Hockey Stick Illusion - US availability

I note that the Hockey Stick Illusion is now available on Amazon.com. The price is highish, but no longer silly.

The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science (Independent Minds)

Paul Dennis responds to the Indy

Paul Dennis is highly unimpressed by the Independent's editorial this morning and has responded in the comments with an angry denunciation, which is, in my opinion, thoroughly deserved.

I am growing tired of the lazy, careless and vacuous journalism that seeks to smear by insinuation. This newspaper asserts that 2 prominent climate bloggers (who spoke at the Heartland Institute) who associate with Paul Dennis a 54 year old climate researcher at the University of East Anglia.

I don't know what the Independent is trying to insinuate but to me associate in this context strikes of conspiracy, subterfuge etc.

A few minutes checking archives would have revealed that my association is that I have written several comments relating to isotope geochemistry and how it may be used to determine past climates at several websites, including climate audit, WUWT, and Air Vent. I am passionate about the public understanding of science and making my science accessible to others. One way, in this modern age, is to engage in blogs. A little more research might have shown the journalists that I also hold some small grants to enable me to develop science education programmes that involve schools in some of my research and that are also to develop 'open notebook' science methds in teaching and research. For those who are unaware open noterbook science is the complete publishing of lab notebooks on the web, raw data, successful and unsuccesful experiments, comments etc. It is the laying out of the genesis of ideas, development of hypotheses and tests, the experimental approach through to interpretation, write up, publication. In addition my laboratory is completely open to anyone who would like to visit and see how we use isotope geochemistry as a tool to understanding natural processes.

I have never met any of the bloggers referred to in the article. I sent Jeff Id a copy of an important paper I wrote with colleagues on climate at the southern end of the Antarctic Peninsula, which by the way showed a strong warming. I wrote to Steve McIntyre once to invite him to give a seminar, and I also wrote to ask if he was aware of anything on the web that could have been hacked from UEA computers. Attempts to paint me a 'denier' (see the article headline are way clear of the mark and I take it very much as an insult.

It is because of this lazy reporting and repeating of memes that I refuse to talk to any newspaper journalist including Paul Bignell of the Independent on Sunday.

Paul Dennis

The Independent is exhibiting the worst kind of gutter journalism and seems incapable of understanding that it is possible to believe in manmade global warming while having an abhorrence of secret data, withheld code and all the shenanigans of journal nobbling and publication gatekeeping that seem to be a feature of Hockey Team science.

Climate cuttings 34

There's just so much material round at the moment, it's hard to keep up. Here then is another resurrection of the Climate Cuttings series, in which I round up some recent developments.

In a story running in parallel in the Sunday Times and EU Referendum, Raj Pachauri is linked directly to a new set of erroneous statements in the IPCC reports. This time it's African rainfall they've been misleading us about. Since Pachauri is the author of the relevant part of the report and has repeated the claims elsewhere, he will find it harder to absolve himself of responsibility this time. Commenters noted a recent study that found that there has been a massive recent greening of the Sahel, with temperature rises leading to higher rainfall.

CCNet's Benny Peiser and The Observer's Robin McKie go head to head on whether Climategate matters. There's an interesting difference in tone between the two men.

The Observer's editorial says that the worst allegations in the emails are of suppression of information. I would have thought gatekeeping at scientific journals was far more important in the big picture. Either way, the Observer thinks that alarmism should continue regardless (or words to that effect).

Phil Jones has apparently considered suicide and he says he is still receiving death threats.

The Telegraph looks at Pachauri's financial interests and also finds that, as well as being a soft-porn writer, the big man is "a professional medium pace bowler", "a good top-order batsman and a fielder with a sharp catching arm." The IPCC. Is there nothing they can't do?

I've noted before the silly attempts to try to link sceptics to oil money, and the Independent is trying hard to use this kind of argument to destroy its remaining credibility. Apparently attending a seminar funded by Exxon is enough to refute one's arguments entirely. (It's true in Independent land).

Politicians drawn in to FoI coverup

The scandal over the illegal blocking of FoI requests by scientists at the Climatic Research Unit has deepened somewhat, with the Mail reporting that the Defence Minister, Bob Ainsworth, used his statutory powers to help prevent disclosure of the work of the former Met Office Chief Scientist on the grounds that for the public to see it would prejudice Britain’s relationship with an international organisation.

Given that the disclosure is expected to reveal corruption within that international organisation, it does rather start to look as if Bob Ainsworth has managed to get himself implicated in the cover up. I don't suppose he has thought it through for himself - he is probably taking his officials' word for it.

I don't suppose people will forgive him though.

Flipping bizarre

An interesting little development on one of the story lines from The Hockey Stick Illusion. In Chapter 14, I tell the story of one of Michael Mann's later attempts at creating a hockey stick shaped temperature curve - Mann 2008. This paper is not as well-known as the Hockey Stick itself, of course, but has become fairly notorious because of an oddity in Mann's algorithm. Because of the way it works, the algorithm is unable to detect the orientation of the proxy series in a dataset and in the case of Mann 2008, this failing had some unfortunate consequences, namely that some of the series ended up upside-down, with what would normally have been read as declining temperatures flipped over so that they looked like warming.

This error was picked up extremely quickly by Climate Audit readers, and McIntyre included this point in a formal comment on the paper. The correction didn't, however, prevent an identical error being made in a later paper, Kaufman 2009, which was written by some of the same authors as Mann 2008 (although not the HockeyStickMeister himself).

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Has Global Warming increased the toll of disasters?

This report on the debate between Pielke Jnr, Ward and Muir-Wood at the Royal Institution is by Josh, the cartoonist whose work has been adorning this site recently.

The Royal Institution has all the academic grandeur you would expect but its decor is up to date and, in a word, posh. The RI website reassuringly says "..although this event is held on a Friday...there is no dress code". The discussion was held in their old lecture theatre, with its steep seats and kitted out with excellent sound, projectors, and very comfy seats. You could imagine the room hearing Michael Faraday 150 years ago - this time it was Roger Pielke Jr.

I am a scientific and medical artist and the notes I take are visual, usually in the form of cartoons, a few of which I include here. This post will just be some overall impressions of the evening as you can listen to all the finer points on the RI website.

James Renderson chaired what was billed as a 'debate'. He got off to a bad start.

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The shorter Guardian

Climatologists are not scientists. People who said so are evil.

Link

State-run banks

Now that the Royal Bank of Scotland is in government control, the public can be sure that the rough edges of capitalism will be smoothed off and a more gentle caring approach will be taken to debts.

INDEPENDENT Anger as RBS pulls plug on girls’ school

Sir David King, conspiracy theorist

Sir David King says that some climate scientists have been overstating things:

Some science we stand on as totally solid and valuable but when we do it with something as complex as climate change we can get ourselves into difficulties so I am very annoyed with some of my colleagues for not following the scientific process," he said. "I have been irritated by some of my colleagues who have overstated the science.

It's funny, but I can't think of a single occasion on which Sir David has spoken of these concerns before, but I guess it's good to know now.

But the remarkable thing about King's interview is that he doesn't seem to have learned the lesson of his earlier utterances about foreign intelligence services being behind the climategate leak/hack, again bringing up national security as an issue for consideration in the climate debate:

He even suggested that British intelligence may have knowledge of who is behind the campaign.

"It is a security issue. We are talking about something that the British Government among others believes is putting our people at risk".

I was talking to an off-duty policeman in the pub last night, trying to get a perspective on why the National Domestic Extremism Team might be involved in the climategate investigation.  He thought the "nothing better to do" explanation was possible, but was also attracted to the "policing-overkill-covers-backsides" theory. And having now read Sir David's comments, I wonder if he's right. If the people in power in London are going to tie themselves up in conspiracy theories over the motley band of global warming sceptics being funded by vested interests and foreign powers then it's hardly surprising when anti-terrorist forces are used to against concerned, but law-abiding citizens.

Darrel Ince gets it

Darrel Ince, a professor of computing at the Open University "gets it".

Many climate scientists have refused to publish their computer programs. I suggest is that this is both unscientific behaviour and, equally importantly, ignores a major problem: that scientific software has got a poor reputation for error.

Daily Mail on Dennis

The Daily Mail has picked up on the Paul Dennis non-story.

Isn't it strange how a comment written here nearly a month ago has suddenly gained legs as an MSM story, and even after it's been pointed out that it's a non-story, the MSM are still following it up.

As an aside, the Mail mentions me, but not Bishop Hill or the book. But they've had no biscuits at all, so this is not unreasonable.

BBC One World podcast

Reader and sometime guest commenter Andrew K has passed this link on - a BBC podcast featuring interviews with David Holland and the acting head of CRU, Peter Liss.

I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, but it sounds like good stuff. The programme can be obtained here.

Paul Dennis in the comments

Paul Dennis has clarified his role in the UEA leak in the comments to the previous thread.

He wasn't involved. Everybody calm down!

A mention in the Guardian

The Guardian has a short piece by David Leigh et al on the police investigation into the Climategate emails.  Leigh has picked up on the comment left on this site by UEA's Paul Dennis, a climatologist who has a much less antagonistic approach to sceptics than his colleagues in CRU. Dennis had commented that he had been interviewed by police.

Here's the bit where I get a mention:

Dennis has now posted an account of his police interview at a British website run by a sceptic accountant, Andrew Montford. He told Montford's blog, called Bishop Hill: "They thought I might have some information on the basis that I had sent [Condon] a copy of a paper I had published on isotopes and climate at the southern end of the Antarctic Peninsula … and I had exchanged emails with Steve McIntyre over the leak/hack.

As you can see, they missed out the important bit, namely the words "and the author of a very excellent book on the Hockey Stick affair".

David Leigh interviewed me a couple of weeks back, and I was careful to cram him full of biscuits and the finest filter coffee that money can buy. And not a mention of the book, not a mention!

Chocolate biscuits next time, I think.

Spectator article now online

Matt Ridley's piece in the Spectator is available here.