Upcoming events

Next week, I'm off down south for a couple of days. The purpose of the visit is to attend a conference to which I've been invited. This promises to be fun, with a positively stellar list of speakers:

• Phil Jones
• Andrew Watson (of "Morano is an asshole" fame)
• Mike Lockwood (of "Svensmark is all wrong" fame)
• Henrik Svensmark (of "no I'm not" fame)
• Nils Axel Morner
• Ian Plimer
• John Mitchell (of "no IPCC working papers" fame)
• Nigel Lawson
• Vaclav Klaus

The balance of speakers is not quite right, with nobody there to put the Stern review side of the economic arguments, but it's hard to argue with the calibre of speaker the organisers have recruited. The suggestion in the invitation was that the organisers see the event as forming an opportunity for compromise between the two sides of the global warming debate.

I will try to liveblog at least some of the proceedings on Tuesday, wifi availability and battery life permitting. Josh will be on hand to do the visuals.

If anyone wants to help defray the cost of the trip, your contributions to the tip box will be gratefully received.

[The conference is invitation-only, but Phil Jones is doing a repeat of his talk at the University of Lancaster on Friday (h/t Aztek) for those who are interested.]

(Bumped)

An interview with Phil Jones

Harold Ambler, a journalist who has written a forthcoming book about global warming entitled "Don't Sell Your Coat", was lucky enough to get an interview with Phil Jones several months before Climategate and he has published some of the details at his website.

This is definitely a "read the whole thing" article, but to whet your appetite, here is an excerpt that I rather enjoyed:

One other reason Jones offered for refusing to share data appeared bizarre, to say the least:

I will say one more thing. Have you considered this issue from a perspective of a Met Service in Africa or South America. I have been told by people from these Met Services that one of the reasons they restrict access to data is that scientists in Europe and North America use their data to further their own scientific ends. This is a sort of data imperialism. They get nothing back and think of themselves as mere data collectors. They want to improve the lot of their scientists. I am able to help a few of them with grants to come and do MSc and PhD courses here at UEA, but it is only a few.

I take Jones at his word here, but it has been a matter of some surprise that he has not mentioned these issues in dealing with other journalists. More to the point, alluding to the plight of underprivileged meteorologists as a means of explaining why data sharing should not be moved forward as expeditiously as possible is, for lack of a better word, weird.

Update on May 3, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Just noticed this is actually from 2009. Not sure why it came up on my Google feed.

Climategate - emails were deleted

Steve M is reporting some fascinating new information about a US Department of Commerce investigation into Climategate. As part of this inquiry they have interviewed Eugene Wahl about the notorious "delete all emails" message sent by Jones to Mann, in which Mann was asked to pass the request on to Wahl.

According to the report, Wahl has confirmed his belief that he did delete his AR4 email correspondence in accordance with Mann's request.

Full story here.

The Beddington challenge

Judith Curry has taken up Sir John Beddington's challenge to scientists to stand up and be counted in the battle against pseudoscience, with a long post on the subject of the Trick to Hide the Decline.

It is obvious that there has been deletion of adverse data in figures shown IPCC AR3 and AR4, and the 1999 WMO document.  Not only is this misleading, but it is dishonest (I agree with Muller on this one).  The authors defend themselves by stating that there has been no attempt to hide the divergence problem in the literature, and that the relevant paper was referenced.  I infer then that there is something in the IPCC process or the authors’ interpretation of the IPCC process  (i.e. don’t dilute the message) that corrupted the scientists into deleting the adverse data in these diagrams.

McIntyre’s analysis is sufficiently well documented that it is difficult to imagine that his analysis is incorrect in any significant way.  If his analysis is incorrect, it should be refuted.  I would like to know what the heck Mann, Briffa, Jones et al. were thinking when they did this and why they did this, and how they can defend this, although the emails provide pretty strong clues. Does the IPCC regard this as acceptable?  I sure don’t.

It's pretty interesting to see Sir John Beddington, Sir Paul Nurse and rest of the scientific establishment, as well as most of the sci-bloggers in the UK, all lining themselves up on the side of pseudoscience on the Climategate issue and Hide the Decline in particular. I wonder how long they can sustain the charade that everything is well in UK climatology?

Jones in Lincs

Phil Jones is speaking tomorrow to the Spalding Gentlemen's Society. There is a brief story in the local paper here.

One interesting snippet from the article is this quote by Jones:

I received a lot of nasty emails from November to March/April last year from people threatening to kill me among other things. I passed them on to Norfolk police who said they didn’t fulfil the criteria for death threats.

I'm slightly bemused by this - a death threat that doesn't meet the police's criteria for death threats. I can't help but be reminded of the poor chap who sent a joke tweet about blowing up an airport and received the full penalty of the law.

Paul Dennis on the trick

Someone called Paul Dennis is commenting on the Simon Singh thread. I assume this is the paleoclimatologist of that name who works at UEA.

He agrees with my take on the trick to hide the decline.

Update on Jan 29, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Paul Dennis responds in the comments and confirms he is who I thought. He says he dabbles in paleo rather than specialising.

More Horizon fallout

Updated on Jan 29, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Jan 31, 2011 by Bishop Hill

There is more fallout from the Horizon programme, some of which is more in the realm of tittle tattle than science and some of which isn't.

The tittle-tattle first. The famous pop-sci author, Simon Singh and the blogger/lawyer/libel reform guru, David Allen Green are trying to pressure James Delingpole into doing another interview, in which Singh gets to bring along a climate scientist to support him. This strikes me as a tad ungentlemanly of Mr Singh. What would be interesting is if Singh and Dellers both got to bring their chosen expert along - given that the Horizon programme majored on Climategate, we could have Phil Jones and Steve McIntyre to discuss the trick to hide the decline, for example.

Click to read more ...

Shub on cancer and climate

While we're talking about cancer, Shub Niggurath has an article about problems with the availability of data and code in another field of scientific endeavour, with close parallels to the case of Phil Jones and the Chinese station data.

What's next?

Two interesting days ahead. Firstly I should get my embargoed copy of the House of Commons report on the Climategate inquiries later today, so there will be some reading to do.  The embargo is lifted at midnight, UK time, and I'll time a post to go up shortly thereafter, so those of you in other parts of the Anglosphere may be able to read it at a sensible time.

Then later today we have the BBC Horizon programme on wicked sceptics. I'm really looking forward to this. There is a trailer article here in the Independent, in which the paper's science correspondent Steve Connor manages to get the trick to hide the decline completely wrong. You would think that after all those inquiries, a science journalist would understand what Jones did.

Toronto Sun on Climate Files

Lorrie Goldstein of the Toronto Sun asks if maybe climate science shouldn't be just a bit more open, and citing Fred Pearce's The Climate Files as evidence. The tone of the article is interesting, with Goldstein noting that Pearce is not a "denier", but pointing out his criticisms of the climatology community's failure to check its findings.

As well as taking pot shots at climatology peer review, he also has things to say about the Climategate inquiries:

Simply having panels of sympathetic academics (or politicians) take a cursory look at the work of climate scientists and pronounce it sound — what happened following Climategate — doesn’t cut it.

Keenan calling SciTech committee

Doug Keenan has written to the House of Commons SciTech committee again.

Read his letter here.

More on Nature's data policy

Last week I looked at Nature's data policy and was corrected by Eli Rabett on the existence of a formal policy. ER pointed to Nature's advice to authors at the time of Phil Jones' 1990 paper on urban heat islands:

Nature requests authors to deposit sequence and x-ray crystallography data in the databases that exist for this purpose.

As he notes, this paltry sentence doesn't support the idea that there was a formal policy in place requiring authors to make data available. However, Shub Niggurath has been doing some research, and I think his findings put this lone sentence in some perspective, which is quite interesting.

Click to read more ...

On Nature's data policy

Eli Rabett has challenged my post about Phil Jones claim that publication of his data was prevented by confidentiality agreements. I said that Nature requires authors to make their data available on request.

Eli's says that Nature only instituted this policy in 1997, and that previously the policy was only that:

Nature requests authors to deposit sequence and x-ray crystallography data in the databases that exist for this purpose.

If so then I stand corrected. I'm not sure that it changes anything very much though, because, as we know, CRU have been unable to produce any agreements that would prevent publication, we know that release would have been required under both FOI and EIR, and we know that they distributed data quite happily to scientists who they saw as onside.

Raising the temperature

Science writer Francis Sedgemore has entered the climate fray, with a posting that seems calculated to raise the temperature of an overheated debate still further.

Jones may have committed a few minor transgressions, born largely of frustration with political obstructionists and time wasters, but this respected scientist did not deserve being hounded to the edge of his grave. The climate denialists responsible for Jones’ near demise are scum, and for them the writing is on the wall. But it will be scientific evidence that does for them, not threatened knocks at the door in the middle of the night.

Of course, the alleged transgressions were not minor. In particular there were allegations of fraud (not investigated), fabrication (no defence offered) and breaches of freedom of information legislation (not investigated). And of course the allegations of fraud and fabrication had nothing to do with anyone taking up any of Jones' time either.

It's a pity that David Adam's Nature article missed so many of the pertinent questions. It seems now to be misleading people like Sedgemore who are not close enough to the story to make a meaningful contribution. In these circumstances, Sedgemore's aggressive language seems rather foolish.

Note however that there is nothing to be gained by responding in kind.

...and now the Guardian

Alok Jha, the Guardian's science podcaster, gets to cover the Climategate anniversary. Jha makes the same mistake as everyone else, asking Jones about the deletion of an email that he didn't receive in the first place.

Also very funny to see the link directly under the title and standfirst:"Attacks on climate science echo tobacco industry tactics".  Alok Jha is not what you might call a rabid warmist, so I think I detect the hand of someone on the editorial side here - perhaps dear old James Randerson, who does like to jazz these things up.