Bishop Hill Mar 5, 2010 Blogs Climate: other The Guardian piece I cited in the last article quotes a physicist named Andy Russell who has written to the IoP expressing his dissatisfaction with their submission. It turns out that Andy also has a blog, which looks very interesting and can be seen here.
Bishop Hill Mar 5, 2010 Climate: CRU Climate: Parliament FOI David Adam, the Guardian's green guru, is on the warpath, in hot pursuit of the Institute of Physics, or at least the identities of those senior members who drafted its statement on climate change.
Evidence from a respected scientific body to a parliamentary inquiry examining the behaviour of climate-change scientists, was drawn from an energy industry consultant who argues that global warming is a religion, the Guardian can reveal.
Bishop Hill Mar 4, 2010 Blogs Climate: other JeanS is well known to followers of climate blogs, being a regular commenter and occasional author at Climate Audit. After Leo Hickman's piece the other day criticising anonymous posters, I asked Jean (not his real name), who is a professional statistician, whether he'd like to say something about his desire as a practising scientist to remain anonymous when contributing to blogs. The following has been lightly edited for language.
...being anonymous is deliberate decision I made after long consideration when I started actively commenting on climate-related blogs. The main reason is that I want to keep my real career out of this. I'm in the academic world, and unlike the US, we do not have a tenure system. People are only human, and anything, even a small thing, that can be used against you might be used, even if it does not have anything to do with the actual topic. That is, I see that using my real name would present some risks to my academic career but I can hardly imagine any situation where it might be helpful.
Bishop Hill Mar 3, 2010 Climate: CRU Climate: Parliament An uncorrected transcript of the Science and Technology Select Committee hearings is now available here.
Bishop Hill Mar 3, 2010 BBC Climate: other I'm grateful to Charles Crawford for this item, in which BBC Radio Five Live's Peter Allen tells a listener that he is not allowed to question manmade global warming. The programme will soon disappear from the BBC website so an excerpt is attached below.
Bishop Hill Mar 3, 2010 Climate: CRU Climate: Parliament Andrew Orlowski takes a long hard look at the hearings on Monday:
Parliament isn’t the place where climate sceptics go to make friends. Just over a year ago, just three MPs voted against the Climate Act, with 463 supporting it. But events took a surprising turn at Parliament’s first Climategate hearing yesterday.
MPs who began by roasting sceptics in a bath of warm sarcasm for half an hour were, a mere two hours later, asking why the University of East Anglia’s enquiry into the climate scandal wasn’t broader, and wasn’t questioning “the science” of climate change. That’s further than any sceptic witness had gone.
Readers should also note the contribution from Josh. New friends eh? ;-)
Bishop Hill Mar 2, 2010 Blogs Climate: Sceptics There's a fascinating analysis of the effect of rude blogging on climate science at the Times. In related news the Guardian decides it's no longer going to call us "deniers". At least not in news stories.
(H/T Anthony Watts)
Bishop Hill Mar 2, 2010 Climate: CRU Climate: Parliament The Guardian reports that the Institute of Physics has issued a clarification of its submission to yesterday's select committee:
The Institute of Physics has been forced to clarify its strongly worded submission to a parliamentary inquiry into climate change emails released onto the internet....
In a statement issued today the institute said its written submission to the committee "has been interpreted by some individuals to imply that it does not support the scientific evidence that the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is contributing to global warming."
It says: "That is not the case. The institute's position on climate change is clear: the basic science is well enough understood to be sure that our climate is changing, and that we need to take action now to mitigate that change."
This is very interesting. I think I follow developments on the climate front as closely as anyone, but I can't say I've heard anyone suggest that the IoP was saying anything more than it actually did - that the climategate affair had worrying implications for the integrity of climatology.
In these circumstances, one also wonders who it was that "forced" the IoP to issue a clarification.
Bishop Hill Mar 2, 2010 Climate: CRU Climate: Russell Muir Russell's panel have published the minutes of a prelaunch meeting from a month ago. It's not hugely exciting but a few points are worth making:
Does anyone else get a vague sense that solutions are being worked out?
(As an aside, I might point out that protecting the PDF file so that the contents can't be copied and pasted is rather irritating). [Update: I've got a work around for this now - thanks]
Bishop Hill
I'm grateful to the correspondent who emailed to point out that Kate Moffatt, one of the PR people on Russell's team, is an employee of Luther Pendragon, whose clients include Pew Charitable Trusts and Climate Strategies, both well known to climate watchers.
Bishop Hill Mar 1, 2010 Climate: CRU Climate: Jones Climate: Parliament FOI Josh Bishop Hill Mar 1, 2010 Climate: CRU Climate: Parliament I meant to apologise for some cases of mistaken identity. I was using Parliament's own video feed, which didn't superimpose the names of speakers. This led to me making a bit of a pickle of several of them, including Graham Stringer, the star of the show, who I labelled as Ian Cawsey for a while. I've been through and fixed them all, including in the comments. Sorry.
Bishop Hill Mar 1, 2010 Climate: CRU Climate: Jones Climate: Parliament FOI Here's the bit from Jones statement that was bothering me:
Stringer: Well I will plug on because I've got one of the quotes from your emails which says "why should I make the data available to you when your aim is to find something wrong with it."...to Hughes. Now that's your email. Now that's the nature of science isn't it, that scientists make their reputations by proving or disproving what other scientists have done previously. Your statement there appears to be anti-scientific and the books that people have written around this issue have persuaded me that you have not provided all the information - the programs, the weather stations, - all the information available so that people can replicate your work, and to say the data is freely available in the United States doesn't enable anyone to go through your workings and agree with you or disagree with you.
Jones: Well the list of stations, we did make that available in 2008, so that has been on our website...
Stringer: How long had people been asking for it at that time?
Jones: Erm
Stringer: You're talking about some papers from 1990 aren't you, that have been kept secret?
Jones: No. There was a paper in1990 and we were asked for the data in that paper, which I was talking about in the previous question, that was made available straight away. The list of stations was made available after about six months, from the first FoI request in about early 2007.
Now I would be grateful if someone would check the transcript for me, but Jones' legendary email in which he rejected Hughes request for data was in early 2005, so I'm struggling to see how the list of stations was released "straight away" in early 2007. Am I missing something here?
Bishop Hill Mar 1, 2010 Climate: CRU Climate: Parliament It's all over! First something to eat and a glass of wine. Then I'll post up some reaction.
18:04 Is all CRU data and code available? Witnesses will check the story out and write.
18:01 Willis says chief scientist should prevent suppression of data in future. Beddington says there are issues. Proprietory data argument again. Beddington does not know if NOAA has same problem.
18:00 Beddington says new temperature set was not in response to the UEA emails.
17:58 Slingo says uncertainties order of magnitude higher for satellites.
Bishop Hill Mar 1, 2010 Climate: CRU Climate: Parliament Climate: Russell One more to go
17:20 When will they report? Russell says he doesn't know.
17:19 Ian Stewart asks about Jones refusal to give data to Hughes. Was he consistent in refusing this? Russell confirms they will look at this. This is important because we know it was supplied to others.
17:17 Willis says peer review aspects have disturbed the committee.
17:14 Willis asks why scientific inquiry is not part of the Russell review. Why can't I understand Russell's responses? "It would be a completely different thing".
