Richard Black and the BBC guidelines

Updated on Feb 18, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Richard Black's article about the Heartland documents is one of many that are now being closely scrutinised to see whether they comply with normal journalistic practice. In particular, as I pointed out the other day, Black's article appears to have been published after the Heartland Institute issued its notice that one of the documents was a fake. The timing difference may have been quite small, although if someone can determine exactly when the press release was issued, I'd be interested. However, whether there was adequate validation of the source is also an interesting question.

The original version of the article said this:

Click to read more ...

Heartfelt but not Heartland - Josh 148

Links to this story just about everywhere this week.

Cartoons by Josh

Watermelons

I try to keep anger out of my writing as much as possible - my USP is slightly detached, slightly amused, try to be civil. (That said, it's hard not to slip into angry mode occasionally, and there are still some moments of fury in the draft of the new book that may or may not make the final cut.)

James Delingpole isn't like me. His USP is angry; furious; appalled, disgusted, but he does it in such a funny way that you really have to be very green not to be amused by  his way with words.

Click to read more ...

Conservative Home against wind subsidies

I think this could be significant. In the latest of its pieces on how to build a majority at the next election, Conservative Home, the biggest website for the Tory grassroots, has come out against subsidies for windfarms.

Breaking with the cross-party consensus on climate change would put Cameron on the side of families and manufacturers. Perhaps free from the obsession with change-the-world environmentalism we could also be freed up as a party to focus on a more practical, local environmentalism. Conservatives should, of course, be conservationists but our focus should be on cleaner rivers, planting trees and protecting habitats of outstanding beauty. Yes, we should invest in clean technologies that will help the global environment but we shouldn't be spending money on imported and immature windfarm technologies.

Watts' analysis

Anthony Watts has published an analysis of the fake Heartland strategy document, looking at the text and document metadata, both of which seem to confirm that it is not what it purports to be.

Perhaps more interestingly, some of the details of how the document came to light have appeared, and it seems that DeSmog had the documents for only an hour before posting them online. As several people have commented, the contrast with Anthony's conduct when the Climategate emails fell into his lap could not be starker. The WUWT team held onto the UEA disclosures for several days while they tried to authenticate them rather than assuming the worst and rushing to publish.

Click to read more ...

Heartland says key memo was fake

This just has just been posted (link).

The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on January 17. He was traveling at the time this story broke yesterday afternoon and still has not had the opportunity to read them all to see if they were altered. Therefore, the authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.

Since then, the documents have been widely reposted on the Internet, again with no effort to confirm their authenticity.

One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.

Update on Feb 15, 2012 by Bishop Hill

In related news, Revkin reports that they are genuine. You have to laugh.

Update on Feb 15, 2012 by Bishop Hill

On the ball as ever, Richard Black appears to have posted his story on the Heartland docs after they were  declared fake. BBCScience has just tweeted a leak to his story. The declaration of inauthenticity is recent enough to rule out malfeasance, but I think a smile is warranted.

Big bucks

A few days ago, a blog called "Not a lot of people know that" published the results of an FOI round-robin, which sought to determine how much the UK was spending on climate research. The results were as follows:

I can...reveal that, during the financial year 2009/10 (the most recent for which the data is available), Research Council spending on “climate change research and training” amounted to £234 million. This analysis was provided by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) on behalf of Research Councils UK (RCUK).

This figure is a minimum - there is also direct funding from government departments and the EU to the universities to add in.

I can't sum up this situation better than the author of the original post:

Let’s be clear about one thing. This sort of money corrupts. It corrupts both individuals and organisations. Climate research funding is agenda driven, rather than result driven; it exists in large part because climate change is perceived as a problem. Research that attempts to prove otherwise is unlikely to be funded at all and even less likely to attract future grants, while scientists who exaggerate the dangers or effects will have no such problems.

It is time to turn the tap off.

Now, what was it you were saying about Heartland?

Supreme Court rejects Sugar case

The appeal of the late Stephen Sugar against the decision of the appeal court that the BBC is exempt from FOI has been unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court. The corporation is to remain beyond scrutiny.

Evidence to the Justice Committee

Written evidence to the Justice Commitee's post-legislative review of the FOI Act has been published. David Holland and I are both included, as is someone who was visited by police as a result of placing a FOI request to UEA.

Twenty-three universities and two umbrella groups for universities have submitted evidence too.

Public interest or vested interest? It's a tight call for the committee.

Heartland docs leaked

Updated on Feb 15, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Some documents have been leaked from the Heartland Institute, which detail its funding of various sceptics - Idso, Carter and Singer - together with some funding for Anthony Watts' temperature stations project. They're stolen documents, I tell you, stolen!

There are apparently nine or ten documents, which will no doubt be scanned for evidence of malfeasance. I haven't seen any serious allegations as yet.

Click to read more ...

Public should be charged to see their own papers

Updated on Feb 14, 2012 by Bishop Hill

That, apparently, is the hope of senior civil servants. A report in the Telegraph says that they are annoyed with the Freedom of Information Act:

Officials are said to be frustrated at spending hours researching the answers to requests for disclosures under the Freedom of Information Act.

Civil servants believe that the laws, which were introduced to make government more open, could have had the opposite effect by making officials less willing to keep written records which could become public.

Click to read more ...

Official sc(k)eptics on AGW

Donald Prothero has an article on AGW in the organ of the official sceptics movement, eSkeptic. The official sceptics are, I understand, an organisation that promotes reason and logical thought. That being the case I was surprised to see just how many logical fallacies were packed into the first few sentences:

On January 27, 2012, the Wall Street Journal ran an Opinion Editorial written by 16 people who deny the evidence of human-induced climate change. Most of the authors of the editorial were not climate scientists; one of two actual climate scientists of the group, Richard Lindzen, is a notorious global warming denier who also denies that smoking causes cancer. Predictably, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Journal refused to run a statement by 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences, although a “Letter to the Editor” by 38 of the world’s leading climate scientists¹ did manage to get published there.

It doesn't improve further on.

H/T to reader Randy for this (I was actually sent this a week or so ago, but have been overwhelmed by things to write about - so sorry to Randy for the delay).

Praise for the IPCC

The IPCC is on the receiving end of some praise from the slightly surprising quarter of Quadrant magazine in Australia (it's not all good news for the IPCC though). Richard Betts gets a somewhat critical mention.

Two for BBC watchers

A couple of interesting articles for BBC watchers.

Firstly this update from the Independent on the story about BBC Worldwide accepting programming from environmental groups for free. The BBC is to issue an apology.

Click to read more ...

May on Bob Ward

When the embargoed copies of the Nullius report went out, there was a bit of a kerfuffle on Twitter, with Bob Ward claiming I was trying to smear him by mentioning his departure from the Royal Society and the rumours that he had been sacked. I thought this was a bit unfair, as I had gone on to point out that Rees had praised Ward's work after he had left, and observed that this suggested official approval of his campaign against Exxon.

I'm grateful to Alex Cull for this excerpt of an interview with Lord May which confirms this impression.

Click to read more ...