Koch fights back

The Charles Koch Foundation has issued a strongly worded denunciation of the New York Times' reporting of the Fakegate affair.

One might expect the Times to have some chagrin about its reporting that was based on material obtained by fraud, motivated by an ulterior ideological agenda, and suspect in its authenticity.  Yet even though that source lied, cheated, and stole – and refuses to answer any further question from the Times or anyone – reporter Andrew Revkin nonetheless found room to praise him, writing, “It’s enormously creditable that Peter Gleick has owned up to his terrible error in judgment.”  Readers would be right to wonder if the Times itself is able to own up to mistakes on this story.

Indeed.

Update on Feb 29, 2012 by Bishop Hill

In related news, Heartland has issued an open letter to the Pacific Institute.

Update on Feb 29, 2012 by Bishop Hill

And Revkin has replied.

Nordhaus and the sixteen

Economist William Nordhaus takes a pop at the sixteen concerned scientists, in the latest skirmish kicked off by their Wall Street Journal editorial.

My response is primarily designed to correct their misleading description of my own research; but it also is directed more broadly at their attempt to discredit scientists and scientific research on climate change.¹ I have identified six key issues that are raised in the article, and I provide commentary about their substance and accuracy. They are:

• Is the planet in fact warming?
• Are human influences an important contributor to warming?
• Is carbon dioxide a pollutant?
• Are we seeing a regime of fear for skeptical climate scientists?
• Are the views of mainstream climate scientists driven primarily by the desire for financial gain?
• Is it true that more carbon dioxide and additional warming will be beneficial?

Comment bug

Yesterday's commenting bug appears to have been fixed (although I haven't been officially notified). I've therefore switched HTML in comments back on.

Nurse's Dimbleby lecture

Paul Nurse gave the BBC's prestigious Dimbleby lecture last night, addressing science and its place in society.

I sensed that Nurse was desperately trying to keep his political side under wraps, as is only appropriate for such an occasion, but I think it's fair to say that hints of his activism crept to the surface occasionally. The presumption that the most likely solutions to global warming would come through some kind of world action and regulation of the nation state was one such, although it is fair to say that he also noted the problems of scaremongering by those with a predisposition towards world government.

I was struck also by this quote.

It is the ability to prove that something is not true which is at the centre of science. This distinguishes it from beliefs based on religion and ideology, which place much more emphasis on faith, tradition and opinion. As a scientist I have to come up with ideas that can be tested. Then I think of experiments to test the idea further. If the experiment does not support the idea then I reject it or modify it and test it again.

The contrast with the CAGW hypothesis is striking. Being able to test a hypothesis in principle seem to me to be very different to actually having tested it in fact. Global warming to me looks more like a "higher speculation" than a working hypothesis.

The full lecture is here.

Update on Feb 29, 2012 by Bishop Hill

The text of the lecture is here.

Ending the IPCC

Judith Curry is interviewed at OilPrice.com and wonders if it isn't time we got rid of the IPCC.

The IPCC might have outlived its usefulness. Lets see what the next assessment report comes up with.  But we are getting diminishing returns from these assessments, and they take up an enormous amount of scientists’ time.

Mann in Time

Time magazine has a rather toe-curling profile of Michael Mann, although there is considerable discussion of the Gleick affair too, including this:

Scientists are held — and hold themselves to — a higher standard than political groups like the Heartland Institute. That's one of the reasons scientists are trusted by a larger share of the public than most other authority figures — especially politicians. But that trust is fragile, and if scientists stoop to some of the same tactics the other side employs — as Gleick did against Heartland — they risk winning a battle at the cost of losing the climate war. As the British climatologist Richard Betts tweeted yesterday: "If people don't trust climate scientists then all the activism counts for nothing."

More links

I'm still suffering, although the medicine is starting to kick in. In the meantime, here are a couple more links to keep you all going.

Ben Pile has a really good summary of the Fakegate affair up at Spiked.

The myth of the climate change denier exists in the heads of environmentalists, and seems to prevent them entering into conversation with anyone that dares to criticise environmentalism. The crusade of ‘communicating’ climate change is not a project that involves an exchange of views. To criticise environmentalism is to ‘deny The Science’, no matter how incoherent the environmentalist’s grasp of science or how lacking his or her sense of proportion.

Sometimes you wonder if GuardianEco is taking the mickey. Look at Damian Carrington's article about what he calls "fossil fuel subsidies". He is actually referring to the 5% lower VAT rate for energy. Having called this a fossil fuel subsidy, he goes on to note that it applies to energy from "renewables" too, and then seems to attempt a justification by noting that most of the energy supply comes from fossil fuels.

The Justice Committee today heard from the universities on the subject of FOI. Audio is here.

Judith Curry's take on Lindzen's talk at Westminster last week is here. I liked this quote of Lindzen's

Unfortunately, denial of the facts on the left, has made the public presentation of the science by those promoting alarm much easier. They merely have to defend the trivially true points on the left; declare that it is only a matter of well- known physics; and relegate the real basis for alarm to a peripheral footnote – even as they slyly acknowledge that this basis is subject to great uncertainty.

Climate Realists has the videos of the talk.

In the news today

The Guardian reports on the vast risk-free profits made by wealthy titled landowners as a result of the windfarm revolution that the Guardian itself has done so much to bring about through its incessant harping on about the dangers of climate change.

In unrelated news, I understand that Mike Kelly has an article a letter in the Times today. Richard Horton (of Russell inquiry fame) tweets:

A Cambridge Prof of Technology writes in The Times today that climate change "science has been consistently over-egged to produce alarm."

Prof Michael Kelly writes, "All real-word data over the past 20 years has shown the climate models to be exaggerating the likely impacts."

Update on Feb 28, 2012 by Bishop Hill

The letter is here.

Mann Q&A

There is a live Q&A with Michael Mann this afternoon (GMT) at the Guardian website. Details here.

Cue outrage

Dan Satterfield, a broadcast meteorologist in the USA, has written an article for the NCAR website, linking weather extremes to global warming.

The past twelve months have seen some of the most extreme weather of modern times, especially in North America. NOAA announced in January that in 2011 the United States suffered through a total of 14 weather disasters that cost over a billion dollars each. Among these were the Texas drought that was literally off the charts, and of course the deadly tornadoes in Alabama and Joplin, Missouri, among other places. More of the United States was either extremely wet or extremely dry in 2011 than in any other year on record.

Click to read more ...

Lying and deception can be justified, says climate change ethics expert

Updated on Feb 27, 2012 by Bishop Hill

James Garvey, a philosopher and the author of The Ethics of Climate Change has written a defence of Peter Gleick at the Guardian:

What Heartland is doing is harmful, because it gets in the way of public consensus and action. Was Gleick right to lie to expose Heartland and maybe stop it from causing further delay to action on climate change? If his lie has good effects overall – if those who take Heartland's money to push scepticism are dismissed as shills, if donors pull funding after being exposed in the press – then perhaps on balance he did the right thing. It could go the other way too – maybe he's undermined confidence in climate scientists. It depends on how this plays out.

Click to read more ...

Off colour

Blogging will be slow, I think. I'm a bit off colour, the new boiler is arriving today and there's work to be done.

In the meantime here are some bits and pieces:

James Delingpole was on the BBC Big Questions show. This was the programme that I was considered to appear on (James suggested me, I gather, for which thanks are due). The climate bit starts from 45 mins.

Congratulations are due to Steve M, Anthony W, Jo Nova and Tallbloke for their clean sweep in the Bloggies.

I've also had this transcript from Hansard sent to me. The noble lords are considering smart electricity meters. Their discussion may well be worthy of some analysis, although I am not going to get time to look at it myself for a while.

A study in groupthink

Maurizio Morabito pointed out his Twitter exchange with Bora Zivkovic, a blogger at Scientific American. Zivkovic is rather worked up, but I think it's quite interesting too see what he has to say. He is clearly very much out of the same mould as Peter Gleick, viewing his cause as beleaguered by wicked big business. It's a fascinating study in groupthink.

(I was also amused by the argument that dissentients will not debate, when the Gleick affair seems to have had its roots in Gleick's refusal to speak to Heartland.)

Click to read more ...

The IPCC's private portals

Readers may remember that several months ago, Chris Horner reported that people working for the IPCC had set up private portals, apparently to allow them to communicate without being subject to FOI legislation. The original story at WUWT is here and Horner does not mince his words, noting the parallels with the Abramoff case.

Horner responded to this news by issuing a FOIA request for any related correspondence held by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and a partial response has now been received. Roughly two thirds of the responsive documents are being withheld.

Click to read more ...

More Fakegate bits and pieces

Mark Fischetti, writing at Scientific American, interviews Gavin Schmidt, "a climate scientist who has been a consistently moderate voice at the center of the climate and ethics debate" about Gleick's activities. Fischetti seems to think that "Deniers are well funded and politically motivated." I guess he didn't actually read the Heartland documents then.

Meanwhile, Anthony Watts has a copy of Gleick's blagging email here.