Climate bloggers in the Speccy

Followers of the climate blogs may want to get hold of a copy of the Spectator this week. The cover story is a piece by the science writer Matt Ridley who "salutes the bloggers who changed the climate change debate".

Matt kindly emailed me a draft from which I have extracted this quote, which rather made my week:

Or take a book published last month called The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford, a rattling good detective story and a detailed and brilliant piece of science writing. Montford has never worked in the media. He is an accountant and science publisher who works from his home in Perthshire. He runs a blog called `Bishop Hill’.

Montford came to the subject in 2005 when he read a blog post by another amateur non-journalist named Tim Worstall, a scandium dealer who lives in Portugal (I am not making this up), who was in turn passing on news of another blogger’s work: Stephen McIntyre, a retired mining consultant and keen squash player in Toronto.

UK readers can buy single copies here.

As expected, PSU inquiry is whitewash

Steve McIntyre has posted some initial thoughts on the Penn State inquiry into Michael Mann's conduct as revealed by the Climategate emails and, as expected, the inquiry has been cursory and biased and has broken its own rules.

As many observers have noted, PSU derives a large income from Mann's presence on its staff, and it was therefore quite foreseeable that they would move mountains to keep him.

Which is why the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has said that they are going to do their own investigation.

And another thing - it is slightly surreal for Penn State to find Mann innocent of having suppressed data when the code for his Hockey Stick confidence interval calculations is still not available.

Greenpeace wants Patchy out

The head of Greenpeace UK wants Raj Pachuari fired, the saga of his conflicts of interest and mishandling of errors in the IPCC reports having endured for so long as to make his continued tenure impossible.

The IPCC needs to regain credibility. Is that going to happen with Pachauri [as chairman]? I don’t think so. We need someone held in high regard who has extremely good judgment and is seen by the global public as someone on their side.

“If we get a new person in with an open mind, prepared to fundamentally review how the IPCC works, we would regain confidence in the organisation.”

Even Bob Ward looks a bit shaky, calling for the IPCC to examine Pachauri's handling of the glacier issue at its next plenary session.

Coming along nicely.

Newsnight turns

BBC's flagship current affairs programme, Newsnight, had climate change as its headline news tonight, with an interesting piece about a largely unnamed group of scientists meeting in the UK to discuss what to do with climate science, an interview with Doug Keenan, and a television debate between Chris Field, head of IPCC WGII, and Roger Pielke Jnr.

Good stuff, but probably not viewable outside the UK.

Update on Feb 3, 2010 by Bishop Hill

Roger's take on the head to head with Field is here.

Fred Pearce on peer review

Fred Pearce again, this time looking at Hockey Team efforts to undermine peer review, and making a much better fist of it than he did of the Hockey Stick.

I found it interesting that he'd managed to speak to James Saiers, the editor of McIntyre and McKitrick's submission to GRL and who was the subject of a Hockey Team plot to oust him. I had tried to make contact with Saiers myself, soon after Climategate broke, but unfortunately got no response. Pearce has him repeating his earlier assertions that his departure from GRL was unconnected with any pressure from outside agencies, and was simply due to his term of office as editor coming to an end. This much is known already. The more interesting question, and the one I had wanted Saiers to respond to is how he had come to be replaced as editor by the much more hostile Jay Famiglietti, an event shrouded in secrecy since Famiglietti only agreed to explain it to McIntyre and McKitrick off the record.

Still, Pearce is new to questioning climate science, and he hasn't made a bad fist of this story.

Fred Pearce on the Hockey Stick

Fred Pearce has an article on the Hockey Stick in the Guardian.

The deniers say it is a lie. Climate scientist stand by it.

Given that the Hockey Stick fails its verification R2 in rather spectacular fashion (as well as the climatologists' own preferred measure, the RE statistic), this statement says much more about the climate scientists than the sceptics.

Fred, you need to read up on this.

Phil Jones speaks

The BBC has the scoop, with an interview of Phil Jones just published on their website.

Professor Phil Jones, former director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), said his results "stand up to scrutiny".

Highlights include a claim that his urban heat island paper has been corroborated by more recent work. Afficionados of Hockey Team rhetoric will recognise a standard line of argument used within the team, namely of claiming that the problems "don't matter".

Jones' claims also do nothing to defend Jones' co-author Wei Chyung Wang from Keenan's accusations of fraud, which rely on Wang's conclusions being impossible to arrive at with the data available.

Update on Feb 2, 2010 by Bishop Hill

There's a press release from UEA here.

Update on Feb 2, 2010 by Bishop Hill

Channel Four carries several interviews with Jones and his replacement as CRU director, Peter Liss.

GISS wants to switch to freeware

According to the folks at ClearClimateCode, Reto Ruedy of NASA's GISS laboratory has indicated that GISS intends to start using the CCC version of GISS's global temperature index code at some point in the future.  This is a tribute to the skills of the CCC guys and says something fairly damning about how the funding that has been poured into GISS by the American taxpayer has been spent.

Scientifically though, it's the right thing to do.

Josh 3

Red tops move in on the act

They always say that when the Sun shifts its support to a new political party then political destiny is irrevocably changed. When the Conservatives lost its support at the end of the nineties their fate was sealed and they were duly swept away in the Blair landslide of 1997.

The UK's premier tabloid has a phenomenal power to change the political landscape and it is widely seen as a barometer for the way public opinion is moving. It's therefore interesting to see not only the "currant bun" but also its close, left-wing rival the Mirror moving in for the kill. The Mirror picks up on Raj Pachauri's travel arrangements, describing him variously as "authoritarian" and "hypocritical". The Sun, in the meantime says that global warming is a con.

It's not looking good.

NZ climatologists lose their calculations

In a horrifying echo of CRU's loss of its temperature data, climatologists in New Zealand seem to have lost the calculations they use to adjust their temperature data.

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has been urged by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC) to abandon all of its in-house adjustments to temperature records. This follows an admission by NIWA that it no longer holds the records that would support its in-house manipulation of official temperature readings.

The killer point here is that the raw data has no trend, while the adjusted data shows warming. Funny that.

(H/T Tom Fuller)

Penn State inquiry reports

The Penn State inquiry into the conduct of Michael Mann has apparently concluded....without apparently taking evidence from anyone who thinks that Mann might have done something wrong.

I wonder if they think that anyone will find this a very convincing inquiry.

Amusing also to see that the Penn State inquiry has completed its work before Sir Muir Russell's "independent" review of the Climatic Research Unit has even started. As I understand it, Sir Muir is still putting his team together and finalising the terms of reference.

It almost looks as if he's dragging his feet.

Peer reviewers acting as gatekeepers

Not a climate science story this one, but one from the world of stem cell research. The themes are remarkably similar to those emerging from the Climategate emails though:

Stem cell experts say they believe a small group of scientists is effectively vetoing high quality science from publication in journals.

In some cases they say it might be done to deliberately stifle research that is in competition with their own.

Weaver still on board

A few days ago I reported that uberwarmer Andrew Weaver was jumping the global warming ship, calling for the resignation of Raj Pachauri and institutional reform of the IPCC. He has now issued a clarification, in which he says he still believes in global warming.

It's as if the first officer elects to sink with the captain.

(H/T Frank O'Dwyer in the comments)

New climategate timeline

There is a new version of the Climategate timeline out, for the ultimate in AGW-obsessive bedroom chic. It really is an amazing piece of work. Details and downloads here.