+++New Climategate inquiry?+++

House Oversight and Government Reform ranking member Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is promising to give a “careful relook” at climate change science in the wake of last year’s “Climategate” scandal if Republicans take over the House.

Full story here.

Yeo wants Patchy to go

Tim Yeo, the deep-green chairman of the UK House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee has called for Rajendra Pachauri to resign.

"I’m afraid I think Dr Pachauri should resign. Firstly he personally has lost credibility, particularly in relation to his claim about the melting of the Himalayan glaciers in the next 30 years," he told the BBC.

He added: "It’s vital that this body is led by someone whose academic and intellectual credentials are unquestioned and I’m afraid that can no longer be said of him."

Apparently Sir Brian Hoskins has also called for Pachauri to step down.

Responses to McShane and Wyner

Readers will remember McShane and Wyner's critique of the way paleoclimatologists handle statistics, which was widely reported some weeks back. The journal in question has invited responses to the paper and these are now online.

There is one from Schmidt, Mann and Rutherford and another from Tingley.

More climate backtracking

Jonathan Porritt notes Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's almost complete failure to mention environmental issues to his extremely green-issue-aware party conference. I don't know about you, but I think one could interpret Clegg's reticence as some fairly fast backpedalling.

I know it’s a bit geeky, but here are the relevant extracts from the speech:“We promised a re-balanced green economy. There will be a Green Investment Bank to channel money into renewable energy”.“Imagine how it will feel to visit home after home that our Green Deal has made warm and affordable to heat”.And, er that’s it.

Geoffrey Lean expresses similar sentiments here.

Black tongue-lashed

Richard Black has been on the receiving end of a Joe Romm tongue-lashing. Apparently he wrote an article that didn't mention catastrophe anywhere, which I must say surprises me almost as much as it must have surprised Dr Romm. Unfortunately, the cynic in me wonders if Richard B's new-found guardedness about the impendingness of the end of the world mightn't have been prompted by the review of BBC science coverage I mentioned in the last posting.

Remind me though - did Richard ever write an article about Climategate?

BBC science review

David Colquhoun, Professor of Pharmacology at University College London, discusses the BBC's science coverage here, particularly in relation to coverage of minority views, including global warming scepticism. He also helpfully points to an opportunity for the public to make their views know to the BBC's ongoing review of scientific coverage.

L'Institut Turgot on le rapport Montford

For the French speakers among you, the Brussels-based liberal think-tank L'Institut Turgot discusses my GWPF report on its blog. (That's liberal in the old-fashioned sense of the word).

Monbiot and TERI's accounts

I've been enjoying the comments thread below Julian and Shub's Monbiot piece. George is clearly quite upset at the suggestion that he was responsible for deleting comments and he has defended himself at his own site, stating that he has never asked the CiF moderators to delete anything.

Some commenters, notably Barry Woods, have argued that we should take George at his word, and I must say I think this is right. Having seen a BBC blogger (Richard Black, IIRC) getting one of his comments snipped on his own thread, George's story that he had nothing to do with the deletions is at least credible.

Click to read more ...

Oxburgh transcript

The transcript of Lord Oxburgh's evidence to the Science & Technology Committee is now available, here.

Read...

...this.

This is a family with four young children, who ran a profitable business; they filled in every form and ticked every box. They have broken no laws, and there are no outstanding environmental notices, but yet, they came to Western Australia with their life savings and they are losing everything.

George Monbiot: scrubbing the record clean

This is a guest post by Shub Niggurath

Background

Last November things began to go seriously wrong for the IPCC version of science.  Things started after a leading Indian glaciologist called VK Raina publicly pointed out that he disagreed with the IPCC conclusion that the Himalayan glaciers would melt away within 30 years.  Raina said studies showed that at the present rate of melting, the glaciers would take hundreds of years to do so.   The Indian public had previously been told that the waters from the Himalayas would dry up within their lifetimes, so this good news was published on the front pages of the Indian newspapers.

Click to read more ...

Josh 42

Financial Post op-ed

I have an opinion piece up at Canada's Financial Post.

New S&T committee submissions

I the wake of the announcement of the reopening of the House of Commons Science & Technology Committee's investigations into Climategate, or at least into the UEA inquiries thereof, there have been a number of written submissions to the committee, which can be seen here.

• David Holland writes to complain about the way his submission to the Russell panel was mishandled.
• Doug Keenan points out that his fraud allegation was ignored
• Chris Huhne is still sticking to the "they were exonerated" line.

...and there is a lengthy submission from UEA. Notable features of this are:

There is some discussion of a non-existent allegation that Lord Oxburgh changed the terms of reference for his panel. This is not the concern. The concern is that Parliament was told that he would look at the whole of CRU's science, but he didn't. The blame for this appears to lie with UEA. The rest is very woolly.

Beddington: "We need error bars!"

Sir John Beddington has commissioned a summary of the science of global warming at the GO Science website. My impression, based on a brief perusal of the contents, is that it's largely a standard-issue "we're all going to fry" kind of thing, but perhaps a more detailed look will prove me wrong. This was interesting though:

The fact that uncertainty exists in climate science, as it does in other fields, does not negate the value of the evidence – and it is important to recognise that uncertainty may go in both (or a number of) directions. But an appreciation of the nature and degree of uncertainty is critical if the science is to properly inform decision-making. Indeed, that is what much scientific endeavour is about, describing both what is known and where our understanding is imperfect, and placing “error bars” on the knowledge we have.

This appears to be an admission that we don't as yet have error bars on "the knowledge we have". An important statement, I would say.