Climate cuttings 60

There's a lot of material floating round the climate blogosphere at the moment, none of which I really have time to do justice to, so here's a round up of what you are missing.

Katharine Hayhoe has posted up some of the emails she has received. One or two of them are very ugly, the rest still rude in a way that we can really do without. Given that Prof Hayhoe has been known to use the 'd' word I'm less sympathetic than I might be, but this is not to condone the messages she has been sent. I hope she eschews name-calling in future though.

Click to read more ...

Imperial wizard

Sir Brian Hoskins recently gave a lecture on the science at climate change at Imperial College. Apparently the take-home quote is this:

We are performing a very dangerous experiment with our planet

Ho hum.

The lecture is here.

Melting ice

Reader Steve W has done some rough calculations on how long it will take the Greenland Ice Cap to melt and is asking for the mathematically minded among you to cast an eye over it.

His post is here.

A Rose on winter

Over the weekend there was quite a lot of interest in David Rose's article in the Mail, which addressed new figures from the Met Office which appeared to confirm a lack of any warming in the last 15 years.

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Rose was also warning of further cold on the way, based on an assessment of Solar Cycle 24 and 25.

The Met Office have now responded, with a blog post that has a whiff of Bob Ward about it: "includes numerous errors in the reporting of published peer reviewed science". The argument seems to be that if you take decadal averages it is still possible to obscure the plateau in the temperatures.

Or words to that effect.

Wheat in India

New Scientist has a very strange report about an article published in Nature Reports Climate Change. It's about what it calls "premature ageing" in wheat in India.

Satellite images of northern India have revealed that extreme temperatures are cutting wheat yields. What's more, models used to predict the effects of global warming on food supply may have underestimated the problem by a third.

Golly. Sounds serious, doesn't it?

Click to read more ...

All models are wrong

Occasional BH commenter Tamsin Edwards - a climatologist at the University of Bristol -  has started her own blog. About time too!

It's called All Models are Wrong, the corollary of course being that some are useful. I predict that this will become a must-read.

Tamsin's first post is about the travails of coming up with a blog name that wasn't going to bring down the wrath of one side or other of the global warming debate. I think All Models are Wrong is fine, although I couldn't help but be reminded of this. :-)

Sir John's emails

A few weeks back, readers may remember, the Information Commissioner ruled that where public servants used private email accounts to conduct public business, their messages were still subject to FOI. With this in mind I decided to ask the Met Office for Sir John Houghton's emails relating to the IPCC's Third Assessment Report. I copied my message to Sir John's email address at the John Ray Initiative - the evangelical programme which now appears to occupy much of his time.

Attentive students of the Climategate emails will have noticed that Sir John appeared to use a private email address for all of his work on this most controversial of reports.

A week or so ago, the Met Office replied.

I am writing to advise you that, following a search of our paper and electronic records, I have established that the information you requested is not held by the Met Office. Sir John Houghton has also confirmed that he does not hold private e-mails relevant to your request.

So it appears that Sir John has deleted historic records relating to his work on the Third Assessment Report - work that was funded by the UK taxpayer.

Hanging the laundry out

In an article entitled Global warming’s ‘dirty laundry’, The Washington Times has called for the University of Virginia to release Michael Mann's emails.

Mr. Mann insists disclosure would have a chilling effect. “Allowing the indiscriminate release of these materials will cause damage to reputations and harm principles of academic freedom,” he wrote in an August letter to UVA.

As important as it is to protect Mr. Mann’s feelings from being hurt, trillions of dollars are at stake with climate-policy decisions being made based on his work. From cap-and-trade to the Kyoto treaty, it’s not enough to make a choice based solely on a trust that this secretive cabal of climate scientists is telling the truth. The taxpayers paid Mr. Mann; they deserve to know exactly what they were getting for their money.

So far, the Climategate disclosures have unmasked shoddy methods in service of a leftist public-policy agenda. Compelling release of all communications - dirty laundry and all - is the only way to provide the full context. Let an informed public decide on its own whether they’ve been hoodwinked by charlatans, or that the sky really is falling.

The point is an important one. Mann would have us believe that he is just bashful about his laundry being seen in public. But the public needs to know that there's nothing worse to be revealed.

Mann lecture at Penn State

A video of Mann's recent lecture at Penn State is available here.

I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, so feel free to point out any points of interest in the comments. The few seconds I have looked at suggest that there wasn't a big turnout for the great man.

Ivory-tower activists

I had an interesting exchange of tweets the other day with Tamsin Edwards. She had noted that she was off to a conference called Planet Under Pressure, and I gently inquired whether this was a suitable conference for a scientist to be attending at public expense - it certainly looks like an activist gathering to me, although in fairness there are also a few scientific sessions.

I think everyone would agree that the public is funding scientists to make scientific discoveries. Whether they are also paying for outreach efforts seems to me to be a moot point. The line between making the public aware of what is going on in science and using science as a tool in an ongoing political struggle seems to me to be one that is fraught with difficulty. There is little doubt that many residents of the ivory tower are little more than publicly funded political activists - a form of corruption if ever there was one. (For the avoidance of doubt, I don't believe that Tamsin E is one of these - indeed I'm not even sure that there are many such among the ranks of climate scientists, strictly defined).

Is there any way of making a clear delineation of what is acceptable or unacceptable for scientists to do with their public funding? Or is this sort of abuse and corruption of taxpayer largesse simply a feature of the system rather than a bug?

Quackery? Josh 143

H/t to Tallbloke who spotted the homeopathy quote by Gavin over at Realclimate. Check out his post here. Judith Curry has a much more sensible view on Kevin's Missing heat here.

Cartoons by Josh

Who pays for Brendan?

Brendan Montague has written a report on the Information Tribunal hearing into GWPF's seed funder. There's not a lot new to tell the truth, apart from the fact that our Brendan is being represented by a barrister.

Now a couple of days back Leo Hickman told me that this pursuit of GWPF's funders was a personal initiative by Brendan

No 3rd party is "funding" the request. Montague is doing it himself. Believes in transparency etc

I've asked the question and today Leo has said that Montague is paying the barrister himself.

Hmm.

I've left a comment at the bottom of Brendan's article.

Update on Jan 27, 2012 by Bishop Hill

I'm sure I recall Brendan telling me how tough life as a freelance journalist was when he came to visit me in 2010. Business sure must have been good since then.

The Education Secretary and s77

This is interesting. Left foot forward is reporting that the education secretary Michael Gove is being investigated for possible breaches of the FOI Act.

Presumably, even if Gove has been breaching the Act, no prosecution will be possible because of the six-month statute of limitations that readers here know applies to such cases.

So I guess Gove, like everyone at CRU, will carry right on as if nothing had happened.

Sceptic letter in WSJ

A group of prominent sceptics have published a letter in the Wall St Journal:

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

(H/T James Evans in Unthreaded)

Mann's emails - part 1

The American Tradition Institute has had sight of some of Michael Mann's emails, as part of its ongoing battle to get the University of Virginia to comply with its legal obligations. Its press release can be seen here.

The selected emails include graphic descriptions of the contempt a small circle of largely taxpayer-funded alarmists held for anyone who followed scientific principles and ended up disagreeing with them. For example, in the fifteenth Petitioners’ Exemplar (PE-15), Mann encourages a boycott of one climate journal and a direct appeal to his friends on the editorial board to have one of the journal’s editors fired for accepting papers that were carefully peer-reviewed and recommended for publication on the basis that the papers dispute Mann’s own work. In PE-38, he states that another well respected journal is “being run by the baddies,” calling them “shills for industry.” In PE-39 Mann calls U.S. Congressmen concerned about how he spent taxpayer money “thugs”.

Update on Jan 26, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Steve M notes that these are Climategate emails and therefore not new. I'm slightly bemused by the ATI headline, which suggests otherwise.