Keep calm

The comments threads are getting completely out of order again. Please could everyone take a deep breath and calm down. There are plenty of other venues if you want to vent your fury.

Climate change cash pays for forced sterilisation

The Guardian is reporting that UK climate change aid money has been used to fund forced sterilisation programmes in India.

Tens of millions of pounds of UK aid money have been spent on a programme that has forcibly sterilised Indian women and men, the Observer has learned...

Court documents filed in India earlier this month claim that many victims have been left in pain, with little or no aftercare. Across the country, there have been numerous reports of deaths and of pregnant women suffering miscarriages after being selected for sterilisation without being warned that they would lose their unborn babies.

Yet a working paper published by the UK's Department for International Development in 2010 cited the need to fight climate change as one of the key reasons for pressing ahead with such programmes. The document argued that reducing population numbers would cut greenhouse gases, although it warned that there were "complex human rights and ethical issues" involved in forced population control.

I couldn't help but recall the comments of a Royal Society fellow, Paul Erlich, on the subject of involuntary sterilisation:

[T]he first task is population control at home. How do we go about it? Many of my colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size. Those of you who are appalled at such a suggestion can rest easy. The option isn’t even open to us, since no such substance exists.

If the choice now is either such additives or catastrophe, we shall have catastrophe. It might be possible to develop such population control tools, although the task would not be simple. Either the additive would have to operate equally well and with minimum side effects against both sexes, or some way would have to be found to direct it only to one sex and shield the other.”

GCSA candidates

Mandarins have narrowed down the applicants for the role of Government Chief Scientific Adviser to a shortlist of six (story here).

A few of the names are familiar to me. Richard Friend was one of those considered for the Oxburgh panel and indeed was one of those who was thought to be likely to look at the investigation with "questioning objectivity". No doubt this mindset will be viewed dimly in Whitehall.

Adrian Smith has worked alongside Beddington for some years, and offered his services for the Climategate investigations. Walport and Anderson also look like insider candidates. The other two - Fleming and Frank Kelly - are unknown quantities.

Green groups funded by big wind

The Mail on Sunday (not online) carries the news that several prominent Scottish environmental groups are sponsored by wind farm companies.

Environment group WWF Scotland admitted that it had received more than £22,500 in the past year from one of the UK's biggest energy firms, Scottish and Southern Energy.

It has apparently also been revealed that Friends of the Earth Scotland are supported by Scottish Power Renewables, while the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Scotland is also in the pay of big wind.

Amusing therefore to see this report issued jointly by the three organisations saying that fears over the reliability of wind power are overdone. Money talks, I guess.

Update on Apr 29, 2012 by Bishop Hill

There was also this RSPB study, which found that "wind farms are not bird blenders".

Pielke Jnr's lecture at ANU

This is well worth a look...

It is helpful to have the slides to hand too.

Update on Apr 30, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Keith Kloor wonders why commenters here are so agitated about Pielke Jr's position.

Bob's book

One of the blogs I've been struggling to get the time to read for quite some time now is Bob Tisdale's. This is Climate Audit territory - lots of graphs, lots of statistics, lots of reading to do before you can understand the full story. Like Climate Audit it's a site that cries out for an introductory text to enable newbies to catch up with the story that has gone before.

Fortunately, Bob Tisdale has now produced a book, which I'm currently working my way through. There are still lots of graphs and lots of statistics, but it's written in a good accessible fashion and I'm getting a great deal from it.

Buy the PDF here or Kindle versions here (US) or here (UK).

St Andrews debate

John Shade, of Climate Lessons blog, sends this report on my debate at St Andrews.

On a wet and windy day, off to St Andrews, where the School of Geography and Geosciences was holding a discussion meeting on climate as one of its World Series Seminars. Speakers: Andrew Montford, and Tom Crowley, a recently retired professor of paleoclimatology. Chaired by Dr Robert Wilson, who said that he was a great believer in discussion where there was discord, and that there was discord in the climate world. He gave Andrew a pleasant and welcoming introduction, noting that he had been quoted in one newspaper report as believing that CO2, all things being equal, will make thing warmer.

Click to read more ...

Hockey Stick Illusion denial

I came across this review of Michael Mann's book in Times Higher Education. The author, Jon Turney, is a green science writer, so you know exactly what to expect, but the thought struck me that it is completely amazing that Mike Hulme's is still the only review of Mann's book to even mention the Hockey Stick Illusion.

Are they all in denial or something?

A right royal fail

Judging from the reactions, the Royal Society's report on population looks to be a new low in its rapid descent into scientific irrelevance. Their outpourings do at least seem to have inspired some excellent work from thinking writers. In particular, Ben Pile and Tim Worstall have excelled themselves.

Horner on the struggle for the Mann emails

The ATI has produced an excellent summary of the convoluted story of the struggle to get Michael Mann's emails.

Quiet

I'm off to St Andrews in an hour or so. Blogging will therefore not happen today.

Back tomorrow.

Murdoch, media and the climate

Sharp-eyed reader Woodentop has noted a fascinating snippet in the evidence submitted to the Levenson inquiry into the relationship between the media and government, currently running into its umpteenth month in London.

The document in question (see link below, an excerpt from a much larger set of documents) is an email from Rupert Murdoch's European public affair boss, Frederic Michel, to the great media mogul himself. It outlines meetings he has had with the advisers of the prime minister, David Cameron, and his deputy, Nick Clegg. It appears that there are a series of proposals for Murdoch's News Corporation to assist the government's public relations efforts - copyright issues and Cameron's "Big Society" programme are mentioned. The quid pro quo appears to be the regulatory clearance of News Corp's bid to buy the shares of Sky TV that it did not already own.

Click to read more ...

Another CSA moves on

Hot on the heels of the announcement that Sir John Beddington is stepping down as government chief scientific adviser comes the news that Bob Watson is to depart from the CSA role at DEFRA.

His replacement is Professor Ian Boyd, who researches mammals at St Andrews and appears to be, well, a scientist rather than an activist.

This looks like some welcome depoliticisation of the top echelons of the scientific civil service to me.

Quote of the day

...science writer and academic Ben Goldacre would rather slam his “cock in a door” than engage in a phony debate with climate change deniers.

From here.

Representative of what?

On Monday, Richard Black wrote about an Ipsos-Mori poll conducted on behalf of Renewables UK:

Earlier this month, Ipsos-Mori asked a representative sample of just over 1,000 adults to what extent they favoured wind power.

Sixty-six per cent were either "strongly in favour of" or "tended to favour" the technology, against just 8% who were opposed.

Pretty strong support, wouldn't you say?

However, thanks to a twitterer who goes by the name of "The Debunker No 2 BS" it has now been revealed that the poll might have been, well, less straightforward than might have been expected. The clue is in the technical details of the report, where we find that:

Questions were asked online of 1,009 adults aged between 16 and 64 across Great Britain.

Whatever happened to the over-65s? Do they have no opinions on windfarms? Perhaps someone with more experience of these kinds of polls can tell me whether this exclusion of older people is normal in these kinds of surveys. Either way, Richard Black has reported the poll as being representative of British people rather than those of working age.

Quelle surprise.