Huppert on 28gate

Don Keiller has sent me copies of his correspondence with his MP, the Liberal Democrat Dr Julian Huppert. Huppert is one of the few ex-scientists in the House of Commons. He is also, incidentally, the son of Herbert Huppert, one of the scientists on the Oxburgh panel.

Dear Dr. Huppert,

I am writing to you about a serious concern regarding the BBC’s reporting of climate change science and associated issues.

From the detail emerging in the aftermath of Mr. Tony Newbery’s F.O.I case (EA/2009/0118) it is absolutely clear that the BBC is in breach of its Charter, which requires it to be impartial.

Furthermore it knowingly and wilfully breached its Charter in this regard and has since tried to hide this fact from the Public and license fee payers, at the public's expense.

Click to read more ...

Another petition

Fay-Kelly Tuncay is having another shot at an epetition to repeal the Climate Change Act.

Sign here.

Green graft

The Telegraph - Louise Gray of all people - reports that money earmarked for climate change adaptation is being channelled to big corporate entities to subsidise windfarm manufacture:

[T]he World Development Movement said the money is going to large companies rather than helping poor people likely to suffer from climate change.

A recent example was £385m, channeled through a World Bank project to promote clean energy in poor countries.

WDM say that most of the money went to private companies to build wind turbines or solar panels for profit.

Some £10m ended up going towards a 27-turbine farm in the state of Oaxaca in Mexico, operated by the French energy giant EDF, to be paid back in 15 years.

Read the whole thing.

Standing up for misconduct

The Royal Society has just published Sir Paul Nurse's annual address to the fellows. His speech this year focused on scientific advice to policymakers, focusing on two issues in particular - climate and genetic modification of crops.

His conclusions are rather good in places:

Scientific advice should be based on the totality of observation and experiment, be based on rational argument, and reflect the consensus views of expert scientists, views which have been rigorously peer reviewed by other independent experts. If there is no strong consensus or if knowledge is still tentative, then these uncertainties should be reflected in the advice.

Click to read more ...

Fracking get a move on

Matt Ridley issues a clarion call for the UK to start fracking:

As part of today’s Autumn Statement, George Osborne is expected to approve the building of 30 gas-fired power stations, simplify the regulatory process for fracking and provide tax breaks for shale gas production in Lancashire as early as next year. This is good news for Lancashire, for the British economy, for manufacturing firms and for the global environment. To do anything else would risk economic self-harm.

Amen to that.

Balderdash, dishonesty and woo

There is much excitement this morning about a Cambridge Econometrics report on windfarms. The headline finding is this (according to the Independent):

British economy would be £20bn-a-year better off with focus on wind power, says think tank

There is a parallel article here at Greenpeace's Energy Desk, which is perhaps surprisingly slightly more honest than the Independent. For example we learn from Greenpeace that:

Based on the government's own price assumptions, and the rising cost of carbon, the report found the cost of power from offshore wind would be within 1% of the cost of power from unabated gas power.

Click to read more ...

Good question, bad answer

From Hansard:

Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con): Lord Stern, whose discredited report still forms the rationale for the Government’s energy policy, calculated in 2006 the amount by which the price of hydrocarbons needed to be increased in order to decarbonise the economy. Since then, the price of hydrocarbons has risen faster and further than either Lord Stern or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change thought sufficient, so why does my right hon. Friend propose to pile Pelion upon Ossa by burdening British industry and households with these tripled taxes?

Mr Davey: My right hon. Friend has been consistent: he voted against the Climate Change Act 2008 and he clearly does not like our low-carbon policies today. The fact that fossil fuel prices have gone up is yet another argument for our policies. We need to insulate our economy, our consumers and our businesses from those high prices. This country has to import far more fossil fuels than we used to because North sea resources are going down, and that is leaving our economy exposed. We need to tackle that issue for reasons of energy security and to ensure that we have competitive prices.

North on 28gate

Maurizio has noticed that Richard D North, the journalist who originally told us about the true nature of the BBC seminar attendees, has published some remarks about 28gate.

I haven’t quite worked out why the BBC were so keen to keep private the list of participants to the seminar. It may not be sinister or stupid. I am fairly sure that I feel some scruple toward any publication of details of “Chatham House” seminars. I know that one mustn’t ascribe particular remarks to particular participants. And, actually, I don’t think I have ever named the participants at such a gig. I would be inclined to check that they were OK with being named before I did so.

I am pleased that nothing I have heard about the seminar contradicts what I did recall and say about it. I did find the event quite depressing and I was peeved that the possibility of my helping to introducing the BBC and its audiences to all sorts of interesting ways of thinking rationally about climate change were not advanced by my attendance. I did think and did say that reporting on climate change would improve as broadcasters realised that their audiences did not want to do very much about it. I think that has come to pass.

North's further remarks here are worth a look too.

Changes to FOI enforcement

The government has published its response to the post-legislative review of the Freedom of Information Act. A number of the recommendations of the Justice Committee have been accepted, but there is a sense of the bureaucracy trying to move as little as possible. For example on the issue of offences under the FOI Act being all but non-prosecutable because of the time delays involved, the government says this:

The Government accepts the conclusion of the Select Committee that the current provisions under section 77 are insufficient to allow the Information Commissioner’s Office sufficient time to bring a prosecution where appropriate. However, the Government does not consider it necessary that cases under section 77 are heard by the Crown Court, nor that the existing penalties are insufficient in being an effective deterrent to misconduct. To address the problem, the Government is instead minded to extend the time available to the ICO to bring a prosecution to six months from the point at which it becomes aware of the commission of an offence rather than six months from the point at which such an offence occurs. This change will address the core problem of insufficient time available to bring a prosecution without an excessive response of making the offence triable either way [i.e. in the Magistrates' courts or the Crown Court].

The whole document is quite interesting. For example, it looks as if we will have a new exemption for pre-publication research. This is one to watch closely - would repeated claims of "I'm going to use it again" be possible?

Of equal concern is the possible introduction of fees at the Information Tribunal. This last one is interesting, since it was not actually an idea that was considered by the Justice Committee. Apparently the government (or their civil servants) have introduced the idea on their own initiative.

And it is unequivocally a bad idea. It would allow the bureaucracy to use the full resources of the state to crush FOI requesters - they would simply have to appeal their way as far as the Tribunal at which point the financial burden would put most requesters off. More work to do.

Biased BBC on Joe Smith

Biased BBC takes a look at the BBC's relationship with green lobbyists and notices the similarities between the IBT's submission to the Jones Review of BBC Science coverage and Joe Smith's 2005 paper on environmental coverage.

It’s a funny thing but having read Dr Joe Smith’s 2005 presentation and then read the IBT 2010 submission it is apparent that they are almost identical…not word for word….but idea for idea, philosophy for philosophy and demand for demand in the way that they would like the BBC to report climate science.

There are at least 10 major points of similarity that stand out…..the conclusion I have come to is that either Joe Smith, or possibly Harrabin, wrote this submission for the IBT or someone at the IBT has taken Smith’s work almost verbatim, and submitted it to the BBC.

I would suggest that Smith wrote it…it is practically the CMEP ‘syllabus’….and Smith has a track record in working unacknowledged ‘behind the scenes’ on BBC projects and programmes that promote the idea of man-made climate change.

Read the whole thing. (Link fixed)

Crunch time for UK fracking

There was lots of action on the UK shale gas front over the weekend. The Telegraph carried an interview with the head of Cuadrilla who was keen to press ahead, but warned against delay:

We have proven that there is gas and that it will flow. In the three years we have been doing tests, they have drilled 60,000 wells in the US. We don't have infinite patience and our investors don't have infinite patience.

The suggestion that George Osborne is going to offer tax breaks to shale gas developments was also surprising. Given that oil and gas fields pay a supertax on top of corporation tax this probably makes sense.

Commenting favourably on the interview, shale gas expert Nick Grealy revealed that he has had early information about the results of the forthcoming estimates of the UK's shale gas resource.

Total UK resource estimate will be confirmed by DECC scientists, not Cuadrilla posturing. I've seen the logs: MONSTROUS

Quantifying Uncertainties in Climate Science

Another date for your diaries - the Royal Met Soc's meeting on uncertainty in climate science.

Climate models produce different projections of future climate change under identical pathways of future greenhouse gases. This meeting will highlight recent studies that have attempted to quantify those uncertainties using different approaches.

Programme: 

Time	No.	Presenting author	Title
16:40		Prof Reto Knutti, (ETH Zürich)	Projection uncertainties: The multi model perspective.
17:10		Dr Paul Williams, University of Reading.	Climate models: The importance of being stochastic.
14:10		Dr Jonty Rougier, University of Bristol	Background and philosophy
14:40		Dr David Sexton, UK Met Office	UK climate projections.
15:10		Dr Tamsin Edwards, University of Bristol	Palaeo-constraints on climate sensitivity.
16:10		Dr Lindsay Lee, University of Leeds	Constraining aerosol models.

Details here.

Windfarms in court

When suggestions were made that windfarms had detrimental health effects on nearby residents, I wondered if we might see windfarm operators sued for damages. I was right:

[I]n a 49-page complaint filed last month, the plaintiffs, who live within a mile or two of the wind farm in Fairfield, Middleville, and Norway, N.Y., are charging the Iberdrola companies with negligence, private nuisance, trespass and product liability violations for building the project without adequately considering the impact on residents.

Plaintiffs said the 476-foot turbines are bigger and noisier than developers promised residents.

As a result, they say, residents near the wind farm are dealing with loud noise each day.

Mann vs Morano

Marc Morano and Michael Mann were interviewed on the BBC's World Service Newshour show. As we know, Mann will not interact with anyone who might challenge his views, so we had the slightly odd spectacle of the interviewer acting as a go-between.

I think it's fair to say that nobody will have learned much from this exchange.

The audio file is attached below.

Mann vs Morano

Redwood on the BBC

John Redwood MP is mightily annoyed at the BBC's coverage of climate change and the EU.

They just cannot leave it alone. Yesterday morning on Radio 4 the early religious slot was taken by Alison Twaddle. She did an uncritical advert for global warming theory, with of course no balance or questions allowed. She told us that the latest US great storm was the kind of event you could expect to be more frequent in an age of high CO2 output, and asked us to thank God for the climate change scientists who have revealed this truth. The link to religion was tenuous and attenuated.

As readers here know, the BBC is operating to an agenda formulated by environmentalists and their lobbists. Redwood says he is going to write to Chris Patten about it. I think he'd be better getting Parliament to take a look at what is going on within the rotten corporation.