Madrid, 1995 - the story continues

A few months ago I linked to the first part of Bernie Lewin's history of the shenanigans around the IPCC's second assessment report. Bernie has now published a long, two-part post examining the science behind the controversial detection and attribution sections of the report: Part one and Part two.

Could this really be it? The first faint image of man in the sky?

Ben Santer had just placed a transparency under the lens to project this colour pattern high upon the conference wall. It was the first afternoon of the Working Group 1 Plenary in Madrid, and this great council of nations from across the entire globe was persuaded to study the significance of its strange contours before getting down to their principle task. And so they should study it, for this is a game-changer striking at the nub of what the IPCC is all about. Although obscure, here is an image of the impact of human industry on the atmosphere above. At least part of the recent warming had at last been attributed to industrial emissions. If not for this, then why these near one hundred delegations flown in from all corners of the globe? There they were carefully positioned at arched rows of labelled bureaus across this cavernous auditorium. As they listened to live translations of Santer’s explanation, not a few of them must have gazed up in wonder: Could this really be what man hath wrought?

British research goes open source

All scientific research funded by the UK taxpayer is to become open source, according to an article in the Guardian. It seems that academics will be required to pay the fees to make their papers freely available.

Since few journals will solely publish papers by UK academics, this presumably means that the scientific publishers will retain the library subscriptions which are the bedrock of their profits, while gaining a massive windfall in the shape of open access fees for much of their content.

A good day to be a scientific publisher I think.

Cicerone and the Today programme

Among the interesting events that I missed last week was the Today programme appearance of climate scientist and head of the NAS, Ralph Cicerone. Cicerone is of course a familiar figure from the Hockey Stick Illusion, with his rewriting of the investigative task allotted to the NAS by congress being a key part in the job of saving the Hockey Stick for the IPCC.

Cicerone was in London ahead of his elevation to the ranks of the fellows of the Royal Society, and a man of his calibre will certainly be very much at home there.

The interview with Today's John Humphrys was notable for its somewhat adversarial tone (see transcript here). Humphrys is very, very green and despite his reputation as a journalistic rottweiler has tended to come over all poodle-like when faced with someone of who shares his apocalyptic views about the future of the planet. His new interest in challenging people like Cicerone is therefore something of a surprise and I have picked up a certain amount of grumbling at his impertinence from green quarters of the internet. Letters of complaint will no doubt be flowing to the BBC in due course.

What has prompted the change? It has been suggested before that there are some journalists within the corporation who object strongly to attempts to dictate their journalistic output. I wonder if it is possible that with the BBC now having largely excluded sceptic arguments from the airwaves, some of the old hands within the corporation are trying to put the arguments over themselves. If so, it's obviously a second-best solution but is commendable journalism nevertheless.

But it does make the BBC look very foolish.

On the accountability of universities

Rand Simberg looks at the aftermath of the Sandusky affair at Penn State University and considers what it means for public perceptions of the investigation of Michael Mann.

Michael Mann, like Joe Paterno (and to a lesser degree, Jerry Sandusky) was a rock star in the context of Penn State University, bringing in millions in research funding. The same university president who resigned in the wake of the Sandusky scandal was also the president when Mann was being whitewashed investigated. We saw what the university administration was willing to do to cover up heinous crimes, and even let them continue, rather than expose them. Should we suppose, in light of what we now know, they would do any less to hide academic and scientific misconduct, with so much at stake?

It’s time for a fresh, truly independent investigation.

I'm not sure why Simberg has used strikethrough style on the word "whitewashed". That the Climategate "inquiries" were devoid of any integrity is beyond question.

Simberg's hope for a meaningful inquiry will undoubtedly turn out to be forlorn. Universities do not investigate their own. They are accountable to nobody and, as Edward Acton showed during the CRU investigations, the vice-chancellors can thumb their noses at politicians with complete impunity.

The question is, why then should the public pay for them?

Back

I'm back from a week at the seaside. Fortunately the weather was not conducive to sitting at the beach, so we opted for sport and culture instead. Much more up my street.

Con Science - Josh 175

Click image for a larger version.

There are clearly great scientists doing excellent work. So why do some seem to be ok with all the scams, boondoggles and tricks that pass for science and policy?

Answers on a placard, please.

Cartoons by Josh

Light posting

There will be blog silence for a few days (unless anything exciting happens).

Mission impoverish

Christopher Booker laments the insanity of the UK government's policy on shale gas, with the headline summing things up rather well

You can’t have shale gas – it might halve your bills

It is an extraordinary thing when the main political parties agree that the way ahead is a the impoverishment of the electorate and transfers of wealth from the poor to the rich.

Horner's latest FOI success

Chris Horner of the American Tradition Institute has got hold of the emails of some academics working at Texas A&M and Texas Tech universities. He has written about what he has found here.

[The emails] reveal a sophisticated UCS operation to assist activist academics and other government employees as authorities for promoting UCS's agenda. This includes "moot-courting" congressional hearings with a team of UCS staff, all the way down to providing dossiers on key committee members, addressing in particular their faith, stance on gay marriage and stimulus spending. Of course.

This also includes directing the taxpayers' servants to outside PR consultants -- apparently pro bono or else on UCS's dime.

Redwood writes

Senior Conservative MP John Redwood has written an open letter to the new director general of the BBC, discussing its institutional bias. Coverage of global warming is mentioned.

The same problem [of institutional bias against certain views of the world] dogs the Corporation’s treatment of climate change theory. The BBC takes the view that the “science is settled”. Any intelligent person should know that by definition the science is never settled. Newtonian physics was a gerat breakthrough, which settled the view of the heavens. In the twentieth century its was challenged and improved. Many intelligent people have many different reaons for disagreeing with  pure climate change theory and more importantly with the policy conclusions that flow from it in the debate. The BBC does all too little to give these dissenting voices decent airtime,to explore their disagreements and to allow viewers and listeners to make up their own minds. If the conventional theory is as all conquering as the BBC says, it should be able to handle grown up examination of its alleged shortcomings from its critics. Tackling fuel poverty and promoting more industry in the UK, two popular causes even with the BBC, are difficult to combine with carbon puritanism.

Green fizzics - Josh 174

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Cartoons by Josh

Testing scientific gullibility

Many readers will be aware of Alan Sokal's famous hoaxing of the postmodernist journal Social Text (as well as the revenge of the humanities scholars some time afterwards).

Now, in an amusingexperiment, scholars at Imperial College have taken the hoaxing one step further:

What would happen if we took Sokal’s broad premise and turned it around onto scientists? Could we make scientists believe a hoax TV news story because it (a) employed familiar TV conventions and (b) it presented a flattering narrative of a lone scientist battling corrupt authority?

We set about constructing a four-minute TV news item about a visiting Japanese scientist called Shigeyuki Kagoshima, whose important climate-saving research had been thwarted by a cynical Chinese corporation. We studied science news clips on television to mimic common devices such as lab presentations and interview conventions. We presented our film to science undergraduates at Imperial College as a genuine news piece – and tested whether our audience could detect the content as fake. Finally, we revealed our hoax – and asked them for their reactions.

Find out what happened here.

A letter to the Economist

Matt Ridley, Benny Peiser and I have a letter in the Economist. You can read it here.

Mixed emotions

A few weeks back, I was wondering whether to write a piece about the Jones' report on the BBC's science coverage and the impact it had made on the corporation's output. This was prompted by the thought that I hadn't seen a single sceptic viewpoint put forward on the airwaves since the report's publication. Then, a few weeks ago, we had James Delingpole's appearance on the Daily Politics opposite green campaigner Andrew Pendleton, and I decided to move on to other things - not that such a brief segment made much impact on my case.

Bob Ward, however, is unhappy with this new development (isn't he always?) and has been venting his spleen at the Huffington Post.

Pendleton, whose contribution was headed "global warming has not stopped", attempted to provide a link to a commentary I published earlier this year which points out that the rise in global temperature recorded since 1997 is not statistically significant, but also shows that there have been many such periods since 1970 when warming was undetectable from just 15 data points. The warming trend over the past 40 years is clear and statistically significant, but carrying out analyses only on small subsets of these data often means that the signal cannot be detected among the noise.

Statistically significant eh? Not sure about that.

However, Bob then makes himself look as bit foolish by criticising Delingpole for linking to a blog posting.

...he claimed that the three warmest years on record in the United States all occurred before 1940, citing a 'sceptic' blog which alleges that the temperature measurements by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies are wrong

So Bob's blog postings, it seems, are kosher, but other people's aren't. Funny that.

It will be interesting to see if Ward's activity has any effect. I fancy not. But I have mixed emotions about the idea of the BBC excluding sceptic views anyway. If Ward is successful it will only hasten the corporation's demise, and that is not a bad thing.

Did Stern account for war and peace?

GWPF outlines a study by Erik Gartzke that discusses the links between global warming and war. Gartzke notes that post-war industrialisation is not only the putative cause of global warming but has also been associated with a steady decline in military strife. In fact, what evidence there is suggests that periods of global cooling are usually associated with the outbreak of hostiliities. 

"Ironically," as Gartzke writes in the concluding sentence of his paper's abstract, "stagnating economic development in middle-income states caused by efforts to combat climate change could actually realize fears of climate-induced warfare." And thus he states in the concluding section of his paper that "we must add to the advantages of economic development that it appears to make countries more peaceful," and that we must therefore ask ourselves if environmental objectives should be "modified by the prospect that combating climate change could prolong the process of transition from warlike to peaceful polities."

I wonder if Lord Stern considered changes in levels of military conflict in his famous report.