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Bishop Hill Dec 11, 2010 Climate: WG3 A number of people have asked for a dedicated thread for discussing the deal at Cancun. I'm out tonight, so behave yourselves while I'm away.
Bishop Hill Dec 11, 2010 BBC Climate: Sceptics Climate: other There is an excellent and very thoughtful analysis of Prof Brian Cox's RTS lecture over at Climate Resistance.
Brian Cox is a great science communicator. That is to say, he makes very effective TV programmes, which do not condescend, and do much to encourage an interest in science. But there is surely science as process, and there’s ‘science’ as an institution. It’s not clear which one Cox – who gave this year’s Royal Television Society Huw Wheldon Lecture – was speaking for. His lecture, given the title, ‘Science: a challenge to TV Orthodoxy’ was disappointing given his previous arguments for scientific research, and didn’t challenge orthodoxy as much as it reproduced it, almost entirely uncritically.
Bishop Hill Dec 10, 2010 Climate: other Josh I thoroughly enjoyed all the helpful comments on both your blogs about Kev's 4 legged climate table. I have tried to put a few of them in... the result was of course entirely predicted by my own highly sophisticated computerised climate cartoon model...as you can see.
Bishop Hill Dec 10, 2010 BBC Climate: Russell Climate: Sceptics David Holland mentioned that he may appear on BBC Ten o'clock News tonight, talking about the Russell review. His appearance appears to be a backup for the Beeb, to fill a gap if nothing interesting comes out of Cancun. So it may not happen.
Bishop Hill Bishop Hill 
My review of Tim Worstall's book, Chasing Rainbows, has been slightly delayed, the reason being that my copy has been purloined by the missus. Now this is a rather remarkable thing, as 'er indoors more normally reads Aga-sagas and other genres of girl book. Economics just isn't really her thing.
But that's the nice thing about Chasing Rainbows - as a primer in environmental economics, it's wonderfully approachable, with Tim's good humour and good sense suffusing the whole thing. It's also admirably concise, running to little over a hundred pages, so few people are likely to be frightened off on that score.
Bishop Hill Dec 9, 2010 Greens From Jo Nova
Western countries will jointly provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to an unnamed new UN Fund. To keep this sum up with GDP growth, the West may commit itself to pay 1.5% of GDP to the UN each year. That is more than twice the 0.7% of GDP that the UN has recommended the West to pay in foreign aid for the past half century. Several hundred of the provisions in the Chairman’s note will impose huge financial costs on the nations of the West.
This looks gobsmacking. Needs careful checking though.
Bishop Hill Dec 9, 2010 Climate: CRU Climate: Parliament The new chairman of the House of Representatives' SciTech Committee has now been appointed. Ralph Hall (R-CA) is the man in the hotseat, and is interviewed at Politico.com, much of the discussion relating to Climategate:
Hall told POLITICO in a recent interview he’s not a climate skeptic. “If they quote me correctly, I've never said it's outrageous to even think about global warming. I want some proof,” he said. “If I get the chair and have the gavel, I'm going to subpoena people from both sides and try to put them under oath and try to find out what the real facts are.”
But he said he does want to question all sides of the issue, including the scientists at the center of the so-called “Climategate” controversy surrounding e-mails stolen from climate researchers last year in England. He said at a hearing last month that the documents exposed a “dishonest undercurrent” within the scientific community. Investigators in the United States and Britain have cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing.
Hat tip - Benny Peiser.
Bishop Hill Dec 9, 2010 Climate: Jones Doug Keenan has written to the House of Commons SciTech committee again.
Read his letter here.
Bishop Hill Dec 9, 2010 Climate: Surface 
From Accuweather:
The central England Temperature (CET) from the 1st-7th of December is -1.9, making this the coldest opening week of December since 1879; 1879 is the coldest opening week on CET record, so this week has been the second coldest opening week to December since CET records began in 1659.
The two-week period, last week of November and first week of December is the coldest since CET records began in 1659.
H/T Sara Chan.
Bishop Hill Dec 9, 2010 Climate: CRU 
A few people have been wondering how Norfolk Constabulary have been getting on with their investigation into the leak/hack at UEA. I had been wondering the same thing myself, and just before the Climategate anniversary, I wrote to the to see how things were coming along. I had had some prior dealings with Norwich's finest at the time of Climategate, when the force's media office had helpfully sent some press releases to me. This meant I had a named contact I could approach directly.
My first letter went out on 5th November:
Bishop Hill Dec 8, 2010 Climate: other Greens This is a guest post by Roddy Campbell.
There’s been a good thread at CaS on alarmism and doom, what I like to call awarmism, with commenters batting back and forward on whether predicting doom and disaster, as Bill McKibben of 350.org does, helps or hinders the CO2 message.
It got me thinking, and then I read this piece at Climate Progress today by Veron, on coral reefs. It’s very good, very informative on the mass bleaching link with warming, and the upcoming acidification threat. I know nothing about coral reefs; I enjoyed reading it.
Bishop Hill Dec 8, 2010 Climate: IPCC Donna Laframboise has an article introducing the release of an unofficial annotated version of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report - all three volumes of it.
Canadian blogger Hilary Ostrov and Australian computer programmer Peter B. have given the climate change world a gift this week. Since March they’ve been hyperlinking and annotating the 3,000-page Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released in 2007. The result is AccessIPCC.com.
Those of us who’ve been taking a close look at the 2007 report (also known as AR4) have identified numerous concerns. Now we have a tool to analyze it more comprehensively than ever before.
The results are very interesting. I'm sure some people will take issue with some of the tags applied to papers, but this shouldn't detract from the overall effect, which is to illuminate our understanding of the AR4 process. Well done Hilary and Peter.
(H/T Ray G)
