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Bishop Hill Feb 21, 2012 The letter by concerned scientists to the Wall Street Journal the other day, together with the response from the Hockey Team, has been the source of a great deal of blogospheric back and forth. The sceptic group have just issued their latest salvo, which includes a rather good graph of temperatures against predictions for each of the IPCC reports.
See the letter here.
Josh Feb 21, 2012 Climate: fakegate Crime Josh 
There seems to be some confusion in some minds as to what is heroic and what is plain illegal. Let's hope the spirit of Shrove Tuesday leads to clearer light being shed on current sins.
Bishop Hill Feb 21, 2012 Climate: MetOffice I'm going to be mainly offline for a couple of days. I'm off to Exeter, where I have been invited to speak to an audience at the Met Office. I'm sure there will be some tough questioning, but I think this is probably more stimulating than preaching to the choir.
Richard Betts has promised me lunch and I understand that Tamsin Edwards is going to make the trek down from Bristol too.
The Met Office are paying my expenses for which I'm grateful. However, if readers want to help out with a speaking fee, the tip box is your friend. Thanks as ever to those who subscribe to the site to help cover the costs of these efforts.
Bishop Hill Feb 21, 2012 Climate: fakegate Extraordinarily, Peter Gleick has confessed to being the person who blagged emails from the Heartland Institute.
In the latest revelation, Peter Gleick, a water scientist and president of the Pacific Institute who has been active in the climate wars, apologised on Monday for using a false name to obtain materials from Heartland, a Chicago-based think tank with a core mission of dismissing climate change.
Crucially, he seems to be denying the faking, although he doesn't appear to be letting on who did.
Bishop Hill Feb 21, 2012 FOI According to an article in Times Higher Education, the government has rejected the attempt by Universities UK to have further exemptions inserted into the FOI Act that would benefit academics at the expense of the public.
Home Office minister Lord Henley said this week that he believed that “adequate protection already exists” for pre-publication research.
The Act already exempts information if it will be published in the future or if it would be commercially damaging.
Lord Henley acknowledged that “adequate safeguards must exist within information rights legislation to make sure that that position [of universities] is not undermined through inappropriate and premature disclosure.”
Bishop Hill Feb 20, 2012 Climate: other Ethics Greens
Updated on Feb 20, 2012 by
Bishop Hill
Sometimes little things lead you to the most interesting discoveries. A week or so ago I got a new Twitter follower in the shape of Amelia Sharman, a student at the London School of Economics. LSE is of course the stamping ground of BH favourite, Bob Ward, and I was therefore interested enough to go and take a look, and not entirely surprised to find out that Sharman works at the Grantham Institute and has an interest in sceptics.
But it wasn't this that caught my eye.
Biofuels have been attracting a minor surge of media interest recently, after Friends of the Earth published a report claiming that they probably produce more greenhouse gases than they save. Maybe it was this that caused my attention to alight on one of Sharman's papers - the one entitled "Evidence based policy or policy-based evidence gathering? Biofuels, the EU and the 10% target".
Bishop Hill Feb 19, 2012 Climate: fakegate The Heartland Institute has issued legal notices to at least two of those who have been engaging in dubious tactics after the faking of the strategy memo became clear.
Firstly there is DeSmog and secondly there is Greg Laden, the blogger who was the subject of considerable interest among Tallbloke's legal team a few weeks back.
...we respectfully demand: (1) that you remove both the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents from your web site; (2) that you remove from your web site all posts that refer or relate in any manner to the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents; (3) that you remove from your web site any and all quotations from the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents; (4) that you publish retractions on your web site of prior postings; and (5) that you remove all such documents from your server.
Josh ;)
(Click the image for a larger version)
Everyone is writing Open Letters these days - so I thought I would have a go.
Bishop Hill Feb 18, 2012 Climate: Mann Climate: fakegate The Hockey Team have also been writing to the Heartland Institute - their contribution can be seen here.
We hope the Heartland Institute will heed its own advice to “think about what has happened” and recognize how its attacks on science and scientists have helped poison the debate over climate change policy. The Heartland Institute has chosen to undermine public understanding of basic scientific facts and personally attack climate researchers rather than engage in a civil debate about climate change policy options.
These are the facts: Climate change is occurring. Human activity is the primary cause of recent climate change. Climate change is already disrupting many human and natural systems. The more heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions that go into the atmosphere, the more severe those disruptions will become. Major scientific assessments from the Royal Society, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, United States Global Change Research Program and other authoritative sources agree on these points.
Bishop Hill Feb 18, 2012 Climate: fakegate Commenters have been drawing attention to a public letter written by healthcare professionals and climate scientists, which called on the Heartland Institute to reveal all its funding. This was cited in a Guardian article, which was later amended to show that the letter had been removed.
This appears to be it, here. In fact it looks as if the document just moved to a different URL, although I've sent it to Webcite just in case.
What motivates the Heartland Institute? As climate scientists and health professionals, we view the systematic sowing of unjustified doubt about climate science as confusing at best, and inhumane at worst.
...
Given the disproportionate influence given to climate sceptics by the media, it is in the public, national, and global interest for all funding behind their activities to be revealed. This will help people to make up their own minds about the truth of the climate change threat, so that action can be planned on the basis of evidence rather than confusion.
Signatories include many familiar names including:
Bishop Hill Feb 18, 2012 Science Media Centre The Science Media Centre's press release on the Heartland documents has yet to appear on their website, but as readers here know, it was posted up by their counterpart organisation in New Zealand - I gave a link a couple of days ago.
Not unexpectedly, the New Zealand Science Media Centre has now taken down the story and you get a 404 if you try to visit today. However, as I said, this was not unexpected, and I took the precaution of sending the URL to Webcite. If you want to see the story, it is here.
Bishop Hill Feb 18, 2012 Climate: fakegate Megan McArdle is still riffing on the Heartland documents and has come up with some interesting new bits and pieces. For a start it appears that the Koch Foundation were not actually funding Heartland's climate change activities but their work on healthcare. I don't suppose we will be reading about this on the pages of the Guardian.
She also has a useful summary of the evidence about who the faker might be.
Bishop Hill Feb 17, 2012 Climate: fakegate Roger Pielke Jr has posted reflections the continuing rumpus over the Heartland emails. As ever, his thoughts are well worth a read:
If the faked document happened to be produced by a climate activist or scientist (as some are already suggesting), then the leaked Heartland documents will go down in history as one of the more spectacular own goals in the history of the climate debate (with the consequences proportional to the stature of the faker). The faking is likely to overshadow whatever legitimate questions may have been raised by the release of the documents. Imagine what would have happened if the UEA hacker/leaker had made up a few emails to spice up the dossier.
This also struck me as wise:
This sort of thing feeds into the worst imaginings of skeptics and blinds them to the fact that there are real issues here despite the frequent over-egging of the pudding.
Meanwhile, Roger has also asked Gleick direct if he was the faker:
I emailed @PeterGleick to ask if he faked the Heartland document, no reply yet. I offered to publish his confirmation or denial on my blog.
Bishop Hill Feb 17, 2012 BBC Also in the BBC guidelines comes this
3.4.6 We should only broadcast material from third parties who may have a personal or professional interest in its subject matter if there is a clear editorial justification. The material should be labelled. This includes material from the emergency services, charities, and environmental groups. We should be reluctant to use video and audio news releases or other similar material. We do not normally use any extracts from such releases if we are capable of gathering the material ourselves. The editorial significance of the material, rather than simply its impact, must be considered before it is used. If it is editorially justified to use it then we must explain the circumstances and clearly label the source of the material in our output.
and this:
4.4.20 Similarly, the BBC must remain independent and distanced from government initiatives, campaigners, charities and their agendas, no matter how apparently worthy the cause or how much their message appears to be accepted or uncontroversial.
I'm struggling with the idea that Richard Black can use quotes delivered by the Science Media Centre without breaching these guidelines. Surely an independent news organisation, particularly one with the resources of the BBC, doesn't need to go to the Science Media Centre to get quotes? Why should the Science Media Centre - which has a political campaigner like Bob Ward on its board - get to decide which scientists' views are suitable for the BBC?
Bishop Hill Feb 17, 2012 Climate: fakegate Climate: other Megan McArdle at the Atlantic has done an excellent analysis of the Heartland documents and comes to the conclusion that the strategy document was indeed a fake.
Overall, like the fake documents and quotes of earlier posts, [the strategy document] just feels too convenient. It's a super-handy roadmap to all the most incendiary portions of the other documents, and it contains absolutely nothing that does not serve that purpose--no formulaic self-puffery, no mentions of problems that you would think a legitimate memo would have covered, like the precipitous cuts in their global warming programs that they were forced to undertake when their anonymous donor delivered less cash than expected in 2011. It reads like it was written for climate activists. And I don't get the feeling that the folks at Heartland are much interested in helping out their friends at ClimateProgress and Grist.
There's also some very interesting speculation about the identify of the culprit going on in the comments at Lucia's at the moment. Steven Mosher has noted the west-coast time stamp in the strategy document metadata and also some of the stylistic quirks of the author - poor punctuation, excessive use of parenthesis, and also the use of the strange term "anti-climate". Comparisons are being made with the literary style and twitterings of none other than Peter Gleick, the very green head of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California.
