Prosecute scientific misconduct

Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal and an expert on peer review, has called for scientific misconduct to be criminalised:

After 30 years of observing how science deals with the problem, I have sadly come to the conclusion that it should be a crime, for three main reasons. First, in a lot of cases, people have been given substantial grants to do honest research, so it really is no different from financial fraud or theft. Second, we have a whole criminal justice system that is in the business of gathering and weighing evidence – which universities and other employers of researchers are not very good at. And finally, science itself has failed to deal adequately with research misconduct.

The point about fraud and research grants is an interesting one. Would it be possible to prosecute people under existing common and statute law? My guess is that it wouldn't be. And if we need new laws, how exactly would you frame them? Perhaps readers with legal qualifications can provide some clarity.

Our neutral civil service

I awake this morning to find my timeline awash with spam from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, furiously retweeting the launch of a report by the New Climate Economy group, a group of green-minded economists headed by Lord Stern and including such eco-figureheads as Ottmar Edenhofer.

In fact there were so many retweets about the report that I could only repost a few here.

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Dixon of crock green

BH favourite Richard Dixon points us to this article in a dicky-looking journal called Environmental Health Perspectives. Sound the alarm, cries the great man:

New US study shows living near gas wells, including #fracking sites, is bad for your health.

The study is here. A few interesting features:

• The authors suggest the study is "hypothesis generating" not conclusive.
• The study was funded by green billionaires.
• The underlying survey was performed with the assistance of an anti-fracking group.

Sheesh.

It's just about the...kerching, kerching

Deep pocketed billionaires are being urged to splash the cash on global warming campaigns rather than any other of the causes so dear to green activists.

The call to hike climate change spending is unprecedented in its scale, with the signatories – all winners of major environmental awards – taking out a full-page advert in today’s International New York Times.

They include former Green Party chairman Jonathon Porritt, Bianca Jagger and Tim Smit, founder of the Eden Project of exotic ecosystem-domes in Cornwall and which hopes to prompt a “tipping point” in climate action.

I hear rumours that there is significant measure of climate fatigue among US philanthropists, so this may well represent a distress signal from our environmentalist friends, who have long enjoyed fabulous wealth.

Look out for attempts to make up the shortfall from taxpayers.

Artificially flavoured, naturally variable - Josh 293

Flavours being added all the time.

Cartoons by Josh

Diary date, communication edition

There is to be a Westminster Hall debate on October 23rd to consider the Science and Technology Committee's report on Communicating Climate Science. No details of time yet.

Scientists decline the poison chalice

When it was announced that David Mackay would be stepping down from his role as chief scientific adviser at DECC, I speculated that it might be a tricky vacancy to fill, what with rumours of blackouts impending.

Here we are nearly six months later. Mackay has gone and no scientist seems to have stepped forward to take up the poison chalice.

I would say they chose...wisely.

The inescapable urge to indoctrinate

The latest edition of School Science Review, a journal of the Association for Science Education, is a climate change special, featuring a review of mainstream positions on global warming by Eric Wolff and a host of other articles covering everything from how better to get children on board the global warming bandwagon to a look at biofuels.

Most of it is paywalled, but you can see the covering editorial here, although to tell the truth it's not particularly exciting. I was struck only by this sentence:

Some teachers may not agree that it is our duty to campaign but we surely have a duty to inform our students where the science is clear, and it is important to teach them about what is complex and uncertain and not known.

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Manns rea?

Things seem to be hotting up on the Michael Mann front, not least because Steve McIntyre seems to have returned to blogging with a vengeance, assisted as always by his trusty band of followers. Today, the climate auditors have turned up another rather embarrassing problem with Michael Mann's legal submission. This document claims that Mann had nothing to do with the infamous cover graphic for the WMO report of 1999, of hide the decline notoriety. Unfortunately, the claim is directly contradicted by Mann's own CV.

I found myself thinking about another of Mann's claims this morning. This was prompted by a comment on David Friedman's blog about Mann's claim in MBH98 that he had used "conventional" principal components analysis. The author of the comment wondered if this could in fact be true. But readers of the Hockey Stick Illusion will recall that the claim of "conventional" was actually only made about Mann's processing of temperature data. Regarding the tree ring data we were only led to understand that PCA had been used.

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A marvel and a mystery

Updated on Sep 11, 2014 by Bishop Hill

A warm welcome to the climate blogosphere for Kate Marvel, a theoretical-turned-climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory.

Dr Marvel's new blog can be seen here, and the first couple of posts make fascinating reading. Today's effort is right up my street, considering the empirical evidence for global warming.

[I]ncreased carbon dioxide warms the lower atmosphere (closer to Earth), but cools the upper atmosphere (closer to space).  I will probably write more about this later but for right now you'll have to take my word for it (or go here).

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Nuclear brouhaha

It looks as though there's a bit of a kerfuffle developing over Friends of the Earth and their stance on nuclear power. It seems that the Today programme (via Roger Harrabin, I think) has reported that FoE is in the process of reversing its stance of complete opposition. FoE staff are furiously tweeting that it is not true.

I haven't heard the Today segment, so I can't comment either way. I'll update if I hear anything.

Update on Sep 10, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Roger Harrabin tweets:

FoE spokesman says "no new policy" but the group does NOT want to shut the UK #nuclear industry. It opposes new-build mainly on cost.

Shale gas getting cheaper

People like BNEF talk about UK shale gas being expensive and hard to extract, although they have not, to the best of my knowledge, ever published the report that they claim justifies their position. In the meantime evidence continues to surface that the technology of shale gas extraction is developing apace.

Just a year or so ago we were talking about breakeven points of $6 for most shale plays in the USA, but as Natural Gas Intelligence reports, US producers seem quite able to get product to the surface at prices below $5:

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Diary dates, Hardaker edition

The Institute of Physics' London Branch is to have a lecture from the Institute's new head, Professor Paul Hardaker.

Challenges in Predicting the Weather and Climate Wednesday, 19 November 2014, 18:00 – 20:00

Meteorology is still a relatively young science with lots of interesting challenges remaining for physicists in improving predictions of our weather and climate. The talk will outline the some of these science challenges, including the contributions made from developments in modelling and observations and how we handle uncertainty in predictions. The talk will also touch on the challenges of communicating the science to the public and policymakers.

Details here.

More retwardian discourse

Back in August, Bob Ward took a pop at Matt Ridley, berating him among other things for an alleged misrepresentation of the global record on drought. Matt's argument was, he claimed "grossly misleading". Much amusement was had when I flagged up the evidence that Matt had cited and Bob mumbled and shuffled before suggesting that the decline wasn't statistically significant. We determined that "grossly misleading" means "correct" in retwardian.

Today Bob is on the case again, spending his tax-funded time to berate...Matt Ridley. This time he is arguing about Matt's case that transient climate response - the amount of warming we will get in the short-term - might be as low as 1.35°C per doubling of carbon dioxide. This figure is sourced from the Lewis and Crok report on climate sensitivity.

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Your taxes at work

This appeared in Hansard recently:

Kerry McCarthy (Shadow Minister (Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs); Bristol East, Labour)

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs how many staff in (a) his Department in the UK and (b) British embassies and high commissions overseas work on climate change-related diplomacy; and what projections he has made of the future staffing requirements for such work.

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