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Bishop Hill Jan 28, 2011 BBC Climate: Sceptics Ben Pile has just posted up what may be the most intelligent commentary to date on Paul Nurse's Horizon programme. There is some pretty bilious stuff on this programme doing the rounds of the web, and Twitter has to be seen to be believed. This is the antidote. It makes Nurse's efforts look rather shallow.
Bishop Hill Jan 28, 2011 Blogs A couple of people have said they have been having slowness and/or errors. This is a problem with Squarespace, but they seem to be on the case.
Bishop Hill Jan 28, 2011 Blogs As the blog grows - and we're up 25% in the last two or three months - it is occupying an increasing proportion of my time. With trying to earn a living in a very hard marketplace, supervising small children, as well as writing another book, I am stretched very thin, and I'm in danger of taking my eye off the ball.
The tip box is very helpful and readers have been very generous (thanks everyone!), but I am wondering about possibilities to make the blog pay for itself in a more reliable way.
There's advertising of course, although I like having an ad-free site, and I'm not sure how much it would actually raise.
Another idea I've wondered about is a "subscriber's club", where you make regular payments and in return get the next book serialised ahead of full publication (plus, say, a limited-edition signed hardback when it does finally appear). Maybe also access to bits of information that I don't want to put out as a full blog post for one reason or another.
Lastly I could try standing outside Exxon's offices and wait for the cheque to be dropped into my hand.
Thoughts on any of these would be welcome, particularly the subscriber's club idea. How much, if anything, might people pay?
In the meantime I've put up the tip box again.
Bishop Hill Jan 28, 2011 Blogs I want to get a handle on how many people are using the Bishop Hill for mobile devices thingy at http://bishophill.mofuse.mobi/.
Mofuse are moving to a new platform and I'll need to recontruct my site on the new one. Not sure how much of a priority this is though. If you are using the Mofuse version of the site, can you let me know.
Bishop Hill Jan 28, 2011 Climate: Sceptics It's not just UKIP that's on the up, but global warming scepticism too. According to the Daily Mail, the number of people unconvinced by Messrs Pachauri, Mann and Jones has doubled.
The number of climate change sceptics has almost doubled in four years, official research showed yesterday.
A quarter of Britons are unconvinced that the world is warming following successive freezing winters and a series of scandals over the credibility of climate science.
Bishop Hill Jan 27, 2011 Climate: Sceptics UKIP The UK's only sceptic political party of any note is apparently shooting up the political charts, and is now polling at levels it has never reached in the past. According to Ed West, the party is even beating the LibDems in some age brackets.
With the Tories on the Science and Technology Committee voting for whitewash rather than the truth, I would expect plenty more people to abandon the Tories for Farage's anti-establishment party.
Bishop Hill Jan 27, 2011 Climate: Parliament Journals This could be interesting:
The Committee has today launched an inquiry into peer review. The committee invites evidence on the operation and effectiveness of the peer review process used to examine and validate scientific results and papers prior to publication.
The Committee welcomes submissions on all aspect of the process and among the issues it is likely to examine are the following:
- the strengths and weaknesses of peer review as a quality control mechanism for scientists, publishers and the public;
- measures to strengthen peer review;
- the value and use of peer reviewed science on advancing and testing scientific knowledge;
- the value and use of peer reviewed science in informing public debate;
- the extent to which peer review varies between scientific disciplines and between countries across the world;
- the processes by which reviewers with the requisite skills and knowledge are identified, in particular as the volume of multi-disciplinary research increases;
- the impact of IT and greater use of online resources on the peer review process; and
- possible alternatives to peer review.
The Committee welcomes submissions from scientists whose material has been peer reviewed, those who commission peer reviews and those who carry out peer review.
The Committee invites all written submissions on any of these issues by Thursday 10 March 2011.
Bishop Hill Jan 27, 2011 Bureaucrats Climate: CRU FOI A scientist called Adam Leadbetter has written a thoughtful piece on the Paul Nurse programme. He is writing from a mainstream standpoint and therefore gets some of the Climategate facts wrong, but his conclusions about data openness are worth a look.
In passing he makes reference to the political control of scientific funding:
Science journalism needs to be more responsible
The Daily Express, The Daily Mail and The Guardian were shown by Paul Nurse to have reported the outcomes of the investigation into Climategate in completely different ways. Yes, newspapers have different editorial lines and I will choose to read one newspaper based on how it fits with my political standpoint and you may choose to read another. Fine. It is also true that scientific funding bodies may choose which projects are deserving of their money based on a political agenda set at a national governmental level. Despite that, however, the results of a scientific programme should be apolitical and as such deserve to be disseminated, at what ever level of detail, in an apolitical, factual way and not spun out of all recognition to the tone a newspaper editor finds most appealing.
The idea that politicians direct scientific funding is, I think, at least mainly incorrect. There is a long-standing convention - the Haldance principle - that scientific funding is directed by scientists, or perhaps more accurately by scientific administrators. So while we might be concerned about scientific funding being directed to support the ambitions of politicians, I'm not sure that things are any better with the science bureaucracy running the show. The bureaucrats, like the politicians have little or no incentive to direct funding towards projects that will further the interests of the public. Their economic incentive is simply to get more funding.
We can see the results of these perverse incentives in the pages of New Scientist every week.
Bishop Hill
The original article seems to have disappeared. Adam says he's in the process of moving to a different blogging platform. The copy from the Google cache can be seen here.
Bishop Hill Jan 26, 2011 Climate: Surface John Graham-Cumming emails to point me to his latest blog post, in which he outlines a small bug in the code used by the Muir Russell panel in their (kinda, sorta) replication of the CRU temperature series. This was spotted by someone called David Jones, who I think is something to do with Nick Barnes' Clear Climate Code project. The problem appears to be that the Russell version of the code doesn't weight cells by area.
The impact doesn't seem to be enormous.
The warming trend shape doesn't change, but the temperature anomaly does alter. In recent years the unweighed average is greater than the weighted. For example, grabbing 1998 to 2008 at random the differences ranges between 0.02C and 0.07C with an average of 0.06C. So the upshot of the ICCER bug is that it makes things seem slightly warming.
Bishop Hill Jan 26, 2011 Climate: Jones FOI While we're talking about cancer, Shub Niggurath has an article about problems with the availability of data and code in another field of scientific endeavour, with close parallels to the case of Phil Jones and the Chinese station data.
Bishop Hill Jan 26, 2011 Climate: other Royal Society I was pondering my post yesterday about all the senior members of the scientific establishment who agree with us in the sceptic blogosphere that the science of global warming suffers from a problem of overhyping of the size of the problem. I think it is fair to say that this is probably a relatively uncontroversial observation these days.
It is interesting to have this new consensus in mind when one thinks about the analogy Sir Paul Nurse used in his encounter with James Delingpole on Horizon last night - that of a visit to a cancer specialist. One wonders if a more accurate analogy would have been a visit to a cancer specialist whose hospital has been found to be regularly guilty of operating when there is no medical need.
Bishop Hill Jan 25, 2011 BBC Climate: Hulme Royal Society Mike Hulme has published some thoughts on the Horizon programme, little of which will be disputed by sceptics. Here's a snippet:
I do not recognise [Nurse's] claim that “climate science is reducing uncertainty all the time”. There remain intractable uncertainties about future predictions of climate change. Whilst Nurse distinguishes between uncertainty arising from incomplete understanding and that arising from irreducible stochastic uncertainty, he gives the impression that all probabilistic knowledge is of the latter kind (e.g. his quote of average rates of success for cancer treatments). In fact with climate change, most of the uncertainty about the future that is expressed in probabilistic terms (e.g. the IPCC) is Bayesian in nature. Bayesian probabilities are of a fundamentally different kind to those quoted in his example. And when defending consensus in climate science – which he clearly does - he should have explained clearly the role of Bayesian (subjective) expert knowledge in forming such consensus.
Bishop Hill Jan 25, 2011 Blogs There is a list of the top weather and climate blogs here. Yours truly features.
Bishop Hill
Anthony in the comments notes that it's a site trawling for links. I've removed the link accordingly. My moment of glory gone!
