A strange convergence of interests

 

The Telegraph reports that complaints have been made to the Charities Commission about green NGOs campaigning on Brexit. 

The charities watchdog will on Monday issue new guidance on political neutrality after Friends of the Earth, The Wildlife Trusts and Greenpeace all made public comments backing EU membership.

The charities have all insisted that Britain being a member of the EU is vital to protecting Britain’s wildlife - with one suggesting that those backing Brexit want to make the country “the dirty man of Europe”.

The author of the piece, political correspondent Ben Riley Smith, seems to have missed the fact that Friends of the Earth and the Wildlife Trusts are heavily funded by the EU.

Outlook bad for Shukla

Remember Jagadish Shukla, the American professor who called for racketeering laws to be used against sceptics? There was considerable interest when it was revealed that Prof Shukla appeared to be working full time for a charity he ran, as well as taking his university salary. This "double dipping" seems to have been brought to the attention of US lawmakers, who have asked auditors to investigate. It's not looking good for Prof Shukla:

According to [House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith]’s letter, the audit “appears to reveal that Dr. Shukla engaged in what is referred to as ‘double dipping.’ In other words, he received his full salary at GMU, while working full time at IGES and receiving a full salary there.”

Mr. Smith cites a memo from the school’s internal auditor in claiming that Mr. Shukla appeared to violate the university’s policy on outside employment and paid consulting. The professor received $511,410 in combined compensation from the school and IGES in 2014, according to Mr. Smith, “without ever receiving the appropriate permission from GMU officials.”

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Going down?

The highlight of the day looks as though it's going to be the sentencing of the Heathrow 13 - the gang from Plane Stupid who thought it would be amusing to shut down Heathrow airport for several hours. Expectations are that a jail sentence beckons.

The usual suspects are protesting outside the Magistrates Court and there will no doubt be lots of spurious claims that these were "peaceful protestors", as if preventing people from going about their daily business were anything other than thuggery.

Massive support for #Heathrow13 here Willesden for sentencing. A travesty and a disgrace if they are jailed. pic.twitter.com/HmamLzvV4x

— Sian Berry (@sianberry) February 24, 2016

It's about time these people were dealt with.

Update on Feb 24, 2016 by Bishop Hill

As always, it's good to look at the protests from a wider angle.

Bit late but im here to support the #Heathrow13 pic.twitter.com/1NyEVM2DTY

— Isabel Bottoms (@IBottoms) February 24, 2016

Update on Feb 24, 2016 by Bishop Hill

Six week sentences, suspended for 12 months, plus community service plus fines.

I wonder if this will put any of them off.

How is this not fraud?

I'm not a great one for shouting fraud, but I can't see that there is any other conclusion that one can draw.

Somebody on Kickstarter is trying to raise funds for a film about Kiribati, the coral atoll that all BH readers know is not getting smaller. 

Yet the promoters of this film are saying this (click for larger):

That to me looks distinctly like a false statement being used to raise money. A fraud, in other words.

Greens lining the pockets of farmers

This excerpt is from Farmer's Weekly, (paywalled here).

I’ve been spotted rummaging through the hedges and tracks than border my farm, searching high and low for, would you believe, an electricity substation. It turns out that if you are lucky enough to find one on or near your farm, and it’s over 33kV, you’re blessed: you can now go ‘generator farming’.

On a concrete pad (hmm, carbon footprint?), surrounded by a massive earth bund, an array of diesel-powered (yes, diesel) generators are installed and linked to the grid. Their sole purpose is to switch on and provide back-up power when the national grid is found wanting. They are known as ‘short term operating reserves’, or Stors.

The figures (as supplied by Strutt and Parker) are astonishing. The average Stor will supply 20MW, and so will need 50 400kW generators. The rents are even more mind blowing. The rule of thumb is £1,000-£2,500/MW capacity, so for a 20MW Stor – well, do the sums yourself. The other good news (assuming you yourself don’t live in earshot) is they tend to only work at night – probably something to do with the inherent night-time uselessness of solar farms. And if you do live nearby, fifty grand a year will pay for some serious double-glazing, or even a new house at the far end of the farm.

The Lewandowsky concoction

The Social Psychology of Morality, a forthcoming book from the Psychology Press, has a chapter on the interaction between "high moral purpose" and scientific integrity, and takes a brief look at the work of Stephan Lewandowsky, including this summary of the great man's work:

Understanding when people are and are not persuaded by science is an interesting and important area of research. But this curious case highlights the threat to scientific integrity that can stem from high moral missions. The notion that skeptics believed something so silly as the faking of the moon landing is yet another myth essentially concocted by the researchers.

Self-criticism

It's a few days old now, but I have been meaning to mention a rather interesting article at Times Higher Education. It's about a secret dossier government dossier, warning that fraud is rife in biomedical research:

The draft "Confidential dossier on fraud in UK biomedical research" concludes that some research institutes, university administrators, funders, journals and science leaders have been covering up malpractice.

THE has also got hold of a comment on the dossier from somebody at the Royal Society, who thinks that although the dossier may overstate the case, it recognises the twin problems of malpractice and it being covered up by scientific institutions.

Including, presumably, the Royal Society itself.

Quote of the day, Lewandowsky edition

[T]he level of obfuscation the authors went to, in order to disguise their actual data, was intense. Statistical techniques appeared to have been chosen that would hide the study’s true results. And it appeared that no peer reviewers, or journal editors, took the time, or went to the effort of scrutinizing the study in a way that was sufficient to identify the bold misrepresentations.

A psychologist considers the work of Stefan Lewandowsky

For discussion

Industrial scale evil can usually be traced to (a) perverse incentives and/or (b) use of low discount rates.

Discuss.

Buying research

There is a rather interesting article in Times Higher Education today. It considers the question of whether academics are getting a reputation as being for sale. Actually I'm not sure why this is considered a question, as evidence that a significant proportion of academics will write a paper to show pretty much anything is hardly lacking. Who can forget the round robin from WWF to climate scientists trying to find someone to write a paper linking a heatwave in France to climate change? Or the Sarah Muckherjee's claim that most climate research was funded by big green.

The LSE's relationship with its funders has been the source of constant entertainment here at BH, with Colonel Gaddaffi and Jeremy Grantham apparently getting good value for money, so it's fun to see the article uncover that these are not the only parts of the LSE where money seems to be talking. The now notorious "charity" Kids Company seems to have been an active funder of "research" there:

In interviews, the charity’s chief executive, Camila Batmanghelidjh, cited a 2013 report from researchers at the London School of Economics as evidence that the organisation was well managed. However, neither she nor the report itself pointed out that the study had been funded by a £40,000 grant from Kids Company.

Read the whole thing.

Congress to investigate Shukla

Via GWPF, we learn that the US Congress has decided to investigate the institution behind the RICO letter, which called for sceptical scientists to be prosecuted for racketeering. As everyone no doubt knows, some of the authors of the letter appear to have been lining their pockets with taxpayer dollars in a fairly brazen manner.

Science, Space, and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) today sent a letter to Dr. Jagadish Shukla, a professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University who founded the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES). IGES is a non-profit organization that has received millions of dollars in federal grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA.

Don't you just love it when scientivists overstep the mark?

RICO letter disappears

Steve Milloy notes that the letter by Shukla et al calling for sceptics to be had up on racketeering charges has suddenly disappeared from the website where it was hosted.

Run away.... Letter asking Obama for RICO investigation of skeptics removed from http://t.co/aV9olE1BMp website. pic.twitter.com/0u8zvEf0Ki

— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) September 29, 2015

You can imagine the horror on the signatories' faces when they realised that some very determined people were about to take a close interest in their financial arrangements and those of their colleagues at IGES.

I'm not sure taking the letter down is going to help much though.

Follow the money

There is a big story breaking at Climate Audit right now about the authors of the letter demanding that climate sceptics be put on trial, and in particular the instigator, Jagadish Shukla.

In 2001, the earliest year thus far publicly available, in 2001, in addition to his university salary (not yet available, but presumably about $125,000), Shukla and his wife received a further $214,496  in compensation from IGES (Shukla -$128,796; Anne Shukla – $85,700).  Their combined compensation from IGES doubled over the next two years to approximately $400,000 (additional to Shukla’s university salary of say $130,000), for combined compensation of about $530,000 by 2004.

Shukla’s university salary increased dramatically over the decade reaching $250,866 by 2013 and $314,000 by 2014.  (In this latter year, Shukla was paid much more than Ed Wegman, a George Mason professor of similar seniority). Meanwhile, despite the apparent transition of IGES to George Mason, the income of the Shuklas from IGES continued to increase, reaching $547,000 by 2013.  Combined with Shukla’s university salary,  the total compensation of Shukla and his wife exceeded $800,000 in both 2013 and 2014.  In addition, as noted above, Shukla’s daughter continued to be employed by IGES in 2014; IGES also distributed $100,000 from its climate grant revenue to support an educational charity in India which Shukla had founded.

Kelly on Stern

Mike Kelly has a long piece in Standpoint magazine looking at Lord Stern's magnum opus and some of the big questions of the climate debate:

Those building the biblical Tower of Babel, intending to reach heaven, did not know where heaven was and hence when the project would be finished, or at what cost. Those setting out to solve the climate change problem now are in the same position. If we were to spend 10 or even 100 trillion dollars mitigating carbon dioxide emissions, what would happen to the climate? If we can’t evaluate whether reversing climate change would be value for money, why should we bother, when we can clearly identify many and better investments for such huge resources? The forthcoming Paris meeting on climate change will be setting out to build a modern Tower of Babel.

Well worth a read.

In BBC world, only anti-capitalist opinions are valued

The BBC's new logoThe BBC's love of anticapitalist campaigners knows few bounds and there's a smashing example this morning in the shape of Matt McGrath's article about the UN climate talks. McGrath is riffing on the developing world's demands for "compensation for extreme weather events that they link to large scale carbon emissions".

Demonstrating an almost heroic ability to ignore the elephant in the room, McGrath manages to overlook the almost complete absence of any increase in extreme weather than might affect the developing world. East Pacific hurricanes for example. Or drought. Or flood.

But if McGrath cannot bring himself to note such inconvenient facts, he can always bring himself to find out what anticapitalist campaigners have to say. In his article, there are quotes from two of them:

• Julie-Ann Richards is a climate campaigner for Oxfam, whose campaigners are generally anti-capitalists, according to this insider.
• Harjeet Singh is from Action Aid, described here as "the most anti-capitalist of all the major development charities".

No other opinions seem to have been sought.