The plot thickens

The pressure is ramping up on Stephan Lewandowsky at quite a rate of knots. The illusion that his paper was a bona fide contribution to the academic literature has faded away with the news that his headline - linking denial of the US moon landing and AGW scepticism - was not even supported by his data. The first allegations of academic fraud have been made.

To make things worse for Lewandowsky, Simon at Australian Climate Madness has submitted an FOI request for his correspondence related to the paper. Lewandowsky has admitted that no sceptic blogs carried his survey, but I think it's fair to say that nobody actually believes his convenient claim that his approaches to sceptics were spurned. If nothing is turned up by the FOI request it seems likely that the allegations will be widened to include a clear and deliberate intention to commit academic fraud.

Lewandowsky has published a rebuttal (of sorts), notable more for what it doesn't discuss than what it does. I think it's fair to say that this is not the last we are going to hear of the Lewandowsky affair.

Update on Sep 3, 2012 by Bishop Hill

In the comments, Steve McIntyre reveals that he has now turned up the invitation to link to the Lewandowsky survey, so there was at least one invitation issued.

Lewandowsky teeters on the brink

In the comments to the earlier Lewandowsky thread, readers note the following comment by Skeptical Science writer, Tom Curtis:

Given the low number of "skeptical" respondents overall; these two scammed responses significantly affect the results regarding conspiracy theory ideation. Indeed, given the dubious interpretation of weakly agreed responses (see previous post), this paper has no data worth interpreting with regard to conspiracy theory ideation. It is my strong opinion that the paper should be have its publication delayed while undergoing a substantial rewrite. The rewrite should indicate explicitly why the responses regarding conspiracy theory ideation are in fact worthless, and concentrate solely on the result regarding free market beliefs (which has a strong enough a response to be salvageable). If this is not possible, it should simply be withdrawn.

It surely cannot be long before this happens.

Ridley prize winner

The Spectator has announced the winner of the inaugural Matt Ridley prize for environmental heresy (on which I was one of the judges). The winner is Pippa Cuckson, whose uncovering of the environmental disaster of in-river hydro power was an eye-opener to all of the judging panel. Fraser Nelson's eulogy is here.

Unfortunately the essay itself is paywalled, but was undoubtedly a worthy winner.

Stuart Young on the IPPR report

Stuart Young, whose report on intermittency of wind generation I discussed here a week or so ago, has written a response to the IPPR puff piece last week. He doesn't seem impressed:

The conclusions of the report note that:

• It is inaccurate to describe the output from wind power as ‘unpredictable’.
• In the short term, wind power output is remarkably stable and increases and decreases only very slowly.”

National Grid records generation by technology every five minutes and that is to be found on the NETA website at www.bmreports.com. National Grid also forecasts wind output for two days ahead and refines that forecast daily. This is recorded on the “Wind Forecast Out-turn” page on the NETA website...

This clearly shows the difference between the refined output and the recorded output to be as high as 1250MW, and the difference between the initial and refined forecasts to be almost 800MW over a 24 hour period. This is not a reflection on National Grid’s forecasting ability, it is an illustration of the impossibility of accurately and reliably forecasting the availability of electricity generated by wind.

Young comment on IPPR

Public consultation on offshore wind

This press release was recently released by the Scottish Government. The short notice is, well, extraordinary.

Local communities are being encouraged to get involved in Scotland’s plans for offshore renewable energy, as a series of public meetings kick off over the coming weeks.

The meetings will provide information about the planning process on how Scotland can utilise offshore wind, wave and tidal energy, and seek the views of members of the public to help inform this work...

Meetings will take place in the following locations:

• Edinburgh, September 3: Premier Inn, Morrison Street, Haymarket
• Kirkwall (Orkney), September 4: Kirkwall Town Hall, Broad Street
• Aberdeen, September 5:  Camelite Hotel, Stirling Street
• Glasgow, September 6: Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Sauchiehall Street
• Newton Stewart (Dumfries & Galloway), September 7: McMillan Hall, Dashwood Square
• Stornoway (Lewis), September 27: Bayhead Bridge Centre, Lamont Lane
• Inverness, September 28: Crown Court Townhouse Hotel, 25 Southside Road

Yeo works late

Tim Yeo never gives up, does he?

Ever more entangled become the political and business interests of Tim Yeo MP, chairman of the Commons select committee on energy and climate change. Last Tuesday, Mr Yeo rose to the top of the news agenda by demanding to know whether David Cameron was going to be “a man or a mouse” in handling the issue of a third runway at Heathrow.

Yeo cited as his main reason for supporting this cause that it would help British businesses to open up more trade links with China. But it was then pointed out that a company of which he is chairman, TMO Renewables (which last year paid him £60,000, at up to £1,000 an hour), has just signed a memorandum of understanding with the largest farming corporation in China to supply it with feedstocks for biofuels. TMO’s latest annual report states that doing business with China has become a “key focus” of its activities.

Ranalli on scientific consensus

A new paper by Brent Ranalli looks at the concept of scientific consensus, how such consensuses are used by the public, and whether they can be trusted. In particular Ranalli is concerned with what he calls a "hard-won" consensus.

Here is the abstract.

What makes a consensus among scientists credible and convincing? This paper introduces the notion of a “hard-won” consensus and uses examples from recent debates over climate change science to show that this heuristic stan­dard for evaluating the quality of a consensus is widely shared. The extent to which a consensus is “hard won” can be understood to depend on the personal qualities of the participating experts; the article demonstrates the continuing util­ity of the norms of modern science introduced by Robert K. Merton by showing that individuals on both sides of the climate science debate rely intuitively on Mertonian ideas—interpreted in terms of character—to frame their arguments.

Click to read more ...