The hearings - UEA

Two more to go

16:52 Harris cites IoP submission. Do emails reveal anything that make Jones vulnerable? Jones says only seen a fraction of his emails. Says there is nothing in them to show that he has perverted the peer review process.

16:51 Harris asks about peer review process and manipulation thereof. Jones says they were already published and he was just commenting that they were not good papers. Asks about complaints to Peiser and E&E. This is Sonia B-C. Jones doesn't answer the question. Harris lets him get away with it.

16:49 Harris asks if there are issues of inter-group rivalry preventing disclosure of data.

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The hearings - The ICO

That's the end of that one

16:05 Ian Stewart has another bid to see if they couldn't maybe just withhold the data. Thomas not impressed.

16:02 Discussion of whether ICO should discuss statements of ICO that FoI was breached at UEA. Was this appropriate. Is this part of the terms of reference?

15:56 Stewart talks of mass of requests and abuse of process. Thomas says there exemption for these kinds of things. Says 60 requests is not many. Stewart says scientists were exasperated. Thomas says he understands this, but sympathy is the wrong word. Says proactive disclosure is probably easiest approach.

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The hearings - Lawson and Peiser

I'll start a new thread now

15:38 I think this is Iddon, saying that scientists often keep data back until they are ready to publish. Lawson says it's not a question of data being immediately available - mentions Yamal. More important that we are open where policy matters are concerned.

15:36 Lawson discussing surface vs satellite records. Says further investigation required.

15:34 Stewart asks if NASA and NOAA records are wrong or misleading. Peiser returns to the process - is the data and code available. Asks if parliament want the public to trust the data.

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Bishop Hill elsewhere

I have a piece up at the Channel Four website, looking forward to the hearings this afternoon.

Interview with Michael Mann

Thanks to reader Kevin for pointing out Chris Mooney's interview of Michael Mann. I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, but feel free to tell me whether I should invest the time.

Liveblogging the hearings

I'm going to have a go at liveblogging the select committee hearings this afternoon, so do tune in if you can.

Sidelining the 2500?

Re-reading Richard Tol's post at Die Klimazweibel (can anglophone readers call it The Climate Onion?), I was struck by this:

The models assessed by the IPCC all have that abatement costs grow and accelerate as targets become more stringent. Typically, doubling the rate of emission reduction would lead to a quadrupling of costs. The cost curve in SPM.6 (and SPM.4) bends the wrong way: Incremental costs fall as policy become stricter.

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Josh 6

The rot spreads to WG3

The IPCC -gates have so far mainly been a feature of Working Group 2, which looks at the potential impacts of climate change. As Hans von Storch explains in the introduction to a posting by Richard Tol, this is not because the other areas of the IPCC report deserve a clean bill of health.

The WG3 report did not attract the same scrutiny. This could create the impression that WG3 wrote a sound report. That impression would be false. Just as WG2 appears to have systematically overstated the negative impacts of climate change, WG3 appears to have systematically understated the negative impacts of greenhouse gas emission reduction.

Tol's article is a must-read.

Climate cuttings 35

Let's round up some of the developments in the Sunday newspapers and around the blogs.

Steve McIntyre gives some of the back story on Geoffrey Boulton's CV. Was it tarted up by the mysterious Nini Yang? And why is Boulton trying to insinuate that sceptics tampered with it when it is clear that this cannot have been so. A commenter on this site notes another appearance of the IPCC in a Boulton biography.

Al Gore himself is in the New York Times, telling us to move along and that there's nothing to see here. Werner Krauss is looking for reasoned responses. The Sunday Times says Gore's hurricane science is wonky.

Booker looks at the steady draining away of credibility at the IPCC and manages to fit in citations of both The Hockey Stick Illusion and Mosher and Fuller's CRUTape Letters.

Much interesting backwards and forwards on the surface temperature records. Tamino says that the "great dying of the thermometers" has no effect on the trend. Lucia agrees. Roy Spencer says he has evidence of a spurious warming in Phil Jones' CRUTEM3 land temperature index.

Benny Peiser's submission to the Science & Technology select committee is very interesting, telling the story of the Keenan fraud allegation from the journal editor's perspective.

Richard North notes that some £11m of British taxpayers money has been delivered or pledged to Pachauri's TERI

It's snowing again.

Channel Four on Boulton's CV

Nick Scott-Plummer updates the story of Geoffrey Boulton's CV over at the Channel Four website. You may remember that Steve McIntyre found a copy of the CV from 2007 that referred to Boulton being on the IPCC. Boulton has now sent a contemporaneous copy of his CV to Channel Four, pointing out that this version doesn't include the line about the IPCC. Nick continues:

Asked whether he was implying dirty tricks we received another email: "Professor Boulton has no CV with that line on it, because there is no reason for it", adding: "people are free to draw their own conclusions as to why it seems to have appeared now".

There's also some pertinent comments about how the blogs are making the running on these stories, digging up small details in a very short space of time. And in fact, commenter Turning Tide, has already pointed out that the last edit date for the new version of Boulton's CV is actually July 2008, so this is perhaps not the vindication that was originally thought.

Tip jar

I've added a tip jar to the top of the sidebar for anyone who is so inclined. All contributions gratefully received.

How to report climate change after Climategate?

These are notes taken from a discussion meeting at Oxford University on 26^th February 2010 and sent to me by reader, Simon Anthony. I think they are extremely interesting.

Question and answer format featuring environmental correspondents Richard Black (BBC), Fiona Harvey (FT), David Adam (Guardian) and Ben Jackson (Sun) and chaired by Fiona Fox, director of the Science Media Centre.

(Abbreviations: CG = Climategate; CC = Climate change; CH = Copenhagen meeting)

FF: Has the press done a disservice to the public in reporting CG?  Has media a responsibility to make the public “think the right way”?

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Getting out of hand again

The pace of events is getting out of hand again and I'm struggling to keep up with the demands on my time and the regrettable need to earn a living. I must put a tip box up on the site some time.

The stunner for me today has been the Institute of Physics submission to the Science and Technology Committee, which is to the point to say the least. This is really starting to look very bad for the guys at UEA:

1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

With retrospect, once the emails became public it was likely that some of the major learned societies might try to distance themselves from the climatologists. It may be that support for the CRU now starts to fall away. We'll see.

McIntyre has the full story.

Of course, there is also the story of the IPCC review, but that will require a more considered piece, which will have to wait for the morning. For now, the local hostelry is calling.

No offence established?

Some explanation of the rather surprising statements on FoI made by Sir Edward Acton and his colleagues in their submission to the Parliamentary Select Committee has emerged. As noted in the previous post, Sir Edward said that no offence under the FoI had been established and that the evidence was prime facie in nature. Here is the exact quote for reference

On 22 January 2010, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) released a statement to a journalist, which was widely misinterpreted in the media as a finding by the ICO that UEA had breached Section 77 of the FOIA by withholding raw data. A subsequent letter to UEA from the ICO (29 January 2010) indicated that no breach of the law has been established; that the evidence the ICO had in mind about whether there was a breach was no more than prima facie; and that the FOI request at issue did not concern raw data but private email exchanges.

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