That break-in

There are reports today that there has been a break-in at the offices of global warming scientist Andrew Weaver.

In one incident, an old computer was stolen and papers were disturbed. In addition, individuals have attempted to impersonate technicians in a bid to access data from his office.

Do you know what I find odd? In none of the reports is there any mention of when these alleged break-ins happened and there are no statements from the police either.

Hmmmm....

Perhaps someone should contact the police in Victoria, Canada, to see how their investigation is coming along.

Update on Dec 7, 2009 by Bishop Hill

Update: Lucia in the comments says the breakin appears to have been last year.  Clearly a conspiracy then.

Another journalist threatened

In the comments to an earlier thread, this:

I am a journalist and have been "warned", in a manner similar to the one posted, by a social economics professor.

The "offence" was a summary of Lord Monckton's opinion that AGW is diverting resources, causing food price hikes and adds to human misery.

The threat was that the mere reporting of information would be taken as a direct adoption of Monckton's views and the writer and the magazine would be seen as oil industry shills. The prof threatened by phone but refused the invite to write his own two page response in the form of an article, not just in the letters page.

My temper is very elastic, but not infinite. Having recycled (certifiably) my last car in March 2000 and being a 100 per cent bike commuter ever since, I got pissed at being called an oil industry shill.

The lesson- you will be surprised how quickly these people slink back into the darkness when told unequivocally to bugger off. They are also very vulnerable to humor, probably because they are humorless themselves.

I've made a minor change in the punctuation to the first sentence to clarify the meaning.

On a lighter note..

Via a reader, who found it here.

Dig for victory

Deltoid has picked up on my article about Roger Harrabin's response to the Jo Abbess affair. He says I'm accusing Harrabin of lying. What I said was I'm not convinced by his arguments, which is not the same thing. At the moment, I'm reserving judgement. As Mr Deltoid says, it is possible that Roger H received an email from the WMO in the half hour during which he made such an astonishing volte-face, but IMHO it's a tad unlikely.

I tried to ask Roger to publish the WMO correspondence via a comment on the Editors Blog thread, but it doesn't seem to be accepting any input at the moment. So to shortcut the process I've sent in a Freedom of Information request to the BBC to get all the correspondence between them and the WMO on this article.

Let's see what happens. 

Harrabin speaks!

Roger Harrabin has finally responded to the Jo Abbess furore. Writing on the BBC News Editors Blog he claims, incredibly, that the changes were not made in response to Jo Abbess at all.

[After publishing the article I] received suggestions that the article should offer more background. The WMO wanted to emphasise M. Jarraud’s view that a slight temperature decrease in 2008 compared with 2007 should not be misinterpreted as evidence of a general cooling. Some of the feedback seemed helpful so we altered and expanded the report - improving it substantially for the general reader, in my view.

Among my e-mail exchanges was one with an environmental campaigner who published our e-mails implying that we had changed our article as a result of her threat to publicly criticise our report. We didn’t change it for that reason. We changed it to improve the piece. But we’ve stirred the wrath of some of our readers as a result.

So we are asked to believe that between 10:57 am, when Roger was still arguing that the article should be left in its orginal form, and 11:28 am when he wrote to ask whether his changes were acceptable, he had suddenly changed his mind on the basis of new correspondence he had received from, among others, the WMO.

Colour me unconvinced.

I've left a comment on the BBC thread to ask if they will publish the WMO correspondence. At the moment, it doesn't seem to be accepting comments though. 

Colour me unsurprised.

Roger also responds to the argument that he should have made the changes to the story clear within the revised text. (You will remember that he failed even to change the timestamp, which would appear to be contrary to BBC policy). He claims, again apparently with a straight face, that the changes were minor and not worthy of note. By way of verifying this claim, let's just remind ourselves of the change which I highlighted in my earlier post:

Old version

This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory. But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend - and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years.

New version 

But this year's temperatures would still be way above the average - and we would soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of global warming  induced by greenhouse gases.

Roger, please stop digging.

Remember this?

I'd forgotten this post which I wrote about Roger Harrabin last year. For those who missed it, here again is a leaked email by Mr H in which he outlines his tactics on reporting climate change.

In any future reporting of Gore we should be careful not to suggest that the High Court says Gore was wrong on climate.......

We might say something like: "Al Gore whose film was judged by the High Court to have used some debatable science" or "Al Gore whose film was judged in the High Court to be controversial in parts".

The key is to avoid suggesting that the judge disagreed with the main climate change thesis.

Ah yes, impartiality is all at the BBC. 

Jo Abbess's fifteen minutes of fame

The Harrabin/Abbess story continues to reverberate. It's now crossed the Atlantic and has been picked up by Instapundit and a TV programme called the Glen Beck show, as well as a host of online commentators.

There's an interesting point at towards the end, where Beck reveals that the BBC is refusing to comment on the story, which I suppose is entirely understandable, if not forgiveable.

Benny Peiser's CCNet email newsletter is still digging away at the story too (and even includes my story about the BBC stealth editing guidelines as its headline - thanks for the mention!).  

Meanwhile Peter Risdon has a whole new BBC climate story, with environment correspondent Richard Black lining up scientists to criticise Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark's cosmic ray theory of climate change, but failing to include Svensmark's reponse (if he asked for one at all). And intriguingly, Black has demanded that all of his correspondence with Risdon be kept confidential. What can he possibly have said?

More on Jo Abbess

A commenter on the previous post suggests that climate activist Jo Abbess is a "fascist bitch". I don't think so, actually. If you Google her name she makes some revealing contributions to a thread on Comment is Free which show that she is something much less sinister.

Like this one 

The new thinking has to be something like this :-
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
The only way we make it out of here alive is if we believe, and act as if
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies.

 Or this one

Love, children, love. It's not *all* you need, but it's a start 

I mean, far out man! But is our Jo a complete space cadet or has she got some more earth-bound opinions? Of course she has - she does political opinion too. Here's her opinions on Tony Blair:

he is in reality a sensitive, spiritual family man, navigating the tightrope of public presence with a skill that should make you marvel. he hit the water running, remember.

One can but wonder what it was that our Jo hit, but I think we can be sure that it's not the water. It seems plain to me that "misguided space cadet" is probably a better description than "fascist bitch".

All the same, it's a remarkable set of comments, revealing of the deep, incisive intelligence that was able to get the logical colossus that is the BBC's Roger Harrabin to roll over and beg to have his tummy tickled. 

Harrabin gotcha!

My favourite BBC environment correspondent, Roger Harrabin, seems to have been caught napping. A green activist called Jo Abbess wrote an email to Harrabin asking him to change an article he wrote to make it more acceptable to green opinion. Harrabin promptly wrote back to see if his changes were acceptable to her! Abbess doesn't seem to be the sharpest tool in the box, because she promptly posted the correspondence up on a website. The full correspondence is here.

Click to read more ...

A new logical fallacy?

Via In the Green, this quote from the Baltimore Sun on the subject of the recent global warming sceptics conference in New York.

How many scientists doubt global warming? It's looking like it could be about 20 -- compared to the more than 2,500 globally who have reached the conclusion that climate change is really happening. That's pretty strong evidence of a scientific consensus. "The meeting was largely framed around science, but after the luncheon, when an organizer made an announcement asking all of the scientists in the large hall to move to the front for a group picture, 19 men did so," 

This is clearly a nonsense. They are claiming that the sample is also the total of the population! I'm sure there must be a posh latin name for this fallacy, but having leafed through Madsen Pirie's "How to win every argument", I can't find it. Have I discovered a fallacy so daft that nobody has actually ever tried it before? Has the Baltimore Sun just plumbed a new depth in the annals of silliness?

We need to know. 

Why you should not buy newspapers or watch TV news

The reason is that they only tell you what they think you should hear.

Professor Philip Stott links to Melanie Phillips' round up of the recent cold weather around the globe. Pretty much all of it has gone unreported elsewhere. 

End of the consensus

Roger Pielke Snr has posted up the results of a survey into the opinions of bona fide climate scientists into the whole phenomenon of global warming. The actual work was performed by Fergus Brown, with the supervising team including both mainstream and more sceptical scientists.

The results were pretty much as I'd expected, and therefore seem to have been a surprise to some on the more mainstream side of the argument.

1. The largest group of respondents (45-50%) concur with the IPCC perspective as given in the 2007 Report.

2. A significant minority (15-20%), however, conclude that the IPCC understated the seriousness of the threat from human additions of CO₂ .

3. A significant minority (15-20%), in contrast, conclude that the IPCC overstated the role of human additions of CO₂  relative to other climate forcings.

4. Almost all respondents (at least 97%) conclude that the human addition of CO₂  into the atmosphere is an important component of the climate system and has contributed to some extent in recent observed global average warming.

There is a follow up thread on Fergus Brown's blog here.   

Alex Singleton gets it spectacularly wrong

Alex Singleton of the Globalisation Institute is a sensible chap and resides very much on the side of the angels. Unfortunately in his article at the Graun today he gets it spectacularly wrong.

His thesis for the day is that green taxes won't work, and so we should introduce compulsory carbon offsetting.

We should scrap green taxes on flying and replace them with compulsory carbon offsetting. Like a tax, offsetting would add to the price of a journey. The difference would be that the money would go to actually improve the environment.

And he's quite definite about the kind of offsetting schemes he want to see.

It is certainly true that some carbon offsetting schemes are dubious. One involves discouraging the use of labour-saving diesel water pumps in developing countries and getting people to use back-breaking pedal-pumps, which were banned in British prisons a century ago. We should not allow some ill-conceived options to put us off more worthwhile schemes, such as planting trees.

Which is where he has got it wrong.

Anthropogenic global warming is alleged to be happening because carbon, which was formerly locked away in the form of oil, coal and gas, has been released into the atmosphere. Growing trees is going to have little or no effect on the situation,  because trees have a finite life cycle and when they die they just release carbon back into the atmosphere.

As Britain's great chronicler of trees and woodland, Oliver Rackham, has said of carbon offsetting:

Telling people to plant more trees is like telling them to drink more water to keep down rising sea levels.

Roger Harrabin

The Nameless One, writing at the Devil's Kitchen, notes with his customary gusto, a leaked BBC email which shows BBC environment reporter Roger Harrabin's attempts to develop a party line on the "Al Gore made it up" court ruling. (Well, it was words to that effect anyway). Harrabin's tactics for saving Gore's face are these:

In any future reporting of Gore we should be careful not to suggest that the High Court says Gore was wrong on climate.......

We might say something like: "Al Gore whose film was judged by the High Court to have used some debatable science" or "Al Gore whose film was judged in the High Court to be controversial in parts".

The key is to avoid suggesting that the judge disagreed with the main climate change thesis.

Attentive readers will remember that, according to Head of BBC TV news Peter Horrocks, that the BBC has no line on climate change. What the leaking of the memo shows is that either Horrocks is a liar or Harrabin is attemping to create an official line in contravention of BBC policy. I wonder which one of them will be disciplined?

As happens, I was looking into Harrabin myself when I read DK's story. According to his BBC website profile he is co-director or something called the Cambridge Environment and Media Programme, which is part-funded by the BBC (the rest of the funding being from private sources - I wonder who?). Apparently this organisation, which doesn't seem to have a website, tries to find ways to engage the media in debates on sustainable development.  

Now is it just me, or does it seem a bit odd that the BBC is using public money to persuade itself to engage in debate on environmental issues? Couldn't it just, you know, engage?

Doesn't it seem stranger still that the loot is being sent to an organisation run by one of its own employees? This seems to reverse the normal employer/employee relationship. Shouldn't the higher-ups at the BBC be telling Harrabin what to do?

And isn't it yet more bizarre that it is trying to promote inclusion of particular issues in the news agenda - an overtly political act if ever there was one? The BBC, remember, has no line on climate change (and presumably the whole question of environmentalism too). Is the BBC actually funding a campaign to promote environmentalism on the airwaves?

I don't know about you, but I smell fish.

Irony alive and well at the BBC

On the BBC's climate change portal at the moment, the main stories include

• Calls to strengthen the EU emissions trading scheme for airlines
• Calls to encourage homes to go green
• A report that the British are addicted to cheap flights
• A report that the risk of flooding due to climate change has been underestimated
• A conference to discuss tackling climate change
• Increases in forest fires due to climate change
• A report that APEC has muddied the climate change waters
• A way to track your carbon emissions through your phone
• A report that winter sports threaten mountain ecosystems

and lastly, and surely with tongue firmly in cheek, an entry from the Editors blog in which Head of TV news, Peter Horrocks says that the BBC has no line on climate change.

You couldn't make it up.