Slow blogging

I'm somewhat off colour - blogging may be light for a couple more days.

IPCC on climate sensitivity

Nic Lewis, best known as one of the co-authors of the O'Donnell et al paper on Antarctic temperatures has a must-read post up at Judith Curry's place. The title tells you all you need to know:

The IPCC’s alteration of Forster & Gregory’s model-independent climate sensitivity results.

This is pretty shocking stuff.

Again.

Testing two degrees

One of the questions I would have liked to ask at the Cambridge conference the other week related to a graph shown by John Mitchell, the former chief scientist at the Met Office. Although Mitchell did not make a great deal of it, I thought it was interesting and perhaps significant.

Mitchell was discussing model verification and showed his graph as evidence that they were performing well. This is it:

Click to read more ...

Material World on climate models

The BBC's Material World programme interviewed Prof Paul Valdes, a climate modeller. The message appears to be that climate models are very bad at reconstructing major climate shifts in the geological record and are probably bad at predicting future ones too.

The conclusion of the interview appears to be that it's worse than we thought. This struck me as slightly odd given that the rest of the interview appeared to revolve around the fact that the models don't tell us anything very useful.

Eduardo Zorita has further thoughts at Klimazwiebel.

Material World excerpt

Pearce on the new FOI disclosures

Fred Pearce has an article up about Jonathan Jones' successful attempt to get the CRUTEM data from UEA. He has interviewed Prof Jones in the process:

"I am extremely concerned about the apparent pattern of secrecy and evasion," he said. "My sole aim [in pursuing the case] is to help restore climate science to something more closely resembling scientific norms."

Mooney unspun

Falkenblog looks at Chris Mooney's recent output and concludes that he doesn't understand standard errors:

[Mooney] concludes that 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing'. Yes, Mr. tendentious English major without an understanding of standard errors, it is.

Huhne mangles economics

Tim Worstall is quite magnificently rude about Chris Huhne's grasp of economics and his (ahem) forgetfulness about what Lord Stern actually said in his report.

The Haunting 2

Haunting the Library is back in the saddle after a long lay-off. He marks his return with a piece about the Club of Rome.

Conflict of interest

Updated on Jul 1, 2011 by Bishop Hill

The AGW upholder community is all a-quiver with the news that Willie Soon received a lot of money from the oil industry. Even Monbiot himself is on the case, with a stream of tweets on the subject:

Secret funding of climate change deniers exposed again: bit.ly/m6Yjlp. Key issue here is that interests never declared.

Click to read more ...

UEA financials

UEA have relented and provided copies of the invoices I asked to see.

This has thrown some light on the issue I hoped to address, namely the status of the Russell panel. There are a couple of invoices in there that are addressed directly to the Climate Change Emails Review. This would appear to suggest that the panel was a "wholly-owned subsidiary". This would suggest to me that Muir Russell's emails are subject to FOI.