An open door?

H/T to Hengist for pointing us to this interview with the BBC's new science editor, David Shukman. Here's the bit about climate change.

Interviewer: One of the inevitable hot potatoes falling into your lap will be the controversies over climate change. You will not please - probably - anyone in this tormented area but how will you approach it?

Shukman: I think we assess the weight of the evidence on any particular story, whether it's climate science or something else and make a judgement about the strength of that evidence, how we're going to cover it, the relative airtime we might give to different points of view, but it's important to stress that we have an open door and I hope we alway have to the full range of opinions

Interviewer: So no ideas are is shut off, not even in the controversial area of climate change

Shukman: Nothing is shut off, but if you have got,let's say, 30 years of data , painstakingly gathered in lets say the Arctic by the American space agency, NASA, that something you can say "that's a solid body of evidence". We'll explain to viewers where there may be weaknesses, but that's the kind of thing where you can say "let's apply due weight", and the due weight in that case might point in one direction.

Glyndebourne's turbine

The opera house at Glyndebourne has installed a new wind turbine, a story covered in gratuitous detail by the Guardian.

"That is just so beautiful," sighed Brenda Sherrard, as Sir David Attenborough and Verity Cannings, deputy head girl at Ringmer community college, wrestled with the green ribbon wrapped around the 44-metre mast of the first wind turbine to power a major UK arts institution.

I was struck by this quote from the aforementioned deputy head girl at the local college.

I don't get how anyone can object to it. In a few years' time they won't even notice it. In another few years, if we don't do something about climate change, this view won't be here anyway because we'll all be under water.

It would be inappropriate, I think, to criticise Ms Cannings, who is, after all, rather young. But what do her extraordinary ideas tell us about the education system in this country? And should we be concerned that the Guardian reports this nonsense?

Tom's back

Tom Fuller is back in the blogging saddle, with a shiny new site called 3000 Quads.

Good to have you back Tom.

Centring matters

Readers at Climate Audit have been discussing the suggestion that a graph by Neukom et al produced a misleading rhetorical effect by centring the series - one paleoclimate reconstruction and a series of climate models - on the second half of the twentieth century. As a commenter observed, since the models run forward in time, the series should actually have been centred on a single point at the beginning. Then their divergence over time could be observed.

In response, Climate Audit regular UC has put together an animation showing how these kinds of spaghetti graphs might look centred on different periods. He has used paleoclimate rather than model data for convenience. It's rather beautiful I think.

Appalling disinformation in Irish Times

The Irish Times has the most appalling piece by an environmental writer called John Gibbons. This is how the article begins:

GLOBALLY, 2010 was a year of weather-related disasters on an almost unprecedented scale. Last year was worse, with a record $380 billion in economic losses attributed to “natural” disasters, many climate-related, according to insurance giant Munich Re.

Few experts expect to see any break in this upward trend this year, or any time soon. Instead, as record emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated, the climate system is now behaving precisely as scientists have been projecting for decades. The rapid build-up of energy in the system is the “engine” that is fuelling extremes, from storms and floods to severe droughts.

Here's Scientific American's take on the same report.

Natural disasters around the world last year caused a record $380 billion in economic losses. That's more than twice the tally for 2010, and about $115 billion more than in the previous record year of 2005, according to a report from Munich Re, a reinsurance group in Germany. But other work emphasizes that it is too soon to blame the economic devastation on climate change.

Almost two-thirds of 2011's exceptionally high costs are attributable to two disasters unrelated to climate and weather: the magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in March, and February's comparatively small but unusually destructive magnitude-6.3 quake in New Zealand.

Quite, quite extraordinary.

Update on Jan 20, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Shub in the comments points out that John Vidal at the Guardian has the same problem.

Huhne toast?

Guido Fawkes is reporting that incriminating documents relating to Chris Huhne's speeding ticket will be handed over to police.

Could be curtains for Mr Huhne.

A wind-up

Thanks to a reader for alerting me to a new report from the Netherlands Institute for International Relations, ‘Clingendael’. The institute has a new programme looking at what it calls "the issue of the growing mismatch between long-term energy needs, climate change visions and short-term market developments".

The report covers the question of just how much conventional power capacity is required to back up wind farm installations. Here are some excerpts from the conclusions:

Wind power has a low capacity credit (in NW Europe). This means that wind power does not significantly replace other generating capacity; alternative power sources need to be in place, together with new installed wind capacity for at least 80% of installed wind capacity, to ensure that there is sufficient back-up to meet market demand at times of reduced wind power supply. Most of this will have to come from conventional power plants. If hydro capacity from Norway  is available, this back-up capacity could be reduced to approximately 70%.

The effectiveness of wind power to reduce CO2 emissions is directly related to the level of CO2 prices. In today’s energy market with low CO2 prices, new installed wind power tends primarily  to replace gas-fired power, resulting in limited CO2 reduction, and thus becomes an expensive and less effective way of reducing CO2 emissions.

Diary date, Notts

The Nottingham Trent University is having a lecture on climate change on 7 March. The speaker is Manoj Joshi of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science.

Climate change is one of the major environmental challenges facing humanity over the next century. Given its importance, the science of climate change encompasses many fields from the natural sciences to the social sciences. This talk will use the latest physical science to discuss three questions: is the world warming up; what are the causes; what will the impacts of climate change be?

Details here.

More problems at Skeptical Science

Shub notes some more integrity issues at Skeptical Science. Coming so soon after the comment editing problems, quote doctoring is not really a surprise.

Quote of the day

I should declare that I am an extensive user of freedom of information legislation, particularly as regards universities, which I have found unutterably tiresome and difficult to deal with. One of their more tiresome habits is to refuse to provide information in anything other than PDF format. They get it in Excel, or whatever form, and translate it into PDF to provide it to me, merely to cause me extra work. I have to buy a program to suck it out of the PDF again. PDF is not a transmissible format, as it were, and they are merely trying to make life difficult by putting it in that format. So I would like to be sure that when data are provided they are provided in a properly reusable format. I have never come across a data set that cannot be reduced to tabbed, delimited text. Maybe that happens in a collection of tables, but data are essentially a simple thing. Although the data may be held in an immensely complex form in the program that the scientists are using, in any program that I have come across it should be easy-if only for the purposes of sharing with other people-to drop out at least the base data into relatively simple form.

Lord Lucas, speaking in the debate on the Protection of Freedoms Bill, has clearly experienced some of the same frustrations as others who have tried to get information from universities.

Quote of the day

I am all for making things available but, at the same time, I shall mention something which is perhaps tactless-if not even politically incorrect-which is that the Freedom of Information Act has, as many of your Lordships will know, been used as a weapon of harassment in some circumstances. The climate change community in general, and the community at the University of East Anglia in particular, have not only been subject to criminal invasion of their databases, carefully timed for particular events, but are continually bombarded with very elaborate requests for information that go well beyond the sharing of basic data, so we have to be careful in how we draft this.

Lord May of Oxford seems to oppose attempts to replicate climate scientists' work

A new climate science player

There has been a certain amount of excitement on upholder blogs this week - the cause being the news that the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has decided to involve itself in the climate change wars in the USA. NCSE has been at the forefront of efforts to keep intelligent design out of the classroom so this latest move represents a broadening of its focus.

Their website incorporates a shiny new climate change section, including a Climate Change 101 page. From there comes this paragraph on detection and attribution:

To ensure the accuracy of the models at projecting future climate trends, the models are often run backwards in time to “retrodict” past climate changes, and then compared with paleoclimate observations. The models through this process have become remarkably accurate and give the climate research community confidence that the future projections are robust.

Remarkably accurate? Is that right? And do we think they have portrayed the uncertainties in a reasonable fashion? Or in any fashion at all?

Richard B at Nature

Richard Betts, writing at Nature's blog, says upholders of the climate consensus should talk to dissenters.

I think the only solution is to talk about the science as science, in the context of all its implications and also for its own academic interest – and talk about it to everyone irrespective of their position in the policy debate.  This includes talking with sceptics, and not in defensive mode but as scientists willing to talk around the issue.  It used to be the received wisdom that climate scientists should not engage with “sceptics” beause, it was said, it only wasted time and gave credibility to arguments that had already been countered many times before.  In my view this is no longer a helpful strategy, if it ever was.

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More from Norfolk Police

Readers may remember that I asked for Norfolk Constabulary's correspondence regarding the Russell inquiry - this was centred around the extraction of emails from the CRUBACK3 server by the police's forensic IT contractors, Qinetiq.

Although much correspondence was released, there were many redactions, few of which made any sense. I therefore launched an appeal and when this was (bien sur) rejected appealed to the Information Commissioner.

Although I have had no decision from the Commissioner, today I had another letter from the Constabulary:

We have engaged with the ICO throughout their consideration of your appeal.

As part of this engagement we have returned to the relevant third parties, the UEA/Muir- Russell Inquiry and the company Qinetiq, to again seek their views on whether information about the negotiation between them for the provision of a service should continue to be treated as information that attracted a duty of confidentiality. The parties advised that there are two significant factors that have come into play since the original response was made; the passage of time and a change in the commercial functions of Qinetiq. This has led to both third parties removing their objections to the release of information originally refused under section 41. Therefore, the Constabulary no longer has reason to apply the exemption and we can release the information. A further set of emails is attached.

The release is here. I don't see much of interest yet, although I need to check this to the first release. I don't recall that I was told that any emails were withheld completely. I'm also not sure that the gaps - the redactions - have now been filled in.