The Guardian backs big oil

Barry Woods points us to the transcript of a most amusing Guardian podcast on the subject of that organ's latest bit of posturing. It seems that the divestment campaign has yet to actually have any impact on the Guardian's own investments:

Amanda Michel: You know, there are big questions about asking people to do something that we ourselves have not done.

Aleks Krotoski: What Amanda is talking about is sorting out the Guardian's own pots of money, their investments.

Amanda Michel: It will seem like hypocrisy.

Alan Rusbridger: We have about £600 million invested at the moment, and I don't think our fund managers could say exactly how much was invested in fossil fuel. But it is there, we haven't said that it shouldn't be, so we have got money invested. And so, if we're going to be calling on people to divest, people are bound to ask "Well, is that what the Guardian's going to do?"

I have to say I agree with Ms Michel: it will indeed seem like hypocrisy for the Guardian to keep backing big oil in this way.

The perils of over-promotion

Prominent anti-fracking campaigner and prospective parliamentary candidate Mike Hill has been very good at promoting himself in recent years. But media attention can be a double-edged sword, as Mr Hill has found to his cost in recent days. Last week he was the subject of a two stories at Guido Fawkes blog, when it emerged that he had once applied for a job at Cuadrilla, that he had pretended spun things so as to present himself as an adviser to the European Union, the Royal Society and DECC, when his role had been little more than to be involved in discussions with them.

Today he is in the Times, which reveals that Mr Hill helped produce a report on fracking that persuaded a doctors' organisation to take a stand against fracking. However, Mr Hill's anti-fracking background was not revealed and with his colourful background now revealed to all it could be argued that the doctors' statement is now a dead letter.

Click to read more ...

Simon's Caribbean climate capers

The BBC really is ramping up the pressure on climate change. Having made my way back to the episcopal palace late yesterday afternoon I collapsed in a corner to catch up on my reading. Meanwhile, on the TV in the corner was Simon Reeve's Caribbean, a travelogue show which this week featured visits to Venezuela and Colombia.

I wasn't paying any attention until, towards the end, I was forced to sit up by the (perhaps inevitable) introduction of the climate debate. This centred upon Reeve's visit to the Sierra Nevada mountains of Columbia and an Amerindian tribe called the Kogi. You got a hint of what was coming when the first Kogi interviewed told the camera that her people did not damage the Earth (from 51:00). But it really kicked off from 54:30 when the same interviewee asked:

Click to read more ...

An unbalanced panel

I'm in Bath at the moment, appearing on BBC The Big Questions. The show was broadcast live at 10am here, but we are asked not to mention our involvement ahead of time. It should be on iPlayer in due course.

The subject is:

Are we right to impose environmental costs on future generations?

The show's panel also features Tony Juniper, Ben Harris-Quinney of the Bow Group and Hannah Martin of Christian Climate Action. This is what Helen Czerski would refer to as an "unbalanced" panel, no doubt.

In which a BBC presenter reveals what balance means

Hat tip to Barry Woods for pointing me to this Twitter exchange, in which the BBC's Helen Czerski reveals what the corporation understands "balance" to mean in the context of the climate debate:

@SellaTheChemist @theresphysics @MichaelEMann @4589roger @guynewey And actually, it's v. balanced in sense that there is no "skeptic" voice.

— Helen Czerski (@helenczerski) March 26, 2015

Bob spurned

Bob Ward's latest attempt to silence dissenters from the climate consensus has ended, once again, in ignominious defeat, with the Independent Press Standards people telling him that his complaint against David Rose necessitated his taking a running jump.

Conclusions

17. The complaint was not upheld.

As I have noted previously, as far as Ward is concerned the process is the punishment, so I think it's likely that he will try this line again in the future, regardless of his failure this time round.

No false balance at the BBC

Sometimes you just have to laugh at the BBC and the Guardianista types who take it seriously.

The Today programme's piece this morning on the 2-degree temperature target was a case in point: a hilarious example of the corporation's attitude to balance in the climate debate.

The discussion centred around the ideas of Petra Tschakert, an expert in the relationship between climate change and gender, and in particular her view that the 2-degree target should be reduced to 1.5°C.

And to counter this view, the corporation decided to invite none other than Lord Deben, trougher extraordinaire and a man whose tangled relationship with the concept of accuracy is a constant source of stories for this blog.

Too funny.

The Global Warming War

Some sceptics have made a movie, it seems. I must say, from the trailer it looks like lots of fun.

Diary dates, sea ice edition

The BBC's Costing the Earth show is going to look at the sea ice next week in show that will feature Mike Hulme, Helen Czerski and Mark Lynas. I'm not entirely sure that this is a group of people that will shed a lot of light on the matter. Expect lots of hypothesis dressed up as "fact" and speculation flouncing around the place pretending to be probability.

I'm sure it will be entertaining though.

With arctic sea ice shrinking and Antarctic sea ice growing, Tom Heap asks what is happening to the climate.

Click to read more ...

Lew paper shredded

BH regulars Jonathan Jones and Ruth Dixon have published a much-needed response to Lewandowsky's "Conspiracist Ideation" paper. Appearing in the journal Psychological Science, their study seems to lay to rest the idea that the Lew paper was anything other than a smear-job.

This analysis highlights the fact that a skewed sample can easily mask a nonlinear relationship and lead to serious misinterpretation of modeled relationships (Berk, 1983; Groves, 2006; MacCallum & Mar, 1995). Techniques such as SEM should not be used as a “black box” without thorough initial exploration of the data set to check for nonlinearities (Bentler & Chou, 1987; Cumming, 2014). The curvilinear relationship identified in both the panel-survey data of Lewandowsky, Gignac, and Oberauer (2013) and the blogs-survey data of Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac (2013) suggests that both respondents convinced of anthropogenic climate change and respondents skeptical about such change were less likely to accept conspiracy theories than were those who were less decided about climate change.

There is an accompanying blog post by Jonathan and Ruth here, which alludes to the long and painful process of getting the paper published as well as linking to Lew's response. It also contains this summary of the Lew paper:

All the data really shows is that people who have no opinion about one fairly technical matter (conspiracy theories) also have no opinion about another fairly technical matter (climate change). Complex models mask this obvious (and trivial) finding.

Quote of the day, hidden truths edition

"Just being anti-fracking is nonsense to me and always has been. It's purely a reaction and not a positive one. Often in response to utter gibberish news stories or propaganda set off by Frack-Off and co. I am up to the eyeballs with it. They want me to add professional credence to this utter nonsense."

Antifracking campaigner Mike Hill's job application to Cuadrilla. Seriously.

The green blob and its double standards

I'm grateful to Ben Pile and Barry Woods for these observations about the latest edition of Nature Climate Change, a special with a focus on climate change and the media.

Barry noted that it featured articles by Leo Hickman, now of Carbon Brief, and Richard Black, now of the Energy and Climate Change Information Unit. By strange coincidence, both of these organisations are funded by the European Climate Foundation (ECF), a conduit for funding sent by green billionaires.

Ben then pointed out that the author of another article - James Painter of the Reuters School of Journalism - was not only the son in law of Crispin Tickell but also the beneficiary of considerable funding from the self-same ECF. Another coincidence, no doubt, but one that meant that no fewer than three of the five articles in the special feature were written by ECF-funded authors.

Click to read more ...

Quote of the day, unconvincing edition

In a remarkably clear-sighted article at The Federalist, David Harsanyi seems to put is finger on why the illiberal left have failed quite so badly to convince anyone that they are right on climate change.

By declaring the conversation over, you’re done trying to convince anyone.

A question for David Spiegelhalter

Updated on Mar 26, 2015 by Bishop Hill

I have a lot of time for David Spiegelhalter, the Cambridge University statistician who has become something of a go-to guy for the media on matters statistical. You certainly warm towards him when he sticks his head above the parapet to throttle a media health scare at source, as he did yesterday, responding to an article in the Telegraph that claimed that three alcoholic drinks a day could cause liver cancer.

There's no doubt that excessive drinking is bad for you and those around you. But does this justify exaggerated and misleading claims? They got their publicity, but perhaps the WCRF should value its scientific credibility a bit more.

Click to read more ...

Quote of the day, political power edition

I believe that climate moralists are impervious to the adverse impact of their policies because their morality is closely interwoven with misunderstanding of economics, distaste for capitalism, lack of interest in history and the overwhelming desire of their psychic elephants to dictate how other people should live.

The climate issue has to be seen as the latest chapter in the two century long battle to use the alleged moral shortcomings of capitalism to justify political power.

Peter Foster places the climate debate in its historical context