The amazing disappearing Roger Harrabin!

I've written a couple of posts on the subject of BBC environment correspondent Roger Harrabin's work with something called the Cambridge Environment and Media Programme, which appears to be a body which tries to ensure that the BBC adheres to green orthodoxy in all its output.

CEMP originally came to my attention when one of Harrabin's emails was leaked, revealing that he was spending time trying to come up with a party line to take about Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth being found to be misleading in a court case. The BBC's website at the time had a profile of Harrabin, which revealed that he was a CEMP director, and that CEMP itself was "supported" by the BBC. I assume that this means financially supported, although other interpretations are possible.

Then at the start of this year, I noticed that Harrabin and CEMP had been involved in trying to put together the Planet Relief telethon, together with a marauding horde of greens and BBC bigwigs. This was revealed by the blog of one of the environmentalists, Matt Prescott, who thanked Harrabin and his CEMP colleague Joe Smith of the Open University for introducing him to some of the BBC bosses at a CEMP-organised seminar.

CEMP has now come to my attention again, as Tony N at Harmless Sky has been taking a look at their activity too. He notes that the BBC profile of Harrabin is no longer online. On a hunch, I took a look at the Matt Prescott article too, and found that it no longer mentioned Harrabin either - only Joe Smith.

This seemed like just too much of a coincidence to me. I could have been mistaken on one of them, but not both. Fortunately, through the delights of the Wayback Machine, I was able to retreive the original pages.

Here's the BBC profile of Harrabin, from which the pertinent quote is

He co-directs the Cambridge Environment and Media Programme, which is supported by BBC News to bring together senior journalists with outside experts to discuss media coverage of long-term sustainable development issues.

And here's the Matt Prescott piece. It originally said

Joe Smith (Open University) and Roger Harrabin (BBC News) originally introduced me to Jon, in Cambridge, and also played a crucial role in helping to get things off the ground a couple of years ago.

It now reads:

Joe Smith (Open University) originally introduced me to Jon, in Cambridge, and also played a crucial role in helping to get things off the ground a couple of years ago.

Something to hide, gentlemen?

Update on Jan 15, 2012 by Bishop Hill

The full story of Roger Harrabin and the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme is now available as a download here.

Monbiot on corporate welfare

George Monbiot has a rather-less-moonbatty-than-usual article in the Guardian this morning. Entitled "The free market preachers have long practised state welfare for the rich", it's actually more an attack on corporate welfare per se than on the people who support it. In fact the headline writer seems not to have read the article at all, because Monbiot spends quite a lot of time quoting approvingly from a report by the Cato Institute, who are nothing if not arch free marketeers.

It's not often I find myself agreeing with Monbiot, but he has a point. There is absolutely no excuse for subsidising business, whether through direct payments, or through carefully constructed tax loopholes. He's not presenting any solutions in his article though - he's just railing at the problem, and I wonder if this is because the solutions are unpalatable to him.

I've put forward the idea before that we could have a law that made payments to corporate bodies illegal, except in fair payment for goods or services received. That would draw in all the subsidies to lobbyists, companies, NGOs, trades unions and all the horrible regiment of wheedling crooks that beset the political system. Of course, it will never happen because the big political parties are all in hock to these crooks, but in essence it's a simple solution to a complex problem.

Corporate tax dodges are also easily avoided, by simple means of abolishing corporate tax (or at the very least making them flat), but I can't see Monbiot going for that either. He doesn't care how low your salary is - if you are putting something away in your pension then you have to pay tax on it at corporate level.

You can't help feeling that George is actually quite happy with the idea of corporate welfare - it gives him something to rail at and stops him having to deal with the consequences of solving the problem.

Climate Cuttings 25

The very eminent and very sceptical climatologist Richard Lindzen wonders, in a new paper, if modern climatology is set up to answer scientific questions. He discusses the long slow slide of the science away from answering discrete problems to a not-so-brave new world of endless simulation projects, which are unfalsifiable, but keep a lot of politicised bureaucrats employed.

Craig Loehle's first paleoclimatological paper was published by Energy & Environment, the journal the warmists love to hate. He has now moved on to a rather more prominent journal and has a study of the mathematics of tree ring reconstructions in the current edition of Climatic Change. His results rather undermine the whole case for this approach to finding the temperatures of the past by showing that one of its key assumptions - that the relationship between temperature and ring widths is linear - is not actually true.

Veerabhadran Ramanathan is probably one of the most eminent climatologists alive, so much attention will have been fixed on his recent paper discussing the big picture of AGW. In it, he discusses the impact of CO2 emissions on the climate and what it might mean for the global temperature. Roger Pielke Snr wonders why he is discussing global temperature at all, given that they had previously agreed that this is a flawed measure and that the ocean heat content is much more reliable.

Jeff Id produced another jaw-dropping demonstration of how Mann-method climate reconstruction produces hockey sticks and produces a false cooling of the medieval period. This is turning into a must-read blog.

The Met Office has never seen its inability to make any sort of accurate seasonal forecast as a problem when it comes to making sage announcements about how things will pan out in the future. Again undeterred by the failure of their forecast for the summer, they have recently brought out the results of their tea leaf gazing for the winter. This time it's going to be a pretty mild one, they say, although we should apparently be ready for cold snaps. Cold snaps in winter, eh? You don't say! Better lay in some firewood and buy some cold weather gear, people!

And lastly, it snowed in South Africa, a phenomenon that was attributed, without even a hint of irony, to "climate change" (a.k.a. global warming).

Photo credits: Fortune teller, Riptheskull.

Mysterious announcement from the Met Office

There's a news article just published at the Guardian reporting the announcement from the Met Office that "climate sceptics have their heads stuck in the sand".

Climate sceptics such as Nigel Lawson who argue that global warming has stopped have their "heads in the sand", according to the UK's Met Office. A recent dip in global temperatures is down to natural changes in weather systems, a new analysis shows, and does not alter the long-term warming trend. The office says average temperatures have continued their rising trend over the last decade, and that humans are to blame.In a statement published on its website, it says: "Anyone who thinks global warming has stopped has their head in the sand. "The evidence is clear, the long-term trend in global temperatures is rising, and humans are largely responsible for this rise. Global warming does not mean that each year will be warmer than the last."

This is all illustrated with a rather nice graph which looks like this:

Two things jump out at me here. The first is the caption, "Brohan et al 2006". It's remarkable that a paper published in 2006 can analyse temperatures up to 2007, don't you think? Perhaps this is something to do with the Met Office's much-vaunted forecasting abilities?

A little research shows that Brohan et al 2006 was, in fact, the paper where the HADCRUT3 temperature series was announced to the world. This seems to suggest then that this "new analysis" is not actually a peer-reviewed study, but is just somebody bashing some numbers out.

Actually, I don't have a problem with somebody just bashing some numbers out. If the analysis is good, the analysis is good, and whether it's peer-reviewed or not is irrelevant. It would have been more honest of the Met Office and the Guardian to make this fact plain though. But another question then arises: if they've just taken the data and calculated some trends, why have they only used data up to 2007?

Ah, yes, the 2008 figures have dropped precipitously, haven't they?

So, this looks to me as if the Met Office is indulging in a little propagandising. Plus ca change and all that...

One last mystery though. When I look up the Met Office's media pages, there's no sign of the press release at all. Do you think they pulled it?

Update on Sep 23, 2008 by Bishop Hill

Rich in the comments has found the "press release" which isn't really a press release at all, but a new glossy brochure. The unscientific tone is a sight to behold.

The reference on the graph is slightly more revealing - it reads HADCRUT3 Brohan et al 2006, so there is not even the pretence that this is a new study. It's just a new leaflet. Well worth an article in the Guardian I would have thought.

Climate cuttings 24

Welcome to episode 24 of Climate Cuttings, my roundup of developments on the global warming front.

First up is Nobel Laureate, Al Gore, who has changed his mind on whether adaptation should play a part in our reaction to climate change. He has now decided that those who advocate it are not dangerous lunatics after all, but are in fact, erm, right. Meanwhile, the Australian Garnaut Report into climate change also concludes that adaptation is the best policy.

The science is settled, right? Except that we don't know much about the effect of clouds on climate, of course. Oh yes, and we also don't understand the effect of snow (ie how much heat it reflects back into space) either, it seems.

Two sceptical scientists, David Douglass and John Christy, have a new paper out which looks at how much recent warming is caused by CO2. Their conclusions are that it's not very much. Meanwhile, Lean and Rind have published a statistical study, where they dig for correlations between forcings and temperature, and they find that the solar contribution to global warming is small. They did this using what they call "a robust multivariate analysis". I don't know about you, but when someone has to put the word "professional" in their job title (like "nursing professional") it's usually a sure sign that they are anything but. One can't help feeling that the use of "robust" in this context might actually be a contraindicator in the same way.

Meanwhile, NASA have announced a press conference for next week, in which they will discuss the state of the sun. As we've learned from Lean and Rind above, the sun has little impact on climate, so presumably NASA are going to talk about the lack of sunspots as a matter of interest rather than because of any effect it may have on us.

There is a whole new climate auditor on the block. Jeff Id has done some jaw-dropping work on Mann's new "Save the Hockey Stick" paper. It seems that Dr Mann has been cherry picking his data.

The BBC's Climate Wars covered the "sceptic fightback". This may have been the most dishonest piece of television ever broadcast in the UK.

World's premier scientific journal says "Kumbiya!"

Nature's descent from serious scientific publication to journal of record for the darker fringes of the green movement continues apace with a hilarious piece from hippie-chick editor, Olive Heffernan.

Olive's clearly a girl who's got her mind focused closely on here work because she is

someone who spends most waking hours thinking about climate change

and in a rational way too, no less! But she's a happy hippy at the moment because she's been able to drop the strictly rational approach of screaming "We're all going to fry!!" personified by Nature - she's been attending some workshops at which participants held hands and got in touch with their inner Karma

discussed objects relating to climate change that hold special personal significance, and ‘coaching’ sessions to think about how our own actions might make a difference.

Ah, to be a member of the scientific elite, eh? I wonder what Olive's special object was? A signed swimsuit pic of Al Gore astride a polar bear perhaps? A hockey stick?

Still the second bit - about ones own actions making a difference - that should have been pretty easy. The organiser of her seance workshop has also organised a trip to Greenland for a buch of scientists and assorted B list celebs. My suggestion would be that Olive persuades the silly airheads to stay at home and stop burning oil in the pursuit of fleeting attention from the media.

Organised crime

It's all very confusing, the modern world, isn't it? Today I received an email purporting to be from HM Revenue and Customs, declaring that I was eligible for a tax refund of J342.90! Yes, that's right J342.90.

With my razor intellect I was able to spot the flaw in this particular ruse, since I have noted on a number of occasions that we use Pounds Sterling in this country rather than Js, whatever those might be.

So, it's a phishing scam of some sort. No doubt I have to hand over my life savings in order to get hold of this J342.90 rebate. Which, when you come to think of it, is rather like the arrangement I have with the real HM Revenue and Customs. 

I checked the HMRC website, and it seems that this is a pretty common fraud attempt. But it's confusing, isn't it, when you have a bunch of organised criminals sending out emails that look like they come from the real organised criminals and with a modus operandi that it indistinguishable from the real thing too?

What's an honest man supposed to do?

Noel Edmonds

Interesting news just now, that Noel Edmonds has cancelled his TV licence, infuriated by the BBC's threatening infomercials - the ones that tell viewers, "We know where you live". 

Almost inevitably the BBC misrepresents what he has done, saying that Edmonds is angered by the BBC's approach to licence fee evaders. He is in fact quite clear that he's angered by the fact that Auntie threatens everyone, regardless of their guilt or otherwise.

Edmonds was reticent about whether he has got rid of his telly too. Reading between the lines, my guess would be that he has not.

Climate cuttings 23

Ian JolliffeBack in March, global warming's canine-in-chief, Tamino, wrote a series of posts explaining why the notorious decentred principal components analysis used by Michael Mann in his near-legendary hockey stick paper were, in fact, entirely valid. He rounded the series of postings up by citing in his support Ian Joliffe, an important authority on principal components. Tamino is now looking rather foolish, because Joliffe has posted a comment on his site saying that Tamino has misrepresented his views and that Mann should not have used decentred principal components. In fact he wonders about the validity of using principal components at all. Oh dear. 

Mann's latest magnum opus is still causing much hilarity, with the stick-meister deleting and replacing the data on his website faster than a climatologist can fill in a funding request. Unfortunately he has (to his credit) already placed the raw proxies in a public archive from where it is possible to see the quality of the inputs to his study. This is a particularly hilarious one..  

Iain StewartThe BBC's "history" of global warming (in reality it's a propaganda piece) showed a few frayed seams. Presenter Iain Stewart spent a lot of time pouting about how Reagan appointed the Nierenburg committee to look at the issue, and hand-picked its chairman so as to bias its findings. Unfortunately, somebody noticed that the committee was actually set up by the Carter administration. This (ahem) error has come straight from the mouth of Naomi Oreskes, so the producers of the programme have only themselves to blame for picking a "player" as the series adviser. The son of the committee's chairman has responded in the comments and notes that Oreskes knew that the committee was appointed by Carter, because she says so in a scholarly work on the subject. I guess the bit about it being wicked Reagan who appointed Neirenburg was a bit of a flourish for the benefit of the proles.

Atmoz (a climatologist from the US) has also been looking into Oreskes' work on the Nierenburg report, and has found some pretty outrageous selective quoting and misrepresentation of the findings. With all these revelations, she is starting to look throroughly dishonest. The perfect series adviser for a BBC documentary, in fact.

This year's Artic melt seems to have come to a end, with small increases in area appearing for the first time this year, slightly earlier than 2007. The minimum area seems to have been some 400,000 sq km higher than last year. Still no sign of the Antarctic warming either.

And lastly, it hailed in Kenya.

News from the front

Johann Hari has dared to cross the monstrous regiment of home educators in his article in the Independent today. In a carefully ambiguous article, he manages to imply that there are lots of home educated children who are simply not learning anything at all, and insinuates that HE parents are little better than child abusers.

Having bad-mouthed the HE community, Hari manages to compound his error by a bit of blatant misrepresentation. He quotes research by someone called Rob Blackhurst, who apparently found that children in HE families, as old as twelve, couldn't read and write. Now if you look up Rob Blackhurst and home education on Google, you will find that Mr Blackhurst is a journalist rather than an academic, and that he wrote a very sympathetic piece about HomeEd in the FT some months back. In it, he does indeed talk of children who didn't learn to read until very late...

One of our children didn't read until he was nine or 10...

says the quoted home educator. Full marks to Mr Hari then? Not exactly. The rest of the quote is

and he's just completed an MA in creative writing.

Not exactly what Mr Hari would have you believe that Blackhurst found, I would say.

There has been a great swathe of media comment about HE in the last week or so, presumably timed to coincide with the return of the English schools. The unions and the left wing commentators have been attacking really quite hard, with vague insinuations of child abuse, and heart-rending tales of children shut up inside for months at a time, deprived of the alleged benefits of a state education and the national curriculum.Reading between the lines though, there are two factors driving them. Firstly they are frightened that the trickle of children out of the state system and into HE will become a flood. If this happens then the state education system will be put under enormous strain and enormous pressure to change. And of course, change is the last thing that the teaching unions want. But most of all, they want access to people's homes. If you read Hari's article, he wants all children to go to school, but most of all he wants education and welfare officers to be able to turn up to check that home educating parents are not abusing their children. He is really that much of a fascist. And rest assured that once education and welfare officers have access to HE homes to check up on children there, the same outraged voices that question why nobody can check up on HE children now, will be raised again to demand why HE homes can be inspected, but not the homes of other children.

HE families are the front line in the fight against the big brother society. They may not realise it, but their fight is the fight of all of us. They deserve our support.

Insulation

My house is very very cold in winter. Ice on the inside of the windows cold. The plan for the autumn was to get the basement insulated, and maybe if I was feeling flush, putting some extra insulation in the loft.

The plans now are on hold, cos apparently Gordon Brown is going to subsidise me to do it. I'll just hold on for a while.

This action is very welcome, but it does suggest that he's a twit, because I was going to do it anyway.

Pooter in a hole in a wall

I'm grateful to Carlotta for this link to a story about Sugata Mitra's famous computer in a hole in a wall experiment. He and his colleagues set up a PC with a mouse and stuck it in a hole in a wall in a slum in Delhi so that passers-by could have a go. Then they sat back to watch what happened.

The story is quite well-known, but for those who haven't heard it, what happened was that the slum children taught themselves to use the PC, and then set about teaching each other. Adults seemed to approve of their kids educating themselves in this way, but they didn't actually get involved in trying to teach the children, not did they try to learn themselves.

The story is a wonderful tribute to the innate ability of children to learn and discover things on their own, and it raises all sorts of interesting questions about why we try to educate children the way we do, or in fact, if we are actually educating them at all. Do children really need so much formal learning as they get now?

I wonder if, back in the days before state education, those who fell outside the system of private schools and tutors and dame schools and ragged schools that were the backbone of the education system in those days, ended up passing their discoveries between each other like the slum children of Delhi today. One can imagine a battered copy of Dickens being passed round the urchins, with the little ones desperate to learn their ABCs so they could share in the excitement.

There's a research project for somebody in there somewhere.

The climate wars

Just finished watching the BBC's history of the climate wars in which a geologist called Ian Stewart manages to emit more carbon dioxide than most people manage in a year. In episode one he managed to visit Hawaii, Greenland, Colorado, the south-west of England, California. A powerboat trip was, of course, essential to his historical case. which was largely a predictable environmentalist take on the last half century. .

It included a wonderful moment where Ian Stewart tried to write off a committee reporting on the issue of climate change by saying its head was "a passionate believer in free markets". Well, that settles it then. He did engage in some pretty grubby innuendo at times.

The programme adviser was Naomi Oreskes, which kind of gives you an idea of the integrity of the piece. Oreskes has a companion piece in the Sunday Times today, which rather suggests that the show is part of a campaign rather than a serious attempt at a history of the controversy.

One interesting point was that when they got onto the subject of temperature reconstructions, they only talked about ice cores and not tree rings. It's possible that they'll cover this next week, but could it be that they are going to skip over the subject of the hockey stick entirely? They couldn't could they?

Climate cuttings 22

Right, having restarting the blogging engine, here's a much-delayed edition of climate cuttings. Some of these are quite old now, having sat waiting for me to click the publish button for a month now. Still - there's some interesting stuff out there.

A paper published in The Holocene said that there was a surge in summer storms in Britain in the 1680s and 1690s - the depths of the Little Ice Age. This rather dents recent theories that summer storms are being caused by global warming.

The Hockey Stick reared its ugly head again! Michael Mann's dodgy reconstruction of past temperatures appears in the pages of an important US report on climate. Still more remarkably it's in the variant where the thermometer record is tacked on to the end of the reconstruction to make it look more scary, with not a word of explanation that this is what has been done. Junk science from the US government, it seems.

And a few weeks later Dr Mann tried it on again, publishing a new take on paleoclimate, which quickly reduced readers at Climate Audit to tears of laughter as problem after problem with the data came to light. The cock-ups didn't so much crawl out of the woodwork, as fart up into the firmament like so many damp squibs. The full story is ongoing over at Climate Audit. I'd try to point you to a relevant place but there are so many threads outlining all the things wrong with this study that it's a full time job keeping up with them all. 

The new paper was, of course, given the headline treatment by the BBC ("Any old bilge, so long as it's green bilge"). The hockey stick is alive and well apparently.

Meanwhile, concerns were raised about the mental stability of statistician Matt Briggs. Dr Briggs may have been driven close to madness by the repeated transgressions of basic statistical procedures by the hockey team. (This is a really good posting, by the way, especially for any members of the hockey team who might still have delusions of statistical competence - didn't Wegman say they should involve some statisticians in their work so they would stop getting it wrong?).Having got his hands on CSIRO's drought data (see Climate Cuttings 21), David Stockwell did a statistical re-analysis of the numbers behind the Australian scientific body's claim that their models showed that droughts were going to double in the next twenty to thirty years. When it came to the models' correlation with observed rainfall, Stockwell observes:

In almost all cases, the correlation coefficient between simulated and observed values was very low, and not significant. The models on average explained less than 1% of the observed variation in rainfall.

There have now been no sunspots on our local star for 400 days. This is getting solar enthusiasts rather excited because most previous solar cycle minima have had between two and three hundred sunspot free days.

A guest blogger at Anthony Watts reviewed the Met Office's summer forecast:

On April 11, 2007 they issued this press release stating “there is a high probability that summer temperature will exceed the 1971-2000 long-term average of 14.1 °C ….. there are no indications of an increased risk of a particularly dry or particularly wet summer.”  This was interpreted by The Guardian as “Britain set to enjoy another sizzling summer.“

Britain was hit by flooding.

One of the oddities of the surface temperature record is the claim by climatologists that the effect of urban heat islands (warming from urbanisation) is negligible. A new study from some awkward so-and-so in Japan says that the effect is actually rather larger than the alleged twentieth century warming. Don't expect to read about this in the next IPCC report. (He was probably funded by big oil anyway).

August 2008 temperatures were well below 2007's. The BBC forgot to mention this. Again.

And finally, our favourite enviro-hero Lewis Gordon Pugh (remember him?) went on another CO₂ splurge conciousness raising mission to the Arctic. This time he was going to kayak to the North Pole, which was going to be ice-free this summer, you may remember. He had to turn back because of heavy sea ice. And because his bottom was cold.

Photo credit: Summer storm by Steve Lacy, Tree rings by Shekay,

Catz Club

Phew! The work crisis seems to have abated (slightly) and I am heading for the alehouse in a moment, but before I go here's an interesting snippet.

Labour has agreed to pay back £15,000 it received from a children's charity after a report found that charity law had been breached.

OK, more dodgy donations to the Labour party - nothing new there. Apparently the generous party benefactor, which provides after-school care and holiday clubs for children, believed it was an administrative error, and that they should have routed the gift through their trading subsidiary. Except that's illegal too, it seems.

Still, here's the fun bit. The accounts of Catz Club were qualified last time round on the grounds that the charity might not continue to operate as a going concern. They had a £3.4m deficit on income of £850k. Yes, folks they spent two and a half million more than they received in income! The auditors said they were being kept afloat by the chairman, one A Mitchell. The 2007 accounts are overdue too, so to say that they are up the creek without a paddle is probably an understatement.

So, do you think they were after something, in return for their generous gift?