Boulton pulls the strings

Well, well, well. You really can't pull the wool over Steve McIntyre's eyes can you? It turns out that the issues paper for the CRU emails review was written, not by Sir Muir Russell, but by Professor Geoffrey Boulton, the secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the body that is supplying the secretariat to the review, the man who works along the hall from Hockey Team staffers, the man who promotes global warming, the man who stands in breach of the panel's own rules but refuses to stand down.

No wonder he's staying put - he's running the show.

Update on Feb 15, 2010 by Bishop Hill

In the comments to the CA piece, Mr Pete notes that the PDF was generated from a Word file and that the Word file's author was Boulton too.

Boulton is staying

Sir Muir Russell and his team have rejected the concerns of those of those sceptics who have questioned his suitability as a panel member.

Sir Muir Russell said:

"This Review must determine if there is evidence of poor scientific practice, as well as investigate allegations around the manipulation and suppression of data.

"As others have pointed out, it would be impossible to find somebody with the qualifications and experience we need who has not formed an opinion on climate change.

"I am completely confident that each member of the Review team has the integrity, the expertise, and the experience to complete our work impartially."

Unfortunately it is not Sir Muir who needs to be confident of the integrity of the review team, it is the public who will be the consumers of his findings. Sir Muir said at the start of his review that he considered it important to carry the confidence of sceptics. It seems clear now that this is not an issue that is occupying his mind any longer.

Was there a recording of Phil Jones?

There are a few little stories floating around at the moment which I'll post here.

Cool Dude in the comments reports a rumour that Roger Harrabin recorded an interview with Phil Jones but decided not to run with it since Jones came over so badly.

Sources have told me there was a recorded interview and it was decided at high level not to use it because Jones didn't come across very well.

I hope someone from the BBC will comment here because if true this will smack strongly of the BBC playing at a PR service to the environmental movement rather than news reporting on behalf of the licence fee payer. The BBC Trust is soon going to begin a review of the corporation's perceived lack of neutrality on the climate change issue, so a suppression of Jones' interview after the announcement of this review would look very bad and moreover positively reckless.

Perhaps Roger Harrabin could head off this kind of criticism by posting the raw footage on the BBC website.

Boulton contradicts Sir Muir

From the same Times article discussed in the last posting, a statement from Professor Geoffrey Boulton on the furore over his combining a position on the CRU emails review and role as a global warming activist.

Sir Muir issued a statement last week claiming that the inquiry members, who are investigating leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia, did not have a “predetermined view on climate change and climate science”.

Professor Boulton told The Times: “I may be rapped over the knuckles by Sir Muir for saying this, but I think that statement needs to be clarified. I think the committee needs someone like me who is close to the field of climate change and it would be quite amazing if that person didn’t have a view on one side or the other.”

This is quite extraordinary. How was it that the review went public with a statement that the panellists' views on climate change were not predetermined when one of the panellists openly admits that his views are just that? Did Sir Muir check the views of the panellists before he published this statement on the official website? What did Professor Boulton tell him then? For that matter, what did Philip Campbell say? We need answers to these questions because either Sir Muir has not checked to ensure that his panellists are independent or someone has not been telling the truth.

The Russell review is rapidly turning into a farce.

Spring arrived early

...because it must be April fool's day. Bob Watson has declared that there is a problem with global warming science because of all the errors that have been identified in the IPCC reports:

Professor Watson, who served as chairman of the IPCC from 1997-2002, said: “The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.”

But here's the hilarious bit - as well as saying that the IPCC should look at where the problems came from, Bob Watson has another plan, this time to convince us all of the credibility of what we're being told:

Professor Watson has held discussions with Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, about creating a new climate research group to supplement the work of the IPCC and to help restore the credibility of climate science.

Al Gore! Restore the credibility of climate science!!?? This is a joke, right?

(H/T Lubos Motls)

Subprime science

H/T Marc Morano

Jones on the Medieval Warm Period

It's interesting to compare Phil Jones' various prognostications on the reality or otherwise of the Medieval Warm Period.

Jones et al 1998:

..we can only concur with Hughes and Diaz (1994) that there is little evidence for the
‘Medieval Warm Period’, although it is variably quoted as occurring between 900 and 1200...From the few reconstructions used prior to 1500 there is little evidence for the ‘Medieval Warm Period’.

Jones and Mann 2003:

To the extent that a ‘Medieval’ interval of moderately warmer conditions can be defined from about AD 800–1400, any hemispheric warmth during that interval is dwarfed in magnitude by late 20th century
warmth.

Jones & Mann 2004:

Our assessment affirms the conclusion that late 20th century warmth is unprecedented at hemispheric and, likely, global scales.

BBC interview 2010:

There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

One striking feature of the recent statements are that the disappearance of the scare quotes from the medieval warm period. But the overall tone has changed too. This looks like a pretty clear change of emphasis to me, but I'm sure that there are those who will argue that his latest statement is, in Hockey Team jargon, "consistent with" his earlier positions.

Harrabin on the Jones interview

Hat tip to the reader who pointed out this Today Programme discussion with Roger Harrabin, in which he describes his email interview with Phil Jones. No startling new revelations, but there is apparently more to come soon.

And also, did Harrabin's voice crack at one point, or did I imagine that?

Phil Jones in the Sundays

There's sure to be some analysis of Phil Jones' comments to Roger Harrabin in the Sunday papers, and I'll post links up as I get them. Thanks to Steve2 in the comments for the first of these:

MAIL ON SUNDAY: Untold billions of pounds have been spent on turning the world green and also on financing the dubious trade in carbon credits...You might have thought that all this was based upon well-founded, highly competent research and that those involved had good reason for their blazing, hot-eyed certainty and their fierce intolerance of dissent. But, thanks to the row over leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit, we now learn that this body’s director, Phil Jones, works in a disorganised fashion amid chaos and mess.

Not Phil Jones, but very funny all the same.

Jonathan Leake is going to turn himself into even more of a hate figure for the green fraternity, reporting today on an interesting paper by Terry Mills that suggests that recent warming is just as likely to be a statistical artefact as a real change in the climate.

Gordon Brown is launching a new climate panel and denounces us all as "deniers" in the process. I guess he didn't get the memo either.

Ouch

Hans von Storch's comment, the first one in this thread about Phil Jones interview with Roger Harrabin, makes me wince rather.

Same as always - can we rely on Harrabin' report that the various quotes of Phil Jones are correct? I [once had dealings with Harrabin], and he had a somewhat liberal attitude in this respect, I remember. Any chance to verify independently the quotes?

Update: I've tweaked the language in the bracket slightly - see the comments for details.

The Inquiry Team

Boulton braced for trouble

The Scotsman has been reading the blogs it seems, picking up on the work of readers here in unearthing Professor Boulton's background in global warming alarmism. Some recognition of this blog would have been welcome, but such is life.

Professor Boulton makes an attempt to defend himself:

Last night, on being questioned by The Scotsman, Prof Boulton insisted he was a "sceptical scientist" prepared to change his views "if the evidence merited".

...and we must of course take him at his word on this. However, the panellists must be free of even the appearance of bias if they are to win the confidence of sceptics, and it is for that reason that Professor Boulton is unsuitable.

I think there now has to be a major question mark over the whole of the Russell Review. With two of the five panellists appointed having been shown to have been wildly unsuitable, many will conclude that Muir Russell has set out to produce a predetermined result, not to reach the truth.

Maybe they need to start again.

What a night..

Well that was exciting wasn't it? I rolled in from the local hostelry at 11pm to find a message waiting for me from BBC News and the most extraordinary pair of articles about Phil Jones on the BBC website.

The BBC were pushing this story, which seems to have been some colleagues telling tales about the state of Jones' office, the spin being that Jones' untidiness is the reason he can't lay his hand on his data. This doesn't really ring true to me. In the emails, Jones was telling his Hockey Team colleagues that he was going to refuse to release the data, not that he couldn't lay his hands on it. If he really couldn't lay his hands on it, you would have expected him to start trying to collate the data anew, wouldn't you? And anyway, what was it that he sent to Peter Webster at Georgia Tech? I'm profoundly uncomfortable about this story.

Far more interesting is this Q&A between Harrabin and Jones, in which Jones announces that the existence of the Medieval Warm Period is still a matter for debate, a step that for most people would be enough to win them the "denier" label. He says only that "there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity". Most of us thought that the science was "settled".

The whole thing is a must-read, but it's also worth standing back and marvelling at Professor Jones' ability to express uncertainty in a manner that will be readily comprehensible to the layman. This is something that we have been told many times is very difficult to do. Perhaps we are getting somewhere now.

+++Wow+++

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8511670.stm

Tennekes resigns

Henk Tennekes, a prominent sceptic, has resigned from the National Academy of Arts and Sciences of the Netherlands. His resignation statement is a must-read.