Spiked on the Hockey Stick

Spiked has an article about yours truly and the Hockey Stick. There is also a photograph.

Call for IPCC openness

Nick Barnes, the man behind Clear Climate Code, is putting together a petition to the Interacademies Council inquiry into the IPCC. This calls for the opening up of the IPCC on a number of fronts, particularly regarding the underlying research papers and their data and code.

Sign up here.

The Kelly paper

The most interesting of the attachments to Professor Hand's emails is a paper by one of his fellow panellists, Michael Kelly, who is Professor of Electronics at Cambridge.

The paper records Professor Kelly's impressions as he reads through some CRU papers. I can't really do justice to this paper as a short summary. For the moment, I've extracted the relevant pages from the full download and you can just read it. I think Steve M will probably have something to say on Kelly's work, which seems fairly frank.

The download is here.

Kelly on CRU

Update on Jun 22, 2010 by Bishop Hill

McIntyre's take on the Kelly paper is here.

The Hoskins emails

The Hoskins emails are much fewer in number but there are still some gems:

Click to read more ...

The Hand emails

These are the key issues from the Hand emails (excluding the attachments, which will be considered separately).

Click to read more ...

+++Behind the scenes at the Oxburgh inquiry+++

Slowly, but surely, the curtain is being lifted on Lord Oxburgh's inquiry into the science of CRU. Today I received a response to my FoI request for the emails of Sir Brian Hoskins and Professor David Hand (both of Imperial College, London) related to the Oxburgh inquiry. They are going to make a bit of a splash I think.

The emails can be downloaded here. There's a file for each man's correspondence and another for the attachments to Hand's emails. There's a lot of administrative stuff, but there is much of interest and some that made me laugh out loud.

I particularly liked the bit Oliver Morton of the Economist asks Oxburgh who chose the papers for the inquiry. Oxburgh replies:

Thanks for your message - the answer is that I don't know! What I received was a list from the university which I understand was chosen by the Royal Society The contact with the RS was I believe through [redacted - probably Martin Rees] but I don't know who he consulted. [Name redacted], when I asked him, agreed that the original sample was fair.

 A summary of the Hand emails is here. The Hoskins emails are here. Just the attachments to do.

Deepak Lal on consensus

This is an excerpt from a paper by Deepak Lal, an economist at UCLA. It dates from the year 2000.

My friend John Flemming who was then chief economist at the Bank of England, and also chairing a subcommittee of one of the UK's research councils, told me on reading the lecture that I would get nowhere by taking on the scientists who, at a meeting he attended to distribute funds for climate research, had explicitly said that they were not going to behave like economists by disagreeing with each other!

The wisdom of Solomon

As part of his ongoing investigations into the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, David Holland has used FoI to get hold of a pile of emails from Professor Brian Hoskins, then of the University of Reading and now at Imperial College.  Readers will remember that Professor Hoskins amusingly rubber-stamped the list of papers chosen by UEA for the Oxburgh report.

Click to read more ...

School fete

Today was the school fete. I was on carparking duty. Health and Safety has decreed that someone wearing a high-vis jacket must be in attendance at the carpark throughout the event. For the first hour, I was that person.

The fete began at 1pm. By the time I arrived at the carpark at 12:59, it was just about full, parents having proven remarkably adept at parking their cars without my assistance. This is perhaps not surprising as most of them use the carpark on a daily basis when they are on the school run.

Over the next hour I waved a few latecomers away and sat in the sunshine reading the newspaper. My high-vis jacket was quite useful as a cushion. I must have turned away about ten cars, most of which were subsequently parked in the road outside the carpark. I wasn't sure if my remit extended to the street so I left them to do this unassisted. They too seemed to manage quite well without me.

Later I went down to the fete itself. The tents had red and white tape tied to the guy ropes. This is apparently a rule laid down by Health and Safety. The scones were unbuttered, since this is not permitted by Health and Safety either. There were no sandwiches,since these apparently pose an unacceptable risk to the public.

The risk assessment had concluded that a tug of war is too dangerous so we didn't do that this year. I was reminded of the school sports day last week when parents were asked if anyone had safety concerns over their children taking part in the three-legged race. Apparently Health and Safety will be angry if this question isn't asked.

Strange day really.

A challenge

In the comments on the Collide-a-scape thread, Judy Curry has issued a challenge to mainstream climate science:

I am laying down the gauntlet, [The Hockey Stick Illusion] really needs to discussed and rebutted by the paleo researchers and the IPCC defenders.

Most of the responses are fallacious so far - along the lines of "a bad person liked this book". Let's see if anything more substantial appears.

Roger Harrabin on libertarian columnists

Roger Harrabin has an article about "libertarian columnists" in New Scientist.

Libertarian columnists have helped turned many British Conservative parliamentarians into climate doubters, and the Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, has installed a Liberal Democrat climate secretary to give his coalition's green policies some protection from his own party's right wing.

Libertarian columnists? Whoever can he mean?

Arthur Smith on the trick

Another defence of the Nature trick has been published. This time the author is Arthur Smith.

Hockey Stick Illusion at Collide-a-scape

Keith Kloor's Collide-a-scape site is currently discussing the Hockey Stick Illusion. Many of the usual suspects are arguing that it should be ignored, with Judy Curry arguing the case that it matters.

Please keep it ultra-polite and don't rise to any bait that is set out for you.

Sea-ice modellers open up?

An article in Wired magazine recounts how sea-ice modellers are sharing data and methods and are learning from each other in the process. It's not obvious whether the sea-ice community have actually made their data and code open to the world or whether this is just a case of sharing within the community, but it's a step forwards at least.

It's also nice to see Mark Serreze apologising for his role in stirring up scare stories in 2007:

"In hindsight, probably too much was read into 2007, and I would take some blame for that,” Serreze said. “There were so many of us that were astounded by what happened, and maybe we read too much into it.”

If climatologists are now going to eschew scaremongering then that is certainly welcome. It's therefore a pity that the Wired reporter, Alexis Madrigal, begins the piece with the obligatory reference to "record low levels of sea ice in the Arctic". It's not that she's wrong, but just a few months ago sea ice levels were higher than they have been for years, and the more representative global sea ice levels are actually currently above their long-term average.

Christy on the IPCC

Steve M posted a link to the audio of John Christy's presentation to the Interacademies Council a couple of days ago. For those of us who prefer the written word, Marcel Crok has now posted a transcript. You need to scroll through the Dutch to get to Christy's words in English.

I liked this bit:

A fundamental problem with the entire issue here is that climate science is not a classic, experimental science. As an emerging science of a complex, chaotic climate system, it is plagued by uncertainty and ambiguity in both observations and theory. Lacking classic, laboratory results, it easily becomes hostage to opinion, groupthink, arguments-from-authority, overstatement of confidence, and even Hollywood movies.