Cartoons by Josh

James Delingpole isn't like me. His USP is angry; furious; appalled, disgusted, but he does it in such a funny way that you really have to be very green not to be amused by  his way with words.

Breaking with the cross-party consensus on climate change would put Cameron on the side of families and manufacturers. Perhaps free from the obsession with change-the-world environmentalism we could also be freed up as a party to focus on a more practical, local environmentalism. Conservatives should, of course, be conservationists but our focus should be on cleaner rivers, planting trees and protecting habitats of outstanding beauty. Yes, we should invest in clean technologies that will help the global environment but we shouldn't be spending money on imported and immature windfarm technologies.

Perhaps more interestingly, some of the details of how the document came to light have appeared, and it seems that DeSmog had the documents for only an hour before posting them online. As several people have commented, the contrast with Anthony's conduct when the Climategate emails fell into his lap could not be starker. The WUWT team held onto the UEA disclosures for several days while they tried to authenticate them rather than assuming the worst and rushing to publish.

The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on January 17. He was traveling at the time this story broke yesterday afternoon and still has not had the opportunity to read them all to see if they were altered. Therefore, the authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.

Since then, the documents have been widely reposted on the Internet, again with no effort to confirm their authenticity.

One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.

I can...reveal that, during the financial year 2009/10 (the most recent for which the data is available), Research Council spending on “climate change research and training” amounted to £234 million. This analysis was provided by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) on behalf of Research Councils UK (RCUK).

This figure is a minimum - there is also direct funding from government departments and the EU to the universities to add in.

I can't sum up this situation better than the author of the original post:

Let’s be clear about one thing. This sort of money corrupts. It corrupts both individuals and organisations. Climate research funding is agenda driven, rather than result driven; it exists in large part because climate change is perceived as a problem. Research that attempts to prove otherwise is unlikely to be funded at all and even less likely to attract future grants, while scientists who exaggerate the dangers or effects will have no such problems.

It is time to turn the tap off.

Now, what was it you were saying about Heartland?

Twenty-three universities and two umbrella groups for universities have submitted evidence too.

Public interest or vested interest? It's a tight call for the committee.

There are apparently nine or ten documents, which will no doubt be scanned for evidence of malfeasance. I haven't seen any serious allegations as yet.

Officials are said to be frustrated at spending hours researching the answers to requests for disclosures under the Freedom of Information Act.

Civil servants believe that the laws, which were introduced to make government more open, could have had the opposite effect by making officials less willing to keep written records which could become public.

On January 27, 2012, the Wall Street Journal ran an Opinion Editorial written by 16 people who deny the evidence of human-induced climate change. Most of the authors of the editorial were not climate scientists; one of two actual climate scientists of the group, Richard Lindzen, is a notorious global warming denier who also denies that smoking causes cancer. Predictably, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Journal refused to run a statement by 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences, although a “Letter to the Editor” by 38 of the world’s leading climate scientists¹ did manage to get published there.

It doesn't improve further on.

H/T to reader Randy for this (I was actually sent this a week or so ago, but have been overwhelmed by things to write about - so sorry to Randy for the delay).

Firstly this update from the Independent on the story about BBC Worldwide accepting programming from environmental groups for free. The BBC is to issue an apology.

I'm grateful to Alex Cull for this excerpt of an interview with Lord May which confirms this impression.

Dear Professor Nurse

I am a retired professor of chemistry in The University of Chicago. I also am a Fellow of the Royal Society. First, allow me to congratulate you on becoming president of the Society. You are about to live in interesting times, I am sure.