Education Secretary used private emails

Education Secretary Michael Gove is accused of having used private email to conduct government business.

The information commissioner has written to the permanent secretary at the Department for Education to raise concerns about the department's handling of FOI requests. A spokeswoman for the Information Commissioner's Office said it was still making inquiries and had not launched an investigation.

The FT reports that Dominic Cummings, Gove's chief political aide, wrote to colleagues shortly after he was appointed stating he "will not answer any further emails to my official DfE account …"

The email continued: "i will only answer things that come from gmail accounts from people who i know who they are. i suggest that you do the same in general but thats obv up to you guys – i can explain in person the reason for this …"

Tut tut.

What I don't understand is why this is unacceptable for government ministers but not for other state functionaries, such as academics.

Yup

In the past I've told people that I reckon much will be made of the Salzer et al. paper in the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report. The paper purported to find that bristlecones were in fact reliable proxies, despite everyone previously having agreed that they were contaminated with a non-climatic signal.

I'm therefore not very surprised to see this report in the New York Times today.

A study published in 2009 — with Matthew Salzer of the Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona as the lead author — found bristlecone ring-growth rates in the second half of the 20th century to be higher than in any other 50-year period in the last 3,700 years.

“The accelerated growth is suggestive of an environmental change unprecedented in millennia,” the report states. As a result, the bristlecone pine is considered by many dendrochronologists to be an “indicator species” for climate change.

With this, and the fact that CRU's own Tim Osborn has been lined up as a lead author, my prediction is that the Fifth Assessment Report will major on the millennial temperature reconstructions like its predecessors.

Spurning your friends

The mystery person who tried to get Paul Dennis's emails from UEA has been spurned by the university again.

In the wake of his last jilting, he appealed the university's decision that the data was "not held" under the terms of the FOI Act, asking them to reconsider the decision under EIR - readers may remember that this was the approach I suggested in my earlier post on the subject.

Almost inevitably, Acton et al. have said no, with the reasoning being as follows:

Click to read more ...

Inspirational Josh

This just in from reader Anoneumouse, inspired by Josh's recent tour-de-toon.

Self-immolation

Next time somebody mentions Skeptical Science as a reliable source of information on climate science, they should probably be asked about the antics that Shub Niggurath describes today.

It's pretty horrible stuff.

Opening up research findings

An announcement from the Department of Business Innovation and Skills

Science Minister David Willetts has today announced a new independent working group to look at how UK-funded research findings can be broadened for key audiences such as researchers, policy makers and the general public.

The group will be made up of representatives from the higher education sector, research investors, the research community, scholarly publishers and libraries. It will examine how access to research findings can be made more transparent and accessible.

Stirling's excuses

H/T to Hilary Ostrov for this CBC radio show about the University of Stirling/Philip Morris FOI story.

Lots of familiar excuses are given as to why the university should not have to reveal its data. Is anyone really going to be convinced by the argument that publication in peer-reviewed literature somehow is a reason for not allowing access to the data.

Well worth a listen.

Extending the statute of limitations

The Scottish Government is apparently considering extending the statute of limitations for offences under the FOI Scotland Act.

Section 65 of FOISA. Section 65 provides that once a request has been made to an authority, it is a criminal offence for the authority, its employees or contractors to alter or destroy the information with the intention of preventing disclosure. Any such offence must be prosecuted within six months of the time when the offence was committed. In practice it is very difficult to prosecute an alleged offence within that timeframe. So the Amendment Bill would extend the period for summary prosecution.

Quote of the day

Sci blogger Martin Robbins:

Has anyone coined a handy term for the tactic (favoured in alt med) of haphazardly citing 100s of papers and hoping people won't check them?

Barry Woods:

IPCC working group 3

Case not Proven

Proven Energy, the domestic wind turbine manufacturer that had to advise buyers of one of its most popular machines to switch off because of a fault, has gone into receivership.

A Scottish company that makes small-scale wind turbines has gone into administration with the loss of 55 jobs.

Directors of Proven Energy called in the receivers after a fault was found in one of its turbines and the firm did not have the finance to keep trading.

Glaciologists condemn Guardian "misinformation"

The Guardian has been reporting details of a new atlas, which reports 15% ice loss in Greenland, ascribing the changes (bien sur) to global warming.

The world's biggest physical changes in the past few years are mostly seen nearest the poles where climate change has been most extreme. Greenland appears considerably browner round the edges, having lost around 15%, or 300,000 sq km, of its permanent ice cover. Antarctica is smaller following the break-up of the Larsen B and Wilkins ice shelves.

Click to read more ...

Gorathon - the slideshow

Research funding as the enemy of innovation

This is a guest post by Demetris Koutsoyiannis

I fully endorse Donald W. Braben’s statement, posted in Times Higher Education and linked in Bishop Hill’s post, that the current research councils’ system for selection of proposals for funding is

fundamentally flawed and a pathway to mediocrity. 

I wish to offer an example and a suggestion for an alternative procedure. My example tries to offer additional evidence in support of the above statement. My suggestion is based on the approach Mother Nature follows in her selection procedures. These procedures always involve randomness, whose power has increasingly been recognized (cf. genetic, evolutionary and simulated annealing algorithms in optimization).

Click to read more ...

Trenberth et al in Remote Sensing

Updated on Sep 16, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Kevin Trenberth has his own response to Spencer and Braswell in Remote Sensing. It's billed as a commentary rather than a proper paper.

The first thing you notice is this:

Received: 8 September 2011 / Accepted: 8 September 2011 / Published: 16 September 2011

so presumably it's fair to say that this is not a peer-reviewed contribution to the literature.

Click to read more ...

Zeke on Spencer and Dessler

There's an excellent post by Zeke Hausfather at Yale Climate Forum. It's written as a layman's explanation of the controversy.

I was struck by this bit:

Dessler begins quite clearly by pointing out how "the usual way to think about clouds in the climate system is that they are a feedback — as the climate warms, clouds change in response and either amplify (positive cloud feedback) or ameliorate (negative cloud feedback) the initial change."

He suggests that Spencer and Braswell's formulation — that clouds are both a cause of and feedback on climate change — is rather outside of current norms.

Doesn't this just sum up the problem with climatology - that new ideas, particularly from those outside the mainstream, are seen as a problem rather than a possible step forward?