Quote of the day, corruption edition

By far the biggest beneficiary of the contracts awarded without competition last year was Danish energy giant DONG Energy, which owns three of the five offshore wind farms and stands to reap £7.8bn in subsidies.

Benj Sykes, head of its UK wind business, said he did not know whether his company’s projects could have been built more cheaply but he insisted the subsidy price was not “in any way giving us any sort of return that is not justified”.

The scale of the corruption that the government has brought upon us is sometimes rather startling. Read the whole thing.

Green, peaceful?

I have an article up at the Spectator Coffee House blog about Greenpeace and its recent travails:

For the best part of half a century Greenpeace’s constant campaigning on environmental issues has been an almost unmitigated success. Its effectiveness has brought it both astonishing wealth and almost unimpeded access to decision-makers. During this time, it has had what amounts to a free pass from the media, its claims and methods rarely questioned by credulous environmental correspondents.

But are the wheels finally coming off? Looking back over the last few years it’s easy to get that impression: an organisation that once seemed untouchable has found itself having to answer some very sharp questions about the way it behaves and operates.

Read the whole thing.

Quote of the day: can't trust Greenpeace edition

Stephen Tindale is a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform. He spent six years as executive director of Greenpeace UK, which opposes GM crops. However, he has always thought that GM technology should be assessed case-by-case. He minimised campaigning on GM – never authorising direct actions against GM during his time in charge – and told Greenpeace’s campaigners to focus instead on how to make agriculture less environmentally-damaging.

The extract above is from this recent article, in which Tindale argues for just such a case-by-case assessment. Despite what he says, this does seem to be quite a turnaround.

You can see the problem for a Greenpeace director. If he had said what he really believed ten years ago, the flow of funds from the terrified public to Greenpeace would have dried up. So he kept mum; at best toned things down a bit (although not that much as these (1,2) statements from his time in office make clear). Then when he had flown the coop he could tell us the truth.

Compare and contrast

Be warned, this is very, very ugly stuff, and there are several messages in there that seem to me to be criminal.

Colour me disgusted

Yours truly in the aftermath of death threats to Phil Jones

Now that lukewarmers have been outed by facts they are playing the 'victim' card. It's not the world that's against them it's the science.

Lord Deben in the aftermath of threats to Matt Ridley and David Rose

Hilarious self-pitying nonsense as @DavidRoseUK interviews himself for 'The Mail on Sunday'. Seriously. http://is.gd/AQFsVF

Bob Ward in the aftermath of threats to Matt Ridley and David Rose

More Greenpeace death threats

Updated on Jan 23, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Who can forget the infamous threat from Greenpeace's Gene Hasmi?

We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.

And we be many, but you be few.

But was this a one-off? The evidence is suggesting otherwise. In the comments thread to a particularly sick Guardian post, which was adorned with a photo of a severed head, and which I will not therefore dignify with a link, comes this from commenter Bluecloud:

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Mann caught out again

Steve McIntyre reports that Michael Mann has been caught out grafting the thermometer records onto proxy data, something he claims that only happens in the fevered minds of evil-big-oil-funded-gaia-maiming deniers.

Whoops.

Sans ifs, sans buts, sans everything

Judith Curry quotes this sentence from Peter Lee's GWPF essay on climate change and ethics

Omitting the ‘doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts’ is not a morally neutral act; it is a subtle deception that calls scientific practice into disrepute.

I couldn't help but recall the reaction from climate scientists when I said it was "grossly misleading" of Keith Shine to omit any caveats when explaining the efficacy of GCMs to parliamentarians.

I stand by what I said.

Climate change...ethics?

The GWPF has a new and, in my opinion, very important paper out on the subject of climate change and ethics. Here's the press release:

London, 16 December: A new paper by Dr Peter Lee and published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation explores many of the ethical disputes that characterise climate science and policy in the twenty-first century.
 
“Science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in their message… Leaders must act.” These words by Ban Ki-moon, United Nations Secretary-General, welcomed the latest IPCC Report as certain and indisputable.

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Failtrade

Fairtrade is, like global warming and "sustainable development", one of those things that is drummed into schoolchildren as an unquestioned good. I even live in a "fairtrade county", whatever that means. The news that the Fairtrade movement is not actually managing to help poor farmers at all and may even be harming them is probably not news to many readers of this blog - I see I was critical of the idea as long ago as 2006 and no doubt there are other evil free-marketeers who have been banging on this particulary drum even longer. Tim Worstall's coverage of these new findings is excellent.

University challenge

The University of Queensland has been challenged to come clean over the Cook 97% consensus paper. Rud Istvan, in an open letter published at WUWT, notes that the University has claimed that the ethical approval they gave for the paper demanded that the identities of participants be kept confidential. However, as Istvan also notes, the names of the raters were published in the paper. So either the paper is unethical or, and perhaps more likely in my opinion, the ethical approval does not actually exist:

Either way, you and UQ both appear in a very bad light. It appears that UQ congratulates itself on gross ethical breaches (especially when basking in so much notoriety), while at the same time withholding anonymized primary data underlying a self admitted important research paper in contravention of UQ written research data policy. Either retract the admittedly unethical paper, or retract the grossly mistaken excuse and release the requested data to Tol.

Read the whole thing.

Ethical confirmations

As if any confirmation were required that Lewandowsky's papers were ethically compromised the expressions of dismay from the wilder fringes of the green movement provide it in buckets.

Ugo Bardi, an Italian chemist who seems to have something to do with the Club of Rome, has resigned from the editorial team at Frontiers in disgust, penning a long protest article here. In it we learn that although he has no opinion on the ethical or legal aspects of the paper he is convinced that Frontiers has let Lewandowsky down.

It is not for me, here, to discuss the merits and demerits of this paper, nor the legal issues involved (noting, however, that the University of Western Australia found no problems in hosting it on their site). However, my opinion is that, with their latest statement and their decision to retract the paper, Frontiers has shown no respect for authors nor for their own appointed referees and editors. But the main problem is that we have here another example of the climate of intimidation that is developing around the climate issue.

And, as if to put the seal on the conclusion that the paper was bunk, support for Bardi's decision comes from Peter Gleick, a man with long and deep experience in the area of ethical compromise:

Not retracting academically flawed papers is bad for a journal; so is retracting academically sound ones.

Dating error

Updated on Apr 1, 2014 by Bishop Hill

The difficulties of getting academics to correct errors is a regular theme on this blog, the Lewandowsky affair being just the latest in a long and shameful litany. Today's guest post by Doug Keenan describes a set of allegations he has submitted to the University of Oxford. Although not related to climatology, the parallels are obvious.

Research Misconduct by Christopher Bronk Ramsey

Submitted to the University of Oxford by Douglas J. Keenan 28 March 2014

NOTE: a draft of this report was sent to Ramsey; Ramsey acknowledged receipt, but had no comments on the contents.

The perpetrator

Christopher Bronk Ramsey is a professor at the University of Oxford. His main area of work is in a subject known as “radiocarbon dating”. Briefly, radiocarbon dating tries to determine how many years ago an organism died. For example, suppose that we find a bone from some animal; then, using radiocarbon dating, we might be able to determine that the animal died, say, 3000 years ago.

Click to read more ...

University ethics

In yet another astonishing post at Climate Audit, Steve McIntyre reveals that the conclusions of the University of Western Australia's ethics inquiry into Stephan Lewandowsky were written by Lewandowsky himself:

Half an hour later (Oct 15 15:18; FOIT, 9), Lewandowsky replied by adding the sentences bolded below, which add the claim that the University had “considered” my claims and found them to be “baseless” and that his research had been “conducted in compliance with all applicable ethical guidelines”...

Moreover, as Lucia Liljegren notes on Twitter, the university announced that they had held an inquiry that exonerated Lewandowsky, when in fact they had done nothing of the sort.

And apparently there is worse to come.

The great eco-cesspit

The big climate and energy story this morning is David Rose's splash on the eco-policy cesspit - the mob of greedy politicians, greedy lobbyists, greedy civil servants and greedy greens who are all enriching themselves at public expense.

Four of nine-person Climate Change Committee, official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until recently, being paid by firms that benefit from committee decisions.

A new breed of lucrative green investment funds, which were set up to expand windfarm energy, are in practice a means of taking green levies paid by hard-pressed consumers and handing them to City investors and financiers.

£3.8 billion of taxpayers’ money funds the new Green Investment Bank, set up by the Department of Business and Skills. One of its biggest deals involved energy giant SSE selling windfarms to one of the new green funds, Greencoat Wind. The Green Investment Bank’s chairman, Lord Smith of Kelvin, is also chairman of SSE. The bank says it ‘provided expertise’ to enable BIS to take a £50 million stake in Greencoat, which helped fund the SSE sale.

The same bank’s chief executive, Shaun Kingsbury, is one of the UK’s highest-paid public sector employees. His £325,000 salary is more than twice the Prime Minister’s.

Firms lobbying for renewables can virtually guarantee access to key Government policy-makers, because they are staffed by former very senior officials – a striking example of Whitehall’s ‘revolving door’.

Standards in public life. Don't make me laugh.

Consistent conning

Monckton getting done over by greens in Australia, Chris Heaton-Harris getting done over by Greenpeace, the long sorry trail of deceit of Brendan Montague - the list of instances of dishonesty by environmentalists when interviewing people with whom they disagree is extraordinary.

Today James Verdon describes how he was tricked in similar fashion by someone called Marco Jackson, who turns out to be associated with the Frack Off group.

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