UEA - a new story

David Holland has asked me to post some details of a letter he has received from UEA via WhatDoTheyKnow. David is away this evening.

The letter appears to be a direct response to the guest posting here yesterday and can be seen here. It outlines two errors in UEA's recent FOI response, although only the first appears significant to me. This is the key excerpt:

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The Holland redaction

This is a guest post by David Holland.

Late last Friday afternoon, the University of East Anglia released some further information that should be of interest to anyone who has followed the minutiae of Climategate.

There is, for instance, a breakdown of the costs of the Russell Review at the end of the response letter. However, of most interest to me, and bearing directly upon the “rigour and honesty” of the Russell Review and UEA’s scientists, is Professor Boulton’s email of 6 May to Professor Briffa. This email (in the zip file here) concerned Briffa's work on the IPCC AR4 Report and the assistance he had received from Eugene Wahl. In his email, Boulton asks Briffa to reply to my allegation that the deadline for cited papers to be “in press” was changed to allow the citation of the Wahl and Ammann 2007 paper, which had missed the original deadline. Without it, IPCC WGI would have had to record the fact that the last word in the peer-reviewed literature was that the Mann et al “hockey stick” studies were invalidated by McIntyre and McKitrick.

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GWPF report press

I'll post up links to any news coverage of the GWPF report here.

James Delingpole:

Climategate whitewashers squirm like maggots on Bishop Hill's pin

Here's Fred Pearce in the Guardian:

Andrew Montford's report for Lord Lawson's sceptic thinktank raises some valid criticisms but will most likely be ignored for its brazen hypocrisy

Roger Harrabin

[Montford's] report complains that the enquiries commissioned by UEA did not offer sceptics the chance to give oral evidence. He points to many instances where he says the enquiries failed properly to investigate serious allegations against academics at UEA.

Louise Gray in the Telegraph

[A] report for GWPF by Andrew Montford, a well known blogger, said the inquiries failed to ask the opinions of sceptics. He also said they were rushed and failed to ask a series of questions about why requests for information were refused or probe allegations of fraud in scientific papers.

Fiona Harvey in the FT

[I]n the latest salvo, the Global Warming Policy Foundation – a think-tank started by the UK’s former finance minister Lord Lawson – published its critical assessment of four of these inquiries on Tuesday.

“None of the panels mounted an inquiry that was comprehensive,” the GWPF concluded. None “managed to be objective” or “performed their work in a way that is likely to restore confidence in the work” of the UEA scientists who wrote the e-mails.

The press conference

Whew! That was quite a tough couple of days, but I think it went pretty well in the end. The turnout for the press conference was reasonable, although it was a worry at about two minutes to 11 when there were fewer than ten people in the room, and four of those were on the top table. In the end though we had the Times, Guardian, FT, Express and a few others. 

The presentations were fine - perhaps I might have made it a little shorter if I had my time over again - but of course the meat was in the questioning. I was a bit waffly on one of them, but chatted to the journalist in question after the event and made things a bit clearer. James Randerson's questions were interesting - were you paid for the report and how much - that kind of thing. This was pretty feeble stuff after the other journalists' questions. The other question he put, where I made a slight error in my reply, was when he asked why, since I was criticising Oxburgh for being partisan, the public should trust my report, given that I am also a partisan. My reply was that it wasn't enough to point to the partisanship, but to point out the subsequent errors or omissions, and I invited the press to check the citations in the report out for themselves. But I also began my reply with "Yes I am a partisan" or words to that effect. This is frankly, undeniable, but I saw James leap for his pen at that point, so I guess he will try to make something of it. 

The moment of excitement was at the end, where Graham Stringer piped up from the back of the room. I hadn't noticed he was there before then, but his comments did bring a certain focus to events. After the trivia of James R's questions, hearing from a member of the Science and Technology Committee that what was going on at CRU was literature and not science made the question of how much I was paid for the report seem somehow deeply irrelevant. 

So, I'm reasonably content with how thing went. It just remains to be seen what everyone makes of it.

Was Briffa the mole?

AJ Strata looks at the evidence that someone in the heart of the Hockey Team couldn't stand the pressure any longer and decided to spill the beans. Was it Keith Briffa?

Quote of the day

Hat tip to Hans von Storch for pointing out this comment in the emails. It was sent by paleoclimatologist Ed Cook to the CRU's Keith Briffa, outlining his opinions on the current (2003) state of knowledge of past temperatures:

The results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about <100 year extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know fuck-all).

Read that carefully people. We know a fair bit about the temperatures in the last 100 years, but only for the extra-tropics. Before that, we know nothing. Nothing.

Nothing.

Read the whole email. It's astonishing.

Update on Dec 7, 2009 by Bishop Hill

Aidey in the comments points out that I've got the nuance of this post wrong. What Aidey points out is that what Cook is saying is that we understand short-term variability (<100 years) but not long-term (>100years). What does this mean about our understanding of the much-disputed medieval warm period though?

Another reputation on the line

New Scientist has published a Climate Myths Special today which has been welcomed with open arms in some corners:

"I have already forwarded links to my local FoE and Social Forum lists, to draw other people's attention to it." says one particularly diligent commenter in the NS Environment Blog.

I don't know why a publication like New Scientist would take sides like this in such a controversial issue. If they're wrong, they end up with their reputation in tatters, and nobody will notice if they're right. Climate Audit has already pointed out the excision of embarrassing data from their 1000 year temperature graph, (compiled for them by Dr Rob Wilson of the University of Edinburgh).

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If you follow the dark blue line (Briffa 2001) into the choke point of the graph in the 1960s you will notice that it doesn't actually come out again. It's hard to see because it has been stopped right on the choke point so that you can't make out where the line ends. Was there no data after 1960? Unfortunately for the commercial reputation of New Scientist there was. In a previous paper using the same raw data, Briffa had shown the full set of results through to 1994. And of course, the proxy suggests that temperatures were in fact falling throughout most of the rest of the century (the green line on this second chart).

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Enclosure