Open access and gatekeeping

Nature is to start up an open-access scientific journal. The new journal, to be called Scientific Reports, will cover biology, chemistry, the earth sciences and physics.

The story, in the Times Higher Education Supplement, concentrates on the implications for subscription-based journals, but it is interesting also to consider whether this will have any effect on attempts to keep sceptics out of the scientific literature.

Like the Public Library of Science's PLoS ONE journal, Scientific Reports will be entirely open access and will publish every submission deemed by a faster peer-review process to be technologically sound - including those reporting useful negative results.

One wonders if a "faster" peer-review process, 88 pages of peer review correspondence can simply be replaced with the word "No".

Focus magazine on sceptics

P Gosselin reports on a sceptic friendly article in the German Focus magazine, covering the recent EIKE conference of sceptics.

The story looks in-depth at the climate conference and the overall atmosphere for skeptics in Germany, but does it fairly, something we are not at all accustomed to from the rest of the hostile media here in the Vaterland.

Damian on lunatics

Damian Carrington is discussing violence over at the GuardianEco blog, inspired (if that is the right word)  by events in Arizona. His point is that there are lots of threats of violence around the fringes of the climate debate, and he refers to emails that were apparently sent to Stephen Schneider and Leo Hickman.

Damian is right of course, but I do wonder if he is going to raise the subject of George Monbiot too, the great man having opined thusly?

...every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.

As Damian puts it,

So it's clear that even in issues such as climate change there is an active fringe of people deploying violent rhetoric and hate mail against those with whom they disagree. Could that tip the balance between thought and action in the mind of an unstable individual? It's a worryingly plausible thought.

I find it hard to disagree.

Update on Jan 14, 2011 by Bishop Hill

On second thoughts, I don't think I've got this quite right. See update here.

The Heretic

The Guardian has an interesting article about two new shows about to open in London's West End.

The National Theatre's Greenland will attempt to give an overview of the dangers posed by climate change and will broadly support the idea, shared by the vast majority of scientists, that global warming is occurring because humans have been pumping more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. By contrast, The Heretic, at the Royal Court, will provide support for those who deny mankind is causing climate change.

The Heretic sounds quite interesting...

The play, by Richard Bean – whose work includes the National's English People Very Nice – is described as a black comedy by the Royal Court, though it refused to discuss the show with the Observer. "The Heretic obviously discusses global warming and climate change but it's much more of a discussion/debate as to what it means to be a scientist and the subject of empiricism," said a spokesman.

The show has a home page here, although I'm not sure they have quite the right visuals to go with it.

A smear piece

The main target of Adrian Kelleher's article in Ireland's Village magazine appears to be Richard Tol, with Ian Plimer referred to as a "fraud" for good measure.

Climate skeptic shop

Slightly late for Christmas, but once you get the urge to start spending in the new year,  Michael Cejnar's Climate Skeptic Shop looks like the perfect place to get equipped with the look of the moment.

New New Zealand temperature records - no warming

Via Scoop, sceptics in New Zealand have persuaded the country's weather bureau to revise their temperature records.

NIWA has abandoned the official national temperature record and created a new one following sustained pressure from the NZ Climate Science Coalition and the Climate Conversation Group.

Spokesman for the joint temperature project, Richard Treadgold, Convenor of the CCG, said today: “We congratulate NIWA for producing their review of the NZ temperature record — more than a year after we challenged it — and we think it’s great that NIWA have produced a graph with full details behind it.

“But we note that, after 12 months of futile attempts to persuade the public, misleading answers to questions in the Parliament from ACT and reluctant but gradual capitulation from NIWA, their relentless defence of the old temperature series has simply evaporated. They’ve finally given in, but without our efforts the faulty graph would still be there.”

Congratulations to everyone involved in this effort.  What a triumph for citizen science.

And the punchline is this:

“NIWA makes the huge admission that New Zealand has experienced hardly any warming during the last half-century. For all their talk about warming, for all their rushed invention of the “Eleven-Station Series” to prove warming, this new series shows that no warming has occurred here since about 1960.

Read the full story here.

(H/T Messenger)

More evidence of climate change

Hat tip to several readers who sent this list of questions and responses from last night's University Challenge programme.

1 Which New York City borough gives name to declaration that a scientific consensus on climate change does not exist? Queens. No, Manhattan.

2. Author of Cool It? Bjorn Lomborg, correct

3. Which former Conservative chancellor wrote An Appeal to Reason? Don't know.

Climate Resistance on Cox

There is an excellent and very thoughtful analysis of Prof Brian Cox's RTS lecture over at Climate Resistance.

Brian Cox is a great science communicator. That is to say, he makes very effective TV programmes, which do not condescend, and do much to encourage an interest in science. But there is surely science as process, and there’s ‘science’ as an institution. It’s not clear which one Cox – who gave this year’s Royal Television Society Huw Wheldon Lecture –  was speaking for. His lecture, given the title, ‘Science: a challenge to TV Orthodoxy’ was disappointing given his previous arguments for scientific research, and didn’t challenge orthodoxy as much as it reproduced it, almost entirely uncritically.

Read the whole thing.

Holland on TV

David Holland mentioned that he may appear on BBC Ten o'clock News tonight, talking about the Russell review. His appearance appears to be a backup for the Beeb, to fill a gap if nothing interesting comes out of Cancun. So it may not happen.

Climate models hopelessly simplistic

P Gosselin has an interesting story about an Austrian meteorologist who is completely underwhelmed by the reliability of climate models. As Karsten Brandt apparently puts it:

It is simply nonsense. These prognoses are not worth the paper they’re printed on. The Gulf Stream has an impact on European weather that is 100 times larger than CO2.”

Read the whole thing.

WSJTV on the AGU balance

The American Geophysical Union is putting together a bank of scientists to advise journalists on global warming. Anne Jolis of the Wall Street Journal wonders why it doesn't appear to include any sceptics.

German sceptic conference

EIKE, the organisation for sceptics in Germany, is organising a conference in Berlin on 3-4 December 2010, to coincide with the global knees-up in Cancun. The meeting will be held in English and German, with simultaneous translation. Confirmed speakers include Carter, Plimer, Veizer, Singer and Svensmark.

Details here. Registration here.

Acton speaks on lunchgate

This is odd. Professor Edward Acton has made what almost appears to be an official statement on lunchgate.

Bob's reputation in Oz

The Grantham Institute should take a close look at their Director of Communications, Bob Ward. In the last few weeks in Australia he has been complicit in so many untruths that it should have a flow-on consequence for them in their dealings with the media.

So says Graham Young, an Australian journalist writing in an article entitled Why you should be careful dealing with Bob Ward, Director of Communications for the Grantham Institute.

I know what he means. The whole piece is well worth a read, with Ward seemingly claiming on TV  that he has written a "systematic analysis" of sceptic papers, then failing to respond to requests to supply this analysis to Young, and then changing his story, claiming that he had only written an analysis of a paper by Bob Carter.

Amazingly Ward then upped the ante by writing a letter to the Australian saying that Young had falsely accused him of refusing to supply the paper. As Young notes, this was an extraordinary step, as the correspondence between them was to hand, so that Ward's story was readily shown to be untrue.

Simply astonishing.