VS

A note to everyone who was bashing away at each other on the Josh 14 thread, VS has added a comment to the end which may be of interest.

Brushes at the ready...

Updated on Mar 30, 2010 by Bishop Hill

The report of the Parliamentary Inquiry into Climategate is due in a few hours time, and I've just seen what looks like the first news report of the press conference today. The general theme seems to be:

• breaking the FoI laws was naughty
• apart from that please move along because there's nothing to see here.

Click to read more ...

It's Big Oil, stupid

John Vidal of the Guardian is getting all excited by a Greenpeace report linking sceptics to...Big Oil. The wicked capitalists in question are Koch Industries, "a little-known, privately owned US oil company" (which just happens to be the largest privately owned business in the world). Now that the truth about their corporate largesse has been revealed by the tireless efforts of Mr Vidal and his colleagues at Greenpeace, we can presumably ignore everything said by...

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Sir John Lawton on AGW

The Chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution has just made some quite interesting comments in relation to the expected rate of warming. Speaking at the launch of a report into how the UK should adapt to possible climate change, he said:

The planet is already slightly above the worse case scenario so if we do nothing we could be looking at a temperature rise of 4C (7.3F) by 2100

Click to read more ...

Micro-id

Congratulations to Jeff Id of The Air Vent fame, who has become a father.

Baby Ethan weighs in at 0.00354 Metric Tons apparently.

Josh 15

More cartoons by Josh here.

Lovelock, AGW and democracy

James Lovelock in the Guardian

One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is "modern democracy", he added. "Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while."

Update on Mar 29, 2010 by Bishop Hill

The full transcript is here. It will make painful reading for AGW proponents.

On rainforest sensitivity

A couple of days ago, I posted on the news that Dr Simon Lewis, a rainforest expert from the University of Leeds, has filed a complaint about an article written by Jonathan Leake at the Sunday Times. Leake's article concerned the IPCC's use of "grey" literature to support a claim that the Amazon is very sensitive to drops in rainfall and that as much as 40% was in danger of being wiped out by small reductions in precipitation.

Click to read more ...

Visser et al on the divergence problem

There is a new paper up for open review at Climate of the Past. Visser et al look at the divergence problem and propose a way for dealing with it when calibrating proxies.

One for the statisticians.

Graun still deleting comments

Not a comprehensive survey, but of the first 50 comments on Pachauri's article in the Guardian, 18 were deleted.

Criticism is forbidden.

Booker on GLOBE

Christopher Booker picks up the GLOBE story for the Sunday Telegraph.

Josh 14

More cartoons by Josh here.

UEA says "who cares what you think!"

The University does not see any conflict of interest in Lord Oxburgh's affiliation with Globe UK, a small parliamentary body from which he receives no financial reward and whose members include well-known parliamentarians such as Ken Clarke, Chris Huhne, Lord Fowler, Simon Hughes and Tim Yeo.

Lord Oxburgh's  views on climate change are a matter of public record.

The University fully expects that Lord Oxburgh and the panel will question CRU's work in the most objective way, and is committed to taking whatever action is necessary following publication of his report.

Full story at El Reg.

Climate change in schools

Readers who have expressed concern over the use of green propaganda in schools will be interested in this, a report on the Climate Change Schools Project.

The students really benefitted from the experience and really seem more aware of the different issues connected to climate change. They often now come to school in the morning to ask if I have heard the news and telling me we really do need to do something- Last week it was the fact that 1 in 6 houses are going to be at risk of flooding in the later part of this century.’

Climategate and storms

TonyN at Harmless Sky has a new story based on the Climategate emails. He shows how IPCC authors struggled to give the impression that storms were becoming more severe when the evidence showed that the opposite was true.

Take a look.