Curry and Hickman in the Guardian

It looks as though Judith Curry is going to have a piece up at the Guardian in which she continues in her struggle to bridge the chasm between the sceptics and the mainstream. It's not available yet, but reader Fran Codwire, in the comments, has caught a glimpse of Graun regular Leo Hickman's response, which looks as though it will appear before Curry's original.

Hickman's contribution seems like something of a rant to me, holding McIntyre and Watts responsible for the contributions of their commenters and apparently demanding that anonymous commenters be unmasked. This is the only rational explanation I can reach when he says "I think until those that frequent these sites come out from behind the cloak of anonymity that most of them choose to hide behind very few people, particularly climate scientists, will be willing to trust the motives of this army of DIY auditors."

I mean, how will retribution be handed out if nobody knows who these people are?

Update on Feb 24, 2010 by Bishop Hill

Curry's article is here.

Hickman's is now online here.

Cartoons by Josh

Resident cartoonist, Josh, has started a dedicated website for his climate related work. See it here.

This seems like an admirable opportunity for me to purloin some more of his output

Timmy in the Express

Tim Worstall has a piece on the economics of climate change in the Daily Express, which is excellent and not just because he manages to squeeze in a reference to the Hockey Stick Illusion in passing.

A review of the Wellington debate

These are the impressions of the global warming debate held at Wellington College of commenter Atomic Hairdryer.

The Wellington Squared debate, a sceptic's view (link)


Motion to be debated was

"The prophets of global warming are guilty of scaremongering"

The venue was interesting. An imposing college built as a monument to Wellington for his services in that old British tradition of warring with the French. The debate itself was held in the chapel, which may have been appropriate given global warming as a religion and prophets but was a somewhat awkward arrangement. The pews were at 90 degrees to the altar where the debaters and screen was placed so not as comfortable as the RI.

Click to read more ...

Inhofe demands investigation of Mann

James Inhofe, uber-sceptic senator from Oklahoma, has called for an investigation of Michael Mann.

Just prior to a hearing at 10:00 a.m. EST, Senator Inhofe released a minority staff report from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, of which he is ranking member. Senator Inhofe is asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether there has been research misconduct or criminal actions by the scientists involved, including Dr. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University and Dr. James Hansen of Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Science.

If this happens it could be quite interesting. Inhofe is pointing at major issues that are not really being touched elsewhere, such as the pressurising of scientific journals. It would be interesting to see if the Senate could get people like Famiglietti and Saiers to explain exactly what went on at Geophysical Research Letters when McIntyre and McKitrick's 2005 paper was submitted.

Rip it up and start again

Fox News seems to have something of an exclusive, with a story that the Met Office is proposing creation of a new verifiable set of global temperature data. Something of an admission in there, wouldn't you say.

At a meeting on Monday of about 150 climate scientists, representatives of Britain's weather office quietly proposed that the world's climatologists start all over again to produce a new trove of global temperature data that is open to public scrutiny and "rigorous" peer review.

I am almost certainly an incorrigible cynic, because I just can't get out of my head the idea that this will mean that the existing CRU data and code will remain off limits, while scientists spend a decade or more creating this new temperature set.

Update on Feb 23, 2010 by Bishop Hill

The text of the Met Office's proposal (or at least the executive summary thereof) is here. Interestingly it requires the data to be publicly available and the methodology to be published in the peer reviewed literature.

I guess this means that we will have access to the data but not the code. Adjustments to remain a secret then, and remember the warming is all in the adjustments (or it is in the US at least).

Oral evidence

The oral evidence sessions for the Parliamentary Inquiry into CRU have been announced.

Oral evidence

Forthcoming session:

Monday 1 March 2010

3.00pm The Rt Hon the Lord Lawson of Blaby, Chairman, and Dr Benny Peiser, Director, Global Warming Policy Foundation
3.30pm Richard Thomas CBE, former Information Commissioner
4.00pm Professor Edward Acton, Vice-Chancellor, University of East Anglia and Professor Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit
4.40pm Sir Muir Russell, Head of the Independent Climate Change E-Mails Review
5.00pm Professor John Beddington, Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Julia Slingo OBE, Chief Scientist, Met Office, and Professor Bob Watson, Chief Scientist, Defra

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Academic sceptics

Roger Harrabin emails to ask if I know any UK-based physical scientists who are sceptics. Not many is the answer, but then I don't know who the vast majority of my readers are anyway.

I do serve a lot of pages to readers at .ac.uk web domains, and I can see that at least some of these are from physical science departments, so it's fair to say that such people exist, although they are perhaps few in number. If so, Roger H would like to hear from you, in confidence, if necessary. He also welcomes evidence that putting one's head above the parapet in this way is a career-ending move.

Commenters have already noted Paul Dennis's remarks at WUWT to the effect that he responded to Roger H's earlier call and didn't get any reply worth the mentioning, but I would suggest that this could reasonably be interpreted as an oversight. Best to make the effort I would say.

Reisinger and the divergence problem

An interesting article from the New Zealand Herald, looking at the divergence problem. What particularly fascinated me was the explanation of the issue from Andy Reisinger, who some will remember as being a man who is very close to Rajendra Pachauri.

Reisinger is a climatologist, but not, if I remember correctly, a paleo guy. It's odd then to see him being the expert interviewed on the subject of the divergence problem. It might also explain the explanation he gives for this inconvenient effect:

Dr Andy Reisinger, a climate researcher at Victoria University who has followed the progress of proxy temperature reconstructions, said it could be that a lack of rain in recent decades had stunted tree growth in some high-altitude spots - or that when temperatures reached a certain point, trees began to react differently.

Whatever the cause, "the relationships [between tree-rings and temperature] that we've developed for the last 500-100 years may not apply in the last 50," he said.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that paleoclimatologists picked trees that were sensitive to temperature rather than precipitation when they set about recreating temperatures of the past. If a drop in rainfall can cause a drop in growth now, then it could have caused a drop in the past. In other words, the paleo guys will have to admit that they know absolutely nothing about temperatures before the nineteenth century.

Light posting

Posting will be light-to-non-existent this weekend.

Reiner Grundmann on the Hockey Stick Illusion

Reiner Grundmann reviews The Hockey Stick Illusion at Die Klimazweibel.

Email

I seem to be getting a certain amount of incoming email going astray. If you've sent me something important and I haven't responded you may want to send it again.

Michael Mann in the Benshi...

...the Benshi being the name of a website. It's mainly about the interaction of media and climatology, with the usual denunciations of the "well-funded" efforts to undermine Mann and his colleagues. Ironic that, given we've just been having a conversation about why we can't seem to afford anyone easier upon the eye than David Henderson and Lord Lawson to put our message over to the masses.

The interview is here. (H/T Doug Keenan in the comments).

Richard Lindzen in the Boston Globe

Richard Lindzen has a pop at Kerry Emmanuel's Boston Globe op-ed in a letter to the paper's editor.

KERRY EMANUEL’S Feb. 15 op-ed “Climate changes are proven fact’’ is more advocacy than assessment. Vague terms such as “consistent with,’’ “probably,’’ and “potentially’’ hardly change this.

Environment correspondents

David Henderson's interview on Newsnight Scotland was rather good, I thought. Henderson came over rather well, and in my opinion he's a better frontman for the GWPF than Nigel Lawson, with none of the political baggage with which the former chancellor is encumbered, while also being possessed of oodles of gravitas.

Henderson's opponent was Rob Edwards, the environment editor of the Glasgow Herald.

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