Welcome back my friends...

...to the show that never ends. Yes, the story of Muir Russell's inquiry unfolds a little further, with David Holland digging a little further into the details of the financial arrangements for the inquiry. UEA look like they are going to end up in trouble with the ICO again. Full story at Climate Audit.

In the meantime, David Roberts of Grist looks at the various Climategate inquiries, including the Russell inquiry, and shows just how desperately ill-informed he is:

The U.K.'s Royal Society (its equivalent of the National Academies) ran an investigation that found "no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice."

No it didn't - the inquiry was run by UEA and the Royal Society merely helped find people who could be relied upon to come up with the right answer (we have the emails showing this, Mr Roberts) and then pretended that they had selected the papers chosen (we have the emails showing this too - but don't worry Mr Roberts, nobody expects you to do any investigation either).

The University of East Anglia appointed respected civil servant Sir Muir Russell

You're kidding, Mr Roberts, surely? Russell - the man who closed off the construction project on the Scottish Parliament building ten times over budget - respected?

to run an exhaustive, six-month independent inquiry;

He didn't even attend the interviews with the principals. He didn't interview any of the complainants?

he concluded that "the honesty and rigour of CRU as scientists are not in doubt ... We have not found any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments."

That's because they didn't look for any!

Josh 82

Snow in Lahore

Snow has fallen in Lahore, apparently for the first time ever.

LAHORE: The city on Saturday received heavy rain and hailstorm measuring 4.5 millimetres, which carpeted several roads and sidewalks with snow sending a wave of cheerfulness among citizens.

The hailstorm, witnessed at isolated places in the city in the evening, was enjoyed by citizens especially children, who were seen forcing their parents to stop by footpaths to play with snow at Zafar Ali Road, Gulberg Main Boulevard and Davis Road.

There seems to be some doubt over whether it was snow or hail, but there are pictures of snowmen on the page linked. Comments under this video suggest that it was graupel, which seems to be something of a cross between the two.

Green jobs cost you more

Updated on Feb 28, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Feb 28, 2011 by Bishop Hill

As if any further evidence were required to demonstrate the point, the Scottish Government has received a report showing that their policies are costing us dearly.

Government support for the renewable sector in Scotland is costing more jobs than it creates, a report has claimed. A study by consultants Verso Economics found there was a negative impact from the policy to promote the industry. It said 3.7 jobs were lost for every one created in the UK as a whole and that political leaders needed to engage in "honest debate" about the issue.

Click to read more ...

Some correspondence with Freeman Dyson

Reader Dead Dog Bounce has had some correspondence with Freeman Dyson on the subject of his recent interview with Freeman Dyson. I am reproducing their correspondence with permission.

Dead Dog Bounce to Freeman Dyson

Dear Professor Dyson,

I read today your correspondence with the Science Editor of the Independent, Mr Steve Connor. What came across to me was that you seemed to have more to say than the nature of the discussion allowed or encouraged.  I realise that it is slightly impertinent for an interested lay-person like myself to write to a man of as much substance as yourself, but I have been following the discussions about AGW for some time, and feel that a huge opportunity presented by this correspondence appears to have been wasted.  I will of course understand if this email goes without response.

Click to read more ...

Throwing the Booker at wind turbines

Christopher Booker is on a roll at the moment, with an excoriating article about wind turbines in the Mail.

What we are seeing, in short, is the price we are beginning to pay for the past two decades, during which our energy policy has become hopelessly skewed by the siren calls of the environmentalists, first in persuading our politicians to switch from coal and not to build any more nuclear power stations, and then to fall for the quixotic dream that we could gamble our country’s future on the 'free' and 'clean' power of wind and sun

Environmentalists - working every day to mar your present and ruin your future.

Solar flares

Cor...

WUWT is best science blog

Congratulations to Anthony and his team!

Read all about it!

A media love-fest

This is a guest post by Richard Drake.

Three minor things went wrong when I attempted to take part in a debate called Has the media failed science? at Imperial College London last Thursday, as advertised on Bishop Hill six days before. One was that the event ran for two hours, not one, as advertised. This helped to make interaction feasible but had a bad impact on what I'd planned for the rest of the evening! Second, no wireless internet connection was provided for those not at the university or in UK academia generally. Third ... well, the third was quite amusing and humour may be in short supply here so it'll keep for later. There were more serious flaws, the biggest of which was that the debate was not a debate. It was a media love-fest, as one of the audience rightly said in the Q&A.

Click to read more ...

Muller in the Guardian

The Guardian interviews Berkeley's Richard Muller about his new surface temperature record. This is a really interesting article on several levels. Firstly, it manages to mention sceptical views without denigrating them and manages to take on board Muller's support for some parts of the sceptical case without seeing him as the devil incarnate:

[For Muller to] concede that climate sceptics raise fair criticisms means acknowledging that scientists and government agencies have got things wrong, or at least could do better. But the debate around global warming is so highly charged that open discussion, which science requires, can be difficult to hold in public. At worst, criticising poor climate science can be taken as an attack on science itself, a knee-jerk reaction that has unhealthy consequences. "Scientists will jump to the defence of alarmists because they don't recognise that the alarmists are exaggerating," Muller says.

There are also some fascinating details of the new record - it will not be a gridded series, but will weight series according to how reliable they are.

Publishing an extensive set of temperature records is the first goal of Muller's project. The second is to turn this vast haul of data into an assessment on global warming. Here, the Berkeley team is going its own way again. The big three groups – Nasa, Noaa and the Met Office – work out global warming trends by placing an imaginary grid over the planet and averaging temperatures records in each square. So for a given month, all the records in England and Wales might be averaged out to give one number. Muller's team will take temperature records from individual stations and weight them according to how reliable they are.

Exciting times, I would say.

Natural Histrionics Museum

The Natural History Museum has set up a climate change quiz, which has to been seen to be believed.

See it here, (but be warned, you will need a strong stomach).

When Irish Greens are Sliding

The Irish Greens have apparently been annihilated in the country's elections, with the party losing all of its six seats.

Nothing like a bit of recession to concentrate minds on economic realities.

(H/T Don Pablo)

Nature materials policy

Shub Niggurath has an in-depth look at Nature's materials policy - a must-read.

(Also posted at WUWT)

Booker on insurance

Booker looks at the involvement of the reinsurance industry in keeping the global warming thing alive, and quotes favourably from Willis Eschenbach's article at WUWT on the subject of Nature's recent article purporting to link flooding to global warming (which I confess I missed, but will now devote some time to).

When your results represent the output of four computer models, fed into a fifth computer model, whose output goes to a sixth computer model, which is calibrated against a seventh computer model, and then your results are compared to a series of different results from the fifth computer model, but run with different parameters, in order to show that flood risks have increased from greenhouse gases…” you cannot pretend that this is “a valid representation of reality”, let alone “a sufficiently accurate representation of reality to guide our future actions”.

Italian comedy

You may remember that my Climategate Inquiries report was recently translated into Italian, and was published by a Turin-based think tank. Today I picked up my name being mentioned on Italian blog and I decided to get a machine translation. It was well worth it, because this must be one of the funniest pieces about my work to date.

The author appears to be a science writer and journalist called Mark F. Let's take a look at what he has to say - this is a machine translation tidied up by me. I think it's right though...

Click to read more ...