Mr Swinney's footwork

Readers will recall that a power cut put a large swathe of northern Scotland in the dark a few weeks back, apparently due to a faulty relay in a substation. However, a number of expert commentators have observed that this seems to be a somewhat implausible explanation and there have been several attempts to check the facts, including an FOI request submitted by yours truly.

One of the other attempts took the form of a question put in the Scottish Parliament by Alex Johnstone, the MSP for North East Scotland.  Here, such as it is, is the answer he received:

Electricity Grid Failure (Wind Turbines)
3. Alex Johnstone (North East Scotland) (Con): To ask the Scottish Government whether it has undertaken any further investigation into whether an overreliance on wind turbines as a source of electricity played a role in the grid failure on 16 April 2014. (S4O-03258)

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Settled science at the BBC

The BBC is currently engaging in some intense navel-gazing, as part of which it has been considering the range of opinions to which it currently gives airtime. This process is documented in a paper on the BBC Trust website, which includes this interesting little snippet:

...the need for BBC journalists regularly and systematically to challenge the assumptions behind their own approach to a story, is...difficult to achieve. Even when good intentions lead to specific measures aimed at doing so, there can be inadvertent aberrations. Take, for example, the BBC College of Journalism online service, which includes a whole section on impartiality. First among the clips illustrating the need for impartiality in covering the subject of climate change is an illustrated lecture given by the BBC’s former Environment Correspondent Richard Black. The section of the lecture on the site is entirely devoted to sustaining the case that climate change is effectively “settled science” and that those who argue otherwise are simply wrong. What might have been helpful is for Richard’s talk about the scientific position, and David Shukman’s on the same site, to have included a line or two in which he reminded his audience of John Bridcut’s point, a point made also in the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines, that dissenters (or even sceptics) should still occasionally be heard because it is not the BBC’s role to close down this debate.

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The Bengtsson affair and the GWPF

This posting is by David Henderson, the chairman of the Academic Advisory Council at GWPF, and is crossposted from the GWPF website

Prologue: a resignation under duress

On 24 April 2014 I sent an email to an eminent meteorologist, Professor Lennart Bengtsson,[1] inviting him to become a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), and three days later I was happy to receive a letter of acceptance; I duly added Bengtsson’s name to our list of Council members, and his acceptance was announced on the GWPF website.

On 1 May the Dutch journalist Marcel Crok published on his blog an interview with Bengtsson. He began by posing the question: Why did you join the GWPF Academic Council? Bengtsson’s response was as follows:

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Bacon - is there anything it can't do?

The ability of bacon to cure all known ills has long been recognised, but now, thanks to the global warming movement, its day of reckoning may be near. It seems that the humble bacon butty is causing global warming.

I kid you not.

Researchers have come closer to understanding why fatty acids, emitted in significant quantities by fast food outlets cooking meat, persist for so long in the atmosphere.

Yup, and these particulates cause global warming.

The presence of particulate matter in the atmosphere is a major health concern and may ultimately have significant climate change implications. Reports suggest that around a third of directly emitted aerosols above central London come from cooking...

But as a cloud looms in the shape of an imminent (no doubt) ban on the English breakfast, there is at least a silver lining because it seems that oil-based biofuels are also a major factor in the rise in oil-based particulates. So we might also ask: biofuels - is there anything they can't ruin?

The anger of the climate community

Whenever I hear Thomas Stocker speak I am reminded of Tony Blair or David Cameron: too slick, too polished, too insincere. So when I see that he has been expounding his thoughts on the climate debate in the Irish Times I am not exactly inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

He has, however, something of a point:

Prof Stocker, who has avoided using social media, agreed that several colleagues such as Phil Jones and Michael Mann had been “vilified” on Twitter and other forums, and some of them had even received death threats for daring to speak out.

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Allen a'tale

Some readers may have seen Der Spiegel's coverage of the Bengtsson affair a couple of days back. I didn't cover it, as I recall because it didn't seem to add much we didn't know already. However, one interesting wrinkle has emerged today. This revolves around a quote from Myles Allen about the Lewis/Crok report:

Professor Myles Allen, a climate researcher at Oxford, says, "The problem is [GWPF's] anti-science agenda, clearly illustrated by the fact that they refused point blank to submit their recent report criticizing the IPCC 5th Assessment Report to the same kind of open peer review that the IPCC report was itself subjected to."

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Carbon criminals

The Commons Environmental Audit Committee has been holding an inquiry into "sustainability in the Home Office". I kid you not. There were hearings at the end of last month that somehow eluded my attention, but thanks to the transcription service at the Palace of Westminster we can now enjoy the wit and wisdom of the committee members and the witnesses they invited to enlighten them.

For example, the commitee invited Ken Pease, professor of crime science at University College London, to take part. Why professor Pease? Well, the suspicious minded among you might draw conclusions from the fact that he has been a Green Party member for 30 years. But what a witness though! Take a look at this:

If you Google climate change, then crime does not tend to come up, and if you Google crime then climate change does not come up.

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The descent of broadcasting

Pour yourself a coffee, open a packet of biscuits, and sit yourself down in a comfy chair to read Ben Pile's long and utterly fascinating survey of the descent of science broadcasting and in particular the BBC's Horizon strand. With side swipes at, among others, Paul Nurse, Simon Singh, Iain Stewart and David Attenborough it is unmissable. Take this bit:

Nurse’s contempt for ‘politics and ideology’ and ‘polemicists and commentators’ is simple contempt for the viewer. Nurse asks for his trust, but does not reciprocate — the viewer is too easily misled, not being sufficiently equipped, too vulnerable to ‘others who don’t understand the science’. Science is just too complicated for the public. The values of the contemporary Royal Society are now identical to the values of the producers of Horizon: the public is a dangerous, contemptible moron.

Read the whole thing.

Simon Singh on peer review

I was intrigued to see Simon Singh retweeting a letter to the Times criticising the peer review system. Penned by Professor Tony Waldron of UCL, it described peer review as being a system in which one group of scientists does its best to stop another group from publishing. I'm sure plenty of readers will have no dispute with this.

Given Singh also has great enthusiasm for mainstream positions on climate change and a tendency to invoke the peer reviewed literature and the IPCC in his support, I wondered if these two positions weren't a bit inconsistent.

UKIP triumph

The news that UKIP have topped the polls for the European Parliament is clearly of great moment, and it's worth considering for a moment whether the party's energy and climate change policies have played any part in the victory. It's possible that the word is getting out about renewables and shale gas and that some voters are attracted to a party that is not caught up in the destructive green zeitgeist. But the much smaller advances made by the party in the local elections suggest that the effect is small.

There's still a long way to go.

Failtrade

Fairtrade is, like global warming and "sustainable development", one of those things that is drummed into schoolchildren as an unquestioned good. I even live in a "fairtrade county", whatever that means. The news that the Fairtrade movement is not actually managing to help poor farmers at all and may even be harming them is probably not news to many readers of this blog - I see I was critical of the idea as long ago as 2006 and no doubt there are other evil free-marketeers who have been banging on this particulary drum even longer. Tim Worstall's coverage of these new findings is excellent.

Kennedy departs

With UK energy and climate policy a demonstrable shambles and the lights set to go out in the next year or two, David Kennedy is departing the Committee on Climate Change for pastures new. The great man is heading off for a non-climate related role at DFiD. Lord Deben issued this parting eulogy:

David Kennedy created the team at the Committee on Climate Change, he established its reputation for scientific rigour and accuracy, and he has maintained that reputation throughout his seven years of service. He is the best kind of civil servant; intellectually robust and technically proficient, bringing sound judgment and careful evaluation to every issue. We owe him a great debt for a job well done. He leaves the CCC in a very good position and his successor will have the firmest of foundations from which to take the organisation forward.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

Newsnight on shale

Ahead of today's announcement on shale oil prospects in southern England's Weald basin, Newsnight took a look at the differences between the shale industry in the US and the sclerotic developments here. Featuring Iain Stewart, it was a pretty balanced piece. The one thing I felt it missed was a view of a production well head.

See it here from 10 mins.

Update on May 23, 2014 by Bishop Hill

The BGS report is available here. Apparently the amount of oil in place is put at 4.4 billion barrels (with the likely range set at 2.2 to 8.6 bbl).

Wow.

University challenge

The University of Queensland has been challenged to come clean over the Cook 97% consensus paper. Rud Istvan, in an open letter published at WUWT, notes that the University has claimed that the ethical approval they gave for the paper demanded that the identities of participants be kept confidential. However, as Istvan also notes, the names of the raters were published in the paper. So either the paper is unethical or, and perhaps more likely in my opinion, the ethical approval does not actually exist:

Either way, you and UQ both appear in a very bad light. It appears that UQ congratulates itself on gross ethical breaches (especially when basking in so much notoriety), while at the same time withholding anonymized primary data underlying a self admitted important research paper in contravention of UQ written research data policy. Either retract the admittedly unethical paper, or retract the grossly mistaken excuse and release the requested data to Tol.

Read the whole thing.

What is the Science Media Centre for?

I'm grateful to a reader for pointing out something interesting about the Science Media Centre, and in particular about the experts it selects for reaction to major stories. Take a look at the most recent rapid reaction articles on its website and consider the institutions represented:

Bengtsson story*

Expert	Institution	SMC funder?
Hulme	KCL	y
Lewis	UCL	y
Ward	LSE
Haigh	Imperial	y
Maslin	UCL	y
Palmer	Oxford	y
Allen	Oxford	y

National Care of the Dying Audit

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