Doctor Mann, I presume?

Steve McIntyre's latest post at Climate Audit includes the extraordinary revelation that Michael Mann's latest submission to the courts regarding his libel suit includes a doctored quote. The offending words purport to be an excerpt from the Russell inquiry report, but, demonstrating a startling disregard for the court, the excerpt has been altered to make it look as if Mann had been exonerated by Russell. However, this has been done so badly as to make the alteration fairly obvious.

Later in the Reply Memorandum (page 19), Mann purported to provide the requested supporting quotation from the Muir Russell report showing that the supposed exoneration was not limited to “CRU scientists”, but extended more generally to “the scientists”, including Mann himself:

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Throwing the mud back

Also coming out fighting this morning is Roy Spencer, as mild a character as you could ever wish to meet, but I guess everybody has their limits. Today he has decided that he is just not going to sit back and take the abuse any longer.

When politicians and scientists started calling people like me “deniers”, they crossed the line. They are still doing it.

They indirectly equate (1) the skeptics’ view that global warming is not necessarily all manmade nor a serious problem, with (2) the denial that the Nazi’s extermination of millions of Jews ever happened.

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Steyn's counterblast

Well it has all kicked off overnight, hasn't it? Mark Steyn has decided that attack is the best form of defence and has decided to countersue Michael Mann for $10 million.

FIRST COUNTERCLAIM

130. Plaintiff [Mann] has engaged in a pattern of abusive litigation designed to chill freedom of speech and to stifle legitimate criticism of Plaintiff’s work. He is currently suing Dr Tim Ball in British Columbia over a hoary bit of word play (“should be in the state pen, not Penn State”) applied to innumerable Pennsylvanians over the years. Having initiated the suit, Dr Mann then stalled the discovery process, so that the BC suit is now entering its third year – Mann’s object being to use the process as a punishment, rather than any eventual trial and conviction. See Mann vs Ball et al, British Columbia VLC-S-S-111913 (2011) (exhibit attached).

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APS shows the way

Judith Curry is recounting her experiences with the American Physical Society, which has decided to update its public position statement on climate change. This last happened in 2007, so one assumes that the move is prompted by the publication of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report.

It's fascinating to see that the APS seems to have taken on board the criticisms of outsiders and has gone out of its way to put the process in under the control of people who are "above the fray". They have also adopted a policy of transparency in reaching their conclusions, a process that is ongoing. This even extends to holding hearings and publishing the transcripts.

Learned societies in the UK would do well to follow suit.

Is Seumas Milne ever right about anything?

There is lots of fun to be had with Seumas Milne's bile-filled rant in the Guardian today. This appears to be part of the campaign of vilification that those nice people at Greenpeace launched against Owen Paterson as soon as he was admitted to hospital for emergency eye surgery and unable to respond.

Count the misconception, mispresentation and misinformation in this sentence for example:

The basic physics may be unanswerable, 97% of climate scientists agree that carbon emissions are dangerously heating up the planet, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warn it's 95% likely that most of the temperature rise since 1950 is due to greenhouse gases and deforestation, the risk of a global temperature rise tipping above 1.5–2C be catastrophic for humanity.

Milne even cites Slingo's attribution of the floods to climate change two days after the Met Office distanced themselves from her.

He has the most astonishing hit rate. How does he do it?

The Moral Maze

The BBC's Moral Maze show is on science and morals tonight, and it looks as though there is going to be a focus on climate change.

As the flood waters rise and gales rip through the country the debate about climate change has erupted with new energy, with both sides claiming the scientific and moral high ground. So where does that leave us? Whether it's climate change, GM crops or the latest IVF technique - how should we make moral decisions when the facts are in dispute? Environmentalists accuse the sceptics of being climate change "deniers" with all the emotional charge that comes with that word "denier"; while the sceptics accuse the environmentalists of following a quasi-religious cult that is more about controlling people's freedoms than it is about anything to do with the weather. Both claim the science backs up their position and accuse the other side of ignoring and twisting the evidence. Do we rely too much on science being the only reliable and neutral source of knowledge? How often have you heard politicians fall back on the phrase "the science shows that..." when they're promoting their own values and policies? Is science filling in the moral vacuum left by our increasing scepticism of traditional forms of authority? Or is the scientific method the only thing that's saving us from dressing up our own prejudices as moral, right and just? Increasingly we live in an age when we want answers and we want them now. But arguably, we also live in an age when our scientific illiteracy is matched only by our philosophical ignorance. Thankfully the Moral Maze is here to help. Combative, provocative and engaging debate chaired by Michael Buerk with Claire Fox, Michael Portillo, Giles Fraser and Anne McElvoy.

It has already started, and I've only just found out about it, but here's a thread for anyone who wants to discuss it. I'll try to catch up later.

The peer review game

There is an interesting letter in Nature this week. In-Uck Park of the University of Bristol and his colleagues have adopted something of a game-theoretic approach to try to understand aspects of the peer review process.

The objective of science is to advance knowledge, primarily in two interlinked ways: circulating ideas, and defending or criticizing the ideas of others. Peer review acts as the gatekeeper to these mechanisms. Given the increasing concern surrounding the reproducibility of much published research, it is critical to understand whether peer review is intrinsically susceptible to failure, or whether other extrinsic factors are responsible that distort scientists’ decisions. Here we show that even when scientists are motivated to promote the truth, their behaviour may be influenced, and even dominated, by information gleaned from their peers’ behaviour, rather than by their personal dispositions. This phenomenon, known as herding, subjects the scientific community to an inherent risk of converging on an incorrect answer and raises the possibility that, under certain conditions, science may not be self-correcting. We further demonstrate that exercising some subjectivity in reviewer decisions, which serves to curb the herding process, can be beneficial for the scientific community in processing available information to estimate truth more accurately. By examining the impact of different models of reviewer decisions on the dynamic process of publication, and thereby on eventual aggregation of knowledge, we provide a new perspective on the ongoing discussion of how the peer-review process may be improved.

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Slingo out to dry

I have written up the story about the travails of Professor Slingo for the Spectator's Coffee House blog.

See here.

The reverse Cassandra effect

This excerpt from an old Wired article about the late, great Julian Simon is somehow very apt these days.

Simon always found it somewhat peculiar that neither the Science piece nor his public wager with Ehrlich nor anything else that he did, said, or wrote seemed to make much of a dent on the world at large. For some reason he could never comprehend, people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and everything; theywere immune to contrary evidence just as if they'd been medically vaccinated against the force of fact. Furthermore, there seemed to be a bizarre reverse-Cassandra effect operating in the universe: whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days "experts" spoke awful falsehoods, and they were believed. Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker.

Newsnight

I'm due to be on Newsnight tonight to discuss the reaction to the floods with Lord Deben and Kevin Anderson.

Slingo alone

Readers will remember last week's joint Met Office/CEH report on the floods, of which I gave a favourable review at the time. In particular, the report noted that "As yet, there is no definitive answer on the possible contribution of climate change to the recent storminess, rainfall amounts and the consequent flooding."

What was not so good was Julia Slingo's "intepretation" of the report's contents. The BBC, among others, reported her as saying "all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change".

Readers will also recall David Rose's report in the Mail on Sunday yesterday, which described the apparent contradictions between the views of Slingo and Professor Mat Collins of Exeter University, who was quoted as saying "There is no evidence that global warming can cause the jet stream to get stuck in the way it has this winter. If this is due to climate change, it is outside our knowledge".

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Whack

As readers here no doubt know, James Delingpole has left Telegraph blogs to start up the London operations of the US Breitbart organisation. He has started with a bang.

Breitbart London's new Executive Editor James Delingpole looks at the ten 'best' lefty lies about the UK flooding... then debunks them.

Smashing. Read the whole thing.

Stern's pecuniary diversion

The Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information has discovered that while Lord Stern was deputy chairman of the Global Green Growth Institute, a major contract was awarded to the Grantham Institute at LSE, which is of course also headed by Lord Stern too.

Apparently alarm bells were sounded by Danish civil servants at the time but you rather get the impression that their concerns were overridden. This seems to have captured the interest of experts in corruption:

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Somerset stops pumping

The Western Daily News has reported that the huge Dutch pumps that were brought in to try to contain the floodwaters on the Somerset levels have been switched off.

[The pumps'] installation on Friday has resulted in damage to the riverbank...A spokesman for the [Environment Agency] said: "We have had to stop pumping because of the damage to the bank on the River Parett".

One wonders whether this is a case of "the river bank might collapse and let even more water out" or whether it's a case of "that's damaging to environment and will have to stop".

Sceptics are right

Matt Ridley has a powerful column in the Times today, arguing that sceptics are right:

There is no evidence, Mr Miliband, Lord Stern and others, that our floods and storms are related to climate change

In the old days we would have drowned a witch to stop the floods. These days the Green Party, Greenpeace and Ed Miliband demand we purge the climate sceptics. No insult is too strong for sceptics these days: they are “wilfully ignorant” (Ed Davey), “headless chickens” (the Prince of Wales) or “flat-earthers” (Lord Krebs), with “diplomas in idiocy” (one of my fellow Times columnists).

Cue outraged letters from Bob Ward and Lord Deben.