A meeting of moderates

I am still pretty overwhelmed with "stuff" at the moment. Just life things, really - IT problems (Bill Gates, you are useless), school problems (Perth & Kinross council, you are worse) and of course the day job too. This is leaving precious little time for the blog and for thinking about peace conferences.

Almost off the top of my head, therefore, is the idea that the objectives for such a peace conference should be quite limited. So when Leo Hickman suggests as a starting point...

Unimpeachable, transparent, uncorrupted science
Energy security
"Clean" energy (if CO2 is not your concern, then surely reducing localised air pollution is a valid goal?)
Halting deforestation
Halting biodiversity loss
Conserving marine habitats
Avoiding economic instability
Protecting the poor and vulnerable
Ensuring global food supplies

...it seems to me that he is hopelessly overambitious. At the very most, a conference might address the first point. That would be an important objective. The rest is a wish-list, with many tradeoffs needing to be made. These are not questions to be decided at conferences.

What's up with Norfolk Police?

A few weeks back I got some general ledger details from UEA and we discovered, among other things, that UEA had made a big payment to Norfolk Police Authority. The police authority is the body that oversees the constabulary, which I thought was rather odd.

I therefore put in an FOI asking them for a copy of the invoice plus any related correspondence. The immediate response was slightly strange in that I was passed straight on to Norfolk Constabulary's FOI department. At the time I assumed that Norfolk Police Authority and the Constabulary itself must share financial ledgers. I thought nothing else of it.

However, today the reponse has come back.

Click to read more ...

Leo Hickman on peace talks

Leo Hickman in the Guardian muses about the possibility of peace talks to end the climate wars. Yours truly is mentioned:

I admit that I sometimes find it hard to detect the signal from all the noise when observing climate sceptics, but the most positive contribution the more moderate climate sceptics (or "luke-warmers", as they are sometimes described) such as McIntyre and Andrew Montford have brought to the debate is their dogged insistence that climate science must be transparent, open, fair and free from influence. I don't think anyone could argue that this is not a worthy goal and, even if you disagree with their motivations, tone and methodologies, we will come to thank climate sceptics in years to come for forcing these obvious improvements. So, would a "meeting of the moderate minds" within this debate be productive?

Update on Jun 22, 2011 by Bishop Hill

I'm in discussions about a formal response to Leo Hickman's suggestion. Watch this space.

Bit distracted

I'm a bit distracted by other things at the moment. Normal service will resume soon.

Whatdon'ttheyknowanymore

Last week David Holland had a response to an FOI request for correspondence between UEA and Russell and Boulton. This turned up on one of my Google alerts and I have been busying myself analysing the results. David is away on holiday at the moment, but interestingly, if you go to look at the page for the request now, you see this.

I wonder what's up?

Conjuring up the future - Josh 108

I can't believe the IPCC can pull this one off - can they?

So what about solar?

Following on from the previous posting, this thread is for any findings from a perusal of the solar chapter.

So what about bioenergy?

In the comments on the last thread, Pointman wonders whether there might be problems with some of the other chapters of the IPCC renewables report. This thread is for any findings on the bioenergy chapter, which can be found here.

This time it's hydro

Mark Lynas is back in the groove, relaying new allegations of bias in the renewables report - this time related to the hydropower chapter.

“The value of the IPCC report is weakened by the strongly biased treatment of hydropower,” says Peter Bosshard, policy director for International Rivers, which campaigns to raise attention of the damaging effects large dams can have on riverine ecosystems. “At least half of the lead authors of the hydropower chapter are not independent scientists, but have a vested interest in the promotion of hydropower. This creates a conflict of interest, which is reflected throughout the report.”

IPCC Circus - Josh 107

Some context. Over at Keith Kloor's Ray Pierrehumbert, RealClimate blog founder, left a rather rude comment ending with this about troublesome voices like McIntyre, McKittrick, and Watts.

"... big as the IPCC tent may be, I hope there will never be a place in it for any of these clowns."

Which made me conclude that Ray thinks that the IPCC is a circus and it should only be populated by approved and accredited clowns. Fair enough.

More cartoons by Josh

Beyond repair

Our glorious government here in the UK is considering subsidising the Irish wind industry.

THE BRITISH government could massively subsidise the Irish wind energy industry under proposals to be considered in London today.

Britain believes the west coast and the seas around Ireland can provide it with a large amount of its renewable energy and could be willing to subsidise offshore wind farms there.

Industry groups here say such a move could be worth up to €1.6 billion a year to the Irish economy.

These clowns really have to go don't they?

Political science

One academic who is untroubled by yesterday's call for adherents to the AGW hypothesis to stop calling their opponents "deniers" is Stephan Lewandowsky, an Australian academic who has a somewhat offensive piece in The Conversation, the chat site for university people.

At a time when Greenland is losing around 9,000 tonnes of ice every second — all of which contributes to sea level rises – it is time to hold accountable those who invert common standards of science, decency, and ethics in pursuit of their agenda to delay action on climate change.

It's an interesting piece, covering a range of areas of interest to readers here, including the Hockey Stick (without mentioning McIntyre and McKitrick!), the travails of Prof Wegman, and the peer review of the Soon and Baliunas paper.

Reliable sources

Scibloggers are all tweeting furiously about this article on the Skeptoid blog. It's a pretty interesting piece, which argues that sceptics should follow the data and warmists should be nicer. There's much to agree with, but the author Craig Good rather shoots himself in the foot by repeated recommending Skeptical Science as an unbiased source on the subject of global warming.

As I have pointed out in the past, Skeptical Science's reporting of some issues I am familiar with are deeply troubling. It is hard to credit the site's failure to even mention that the Hide the Decline dataset had been truncated.

Click to read more ...

Not his finest hour - Josh 106

From Booker's latest article

A rising tide of controversy

I've not followed the sea level rise story closely, but my interest was piqued by Morner's lecture at Cambridge a few weeks back. I don't suppose this news will surprise him very much.

The University of Colorado’s Sea Level Research Group decided in May to add 0.3 millimeters -- or about the thickness of a fingernail -- every year to its actual measurements of sea levels, sparking criticism from experts who called it an attempt to exaggerate the effects of global warming.

The story seems to be that the land is rising, increasing the carrying capacity of the oceans. This would effectively reduce the amount of sea level rise expected, and we couldn't have that - hence the "adjustment". The effect of the adjustment appears to be small when put against the projected rises, but is certainly material against the actual changes recorded (although these are, per Morner, wrong).