Making mileage

Photo by Giro555 on Flickr. Click for link.The number of articles discussing possible links between Haiyan and global warming is something to behold given that, at least as far as I can see, most are correctly concluding that this particular beast of a storm cannot be attributed in this way.

• Time Magazine has Did Climate Change Cause Supertyphoon Haiyan?
• Scientific American has Did Climate Change Cause Typhoon Haiyan? and Did Climate Change Intensify Supertyphoon Haiyan?
• Nature News has Did climate change cause Typhoon Haiyan?

• The BBC's Newsnight show was pretty good on the subject too, making a fairly clear statement on attribution (video here if you are in the UK), followed up with someone from the Met Office making the same statement

Click to read more ...

Lewandowsky: Backdating

This is a guest post by Shub Niggurath.

Steve McIntyre has a post on the Lewandowsky affair. It is a key one, so a summary might be useful.

The notorious 'Fury' paper from the Lewandowsky group is, at time of writing, in chronic 'temporary withdrawal'. The 'Moon' paper has data issues that invalidate the paper. When questioned how he reported on skeptics in the Moon paper without surveying them, Lewandowsky said he had asked skeptics in 2010 to host the survey. He didn't say who they were. This came as a surprise. Searches showed no messages from Lewandowsky. Several skeptic bloggers reported no receipt. Subsequently, others fished out the survey emails. It was realized they were sent under assistant Charles Hanich's name. The bloggers contacted each other and dug up the emails rapidly. This was summarized on Jo Nova's blog and other venues on a running basis.

Click to read more ...

Mad, bad Bernie

There's a fascinating blog by someone called Bernie Bulkin at the DECC website. Mr Bulkin is the chairman of the Office for Renewable Energy Deployment and he's writing about burning wood for energy.

...the impression [is given] that our policy is simply to divert whole, mature trees from construction and manufacturing and turn them into energy. It isn’t. We don’t think this is sustainable, and it is not what our Bioenergy strategy suggests. The evidence gathered for that Strategy shows that the current typical practice of taking the residues from timber production deliver greater GHG benefits than leaving the forest unmanaged.

Click to read more ...

Yeo works late

Tim Yeo never gives up, does he?

Ever more entangled become the political and business interests of Tim Yeo MP, chairman of the Commons select committee on energy and climate change. Last Tuesday, Mr Yeo rose to the top of the news agenda by demanding to know whether David Cameron was going to be “a man or a mouse” in handling the issue of a third runway at Heathrow.

Yeo cited as his main reason for supporting this cause that it would help British businesses to open up more trade links with China. But it was then pointed out that a company of which he is chairman, TMO Renewables (which last year paid him £60,000, at up to £1,000 an hour), has just signed a memorandum of understanding with the largest farming corporation in China to supply it with feedstocks for biofuels. TMO’s latest annual report states that doing business with China has become a “key focus” of its activities.

The Bishop, the Sky and the Leveson Inquiry

The Leveson Inquiry has just published a submission from me and Tony Newbery of the Harmless Sky blog.

The submission was prompted by Fiona Fox's evidence to the inquiry, which told a tale of wicked journalists distorting the results of noble scientists. Tony was aware, however, that the origin of the distortion was not in fact in the media but in a press release prepared by the scientists themselves, with assistance from Fox's own Science Media Centre. We have attempted to fill in some of these details for the inquiry.

The submission also covers the BBC's handling of climate science and controversies over Climategate.

Update on Aug 17, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Leo Hickman has pointed out a minor error. In para 22, we say that he didn't give us credit for our efforts in disclosing the fact that Outside Organisation were paid £113k by UEA. The original FOI came from Graham Stringer, but the story was broken by me. Leo did link to the copy of the Stringer response letter at BH, but we missed this because the link was only part of a text string (see the letters PDF in this post). Hope this clarifies.

Keenan and the LIBOR scandal

A few days ago readers were discussing the apparently inability of anyone in the UK establishment to bring anyone to book for any misdemeanour whatsoever. In that vein, Doug Keenan's recent article in the FT seems rather pertinent. Although it's somewhat off-topic for this blog, covering the issues surrounding the recent LIBOR-fixing scandal, the themes of willful ignoring of evidence that might lead the truth being uncovered are obvious. The involvement of the former head of the UK's Committee on Climate Change, Lord Turner, only adds spice.

Update on Aug 10, 2012 by Bishop Hill

An extended version of the article appears here.

Keenan himself is interviewed on the BBC's World Business Report (from 5:10).

UK Conference of Science Journalists

This is a guest post by Doug Keenan.

The 2012 UK Conference of Science Journalists was held on June 25th. The programme is available on the UKCSJ web site. I attended two of the sessions: the first was a session was entitled “What can journalists do to uncover scientific misconduct?”; the second was the plenary at the end. What follows is my perspective on those sessions.

___________________

Misconduct session

Misconduct is what most people call “fraud”. This session had three speakers.

The first speaker was the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Anaesthesia, Steve Yentis. Yentis told about the case of Joachim Boldt, an anesthesiologist who has had over 80 papers retracted. He also told about the case of case of Yoshitaka Fujii, an anesthesiologist who seems to have published 193 bogus papers. A third case was also cited, though I did not get the details. Yentis has been leading the charge to get more integrity in anesthesiology.

Click to read more ...

Grundmann on Climategate and the scientific ethos

Another Grundmann paper looks at whether Climategate demonstrated breaches of what he calls the scientific ethos. The Hockey Stick Illusion is discussed at some length.

I was particularly interested in Grundmann's views on whether anything in the story of the Hockey Stick amounts to scientific misconduct. There was a minor blog tiff between myself and Roger Pielke Jr about this a couple of years back. Grundmann analyses Pielke Jr's position and reckons you can come to a different conclusion. It's all in the definition of what constitutes misconduct.

I must say, I struggle with a definition in which misleading people is not seen as misconduct.

Who leaked the Hintze correspondence?

Updated on Mar 28, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Mar 28, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Mar 28, 2012 by Bishop Hill

There is some fascinating web-sleuthing going on in the comments on the Hintze email post, as readers try to work out who leaked the correspondence to the Guardian. Some clues have come from the correspondence itself, redacted versions of which have been published by the Guardian.

• Original begging letter
• Hintze's reply.

The original letter reveals that the requester was involved in the relationship between climate and health:

Click to read more ...

Theatrical works

This story is not climate-related, but is somehow very resonant with the issues we return to again and again here at BH. Josh points me to this retraction of many of the most scandalous details about Apple's Chinese subcontractor, FoxConn. It appears that the source of the disinformation, Mike Daisey, was a well-meaning chap who just wanted to make people care.

Sound familiar?

Daisey says he stands by his story "as a theatrical work".

Irony fail

Readers will be amused by the outpourings of Lawrence Souder and Furrah Qureshi of Drexel University. Their latest paper appears in the Journal of Scientific Communication.

Most accounts of an ideal scientific discourse proscribe ad hominem appeals as one way to distinguish it from public discourse. Because of their frequent use of ad hominem attacks, the Climategate email messages provoked strong criticisms of climate scientists and climate science. This study asks whether the distinction between public and scientific discourse holds in this case and thus whether the exclusion of ad hominem arguments from scientific discourse is valid. The method of analysis comes from the field of informal logic in which argument fallacies like the ad hominem are classified and assessed. The approach in this study focuses on a functional analysis of ad hominem—their uses rather than their classification. The analysis suggests three distinct functional uses of ad hominem remarks among the Climategate emails: (1) indirect, (2) tactical, and (3) meta-. Consistent with previous research on ad hominem arguments in both public and scientific discourse, these results reinforce the common opinion of their fallacious character. Only the remarks of the last type, the meta- ad hominem, seemed to be non-fallacious in that they might help to preempt the very use of ad hominem attacks in scientific discourse.

Throughout their paper, Souder and Qureshi refer to anyone who questions any aspect of the AGW hypothesis as "deniers". Perhaps irony hasn't made its way to the top of the ivory tower yet.

The paper is quite interesting though.

Lying and deception can be justified, says climate change ethics expert

Updated on Feb 27, 2012 by Bishop Hill

James Garvey, a philosopher and the author of The Ethics of Climate Change has written a defence of Peter Gleick at the Guardian:

What Heartland is doing is harmful, because it gets in the way of public consensus and action. Was Gleick right to lie to expose Heartland and maybe stop it from causing further delay to action on climate change? If his lie has good effects overall – if those who take Heartland's money to push scepticism are dismissed as shills, if donors pull funding after being exposed in the press – then perhaps on balance he did the right thing. It could go the other way too – maybe he's undermined confidence in climate scientists. It depends on how this plays out.

Click to read more ...

Booker on biofuels

Christopher Booker sends this excerpt from his splendid book, The Real Global Warming Disaster. It describes events in 2008 and ties in nicely with my Entrepreneur post a couple of days ago.

In startling contrast, however, one Commission proposal met with a storm of protest. This was its requirement that by 2020 10 percent of the EU’s transport should be powered by biofuels.  Over the previous two years a sea-change had been taking place in attitudes towards biofuels, not least among many of the organisations normally looked on as the EU’s closest environmental allies.

Click to read more ...

The Entrepreneur

Updated on Feb 20, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Sometimes little things lead you to the most interesting discoveries. A week or so ago I got a new Twitter follower in the shape of Amelia Sharman, a student at the London School of Economics. LSE is of course the stamping ground of BH favourite, Bob Ward, and I was therefore interested enough to go and take a look, and not entirely surprised to find out that Sharman works at the Grantham Institute and has an interest in sceptics.

But it wasn't this that caught my eye.

Biofuels have been attracting a minor surge of media interest recently, after Friends of the Earth published a report claiming that they probably produce more greenhouse gases than they save. Maybe it was this that caused my attention to alight on one of Sharman's papers - the one entitled "Evidence based policy or policy-based evidence gathering? Biofuels, the EU and the 10% target".

Click to read more ...

Ivory-tower activists

I had an interesting exchange of tweets the other day with Tamsin Edwards. She had noted that she was off to a conference called Planet Under Pressure, and I gently inquired whether this was a suitable conference for a scientist to be attending at public expense - it certainly looks like an activist gathering to me, although in fairness there are also a few scientific sessions.

I think everyone would agree that the public is funding scientists to make scientific discoveries. Whether they are also paying for outreach efforts seems to me to be a moot point. The line between making the public aware of what is going on in science and using science as a tool in an ongoing political struggle seems to me to be one that is fraught with difficulty. There is little doubt that many residents of the ivory tower are little more than publicly funded political activists - a form of corruption if ever there was one. (For the avoidance of doubt, I don't believe that Tamsin E is one of these - indeed I'm not even sure that there are many such among the ranks of climate scientists, strictly defined).

Is there any way of making a clear delineation of what is acceptable or unacceptable for scientists to do with their public funding? Or is this sort of abuse and corruption of taxpayer largesse simply a feature of the system rather than a bug?