The ASI wants a royal commission on climate

Miles Saltiel, writing at the Adam Smith Institute blog, has called for a royal commission on climate. In a post discussing Ed Hawkins' now famous graph of model predictions and observations, he suggests that climatologists' predictions are now falling apart.

So let the Prime Minister launch a Royal Commission to revisit the evidence, modelling and consequent policy. The composition of such a Commission would have to be carefully chosen to ensure balance. The public interest needs statisticians and scientists from outside the hermetic world of “climate science” to challenge insiders robustly and in full view. Also in the interests of transparency, the DPP should seize data such as papers from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia for examination by forensic statisticians. The Commission should be given ample time to get it right - five years at least.

Interview with Julian Gregory

Leo Hickman has published the transcript of his interview with DCS Julian Gregory, the policeman who led the investigation into Climategate. There is much of interest, not least this bit about what led the police to believe that nobody internal was involved.

Norfolk Police gave a press conference yesterday in which it revealed some more details about the investigation. For example, DCS Gregory said that the hacker(s) had, whilst accessing the university's servers remotely via the internet, breached several passwords in order to gain access to the emails and other documents. He also said that officers had examined CCTV footage at CRU to investigate the possibility – subsequently ruled out - that a member of staff might have been involved.

This, I have to say, brought a smile to my face.

There was also this reference to Mosher:

Have you kept on top of all the internet speculation and commentary surrounding this case?

Firstly, you can't investigate what's said online. Secondly, you look at those blogs and most of it is speculative, uninformed and, occasionally, ridiculous.

But did you keep an eye on it in case someone came up with a possible lead or sensible theory, or did you see it as nonsense and a distraction?

The latter. I think it was Steven Mosher who said he knew who it was, or had a theory, at least. Maybe he does. Maybe he doesn't. Where does that take you? And is he likely to tell the police? The difference between the police and, say, journalists, is that we won't embark on a number of lines of enquiry because, ultimately, you can see that in terms of getting to where we need to get to - which is beyond reasonable doubt - it's not going to get you there. The fact that things are "interesting" is not always enough.

If I'm reading this correctly, the police didn't even ask Mosher about his ideas. Given that he has written a book about Climategate, this is rather surprising. I would have thought it was worth the effort of an email.

Models, data and the Arctic

Updated on Mar 12, 2012 by Bishop Hill

While I was at the Met Office the other day, I had a very interesting presentation from Jeff Knight, who IIRC runs the season-to-decadal forecasting unit there. Jeff's talk included discussion of a paper that Lucia had looked here. Lucia's comments are, as always, very interesting and address a range of concerns that I'm not going to touch on here. The paper itself is here.

The headline image of Jeff's talk was what the Met Office refers to as "the Celery Stick" graph, which assesses the range of model predictions against data:

Click to read more ...

Mosher's story

Is up at BigJournalism.

Whodunnit? He isn't saying:

Several days before the Climategate files were made public, Mosher says he had been given the files from an undisclosed source. “[The] file came to me in the form of a CD, and I was asked by people to take a look at it and give my opinion whether it was a hoax or not.”

How did Mosher get the Climategate files?

New revelations of the circumstances surrounding the escape of the climategate emails and data seem imminent. Patrick Courrielche has a three part article, the second part of of which has just been published. Taking us through how some of the key climate bloggers were informed of the whereabouts of the files, and how they were at first missed, he then leaves us with this devastating cliffhanger...

As anyone who really researches Climategate will learn, the name Steven Mosher continues to pop up. When the story broke, it was Mosher who drew attention to the comment at the Air Vent. He was also the man that alerted Lucia of The Blackboard blog to the files. And he was the first to alert followers of ClimateAudit with a series of posts that included some of the emails.

Why was Steven Mosher so ubiquitous when it came to the breaking of the Climategate story? Because Steven Mosher had the files several days before they reached the internet.