Oxburgh's undisclosed interest

The House of Lords Commissioner for Standards has issued his report on the conduct of Lord Oxburgh, the latter having been the subject of a complaint from BH regular Don Keiller. Although several allegations were made, the commissioner decided that only one was part of his remit, namely Oxburgh's failure to disclose the fact that he was an advisor to a renewable energy investment fund called the Real Energy Asset Company. Here are the findings:

I am satisfied that Lord Oxburgh's role as an adviser to the RAEF would be thought by a reasonable member of the public to be a relevant interest for the purposes of the Code of Conduct. The responsibilities of the advisory board quoted above make membership of it akin to the offices and bodies required to be registered under category 10 of the Guide to the Code of Conduct (paragraph 79). Accordingly, I am of the view that he should have registered his membership of the advisory board in the Register of Lords' Interests and that he breached the Code of Conduct by not doing so.

Lord Oxburgh has been candid and cooperative throughout my investigation. I am satisfied that the relationship between him and the RAEF was imprecise. Lord Oxburgh was surprised to learn that his association with the RAEF had been publicised on the organisation's website. Lord Oxburgh took prompt action to disassociate himself from the RAEF (see appendix E) and has demonstrated a clear desire to uphold the standards of the House and to avoid any embarrassment. Thus, I was content to agree remedial action with him. Lord Oxburgh has "put the record straight" by ending his connection with the RAEF and has written to the chairman of the Sub-Committee on Lords' Conduct (appendix F) apologising unreservedly for not being more careful and for giving rise to the complaint. I suggest that no further action need be taken.

Oxburgh still spinning

Lord Oxburgh was interviewed on Australian radio the other day (H/T Australian Climate Madness), discussing global warming science and Climategate.

The interviewer is very impressed that an oil industry man is so convinced of AGW. He also seems well informed about Oxburgh's advisory role to banks and governments. Strangely, however, he doesn't seem to have picked up that Oxburgh is heavily involved in the renewables industry.

Funny that.

Politicians cause another food crisis

The drought in America has had predictable knock-on effects on expectations of this year's harvest. There is certainly a sense of panic in the FT's report (H/T RP Jr):

The world is facing a new food crisis as the worst US drought in more than 50 years pushes agricultural commodity prices to record highs.

Corn and soyabean prices surged to record highs on Thursday, surpassing the peaks of the 2007-08 crisis that sparked food riots in more than 30 countries. Wheat prices are not yet at record levels but have rallied more than 50 per cent in five weeks, exceeding prices reached in the wake of Russia’s 2010 export ban.

Click to read more ...

'Ello, 'ello, 'ello

From Scottish Sceptic:

So, it is with deep regret that I feel I have:

• Informed the Norfolk police of a likely crime at the UEA.
• Asked my MP (Jo Swinson) to inform the appropriate parliamentary authorities that they appear to have been lied to.
• Written to Sir Muir Russell (by way of the judicial appointments board) making him aware of these allegations.
• Initiated a complaint with the UK civil service against Sir John Beddington.

Interesting. Particularly the first point. I wonder what crime is alleged?

Cicerone on Climategate

Ralph Cicerone is best known to readers here as the man who diverted the NAS panel away from what they had been asked to look at onto areas that were more congenial. He has now shown up again in an article about the state of climate science at the Atlantic. He seems be presenting an, ahem, mistaken view of what the Climategate inquiries looked at.

“The science at East Anglia was fine,” Cicerone says. “But I think [the East Anglia scientists] were just angry. They were too poorly equipped, scruffy, and informal an outfit to show everyone all their data all the time. On the scientific consensus, there’s no impact at all—although on public opinion there was an impact.”

What did Fox know?

This appears to have been the view of at least some attendees at the annual conference of the World Conference of Science Journalists, held this year in Doha. Fiona Fox reports a conference session set up to discuss the role of the science media centres, with Connie St Louis (chairman of the Association of British Science Writers) invited to assume the role of critic-in-chief. 

Connie took on her role as critic enthusiastically and told the audience that the SMCs are actively encouraging the trends towards lazy 'copy and paste' journalism, are becoming too powerful and are vulnerable to being hijacked by maverick scientists, campaigners and funders alike. Connie told us that she teaches her students to do real journalism - to 'dig out' original stories, ask the tough questions to mainstream scientists and to keep a distance between themselves and the scientists they report.

This seems exactly right to me but in many ways St Louis' criticisms don't go far enough. The blogosphere has been diligently investigating climate science and asking those "tough questions" of climatologists and yet has been completely ignored by the Science Media Centre.

At times the centre has gone further, adopting the role of spin doctor on behalf of mainstream science. Its reaction to the Oxburgh report is a case in point, with the centre seeking reactions from Martin Rees and Brian Hoskins, both of whom had helped to arrange inquiry (or whitewash if you prefer). No mention was made of their involvement, however. This then raises the uncomfortable question of whether the SMC is so close to the scientific establishment that it is actively involved in covering up the misdeeds of scientists or whether it is was just blind to the possibilities. Did Fox know of the involvement of Rees and Hoskins in setting up the inquiry or was she kept in the dark?

I will write and ask.

(Incidentally, is it just me that sees scientifically literate people meeting in Doha for navel gazing purposes as strong confirmation of the suggestion that well educated folk are unconvinced by the idea of catastrophic manmade global warming?)

Antarctic fox

I think I've mentioned that there was a certain amount of fraternisation across party lines at the reception after the Cambridge Conference. Josh and I had a nice chat to Dr Emily Shuckburgh, who is works at the British Antarctic Survey as well as being a scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Since that time we've exchanged a few emails and, with my recent blog posts touching on the issue of ocean heat mixing, Dr Shuckburgh thought one of her video diary entries from the Southern Ocean might be of interest.

Click to read more ...

Childish games from UEA

On Monday, the deadline passed for a request I had made for financial information relating to the Climategate inquiries. This was for (1) a report, at invoice level, of monies expended re the Climategate inquiries and (2) Copies of invoices and other documentation to go with them.

I chased the university today and received a response as follows:

...it has come to my attention that, in order to provide a response as requested to question 2 of your request, the amount of time and money required to locate and extract the requested information will exceed the statutory appropriate limit as mandated in section 12(1) of the Act and described in the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004. Providing a response to this question alone would likely exceed the appropriate limit. However, pursuant to s.16 of the Act, I would ask whether you would be satisfied with just a response to question 1 of your request? We anticipate that we could provide a response to that question within the statutory appropriate limit.

So, after the deadline passes, they ask for clarification. They claim in their letter that this allows them to restart the clock, but unfortunately they forgot to tell me that within the deadline, so they breached the law anyway - you know, the one they made a formal undertaking to comply with.

I've asked for the part 1 - the invoice listing - immediately, and will assess what to do after that.

Diary date for Cambridge

Readers in the Cambridge area may be interested in this meeting, which features two familiar names, in the shape of Lord Oxburgh and Mike Kelly. Lord O is described as

...well known for his work as a public advocate in both academia and the business world in addressing the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and develop alternative energy sources.

Just the man to run an inquiry into allegations of misconduct against climate scientists then.

The subject of the meeting is the energy gap:

The UK Government has a Herculean task – in both maintaining electricity supplies against obsolescent generating capacity, and in meeting very challenging carbon reduction targets, and moreover in achieving this through market mechanisms.

I wonder if Lord O will be arguing for extensive investment in wind power?

Sir John B and the IPCC

As readers no doubt know, I have previously obtained a great deal of Sir John Beddington's correspondence around the Climategate affair. As evidence of Sir John's involvement in setting up the whitewashes grows, I started to wonder about the information that Sir John's office had said they had withheld for one reason or another. In particular I wondered what was covered by this:

* various internal advice from Government Office for Science and other officials to Sir John regarding the UEA incident and the establishment of the independent reviews, and advising on aspects of the handling of this from the viewpoint of the Government and his personal role.

Since there is a presumption in favour of disclosure, I decided to appeal the decision to withhold and I have now received some further information.

Click to read more ...

Oxburgh's Eleven in the reponse

Sir John Beddington admits that the multiproxy studies, which had were central to the Climategate allegations, were not examined by the Oxburgh panel. Instead they looked at a list of papers chosen by UEA itself, some of which were so obscure that even CRU's most ardent critics had never heard of them.

In our view, the debate about the 11 publications examined by the Scientific Assessment Panel (SAP) is frustrating. While there is no doubt that the papers chosen were central to CRU’s work and went to the heart of the criticisms directed at CRU, the allegations that certain areas of climate science such as key multiproxy temperature reconstructions were purposely overlooked could have been disregarded if the SAP had set out its process of selection in a more transparent manner. (Paragraph 49)

What, then can one say about his concluding remarks?

We note the Committee’s conclusion that the selection of papers examined by the SAP was representative of the work of CRU in all areas in which allegations had been made. We note that once again the primary concern of the Committee related to transparency and communication—in this case with regard to the process for selecting the sample of papers
considered by the SAP—rather than any conscious decision to purposely overlook certain  areas of work.

So to review: Sir John persuades Lord Oxburgh to head the panel despite Lord O having a conflict of interest. Lord O misleads public, parliament and government about the nature of his review. Lord O fails to look at the most criticised papers, having accepted a list proposed by the people he's supposed to be investigating. Sir John congratulates Lord O on having played a blinder. Sir John notes that Lord O has misled everyone and failed to look at the papers everyone is upset about and says it doesn't matter. Sir John says that CRU's science is still sound.

OK...?

Sir John responds

The "government" has responded to the Science and Technology Committee's report into the UEA inquiries.

After two independent reviews, and two reviews by the Science and Technology Committee, we find no evidence to question the scientific basis of human influence on the climate.

We note that this report from the Committee makes recommendations aimed at strengthening the transparency of scientific research, and that the principle of transparency is one to which the Government is fundamentally committed.

Which I guess is pretty much as expected.

The report was apparently prepared by the Government Office for Science - Sir John Beddington's crowd - with input from various other ministries. One wonders what input the government actually had, apart from applying a signature to the document in question.

I'll take a look at the report in more detail in a moment, but first I want to say something about Sir John's role in the Climategate affair. We know that the first person UEA's Trevor Davies wrote to when the story broke was Sir John. We know that Sir John pushed Lord Oxburgh, conflict of interest and all, to stand as chairman of the scientific inquiry, despite the noble lord's objections. We know that on completion of that inquiry, Sir John wrote to congratulate Lord Oxburgh, saying that all agreed that he had "played a blinder". We also know that Sir John was pivotal in getting the Russell panel to spend a lot of time on the peripheral issue of the surface temperature records.

And now he is personally responsible for putting together the government's response? And he tells us that there is no evidence that the scientific conclusions on the IPCC are undermined?

Are we expected to take this seriously?

Echoes of Oxburgh

Nick Cohen in the Guardian writes about the scandal of the London School of Economics' acceptance of funding from the Gaddafi regime and the questions that are being asked over its awarding of a degree to the Libyan leader's son. There is an interesting twist though:

The university has appointed Lord Woolf – a retired lord chief justice, no less – to investigate Giddens, Brahimi and their colleagues. He will find out what happened to the hundreds of thousands of pounds the university took from Gaddafi's son, Saif, and whether it was in return for a Phd and academic support for his crime family's rule of Libya. The "independent inquiry" will establish the "full facts", the university says, as it drops heavy hints that it is time to "move on".

Willing though the amnesiac media always are to jump to the next scandal, this story isn't over yet. No one outside the LSE has noticed that Lord Woolf may face a conflict of interest. Some would argue that if he were still a judge in a court of law, he would have to tell the parties to a case that they had the right to ask him to stand down.

Somebody remind me how the Guardian dealt with the appointment of Oxburgh to deal with the UEA inquiry...

Beddington on warpath

The sight of a government chief scientific officer on the warpath is not a pretty one. Sir John Beddington, for it is he, is all a-quiver, enraged with the antics of pseudoscientists of all complexions:

We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of racism. We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of people who [are] anti-homosexuality... We are not—and I genuinely think we should think about how we do this—grossly intolerant of pseudo-science, the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method."

"One way is to be completely intolerant of this nonsense," he said. "That we don't kind of shrug it off. We don't say: ‘oh, it's the media’ or ‘oh they would say that wouldn’t they?’ I think we really need, as a scientific community—and this is a very important scientific community—to think about how we do it."

Now, we sceptics have been mightily concerned about cherrypicking. Indeed, we raised the issue with several of the Climategate inquiries. Of the investigations into Jones et al, it was the Oxburgh inquiry, that of course had the most reason to investigate the question of cherrypicking at the Climatic Research Unit: who can forget the selection of proxy series for Osborn and Briffa, for example? That was certainly one that raised a few eyebrows.

But as we know, Lord Oxburgh and his panel decided not to look at this paper and their report is silent on the question of cherrypicking.

And how did Sir John Beddington react? I'm sure readers here remember that he wrote to Lord Oxburgh telling him that he had "played a blinder". Perhaps being inside a university gives you some kind of immunity from Sir John's wrath.

GLOBEspeak

Ellee Seymour has had a chat with Lord Deben, the politician formerly known as John Gummer, and who, if you go a little further back, was called John Selwyn Gummer.

Lord Deben is now the head of GLOBE International, the green legislators organisation. Given the number of GLOBE's members who have come to the attention of the constabulary, it's a wonder that anyone would want the role.

The report is, well, pretty toe-curling.