Off the agenda

Channel Four's Jon Snow wonders why climate change is off the political agenda.

Having seen his video, I think I know why.

The sci-journalist as naif

A conference at the University of the West of England in July is going to hear from Felicity Mellor - a frequent subject of BH posts - about science journalism. Here's her abstract:

Conventionally, academics studying science journalism, as well as practising science journalists, claim that science reporting follows the same news values as other forms of news. Whilst this is true in many respects, it fails to account for how science journalism differs from many other beats in its failure to adopt a critical stance. This paper explores the extent to which an additional set of 'non-news values' also operates, and suggests that it is here that the science beat differs from other beats. Taking the news coverage of invisibility research in the field of transformative optics as an example, I show that sources of funding, uncertainties, and limitations are routinely excluded from science news, suggesting that an implicit set of normative values structures what is omitted from news reports. These non-news values draw on a naïve, idealist philosophy of science which construes questions of interests and fallibility as a non-concern for news discourse about science.

It looks as if one person has worked it out, at least.

The Iris Hypothesis from the archives

Today, most mainstream researchers consider Dr. Lindzen’s theory discredited.

Justin Gillis in the New York Times

...the basis of Lindzen’s argument, which itself is the basis of all remaining relatively credible climate contrarianism, is entirely false...

Dana Nuccitelli

You have people who keep propping [the discredited theory] up,...Lindzen may still hold to it, but no one would still be listening to him. He wouldn't be given a platform.

Prof Joel Norris of Scripps

Refuted by four peer-reviewed studies within a year of the publication of Lindzen's hypothesis.

Nuccitelli again

Twotalitarianism

I must say I am watching the behaviour of the Twitter management carefully, as it looks somewhat alarming. As Anthony reports, Tom Nelson has been suspended for asking if a Katharine Hayhoe graph was "crap". That's asking, not saying. Meanwhile Gavin Schmidt describes a different graph as crap (that's saying, not asking) and it's all fine and dandy.

The Guardian backs big oil

Barry Woods points us to the transcript of a most amusing Guardian podcast on the subject of that organ's latest bit of posturing. It seems that the divestment campaign has yet to actually have any impact on the Guardian's own investments:

Amanda Michel: You know, there are big questions about asking people to do something that we ourselves have not done.

Aleks Krotoski: What Amanda is talking about is sorting out the Guardian's own pots of money, their investments.

Amanda Michel: It will seem like hypocrisy.

Alan Rusbridger: We have about £600 million invested at the moment, and I don't think our fund managers could say exactly how much was invested in fossil fuel. But it is there, we haven't said that it shouldn't be, so we have got money invested. And so, if we're going to be calling on people to divest, people are bound to ask "Well, is that what the Guardian's going to do?"

I have to say I agree with Ms Michel: it will indeed seem like hypocrisy for the Guardian to keep backing big oil in this way.

Bob spurned

Bob Ward's latest attempt to silence dissenters from the climate consensus has ended, once again, in ignominious defeat, with the Independent Press Standards people telling him that his complaint against David Rose necessitated his taking a running jump.

Conclusions

17. The complaint was not upheld.

As I have noted previously, as far as Ward is concerned the process is the punishment, so I think it's likely that he will try this line again in the future, regardless of his failure this time round.

Guardian mob attacks: reports were accurate

The BBC has interviewed an eyewitness to the Guardian mob attack on Nigel Farage and has confirmed the accuracy of the original reports:

There was lots of noise and kerfuffle. It was harassment, there was no reasoning with them.

Enough to frighten the living daylights out of a ten-year old I would have thought.

Farage mob leader is Guardian writer

The news that UKIP leader Nigel Farage and his family were attacked in a pub this afternoon would be interesting enough at the best of times, but for BH readers there are many other angles that attract attention besides the thuggery.

If early reports are to be believed, the mob was organised by a guy called Dan Glass, a former leader of the Student Union at the University of Sussex, but who was also involved with the green group Plane Stupid. They too had a dubious relationship with the concept of law and order.

He is also a "Guardian Youth Climate Leader" and an occasional Guardian columnist. One can't help but wonder why so many writers at the Graun seem to be mixed up with violence and thuggery these days.

Update on Mar 22, 2015 by Bishop Hill

It turns out that Dan Glass was not the only Guardian columnist at the protest. Eva Jasiewicz, who has written for the Graun here, was there too.

Update on Mar 22, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Jeez, and another one! Pennie Quinton's Guardian corpus is here, her involvement in the mob here.

Waiting for a Guardian outcry

So, in the wake of Pielke Jr's comment yesterday, we know that Kerry Emanuel has been citing a paper without disclosing that he had been involved in its preparation. We know that the paper was commissioned and paid for by green billionaire Tom Steyer. The question that now springs to mind is whether Emanuel has disclosed this activist cash in his academic work; in the wake of the recent rumpus over Willie Soon's papers, readers will recall that environmentalists are very keen that such disclosures are made.

Emanuel has disclosed in one of his papers that his own business, WindRiskTech, is involved in the same line of work:

Conflict of interest statement: The technique used here to estimate the level of tropical cyclone activity in CMIP5-generation climate models is also used by a firm, WindRiskTech LLC, in which the author has a financial interest. That firm applies the technique to estimate tropical cyclone risk for various clients.

However, the argument made about Willie Soon's COI disclosures was that all of his papers should disclose his funding from an oil company, whether directly connected or not. So in this case I feel certain that environmental activists will be loudly condemning Emanuel's failure to disclose Emanuel's income stream from a green billionaire.

No? Why ever not?

The environment correspondent's standards

The FT reports that carbon dioxide emissions remained steady in 2014, despite the global economy having continued to expand.

One of the reasons is apparently China's energy mix:

China has cut its use of coal, one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions, and installed more hydroelectricity, wind and solar power.

Now the FT article is written by Environment Correspondent Pilita Clark, so claims about the involvement of wind and solar need careful examination. I think a little data is required, which, thanks to Reuters, I am able to bring you:

Click to read more ...

Another witchhunt

So the usual suspects in the green-tinged media are running another of their witchhunts. This time they have returned to the attack against Willie Soon, with the New York Times' Justin Gillis and the Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg in the front line.

As far as I can see, the story is that Soon and three co-authors published a paper on climate sensitivity. At the same time (or perhaps in the past - this being a smear-job it's hard to get at the facts) he was being funded by to do work on things like the solar influence on climate by people that greens feel are the baddies. They and the greens feel he should have disclosed that baddies were paying him to do stuff on a  paper that was not funded by the baddies.

I guess you can make a case that he should have done, but I'm struggling to get very excited about it as a transgression.

And as a fairly ugly attempt to poison the well the articles in the New York Times and the Guardian are an indictment of the standards at those once respected publications. Their failure to discuss the contents of the Soon paper speaks volumes.

The Guardian apologises

The Guardian has apologised for its behaviour over the Bluecloud affair, in which a Greenpeace activist and sometime Guardian writer named Gary Evans discussed beheading Matt Ridley.

The web and particularly the threads are a robust environment but I think we should have taken the beheading comment down as soon as it was reported, even though I agree with the moderators that it was an attempt at a joke rather than anything else. I think the “Bluecloud” comment falls squarely within rule 3 of the Community guidelines: “We understand that people often feel strongly about issues debated on the site, but we will consider removing any content that others might find extremely offensive or threatening.”

When beheadings have been such a tragic part of the news agenda for so many months the choice of a severed head as the accompanying photograph was an error. It seems unlikely to me that the offending comments would have been made had the picture not been what it was. For that reason and the length of time it took to remove the comments, I think Lord Ridley deserves an apology, which I am happy to give on behalf of the Guardian.

A weapons-grade fruitcake

A couple of days ago, there was one of those science communication thingies where a bunch of greens and their fellow travellers in the media get together to chew the fat on how better to keep the climate gravy train on the rails. The panel was chaired by Jon Snow and featured Tom Clarke, the Channel Four science chap, Zoe Williams from the Guardian, someone from Greenpeace and Tom Chivers, now of Buzzfeed. As far as anyone could tell the audience was made up entirely of fellow travellers, including Bob Ward.

I can't say it was terribly interesting, and it was marred by technical glitches,

Click to read more ...

New Atlantis, same old problems

Well you can't fault the green movement's persistence. With the National Theatre's Greenland having being a spectacular flop and last year's 2071 having apparently failed to set the pulse racing too, the London luvvies are having yet another attempt to bring the public on board.

The new show is called The New Atlantis and, being green, gets lots of free publicity courtesy of the BBC.

At the futuristic venue, The Crystal, on the Thames in East London, the cast of New Atlantis is rehearsing for the new production, named after a fictitious intergovernmental organisation managing water supply in the capital.

Click to read more ...

The old fabulist of Fleet Street

Sometimes the sheer brazenness of the Guardian can take you completely aback. Having spent the last five years hyping every tall story from the environmentalists to high heaven and back again the old fabulist of Fleet Street has come up with a portentous editorial saying that the government is ignoring "genuine anxieties" that people have about this "novel" process.

Bribes and bullying are no way of dealing with genuine anxieties about a novel process

To the extent that the anxieties are genuine this is simply because environment correspondents across the media, but particularly at the Guardian, have been systematically misleading the public. As if to provide support for this view, the suggestion that fracking - a process that has been used for half a century without anyone noticing - is "novel" is simply untrue.

A glance at the rest of the article brings further examples, such as the endless repeated canard that warming above 2°C is somehow dangerous. No it isn't. No it isn't. No it isn't. No it isn't.