Hans Verolme: your taxes at work

Hans Verolme, a Dutch national, was recruited into the UK's diplomatic service in 2000, having previously worked for a Dutch environmental group called Ecooperation.

Verolme appears several times in the CG2.0 emails. The first exchange is in #0277, the thread beginning in May 2003. Cathy Johnson, an official from Defra, contacts Verolme and passes on a document written by the Hadley Centre's Peter Stott. This is a critique of the Soon and Baliunas paper and apparently includes some questions that can be asked of Soon.

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Climate Change Act Reconsidered part I - Josh 129

A packed Committee Room 14, House of Commons, Westminster, London, UK, on Wednesday 30th Nov 2011, heard from Dr Philip Stott, Rev Philip Foster, Prof Ian Plimer, Donna Laframboise, James Dent, Ruth Lea and Matt Ridley. Josh sketched some notes.

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El Reg on Schellnhuber

Andrew Orlowski has penned a fascinating profile of H-J Schellnhuber.

Schellnhuber had become fascinated by complex systems and non-linearity, particularly the work coming out of the New Age-y Santa Fe Institute. (He formally joined the Institute last year.) This was deeply influential. What he saw terrified him: a world out of control. Let this hagiographic profile of Schellnhuber pick up the tale.

"After many successful, and some failed, attempts to explain climate change to political leaders and CEOs, Schellnhuber has a good sense of what works and what does not. As the lead author of the chapter on 'large-scale discontinuities' in the third report produced by the IPCC, he used the phrase 'tipping point', which has wide currency in the business world," we learn.

“In a conversation with a BBC journalist, I said ‘these are, more or less, tipping points’ [in climate change]. He immediately understood," Schellnhuber told his profiler.

Schellnhuber capitalised on this with a paper, Tipping Elements in the Earth's Climate System co-authored with several others. Despite its speculative nature – "subsystems indicated could exhibit threshold-type behavior in response to anthropogenic climate forcing", we learn. It has been cited over 500 times.

Read the whole thing.

A meeting of the Tyndall advisory board

#2974, an email from Prof John Shepherd, a Tyndall advisory board member to RealClimate's Stefan Rahmstorf. It is a response to an email in which Rahmstorf has suggested suggested setting up a website to counter sceptic arguments (perhaps the germ of the idea for RealClimate itself?). That's not the point though. The point will be clear when you read Shepherd's report of a meeting of Tyndall's advisory board.

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Schellnhuber and the Tyndall Centre

Updated on Dec 2, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Some strange goings on with UEA's successful bid to host the UK's national climate change centre. UEA's success led to the setting up of the Tyndall Centre.

Talking to the judges

On 27 September 1999 we see an email (#2779) from UEA's Martin Parry (later head of IPCC WGII) in which he discusses a conversation he has had with Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber.

Please keep this confidential.  It is a note on a phone call last week with Hans Joachim Schellnhuber.  In summary, he has offered to "champion" the UEA cause for a UEA bid for the Climate Change Centre.

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Time for a tip drive

I haven't done a tip drive for a while. The tip box is over there on the right. Or better still, subscribe, in return for which you get a monthly newsletter telling you about what I'm working on.

Harrabin on CMEP

Roger Harrabin has written an article responding to David Rose's article in the Mail on Sunday about the activities of the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme. This is most of it.

Climate sceptics seeking more space on the BBC helped provoke the Trust’s investigation into science impartiality but the Trust said we were already giving them too much space – not too little. We should bear this in mind when we hear new accusations of bias. Take the Mail on Sunday’s latest articles, which focused partly on the BBC ‘Real World’ seminars I helped to run. They began in the late 90s after I wondered which stories would still appear significant in 100 years. I concluded that longterm changes in environment and development might prove very important, and judged that these slow-burn issues were under-covered at the time.

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Back from Germany

I got back from Germany last night. The conference was lots of fun and I came away thinking what a nice bunch of people we sceptics are. I think for readers here there was not a great deal to report, apart from the fact that sceptics in Germany have a much bigger mountain to climb than those in the English-speaking world.

Climategate 2.0 in context

This is a guest post by David Holland

Quite often things are mischievously quoted out of context by one’s critics and the press and, when faced with an embarrassing but partial release of what they had said, or written, the first response of many people is to dismiss it as being out of context. This was the claim made by innumerable supporters of the orthodox IPCC view of climate change science when, in November 2009, over 1000 emails were released in 2009 from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. It was suggested that the release was highly selective, cherry picking only the apparently discreditable emails and omitting their proper context. For many making it, however, it was a claim based on heartfelt hope and belief rather than on any knowledge of the rest of the emails or even those that had been released.

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Hulme's Greenpeace and UN consultancies

Email 2099 is from Helen Wallace, a senior "scientist" at Greenpeace to Mike Hulme.

I am wondering whether you could help us with some urgent (paid) work we need doing for Kyoto. Or perhaps you can recommend someone else?

We want to produce a briefing that replies to all the usual climate 'sceptics' arguments, in the form of short questions and answers.

Later in email 2187, money gets discussed again. This time the questions come from Iain Reddish of Greenpeace, again to Hulme.

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Coining it

Email 3989 covers a consultancy tender by CRU staff. The tender is for AEA, an environmental consultancy.

We learn that the day rates are as follows:

>> Phil: £750
>> Tim, Rachel, Anthony, Aldina, William, Clare: £550
>> Maureen: £450

And what will happen to this money?

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More tips

Via a reader:

#4101 - Edward Cook tells Phil Jones that Mike Mann is "serious enemy" and "vindictive". Mike Mann had criticized his work.

#4091 – Phil Jones tries to teach a statistician to suck eggs, and gets his ass handed to him.

#4025 – Keith Briffa questions Mike Mann’s objectivity

#0497 - Jones falls out with Mann

On my travels

I'm off to Germany today, where I will be speaking at the EIKE conference. I wonder if there will be anything to discuss? :-)

I'm back on Sunday. Someone will be moderating the comments threads in my absence.

CRU "not especially honest" on MBH98

Email 1656

date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 11:05:20 +0100
from: "Douglas Maraun" <d.maraun@uea.ac.uk>
subject: Informal Seminar TODAY
to: cru.internal@uea.ac.uk

Dear colleagues,

I'd like to invite all of you to todays discussion seminar, 4pm in the coffee room:

"Climate science and the media"

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The blessed plot

Email 0306 is another killer for the BBC. It is correspondence between the Tyndall Centre's PR guy, Asher Minns, and Joe Smith, the co-organiser of the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme along with Roger Harrabin.

Minns is inviting Smith to the Tyndall Assembly, a meeting of Tyndall folk with their wider network of colleagues. We learn that the other speakers include Pachauri, Jim Skea (director of a UK energy research centre), and somebody from the Potsdam Institute.

Minns says:

My thinking for your part is that you give an overview of your BBC-Cambridge series and its objectives and outcomes and challenges. I would also quite like to hear what you see as the challenges in the relationship between the media and climate change research, and the role you see Tyndall playing. These are just my ideas for now - we can chat on Tuesday.

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