The Sunlight on Huhne

Via Guido, Bishop Hill readers' favourite politician, Chris Huhne has been receiving some attention from the Sunlight Centre for Open Politics, who are insinuating some dubious practices in Huhne's election expenses.

If this sticks then we may get a new man at DECC regardless of whether Huhne chooses to go.

Update on May 8, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Interesting - looks like this is actually a slightly different allegation. See the comments below.

NZ scientists refuse too

Scientists in New Zealand are refusing to release information about a new temperature index they have published (H/T andyscrase). They have argued that technical details of how the new index was constructed and papers relating to the peer review that is alleged to have been performed are all exempt from the country's freedom of information legislation.

Is there no end to the corruption?

Bureaucrats demand more bureaucracy

It's a surprise, isn't it?

A think tank called the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) has issued a report calling for regulation of private universities. According to the BBC:

Anthony McClaran, head of the Quality Assurance Agency - the UK's higher education standards watchdog - welcomed the report.

If you take a look at the HEPI site it's largely run by university people (although some outsiders, including Lord Oxburgh, are involved). If you look at its accounts you discover that much of its funding comes from the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) - it is a fake charity in other words.

So what you see here is the Higher Education bureaucracy attempting to burden private sector providers with as much regulation as possible in order to prevent them from competing. The regulators who will benefit from all the extra work then pipe up and say what a good idea it is. It's naked self-interest and there is not even a hint of the truth on the BBC article.

Public self-servants eh?

(If I had time I'd take a closer look at HEPI - it appears that its chief excutive went from being head of policy at HEFCE to being head of HEPI (on £130k per annum), a body which we have seen derives much of its funding from HEFCE. )

A good day to bury whitewash

Has anyone else been struck by the timing of the official response? On the same day as the local election and referendum results come out?

A good day to bury whitewash, I suppose.

Black scared of comments

Richard Black has put up an article about the government response - with no comments permitted (it's a news article, see).

Tee hee.

Oxburgh's Eleven in the reponse

Sir John Beddington admits that the multiproxy studies, which had were central to the Climategate allegations, were not examined by the Oxburgh panel. Instead they looked at a list of papers chosen by UEA itself, some of which were so obscure that even CRU's most ardent critics had never heard of them.

In our view, the debate about the 11 publications examined by the Scientific Assessment Panel (SAP) is frustrating. While there is no doubt that the papers chosen were central to CRU’s work and went to the heart of the criticisms directed at CRU, the allegations that certain areas of climate science such as key multiproxy temperature reconstructions were purposely overlooked could have been disregarded if the SAP had set out its process of selection in a more transparent manner. (Paragraph 49)

What, then can one say about his concluding remarks?

We note the Committee’s conclusion that the selection of papers examined by the SAP was representative of the work of CRU in all areas in which allegations had been made. We note that once again the primary concern of the Committee related to transparency and communication—in this case with regard to the process for selecting the sample of papers
considered by the SAP—rather than any conscious decision to purposely overlook certain  areas of work.

So to review: Sir John persuades Lord Oxburgh to head the panel despite Lord O having a conflict of interest. Lord O misleads public, parliament and government about the nature of his review. Lord O fails to look at the most criticised papers, having accepted a list proposed by the people he's supposed to be investigating. Sir John congratulates Lord O on having played a blinder. Sir John notes that Lord O has misled everyone and failed to look at the papers everyone is upset about and says it doesn't matter. Sir John says that CRU's science is still sound.

OK...?

Peer review in the response

We know that Muir Russell and his UEA chum Geoffrey Boulton failed to investigate most of the instances of perversion on the peer review process. We know that the instance they did investigate - the Soon and Baliunas affair - they failed to find out if CRU staff had contacted the journal involved. Instead they exonerated the CRU staff using the following evidence:

• a report that noted that peer review is often heated
• Phil Jones' word that he had done nothing wrong.

Knowing this, what can one say about Sir John's statement as follows?

The Government notes the Committee’s conclusion that there was no evidence of attempts to subvert the peer review process, and agrees that academics should not be criticised for commenting informally on academic papers, noting that constructive criticism and challenge is fundamental to ensuring a robust scientific approach.

Sir John responds

The "government" has responded to the Science and Technology Committee's report into the UEA inquiries.

After two independent reviews, and two reviews by the Science and Technology Committee, we find no evidence to question the scientific basis of human influence on the climate.

We note that this report from the Committee makes recommendations aimed at strengthening the transparency of scientific research, and that the principle of transparency is one to which the Government is fundamentally committed.

Which I guess is pretty much as expected.

The report was apparently prepared by the Government Office for Science - Sir John Beddington's crowd - with input from various other ministries. One wonders what input the government actually had, apart from applying a signature to the document in question.

I'll take a look at the report in more detail in a moment, but first I want to say something about Sir John's role in the Climategate affair. We know that the first person UEA's Trevor Davies wrote to when the story broke was Sir John. We know that Sir John pushed Lord Oxburgh, conflict of interest and all, to stand as chairman of the scientific inquiry, despite the noble lord's objections. We know that on completion of that inquiry, Sir John wrote to congratulate Lord Oxburgh, saying that all agreed that he had "played a blinder". We also know that Sir John was pivotal in getting the Russell panel to spend a lot of time on the peripheral issue of the surface temperature records.

And now he is personally responsible for putting together the government's response? And he tells us that there is no evidence that the scientific conclusions on the IPCC are undermined?

Are we expected to take this seriously?

Attention deficit disorder

Political Climate is a new blog to me. I chanced upon their article about the media's interest in climate change (or the lack thereof), and was struck by this graph.

Amusingly the uptick in 2009 appears to be ascribed to the Copenhagen conference rather than anything else that may have been happening at the time. 

Click to read more ...

Von Storch on stroppy answers

Gosselin reports on an interview with Hans von Storch in the German media.

On the loss of credibility, climate science itself is to blame. The science has stirred up scientifically unfounded expectations, says von Storch. The demand that the public has to rapidly accept instructions on how to act in order to save the planet has blurred the boundaries between policy and science. As a result, science has not become something that has to do with “curiosity”, but rather gives the impression that it’s all about pushing a pre-conceived value-based agenda: “As scientists we have become political tools who are to deliver sought arguments to get citizens to do the right thing.”

http://notrickszone.com/2011/05/04/hans-von-strorch-science-has-failed-to-answer-legitimate-questions-warmists-have-responded-with-a-stroppy-reply/

Climate consultancy

On the subject of conflicted panels, I was thinking about Sarah Muckherjee's statement that NGOs were paying for climate research. I'm pretty sure that nobody has come across universities paid anything by NGOs in relation to climate research, but a comment by Richard Tol suggested that consultancy payments often go straight into academics' bank accounts rather than university coffers. This would make it impossible to trace them, even via FOI.

In medical science similar situations arise, and the journals have put in place a requirement for scientists to make positive declarations regarding conflict of interest. Do any climate journals carry such a requirement?

Conflicted panels? Whatever next?

A fascinating article at the British Medical Journal site, looking at the problem of the medicalisation of every problem in society. The author reckons it's a lot to do with new diseases being created by expert panels with financial conflicts of interest. Sound familiar?

Among the 12 members of the panel that created the controversial diagnostic category “pre-hypertension” in 2003, 11 received money from drug companies, and half of those people declared extensive ties to more than 10 companies each. Critics have rejected “pre-hypertension” as a dangerous pseudo-syndrome that could increase drug company markets, while others point out that it gives a diagnostic label to nearly 60% of the adult population of the United States. Similarly, 11 of the 12 authors of a 2009 statement on type 2 diabetes were heavily conflicted, with authors working as consultants, speakers, or researchers for an average of nine companies each. That panel advocated a contentiously low blood sugar target, and explicitly defended the use of rosiglitazone, a drug since suspended from the European market because of its hazards to human health. Within the field of sexual dysfunction, conflicts of interest have reached new heights of absurdity, with drug company employees joining their paid consultants to design diagnostic tools to identify and then medicate millions of women with a disorder of low desire that may not even exist.  

Scientists behaving badly

Times Higher Education has a cover story about scientists behaving badly. The focus is on biomedical research and, in particular, the story of how two dogged biostatisticians named Baggerly and Coombes struggled to expose the errors in a paper on chemotherapy by Potti and Nevins.

The Climategate parallels in the story are obvious.

As well as the article (which is by Darrel Ince of the Open University) there is an accompanying editorial, which looks significant.

We may struggle to change human nature, but we ought to be able to ensure that journals, as Professor Ince says, "acknowledge that falsifiability lies at the heart of the scientific endeavour" - they must be less quick to dismiss challenges to their published papers and more willing to admit mistakes.

Duke itself has acknowledged that in work involving complex statistical analyses, most scientists could benefit from a little help from the statistics department before publishing.

Professor Ince goes a step further, arguing that all elements of all the work (in the Duke case, the full raw data and relevant computer code) should be made publicly available so that others can replicate or repudiate the findings.

In this age of information and the internet, that can't be too difficult, can it?

Monbiot on reality

While many people have assumed that George Monbiot would always remain an overgrown teenager, his recent outpourings seems to have at least a whiff of maturity and even a newfound willingness to engage with the world as it actually is. Monbiot's column on Monday has attracted much attention (Judith Curry here, Anthony Watts here) and there is now a follow-up piece looking at the same areas.

Environmentalism is stuck – factional and uncertain even of the goals we seek. But we must face facts and engage with reality.

Of course many people have been saying that environmentalists were delusional for years, but I'm sure we were denounced for doing so.

More on disasters

Anthony Watts has picked up the Houghton quotes story, and I thought it was worth expanding on what makes me uneasy about these links between disasters and global warming.

It seems clear to me that the original misquoted version hinted that Sir John was in favour of inventing catastrophes. His true words don't carry anything of that meaning.

The question then become one of whether his true words suggest creating links between disasters and global warming. Again, I'm not sure they do. A commenter here points out the rest of the quote in which Sir John says

It’s like safety on public transport. The only way humans will act is if there’s been an accident.

Click to read more ...