Fred Pearce on peer review

Fred Pearce again, this time looking at Hockey Team efforts to undermine peer review, and making a much better fist of it than he did of the Hockey Stick.

I found it interesting that he'd managed to speak to James Saiers, the editor of McIntyre and McKitrick's submission to GRL and who was the subject of a Hockey Team plot to oust him. I had tried to make contact with Saiers myself, soon after Climategate broke, but unfortunately got no response. Pearce has him repeating his earlier assertions that his departure from GRL was unconnected with any pressure from outside agencies, and was simply due to his term of office as editor coming to an end. This much is known already. The more interesting question, and the one I had wanted Saiers to respond to is how he had come to be replaced as editor by the much more hostile Jay Famiglietti, an event shrouded in secrecy since Famiglietti only agreed to explain it to McIntyre and McKitrick off the record.

Still, Pearce is new to questioning climate science, and he hasn't made a bad fist of this story.

Red tops move in on the act

They always say that when the Sun shifts its support to a new political party then political destiny is irrevocably changed. When the Conservatives lost its support at the end of the nineties their fate was sealed and they were duly swept away in the Blair landslide of 1997.

The UK's premier tabloid has a phenomenal power to change the political landscape and it is widely seen as a barometer for the way public opinion is moving. It's therefore interesting to see not only the "currant bun" but also its close, left-wing rival the Mirror moving in for the kill. The Mirror picks up on Raj Pachauri's travel arrangements, describing him variously as "authoritarian" and "hypocritical". The Sun, in the meantime says that global warming is a con.

It's not looking good.

WWF - another fake charity

John Rosenthal has taken a long hard look at where WWF gets its funding. Afficionados of the Fake Charities projects will not be surprised to learn that they huge swathes of their income is derived from the EU.

According to European Commission data, WWF was awarded nearly €9 million in EU support in 2008 alone. In 2007, the figure was over €7.5 million. Most of this support came in the form of ostensibly project-linked grants to WWF-International or its national affiliates.

David Holland on BBC news

UK readers can see David Holland interviewed on the BBC news here. The interview was moderately inconsequential IMHO, although David handled himself very well.

Also in the letters pages of the Times are old friends Bob Ward, the warmist PR man at Lord Stern's Grantham Institute, and Don Keiller, a sceptic academic.

Update on Jan 28, 2010 by Bishop Hill

The Channel Four report on the issue can be seen here on their internet TV viewer (which ought to be called the FourPlayer, but is regrettably known as Channel4OD). Their report is clearly from a green perspective, but does at least cheer us all up with a snippet from the Hide the Decline video.

Choice quote from Bob Ward "if you are less than transparent then people think you might be hiding something". To which one is tempted to respond that if you say you are hiding something, people might also conclude that you are hiding something. Like a decline for example.

BBC impartiality

The BBC's flagship Today programme featured an environmentalist presenter, John Humphrys, interviewing an environmentalist, Tony Juniper and an activist environmental scientist, Mike Hulme.

Nobody to put the sceptic point of view.

Again.

Andrew Neil on gates

Andrew Neil is emerging as the voice of scepticism within the BBC. Twenty years or more after the global warming debate began, it's certainly nice to see one's opinions finally recognised as legitimate. He hits hard at the IPCC and has some nice words for the blogosphere too.

The bloggers, too easily dismissed in the past, have set the pace with some real scoops -- and some of the mainstream media is now rushing to catch up.

Unsinkable

Josh

Bishop Hill reader Josh send this cartoon to enliven my site (some of you may already have seen it at SPPI blog).

An interesting take on a climate poll

The Von Storch & Bray annual poll of opinion among climatologists is always interesting. Here's an new and interesting take on it by Joseph Bast:

Thirty-five percent [of climatologists] responded “very much” when asked the following question: “How convinced are you that most of recent or near future climate change is, or will be, a result of anthropogenic causes?” On a scale from 1 to 7, with 1 being “not at all” and 7 being “very much,” 83 percent answered 5, 6, or 7. Only 1 percent said “not at all” and only 11 percent answered 1, 2, or 3. Answers to the question “How convinced are you that climate change poses a very serious and dangerous threat to humanity?” were similar.

However, the Bray and von Storch survey also reveals that very few of these scientists trust climate models — which form the basis of claims that human activity could have a dangerous effect on the global climate. Fewer than 3 or 4 percent said they “strongly agree” that computer models produce reliable predictions of future temperatures, precipitation, or other weather events. More scientists rated climate models “very poor” than “very good” on a long list of important matters, including the ability to model temperatures, precipitation, sea level, and extreme weather events.

Given that the reliability of the predictions from climate models is the chief evidence for the global warming hypothesis, this is, as Bast notes, a very surprising set of opinions for climatologists to hold.

BBC to review climate coverage - so what?

According to the Daily Mail, the BBC Trust is to review the corporation's coverage of, among other issues, climate change.

The BBC Trust today announced it would carry out the probe into the 'accuracy and impartiality' of its output in this increasingly controversial area.

The review comes after repeated criticism of the broadcaster's handling of green issues. It has been accused of acting like a cheerleader for the theory that climate change is a man-made phenomenon.

This is, frankly, a sideshow. Complaints about the BBC's handling of climate change have been brushed aside by the BBC Trust time after time. They are simply going through the motions in order to fend off complaints. No heads will roll, no changes will be made. Richard Black will continue to shut down his blog comments whenever there is a sceptic story in the air.

The only possible resolution to this problem is to close the BBC down.

Curlers thumb noses at bureaucracy

Round these 'ere parts there is much excitement over the possibility of a Grand Match, when Scottish lochs freeze over to a sufficient extent to allow for a curling tournament. There have only been three of these since the war, but the ice on some of the likely lochs are now within a whisker of the seven inches required to mount the tournament. Unfortunately, it looks like there may be too much snow sitting on the ice here at Loch Leven, but the Lake of Menteith is apparently looking good.

Meanwhile, culled from this curling blog is a rather wonderful snippet about curling in Lochmaben that tells us so much about modern Britain without even trying:

Apparently it was quite a day in Lochmaben. The ice had been checked by the local council and was 7-8 inches, and solid. However, someone phoned the police to say there were lots of people on the ice and they didn't think it was safe. Anne tells the story, "Six police officers arrived but they couldn't go on ice to warn people because of health and safety so they passed the buck to the Nith rescue who came with a rescue boat but because of heath and safety they couldn't go on ice either. So the Coast Guard arrived, lights flashing! But guess what? Because of health and safety he couldn't go on the ice either! A great day was had by all.

 

IJoC to institute new data policy

Progess is glacial, but is nevertheless in the right direction - this in today from Professor Hardaker at the Royal Meterological Society in response to my query as to how the RMS publications committee had decided to address the issue of availability of data and code.

The Scientific Publications Committee did agree that the Society should formalise its policy for all of its journals on this and that the spirit of the policy should be to make available supporting information and data where possible within the licensing and copyright rules – we think this follows best practice.  The Committee have asked me to finalise a draft policy for their approval at the next meeting.

The devil will be in the detail of course, but at first sight "supporting information and data" might well be construed as covering data, intermediate results and code. Let's hope so. It will also be interesting to see if they adopt a policy of demanding all this information up front, or if they go for the normal physical science journal approach of making information "available upon request". I hope they don't choose the latter, a sure recipe for conflict in the future, but we will have to wait and see.

Who would be in Professor Hardaker's shoes?

As the Climategate analysis starts to flow from Steve McIntyre's keyboard, it's interesting to note the theme of "climategatekeeping" emerging from the first few posts. It seems clear that there have been multiple instances of attempts to suppress or delay sceptic papers and just as many examples of warmist papers being rushed through to print on the nod. This angle to the climategate affair has been given added impetus in recent days by the extraordinary revelations of Spenser and Christy in their American Thinker article, showing how the journal editor at the International Journal of Climatology (IJoC) conspired with Hockey Team members to delay the appearance in print of a sceptic paper (Douglass et al).

IJoC, which is a journal of the Royal Meteorological Society of the UK,

Click to read more ...

Searching for Phil Jones

This was rather amusing until environmentalists started to get violent.

More evidence of gatekeeping

The news that a Russian think tank has accused the CRU of cooking the books has been doing the rounds of the internet. The other intriguing angle to this story though was further evidence of climate sceptic papers being illegitimately rejected by reviewers. Here Phil Jones reports to Mann what he has done.

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.

Now, someone has identified themselves as being the authors of one of the papers concerned. Commenting at Climate Audit, Lars Kamel says this:

One of those rejected papers about Siberian temperatures may have been by me. The time is about right. I got it rejected because of nonsense from a reviewer and the editor saw it as an attack on him when I critized the quality of the review. After that, I gave up the idea of ever getting something AGW critical published in a journal.

It will be interesting to see if Kamel's paper on CRU's handling of Siberian temperatures was valid, or if Jones rejected it simply because it disagreed with him. I wonder if we can get hold of Jones' review? The second part of Kamel's point is important though. This suggests that at least some sceptics simply gave up trying to get their views published because they knew they could not get their findings past the gatekeepers. This demonstrates that the IPCC reports can never be anything other than biased. The scientific literature does not represent the collected knowledge mankind has about the climate. It represents the collected views of part of the climatological community.

Another scientist has been speaking out on the same issue. Dutch professor, Arthur Rorsch, is making further allegations of misdeeds by climatologists. In an article entitled "Sick science" he explains how difficult it was for sceptics to get published.

"It is exactly as we feared.   If I were to submit an article from a friendly colleague who wanted to publish in a scientific journal, we would always get a rejection; without proper  argumentation. I was not the only Dutch researcher that happened to. Climate skeptics everywhere ran into brick walls.  

He describes the emails as demonstrating an intent to deceive and has this to say of the state of climatology:

This is no longer genuine science.  These are politically motivated people...it is a religion, or rather, a belief.

Update on Dec 17, 2009 by Bishop Hill

The other paper appears to be Aufhammer et al. This second paper, interestingly has some of the Climate Audit regulars cooing with appreciation of what a good study it is.

Update: Aufhammer has now commented and says it's a simple case of a good paper being rejected - bad stuff happens, in other words.  He does say that one of the original reviewers had very strong opinions against it, so I'm not convinced this takes away from the original point that much - climatologists were still trying to reject papers for invalid reasons.