The penny drops

Anne Glover, the EU Chief Scientist who was forced out of her job after a letter-writing campaign by green groups, has dished out a certain amount of retribution this morning, accusing Greenpeace of being dishonest about the risks and benefits of genetic modification.

I'm deeply disappointed with them, because those NGOs that you mentioned were NGOs that I used to trust and many citizens do trust. I think they have ignored the evidence and they have fabricated a scenario.

If I look at their letter, and what they describe, because I've met with many of them they know that simply it's not true what they talk about.

They have an ideology, they have a philosophy they wish to pursue. But you shouldn't try and back it up by evidence, or if you like bad calling the evidence. That's not honest.

I am constantly taken aback by the number of people in positions of power and authority who simply have no idea that many major environmental groups deceive the public in order to advance their aims. If Prof Glover is interested in becoming a little more enlightened, I commend the "Greens" tag on this blog to her.

Campus freedom of speech

Spiked has done a very interesting survey of freedom of speech on UK university campuses, rating each one on how good it is at protecting individuals' right to speak their mind and hear different views.

Needless to say the London School of Economics is right down among the worst. I wasn't surprised to see UCL or Birkbeck with a red flag either. More surprising were the red flags for Oxford and Edinburgh. My own alma mater - St Andrews - was at the other end of the scale and it was interesting to see that the UK's only private university - Buckingham - was also top-rated.

But the really striking thing is just how few universities received a green flag and how many got a red. This really does make the Spiked survey very important and I hope a few universities are now going to take a long hard look at themselves.

Quote of the day, comedy climate edition

Mutual confirmation of models (simple or complex) is often referred to as ’scientific robustness’.

Alexander Bakker describes some of the axioms of climate modelling.

Oreskes savaged

Michael Lavine, a statistician from the University of Massachusetts Amherst has performed a very polite savaging of Naomi Oreskes over at Stats.org. Here's an excerpt:

After urging scientists to adopt a threshold less stringent than 95 percent in the case of climate change, [Oreskes says]:

WHY don’t scientists pick the standard that is appropriate to the case at hand, instead of adhering to an absolutist one? The answer can be found in a surprising place: the history of science in relation to religion. The 95 percent confidence limit reflects a long tradition in the history of science that valorizes skepticism as an antidote to religious faith. Even as scientists consciously rejected religion as a basis of natural knowledge, they held on to certain cultural presumptions about what kind of person had access to reliable knowledge. One of these presumptions involved the value of ascetic practices. Nowadays scientists do not live monastic lives, but they do practice a form of self-denial, denying themselves the right to believe anything that has not passed very high intellectual hurdles.

Yes, most scientists are skeptics. We do not accept claims lightly, we expect proof, and we try to understand our subject before we speak publicly and admonish others.

Thank goodness.

Read the whole thing.

Compare and contrast

Be warned, this is very, very ugly stuff, and there are several messages in there that seem to me to be criminal.

Colour me disgusted

Yours truly in the aftermath of death threats to Phil Jones

Now that lukewarmers have been outed by facts they are playing the 'victim' card. It's not the world that's against them it's the science.

Lord Deben in the aftermath of threats to Matt Ridley and David Rose

Hilarious self-pitying nonsense as @DavidRoseUK interviews himself for 'The Mail on Sunday'. Seriously. http://is.gd/AQFsVF

Bob Ward in the aftermath of threats to Matt Ridley and David Rose

Inside scientivism

The BBC's Inside Science had a fascinating section (from 30 sec) about the recent research by Cardiff University's Nick Pidgeon on the effect of last year's floods in the West Country on public perceptions of climate change. Pigeon found that those affected by the floods were more likely to develop a firm belief in manmade global warming than those who were not.

To his credit, presenter Adam Rutherford noted that linking flooding events to climate change is hard, but he was neatly parried by Pidgeon, who wheeled out the attribution paper from Myles Allen's group, with its silly claim that global warming has made floods 25% more likely in the UK. Listeners were not informed that this claim was based on an unvalidated climate model with no proven ability to model precipitation (no climate model has). It would also have been interesting to ponder whether this 25% increase in the likelihood of floods has produced actually made floods 25% more prevalent. I think not.

Still, the section was about Pidgeon's study. My abiding impression was of a BBC presenter and a social scientivist sitting about discussing the efficacy of what amounts to a con on the general public. Julia Slingo's desperate misinformation about the human link to last winter's floods has clearly done its work. And the sense you got of the reaction in the studio was of "how interesting" leavened with a bit of "oh goody", but not a hint of "people are not understanding" or "people are being misled".

Oh dear.

SNP accused of fabrication

The news that the Scottish government has kicked the shale gas question into the long grass until well after the general election has elicited a pretty forthright response from one of the experts involved in the official review of unconventional oil and gas north of the border.

SNP ministers are deliberately misleading the Scottish public by pretending their fracking ban is about health and environmental concerns instead of political posturing, an expert they asked to research the controversial practice has said.

In a damning intervention, Professor Paul Younger, Rankine Chair of Engineering at the University of Glasgow, said the Scottish Government’s justifications for unveiling an indefinite moratorium on fracking were “all made up” and “completely feigned”.

Read the whole thing.

Update on Feb 2, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Prof Younger has apparently posted the following in the comments to the Telegraph article:

Just for the record, re the following reported comment of Stewart Maxwell MSP: "... Mr Maxwell insisted the panel’s report did not provide all the evidence required but could not specify what was missing ... He claimed it did not address the public health impact but the interviewer pointed out this was tackled in the document. Pressed on his error, he then claimed that many experts disagreed with its findings ...".

The final line shows that, not abashed by having failed to read the report himself before the interview (otherwise he would have known its contents), Stewart Maxwell has now made up a story about disagreements from "many experts" disagreeing with our report's findings. Let me categorically state: no such disagreements from any scientist or engineer has been brought to the attention of the former members of the expert panel by the Scottish Government, and none have been directed to me, either publicly or privately. The "many experts" are therefore a complete fabrication on the part of Stewart Maxwell MSP. Shameful.

Rose on green thuggery

David Rose has a long piece in the Mail on Sunday looking at the increasing prominence of thuggery among environmentalists.

Climate of Hate: His children are urged to kill him, he's compared to Adolf Hitler and labelled a 'denier' – even though he's Jewish. Disturbing article reveals what happens if you dare to doubt the Green prophets of doom.

You get a sense that the powers that be in the Guardian are giving this behaviour a nod and a wink.