More recognition for Climate Audit

The environmental activists at Nature may refuse to link to Climate Audit but this sort of silliness is not universal. As a reader points out to me via email, the University College London Environmental Change Institute not only links to CA from its blogroll, but also carries the full blog as a feed direct to its own pages. Following Steve McIntyre's invitation to address faculty and students at Georgia Tech, this looks like further evidence that the right for sceptical views to be heard is being won.

This recognition is well-deserved, of course, and makes the Climate Audit denialist position of Nature look even sillier than it did before. This will not change their position, of course.

("Climate Audit denialism". I like that.)

H/T to Frederick Colbourne via email. 

Liberal Youth

According to this, the LibDem youth wing is to be relaunched as Liberal Youth. They were previously called Lib Dem Youth and Students.

Is there any significance in the party dropping the "Dem" bit from the party name. Are they to be liberals, pure and simple, and not just another more-than-usually-woolly social democrat party?  If you look at their policy documents they still seem to be the old orgy of tax and spend that have characterised the party's platform of recent years. There is, however a suggestion that the whole range of policies will be revamped following the relauch. Let's hope so, but let's not hold our breath either, shall we?

Women's studies

Via Croziervision, this story at Laban Tall's:

Women's Studies as a distinct undergraduate discipline will disappear this October, when the last institution offering first degrees, London Metropolitan University (formerly Hoxton Working Men's Club) stops taking undergrads. According to this Today report (RealAudio, 15 mins in) it's down to lack of demand.

There are very few things that the government have got right in the last ten years. Independence for the Bank of England was one. The other (and I can only think of the two) was the imposition of fees for university education. Suddenly, doing the student bit is no longer a matter of "an amusingly tipsy way of spending three years" or "a lifestyle choice", but a matter of finding a way to do something that is useful to society - which is to say, something that people are willing to pay for. It's small wonder that people are now avoiding mickey mouse degrees in favour of something which might actually give them a living at the end of it.

The counter-argument to my hypothesis is that a university education is not vocational - it's about interacting with clever people, broadening ones mind, having the time to think, blah, blah, rhubarb. To which I would respond that we've got the internet now.  You want mind broadening? Find a decent chatroom.

Another global warming sceptic

Professor Laurence I Gould, a physicist from the University of Hartford writes an opinion piece of the newsletter of the New England section of the American Physical Society:

The world has been inundated with claims about dangerous anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Such claims continue to be advocated by a number of scientists, believed by frightened citizens, prominently featured in the mass media, urged to be acted on by many politicians, held to be true by a variety of business people, and spread through educational institutions. As a result, there has emerged a predominant AGWA [my acronym for AGW Alarmist (or Alarmism)] point of view. That point of view probably stems from a confluence of interactions explained through sociology, psychology, philosophy, politics, economics, the media, and science. Only a few of those issues can be treated here — and then, only briefly.

I think it urgent that members of the scientific community should know about some of the issues being propagated. It is urgent because of the dangers to physics in particular, and to science and, consequently, to civilization (depending so heavily as it does on science) in general.

The global warming enthusiasts have been known to call, from time to time, for sceptics ("denialists") to be tried for crimes against humanity. Those of us on the other side of the debate might wonder what steps the scientific community will take against those who have promoted the scam with such vehemence, once the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

Via Greenie Watch. 

I enjoyed this

I'm not desperately inspired at the moment. So instead of writing something useful here's some things that other people have written. I enjoyed this post from Brian Micklethwait's Education Blog

I am more than ever convinced that if the entire state education system were to drop dead tomorrow morning, that would be a great improvement for some people immediately, for many people in a few weeks, for most people in a few months, and for almost everyone in a few years.  After a decade, the results would be miraculous.

And also this rather amusing primer on the US Sub-prime mortgage debacle, which I found on the Volokh Conspiracy. You need to click the screen to go through the slides.

One side of the story

The BBC is trumpeting a UN report on the loss of ice from glaciers.

The rate at which some of the world's glaciers are melting has more than doubled, new data says.

Which begs the question of what has happened to the others. Has the rate more than halved? Or are they in fact growing. Helpfully, Biased BBC points out that Arctic Sea ice is back to normal and the world has endured its coldest winter for decades, so it's probably fair to say that global catastrophe is not yet upon us.

Ah, but the UN are talking about glaciers, not icecaps, I hear you say. Well, take a look at this report from the Washington Post back in 1922 (H/T Anthony Watts).

 

Here's the text in more legible form:

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

 Perspective is a wonderful thing.

Your tax money at work

It's probably too much to hope that heads might roll over this.

(Via Samizdata). 

Coal

Thought for the day:

Greens are calling for a moratorium on new coal fired power stations. Would they have still been making these demands if we still had a mining industry? 

Homework is rubbish

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers, a trade union, has called for homework to be scrapped.

The cynics among us would probably assume that they just didn't want to do the marking. The extremely cynical might point out that they don't anyway. 

I'm cynical on many things, but actually this is not such a bad idea. Certainly the baby Bishops are knackered when they get home from school and we tend to have great crises over getting anything done. I'd rather they were out playing in the garden.

Interestingly, one book I've seen on helping children with their studies said quite plainly that homework was a waste of time and that you should just do it for them. I certainly can't see much point in "make up a sentence including the word "today" (or "yesterday" or "birthday"). Is this useful?

The downside I would see in the plan would be that I would have absolutely no way of gauging my children's progress. Seeing their homework is as much information as I get. But I'd certainly be willing to trade regular reports for no homework. 

Great blogging career moves

One of the great blogging career moves of all time must be Lucia Liljegren's switch from writing about knitting to a site devoted to statistical analysis of climate science.

Her most recent posts were a piece about the application of the Cochrane-Orcutt method to monthly global temperature data and a short article about a stuffed elephant.

This makes me feel rather inadequate.

(Since you ask, Cochrane-Orcutt "adjusts a linear model for serial correlation in the error term", at least according to Wikipedia. Lucia's article actually looks rather exciting since it appears to show that the IPCC's projections for global temperature are too high. Only the mathematically inclined need read though).

More statistical analysis of MPs' expenses

Following my recent post on the lack of correlation between MPs' staff costs and the amount they spent on office costs, I thought of another interesting test I could do.

TheyWorkForYou publishes figures detailing what proportion of letters sent via their website are actually responded to within a reasonable time. We would expect that MPs with large staff costs should be able to get prompt replies more often than their understaffed colleagues, wouldn't we? (Actually, given we think they're paying their wives and families to do nothing, we wouldn't expect this at all, but let's play along with the hypothesis, shall we?)

Here's the graph:

Again, I've plotted a best fit line so we can understand what's going on a little better.

This time, there is a microscopic correlation, but even so, it's still not good news for our friends in Westminster. The slight downslope to the graph actually seems to show that an MP with low staff costs is more likely to answer his correspondence on time than his high claiming counterpart.

What possible explanation can there be for this anomoly?

I just can't imagine.... 

Civil Serf is down

The Sunday Times has a story speculating about the identity of Civil Serf, the anonymous Whitehall blogger.

The Civil Serf - as she calls herself - claims to be a 33-year-old fast-stream civil servant ready to expose the daily chaos of the Labour government machine while lampooning ministers and highlighting the idiocy of mandarin colleagues. There are also moans about drunken advances from the opposite sex.

It's a great blog - she writes beautifully, or at least she did, because as of this moment the whole site appears to have been deleted.  It's a shame, but it was certainly good to have a light shone on the inner workings of the mandarinate for a while.

Michael Martin in trouble again

Michael Martin has been caught at it again. Following hot on the heels of the revelations about his dodgy expenses come allegations that he's colluding with the government to suppress a FoI request into the costs of the ID cards scheme.

SpyBlog has the truly scandalous details. 

Hutton on telly

Will Hutton writes in the Observer: the best telly is coming from commercial outfits in the US. State-owned BBC and Channel 4 are moribund and won't take risks.

And his conclusion?

Don't even think about privatising it. 

Numpty. 

Any lawyers out there?

Via here, I found this article in the Guardian by Dr Simon Lewis, who is a geographer working in the field of biodiversity.

In April last year a group of environmentalists shut down E.ON's coalfired power station in Ratcliffe-on-Soar. The goal: to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and, in their words, "save lives". Yesterday judge Morris Cooper presented a 20-page judgment accepting there was an "urgent need for drastic action", but convicted them of aggravated trespass, saying their defence, that their crime was necessary to save lives, could not be substantiated.

In the trial, for which I was an expert witness, crucial questions were how many people does climate change kill, and what proportion is the UK responsible for? I was surprised to discover that nobody knows.

This is a surprising thing to say, firstly because it's patently obvious that nobody knows - how could they? But secondly, if he had to go away and find out the answers to these questions it rather suggests that he's not actually an expert at all. Dr Lewis, as I've mentioned is an ecologist, not an epidemiologist. It makes the court system look rather silly to call someone as an expert on one thing whose expertise is in something completely different. 

So my first question for lawyers is this: do UK expert witnesses actually have to demonstrate some expertise in the relevant field? Or can the defence just put up some random green with letters after their name?

There's more about the trial here - this appears to be a site run by one of the defendants or perhaps one of their supporters. What intrigued me were the notes of Dr Lewis's testimony, and in particular this:

defence lawyer:  IPCC reports, how are they viewed in the scientific community?

 [Dr Lewis] IPCC - a consensus document, made up of thousands of scientists' reviews of the literature. That no scientist holding a position in an academic university who disagrees with on record.

Now this statement, as set out here, is manifestly untrue. Richard Lindzen, anyone? Professor of Meteorology at MIT? From his Wikipedia page:

Lindzen stated that "there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them" and "I cannot stress this enough -- we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions, agreement with the three basic statements tells us almost nothing relevant to policy discussions."

So my second question for any lawyers reading is this: if Dr Lewis gave evidence along the lines of the statements attributed to him above, has he committed perjury?

And question three is this: can anyone lay their hands on a copy of the trial transcript?.