UWA's ethical collapse

Jose Duarte has posted an update on his efforts to have Stefan Lewandowsky deal with the errors and ethical breaches in his Conspiracist Ideation paper.

The journal, PLOS ONE, has forced the authors to publish a correction dealing with most (but not all) of the errors. Lew, rather gracelessly refuses to name Duarte as the person who discovered the problems, prompting Richard Tol to post a comment on the PLOS website:

The anonymous reader referred to in the correction is not Lord Voldemort, but rather Dr Joe Duarte.

However, but it seems fairly clear that university offficials - from the vice-chancellor down - are thumbing their noses at the very idea that ethical considerations might apply to their staff and they appear to be trying to give Lewandowsky retrospective permission for his use of minors in the survey. They are in essence covering up for Lew.

As Joe puts it, it is an "ethical collapse".

Big oil and the ECIU

Our environmentalist friends are fond of pointing to Peter Lilley's involvement with Tethys Petroleum and claiming that it means he can't be trusted on questions of energy and climate change.

How amusing then that Lord Howard, a board member of Richard Black's ECIU, turns out to be the director of an oil company himself and, moreover, an oil company that is the subject of an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office.

Guardian advertorial

Look at what the Guardian put out the other day: an article by the head of Veolia UK protesting against the government's decision to slash subsidies for renewable energy and touting the idea of a "circular economy", in which a lot of recycling goes on.

Which is perhaps unsurprising for a business involved in connecting windfarms to the grid and with a subsidiary making large sums of money from recycling.

But a little hypocritical of a publication that gets uppity about alleged vested interests elsewhere.

Casual smears at RTCC

A year or so ago I caught the people at the Responding to Climate Change website fabricating a story. They had claimed that an island in the Solomons was being evacuated due to climate change but a little research showed that it was due to a tsunami. RTCC had simply tried to appropriate the story for "the cause".

Today I find that RTCC editor Ed King has done a drive-by smear on Matt Ridley, alleging that he is the owner of a coal mine. The insinuation is fairly clear - that Ridley argues against decarbonisation in order to protect this business interest. Of course as readers here know, all subsurface energy assets in the UK are the property of the state so it it is not even possible for Ridley to own the coal under his land. Moreover the mines there are operated by H.J. Banks Ltd: Ridley is therefore neither owner nor operator. In fact he only receives a wayleave from Banks for access to the site.

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Venting and venting

Robert Wilson is nothing if not grumpy, and his grumpiness can lead him occasionally to a kind of foolishness that he might have avoided if he had taken a deep breath before clicking on the publish button.

Today's post is a case in point. Entitled  Dear climate change deniers, please spare me your faux concern for the poor it is something of a rant at "right wing climate change deniers/skeptics/lukewarmers" (he forgot "eeevil" and "big-oil-funded"). According to Wilson, BH readers and people like that are actually cold, callous, heartless bad people who are unconcerned about our fellow human beings unless they are, like us, bloated plutocrats. What seems to have pushed him over the edge was a tweet from Junkscience's Stephen Milloy, which had a poverty-stricken Indian lady asking "Who exactly is 'the Pope' and why doesn't he want me to have electricity?". It does look rather as if Wilson's ire has been prompted more by the fact that these are difficult questions for global warming adherents to answer rather than anything else. Certainly it's a crashing logical fallacy to respond as Wilson does:

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Looking back at Ehrlich

Yesterday saw a flurry of articles about Paul Ehrlich's magnum opus, The Population Bomb. It's fair to say that, although it brought Ehrlich fame and a career, history has not been kind to the book and there is no shortage of people lining up to point out what a disaster it was for people in poor countries. Matt Novak at Gizmodo is a case in point:

Ehrlich’s predictions led to real action. In India, millions of people were sterilized by the government, sometimes forcibly. His views were embraced by wealthy people in the developing world who could insist that the poor were poor because they were having too many children — an argument that’s not uncommon here in 21st century America.

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With apologies to Joel Pett

I found myself thinking about a well-known climate change cartoon by Joel Pett, and wondered if the wording didn't need to be changed slightly (original here). The words on the left come from the Climategate emails.

Pope Francis and Ben Tre

The Pope has apparently lent his approval to a petition by the Catholic Climate Movement, which wants to step up the  pace on global warming policy. The petition's wording is as follows:

Climate change affects everyone, but especially the poor and most vulnerable people. Impelled by our Catholic faith, we call on you to drastically cut carbon emissions to keep the global temperature rise below the dangerous threshold of 1.5°C, and to aid the world’s poorest in coping with climate change impacts.

No fossil fuels for African people then. To save the poorest we had to abandon the poorest. It's Bến Tre all over again.

Barker takes the rotating door

Everybody breathed a sigh of relief with the news last year that Greg Barker was going to stand down as an MP. Having been one of the leading lights of the crony capitalist wing of the Conservative Party, his exit could only be a positive development.

Not that Barker was going to let things improve if he could help it, and news comes to us today that he has miraculously been appointed to the board of green lobbyists the Climate Group, who "work with corporate and government partners to develop climate finance mechanisms, business models which promote innovation, and supportive policy frameworks".

I wonder if Amber Rudd has started putting out feelers yet?

Lomborg axed

The Australian media reports:

The University of Western Australia has cancelled the contract for a policy centre that was to be headed up by controversial academic Bjorn Lomborg after a "passionate emotional reaction" to the plan.

The Federal Government had pledged to contribute $4 million to the Consensus Centre, a think tank that was to use methods similar to those used by Dr Lomberg's Copenhagen Centre.

If you are an academic, dissent on climate change or climate change policy will lead to a loss of your livelihood.

You have been warned.

There's something about Bristol

There is a really violent undercurrent to this election:

Vandals targeted a Conservative MP days before the election by deliberately flooding her garden with 1,300 litres of sticky oil.

Last week cars belonging to Ms Leslie and her elderly father Ian, 70, were daubed with paint and the words 'Tory Scum' were scrawled along the bodywork.

Charlotte Leslie has written about her shock at finding that vandals had punctured the oil tank in her garden, causing her parents' entire heating supply for the year to seep into the ground.

The thuggery seems to have been prompted by Ms Leslie's support for unconventional oil and gas development. In other words it's the environmentalists again.

Creating distance

On the previous thread, Richard Betts argued that nobody was arguing for shifting resources from dealing with the problems of the present and towards the (hypothetical) problems of the distant future.

As evidence to the contrary, I give you firstly the reaction to Bjorn Lomborg's arguments - namely that we should focus on problems like clean water, malaria and access to energy in the developing world today. For this he has been subject to what can reasonably be characterised as a hate campaign by environmentalists.

Secondly I give you Bob Ward, who described a Matt Ridley article calling for a focus on energy access for Africa as "extreme nonsense":

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Green policy - complicity in genocide?

Matt Ridley has republished his Times column from yesterday at his blog. It picks up many of the themes that have been the focus of BH in recent days, particularly the curious moral corner into which the greens have worked themselves:

Without abundant fuel and power, prosperity is impossible: workers cannot amplify their productivity, doctors cannot preserve vaccines, students cannot learn after dark, goods cannot get to market. Nearly 700 million Africans rely mainly on wood or dung to cook and heat with, and 600 million have no access to electric light. Britain with 60 million people has nearly as much electricity-generating capacity as the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, minus South Africa, with 800 million.

His post also contains the valuable information that Britain has, like the USA, banned investment in fossil fuel power stations in developing countries.

Matt is an admirably polite writer, even in the face of gross provocation from environmentalists. Tom Fuller, who has also been discussing these matters, is much blunter about what it all means:

[T]o be agonizingly clear, there is a case to be made for saying the aggregate effect of Green policy in the developing world is perilously close to being complicit in genocide.

That's about the size of it.

On encyclicals

This is a guest post by Cumbrian Lad.

Climate change and the coming encyclical

Today we see another set of meetings in Rome. One is that of the Pontifical Academy of Science, and the other the Heartland Institute. Both organisations are hoping to influence the widely heralded encyclical from Pope Francis that will include references to climate change. Given that the text of the encyclical has already been finalised, and is currently being translated, there may not be much that either party can do to affect its content. The headlines they are making will be building up expectations on both sides, and it's worth having a closer look at the background to an encyclical. 

What is an encyclical?

Simply put, it is a circular letter written by the Pope to the Church which forms a part of the Ordinary Magisterium or teaching of the Church. It is not a formal statement of the type that is regarded as infallible doctrine, as it usually deals with moral guidance and the application of existing doctrine to current matters. In the past encyclicals have dealt with such subjects as war and social issues of all types.

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The morality of the green academic

A few days ago, I mentioned Professor Corey Bradshaw, the University of Adelaide academic who was being extremely vocal in his attempts to get Bjorn Lomborg defunded and ostracised.

I was blocked by Professor Bradshaw soon after my post appeared, but I gather that he is still hard at work demonstrating his willingness to sacrifice other people's careers to his own political imperatives:

Last week I was asked to exam a @uwanews PhD thesis. After the #LomborgDebacle wp.me/phhT4-4rC, I refuse. Apologies to the student.

What a lot of collateral damage the environmentalist academic can tolerate!

Update on Apr 27, 2015 by Bishop Hill

While we're on the subject of greens, how about Vivienne Westwood's comments about David Cameron's dead son?

Or what about the guy who thinks that Bjorn's Lomborg's call for spending on clean water for Africans is "warped" and "blinkered"?