials.

I can research a major environmental or sustainability issue of national or global importance and report on my findings.

I can monitor the environment by collecting and analysing samples. I can interpret the results to inform others about levels of pollution and express a considered opinion on how science can help protect our environment.

So I was certainly right that it's not a curriculum for excellence. It's a curriculum for conformity, a curriculum for political correctness and a curriculum for greenery. But not a curriculum for excellence.

Your views are unacceptable

There was an interesting article in the Times last week. Media Editor Dan Sabbagh profiled the BBC deputy director general, Mark Byford, who is the man responsible for maintaining the organisation's impartiality.

Try to ask him whether the BBC has a case to answer, and it is hard to get anywhere. Andrew Marr’s remarks, for example, are dismissed as “a quote from a seminar that was held several months ago,” and while Mr Byford is willing to concede that “he’s heard people say” that the BBC has a liberal bias, he does not accept it exists.

I don't suppose he reads Biased BBC then - everything's fine and dandy and the fact that ex-BBC journalists like Andrew Marr and Robin Aitken say that there is bias is just something that can be shrugged off. Move along, nothing to see here.

Sabbagh makes a very pertinent point though which rather skewers Byford as a man who is being economic with the actualité:

Yet the final report repeatedly teases out examples where the BBC has reflected a narrower range of opinion than exists in Britain at large. The document asks, when, for example, was the last time Radio 4’s Today discussed capital punishment in a way that was in any way not hostile to the notion – or why politicians are treated completely differently to the spokesmen for pressure groups.

So could the BBC now air a “polemic” in favour of capital punishment? That would cause a stir. On this Mr Byford is hard to pin down: he argues that the BBC gives vent to a broad range of views “every week on Question Time”; that polemic would not be appropriate in news and current affairs, although “in a documentary there is a place for it”. But he does not agree that he should commission a bring back hanging documentary either.

I think this is pretty much indefensible. Capital punishment is a view favoured by nearly half the population (full disclosure: not the half I'm in)  so what we are seeing is that the deputy director general of the BBC is essentially indicating that the views of half of the licence fee payers are so offensive to him that he is willing to abuse his power and prevent these views being aired in a documentary. His head should surely roll for this, and if the governors (or whatever they call themselves these days) don't do it, then their heads should roll too.

What other views are offensive to Mr Byford? Euroscepticism? Corporal punishment? English Parliament? Conservatism?

Based on the BBC's output, I think we can probably speculate that it's all of the above.

He should go. 

French try to remove EU commitment to free trade

Benedict Brogan reports:

The French have craftily got the Germans to change the Union's objectives from "The Union shall establish an internal market where competition is free and undistorted" to "The Union shall establish an internal market."

Don't worry though, the Liberal Democrats are going to persuade them to change it back again.

There is no consensus, anyway (redux)

Roger Pielke Snr has a new post up, in which he documents all the scientific papers which question the robustness of the surface temperature record. There are a lot of them.

None of these are cited by the IPCC because they conflict with the need to obtain a particular result. Pielke is quite straightforward about this - it's bias. 

Libertarians take their pep pills

The Libertarian Alliance Blog has suddenly burst into life again, narrowly avoiding deletion from my feed reader.  "Abolish the BBC" is one of their first entries. It's almost like they never went away.

Nature blogs

MacMillan Nature group now has a really quite impressive web presence - at least in terms of volume. Their head honcho, Richard Charkin, is a blogger and what's more he's a real one too. He actually seems to write the posts himself, and does (for a corporate bod) dangerous things like offering the occasional opinion. He looks like a good man to have in charge of a publishing business when things are changing so quickly.

Under his tutelage, the group has started up a plethora of blogs (or "clogs" as EU Referendum likes to call corporate blogs) covering every subject from peer review to avian flu. (There's a song in there somewhere). This is admirable, but the group still gives the impression of not really having found its feet in the online world. There are also some pretty large risks they are running, and I'm not sure that they are playing their cards very cleverly. More of that later.

First though, why do I think they're not quite on the ball as regards blogging? I've subscribed to a couple of their blogs - one on peer review and also Nature Climate Feedback. The first thing to say is that content is a little thin on the ground. If you want a popular blog it's pretty much a given that you have to update it regularly, if not daily. Only the very best bloggers manage to buck this trend. Comments on Nature blogs are also pretty much moderated to death. I left a comment on the Peer to Peer blog shortly after it opened. This was not actually published until after I'd had an email correspondence with the site administrator which lasted the best part of a week - it was a friendly correspondence, for sure, but why didn't they just post the comment straight away? Another comment which I posted on Monday night was finally published today, more than 24 hours later. This is not the way to stimulate an interesting debate. It rather smacks of the way science was conducted in the nineteenth century, when you put your correspondence in the mail and it was delivered by packet steamer. It just doesn't cut the mustard any more.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way. Nature's web tech site, Nascent, has pulled in fully 164 comments in the 18 months since its first posting. Climate Feedback, being in such a controversial area, really ought to be their showpiece site, but has managed to pull in just 150 comments in three months. This all suggests that the punters are being turned off.

It's a tricky situation for Nature. It's not clear how the group intends to monetise their web presence. Most people out there are relying on getting lots and lots of eyeballs on their web presence in order to do this. This is fine for people like DK or Instapundit who can be opinionated, but Nature has a much more difficult tightrope to walk. Its whole commercial reputation relies as being seen as a neutral umpire in matters scientific. If it were seen to take sides in a debate, it might get away for it for a while, but eventually it would end up backing the wrong horse in one race or another, and then its reputation would be shot. It has to be very careful about getting into the news and opinion game.

A couple of examples:

In Nature Reports: Climate Change, which is a climate focused site of which the Climate Feedback blog forms a part,  Amanda Leigh Haag writes about a possible successor to the Kyoto Treaty. In it,  she cites the following:

• Michael Oppenheimer, a geoscientist and climate-policy expert at Princeton University in New Jersey,
• John Drexhage, director of climate change and energy programs at the International Institute for Sustainable Development in Ontario, Canada,
• Rob Bradley, director of international climate policy at the World Resources Institute, in Washington DC,
• Elliot Diringer, director of international strategies for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, based in Arlington, Virginia,
• Roger Pielke Jr, a climate-policy expert at the University of Colorado, Boulder,
• Saleemul Huq of the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development

Now if you are going to take virtually all of your quotes directly from current and former staffers of environmental pressure groups (the exception is Pielke), you run the risk of people thinking that your publication is not actually a science site, or even just a news site, but is in fact just another arm of the environmental campaigning movement. You might perhaps think that this is an admirable thing to be. But many of your readers will not, and they may well stop reading both your websites and your scientific journals.

Another example is this post by Olive Heffernan, who is the editor in charge of Climate Feedback. In it she lambasts Czech president Vaklav Klaus' recent article in which he says that there is a risk to liberty from the demands of environmentalists. She decries his lack of qualifications as a climate expert by way of denouncing his views, although she is herself a zoologist by training. These kind of opinions are fine in general. It's fairly easy to take pot-shots at them, and if the comments cleared moderation in less than 24 hours I might do so more often - but that's not the point. When they come from a Nature employee the situation is rather different. Can a Nature editor really be seen to publicly take one side like this? Heffernan not only has a go at Klaus, but also at Richard Lindzen who is, if nothing else, a professional climatologist. These are Nature's customers for heavens sake. You can't go slagging them off just because they disagree with you, Olive. Should prospective Nature authors be asking themselves if their views are acceptable to the group before they submit their manuscripts?

It would be a pity if Nature were found to have spoken out in favour of the global warming enthusiasts and to have published junk science on their behalf, as well as having ridiculed the skeptics. It just wouldn't look very clever, would it?

I don't think all is lost though. The climate debate is largely conducted at Climate Audit and Real Climate and there is a real lack of communication between the two sides. There could be a very exciting role for Climate Feedback in umpiring a proper debate between the two sides. It could be wonderful to read, useful for the advancement of science, and cut a huge amount of risk out of the Nature business model. I imagine the moderators calling in expert advice - say a statistician when the conversation turned to matters statistical - in order to force people to address the arguments of their opponents rather than the usual ad-hominems and evasions which characterise most online argument.

First though they would have to admit that there is a debate at all, so I'm not holding my breath.

Update 21 June 2007: Welcome to readers from nurture.nature.com! I hope you find the posting useful.

Appreciation

The accolades continue to flood in for this blog. After being declared "94th best non-aligned political blog penned by someone adopting an ecclesiastical persona"^* in Iain Dale's political blogging guide thingy last year, I now find that while my back has been turned I have come third (or perhaps even second equal!) in the Blogpower awards - Best layabout and style category. Had I known I'd been nominated I might have voted for myself and come a clear second!

Thank-you to the eight people who voted for me (although since multiple voting is allowed, it may be one person with a crush on me). Either way, I'm touched.

^* I made part of this up.

Some climate snippets

Following on from its exposure as... erm... erroneous, Steve McIntyre has invited Phil Jones of the Hadley Centre to withdraw his 1990 paper in Nature. The Bishop wonders if he will respond, let alone comply.

Tim Blair notes a prominent Australian environmentalist doing a bit of a flip-flop on the subject of drought. (via Gust of Hot Air)

IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth notes a number of surprising features of future climate:

• There are no predictions in the IPCC report and there never have been. There are only scenarios.
• None of the models used by IPCC use the current climate as their starting point and "none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate."
• "[W]e do not have reliable or regional predictions of climate"

The ettiquette of responding to commenters

Apart from the obvious one of actually responding in the first place, I have a mild beef with the way some site owners deal with debate in an comments thread on their blogs.  I count three different ways of dealing with a comment thread:

1. Quote directly from the comment and respond to the issues raised in the quote.
2. Append your response to the end of the quote
3. Append your response underneath each paragraph of your visitor's comment so that your responses intersperse themselves between his points

I'm of the firm opinion that (1) is the best option. It has the (for me) huge advantage that you can get notified of new comments on the thread using a comment tracker like co.mments.com, and allows your commenter to make his points in his own way. The disadvantage is that threads can sometimes get a bit difficult to follow, particularly if they are long and complex. This is, however, the approach adopted by most site owners.

(2) Adding responses to the end of comments is also fine - it makes the thread rather easier to follow but you may not know if your comment has been responded to. Tim Worstall is probably the best known exponent of this approach.

You might make a case that (3) - interspersing responses throughout the comment - has certain advantages, in that the site owner can respond to each point made by the commenter. However I think its use should be discouraged, because it becomes something akin to a fisking of the commenter. It seems to me that a polite welcome to a commenter involves letting them say their piece, allowing other readers to appreciate the their argument in the best light possible. Interspersing ones own responses seems to me to be just plain bad manners - it's the equivalent of interrupting them at the end of every sentence. I know of two sites that use this approach - Real Climate and William Connelly (who is, coincidentally a Real Climate contributor). Are there any others?

Getting rid of unwanted visitors

A couple of months ago it was reported that there are 266 reasons the state can use to demand entry to your house. This appalling news has been tempered somewhat by today's report that if residents insist on smoking in the presence of council officials the visit will be cancelled and replaced with a meeting at the council offices.

So when the man from the council demands entry to your home under the "Offensive Wallpaper Regulations 2007", all you need do is blow smoke in his face and tell him to bugger off.

And if that's not a reason to take up smoking, I don't know what is. 

This should be fun

A freelance researcher called Doug Keenan has accused prominent climate scientist, Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, of fabricating part of a key paper on the Urban Heat Island effect. This is one of the most important papers underpinning the claims of manmade global warming.

In the paper, Jones claimed that he sampled the temperature records from weather stations selected for having uninterrupted histories - that is to say they hadn't been moved or had their instrumentation changed and so on. This is vital for the credibility of the paper.

Keenan has discovered that for many of the stations Jones used, there are actually no records of whether there were any changes or not and says that the claims made in the paper are therefore fabrications.

Stand back and watch the fireworks. 

(Via Climate Audit) 

What's wrong with the IPCC - a guide for the layman

This is an attempt to summarise some of my previous postings on the IPCC process into a single article. What I'm trying to do is to make the case that there are signficant problems with the science that can be readily understood by the average reader. Even for a layman, these issues should give pause for thought.

The posting was inspired by this article by the Lazy Environmentalist - a blog I chanced upon while idly surfing my way around Technorati.com. The author seems to be, shall we say, an enthusiastic and unquestioning believer. 

Temperatures are going up

Temperature records are derived from surface stations, satellites and radiosondes (weather balloons).

There are many problems with the surface temperature record. Firstly, it's not really a record of the temperature, but a theory of what the temperature record would have looked like if it had been measured correctly. The records from many stations are subject to significant adjustments to deal with issues like station moves, creeping urbanisation and so on. These adjustments are often larger than the trend which comes out at the end of the process. In other words the raw data shows cooling, but by the time they've adjusted it, it shows warming. The adjustments are largely shrouded in mystery, so it's not possible to say if they are reasonable or not. One surprising artifact of these adjustments is that the historic temperature record keeps changing - the past keeps being made to look colder so the warming seems ever greater.

A new website, surfacestations.org, has started to uncover a worrying failure of many temperature stations to site their instruments correctly - including several next to airconditioning units and carparks, and more than one next to a barbeque.

The weather stations are mostly on land, but most of the earth is ocean. While the sea surface record carries a greater weight in assessing the global temperature, the accuracy of that temperature is questionable because of this unevenness in the spread of the stations. The sea surface record, like the land record, is also subject to large adjustments which dwarf the warming which it is claimed has been detected. Here is an example of very shaky reasoning for a major adjustment.

The satellite and weather balloon records are much less convincing if you are looking for evidence of warming.

Temperatures in the past

The estimates of temperatures before widespread instrumental records became available are created from proxies - the temperatures are estimated from tree-ring widths and densities, and from ice cores. There are particular problems with the tree rings. Trees can grow faster or slower when temperatures rise, and it is not clear that the attempts by scientists to deal with this issue - by measuring trees at the upper tree line  - have been successful. One scientist has found treeline samples from the same site showing both responses.

Another problem is that some temperature reconstructions have been suggesting declining temperatures in the second half of the twentieth century when, of course, things are meant to have warmed up rapidly. This embarrassing problem ("the divergence issue") has been quietly brushed aside by the IPCC, and in their report the offending records have been truncated at the point at which they start to fall away, so that the remaining records all show a rising trend. It is hard to see this as anything other than dishonesty.

The reconstructions with rising trends all use include a couple of particular species of trees - bristlecone pines and foxtails. These have both shown rapidly increasing growth rates in the twentieth century, something which is believed to be caused by non-climatic factors. Despite this being widely understood, the reconstructions have still been put forward by the IPCC as valid.

Most of the reconstructions stop in the 1990s. One simple test of whether they are reasonable or not would be to measure recent tree ring widths and to use this to derive a temperature. This could be compared to the actual temperature from the instrumental records. Despite all the money poured in to climate research, this has not been done and so questions over the accuracy of the reconstructions remain. And since we don't know if the reconstructions are valid, we can't say whether current temperatures are above, below or the same as, temperatures in warm periods in the past (eg "The Medieval Warm Period"). This extraordinary failure means that in essence we don't know if the problem is a problem we should worry about or not.

Data and code

One of the basic tenets of the scientific method is that work should be reproducible by other scientists. In order for climate scientists' work to be reproduced it is necessary for their data and the computer programs which transform it into results to be freely available. There are many instances of climate scientists refusing to release data, or "losing" it. This has happened with prominent scientists and key scientific papers. So some of the most important scientific work of recent years - work which underpins the IPCC process and the doom-laden results which it announces to the world - is not capable of being replicated. A reputable scientific body would disassociate itself from suspect papers of this kind. The IPCC embraces them.

The consensus

The IPCC's assessment report is said to represent the consensus view of 2500 scientists. Who these scientists are and how they made their happiness with this alleged consensus clear is not known. The comments of reviewers on the draft IPCC reports cannot be reproduced, despite this contravening the IPCC's own rules. The public have to accept the existence of a consensus on trust.

BBC officially biased

The Sunday Times is reporting that an internal BBC report to be published next week will conclude that the corporation is institutionally biased in favour of the left wing causes held dear by most of its staff and journalists. While it is nice to have confirmation of what most of the dextrospere has long known, we have no idea of whether the report will actually have any effect in practive. It's much more likely that it will be paraded as evidence that the Beeb has changed while actually leaving everything just as it is.

If the BBC is sincere about wanting to correct the imbalance we might expect to see a number of actions.

Firstly, heads would have to roll. The requirement to be balanced is a key part of the BBC's charter - such a flagrant breach surely demands a major clear out of the senior staff who have allowed this state of affairs to continue unaddressed for so many years.

The placing of BBC job advertisements in the Guardian, to the virtual exclusion of any other newspapers, should be ended. There should be a defined period - say ten years - in which all BBC jobs are only advertised in the Telegraph. This should help redress the balance in the staffing.

The BBC's disinformation campaigns on behalf of environmentalists and socialists need to be reversed. There needs to be an sustained series of programmes to question global warming, recycling, UK membership of the EU, and all the other myriad causes for which the corporation acts as an unpaid cheerleader. The BBC has told one side of the story for many years. In order to redress the balance it needs to tell the other side, and the other side only, for many more years to come.

Of course there's not a cat's chance of any of this actually happening. There will be a fuss this week when the report comes out. Then when it's all died down again, the red flag will be raised again over Television Centre and normal service will be resumed. 

Predictions for Blair's resignation honours list

Alistair Campbell surely. Michael White of the Graun is a shoo-in too.

More suggestions in the comments please. 

Illiberalism breeds illiberalism (again)

Guido and Iain Dale both stick the boot in to the senile old git leader of the (allegedly) Liberal Democrats. Once again, they've seen a problem caused by illiberalism and have adopted a policy of further illiberalism to deal with it. One really does wonder whether they can mention their own party's name without putting their tongues in their cheeks. (Perhaps they should rename themselves the "Liberal" Democrats or even the LiberalDemocrats).

The latest wheeze is to only permit farmers to sell development land to the council. It will be for a "fair" price, of course - apparently ten times the agricultural value is what the Commisar party feels it's worth. It's so illiberal I don't know where to start. Do the People's Revolutionary Liberal Democrats not understand the point of private property? That it underpins free societies? Can they not see that they are simply proposing an extension of the corruption that already engulfs the planning process - the land will simply be sold on to the developer who pays the largest bribes. (Hmm, the Liberal Revolutionary Democrat Fraction are big in local government aren't they?- perhaps I'm beginning to understand their thinking. No doubt it has also crossed their minds that the price of agricultural land is falling while development land is rising in price, so the politicians' cut should grow quite nicely in future).

Jock Coats reckons that farmers are currently engaging in rent seeking (see comment at 1.22, here). This is utterly bizarre. The state removes people's ability to do what they want with their own land, and if they try to get that right back again they are rent-seeking? Whose land is it anyway, Trotsky?

Someone called Tim Leunig (apparently from the LSE) describes the policy as "liberal and localist" (comment at 4.44 here). This is quite frankly, crap. It is simply an abomination of the language to describe price fixing as "liberal". It's liberal in the same way as incomes policies were liberal and look at the damage they did. (And don't try to impress me with Michael Gove thinking they're a good idea either - pointing me at another bunch of statists makes my case better than it does yours, Mr Leunig).

Let me spell it out. Scrap the bloody planning laws and let people build where houses are needed. (And I say this as someone who has just bought a house next to a field which may well get planning permission for the local landowner to build a load of houses on). 

Liberal Democrats - pah! The Labour party with jaundice, more like.