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Bishop Hill Jun 20, 2007 Blogs The Libertarian Alliance Blog has suddenly burst into life again, narrowly avoiding deletion from my feed reader. "Abolish the BBC" is one of their first entries. It's almost like they never went away.
Bishop Hill Jun 20, 2007 Blogs Climate: other Journals MacMillan Nature group now has a really quite impressive web presence - at least in terms of volume. Their head honcho, Richard Charkin, is a blogger and what's more he's a real one too. He actually seems to write the posts himself, and does (for a corporate bod) dangerous things like offering the occasional opinion. He looks like a good man to have in charge of a publishing business when things are changing so quickly.
Under his tutelage, the group has started up a plethora of blogs (or "clogs" as EU Referendum likes to call corporate blogs) covering every subject from peer review to avian flu. (There's a song in there somewhere). This is admirable, but the group still gives the impression of not really having found its feet in the online world. There are also some pretty large risks they are running, and I'm not sure that they are playing their cards very cleverly. More of that later.
First though, why do I think they're not quite on the ball as regards blogging? I've subscribed to a couple of their blogs - one on peer review and also Nature Climate Feedback. The first thing to say is that content is a little thin on the ground. If you want a popular blog it's pretty much a given that you have to update it regularly, if not daily. Only the very best bloggers manage to buck this trend. Comments on Nature blogs are also pretty much moderated to death. I left a comment on the Peer to Peer blog shortly after it opened. This was not actually published until after I'd had an email correspondence with the site administrator which lasted the best part of a week - it was a friendly correspondence, for sure, but why didn't they just post the comment straight away? Another comment which I posted on Monday night was finally published today, more than 24 hours later. This is not the way to stimulate an interesting debate. It rather smacks of the way science was conducted in the nineteenth century, when you put your correspondence in the mail and it was delivered by packet steamer. It just doesn't cut the mustard any more.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way. Nature's web tech site, Nascent, has pulled in fully 164 comments in the 18 months since its first posting. Climate Feedback, being in such a controversial area, really ought to be their showpiece site, but has managed to pull in just 150 comments in three months. This all suggests that the punters are being turned off.
It's a tricky situation for Nature. It's not clear how the group intends to monetise their web presence. Most people out there are relying on getting lots and lots of eyeballs on their web presence in order to do this. This is fine for people like DK or Instapundit who can be opinionated, but Nature has a much more difficult tightrope to walk. Its whole commercial reputation relies as being seen as a neutral umpire in matters scientific. If it were seen to take sides in a debate, it might get away for it for a while, but eventually it would end up backing the wrong horse in one race or another, and then its reputation would be shot. It has to be very careful about getting into the news and opinion game.
A couple of examples:
In Nature Reports: Climate Change, which is a climate focused site of which the Climate Feedback blog forms a part, Amanda Leigh Haag writes about a possible successor to the Kyoto Treaty. In it, she cites the following:
Now if you are going to take virtually all of your quotes directly from current and former staffers of environmental pressure groups (the exception is Pielke), you run the risk of people thinking that your publication is not actually a science site, or even just a news site, but is in fact just another arm of the environmental campaigning movement. You might perhaps think that this is an admirable thing to be. But many of your readers will not, and they may well stop reading both your websites and your scientific journals.
Another example is this post by Olive Heffernan, who is the editor in charge of Climate Feedback. In it she lambasts Czech president Vaklav Klaus' recent article in which he says that there is a risk to liberty from the demands of environmentalists. She decries his lack of qualifications as a climate expert by way of denouncing his views, although she is herself a zoologist by training. These kind of opinions are fine in general. It's fairly easy to take pot-shots at them, and if the comments cleared moderation in less than 24 hours I might do so more often - but that's not the point. When they come from a Nature employee the situation is rather different. Can a Nature editor really be seen to publicly take one side like this? Heffernan not only has a go at Klaus, but also at Richard Lindzen who is, if nothing else, a professional climatologist. These are Nature's customers for heavens sake. You can't go slagging them off just because they disagree with you, Olive. Should prospective Nature authors be asking themselves if their views are acceptable to the group before they submit their manuscripts?
It would be a pity if Nature were found to have spoken out in favour of the global warming enthusiasts and to have published junk science on their behalf, as well as having ridiculed the skeptics. It just wouldn't look very clever, would it?
I don't think all is lost though. The climate debate is largely conducted at Climate Audit and Real Climate and there is a real lack of communication between the two sides. There could be a very exciting role for Climate Feedback in umpiring a proper debate between the two sides. It could be wonderful to read, useful for the advancement of science, and cut a huge amount of risk out of the Nature business model. I imagine the moderators calling in expert advice - say a statistician when the conversation turned to matters statistical - in order to force people to address the arguments of their opponents rather than the usual ad-hominems and evasions which characterise most online argument.
First though they would have to admit that there is a debate at all, so I'm not holding my breath.
Update 21 June 2007: Welcome to readers from nurture.nature.com! I hope you find the posting useful.
Bishop Hill Jun 20, 2007 Blogs The accolades continue to flood in for this blog. After being declared "94th best non-aligned political blog penned by someone adopting an ecclesiastical persona"* in Iain Dale's political blogging guide thingy last year, I now find that while my back has been turned I have come third (or perhaps even second equal!) in the Blogpower awards - Best layabout and style category. Had I known I'd been nominated I might have voted for myself and come a clear second!
Thank-you to the eight people who voted for me (although since multiple voting is allowed, it may be one person with a crush on me). Either way, I'm touched.
* I made part of this up.
Bishop Hill Jun 19, 2007 Climate: Cuttings Following on from its exposure as... erm... erroneous, Steve McIntyre has invited Phil Jones of the Hadley Centre to withdraw his 1990 paper in Nature. The Bishop wonders if he will respond, let alone comply.
Tim Blair notes a prominent Australian environmentalist doing a bit of a flip-flop on the subject of drought. (via Gust of Hot Air)
IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth notes a number of surprising features of future climate:
Bishop Hill Jun 19, 2007 Blogs Apart from the obvious one of actually responding in the first place, I have a mild beef with the way some site owners deal with debate in an comments thread on their blogs. I count three different ways of dealing with a comment thread:
I'm of the firm opinion that (1) is the best option. It has the (for me) huge advantage that you can get notified of new comments on the thread using a comment tracker like co.mments.com, and allows your commenter to make his points in his own way. The disadvantage is that threads can sometimes get a bit difficult to follow, particularly if they are long and complex. This is, however, the approach adopted by most site owners.
(2) Adding responses to the end of comments is also fine - it makes the thread rather easier to follow but you may not know if your comment has been responded to. Tim Worstall is probably the best known exponent of this approach.
You might make a case that (3) - interspersing responses throughout the comment - has certain advantages, in that the site owner can respond to each point made by the commenter. However I think its use should be discouraged, because it becomes something akin to a fisking of the commenter. It seems to me that a polite welcome to a commenter involves letting them say their piece, allowing other readers to appreciate the their argument in the best light possible. Interspersing ones own responses seems to me to be just plain bad manners - it's the equivalent of interrupting them at the end of every sentence. I know of two sites that use this approach - Real Climate and William Connelly (who is, coincidentally a Real Climate contributor). Are there any others?
Bishop Hill Jun 19, 2007 Civil liberties A couple of months ago it was reported that there are 266 reasons the state can use to demand entry to your house. This appalling news has been tempered somewhat by today's report that if residents insist on smoking in the presence of council officials the visit will be cancelled and replaced with a meeting at the council offices.
So when the man from the council demands entry to your home under the "Offensive Wallpaper Regulations 2007", all you need do is blow smoke in his face and tell him to bugger off.
And if that's not a reason to take up smoking, I don't know what is.
Bishop Hill Jun 19, 2007 Climate: Surface A freelance researcher called Doug Keenan has accused prominent climate scientist, Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, of fabricating part of a key paper on the Urban Heat Island effect. This is one of the most important papers underpinning the claims of manmade global warming.
In the paper, Jones claimed that he sampled the temperature records from weather stations selected for having uninterrupted histories - that is to say they hadn't been moved or had their instrumentation changed and so on. This is vital for the credibility of the paper.
Keenan has discovered that for many of the stations Jones used, there are actually no records of whether there were any changes or not and says that the claims made in the paper are therefore fabrications.
Stand back and watch the fireworks.
(Via Climate Audit)
Bishop Hill Jun 17, 2007 Climate: MWP Climate: Models Climate: Surface This is an attempt to summarise some of my previous postings on the IPCC process into a single article. What I'm trying to do is to make the case that there are signficant problems with the science that can be readily understood by the average reader. Even for a layman, these issues should give pause for thought.
The posting was inspired by this article by the Lazy Environmentalist - a blog I chanced upon while idly surfing my way around Technorati.com. The author seems to be, shall we say, an enthusiastic and unquestioning believer.
Temperatures are going up
Temperature records are derived from surface stations, satellites and radiosondes (weather balloons).
There are many problems with the surface temperature record. Firstly, it's not really a record of the temperature, but a theory of what the temperature record would have looked like if it had been measured correctly. The records from many stations are subject to significant adjustments to deal with issues like station moves, creeping urbanisation and so on. These adjustments are often larger than the trend which comes out at the end of the process. In other words the raw data shows cooling, but by the time they've adjusted it, it shows warming. The adjustments are largely shrouded in mystery, so it's not possible to say if they are reasonable or not. One surprising artifact of these adjustments is that the historic temperature record keeps changing - the past keeps being made to look colder so the warming seems ever greater.
A new website, surfacestations.org, has started to uncover a worrying failure of many temperature stations to site their instruments correctly - including several next to airconditioning units and carparks, and more than one next to a barbeque.
The weather stations are mostly on land, but most of the earth is ocean. While the sea surface record carries a greater weight in assessing the global temperature, the accuracy of that temperature is questionable because of this unevenness in the spread of the stations. The sea surface record, like the land record, is also subject to large adjustments which dwarf the warming which it is claimed has been detected. Here is an example of very shaky reasoning for a major adjustment.
The satellite and weather balloon records are much less convincing if you are looking for evidence of warming.
Temperatures in the past
The estimates of temperatures before widespread instrumental records became available are created from proxies - the temperatures are estimated from tree-ring widths and densities, and from ice cores. There are particular problems with the tree rings. Trees can grow faster or slower when temperatures rise, and it is not clear that the attempts by scientists to deal with this issue - by measuring trees at the upper tree line - have been successful. One scientist has found treeline samples from the same site showing both responses.
Another problem is that some temperature reconstructions have been suggesting declining temperatures in the second half of the twentieth century when, of course, things are meant to have warmed up rapidly. This embarrassing problem ("the divergence issue") has been quietly brushed aside by the IPCC, and in their report the offending records have been truncated at the point at which they start to fall away, so that the remaining records all show a rising trend. It is hard to see this as anything other than dishonesty.
The reconstructions with rising trends all use include a couple of particular species of trees - bristlecone pines and foxtails. These have both shown rapidly increasing growth rates in the twentieth century, something which is believed to be caused by non-climatic factors. Despite this being widely understood, the reconstructions have still been put forward by the IPCC as valid.
Most of the reconstructions stop in the 1990s. One simple test of whether they are reasonable or not would be to measure recent tree ring widths and to use this to derive a temperature. This could be compared to the actual temperature from the instrumental records. Despite all the money poured in to climate research, this has not been done and so questions over the accuracy of the reconstructions remain. And since we don't know if the reconstructions are valid, we can't say whether current temperatures are above, below or the same as, temperatures in warm periods in the past (eg "The Medieval Warm Period"). This extraordinary failure means that in essence we don't know if the problem is a problem we should worry about or not.
Data and code
One of the basic tenets of the scientific method is that work should be reproducible by other scientists. In order for climate scientists' work to be reproduced it is necessary for their data and the computer programs which transform it into results to be freely available. There are many instances of climate scientists refusing to release data, or "losing" it. This has happened with prominent scientists and key scientific papers. So some of the most important scientific work of recent years - work which underpins the IPCC process and the doom-laden results which it announces to the world - is not capable of being replicated. A reputable scientific body would disassociate itself from suspect papers of this kind. The IPCC embraces them.
The consensus
The IPCC's assessment report is said to represent the consensus view of 2500 scientists. Who these scientists are and how they made their happiness with this alleged consensus clear is not known. The comments of reviewers on the draft IPCC reports cannot be reproduced, despite this contravening the IPCC's own rules. The public have to accept the existence of a consensus on trust.
Bishop Hill Jun 17, 2007 BBC Climate: other The Sunday Times is reporting that an internal BBC report to be published next week will conclude that the corporation is institutionally biased in favour of the left wing causes held dear by most of its staff and journalists. While it is nice to have confirmation of what most of the dextrospere has long known, we have no idea of whether the report will actually have any effect in practive. It's much more likely that it will be paraded as evidence that the Beeb has changed while actually leaving everything just as it is.
If the BBC is sincere about wanting to correct the imbalance we might expect to see a number of actions.
Firstly, heads would have to roll. The requirement to be balanced is a key part of the BBC's charter - such a flagrant breach surely demands a major clear out of the senior staff who have allowed this state of affairs to continue unaddressed for so many years.
The placing of BBC job advertisements in the Guardian, to the virtual exclusion of any other newspapers, should be ended. There should be a defined period - say ten years - in which all BBC jobs are only advertised in the Telegraph. This should help redress the balance in the staffing.
The BBC's disinformation campaigns on behalf of environmentalists and socialists need to be reversed. There needs to be an sustained series of programmes to question global warming, recycling, UK membership of the EU, and all the other myriad causes for which the corporation acts as an unpaid cheerleader. The BBC has told one side of the story for many years. In order to redress the balance it needs to tell the other side, and the other side only, for many more years to come.
Of course there's not a cat's chance of any of this actually happening. There will be a fuss this week when the report comes out. Then when it's all died down again, the red flag will be raised again over Television Centre and normal service will be resumed.
Bishop Hill Jun 14, 2007 Labour Alistair Campbell surely. Michael White of the Graun is a shoo-in too.
More suggestions in the comments please.
Bishop Hill Jun 14, 2007 Liberalism Guido and Iain Dale both stick the boot in to the senile old git leader of the (allegedly) Liberal Democrats. Once again, they've seen a problem caused by illiberalism and have adopted a policy of further illiberalism to deal with it. One really does wonder whether they can mention their own party's name without putting their tongues in their cheeks. (Perhaps they should rename themselves the "Liberal" Democrats or even the Liberal
Democrats).
The latest wheeze is to only permit farmers to sell development land to the council. It will be for a "fair" price, of course - apparently ten times the agricultural value is what the Commisar party feels it's worth. It's so illiberal I don't know where to start. Do the People's Revolutionary Liberal Democrats not understand the point of private property? That it underpins free societies? Can they not see that they are simply proposing an extension of the corruption that already engulfs the planning process - the land will simply be sold on to the developer who pays the largest bribes. (Hmm, the Liberal Revolutionary Democrat Fraction are big in local government aren't they?- perhaps I'm beginning to understand their thinking. No doubt it has also crossed their minds that the price of agricultural land is falling while development land is rising in price, so the politicians' cut should grow quite nicely in future).
Jock Coats reckons that farmers are currently engaging in rent seeking (see comment at 1.22, here). This is utterly bizarre. The state removes people's ability to do what they want with their own land, and if they try to get that right back again they are rent-seeking? Whose land is it anyway, Trotsky?
Someone called Tim Leunig (apparently from the LSE) describes the policy as "liberal and localist" (comment at 4.44 here). This is quite frankly, crap. It is simply an abomination of the language to describe price fixing as "liberal". It's liberal in the same way as incomes policies were liberal and look at the damage they did. (And don't try to impress me with Michael Gove thinking they're a good idea either - pointing me at another bunch of statists makes my case better than it does yours, Mr Leunig).
Let me spell it out. Scrap the bloody planning laws and let people build where houses are needed. (And I say this as someone who has just bought a house next to a field which may well get planning permission for the local landowner to build a load of houses on).
Liberal Democrats - pah! The Labour party with jaundice, more like.
Bishop Hill Jun 14, 2007 Greens Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth fame has one of his usual "whip up a scare" stories on Comment is Free today. The latest impending disaster is the decision of nPower to dump ash from one of its coal-burning power stations into some lakes in Oxfordshire.
Some years ago, RWE npower started to fill in the lakes with PVA [Ash], killing the wildlife and transforming a thriving ecosystem to a polluted wasteland. I saw this progressive strangulation of nature take place as I passed by on the train on journeys between Oxford and London. The lakes gradually disappeared to be replaced by toxic deserts dotted with a few hardy weeds.
Only a couple of the original dozen or so lakes now remain. One of them, Thrupp Lake, is set soon to suffer the same fate as the others, as RWE npower pipes in its waste from Didcot. The terns, the otters and everything will disappear from there, and not only will the land around Oxford have less wildlife, but people will also have been robbed of a source of inspiration as well.
Some years ago, my wife and I used to visit Musselburgh Lagoons for the birdwatching. The lagoons were something of a legend among twitchers because of the way rare species that were often seen there. Everyone who went knew exactly where the lagoons came from - they were formed and then filled in with the ash from Cockenzie Power station which is just adjacent to the site.
There's an web page about the lagoons here. And here are some excerpts from it:
Typical numbers [of birds] roosting in midwinter are:- 1600 Oystercatcher; 150 Curlew; 900 Bar-tailed Godwit; 400 Redshank; 2000 Knot; 2000 Dunlin; 80 Turnstone; 30 Ringed Plover; and the occasional Grey Plover, Black-tailed Godwit and Purple Sandpiper. Most of these roost at the lagoons...
Many gulls roost at the lagoons, with about 100 Great Black-backed Gulls and sometimes thousands of Herring, Common and Black-headed Gulls present.
The Ringed Plover breed on the old shore-line in the west and central lagoons and, despite the human disturbance of the area, 2 or 3 pairs succeed in raising a few young each year. The only other species that breed in the lagoons are Skylark, Shelduck and Wheatears, which bred for the first time in 1975.
The list of passage migrant species that visit is amazing too, and is far too long to list here. All in all, the situation at Musselburgh doesn't sound very similar to the eco-catastrophe Mr Juniper is predicting does it? Perhaps he's mistaken?
Bishop Hill Jun 13, 2007 Firearms Harry Haddock has piece today about the firearms ban, which includes a wonderful quote from George Orwell
The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer’s cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
Coincidentally, 18 Doughty Street had a studio discussion featuring Chris Atkins, the director of the new documentary "Taking Liberties" and Peter Whittle of the New Culture Forum. Atkins was given a pretty hard time by Whittle who seemed to think that Atkins should have made another film altogether - he would have preferred something about the fear of artists that any output seen as being critical of certain eastern religions would "have consequences".
While this did seem a bit unfair to criticise Atkins for making "the wrong film", Whittle's concerns are certainly ones that I share. Unfortunately the two of them were at complete loggerheads, with Whittle believing the threat to society was from extremists, and Atkins believing it came from the state. Poor old Iain Dale was left trying to prevent an outbreak of fisticuffs - he seems to be suffering a lot from this kind of thing recently now that Yazzer is appearing regularly.
Now, you may be wondering what the connection is between a studio dust-up and the Haddock piece on guns with which I started this posting. It's this: if we were to enforce the right to bear arms guaranteed by the Bill of RIghts, both Whittle's artists and Atkins citizens would be much, much harder to oppress. People are only forced to choose betwen liberty and security because they cannot defend themselves.
One of our rights is missing.
Bishop Hill Jun 13, 2007 Islam Israeli physicist Nir Shaviv wonders if Ramadan's requirement to fast during the hours of daylight would prevent moslems from surviving a polar summer.
This interesting conundrum is rather spoilt by a commenter who points out that the requirement is waived if it would affect the health of the faster.
Bishop Hill Jun 12, 2007 Climate: McKitrick Climate: WG3 Economics I'm just off out to the school board meeting, but before I go here's an ingenious solution to global warming, penned by Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph.
Both warmers and skeptics agree that if there is going to be any warming it will be seen first in the troposphere. Because of this consensus (a real consensus this time) a tax on carbon, linked to the temperature of the troposphere should be supported by both sides of the debate. The tax would initially be quite low. But if the temperature rises, as predicted by the warmers, then the tax goes up. If it falls, or is stable, which is what the skeptics think might happen, then the tax remains relatively trivial.
A rather neat idea, in that it calls the bluff of both sides.
