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Bishop Hill Dec 12, 2011 Climate: Parliament Climate: other Gosselin has translated an interview with Hans von Storch in Der Spiegel. I was sent this yesterday but couldn't make head nor tail of the machine translation
Bishop Hill Dec 12, 2011 Climate: Surface There have been a few interesting bits and pieces over the last few days on the subject of polar ice, which have left me rather confused, so this piece is by way of a call for assistance.
The story starts with Nigel Lawson taking some potshots at David Attenborough for his global warming episode of Frozen Planet. He made a number of specific criticisms of Attenborough.
Had he wished to be objective, he would have pointed out that, while satellite observations confirm that the extent of Arctic sea ice has been declining over the past 30 years, those satellite observations show that, overall, Antarctic sea ice has been expanding over the same period.
Bishop Hill 
With Climategate 2.0 putting the story of the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme into the mainstream media, I thought it might be useful to tell the full story of how I stumbled across the partnership between Harrabin and Smith and how Tony Newbery and I spent four years trying to uncover what it did.
The results are in a short ebook which I am making available today. Details of how to get hold of it are here.
Bishop Hill Dec 11, 2011 Climate: IPCC This has just gone up at the GWPF site:
The basic truth about Durban, the latest and 17th Feydeau farce passing as serious UN climate talks, is simple: the BASIC countries - Brazil, South Africa, India, and China - played a blinder.
They outwitted comprehensively the ever-zealous, naive, and hypocritical EU to ensure that they achieved their fundamental goals, which were to delay any agreement on a replacement for the failing Kyoto Protocol until at least 2015, and any actual action to cut emissions until at least 2020. And, of course, by then, the plate tectonics of world politics may have altered even more radically, so that further delays will be eminently possible, or the global warming narrative - we can only hope - will have withered away permanently into perennial greenhouse history.
Bishop Hill Dec 11, 2011 BBC Interesting story in the Mail on Sunday, which once again touches upon Roger Harrabin and CMEP.
MPs have demanded that the BBC reveals details of all commercial deals its journalists have with other organisations, amid fears of an increasing number of conflicts of interest affecting their work.
The Corporation is under pressure following The Mail on Sunday’s disclosure two weeks ago that senior BBC journalist Roger Harrabin accepted £15,000 in grants from the University of East Anglia, which was at the heart of the ‘Climategate’ scandal, and then reported on the story without declaring this interest to viewers.
Under BBC rules, employees must register shareholdings, outside corporate work, voluntary positions, book contracts and relevant interests of family members and partners. But the BBC has refused to make public details of the register, despite a Freedom of Information request from this newspaper.
For the avoidance of doubt, there is no suggestion that Harrabin has profited personally from his work on the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme, but the payments from the University of East Anglia were clearly relevant to his journalistic independence, and of course the work of CMEP makes a nonsense of the whole idea of the BBC having any integrity.
The idea that their register of journalists' interests should be a secret document is so absurd as almost to defy belief.
Josh Sketch notes from the GWPF Report "The BBC and Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal" by Christopher Booker.;)
Click the image for a full size version.
Bishop Hill Dec 9, 2011 Climate: HSI I've been meaning to tell everyone that the Hockey Stick Illusion is now available in a second expanded edition. It incorporates a new appendix that tells the story of the Hockey Stick and the Milankovitch Cycle and the mysterious carbon dioxide adjustment to MBH99. This was one of the remarkable findings to be precipitated by Climategate 1.0.
And just in time for Christmas too.
Bishop Hill
The story of the Hockey Stick Illusion and the Milankovitch cycle was told here as a blog post here in 2010. The appendix is a tidied up version of this.
Bishop Hill Dec 8, 2011 Climate: Sceptics Climate: Ward Bob Ward receives a gentle lambasting from Christopher Booker in the Spectator. Ward, as we all know, has an interesting approach to factual accuracy, so it's interesting to see Booker's recollections of their interactions.
In 2009, an article of my own about Mörner provoked Ward to take me to the Press Complaints Commission (he has more than once called on the Sunday Telegraph to fire me). I cited a peer-reviewed 2001 paper based on satellite data, which quite independently confirmed Mörner’s finding that sea levels were not rising around Tuvalu. Ward sent the PCC a black-and-white version of the paper’s colour chart, claiming that this disproved my case. I replied with the original colour version, which clearly showed by its colour coding that sea levels around Tuvalu had actually fallen. Quite unabashed, Ward told the PCC that the authors of the 2001 paper had in 2006 published another withdrawing their earlier finding. The 2006 paper made no mention of Tuvalu. As I say, so little are the orthodoxy’s defenders interested in serious debate that they will stop at nothing to discredit any dissent — even as their ‘cause’ continues to crumble around them.
Bishop Hill Dec 8, 2011 Energy: wind Scotland Wind turbines Bit windy here at the moment. I wonder how the windfarms are getting on?
Josh Dec 8, 2011 Climate: Gore Josh Remember Gorathon? Well, now there is a coloured version of all the cartoons which can be printed out as a poster - just in time for Christmas.
Bishop Hill Dec 8, 2011 BBC Climate: other Christopher Booker has an article in the Mail ahead of the publication of his report into the BBC and climate change later today.
So distorted has the BBC’s coverage become that I produced a detailed report on the subject for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the ‘sceptical’ think-tank run by former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, which is published today.
My disturbing findings show that the problem began a few years ago when the alarm over global warming was at its height. Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth — a sensationalist documentary warning of the imminent destruction of our planet because of climate change — was packing in vast audiences and being circulated to our schools to show to children.
Tony Blair was putting global warming at the top of his government’s agenda. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) was producing its scariest report to date.
At a secret ‘high-level seminar’ in January 2006, 30 of the BBC’s most senior staff listened as a former president of the Royal Society, Lord May, told them that ‘the scientific debate over climate change’ was over, and that the BBC must ‘stop reporting the sceptics’.
Bishop Hill Dec 7, 2011 Climate: MWP H/T to Scientist for Truth for this paper from the Chinese Science Bulletin, which incorporates a reconstruction of temperatures from tree rings in Tibet.
Amplitudes, rates, periodicities, causes and future trends of temperature variations based on tree rings for the past 2485 years on the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau were analyzed. The results showed that extreme climatic events on the Plateau, such as the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and 20th Century Warming appeared synchronously with those in other places worldwide. The largest amplitude and rate of temperature change occurred during the Eastern Jin Event (343-425 AD), and not in the late 20th century. There were significant cycles of 1324 a, 800 a, 199 a, 110 a and 2-3 a in the 2485-year temperature series. The 1324 a, 800 a, 199 a and 110 a cycles are associated with solar activity, which greatly affects the Earth surface temperature. The long-term trends (>1000 a) of temperature were controlled by the millennium-scale cycle, and amplitudes were dominated by multi-century cycles. Moreover, cold intervals corresponded to sunspot minimums. The prediction indicated that the temperature will decrease in the future until to 2068 AD and then increase again.
;)
Bishop Hill Dec 7, 2011 Greens Anthony Watts' story about Oxfam trying to get a global tax on shipping imposed is extraordinary (note Anthony's caveats about the reliability of his source however).
Free trade is what prevents famine. Oxfam's actions will make famines more likely and much worse.
Bishop Hill I recently put an FOI request into UEA asking for minutes of meetings of the Tyndall Centre Advisory Board - readers may remember that Tyndall was involved in the plan to get sceptics cleared from the airwaves, apparently at the instigation of the BBC's Roger Harrabin.
The university's acknowledgement of the request seems to flag fairly clearly how they intend to avoid disclosing anything embarrassing:
If the information you request contains reference to a third party then they may be consulted prior to a decision being taken on whether or not to release the information to you. You will be informed if this is the case.
The legislation provides exemptions for information provided in confidence and for personal information. I don't recall anything about consulting third parties.
