The Heretic

The Guardian has an interesting article about two new shows about to open in London's West End.

The National Theatre's Greenland will attempt to give an overview of the dangers posed by climate change and will broadly support the idea, shared by the vast majority of scientists, that global warming is occurring because humans have been pumping more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. By contrast, The Heretic, at the Royal Court, will provide support for those who deny mankind is causing climate change.

The Heretic sounds quite interesting...

The play, by Richard Bean – whose work includes the National's English People Very Nice – is described as a black comedy by the Royal Court, though it refused to discuss the show with the Observer. "The Heretic obviously discusses global warming and climate change but it's much more of a discussion/debate as to what it means to be a scientist and the subject of empiricism," said a spokesman.

The show has a home page here, although I'm not sure they have quite the right visuals to go with it.

Baroness Buscombe

Now here's a thing. Do you remember the various Press Complaints Commission decisions that have interested us sceptics in recent years? There was the Sunday Times sudden and rather odd decision to take down the Amazongate article apparently under PCC pressure. The other one that comes to mind is the highly odd decision that climate change is not a matter relating to current public policy.

So would it surprise you to know that Baroness Buscombe, the chairman of the PCC, is also vice-chairman of GLOBE UK? That's `Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment', for those of you who don't remember. She has occupied the latter position since 2007.

It's a very small world, isn't it?

Green reviews of the year

I've been struck by a couple of the environment correspondents' reviews of 2010, particularly as regards Climategate and the impact of my own GWPF report on the inquiries.

For example, when the report was issued, the contents, which to my mind show pretty conclusively that the Oxburgh and Russell reviews were whitewashes, were reported by the Telegraph's Louise Gray without disputing either the facts or my analysis. One could see her article as an attempt to divert attention away from my principal evidence, but there was no case that the facts were contested.

Click to read more ...

A timeline

15 December 13:05 GMT: Media Matters publishes its Foxleaks story.

15 December ~21:00 GMT: Largest sceptic blog, WUWT, publishes a response: Clueless bloggers attack Fox News..."

15 December 21:04 GMT: Largest UK sceptic blog publishes a response: Uncertainty? It's old hat.

15 December ~23:00 GMT: Guardian's Leo Hickman tweets: "And still the megaphone climate sceptics are ignoring the Fox memo"

16 December ~14:00 GMT Guardian's Damian Carrington retweets Leo Hickman.

Clueless indeed.

The Orwellian solution

As readers know, I have been keeping a close eye on the BBC's review of science coverage, to which TonyN and I have made a submission.

Science coverage on the television was also the subject of a recent lecture at the Royal Television Society (H/T Martyn in the comments) and it's hard to believe that the timing is coincidental.

The speaker was Professor Brian Cox, who, for viewers outside the UK is something of a rising star in the world of TV science. His day job is in physics - he plies his trade at CERN - and if he has something of a retired pop star about him, this is because earlier in life he was the keyboard player in a chart-topping band.

Click to read more ...

Revkin responds

Andy Revkin has responded to the charge that the New York Times is operating a double standard, publishing the Wikileaks documents to fanfares, while refusing to do the same when the Climategate emails appeared.

His response is by way of an update to a post he made a few days after Climategate.

I'll note two things about my coverage of the unauthorized distribution of the climate files:

First, while I initially did not publish the contents of the climate files and e-mails (at the request of Times lawyers, considering the uncertain provenance and authenticity of the materials at the time), I did (from the start) provide links to the caches of material set up elsewhere on the Web.

Secon, in the rush on the day the files were distributed across the Web, I called them "private" when, in fact, I should have said their senders had presumed they were private. As I've said off and on since then, given that much of the research discussed in the exchanges was done using taxpayers' money, any expectation of privacy wasn't justified.]

It's interesting to go back to the original posting, where Revkin calls the Climategate emails at various times "purloined", "acquired illegally" and "hacked", so I find the protestations of innocence revolving around the word "private" somewhat unconvincing.

I'm not sure about claims of concerns over the authenticity of the emails are valid either, given that the University of East Anglia had confirmed that their systems had been compromised on 20th November 2009. It seems to me that the Wikileaks and Climategate scenarios are identical in terms of the evidence of authenticity of the leaked material.

Update on Nov 29, 2010 by Bishop Hill

McIntyre, as ever, has an interesting take on this.

Hypocrite, moi?

Much amusement is being had over the New York Times' enthusiastic reaction to the latest Wikileaks revelations noting the sharp contrast to their refusal to publish the Climategate emails because they were "acquired illegally". As the PowerLine blog puts it,

Without belaboring the point, let us note simply that the two statements are logically irreconcilable. Perhaps something other than principle and logic were at work then, or are at work now.

To his credit, Andy Revkin has tweeted the Power Line critique, but regrettably offers no explanation for the inconsistency.

Graun podcast dull

The Guardian's science podcast this week looks at the book Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer, which looks as though it's Mark Lynas's Six Degrees all over again - the subtitle is The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats, so I think you probably know the story already. Judging from the number of reviews on Amazon (four), so does everybody else.

The podcast is rather dull in terms of its scientific content, although there's plenty to enjoy, but for all the wrong reasons. Alok Jha, the presenter and Tim Radford, who runs the Guardian Science book club, nod sagely at every single one of Dyer's predictions of doom (and he packs a great many of them in). Not a question is asked, not a hypothesis probed. With such an array of extreme predictions made, you would have thought that it would have been enlightening to challenge one or two of them - or perhaps enlightenment is not the objective. This is what groupthink looks like. 

Do have a listen, and feel free to fact-check some of Dyer's more outlandish claims.

Ofcom and an Inconvenient Truth

Tony N has a must-read story about his travails with Ofcom over Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

This story begins with Ofcom, the public authority that enforces broadcasting legislation in the UK, telling me that Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth (AIT) is not a ‘factual documentary’, and ends with them deciding that climate change - the subject of the film - is not a matter relating to current public policy. You may well wonder how this could have happened, and it will take some time to explain.

Read the whole thing.

Dellers is tops

More congratulations - this time to James Delingpole, who has won the Bastiat Award for online journalism, with his coverage of Climategate apparently a key factor in his victory. James' appears to have accepted the prize with his customary understatement.

Why does the Bastiat Prize matter so much? Because it’s about the only prize left which celebrates those true journalistic virtues of scepticism and inquiry which our libtard MSM [mainstream media] has all but abandoned in its eagerness to suck up to whichever bunch of statist shysters currently happen to be in power. It’s about free markets, about small government, about liberty

Purdue climate confab

Video of the Purdue University event featuring, RP Jnr, Judith Curry and Andy Revkin is now available.

WMV file is here.

Where did they go wrong?

Margot O'Neill, a journalist for Australia's ABC, looks back over the history of the reporting of climate science and wonders where it all went wrong.

Previously, media coverage of sceptics had focused almost exclusively on whether or not they believe in anthropogenic climate change, but that is likely to change, the journalists say, because there are many different kinds of sceptics and a range of other debates. Some say they wished they had engaged credible sceptics earlier.

H/T Jiminy in the comments.

Report on the Purdue forum

Many will readers will know that there was a discussion last night between Judith Curry, Andy Revkin, Pielke Jnr and a Elizabeth McNie, a professor of political science and earth and atmospheric sciences.

Boilerplate.com, which looks like it's a newspaper blog, carries a brief report on the proceedings. It sounds as though much good sense was talked. Curry has already posted her speech, but there was also Revkin saying this:

Science is all about what is and the what ifs ... not telling you what to do.

Click to read more ...

What the Green Movement got Wrong

A few weeks back, someone was talking about the nonsense that is spouted by socialists (I think it was socialists anyway) and the remarkable fact that their repeatedly being proved wrong appeared to have no discernable effects on their careers.

Later this week, there is a programme on Channel Four in which environmentalists will describe just how wrong they have been over the years. I don't suppose this will harm the careers of participants like Mark Lynas either.

There is a web page and discussion thread for the series, which is called What the Green Movement got Wrong.

Media coverage of the S&TC hearings

I'll post any coverage of the hearings here.

So far there's only Guardian Eco. Apparently the exchange over the Oxburgh papers didn't fluster the witnesses! They also get the committee chairman's name wrong.