No wallflower

A hydrologist calling himself Potentilla has written a joint article with TonyN at the Harmless Sky blog. It shows an example of how activist scientists, environmental groups and green journalists combine to mislead the public. This is a must-read, particularly for anyone who knows the name of Lonnie Thompson.

Chief scientist: fundamental uncertainty in climate science

The UK government's chief scientist, Sir John Beddington, is the latest rat to flee the sinking ship Climatology, with an interview in the Times in which he comes out of the closet:

The impact of global warming has been exaggerated by some scientists and there is an urgent need for more honest disclosure of the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change, according to the Government’s chief scientific adviser.

Now he tells us. If Professor Beddington really believes this, it's hard to fathom why he hasn't said so in the two years in which he's been in office. 

Professor Beddington also thinks that people should be nicer to sceptics.

Professor Beddington said that climate scientists should be less hostile to sceptics who questioned man-made global warming. He condemned scientists who refused to publish the data underpinning their reports.

Again, not a word about withholding data and code until the ship starts to go down. Where has he been?

Pincer attack?

Joe Barton, the man behind the US Senate's 2006 hearings on the Hockey Stick, has been stirring things up in Washington again:

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) is pressing Energy Secretary Steven Chu for information about department ties to the U.K. climate institute at the center of the controversy over the infamous hacked climate science emails.

Barton, the top Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) wrote to Chu Friday asking about DoE funding for projects connected to the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.

Coming so soon after the announcement of the UK Parliamentary inquiry, one can't help but wonder if the timing is entirely coincidental. Nevertheless, shedding sunlight on what has been going on is certainly no bad thing.

Source: The Hill News.

Glenn McGregor in NZ Herald

Glenn McGregor is a climatologist who is best known to sceptics from his appearances in the Climategate emails where Hockey Team members explain that he is willing to delay sceptic papers and pick "suitable reviewers" for warmist ones, in order to make life difficult for those who might question the global warming hypothesis.

McGregor made a brief appearance in the New Zealand Herald over the weekend, where he is quoted in an article about Kiwis' lack of confidence in global warming science:

Dr McGregor said if climatologists explained their research processes better, they might be able to avoid popular criticisms, such as recent accusations of scientists "fiddling" with climate records.

"When people don't understand the process they just pick up on, 'oh they've adjusted the (climate) record'," he said. "That probably creates a lot of mistrust."

Professor McGregor has been caught red-handed and nobody is going to be fooled by an argument that they are too stupid to understand.

When in a hole, one is normally best advised to stop digging.

Did NASA throw away data too?

The NASA emails are interesting, but I haven't noticed anything too scandalous, apart perhaps from this. After the initial furore over the discovery of the error in their temperature data, NASA bigwig James Hansen decides the correct response is to show that the impact of the correction is small. Unfortunately Makiko Sato, the scientist who maintains the temperature data tells him there's a problem:

On Fri, 2007-08-10 at 11:59 -0500, James Hansen wrote:

Makiko, Reto,
r am being beseiged by these (see below), The appropriate response is to show the curves for U.S. and global temperatures before and after (before and after McIntyre's correction). Makiko doubts that this is possible because the earlier result has been "thrown away", We will never live this down if we give such a statement. It must be possible to reconstruct the "before" result. Unfortunately, this needs to be done soon, as there are various writers with deadlines this afternoon. I hope that is possible -- this should have a higher priority that the
calculation that we mentioned yesterday.

Jim

By the way, I think that we should save the results of the analyses at least once per year, so we will have a record of how they change.

Oh goodness, not NASA too, I hear you cry. Surely they haven't been ditching data just like their colleagues at CRU? And it's all very well saying that results should be saved "at least once a year", but that's not much good after the bird has flown the coop.

Fortunately, Reto has better news...

From: Reto Ruedy
To: James Hansen
Cc: Makiko Sato, Reto Ruedy
Subject: Re: Fwd: FW: GISS - Truth driven vs agenda driven
Date: Frt 10 Aug 2007 13:09:56 -0400

Jim,

Nothing was thrown out ~ I made the corresponding graphs.

Reto

Well that's a relief, but one can't help but wonder if they actually found their earlier results, or if they managed to reconstruct them from scratch.

Judicial Watch obtains NASA emails

This is hot off the presses - Judicial Watch has obtained NASA emails relating to the furore over Steve McIntyre's discovery of an error in their data back in 2007. The revelation of the so-called "Y2K error" lead to a reassessment of climate history in the US, with 1934 being promoted above 20051998 as the hottest year on record.

Judicial Watch article here. The emails are here. Enjoy.

No more democracy

Ecofascism is a word that is bandied about with gay abandon by many on the sceptic side, but it may well be a term that finds greater currency in the near future. Why do I say that? Read Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr on the impatience of climatologists with the democratic process and the admiration some of them express for authoritarian forms of government.

...the times are changing. Within the broad field of climatology and climate policy one is able to discern growing concerns about the virtues of democracy... it is an inconvenient democracy, which is identified as the culprit holding back action on climate change. As Mike Hulme has noted , it can be frustrating to learn that citizens have minds of their own.

Leading climate scientists insist that humanity is at a crossroads. A continuation of present economic and political trends leads to disaster if not collapse. To create a globally sustainable way of life, we immediately need in the words of German climate scientist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a "great transformation." What exactly is meant by the statement is vague. Part, if not the heart of this great transformation is in the eyes of some climate scientists as well as other scientists part of the great debate about climate change a new political regime and forms of governance: "We need an authoritarian form of government in order to implement the scientific consensus on greenhouse gas emissions" according to the Australian scholars David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith their book The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy. The well-known climate researcher James Hansen adds resignedly and frustrated as well as vaguely, "the democratic process does not work". In The Vanishing Face of Gaia, James Lovelock emphasizes that we need to abandon democracy in order to meet the challenges of climate change head on. We are in a state of war. In order to pull the world out of its state of lethargy, the equivalent of a global warming "nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat" speech is urgently needed.

Times withdraws green adverts

New Scientist reports that The Times has withdrawn adverts claiming that climate change had caused the opening of the North-east passage. They also cancelled a second advert that claimed that the world's oceans would be denuded of fish by 2048.

The mainstream media may well be the first climate change casualties.

Update on Jan 6, 2010 by Bishop Hill

Andrew Orlowski in the comments points out that it was him that broke this story. The link to his original piece is here.

Tony N on the New Year

I thoroughly recommend the thoughtful essay by Tony N at Harmless Sky for a review of where we stand on climate change at present.

Is it actually Tata?

A happy new year to all my readers.

I awaken this morning to a mystery - who is it that's threatening Richard North and Christopher Booker? The obvious candidate is Rajendra Pachauri, who has been on the receiving end of many pointed critiques from the two men, mainly as a result of his multiple conflicts of interest.

But perhaps not. North links to this document, a photoessay about big business misbehaving in the mining industry in India. (The download is large - I've extracted the two relevant pages here). This doesn't mention Pachauri or TERI at all. The pages North refers to mention a Tata group steelworks, where the local population was moved from their homes, without compensation, to make way for the new plant, and a list of "People’s struggles against mining projects in the eastern states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand & Orissa". The latter again refers to several Tata projects.

Reading between the lines then, there appears to be a real possibility that it is Tata doing the threatening and not Pachauri.

The East Anglia publication scheme

Steve McIntyre has posted up an interesting article about the complaints made by Nature in its Climategate editorial, namely that scientists were being overwhelmed by freedom of information requests. As he points out, the actual number of requests made so far has been very small, a point reinforced by a brief perusal of WhatDoTheyKnow.com, the portal for many FoI requests to UK public bodies. Prior to Climategate, there were only ten FoI requests to UEA. This doesn't preclude there being requests made through other channels, but it does at least suggest that the problem is rather smaller in scale than Nature would have us believe.

But in many ways, this is besides the point. As well as the Freedom of Information Act, CRU information falls under the terms of the Environmental Information Regulations 2004. These require public bodies to:

(a) progressively make the information available to the public by electronic means which are easily accessible; and

(b) take reasonable steps to organize the information relevant to its functions with a view to the active and systematic dissemination to the public of the information.

As far as I can see, the University of East Anglia, in common with many other UK universities, has failed to set up the legally mandated publication scheme. In other words, the alleged burdensome level of FoI requests has only been necessary because those scientists' have been flouting the law.

A similar point is made in the comments at CA by the economist Richard Tol:

I bet that I get far fewer requests for information (2-3 a week) than my colleagues in climate science proper. I do find these requests disruptive, because it means taking your mind of the data you’re working on and focussing on data you worked on years ago. I have a simple solution for that: I post all relevant data on my website. As the data is in the public domain anyway per the various freedom of information acts that govern my work, I might as well put the data there.

So it's simple. Publish everything as you go and you not only comply with the law but you make your life simpler in the long run.

I've put in a further FoI request to East Anglia, asking what steps they have taken to ensure compliance with the terms of EIR. In the meantime, the ecowarriors at Nature might do better to direct their ire at climatologists who flout the law rather than sceptics who are forced to use FoI to unearth the information that is being withheld.

Stourton on global warming

I caught most of Edward Stourton's history of global warming on Radio 4 this morning. This seems to represent something of a shift for the BBC, moving from outright cheerleading and propaganising to something slightly more balanced. Stourton even managed to include some sceptical views (Pat Michaels and Myron Ebell) without sneering or otherwise belittling them. He also managed not to mention the Hockey Stick as far as I could tell, and one wonders whether this was significant or not.

The shocker was that he covered the Stern Report without informing the listener that Stern reinvented the subject of economics in order to get to the answer he did. Let us say charitably that this is probably a case of embarrassing incompetence on Stourton's part rather than anything more sinister. Still, it is hard to credit that an organisation with the resources of the BBC could make such an oversight.

Meanwhile, no reporting of Rajendra Pachauri's conflicts of interest (latest revelations here) from our national broadcaster. I guess there are limits to how far the BBC is willing to go.

Tool of big oil

Coincidences are funny things. Just hours after joking about my "connections" with the oil industry I got an email from Rob Schneider, the secretary of the Scottish Oil Club, wondering if I'd like to attend some of their meetings. (I always thought these approaches were meant to be accompanied by a large cheque, but what do I know?).

I've written a rather non-commital response explaining that I'm likely to be criticised if I do go, although Rob assures me that the club has as many (warmist) university types as it does sceptic oilmen. This is certainly borne out by the list of forthcoming speakers - I'd be interested to hear what Jeremy Leggett has to say at his talk in February, if only so I can ask him some difficult questions.

Quote of the day

From the University of East Anglia media relations page:

Since it was founded in 1963, UEA has broken the mould in a number of areas, from creative writing to environmental sciences.

Presumably cross-disciplinary fertilisation is a particular strong point too?

Any excuse

Snaffled from the comments at WUWT (where I seem to get a lot of my material these days!) this from someone who has been trying to get more information on the "trick". Commenter "Informant" asked for any emails related to the WMO document in question and received a refusal on the following grounds:

i) information not held.

the only location that this information was held on was on a backup server as the original information had been ‘deleted’ some years ago. Only a technical measure resulted in the information being held on the server and, following Department of Justice guidance on this point, we feel that this information was not ‘held’ by this institution at the time of the request.

This is possibly the most bizarre attempt to avoid FoI requests I've ever come across. The idea that Department of Justice guidance allows FoI requests to be refused on the grounds that the data was on a server due to a "technical measure" is monstrous. There is simply nothing in the FoI legislation that allows information to be refused on these grounds.

Perhaps anticipating this reaction, UEA has another excuse up its sleeve.

ii) material subject to police investigation

pursuant to an investigation carried out by the Norfolk Constabulary, the server upon which the requested information resided was taken from the University grounds and now resides with the police forces conducting an investigation into a possible criminal offence. We no longer have access to either the server or any of the material on it.

This is interesting because of the light it shines on possible sources of the leak - a backup server would presumably not have been accessible to just anyone. It can only be a reason for a delay rather than an outright refusal. I'm also rather bemused that UEA doesn't have a backup of the data on the server.

Either way, this does rather give the impression that UEA will give any excuse to withhold information. They just don't appear to be an organisation that is keen on openness.