Dave Summers on everything

BH reader Dave Summers, a Professor emeritus of mining engineering, is interviewed by CNBC on just about everything to do with energy and climate. There's caution on shale, pessimism on the economy and a healthy dose of scepticism on climate:

As long as journalists are advocates rather than reporters the true story will not emerge. The lack of journalistic challenge in the mainstream media to the deliberate deception employed in hiding the decline in temperature prediction accuracy with the tree rings which dropped just as temperatures were rising, thus invalidating the "hockey stick," was an early indication that media manipulation was going to be a critical factor in this debate.

How long must global temperatures remain relatively stable before someone brings this up as a front page story? The amount of money involved with those who espouse anthropogenic causes of climate change dwarfs the funding that has gone to those who raise questions when so many papers so this "may" happen, and that "might" occur. And those who pay the bills . . .

The long tales

The University of East Anglia is having a conference on writing and climate change. It features well known climate writers Giles Foden, Mike Hulme and, erm, Phil Jones (click for full size)

This comes to me via Richard Bean, who was invited but can't make it. My own invitation appears to have been lost in the post.

Bad choice of victim

Times Higher Ed has a not-unsympathetic profile of David Holland.

What drives a man to spend his retirement trying to refute the scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet?

"I'm a very bad loser. They chose the wrong guy to screw," explained David Holland, a climate sceptic who has taken the University of East Anglia to an information tribunal in the Climategate saga's most recent twist.

Acton's blind eye

Readers may recall that at the Science and Technology Committee hearings into Climategate, Professor Acton told MPs that when he had discovered that the Russell inquiry had failed to investigate the question of breaches of FOI legislation, he had instituted his own inquiry which had determined that Jones and Briffa had not in fact deleted emails subject to FOI.

Click to read more ...

The hearing

I'm just going to write a couple of lines just to report how it went. Further thoughts will follow tomorrow.

It was very much David versus Goliath, just as it was for the Newbery case, with Holland up against teams of professional lawyers. Unlike Newbery's case, the panel today were exemplary in their handling of the case and in the consideration they gave Holland as litigant in person. In terms of getting a successful outcome, I would say the chances are slim, as I don't think there is enough hard evidence to support the position that UEA were running the show, which is what would be required for the information sought to be disclosable. Unless, that is, the court thinks that the failures of the Russell inquiry can be explained in no other way.

Society rejects action on climate

Public support for action on global warming has fallen in fairly spectacular fashion according to the British Social Attitudes Survey.

There has been dramatic decline over the past decade in the public's support for tackling climate change in Britain. Backing for higher green taxes and charges has waned and scepticism about the seriousness of the threat to the environment has increased.

Climategate is cited as a key factor in the fall in support. And rightly so - the Russell panel noted that CRU and IPCC had both been guilty of misleading policymakers over the "hide the decline" episode, and there has been no meaningful investigation into allegations of journal nobbling.

Upholders of the consensus may yell that none of this changes the science, and this is true. But Climategate shows us that the process by which governments have been persuaded that we have a problem is biased. That being the case, the public are right to want a halt to policy responses.

Update on Jan 5, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Whoops - that's an old one! From 2011. I'm closing comments on the thread accordingly.

The roadmap

This is a guest post by Chris Horner.

Information continues to flow in the struggle to bail out the Hockey Team, piecing together the relevant "context" to ClimateGate. This pursuit is of critical importance to he Team, and "the cause", given the solemn vow that this missing context would explain ClimateGate away as something other than "the worst scientific scandal of our generation". Despite this, and the eagerness of certain among the team to claim "exoneration" where sadly none exists, the Team don't seem to want to be helped.

Click to read more ...

Without limitations

Martin Rosenbaum notes in a tweet that the statute of limitations relating to Climategate has now passed.

Come out RC, wherever you are!

More DECC Climategate correspondence

Leo Hickman has had some more of DECC's correspondence relating to Climategate.

The first one that catches my eye is this email to the minister at DECC, informing him that the Russell Report will be published on 7 July. Although the email is dated 2 July, there is a message within the message dated 26 May 2010. This would appear to suggest that ministers were aware of the date of publication six weeks before the general public, which would be odd for an independent inquiry. I would counsel against leaping to conclusions, but it's worth checking out. The redactions in the document appear unjustified to me too.

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Operation Cabin files

Martin Rosenbaum is the BBC's FOI correspondent and was also responsible for the Climategate Revisited programme last night. He has just emailed to say that he has published some of his research material for the show, including material obtained from Norfolk Constabulary's case files for the Climategate investigation.

Read it here.

Update on Nov 1, 2012 by Bishop Hill

This excerpt from a task list is interesting. I wonder who they are talking about?

Climategate revisited

The BBC Radio 4 programme revisiting Climategate is on tonight at 9pm. Here's the blurb:

Climategate was the term quickly applied in 2009 to the mysterious appearance on the internet of large numbers of emails and documents belonging to some of the world's leading climate scientists.

This happened just a month before the Copenhagen climate change conference, which failed to meet the expectations of many for agreement on international action. The timing may not be coincidental.

Click to read more ...

UEA footdragging - Part 2

At the end of Part 1, your “Big-Oil” funded, shadowy, conspirator was reeling from the righteous blows of the Freedom of Information loving UEA and its downtrodden ally, Mills & Reeve. But “Big Oil” never admits defeat, not even in the face of “overwhelming consensus.

So the next sneaky strike was electronically launched…

As before emails/letters sent to me are in italic, my responses in bold

I note your statement that, in your opinion "The University has complied with the substituted decision notice of the Tribunal dated 18 January 2012 and proposes to take no further steps".

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More UEA footdragging (Part One)

This is a guest post by Don Keiller.

As many readers at Bishop Hill are aware I won a “major FOI victory” over UEA last December.

One might be forgiven for thinking that the Tribunal Decision would have been the end of the matter. However UEA and their increasingly rich lawyers had other ideas. Is it simply coincidence that Mills & Reeve are building shiny new offices here in Cambridge? 

What follows is, by necessity, a considerably foreshortened summary. The total correspondence between, myself, the Tribunal Judge, Mills & Reeve and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) comes to over 40 pages. To make this story easier to follow, quotations from emails/letters are in italic for those sent to me, with my responses in bold.

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My day

A busy, but satisfying day yesterday. I did a long, in-depth interview with BBC radio for a forthcoming programme about the impact of Climategate on the global warming debate.  This is to be broadcast on 24th 31st of the month. The interviewer was Chris Vallance, who I haven't come across before, but the show was being produced by FOI correspondent Martin Rosenbaum. I think having the show run by someone from outside the ranks of the green correspondents should give this programme a rather different feel to the norm.

Then off to the Energy Institute Scotland, where a green energy consultant called Demian Natakhan was talking about how to respond to global warming sceptics. To be honest it wasn't a very good presentation and presented several open goals - using the Hockey Stick graph, claiming that "entirely independent" studies confirmed it and talking of 5m sea level rises among the most remarkable. The latter point was truly jaw-dropping, particularly when it was upped to 100m during the Q&A section.

Click to read more ...

NOAA slips up?

Chris Horner sends details of a FOIA request he made earlier in the year. He was seeking details of correspondence between NOAA's Tom Peterson and Thomas Stocker, the head of IPCC WGI. It is hoped that this correspondence might throw some light on the mysterious email sent by Stocker to IPCC lead authors in the wake of Climategate.

Surprisingly, NOAA seemed to have slipped up rather, failing even to acknowledge Horner's request. Apparently, under US law this amounts to constructive refusal, and Horner can now move to seek an immediate judicial remedy.

As Horner comments in his email:

We will soon learn out how badly the global warming establishment wants to fight to keep this, and similar public records, from the public. Will NOAA disregard the caviling from usual suspects and promptly move to produce the record, which should take mere minutes? Or will it heed the calls and hunker down, risking a certain judicial order affirming what an inspector general has already concluded.

IPCC-related records in the possession of government employees (or accessible by them, now that we know about third-party servers established to dodge FOI laws), are indeed agency records subject to release to the taxpayers who underwrite the IPCC enterprise.

Update on Sep 6, 2012 by Bishop Hill

The complaint has now been lodged and can be seen here.