Taking the Michael

Michael Martin's performance in the Commons yesterday has lead several commentators to note his passing the buck to anyone who stood still for long enough to catch it - the police were to blame, the Serjeant at Arms was to blame, but he, Gorbals Mick was a paragon of virtue and an example to us all. (I made that last bit up).

Martin has been heavily criticised for not shouldering the blame himself, but I think those who would cast the first stone need to be much more culturally sensitive. Martin is from Western Scotland, and in the nether regions of Glasgow, politicians have been brought up to avoid responsibility for everything and anything that goes wrong. It's almost bred into them. It's is where the phrase "political accountability" comes from - it means accountability for things that go well, and things that go well only. Martin is merely expressing his native political culture.

So take your English preconceptions of how politicians should behave back to Blighty and have a care for the way other people run their affairs.

Thank you.

Bashful cops

Sky has the footage of the police searching Damian Green's office, which was taken by some of the Tory staffers. They may be the stupid party, but that was reasonably quick thinking.

What I find bemusing is that they have pixellated the faces of the police officers concerned. Why should they do that? The police are public servants and they have no right to expect privacy when they are at work. It is the right of every one of us to film the police. It's one of the few ways we have to keep them honest.

The benefit of the doubt

After something of a hiatus over the weekend, there has been a rush of new comment on the Damian Green affair, including this rather good piece by Henry Porter over at the Graun. I get the impression that this whole affair may well run and run. Wednesday's statement to Parliament by Michael Martin promises to produce some real fireworks - it might well turn out to be one of those rare occasions when it is worth watching it all live on TV. With a bit of luck a few heads might roll. God, there might even be some bloodshed.

It's fair to say that this isn't a black and white issue. The argument that MPs should not be above the law seems to me to be a fair one. The problem is that the law is not designed with the interests of the public in mind - it's been written solely to protect the interests of the state. By outlawing the leaking of government information, the opposition are left weaponless in the fight to hold the executive to account. If the government mean to enforce the laws on leaking it will mean that yet another plank of the British Constitution has been torn up and tossed aside by a government that cares nothing for the public, but only for its narrow partisan self. What point is an opposition that has no access to the information it requires? We desperately need a sweeping new Freedom of Information Act that will make nearly every state document public (with the obvious few narrow exceptions). Only then can we be sure that the government can be held to account.

The actions of the police may or may not have had a sinister motive behind them. What the commentariat has made clear is that, after 90 days detention and 42 days detention and 28 days detention and ID cards and cash for honours and databases and snooping on all and sundry, people are no longer willing to give Gordon Brown and his motley crew the benefit of the doubt.

It's about time too.

Comment not quite so free as it was?

Still here, still working on some other things. I've just cottoned on to the Damian Green story, which is frankly pretty scary. One thing I did notice was that Comment is Free still hasn't uttered a single solitary word on the story. Are the powers that be at the Graun scared of what people will say about the dear leader?

Update on Nov 28, 2008 by Bishop Hill

There's an open thread at CiF where lots of the punters are wondering the same thing.

Another divergence problem

Steve McIntyre has pointed out before that paleoclimatologists actually have two divergence problems rather than one. Most people who follow the climate debate are aware of the fact that tree ring widths have not responded to the rise in temperatures in the second half of the twentieth century, a fact which completely undermines the case for their use as proxy thermometers. This inconvenient truth has been neatly avoided by simple dint of not reporting any proxy data later than 1980, truncating the series where necessary.

The second divergence problem is the fact that tree ring widths, and ring wood densities (which are also used in temperture reconstructions), having tracked each other quite well through most of the record, have also diverged in recent decades. Here the solution here has been to "adjust" the record, pretending that the divergence never happened.

Now (and I'm grateful to a reader for pointing this out to me) the BBC has reported a study in Science which has analysed a Chinese stalagmite and has linked its growth to the Asian monsoon.

The monsoon record also matched up nicely with the advance and retreat of Swiss glaciers.

Scientists say the natural archive shows that climate change can have devastating effects on local populations - even when this change is mild when averaged across the globe.

In the cave record, the monsoon followed trends in solar activity over many centuries, suggesting the Sun played an important role in the variability of this weather system.

To a lesser extent, it also followed northern hemisphere temperatures on a millennial and centennial scale. As temperatures went up, the monsoon became stronger and, as they dropped, it weakened.

Great. More evidence that we're going to be fried alive very shortly. But wait, what's this?

However, over the last 50 years, this relationship has switched.

Oh, oh! Start thinking up stories to explain it guys....

The researchers attribute this to the influence of greenhouse gas emissions and sulphate aerosols released by human activities.

That should do it. Another divergence problem neatly disposed of.

Passing on the libertarian message

Large son and small son were having a conversation in the bath.

Large son: Do you know why we have Guy Fawkes night?

Small son: Err. Yeeesss.

Large son: Why then?

Small son: Errr. Don't know.

Large son: It's because there was a man called Guy Fawkes who wanted to blow up Parliament. That means he wanted to make it bigger.....

The message isn't getting through, is it?

Tax revolts and the BBC

Jonathan Pearce at Samizdata points to an article by Charles Moore in the Tellygraph who is trying to foment a tax revolt against the BBC. Having read exactly what it was that Messrs Ross and Brand said, (the details of the whole affair had previously rather passed me by), I'm inclined to think that he's right. I'm struggling, in fact to think of any saving grace that the BBC has. Maybe it is time that we all just said "Enough".

I can hear it now, the masses in the streets chanting:

Remember Ross! Remember Sachs!

And then don't pay your TV tax!

Sends shivers down your spine, doesn't it? Viva la revolucion!...errm, old boy!

Met Office tea leaves

With the first October snow recorded in London for seventy years, I just feel that it's incumbent upon me to point out that the Met Office has forecast that it's going to be a mild winter again.

Tee hee.

(Busy on some stuff, so blogging may remain pretty light).

Quote of the day

Schools have not necessarily much to do with education....they are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school."

Winston Churchill

Generous bankers

Back to the grind, and it's been cold wet and miserable since we got home. Mind you, that's not a lot different to the weather in Spain. Amazing stuff, this global warming.

Thought for the day was prompted by a posting at CiF, where Ian Jack comments in passing about greedy bankers. The thing is, the credit crunch was caused by aforementioned greedy bankers handing out money to people who had no chance of ever paying it back. I always thought this sort of behaviour was called "generosity" rather than "greed".

(Yes, I know, they were only dishing out the money because the government made them, but all the same...)

Blogging break

Last weekend one of the baby bishops had a sleepover at a pal's house, camping out in the garden. Temperatures fell to 2^oC. This struck me as a valuable lesson in life, namely that camping is uncomfortable and not desperately enjoyable.

This week we're off to warmer climes for another valuable lesson in life, hopefully involving sherry.

Back in a couple of weeks.

The amazing disappearing Roger Harrabin!

I've written a couple of posts on the subject of BBC environment correspondent Roger Harrabin's work with something called the Cambridge Environment and Media Programme, which appears to be a body which tries to ensure that the BBC adheres to green orthodoxy in all its output.

CEMP originally came to my attention when one of Harrabin's emails was leaked, revealing that he was spending time trying to come up with a party line to take about Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth being found to be misleading in a court case. The BBC's website at the time had a profile of Harrabin, which revealed that he was a CEMP director, and that CEMP itself was "supported" by the BBC. I assume that this means financially supported, although other interpretations are possible.

Then at the start of this year, I noticed that Harrabin and CEMP had been involved in trying to put together the Planet Relief telethon, together with a marauding horde of greens and BBC bigwigs. This was revealed by the blog of one of the environmentalists, Matt Prescott, who thanked Harrabin and his CEMP colleague Joe Smith of the Open University for introducing him to some of the BBC bosses at a CEMP-organised seminar.

CEMP has now come to my attention again, as Tony N at Harmless Sky has been taking a look at their activity too. He notes that the BBC profile of Harrabin is no longer online. On a hunch, I took a look at the Matt Prescott article too, and found that it no longer mentioned Harrabin either - only Joe Smith.

This seemed like just too much of a coincidence to me. I could have been mistaken on one of them, but not both. Fortunately, through the delights of the Wayback Machine, I was able to retreive the original pages.

Here's the BBC profile of Harrabin, from which the pertinent quote is

He co-directs the Cambridge Environment and Media Programme, which is supported by BBC News to bring together senior journalists with outside experts to discuss media coverage of long-term sustainable development issues.

And here's the Matt Prescott piece. It originally said

Joe Smith (Open University) and Roger Harrabin (BBC News) originally introduced me to Jon, in Cambridge, and also played a crucial role in helping to get things off the ground a couple of years ago.

It now reads:

Joe Smith (Open University) originally introduced me to Jon, in Cambridge, and also played a crucial role in helping to get things off the ground a couple of years ago.

Something to hide, gentlemen?

Update on Jan 15, 2012 by Bishop Hill

The full story of Roger Harrabin and the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme is now available as a download here.

Monbiot on corporate welfare

George Monbiot has a rather-less-moonbatty-than-usual article in the Guardian this morning. Entitled "The free market preachers have long practised state welfare for the rich", it's actually more an attack on corporate welfare per se than on the people who support it. In fact the headline writer seems not to have read the article at all, because Monbiot spends quite a lot of time quoting approvingly from a report by the Cato Institute, who are nothing if not arch free marketeers.

It's not often I find myself agreeing with Monbiot, but he has a point. There is absolutely no excuse for subsidising business, whether through direct payments, or through carefully constructed tax loopholes. He's not presenting any solutions in his article though - he's just railing at the problem, and I wonder if this is because the solutions are unpalatable to him.

I've put forward the idea before that we could have a law that made payments to corporate bodies illegal, except in fair payment for goods or services received. That would draw in all the subsidies to lobbyists, companies, NGOs, trades unions and all the horrible regiment of wheedling crooks that beset the political system. Of course, it will never happen because the big political parties are all in hock to these crooks, but in essence it's a simple solution to a complex problem.

Corporate tax dodges are also easily avoided, by simple means of abolishing corporate tax (or at the very least making them flat), but I can't see Monbiot going for that either. He doesn't care how low your salary is - if you are putting something away in your pension then you have to pay tax on it at corporate level.

You can't help feeling that George is actually quite happy with the idea of corporate welfare - it gives him something to rail at and stops him having to deal with the consequences of solving the problem.

Climate Cuttings 25

The very eminent and very sceptical climatologist Richard Lindzen wonders, in a new paper, if modern climatology is set up to answer scientific questions. He discusses the long slow slide of the science away from answering discrete problems to a not-so-brave new world of endless simulation projects, which are unfalsifiable, but keep a lot of politicised bureaucrats employed.

Craig Loehle's first paleoclimatological paper was published by Energy & Environment, the journal the warmists love to hate. He has now moved on to a rather more prominent journal and has a study of the mathematics of tree ring reconstructions in the current edition of Climatic Change. His results rather undermine the whole case for this approach to finding the temperatures of the past by showing that one of its key assumptions - that the relationship between temperature and ring widths is linear - is not actually true.

Veerabhadran Ramanathan is probably one of the most eminent climatologists alive, so much attention will have been fixed on his recent paper discussing the big picture of AGW. In it, he discusses the impact of CO2 emissions on the climate and what it might mean for the global temperature. Roger Pielke Snr wonders why he is discussing global temperature at all, given that they had previously agreed that this is a flawed measure and that the ocean heat content is much more reliable.

Jeff Id produced another jaw-dropping demonstration of how Mann-method climate reconstruction produces hockey sticks and produces a false cooling of the medieval period. This is turning into a must-read blog.

The Met Office has never seen its inability to make any sort of accurate seasonal forecast as a problem when it comes to making sage announcements about how things will pan out in the future. Again undeterred by the failure of their forecast for the summer, they have recently brought out the results of their tea leaf gazing for the winter. This time it's going to be a pretty mild one, they say, although we should apparently be ready for cold snaps. Cold snaps in winter, eh? You don't say! Better lay in some firewood and buy some cold weather gear, people!

And lastly, it snowed in South Africa, a phenomenon that was attributed, without even a hint of irony, to "climate change" (a.k.a. global warming).

Photo credits: Fortune teller, Riptheskull.

Mysterious announcement from the Met Office

There's a news article just published at the Guardian reporting the announcement from the Met Office that "climate sceptics have their heads stuck in the sand".

Climate sceptics such as Nigel Lawson who argue that global warming has stopped have their "heads in the sand", according to the UK's Met Office. A recent dip in global temperatures is down to natural changes in weather systems, a new analysis shows, and does not alter the long-term warming trend. The office says average temperatures have continued their rising trend over the last decade, and that humans are to blame.In a statement published on its website, it says: "Anyone who thinks global warming has stopped has their head in the sand. "The evidence is clear, the long-term trend in global temperatures is rising, and humans are largely responsible for this rise. Global warming does not mean that each year will be warmer than the last."

This is all illustrated with a rather nice graph which looks like this:

Two things jump out at me here. The first is the caption, "Brohan et al 2006". It's remarkable that a paper published in 2006 can analyse temperatures up to 2007, don't you think? Perhaps this is something to do with the Met Office's much-vaunted forecasting abilities?

A little research shows that Brohan et al 2006 was, in fact, the paper where the HADCRUT3 temperature series was announced to the world. This seems to suggest then that this "new analysis" is not actually a peer-reviewed study, but is just somebody bashing some numbers out.

Actually, I don't have a problem with somebody just bashing some numbers out. If the analysis is good, the analysis is good, and whether it's peer-reviewed or not is irrelevant. It would have been more honest of the Met Office and the Guardian to make this fact plain though. But another question then arises: if they've just taken the data and calculated some trends, why have they only used data up to 2007?

Ah, yes, the 2008 figures have dropped precipitously, haven't they?

So, this looks to me as if the Met Office is indulging in a little propagandising. Plus ca change and all that...

One last mystery though. When I look up the Met Office's media pages, there's no sign of the press release at all. Do you think they pulled it?

Update on Sep 23, 2008 by Bishop Hill

Rich in the comments has found the "press release" which isn't really a press release at all, but a new glossy brochure. The unscientific tone is a sight to behold.

The reference on the graph is slightly more revealing - it reads HADCRUT3 Brohan et al 2006, so there is not even the pretence that this is a new study. It's just a new leaflet. Well worth an article in the Guardian I would have thought.