Climate Dialogue

Climate Dialogue is a new project run by the Dutch Met Office, the KNMI. It aims to be:

a platform for discussions between (climate) scientists on important climate topics that are of interest to both fellow scientists and the general public. The goal of the platform is to explore the full range of views that scientists have on these issues.

Interestingly, the project has prominent sceptic science writer Marcel Crok on board. Having a critic of the mainstream on board suggests strongly that this is a genuine attempt to communicate. If it works out then it's going to be a bit embarrassing for all those climate "communication" projects we have been having in the UK.

I'm sure we all wish the project well.

A blank from Bridcut

Autonomous Mind has contacted John Bridcut, the author of the BBC Trust's report - the one in which they made the original claim about the nature of the attendees at the seminar.

He seems a little unclear on the origin of the idea that they were scientists.

I cannot now recall the origin of that phrase, and you are the first person to have raised it with me. But if you wish to take issue with the report, I suggest you take up the matter with the BBC Trust.

Read the whole thing.

Hiding the Decline available in USA

Hiding the Decline is now available Stateside, from the Createspace store. It should turn up on Amazon soon, but it's better for me if you buy from Createspace - the margins to me are much better.

The new head of BBC news

Fran Unsworth has replaced Helen Boaden as head of BBC news. Like her predecessor, Helen Boaden, Ms Unsworth was in attendance at the climate seminar.

Readers might also be interested in this transcript of a conference called NewsXchange 2005, which featured Channel Four's Jon Snow and the Guardian's George Monbiot discussing global warming's potential to wipe human life off the face of the planet (I don't remember that bit of the IPCC report, do you?). Fran Unsworth was also in attendance and had some interesting things to say. You can sense the development of some of the ideas that later reappeared in the seminar.

Subscriber orders

If you are a BH subscriber who is awaiting a shipment of Hiding the Decline I apologise for the delay. I inadvertently missed some orders at the end of last month. They went in the post tonight and should be with you soon.

28gate media coverage

We are starting to get some media coverage of what is becoming known as 28gate.

The Register covers the story here

Questions abound this morning on Twitter about the ability of the BBC Trust to maintain its duty to transparency. The BBC's legal strategy entails the indiscriminate application of its FOI derogation "for the purposes of journalism" - this effectively rewrites the 2000 Act, and redefines the BBC as a private body. The trust is surely aware of this; it has a small mountain of correspondence on the subject. But it has yet to enquire, let alone pronounce on whether this is healthy - or legal.

And the Spectator here.

Delingpole here.

Melanie Phillips here.

Tony's first reaction

Tony Newbery has written his first reactions to the discovery of the identities of the BBC climate 28.

The names on the list that Maurizio has published in no way justify the claim made in the ‘Wagon Wheel’ report. It is not enough for the BBC to merely make an apology and a correction at this late stage; much, much more is needed if the organisation’s reputation is to be restored.

What the Saville scandal has shown us is that there is a culture of deceit - and of turning a blind eye to unwelcome problems - at the BBC which extends back over decades. The BBC must be forced to institute a proper inquiry into why Bridcut was misinformed and then tens of thousands of pounds in legal costs were committed to keeping the affair under wraps, just like Saville’s appalling behaviour.

That is the next task.

Read the whole thing.

Quote of the day

From a correspondent:

We now know that the BBC decided to abandon balance in its coverage of climate on the advice of a small coterie of green activists, including the campaign director of Greenpeace. This shows that the "shoddy journalism" of Newsnight's recent smear was no "lapse" of standards at all. BBC news programs have for years been poorly checked recitations of the work of activists.

+++BBC Climate 28 revealed+++

Maurizio Morabito has obtained the details of the BBC climate 28. It had been published by the International Broadcasting Trust.

Greenpeace, Tearfund, Television for the Environment (one of the companies involved in the BBC free programming scandal), Stop Climate Chaos, Npower Renewables, E3G, and dear old Mike Hulme from UEA. Just the group you'd want guiding climate change coverage. Read the whole thing.

[For those who don't know what this is about, read the back story here.]

Boaden comes clean

The BBC's Helen Boaden recently gave what I believe is the first written confirmation from the BBC that the statement made by the Trust - that the CMEP seminar attendees were "the best scientific experts" - was false. In her written evidence to the Information Tribunal she characterised the attendees as follows:

...representatives from business, campaigners, NGOs, communications experts, people from the 'front line', scientists with contrasting views and academics...

It's good to have this confirmed. I wonder if the Trust would like to issue a correction and an explanation of how the public came to be misinformed.

Deja vu

As Anthony would say, "people send me things". Most recent has been this document, the agenda for a seminar at St Anne's College, Oxford later this week. Strangely, this doesn't seem to have been advertised anywhere, but you might realise why when you have finished reading this. You will need to put down any coffee cups you are holding before reading on.

Click to read more ...

Mark Thompson on the GWPF

The former head of the BBC has given a lecture at Oxford about science and rhetoric and the problems of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

An extraordinary document. Read it here.

Booker on Newbery

Updated on Nov 11, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Christopher Booker covers Tony Newbery's Information Tribunal case in his Telegraph column today.

A remarkable legal drama has been unfolding recently in London’s Camden Town, pitting a lone pensioner from Wales against all the might of the BBC, represented by an array of highly-paid lawyers. It has been a battle fought to determine the BBC’s right, under the Freedom of Information Act, to keep secret how it arrived at a major policy decision which, for six years, has allowed it to operate in breach of its legal obligations under its Charter.

Anthony Watts has also covered the story, publishing excerpts from the Register story. Getting attention from both of these high readership sites is obviously important in itself. But when the commenters help out by doing research, good things can happen. Some of Anthony's commenters appear to have identified some candidates for the attendees at the mysterious CMEP seminar:

Click to read more ...

Medieval Matt

Matt Ridley's latest Wall Street Journal column is on the medieval warm period.

I consulted a database of papers collated by the climate-skeptic website CO2Science.org, run by the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, a nonprofit research center in Tempe, Ariz. The database contains numerous published studies of isotopes and other indicators in caves, lake sediments and other samples from Chile, New Zealand, South Africa and Antarctica that find the MWP warmer than today. Two Antarctic studies, for instance, concluded that current warming "is not yet as extreme in nature as the MWP" and that "the present state of reduced ice on the western Antarctic Peninsula is not unprecedented." A far smaller number of studies, such as one from Lake Tanganyika, found the MWP cooler than today.

Today on wind power

In amongst the carnage and bloodshed of the BBC's handling of the McAlpine affair, the Today programme took a moment to talk to Lord Deben and somebody from the Renewable Energy Foundation about subsidies for wind power.

Does it strike anyone else as strange that every time somebody from GWPF goes on the BBC they are asked about their funding, but every time Lord Deben goes on nobody asks him about his acknowledged (and continuing) conflicts of interest?

Anyway, Lord D was on top form, trying to convince everyone that wind is nearly cost-competitive with other forms of energy (the great levelised costs lie) and waffling on about the "devastation" of climate change.

Deben and REF