The (un)sustainability of all climate all the time

[04/23/2013: Please note update, below -hro]

A few days ago, I was taking stock of the many framings of climate. I was also wondering about the various and sundry footprints with which enviro-activists are so concerned. Here, thanks to wordle, is an illustration of what I found:

I very quickly realized that I had forgotten “climate disruption”, so please imagine it included in the above; and I’ve no doubt that there are others I might have missed. But what I had never heard of until yesterday was “climate insecurity”.

There’s a chap by the name of John Ashton who recently delivered [h/t Tom Nelson] a rally the troops speech to the somewhat self-beleaguered of late, U.K. Meteorological Office (fondly known in climate concerned circles as the “Met Office”).

Climate insecurity (whatever this is supposed to mean) is obviously very much on Ashton’s mind, as he mentioned it no less than three times during the course of his 4,986-word peroration, which he had entitled, “Climate Change and Politics: Surviving the Collision”. Oh, and his total “climate” count was no less than 42, and included such memorable turns of phrase as “climate-exposed business sectors” (perhaps he had the UNEP’s B4E in mind?) and “climate diplomacy”.

The latter is something about which, presumably, Ashton knows a fair bit, because his previous day-job (2006-2012) was that of “Special Representative for Climate Change for three successive UK Foreign Secretaries”.

Along with the requisite alarmism, there’s an awful lot of ponderous, pompous and/or presumptuous propaganda in Ashton’s speech; for example:

[...] here is a challenge that is Promethean. We have stolen the secret of fire for our own use, unleashing punitive forces inherent in the system of which we are ourselves part. Dealing with this is imperative, because if we don’t the consequences could soon become unmanageable, perhaps even jeopardizing the system conditions within which civilization itself can flourish.

And as we look more deeply into the picture, it urges us to summon a response that is transformational, because the entire modern economy is organized around the energy system. Making that system carbon neutral will reconfigure the economy, and the power relations embedded within it. Furthermore we must accomplish this urgently, in little more than a generation, while building resilience to the climate insecurity we can no longer avoid.

Promethean, imperative, transformational, urgent. [emphasis added -hro]

Not unlike the UNEP, Ashton is obviously very big on “transformative/transformational” (eight mentions in his speech at the Met Office). But what is curiously and conspicuously absent is any mention of “sustainable” … as in “sustainable development”.

Ashton is one of three founding directors of a group called E3G, and served as the first Chief Executive of E3G in 2005-06. Ever heard of this group before? No? Neither had I! So here’s the scoop:

E3G is an independent not-for-profit organisation, established in 2004, that works in the public interest to accelerate the global transition to sustainable development.

We build coalitions to achieve carefully defined outcomes, chosen for their capacity to leverage change. E3G founders had been working together and developing their shared thinking for several years before the organisation was constituted in 2004.

[...]

E3G makes things happen. We work to deliver outcomes with strategic significance for the transition to sustainable development. [emphasis added -hro]

UPDATE: Alex Cull notes in a very enlightening comment below, there’s at least one, no doubt, “carefully defined outcome” that Ashton – presumably on E3G’s behalf – was not able to “make happen”. Alex concludes:

Whatever the cause, it looks very much as though Ashton and the Qataris had an irreconcilable difference of opinion and that on this occasion, British “climate diplomacy” did not “catalyse transformational change” but hit the buffers of geopolitical reality instead.

In 2004, Ashton made an appearance in the Climategate (CG2 2428.txt) emails. In response to an E-mail, about “getting the idea into [then Prime Minister] Blair’s mind”, Ashton had opined:

cc: “Mike Hulme” , “John SCHELLNHUBER”
date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 10:47:57 +010 ???
from: “John Ashton”
subject: Re: Moving this forward
to: “Peter Read” , “John Shepherd”

John, John and Mike heard much of my argument at the Tyndall Assembly. But I should clarify it a little in the light of Peter’s message.

The problem at present is not the absence of propositions that offer stabilisation and that are scientifically, technologically and economically, credible. Two such broad propositions are biomass energy and capture and storage: both deserve attention within a portfolio of possible responses.

[...]

That is, I am sure, why [Blair's] recent speech concentrated on putting across, more starkly than he has done before, the scale and urgency of the challenge. Abrupt climate change is a crucial piece of that jigsaw – and you can make more impact with it at present by simply highlighting the danger without going too far into any particular set of responses.
[...] [emphasis added -hro]

His E3G bio indicates that Ashton has a long history of having moved virtually effortlessly through the NGO/Government revolving door:

John is one of a new generation of diplomats equally at home in the worlds of foreign policy and green politics. Before moving outside government to establish E3G in 2005, John had a distinguished career in the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, including founding and leading its Environment Policy Department.

A major theme of John’s career has been China. He speaks Chinese. He was an adviser to Governor Chris Patten in Hong Kong from 1993-7. His first diplomatic assignment, from 1981-4, was as Science Attaché in the British Embassy in Beijing. He also has experience at high level on a wide range of European and global issues, including as a political officer in the British Embassy in Rome from 1988-93.

John was the first Chief Executive of E3G in 2005-06, before returning to the UK Foreign Office as the Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative for Climate Change. His role supported Ministers in building a stronger foundation for an effective response to climate change. He had the personal title of Ambassador with direct access to the Foreign Secretary. John played a key role in designing the FCO’s climate change network and strategy, with its focus on climate stability as a precondition for security, prosperity and equity, and on strategic political engagement with the emerging and other major economies. [emphasis added -hro]

One of the other “founding directors” – and the current Chief Executive – is Nick Mabey. If that name rings a bell, it probably should. Mabey hails from the WWF – and he even had a role in promoting Mike Hulme and Joseph Alcamo’s pre-Kyoto “Statement”.

Like Ashton (and many others in this “gently” grown E3G crop of propagandists), Mabey’s bio indicates that he, too, has passed through the NGO/Government “revolving door”:

Nick was previously a senior advisor in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit leading work on national and international policy areas, including: energy, climate change, countries at risk of instability, organised crime and fisheries. Nick was employed in the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Environment Policy Department, and was the FCO lead for the Johannesburg Summit in 2002 [...]

Before he joined government Nick was Head of Economics and Development at WWF-UK. He came to WWF from research at London Business School on the economics of climate change, which he published as the book “Argument in the Greenhouse”.
[...]
Among other appointments Nick is currently on the advisory board of Infrastructure UK, the independent commission reporting to the UK Conservative Party on the design of a Green Investment Bank, and the Advisory Council of the European Technology Platform for Zero Emission Fossil Fuel Power. [emphasis added -hro]

So, it should come as no surprise that movers and shakers at E3G (which evidently stands for Third Generation Environmentalism Ltd) receive funding from WWF as well as from the U.K.’s Department for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and Department for International Development. Big Oil (represented by Shell) is also on E3G’s funding roster.

Readers who have been following the various interwoven threads of this ongoing saga will have noted the (coincidental, I’m sure) inclusion of John [aka Hans Joachim] Schellnhuber in the recipient list of Ashton’s E-mail, above. It was thanks to Germany’s Schellnhuber that the “dangerous” 2°C first entered the propaganda scene. As he told Der Speigel‘s Marco Evers, Olaf Stampf and Gerald Traufetter in April 2010:

a group of German scientists, yielding to political pressure, invented an easily digestible message in the mid-1990s: the two-degree target. To avoid even greater damage to human beings and nature, the scientists warned, the temperature on Earth could not be more than two degrees Celsius higher than it was before the beginning of industrialization.

[...]

Rarely has a scientific idea had such a strong impact on world politics. Most countries have now recognized the two-degree target. If the two-degree limit were exceeded, German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen announced ahead of the failed Copenhagen summit, “life on our planet, as we know it today, would no longer be possible.“

But this is scientific nonsense. “Two degrees is not a magical limit — it’s clearly a political goal,” says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “The world will not come to an end right away in the event of stronger warming, nor are we definitely saved if warming is not as significant. The reality, of course, is much more complicated.”

Schellnhuber ought to know. He is the father of the two-degree target.

“Yes, I plead guilty,” he says, smiling. [emphasis added -hro]

More recently, Schellnhuber has declared [h/t dennisA]:

04/17/2013 – The preparations for the next climate agreement that is supposed to be reached in 2015 are already taking shape – and civil society [aka NGOs -hro] is being asked to accompany and support the EU’s development/decision process.

On invitation by Connie Hedegaard, the EU´s Commissioner for Climate Action, a number of experts and decision makers meet at a stakeholder´s conference in Brussels today.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, has been asked to hold a keynote on the state of play in climate science.

The conference in Brussels was organized to shape the EU’s input into negotiations on a new international agreement to protect the global climate system.

“This is the starting signal for the hardest stage on the path to the world climate agreement 2015,” Schellnhuber says. “When it comes to the facts of climate change, there has been a lot of confusion in the public debates recently, which interested circles seek to exploit and deepen.

“Now it is up to science to bring light into this darkness and to draw a realistic picture of the challenges ahead for the public in Europe. On this basis citizens can make informed decisions.” [emphasis added -hro

Seems to me that those in the Ashton/Mabey/Schellnhuber circles of influence (not unlike BC's Andrew Weaver) have no qualms about putting the enviro-advocacy cart ahead of any evidentiary horses.

Do they care - or even realize - that the graphic images and icons (polar bears and hockey-sticks) based on flimsy "science" they have constructed to support them are being unravelled almost as fast as they come off the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s just-in-time assembly-line?

It was these flimsy "science" constructions, reconstructions (and rapid deconstructions, thanks to people such as Climate Audit's Steve McIntyre, Bishop Hill's Andrew Montford and Polar Bear Science's Susan Crockford) that were running through my mind when I came across the following video [h/t Digging In The Clay's Verity Jones]. The music isn’t exactly what I would have chosen (so you may want to turn down your speakers), but the images are quite compelling, wouldn’t you agree? ;-)

Alternatively, from a (turn up your speakers) musical perspective, the following [h/t my Dad] offers an equally amusing depiction of “footprints” and these inter-related enviro-activists’ endeavours. Enjoy :-)

Climategate 3.0 … Of saints, sanity and premature pronouncements

Unless you happen to get all your news via the traditional mainstream media, you are probably aware that on March 13, the person(s) who liberated a cache of emails and related documents from the cloisters at the University of East Anglia (UEA)’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in November 2009, has relayed to a carefully chosen few the password which would unlock “all.7z” contained in the release of the second tranche (to borrow a word from the infamous Muir-Russell), known as Climategate 2.0 (or CG2 for short).

Using the now familiar pseudonym of FOIA, The Saint (as I have long preferred to think of this person – or these persons – unknown), had included in the accompanying heartfelt missive an injunction:

DO NOT PUBLISH THE PASSWORD

IMHO, as I shall explain later in this post, for various reasons this was a very wise injunction, which should be unanimously respected.

There are over 200,000 files in this third archive, many of which – not surprisingly – have already been released as part of CG1 or CG2. I find it disappointing (and a disservice to The Saint’s earlier work) that some are already posting material they may not have seen before thinking that it’s “new” – when it isn’t.

In the accompanying missive, The Saint had written:

I don’t expect these remaining emails to hold big surprises. Yet it’s possible that the most important pieces are among them. Nobody on the planet has held the archive in plaintext since CG2.

That’s right; no conspiracy, no paid hackers, no Big Oil. The Republicans didn’t plot this. USA politics is alien to me, neither am I from the UK. There is life outside the Anglo-American sphere.[emphasis added -hro]

My translation: “Look folks, I pointed the way to the most relevant and damning emails in CG1 and CG2, so don’t get your hopes up for too much more here”.

Tom Nelson has confirmed this:

I’ve taken a quick look at hundreds of these text files, and I agree with others that that vast majority are mundane. Over the last day, many of us have already had the experience of “finding” an email that shows massive weakness in the warmist case, only to discover that that particular email had already been previously released.

I think over time, even the skeptics have forgotten just how much damage the ClimateGate 1 and 2 files did to the warmist case. [...] (emphasis added -hro)

So, apart from the fact that in their haste to post some are not taking the few extra minutes to eliminate unsightly line-breaks, they’re not even granting The Saint the courtesy of acknowledging her/his earlier work by checking the existing searchable archives.

Furthermore, this scattergun approach can result in related material (which, in at least one instance of which I’m aware, is more damning) being completely overlooked. And because the “source” material they’re posting is not yet located in a publicly accessible repository, no one can verify it.

So I was somewhat annoyed when I read the following comment at WUWT:

SanityP says: March 15, 2013 at 1:04 pm

Still waiting for some actual damning info or at least something that will be a game changer … will this ever happen?

And that’s what precipitated this post (which began as a comment there, but got to be far too long with too many links!)

I don’t know how long “SanityP” has been following this saga; but perhaps s/he’s somewhat late to this party!

An awful lot has changed since Nov. 20/2009. Not the least of which is the ramping up of Mann-o-matic nonsense (feebly but desperately bolstered by contributions from the likes of Ludicrous Lewandowsky) – not to mention the Gleickenschpiel! From a so-called “science” perspective, the best they’ve been able to muster is the now discredited and withdrawn Gergis et paper and (more recently) an iconic resurrection reconstruction by Marcott et al – which is currently being meticulously dissected by Steve McIntyre.

And in the meantime, more and more resources have been made available, and easily accessible, for those laypersons who prefer to think for themselves – rather than accept the routinely unquestioned churnalism and advocacy from the MSM.

Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion (and his sequel Hiding the Decline), Donna Laframboise’s excellent exposé of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert and Harold Ambler‘s Don’t Sell Your Coat … to name but a few of these excellent resources.

I haven’t read it yet, but Rupert Darwall’s newly published The Age of Global Warming: A History [excerpt here commentary here] also promises to be enlightening. Not to mention Dr. David Whitehead’s Whitehouse’s calm, articulate and factual assessment, GLOBAL TEMPERATURE STANDSTILL IS REAL released earlier today

As I had noted when The Saint released CG2, Fred Pearce had made a rather telling comment in a piece he wrote circa Dec. 9, 2009:

I have been speaking to a PR operator for one of the world’s leading environmental organizations. Most unusually, he didn’t want to be quoted. But his message is clear. The facts of the e-mails barely matter any more. It has always been hard to persuade the public that invisible gases could somehow warm the planet, and that they had to make sacrifices to prevent that from happening. It seemed, on the verge of Copenhagen, as if that might be about to be achieved.

But he says all that ended on Nov. 20. “The e-mails represented a seminal moment in the climate debate of the last five years, and it was a moment that broke decisively against us. I think the CRU leak is nothing less than catastrophic.” [emphasis added -hro]

The part I’ve bolded above certainly sounded like a game-changer ringing in my ears!

IMHO, even before CG1, the alarmosphere was in trouble. As I have noted in the past, Joe Alcamo (one of their own!) had sounded the alarm when he addressed the October 26, 2009 plenary of the IPCC in Bali:

as policymakers and the public begin to grasp the multi-billion dollar price tag for mitigating and adapting to climate change, we should expect a sharper questioning of the science behind climate policy. [emphases added -hro]

This was a mere few weeks BC (Before Climategate). In the intervening years, it would seem that the movers and shakers in the alarmosphere have utterly failed to grasp the meaning of “multi-billion dollar price tag” – and in particular the implications thereof in a world where far too many nations’ economies are so weighted with debt that they totter on the brink of collapse.

Get real, eh?!

But speaking of getting real … this brings me back to some of the (over-)heated arguments I’ve seen regarding the wise decision of the recipients to respect The Saint’s injunction not to publish the password.

The arguments I’ve read seem to fall into one of two strains: You must release the password because if you don’t you are (in effect) acting as censors who will decide what we can see and what we can’t. Alternatively, you must release the code because if you don’t then you could be liable for any non-relevant but damaging material contained in whatever does end up getting released to a wider audience.

I don’t happen to agree with either of these arguments. And my reasons are as follows.

Let’s set aside the fact that we should not be following the example of the highly unethical promulgator of forgery, Peter Gleick who had distributed confidential documents he had obtained unlawfully that were none of his business and to which he had absolutely no right.

Those of us who did not personally download CG1 and/or CG2 did not even dream of suggesting that the people who took it upon themselves to create publicly available searchable databases from the material might be censoring or redacting that which we had a right to know. I don’t recall seeing any complaints about information being withheld, do you?! And these very helpful databases were compiled by persons unknown!

Notwithstanding Michael Mann’s claim to the contrary, there is nothing “criminal” about possession of that which has been released to the public domain; i.e. CG1 and CG2. To my mind the password protected files were more akin to an archive of documents written in an obscure language that required “translation”.

And there was only one person on the planet who could provide the “translation” so that the material in the archive would be comprehensible to all who might read it: The Saint.

So maybe what we should be doing – instead of expending hours complaining (and/or trying to guess The Saint’s identity) and arguing while the “translated” documents are being compiled into a useful database – is taking the time to revisit the material we already have at our virtual fingertips to see what we might have missed.

Btw, UEA/CRU seem to have magically found some emails that David Holland had requested five years ago.

Consequently, there’s one other reason I firmly believe that the password should not be published (even without The Saint’s injunction): those in the “cloister” have had the resources at their disposal to make some fairly educated guesses as to what else might be contained in the newly “translated” material. But I doubt that they are, well, 97% “certain”.

Remember that The Saint had said, “it’s possible that the most important pieces are among them”. So, (to paraphrase and/or borrow some of Phil Jones’ famous first words!) why should we make this long-awaited “translation” available to the cloistered ones when all that they’ll do is try to find … more words they can “redefine” before we publish them? ;-)

Knights of the Green Garter: culture, practice and (absence of) ethics of the press

In August 2011, my mouse and I began an exploration that became a series of posts pertaining to coincidences that – with the benefit of hindsight – can be found in chronologies, Climategate, Copenhagen and media coverage of the activities of key characters and constabularies.

If there is an overarching theme to be found in these explorations, I would suggest that it lies in the many unasked and/or unanswered questions to which the indisputable facts give rise. Incidentally, in my reading of Andrew Montford’s excellent Hiding the Decline: A history of the Climategate affair I noticed that a similar theme emerges.

Yesterday in the U.K. members of the press were all a-twitter, so to speak, in anticipation of the today’s release of the report of the Leveson Inquiry. The background of this Inquiry tells us that:

The Prime Minister announced a two-part inquiry investigating the role of the press and police in the phone-hacking scandal, on 13 July 2011.

Lord Justice Leveson was appointed as Chairman of the Inquiry. The first part will examine the culture, practices and ethics of the media. In particular, Lord Justice Leveson will examine the relationship of the press with the public, police and politicians. He is assisted by a panel of six independent assessors with expertise in key issues being considered by the Inquiry.
[...]
It will make recommendations on the future of press regulation and governance consistent with maintaining freedom of the press and ensuring the highest ethical and professional standards.

Lord Justice Leveson opened the hearings on 14 November 2011, saying: “The press provides an essential check on all aspects of public life. That is why any failure within the media affects all of us. At the heart of this Inquiry, therefore, may be one simple question: who guards the guardians?” [emphasis added -hro]

Speaking of ‘guarding the guardians’, one of the Leveson Inquiry related articles that caught my eye today, was that of the U.K. Guardian‘s “crime correspondent” Vikram Dodd:

Leveson warns Metropolitan police it faces criticism

Letter from Leveson follows claims that Scotland Yard failed to fully investigate criminal practices at News International titles

The Metropolitan police has been formally warned by Lord Justice Leveson that it faces criticism from his inquiry into the force’s handling of the phone-hacking scandal and relations with the media.

A letter to the Met says the force’s own actions allowed a perception to emerge that certain media organisations were favoured. It has also been warned that senior officers were encouraged to be close to the media over many years.

Several past and serving officers have been told that the inquiry is minded to criticise them over their actions and decision-making during the first phone-hacking investigation in 2006, and then a decision to refuse to reopen the criminal investigation for 18 months from the summer of 2009 despite mounting evidence that the number of victims was much wider than officially admitted.

Leveson’s long-awaited report is published on Thursday and will rule on the relationships between the press, politicians and police. While most media coverage preceding publication has focused on the reform of press regulation, the report is also one of the most significant inquiries into the conduct of the police in a generation.

[...]

The phone-hacking scandal convulsed the Met, Britain’s biggest police force, leading to accusations that Scotland Yard had failed to investigate the full extent of criminal practices at News International titles because it was too close or fearful of the media group controlled by Rupert Murdoch. Some went further and suggested the Met’s allegedly botched inquiries were the result of impropriety.

[...]

Andy Coulson, the former editor of the News of the World, Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of the Sun who resigned as News International chief executive, Clive Goodman, the former royal editor of the Sun, and Bettina Jordan-Barber, an official at the Ministry of Defence, will appear in court on Thursday on charges relating to Operation Elveden, the Met inquiry into alleged payments to police and public officials.

[...]

The demise of [News of the World's] top leadership followed more than a year of allegations, but was cemented when it was revealed that former NoW deputy editor Neil Wallis had been employed part-time by the force to work on strategic communications. [emphasis added -hro]

Neil Wallis, eh?! Now there’s a familiar name with some rather familiar “high-powered” connections: in particular, to the University of East Anglia (UEA) and its Climate Research Unit (CRU) during its hours months and weeks of need on the “strategic communications” front in the aftermath of Climategate.

There are two schools of thought as to the point at which Wallis and his (apparently now former) colleagues at the PR consultant-to-the-stars firm known as the Outside Organization began their association with UEA/CRU. One is that which was confirmed (very reluctantly, I would guess, considering that it took Freedom of Information requests to pry the details out of them) by UEA. According to the documents disclosed under FOI, Wallis’s engagement began in early February 2010.

The third anniversary of (what is now known as) Climategate 1 (CG1) was marked on November 19. So this early February 2010 date suggests that it took UEA more than two months to realize that they needed rescuing from a bad press mess of their own making. As someone who is perhaps more perceptive of disasters in the making than the powers that be at UEA, journalist Fred Pearce’s December 10, 2009 analysis is worth noting:

Climategate: Anatomy of A Public Relations Disaster

The way that climate scientists have handled the fallout from the leaking of hacked e-mails is a case study in how not to respond to a crisis. But it also points to the need for climate researchers to operate with greater transparency and to provide more open access to data.

The media blizzard that has descended on climate science since the hacking of hundreds of e-mails held on the webmail server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, is set to become a case study — in public relations disasters, in the folly of incontinent electronic communication, in the shortcomings of peer review, and, very probably, in “how not to save the world.”

The e-mails, dating from the mid-1990s to early November this year, first surfaced online on Nov. 20. Within hours they were being described by a columnist in one national British newspaper, the right-leaning Daily Telegraph, as “the final nail in the coffin of anthropogenic global warming,” adding for good measure that “this scandal could well be the greatest in modern science.”

Follow that. Well, the world’s media did.

Pearce had concluded this well-worth reading article, as I have previously noted, by writing:

I have been speaking to a PR operator for one of the world’s leading environmental organizations. Most unusually, he didn’t want to be quoted. But his message is clear. The facts of the e-mails barely matter any more. It has always been hard to persuade the public that invisible gases could somehow warm the planet, and that they had to make sacrifices to prevent that from happening. It seemed, on the verge of Copenhagen, as if that might be about to be achieved.

But he says all that ended on Nov. 20. “The e-mails represented a seminal moment in the climate debate of the last five years, and it was a moment that broke decisively against us. I think the CRU leak is nothing less than catastrophic. [emphasis added -hro]”

Your mileage – and that of others – may certainly vary. But, to my mind it is almost beyond belief that it took UEA/CRU two months to recognize their BIG “reputation management” problem! And it certainly doesn’t jibe with the Sept. 25, 2010 account of their UEA/CRU involvement by the leading lights of the Outside Organization.

UEA/CRU have a longstanding and solid reputation for, well, hiding from public view, inconvenient facts and data (as Montford so ably documents in his book). So, I agree, it would certainly be a toss-up as to whose account is more credible: theirs, or that of a self-promoting PR firm. But, to my mind, Pearce’s analysis above “gives force”, so to speak, to that of Wallis and his erstwhile colleagues.

Wallis has been quite a chatterbox since he launched his latest round of unabashed self-exculpation and self-promotion via twitter in July of this year:

Neil Wallis’s twitter profile as of Nov. 28, 2012. 8,886 tweets and rising!

Yet when presented with an opportunity to resolve the begin-date discrepancy regarding his assistance to UEA/CRU, Wallis very conspicuously – and silently – demurred:

Why didn’t Wallis answer the questions? Curious minds would like to know.

Hmmm …. I wonder if Wallis and Bob Ward, another PR hack (whom we saw in action a few days ago), attended the same “seminar” on how (not) to communicate with the public when they are asked inconvenient questions.

Which brings me back to the Leveson Inquiry. It is worth noting that the “official” name of this inquiry is:

LEVESON INQUIRY: CULTURE, PRACTICE AND ETHICS OF THE PRESS

It is an examination of the rather cosy relationships that seem to have evolved amongst politicians, the press, and the police.

Among those who gave evidence at this Inquiry, are Neil Wallis and the Huffington Post, for which virtual rag Wallis now writes. Perhaps he wrote their submission, just as he seems to have written stories about UEA/CRU’s “Poor Phil”.

Another submission [PDF] to the Inquiry was made jointly by Andrew Montford (Bishop Hill) and Tony Newbery (Harmless Sky). In the Background to their submission, they note:

[...] we both consider that forums in which alternative views on the subject can be expressed, exchanged, and discussed, make a contribution to a scientific controversy that has become influenced by politics at every stage. From the funding of research to the reporting of ethical and moral issues relating to mitigation of, or adaptation to, any future variation in climate, there always seems to be a political dimension as well as a scientific one. Inevitably this is reflected in the way journalists report on this very controversial subject.

Montford and Newbery further noted that:

This submission is divided into two parts: comments on the evidence presented to the inquiry on behalf of the Science Media Centre (SMC), and our own experience when attempting to address a major problem affecting science reporting by the media.
[...]
In our comments on the SMC’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry we first provide additional information about two alleged cases of unsatisfactory press reporting. This new information conflicts with the evidence from the SMC. We then consider whether the SMC’s evidence is compromised by a conflict between its claim to be independent, and its advocacy role on behalf of the scientific community. [...]
[...]
[...] we set out the difficulties we have experienced in persuading the BBC to consider evidence that the impartiality of its newsgathering may have been compromised by its journalists having become far too close to environmental activism.

The SMC was represented by Fiona Fox whose advocacy on behalf of UEA/CRU led her to provide a very misleading – and far from ethical – narrative of the impact of Climategate on “Poor Phil”. She very conveniently omitted any mention whatsoever of the – by then well-known involvement, whenever it might have started – of Neil Wallis and his former colleagues at the Outside Organization. Although the silence of the MSM on the Wallis UEA/CRU connection was positively deafening when his involvement was brought to light, in July and August, 2011.

But this submission from Montford and Newbery sets the record straight. As anyone familiar with their excellent blogs, Bishop Hill and Harmless Sky might expect, it was factual and filled in the wide gaps left by Fox’s oral testimony and submission.

They make a very compelling case which includes their experiences in attempting to provide input to the infamous Jones “review” of the BBC’s coverage of climate change. So it will be interesting to see if it has been taken on board in the Leveson Report – particularly in light of the more recent scandalous disclosures regarding the BBC’s conspicuous absence of ethics and impartiality in their reporting of climate change … not to mention their high-priced obfuscatory stonewalling of FOI requests.

But what will be even more interesting, if Leveson’s report does reflect their evidence – and even if it doesn’t – is whether or not the self-appointed Knights of the Green Garter – Leo Hickman, Andrew Revkin, Suzanne Goldenberg, and Damion Carrington to name but a few – will let their readers know that which has been so conspicuous by its absence in their coverage for far too long. Their active participation in the crusade to save the planet has led them into a culture and practice of “journalism” that is as devoid of ethics as Fiona Fox, Neil Wallis and Bob Ward.

Hiding the Decline and Bob Ward’s overactive imagination corner

Andrew Montford’s History of the Climategate affair

I am currently engrossed in reading Andrew Montford’s latest book: Hiding the Decline: A history of the Climategate affair (HTD) which is – as promised on the cover – a sequel to Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion. As I have previously noted, this earlier work by Montford prompted climatologist, Judith Curry to write:

I give Montford’s book The Hockey Stick Illusiona full 5 stars. Montford’s book will stand the test of time in terms of a history of science book about this episode, and it is being cited in scholarly papers (check google scholar).

Like its predecessor, I’m finding that HTD is definitely a page-turner; and while I do have a few quibbles (mostly of the techno-virtual kind and on which I shall elaborate in a future post – when I’ve completed my reading), I would urge all who haven’t done so to buy your copy now!

My Kindle version (which, for the most part, I’m reading via Kindle for iPad … just love the ability to instantly magnify the graphs!) tells me that I’m now 67% of the way through – having reached location 3981.

So I found it somewhat surprising to encounter in Adam Corner’s corner of the twitterverse [see below, for explanation regarding the divergent path of my mouse to such terrain], the following from CAGW promoter par excellence, Bob <fast fingers> Ward:

He hasn’t read HTD, but he knows it’s a “conspiracy yarn”. Amazing, eh?!

I certainly recalled from my reading of HTD to date that Ward was mentioned a few times; and my search for “Bob Ward” confirmed this. His illustrious name can be found at Kindle locations: 1476, 2896, and 2952. But – unless he has conveniently redefined “featuring” – Ward’s self-declared billing is as far from warranting the adverb “featuring” as his “conspiracy yarn” is from being an accurate depiction of a book he admits he has not read. Even the fourth – and last – mention of “Bob Ward” [Kindle location 4356] is not an account of which (IMHO) he has any reason to be proud.

UDATE 11/27/2012: Paul Matthews advises that when he saw the above Ward-tweet, he responded:

Paul Matthews @etzpcm
@ret_ward So you didn’t listen to the radio programme featuring you and @aDissentient where he said it definitely wasn’t a conspiracy?

Paul Matthews @etzpcm
@ret_ward @aDissentient “Andrew Montford: I think there’s absolutely no doubt that there was no conspiracy” @AJCorner

The latter is from a transcript of this recent BBC radio program in which Ward’s voice was also heard. Yet the cat seems to have gotten Ward’s tweeting-tongue (and/or his fast fingers), because all Matthews has heard in response is … you guessed it … “Sounds of silence”. The “expertise” these activists have developed when it comes to ignoring inconvenient questions is something to behold, is it not?! [end Update]

So what made my mouse meander into Corner’s corner, you might be wondering. Adam Corner (not unlike Bob Ward) unabashedly wears his deep-green advocacy heart on his sleeve; but he is neither “featured” nor mentioned in HTD. Corner’s unconscionable flogging of Lewandowsky’s pseudo-academic “findings” last July did little, if anything, to convey an impression of one who does his homework before posting.

More recently, Corner posted his take on a November 15 seminar on “Communicating Risk and Uncertainty”. One of the scheduled presenters was Myles Allen (who makes two cameo appearances in Montford’s HTD, one of which happens to be a platform he shared with Bob Ward on the heels of the infamous Oxburgh Report pursuant to Climategate). Allen’s presentation topic was “The IPCC’s communication of risk and uncertainty”. For the record, Ward’s role in this seminar was to chair an earlier session entitled, “Public Understanding of Risk and Uncertainty”.

Here’s how Corner had described Allen’s presentation:

In a sen­ti­ment that seemed to be widely shared by the cli­mate sci­ent­ists present, Myles Allen argued that the forth­coming 5th Assessment Report should be the IPCC’s last. Allen’s view was that a mono­lithic state­ment of cli­mate sci­ence know­ledge every five years was no longer the most helpful way to com­mu­nicate cli­mate change. Instead, smaller, more focused reports aimed at spe­cific target audi­ences would make not only a more useful state­ment of cur­rent know­ledge, but a less vul­ner­able target for cli­mate sceptic attacks. One mis­take in the entire doc­u­ment can cur­rently provide a reason for some to doubt the vera­city of the whole cannon of cli­mate know­ledge. If it were not designed to be one, single, defin­itive state­ment, this situ­ation could be avoided.[emphasis added -hro]

I had commented on this in a Discussion hosted at Montford’s blog, Bishop Hill [Nov 16, 2012 at 10:13 PM]. At that time, there were no comments on Corner’s post. In the interim, only three comments have been posted (one of which was from Corner). But a few days ago, Tom Nelson had alerted his readers to a Nov. 22 report of this same seminar by SciDev’s David Dickson, which I found to be far more informative than Corner’s, so I added it to the Discussion thread at Bishop Hill [Nov 23, 2012 at 3:10 PM].

Yesterday (which was already today in Corner-blog time: November 25, 2012 at 12:33 am) I had posted the following comment on Corner’s blog:

Speaking from the audi­ence, the IPCC’s com­mu­nic­a­tions dir­ector, Jonathan Lynn, defended the struc­ture of the organ­isa­tion, and argued against more par­ti­cip­ative forms of engage­ment like blog­ging.

How very predictable of Lynn – and how very typical of the IPCC’s control the message modus operandi. But here’s another perspective on this seminar, offered by SciDev’s David Dickson [h/t Tom Nelson], which includes:

Jonathan Lynn, head of communications for the IPCC, points out that it is up to the 195 member government of the intergovernmental panel to decide on the type of reports it should produce, and that it already publishes reports on specific topics, in addition to its synthesis reports.

One can well imagine that Lynn would have been none too thrilled with the following comments Dickson attributes to Myles Allen:

as a result of criticisms of earlier reports “IPCC statements are becoming so legalistic that their value as a communication tool is diminishing”.

“We should give up on the ‘Stalinist’ notion of a single information vehicle,” Allen told the meeting, organised by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, part of the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford.

Allen suggested that the IPCC process was partly motivated by a desire “to make a big media splash,” as a way of getting key messages through to policymakers.

But this could backfire when it came to conveying the uncertainties contained in climate change predictions.

It is interesting to compare Dickson’s take with that of Corner. Kinda makes one wonder if Corner’s summary of Allen’s observations – in which he depicts (and seems to attribute to Allen) skeptic views as “attacks” – is not heavily weighted by Corner’s own preconceptions and enviro-activist views.

As of 11/25/2012 10:14 PM PST, this comment is still “awaiting moderation”. Which is why my mouse and I had earlier today gone off in search of any cyber-activity on Corner’s part elsewhere on the ‘net. For the record, Corner’s last tweet appears to have been:

Perhaps Corner has “taken a powder”, or perhaps the Apple Crumble Cocktail proved to be too much for him. Or perhaps he had anticipated the advice I gave at the beginning of this post … and he’s decided to curl up with a good book by Andrew Montford, Hiding the Decline: A history of the Climategate affair ;-)

UPDATE: 11/27/2012 Corner has released my post from moderation. But he did not deign to respond to my observations. From his sparse responses to those who’ve asked about the involvement of “the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, part of the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford”, my guess would be that the imprimateur was granted by virtue of the fact that the convenor, James Painter, is a member of the Institute’s staff. Although any journalist (except perhaps Adam Corner) might wonder why the Institute’s site makes no mention of this event. Perhaps it was really arranged by the BBC’s (now formerly) favoured secret seminar organizer, IBT;-)

Of journalists, their sources and … evidence

In my post a few days ago, I had observed that the narratives offered by the New York Times‘ Andrew Revkin (and some of his counterparts at other MSM establishments) often struck me as being somewhat shallow in that he seems overly-inclined to rely solely on the word of a climate scientist, simply because, well, because a climate scientist said so! As I had demonstrated in my post, those who are deemed to be “skeptics” are not accorded such reverence sorry, deference.

This same “deference” is apparently bestowed on News Releases which accord with Revkin’s narrative(s) – without requiring any further exploration. As I had noted in my post, Revkin seemed to be unaware of a subsequent Q & A from the Norfolk Constabulary which clearly indicated that it was only through the application of “screening fallacies” that they were able to “conclude” – as Revkin had dutifully reported:

“There is no evidence to suggest that anyone working at or associated with the University of East Anglia was involved in the crime.”

Surely, once I had made him aware of their subsequent clarification:

“Generally speaking, it was a screening exercise which did not provide any positive lines of enquiry.

“Whilst – because we have not found the perpetrators – we cannot say categorically that no-one at the UEA is involved, there is no evidence to suggest that there was. The nature and sophistication of the attack does not suggest that it was anyone at the UEA.” [emphasis added -hro]

this would have warranted an update to those posts in which he had quoted from – and cited – the July 18, 2012 News Release.

Alas, my expectations must be too high. Revkin did grace my previous post with a reply in which he noted that a link to the Q & A would be “helpful”. Why Revkin didn’t ask for this when he tagged my comment on his blog as an “NYT Pick” is left as an exercise for the reader – as is his apparent inability to find it for himself, if my word does not warrant the same deference and acceptance as that of … oh, I dunno … David Karoly or Gavin Schmidt, for example! But I digress …

I did respond to Revkin’s request for the link and indicated why I had not previously supplied it. Seeing no response to my reply, I decided to post the information in a further comment on his blog, in which I also referred back to my:

Could you share with us the evidence presented to you circa Nov. 20/09 – and duly analyzed by those with appropriate expertise – which led you to conclude that the alleged “hack” for the purpose of an “upload” (an action which has never made any sense to me!) can reasonably be described as: “Real Climate … was clearly subjected to a computer hack …”

Revkin’s reply:

Andrew Revkin Dot Earth blogger

Indeed, my statements about the “hack” of Real Climate rely entirely on the statements of Gavin Schmidt, and not any independent line of evidence. So you’re correct that there’s no independent evidence-based foundation for that level of definitiveness.

In reply to Hilary Ostrov July 24, 2012 at 4:13 a.m [emphasis added -hro]

Well, I give full credit to Revkin for this unequivocal confirmation of what I have long suspected! Although I do wonder if he is fully aware of the many fault-lines in Schmidt’s ever-changing story on this alleged “hack”.

Nonetheless, if I were at Revkin’s keyboard – at the very least – I would want to update the various posts I’d made, PDQ, in order to better reflect the facts and nuances that had been made known to (and/or by) me. As of 07/24/2012 05:04 PM PDT, as far as I can tell, he has not done this.

And I suppose it’s probably going to be too much to expect that he will update his June 11, 2012 post – in which he took the word of David Karoly that a much publicized paper, of which Karoly was a co-author, had been “put on hold” (a rather novel – if not previously unknown – “status” in the realm of academic journal publications). As Steve McIntyre reported today, according to correspondence from Joelle Gergis, the lead author, this paper was, in fact, “voluntarily withdraw[n]“.

In his comment on my previous post, Revkin had offered the excuse that:

I’d love to probe more into this morass, but — as I think you know — Dot Earth is not a climate blog, but has a much wider scope. Just not possible to cover every angle.

I wonder whatever happened to the maxim that “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well”. It certainly doesn’t seem to apply to a good number of papers by noble climate scientists – or to the work of their friends and fellow activists in the mainstream media.

But what do I know, eh?! After all, I’m not a noble climate scientist – or a “respected” and well-known environmental “journalist”.

Revkin screens out cops’ Climategate screening exercises

There’s a myth out there that has gained the status of a cliché: that scientists love proving themselves wrong, that the first thing they do after constructing a hypothesis is to try to falsify it. Professors tell students that this is the essence of science.

Yet most scientists behave very differently in practice. They not only become strongly attached to their own theories; they perpetually look for evidence that supports rather than challenges their theories. Like defense attorneys building a case, they collect confirming evidence.

Matt Ridley on The perils of confirmation bias

And speaking of those who “collect confirming evidence” … I wonder if journalists such as the Guardian‘s Suzanne Goldenberg or the New York Times‘ Andrew Revkin realize (or care about!) the extent to which their green-tinted views – and confirmation bias – colour their narratives (I hesitate to call it “reporting”!) and, in the process, undermine their credibility.

When Gleickgate erupted last February, both were very quick to publish without verifying any of the material they were purveying. To Revkin’s credit, he did partially walk-back his rather gullible repetition of the unverified claims. Goldenberg, as is her wont, did not. To this day she has not explained how she came by such premature knowledge of the “findings” of the so-called independent investigation of Gleick’s appallingly unethical behaviours.

Last month, on the heels of the Gergis and Karoly paper being “put on hold”, Revkin felt obliged to “confirm the accuracy of a post by [Steve] McIntyre quoting him”. Karoly had been quite creatively ambiguous in this E-mail, and Revkin did his best to slant his article in such a way as to avoid mentioning the fact that it was at Climate Audit that the errors in this much publicized paper had been discovered.

And to add insult to injury, in this instance, Revkin chose not to “update” his post to indicate that he had subsequently received an E-mail from McIntyre, but rather to merely add the E-mail as a comment where it remains, effectively, “buried” without warranting even the distinction of an “NYT Pick” flag.

By contrast, when Revkin was alerted to a press release from the Norfolk Constabulary on their recent decision to close their “investigation” into Climategate, he was very quick to add a July 18 “update” – to a post he’d written on July 6, 2010. Here’s a screen-capture of his update (highlighting added by me) – in the context of his original post:

Let’s set aside the fact that Revkin – perhaps motivated by his confirmation bias?! – did not seem to have any interest in what any skeptics might have had to say in response to his questions of July 6, 2010. Let’s also set aside that further in this same article – as I have previously noted – Revkin unquestioningly accepted Gavin Schmidt’s very flimsy excuse for not having contacted the appropriate authorities regarding the alleged Nov. 17/09 “hack” at RealClimate.

To his credit, on March 1, 2011, Revkin had reiterated his rather minimal level of concern regarding Schmidt’s failure to notify the appropriate authorities:

Setting aside the East Anglia incident, one might note that, well, there was a clear “hack” in the intrusion at Realclimate.org in the United States, where someone planted the same folders and prepared a faux post, as described in detail by Gavin Schmidt, one of the founders of that climate blog (and which was reported by me and others at the very start of this saga).

But even there, the situation is not so simple — in part because no one involved in Realclimate.org filed a complaint with the police.

A post of mine from last summer — “Was the East Anglia Incident a Crime?” — picks up the story:

I asked Schmidt whether a criminal investigation was ever conducted into the Real Climate hack. Here’s his reply:

“It would have been up to us to report it, and I didn’t think it was worth it – If you recall, we were kind of busy. ;)”

I think it’s unfortunate that the Real Climate team did not press this case if the law in the United States is as clear-cut as Schmidt asserted. But, in his defense, he clearly did have vast challenges on his plate then…

I still think it’s unfortunate that a complaint wasn’t filed. Perhaps it might have led to an investigation that could have pulled back the curtain a bit on the chain of events leading back to that moment in 2009 when someone hit the “copy” key.[emphasis added -hro]

It is worth noting that Revkin’s July 6, 2010 post was entitled (as noted by the bolded reference above): “Was the East Anglia Incident a Crime?” Yet, it would appear that when he updated this post, he also changed the title which now reads: “Was the East Anglia Incident a Crime? Yes.”

On July 19, Revkin posted his take on the Norfolk Constabulary’s decision to close the file. Again he relies on the News Release of July 18:

British Police Say Climate E-mail Case Was Crime, While Giving Up the Chase
[...]
The news release ends with a paragraph that, in essence, says users of the Internet are on their own:

Norfolk Assistant Chief Constable Charlie Hall, Protective Services lead, said: “Online crime is a global issue. While law enforcement agencies continue to develop our response to emerging threats, it falls upon individuals and organizations to be alert to this and and take steps to mitigate risk as far as is practicable.”

While unable to close in on suspects, the Norfolk police at least said they could confirm that the files were illegally extracted from outside the university:

[A]s a result of our enquiries, we can say that the data breach was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack on the CRU’s data files, carried out remotely via the internet. The offenders used methods common in unlawful internet activity to obstruct enquiries.

There is no evidence to suggest that anyone working at or associated with the University of East Anglia was involved in the crime.

Revkin seems to be quite taken with the claim of “sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack” – which appears twice in the news release. He chose to feature it in both his “update” to his July 6, 2010 post, and in this one!

But again, I give Revkin credit for reiterating:

I also think it was a mistake for the administrators of the American blog Real Climate, which was clearly subjected to a computer hack at the same time back in 2009, not to file a formal complaint with the police.

Although I’m not sure how (or when) he might have arrived at the conclusion that “Real Climate … was clearly subjected to a computer hack …”

When he interviewed Schmidt circa Nov. 20 (three days after this alleged “hack”) what evidence did Revkin (and/or anyone at the NYT with the appropriate log-reading skills) examine in support of Schmidt’s ever-changing story?

Or did his confirmation bias permit him to simply take Schmidt’s word for this alleged “hack”? And is it this same confirmation bias that was operating when he failed to take into account the “screening fallacies” which permitted the Norfolk Constabulary to arrive at the far from credible conclusions in the News Release on which Revkin appears to depend?

In a comment on this July 19, 2012 post, I had written:

“There is no evidence to suggest that anyone working at or associated with the University of East Anglia was involved in the crime.”

OTOH, as the summary of their Q&A at a press conference, today, indicates, this apparent lack of “evidence” could well be the result of a “screening fallacy”:

[Q]Can you describe what investigations you undertook at the UEA and who you interviewed there?

[A]“The focus internally was on the IT infrastructure and working out from there. We also looked at people working at or with connections to the Climate Research Unit and, in simple terms, we were looking for anything obvious. All members of staff were interviewed. If someone had some obvious links or had an axe to grind, then that might have been a line of enquiry.

“Generally speaking, it was a screening exercise which did not provide any positive lines of enquiry.

“Whilst – because we have not found the perpetrators – we cannot say categorically that no-one at the UEA is involved, there is no evidence to suggest that there was. The nature and sophistication of the attack does not suggest that it was anyone at the UEA.” [emphasis (which did not come through in comment posted) added -hro]

I trust you’ll also update your
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/was-the-east-anglia-incident-a-crime/

to reflect this important additional detail from the Norfolk Constabulary.

While Revkin apparently did not deem it necessary to respond to this comment (or – as far as I’m able to determine – to add a further update to his post of July 6, 2010) someone at the NYT decided that my comment was deserving of an “NYT Pick” flag!

Revkin also appears to be oblivious to further “screening fallacies” which became evident from Leo Hickman’s July 20, 2012 interview with “Detective chief superintendent Julian Gregory, the senior investigating officer”:

Did you quickly rule out anyone from the university being involved?

It was the focus of the first few months to go through that option. But our primary line of inquiry was always the technology. We did work through everyone at UEA looking for the obvious, but once we’d achieved that that was mothballed.

[...]

Did you interview any students, as opposed to just staff at UEA?

No. As you can imagine, the university is quite significant in size. It goes back to this being a proportionate investigation and finding a line of enquiry most likely to take us somewhere. We didn’t engage on that kind of speculation. We dealt with some students within CRU, but we limited it to that. [emphasis added -hro]

So what are we to conclude from all this? That Revkin’s narratives are indicative of “confirmation bias” or that his green-tinted advocacy prevents him from conducting even minimal due diligence when presented with claims from a noble climate scientist™? At the very least, he appears to find it necessary to … uh … screen from his readers’ view that which puts his own (very shallow, IMHO) narratives in a somewhat different light.

Of climatologists and cartoons: Compare and contrast

Cartoon 1 [cartoonsbyjosh May 28, 2012]

Climatologist 1: Dr. Myles Allen, blog novice Academic affiliation: Professor of Geosystem Science in the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, and Head of the Climate Dynamics Group in the University’s Department of Physics Extra-curricular activities include: leads the www.climateprediction.net project, using distributed computing to run the world’s largest ensemble climate modelling experiments IPCC involvement1: Lead Author, Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes, Chapter 12 of the IPCC WG1 Third Assessment. Review Editor, Global Climate Projections Chapter 10 of the IPCC WG1 Fourth Assessment. Lead author, Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional;, Chapter 10 of the IPCC WG1 Fifth Assessment. First reaction to cartoon: “The point made in the talk2 was that the revision to the surface temperature record was the only change to a published dataset that was used in the evidence for detection and attribution for human influence on climate to have resulted from the UEA e-mail affair, and that this is not the impression the general public would have got from the coverage.” [May 29, 2012 at 10:43 AM]

Cartoon 2 [cartoonsbyjosh: October 31, 2011]

Climatologist 2: Dr. Judith Curry, blog veteran Academic affiliation: Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology Extra-curricular activities include: President (co-owner) of Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN) IPCC involvement3: None First reaction to cartoon: Cartoon captured and appended to Oct. 30 post with observation, “Josh weighs in”

¹ The intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), makes a point of noting that they do not do research; consequently it is somewhat odd that Allen has listed his history of involvement under the heading “Current Research”.

² This “talk” was a presentation Allen gave on November 3, 2011, the second of a two-day conference entitled “Communicate 2011: Nature People Economics” – sponsored by the Bristol City Council, DEFRA, and an organization called Living With Environmental Change; all of who which seem to have a very green outlook. The topic for this particular session was “The Elephant in the Room: Communicating Difficult Issues” and was Chaired by Professor Angela McFarlane, Director of Public Engagement and Learning, Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

McFarlane’s summary was as follows:

How do we confront The Elephant in the Room and communicate environmental issues that have become taboo? How do we engage people in rational debate about contentious topics. We heard from two experienced communicators who have tackled the issues of population growth and climate change.[emphasis added -hro]

Allen’s (choice of?) topic was “Climate Change – So Last Decade”, although I’m not sure what specific “taboo” he might have been addressing. At one point in his presentation, he did mention “a genuine prediction” and shortly thereafter he spoke of “The IPCC or us scientists, so to speak” [please see Background and Context: Cartoon 1, below]. Although it does occur to me that while he spoke of the UEA “affair” the word “Climategate” passed his lips only once. So perhaps that’s the “taboo”.

³ It is worth noting that in her review of Donna Laframboise’s The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, an exposé of the IPCC, Curry observed: “As a student of the IPCC since December 2009 (yes I was defending the IPCC until that point), I’ve looked at many of these issues myself. I’ve made some of the same points raised in this book. [...] My personal reaction as a scientist is to be very thankful that I am not involved in the IPCC. I already feel duped by the IPCC (I’ve written about this previously), I am glad that I was not personally used by the IPCC.”

Background and Context: Cartoon 1

On May 23, Andrew Montford, author of the must read if you haven’t already The Hockey Stick Illusion and gracious host of the very widely-read Bishop Hill blog, posted the following:

From: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/5/23/myles-allen-on-climategate.html

[Sidebar: Dr. Allen, if you're reading this, I hope you'll appreciate that in deference to your "acutely sensitive" hearing and/or vision, I have reconstructed this post so that it reflects a more "flattering" image. Readers interested in this aspect of the background, please see YouTube Stills.]

As of this writing, there were 75 responses to this post. None from Allen. The view from here, so to speak:

Well, I suppose there’s something to be said for his recognition that the scary stories are just not cutting the mustard – except amongst the political elites who are, as usual, way behind the times when it comes to new, improved mantras.

Talk about cherry-picking, though … in his “summation” of Climategate, Allen hangs his “argument” not even on a single cherry, but on a portion of the skin of a single cherry! Certainly makes one wonder about his mode of “doing science”.

It seems that in our post-modern world, we have “journalists” (e.g. Goldenberg, Revkin, Hickman & Black) acting like PR hacks, “scientists” who don’t seem to have a clue about the scientific method, and advocacy groups pretending that their “reports” are “scientific”.

The verdict of all strongly suggests that this is not a video that is likely to go viral – no one was impressed. I would certainly question the judgment of anyone who describes him as an “experienced communicator”. One who liberally peppers and pads his speech with “ums and ers” does not meet my criteria for a successful communicator – let alone an “experienced” one.

Apparently he was addressing a roomful of journalists and after telling his audience that the “reversal” in “public interest in climate … is essentially [their] fault”, he presented his “argument”:

The problem is that climate change has very much been presented as an issue of global catastrophe that will affect our grandchildren, whereas in fact, the issue is substantially more prosaic than that, but no less serious. That is the point I would like you to take away and consider. [emphasis added -hro]

I’m not sure what he meant by “substantially more prosaic … but no less serious”. Ideas from readers are welcome!

If you prefer not to watch the video, here’s the text of the section (probably from his notes) to which Montford was referring [paragraphs reformatted for ease of reading]:

But what we’ve seen over the past few years is events like the climate-gate email revelations, giving the population at large the impression that the whole issue hangs by a thread of evidence, that a few scientists might have fiddled the data, and therefore, if they are “caught out”, this undermines the entire case for human influence on climate.

In the accompanying slides, you can see the impact of the whole UEA email affair – think about the amount of newsprint, the amount of air time and so forth that was devoted to that affair over the past couple of years – this is the total impact of that affair on any published data set that is of any relevance to the human influence on climate, and the correction is about two hundredths of a degree in the late 1870s.

It is important to get these things right, and we are grateful to those who scoured over the data and identified a problem with input files because that resulted in that small correction in this record. But that’s the only change to any published number which resulted from this entire affair. Now, you wouldn’t have got that impression from the way it’s been covered in the media.

Certainly the public has not got that impression, but rather they have the idea that basically it’s all up in the air again, and that really we have no idea what’s going on, because people have been caught fiddling the numbers.

I’m also not sure what other “events like climate-gate” he might have been referring to. But I certainly did find myself wondering what planet he’s been living on – and what media coverage he might have seen or heard.

I did have to endure the painful experience of watching the video a second time, in order to confirm that my ears had not been deceiving me when I heard him say – as I had noted above – apparently ad lib, because it is not included in the text:

The IPCC or us scientists, so to speak

This is a very telling slip of the tongue methinks … but it will have to be the subject of another post on another day!

Anyway … Allen must have been reading at least some of the negative reviews of his presentation. My guess is that he was not thrilled that his critics did not share his narrow view of the impact of Climategate.

However, rather than engage directly with his critics he chose to ask Montford to post a reply for him. And on May 26, Montford graciously obliged. He introduced the post:

Myles Allen writes

Myles Allen has asked me to post this response to the thread in which we discussed his Communicate 2011 lecture.

Alas, his response showed no indication that he had understood what his critics had written. Nor did the few direct replies he subsequently deigned to make. He chose to completely ignore some very thoughtful questions – and advice! Here’s how I expressed the view from here [May 27, 2012 at 2:15 AM]:

Dr. Myles Allen expounds:

I do think it is sad for democracy that so much energy in the debate on climate change has been expended on pseudo-debates about the science, leaving no room for public debate about the policy response.[...]

[and]

My fear is that by keeping the public focussed on irrelevancies, you are excluding them from the discussion of what we should do about climate change [...]

Frankly, I think it is far sadder for democracy that one who calls himself a scientist should so arrogantly presume that appealing to his own authority (and/or the “expert judgment” of his fellow IPCC authors) is an argument that the public should unquestioningly accept.

Dr. Allen seems to have adopted the approach urged by the “sustainability communications” company, futerra:

Forget the climate change detractors
Those who deny climate change science are irritating, but unimportant. The argument is not about if we should deal with climate change, but how we should deal with climate change.

Actually, I wrote more than that … but what I did not say at the time was how insulting the inference of his “irrelevancies” label was to Montford, Steve McIntyre, and others. I suppose it’s possible that he gave no thought to the implications of his actual words because he was interested not in dialogue but in pushing his “argument”.

Meanwhile, Steve McIntyre made a valiant attempt to guide Allen out of the hole he was quickly digging for himself:

Myles Allen and a New Trick to Hide-the-Decline

Myles Allen has written here blaming Bishop Hill for “keeping the public focussed on irrelevancies” like the Hockey Stick:

My fear is that by keeping the public focussed on irrelevancies, you are excluding them from the discussion of what we should do about climate change

But it’s not Bishop Hill that Myles Allen should be criticizing; it’s [former IPCC Chair] John Houghton who more or less made the Hockey Stick the logo of the IPCC. Mann was told that IPCC higher-ups wanted a visual that didn’t “dilute the message” and they got one: they deleted the last part of the Briffa reconstruction – Hide the Decline. If, as Allen now says, it’s an “irrelevancy”, then Houghton and IPCC should not have used it so prominently. And they should not have encouraged or condoned sharp practice like Hide the Decline.

In the run-up to AR4, I suggested that, if the topic was “irrelevant”, as some climate scientists have said, then IPCC should exclude it from the then AR4. Far from trying to keep the topic alive in AR4, I suggested that it be deleted altogether. I guess that there was a “consensus” otherwise. If Allen wants to complain, then he should first criticize IPCC.

[...]

Allen’s decision to show temperature data rather than Hockey Stick reconstructions cleverly draws attention away from the problems of those reconstructions. The Climategate emails have a apt phrase for Allen’s technique. Showing an unrelated dispute about a temperature graphic rather than the decreasing Briffa reconstruction is itself just another …. trick to hide the decline.

Allen’s first response made me wonder if he’d actually kept his eyes shut so as to avoid seeing McIntyre’s actual post:

The only attribution statement in the IPCC Third Assessment Summary that made reference to the MBH reconstruction was “Reconstructions of climate data for the past 1,000 years (Figure 1b) also indicate that this warming was unusual and is unlikely to be entirely natural in origin.” This is a very cautious statement (“likely” means a 1-in-3 chance that the warming is entirely natural in origin), reflecting our caution at the time about these new pre-instrumental reconstructions.

The key evidence provided for the headline attribution statement “Most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations” was the comparison of model simulations forced with and without anthropogenic influence with the instrumental temperature record.

This comment from Allen happened to immediately follow one of mine in the thread! And it left me shaking my head in utter astonishment. There’s a further irony here: Had Allen actually read what McIntyre had written he would have found a genuine (but irrelevant and immaterial!) error in his post. You see, in his background paragraph, McIntyre had mistakenly described the Bristol conference as “a 2011 conference on Climategate”. For the record, the program overview on the website states:

Recognising the inseparability of Nature, People and Economics is the greatest challenge currently facing environmental communicators.

Without accounting for the value of nature in our economic system, we risk pursuing a path leading inexorably towards the degradation of vital ecosystems. Fail to win the economic argument for wildlife conservation and environmental protection, and our messages are in danger of going unheeded in these testing times. Therefore it is essential that we continue to forge connections with the people whose actions will determine the future outcomes of our planet, and ensure that preserving biodiversity and achieving sustainability remain at the heart of the global agenda. Over two days of talks, workshops, discussion and debate, Communicate 2011 addressed these challenges.

Sure doesn’t look like a “Climategate conference” to me – or even a “climate change” communication conference. Strikes me as being yet another Run-up to Rio+20 propaganda exercise! In light of which, I’m beginning to wonder if the “environmental communicators” weren’t left shaking their heads after Allen’s presentation, trying to fit his “take away” point of “substantially more prosaic … but no less serious” into their communication of the latest and greatest “greatest challenge”!

But I digress …

Allen’s antics did not improve either at Bishop Hill – or at Climate Audit, notwithstanding some excellent advice provided by Lucia. Be sure to read McIntyre’s post which he subsequently updated by elevating Lucia’s advice to the headpost – immediately beneath which you will see Allen’s non-responsive reply which arrived there by virtue of the fact that McIntyre obliged when Allen requested that it be equally elevated.

One of the nice things about being a member of the “congregation” at Bishop Hill is that every once in a while His Grace (as Montford is sometimes fondly called) gives us the opportunity to have some frivolous fun by letting our imaginations run wild. May 27 was one of those days for one of those posts. It was a “caption contest” involving a photo of Allen and a U.K. rapper named Will.I.Am (whom I’d never heard of before). The winner will receive a coffee mug “adorned with the Josh cartoon” of her/his choice. Who could resist, eh?!

If Myles Allen has a sense of humour, one can only conclude that May 27 must have been a very “bad-humour day” for him. So on May 28, shortly after midnight, he let forth a barrage [May 28, 12:08 am] of what I would call “revisionist scholarship” – and did an exit stage-left with a resounding whine, leaving a long trail of very valid – and telling – unanswered questions behind him. Here are some excerpts:

I was in the papers last Tuesday through no initiative of my own, but because I was asked by Intel to talk to their technology ambassador who happens to be Will.i.am. Andrew Montford then decided to dig up an unflattering image on YouTube and it was rapidly whipped up into a claim I was plotting to overthrow democracy, all without anyone taking the trouble to ask me what I meant. Since I do care about democracy a lot more than I care about the Medieval Warm Period, I tried to post to explain that my concern was that the way the climate debate was going, you were running the risk of continuing to argue about things that may ultimately turn out to be irrelevant rather than formulating sensible alternatives to some of the more anti-democratic measures that are being tossed around. For my pains, I have now been called an “idiot”, “prat”, “arrogant” and I don’t know what else. [...]

Now, it seems, Andrew is running a caption competition. What is the problem, Andrew? I wasn’t criticising your book, I was criticising journalists for giving the public the impression that the UEA e-mails called into question the integrity of the data we use for detection and attribution of human influence on climate.

I do appreciate there have been a couple of thoughtful comments on this thread, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to sign off. [...] [emphasis added -hro]

As I had observed in a comment responding to those who suggested that the caption contest was inappropriate:

MA made three appearances (prior to his exit stage-left on May 28 at 12:28 am):

May 26 9:06 am
May 26 9:15 am
May 27 8:14 am

This May 27 comment was merely a copy and paste in which he combined two comments he had made at CA:

http://climateaudit.org/2012/05/26/myles-allen-and-hide-the-decline/#comment-334919

and

http://climateaudit.org/2012/05/26/myles-allen-and-hide-the-decline/#comment-334915

Such non-responsive and/or diversionary contributions might be your idea of “constructive dialogue”, but it certainly isn’t mine. And while I cannot speak for Andrew, I would suggest that in light of the above, this caption contest thread – which did not begin until May 27 (sometime prior to 9:02 AM when the first comment appeared) – is far too kind.

And if one adds to this, MA’s parting whine (May 28, 12:28 am) in which he describes an embedded video as:

an unflattering image on YouTube

and conflates and completely mischaracterizes** criticisms from a thread to which he chose not to respond directly – while ignoring the very valid questions and criticisms in the thread in which he did deign to “respond”, then all I can conclude is that he had no interest whatsoever in “constructive dialogue”.

Later on May 28, Montford wondered how Allen might have come by his mis-perception that Climategate was about the temperature record – rather than the paleo (tree sample) proxy records – as being the predominant “public perception” about which Allen kept harping. Although it should be noted that his “point” – not unlike Gavin Schmidt’s ever-changing story, come to think of it – certainly did change depending on … well, I’m not quite sure what it might have depended on!

As it turns out, on May 29, Steve McIntyre reviewed some of the early press coverage and observed:

I’ve quickly re-examined some of the contemporary news reports as the story unfolded to see how attention got shifted from the Hockey Stick to temperature. These comments are quick and do not represent a thorough canvassing, which would be interesting.

Many of the very earliest comments refer to the Hockey Stick. The earliest comments from the University of East Anglia refer to the temperature record, rather than the hockey stick. Most early coverage by Nature – which was very involved in early coverage – also drew attention to the temperature record, rather than the hockey stick. It looks to me like both the UEA and Nature were important contributors to focussing on the temperature record, rather than proxy reconstructions. I don’t think that Myles can fairly blame “mainstream media” for getting this wrong, when Nature and the UEA were busy fostering this misunderstanding.

But in the meantime … on May 28, Josh had created and posted Cartoon 1.

Background and Context: Cartoon 2

The genesis of this cartoon is far less complicated! Most of it can be found in a post I wrote on Oct. 31 last year. I provided some background – and asked some questions – about Dr. Richard Muller, a physicist at Berkeley who launched the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project on the heels of … Climategate. The project was designed to:

resolve current criticism of the former temperature analyses, and to prepare an open record that will allow rapid response to further criticism or suggestions. Our results will include not only our best estimate for the global temperature change, but estimates of the uncertainties in the record.

Curry was asked to join the project – which she did, with no remuneration and no obligation. Via her blog, she kept us apprised of their progress and developments. But on Oct. 20, she learned that Muller had launched a media blitz to announce the submission of four papers, all bearing her name as one of the co-authors despite the fact that her role had been primarily advisory. In Curry’s view, two of the papers were definitely not ready for prime time. This resulted in an article in the Oct. 30 U.K. Mail Online:

Curry was quite frank about her concerns regarding some of Muller’s statements. The article is worth a read – and you will see some examples of the “fat tale” headlines generated in the U.K. press. (See also Curry’s clarification and account of her subsequent discussion with Muller).

It was the article in the Mail Online which provided Josh with the inspiration for Cartoon 2.

Observations

One thing that became quite clear to me is that Allen’s interest was only in matters that affected his area of expertise and/or contributions to IPCC reports: detection and attribution. In his world, nothing else seems to matter! Curry, OTOH, has a much broader perspective.

This may seem nit-picky (if not sexist!), but if I compare the constant disrespectful haranguing (from both sides of the climate divide) on Curry’s blog to the relatively mild (and few and far between) assessments of Allen’s virtual personna, and their respective responses – I’ve certainly never seen a “whine” from Curry – then all I can say is perhaps female climatologists have much thicker skins than their male peers!

Another interesting difference that I detected is that Curry has never been reticent to publicly criticize if she believes that a colleague is wrong. Allen ducks. Over the last few days, it became apparent that Allen has co-authored at least one paper with known environmental activists [see citation in Donna Laframboise's recent post].

He has also co-authored a paper with two prominent Climategate actors:

MN Juckes, MR Allen, KR Briffa, J Esper, GC Hegerl, A Moberg, TJ Osborn, SL Weber
Millennial temperature reconstruction intercomparison and evaluation
CLIM PAST 3 (2007) 591-609

Here’s an example of Allen paddling away:

I was just saying I can understand the argument for not showing the data that Keith Briffa had concluded was contaminated, just as I can understand the argument for showing it. When Steve McIntyre or Richard Muller talk about this, they make it all seem completely black-and-white, but it isn’t. It all comes down to the dendroclimatologists’ confidence that whatever it was that was contaminating the most recent decades would not have contaminated the earlier data. They clearly were sufficiently confident about this to feel comfortable with displaying the data in the way that they did. I’m not a dendroclimatologist, so I don’t feel qualified to pronounce either way. But I don’t use tree-ring data: perhaps that speaks for itself. [emphasis added -hro]

A further example can be found when Allen was challenged on his failure to speak out against the whitewashes known as the Muir Russell and Oxburgh enquiries pursuant to Climategate:

[...]It would be extraordinarily presumptions for me to suddenly decide I disagree with Oxburgh, Muir-Russel et al without investigating the matter as pain-stakingly as they did.[...]

[...]please let me be clear: I am not actively supporting anyone, I am just declining to comment on scientific process and conduct questions because I’m not best qualified to do so. [emphasis added -hro]

(As an aside, I’m not sure what makes him “qualified” to determine what is “relevant” to a debate and what isn’t, not to mention what makes him “qualified” to flog his pet “policy solution”.)

Curry, OTOH, even in the days before she launched her own blog, was quite forthcoming. As McIntyre observed:

The majority of the climate science “community” appear to be so desperate for affection that they’ve proclaimed wind utility chairman Oxburgh’s love to the rooftops merely because of a few sweet nothings whispered in their ears. (Words of love so soft and tender.) Their gratitude is so great that they are willing to overlook the embarrassing brevity of Oxburgh’s report, Oxburgh’s negligible due diligence and failure to address any of the questions that were actually at issue.

Judy Curry has not compromised her standards.

Uniquely among the “community”, she’s noted the embarrassing brevity of the Oxburgh “report”:

When I first read the report, I thought I was reading the executive summary and proceeded to look for the details; well, there weren’t any.

Uniquely within the “community”, she realized that Oxburgh avoided the questions that were at issue:

And I was concerned that the report explicitly did not address the key issues that had been raised by the skeptics. … I recall reading this statement from one of the blogs, which seems especially apt: the fire department receives report of a fire in the kitchen; upon investigating the living room, they declare that there is no fire in the house.

[...]

Perhaps in addition to having thicker skins, female climatologists are more inclined towards confronting “relevant” issues than their male peers.

Postscript for the record

Allen did eventually make some further – and more relevant – responses both at ClimateAudit and Bishop Hill. And eventually (after yet another whine [May 30, 2012 at 12:05 AM], Allen did move a few inches [May 30, 2012 at 9:58 AM]:

Sorry, I really do have to get back to the day job now. Given these comments, I’m happy to accept that it isn’t clear who was to blame for the conflation of climategate with the surface temperature record. I’ve accused journalists of being to blame, and they seemed to accept it, but perhaps they were just too gentlemanly to object. And watching the early coverage, I was probably acutely sensitive to references to the instrumental record, because that is what I specifically cared about.

Several posts have suggested I was blaming the blogs, but I hope that isn’t true, at least not to the best of my recollection. I was criticising the mainstream media for not keeping the affair in perspective.

Amazing. Simply amazing.

Of Climategate, constabularies, Hickman and l’affaire Tallbloke: a timeline to consider

Just in case you hadn’t heard, a U.K. blogger, Tallbloke, recently had his home invaded by six police officers who – after approximately three hours – left with two computers and a router, claiming that they wished to “clone” the hard drives as part of their (now two-year old) “investigation” into a “data security breach” at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA).

Why this could not have been done on site, with far less inconvenience to one whom they’ve declared is not a suspect, and why this “cloning” has not yet been completed and Tallbloke’s equipment returned to him, are questions that one sincerely hopes will be answered in the fullness of time.

In the meantime, several bloggers have written about this – and related events – since Tallbloke first broke the news on December 14. And, as I had noted a few days ago, the MSM seem to have suddenly noticed Climategate 2.0:

[...] this incident seems to have generated far more interest from the MSM (including the CBC!) than the actual release of the CG2 emails on Nov. 22, and I suspect will encourage even more people to begin their own exercises in due diligence regarding the messages of doom and gloom.

Donna Laframboise has summarized these events in her post today (which also includes a fully linked version of a great piece she had written for the National Post, on December 20, regarding the involvement of the US Department of Justice).

But one thing that I have not seen highlighted throughout the commentaries I’ve read, is the curious timing of the involvement of The Guardian‘s “features journalist and editor”, Leo <free speech for me and no comment from thee when it doesn’t suit me> Hickman – and his failure to verify prior to posting. Hickman’s partner in alarmism is Damian Carrington (another Guardian “journalist” of the green persuasion not known for fact-checking) who was responsible for The Guardian‘s “exclusive” preview of the notorious October 2010 “No Pressure” video.

Bearing in mind the above, as well as The Guardian‘s rather uncanny ability to get the jump on much of the reportage that contributed to the Murdochmania media-frenzy last summer, and the questionably close relationship between some elements of the U.K. press and U.K. law enforcement officials (not the least of which is perhaps best illustrated by the ease with which former News of The World honcho, Neil Wallis succeeded in crossing so many boundaries) … Consider the following …

November 22:

Climategate 2.0 emails released by FOIA (whom I prefer to call The Saint) with announcement and download link placed on various non-alarmist blogs (including Roger Tattersall’s Tallbloke’s Talkshop, JeffId’s The Air Vent, Anthony Watts’ WUWT, and Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit)

November 23:

Damian Carrington, who seems to have appointed himself as The Guardian‘s “expert” on what constitutes a “real scandal”, declared:

Failure to catch climate email hacker is the real scandal
While evidence of global warming grows ever clearer, we are still in the dark over who is putting climate scientists’ emails online

As an aside, it was when I attempted to post a comment in response to this post of Carrington’s that I found that, for some strange reason, any comment from me is now subject to “pre-moderation”. Since the last comment I had made in response to a Carrington post – or indeed anywhere on the Guardian site – was merely to politely ask him (for the second time, since he had ignored my first request) to correct an error his July 28/11 blogpost – in which he had declared another “real scandal” – I can only conclude that Carrington’s advocacy overrides any interest in journalistic inegrity or accuracy. It would have been nice if someone at the Guardian had sent me a note explaining why this second attempt had been deleted (and comments from me placed on “pre-moderation”). But I digress …

November 25:

Hickman “invited” his readers to:

Help us find clues in climate email hacker’s message A README.txt file left by ‘FOIA’ with the hacked emails that were dumped online this week contains tantalising clues

The invitation generated 225 responses during the “open window” period … which didn’t last very long, as comments were closed at 5:00 p.m. GMT. It is not known how long the E-mail address (to which readers could also direct responses) remained active and/or was monitored.

It is worth noting that when challenged on the “hack” labelling, Hickman engaged in the Team’s – by now tried and true – exercise in redefining the meaning of commonly understood English words. When asked:

“Can you also present your evidence that this was a hack and not a leak?”

Hickman responded:

Please let’s not get distracted by the whole “hack/leak” debate again. The Guardian has used the term “hack” for this story since the beginning as a generic term

I’m not sure what Hickman’s new, improved definition of “generic” might be, but his assertion is certainly at odds with two “Related Items” that are linked on the very same page as his post:

To the best of my knowledge, Hickman did not post any follow-up which would indicate that any of the comments or emails he received in response to this November 25 “crowd-sourcing” effort, yielded any information that was, well, post-worthy. Unless one wants to count yet another Hickman <free speech for me and no comment from thee when it doesn’t suit me> post

November 29:

Secret message hidden among fresh climate email files
Folder containing second tranche of emails taken from University of East Anglia server included a message from the perpetrator in an encrypted text file

Certainly, there was nothing significant in Hickman’s post that hadn’t been known in the non-alarmist blogosphere since, well, Nov. 22. Although one might wonder about the “secret message” he thought might be conveyed by the image of “A fallen tree [which] lies in the Mongolian desert” which accompanied this very old news. Yet for some reason, perhaps best known only to himself, sometime on or before …

December 5:

Hickman (or someone from The Guardian posing as an “investigative journalist”) decided to “interview” Tallbloke. In Tallbloke’s words:

I have been put in contact with a journalist from the warmer side of the UK press. He was interested in knowing about anything which might help discover the identity of the Climategate whistleblower, or as he referred to them ‘ the hacker’, and why ‘foia’ might have chosen ‘the Talkshop’ to place a link to the server where he had uploaded the FOIA2011.zip file rather than another ‘higher profile’ UK climate blog.

[followed by Tallbloke's response, which is well worth reading in full and included:]

Investigative journalists also have a duty to follow the trail of interdependent public and private bodies and NGO’s which make use of public money, especially when large sums of it are never seen again and no accounting is forthcoming.

In my opinion that is the bigger story waiting out there, rather than the discovery of the identity of the person who chose to pull the dirty laundry out of the closet.
[...]
[and to which post Tallbloke subsequently appended the following:]

The investigative journalist in question thanked me for my response, and for my wider views, which I’m grateful he took the time to read, although he chose not to respond to them.

It may just be coincidence that (as the Norfolk Constabulary subsequently told Tallbloke), at the request of Norfolk’s finest (or perhaps the Metropolitan Police and/or the National Domestic Extremism Team who had been providing “assistance” to Norfolk’s finest since they first began their “investigation” two years ago) a mere four days later …

December 9:

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) issued a “Request for Preservation of Records” via electronic mail to WordPress’ parent company. This letter, addressed to the attention of “law-enforcement[at]wordpress.com” is dated December 9, but we do not know when it was actually sent to or received by WordPress. The content included:

I request that you not disclose the existence of this request to the subscriber or any other person, other than as necessary to comply with this request. If compliance with this request might result in a permanent or temporary termination of service to the Accounts, or otherwise alert any user of the Accounts as to your actions to preserve the information described below, please contact me as soon as possible and before taking action. [emphasis added -hro]

Which suggests that there may have been some discussion or negotiation prior to …

December 13:

When WordPress forwarded this DoJ request to Tallbloke, Jeff (and presumably Steve McIntyre).

December 14:

The police arrive at Tallbloke Towers – and Roger posts the news.

December 15:

In an unecessarily misleading and erroneous account of the police raid, Hickman also wrote:

During an interview with the Guardian last week before the seizing of his computers, Tattersall said that he had been questioned by Norfolk police “some two months” after the initial breach in 2009, but had heard nothing since. A number of climate scientists and bloggers are known to have been questioned by the police. [emphasis added -hro]

December 16:

When I saw Roger’s post regarding Hickman’s factual inaccuracy, I followed his link to Hickman’s article – and then went off in search of this “interview” on the Guardian site, where I found nothing. So I asked Roger about this “interview” and he responded:

Leo asked me in email why my blog was chosen rather than a higher profile uk site. I told him maybe it was because I made one of the FOI requests to CRU back in 2009 and because of this, I was one of the people contacted for a telephone interview by Norfolk police in early 2010. I probably said “some two months” off the cuff from (dodgy post crash) memory. I speculated that because I had commented about that on Climate Audit, FOIA might have chosen me as a recipient for the link comment, or it was just a random blog roll click from another site, or FOIA likes my science.
:-)

You can read the exact words and the rest of what I said to him here:

http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/opinion-foia-and-where-its-at-with-the-global-warming-issue/
[see also December 5, above -hro]

Within a few hours of Roger’s post, at 9:11 a.m. Hickman posted a comment, in which he wrote:

Thanks for clarifying that about WordPress. I will try and get that reworded as soon as possible.

December 17:

At 8:07 a.m. Roger posted a comment in the same thread indicating that a “corrected” version had appeared – and that it was (IMHO) even worse than the original. He even provided a suggested re-write:

I’ll give the Guardian one more opportunity to get it right before I get my solicitor to send them a letter copied to the Press Complaints Commission. They just shouldn’t be this sloppy when reporting on legal matters which can seriously affect people’s livelihood.

This would be my suggested rewrite:

“Both Tattersall and a US-based climate sceptic blogger known as Jeff Id said they had received a copy of a “formal notice” sent to blogging platform WordPress.com by the US Department of Justice’s criminal division, dated 9 December. This requested that Automattic inc, owners of WordPress.com preserve “all stored communications, records, and other evidence in your possession” related to the two blogs for Nov 22/23rd, as well as those for Climate Audit, a climate sceptic blog run by a Canadian mining consultant called Steve McIntyre.”

This prompted a rather long and convoluted defensive comment from Hickman an hour later, in which he blamed the delay on “[his] editors”.

Finally, at 4:00 p.m., Roger received an E-mail from Hickman indicating that a further change had been made and an additional explanatory note appended. Roger – who, I must say, was far more gracious than I think I would have been in such circumstances – thanked Hickman and closed the thread to further comments.

So I didn’t get a chance to ask:

Wait a minute! According to The Guardian … Leo Hickman is a “features journalist and editor” How many “editors” does an “editor” need in order to make a correction to a paragraph that could have been written with greater clarity and accuracy the first time?

Well, at least it would have been, had the “features journalist and editor” either read the available material more carefully, or chosen to exercise due diligence by verifying before making such a potentially damaging statement.

Had he done so, he could also have spared a few bloggers (of the ultra green persuasion) the embarrassment of having to eat their words (and in at least one instance, eventually remove a post) by which they had uttered a baseless and defamatory assertion.

And considering the timeline above, I’d also be very interested in knowing with whom Hickman decided to share the non-published December 5 “interview” noted above. Wouldn’t you?

In the meantime, perhaps Hickman should take some lessons from Donna Laframboise, so he can learn how a real investigative journalist practices due diligence and verification – before going to print. Even on the simple matter of the raid at midnight meme, Donna checked with Roger, so that her article (unlike Hickman’s) was right – the first time.

UPDATE: 12/22/2011 10:30 AM PST

It seems that I’m not the only one who’s interested in knowing with whom (and when) Hickman might have shared the December 5 non-published “interview”. In a comment below, Roger has provided some additional details, which I’m adding here, for the record:

I have asked Leo straight out if he had any form of communication regarding me with the police between my email exchange with him (he never told me it was an ‘interview’) and the raid on my home.

He denies it:

“No. Bishop Hill asked me that via Twitter yesterday and I confirmed it to him too. Why, do you have evidence that suggests otherwise? Very curious to know where this suspicion has come from.”

To which I replied:
“Just an unhappy close coincidence of events I guess. I hadn’t made any such suggestion to Andrew by the way.” [emphasis added -hro]

This raises another question, in my mind: How ethical is it for a journalist to claim that a response to an E-mail question is an “interview”?

Phil Jones proves himself to be a man of his word (and other news!)

The Climategate 2.0 (CG2) emails, as I had noted (as have others) provide further confirmation and context of that which was discovered in the initial release two years ago.

Many are finding that, well, it’s just as bad as – if not worse than – we thought. By way of example, David Holland, in a guest post at Bishop Hill, provided some additional context for one of the more publicized facts that came out of Climategate 1.0 (CG1), Phil Jones’s May 29/2008 exhortation to his colleague, Michael Mann:

subject: Re: IPCC & FOI

Mike,
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene [Wahl] and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar [Ammann] to do likewise.
Cheers
Phil

To anyone who has followed the “findings” of the various “enquiries” pursuant to CG1, it would appear that they treated this particular E-mail as if it were a “hot potato” that they kept tossing under the table from one to another! Typically, this was done by asking the wrong questions of the wrong parties (in order to ensure that the right answer would eventually emerge).

Following on the heels of Holland’s post on Bishop Hill, Steve McIntyre expands on The Team’s … uh … contributions to “transparency” in the IPCC process. Included in McIntyre’s account, is a string of correspondence circa June 5/08 which involved Jones and his colleagues Tom Wigley and Ben Santer. Earlier in this particular string, one finds Jones writing [4885.txt]:

An annoying email from yesterday is attached! We will likely be replying in a similar vein to our earlier, saying emails between CLAs and LAs for Ch 6 were in confidence. We have emails from all in Ch 6 to say the group doesn’t want emails made available. We will refer Holland to WG1 in Boulder – knowing that there is likely only one person there keeping things ticking over till the TSU closes – which it may have.

IPCC will have to alter those work guidelines to stop this sort of thing next time. I’ll be raising it with whoever is the next Susan [Solomon]. Decision in early Sept – news is it will be one of Tom Karl, Ram, Brian Hoskins or Thomas Stocker. [emphases added -hro]

[Sidebar: For the record, Stocker got the nod as Co-Chair of Working Group 1 (WG1) for the IPCC's 5th Assessment Report (AR5), although how he was chosen (and/or by whom), to the best of my knowledge, remains a mystery.]

And, proving that he is a man of his word, Jones appears to have “raised the matter” with Stocker:

From 2440.txt, June 24/09 Jones to Stocker [h/t Paul Matthews]:

I was in Boulder last week and I spoke to Susan [Solomon - Co-Chair of WG1 for AR4]. We agreed that the only way IPCC can work is the collegiate way it did with AR4.

These people know they are losing (or have lost) on the science. They are now going for the process. All you need to do is to make sure all in AR5 are aware of the process and that they adhere to it. We all did with AR4, but these people read much more into the IPCC procedures. [emphases added -hro]

The “collegiate way” seems to prefigure Muir Russell’s get Jones and Briffa off the hook “team-work sidestep” which also seems to have found its way into the IPCC’s toothless Conflict of Interest “principle based” Guidelines. But I digress …

It would appear that not only are we peons expected to deal with the dictates of “post normal science” – and “redefinitions” of many commonly understood words in the English language (including, it would seem, “transparency”) – but we are also expected to engage in “post normal reading comprehension”, in order to avoid the pitfalls of “read[ing] much more into the IPCC procedures” which, as now we know, they are at liberty to “disappear” as they see fit!

No doubt Donna Laframboise will have to completely rewrite The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert. And the InterAcademy Council (IAC) should be called upon to rewrite its 2010 Report on the Processes and Procedures of the IPCC, because they obviously failed to take into account the manner in which Jones (and presumably others of The Team who are equally dedicated to “the cause”) have determined that the IPCC rules should be read!

And speaking of how things should be read … Stocker (who seems to have his fingers in many IPCC pies and has wasted little time before engaging in “non-policy-prescriptive” pronouncements such as, “the planet might be better off if [gas prices] soared to ‘three to four’ times its current level”) has taken it upon himself to determine how the Aarhus Convention should be read.

First, from Wikipedia’s helpful description:

The Aarhus Convention grants the public rights regarding access to information, public participation and access to justice, in governmental decision-making processes on matters concerning the local, national and transboundary environment. It focuses on interactions between the public and public authorities.
[...]

The Three Pillars

1. Access to information: any citizen should have the right to get a wide and easy access to environmental information. Public authorities must provide all the information required and collect and disseminate them and in a timely and transparent manner. They can refuse to do it just under particular situations (such as national defence) [10]; [11] UNECE, 2006)

2. Public participation in decision making: the public must be informed over all the relevant projects and it has to have the chance to participate during the decision-making and legislative process. Decision makers can take advantage from people’s knowledge and expertise; this contribution is a strong opportunity to improve the quality of the environmental decisions, outcomes and to guarantee procedural legitimacy [12][13]

3. Access to justice: the public has the right to judicial or administrative recourse procedures in case a Party violates or fails to adhere to environmental law and the convention’s principles. [14][15]

Now, for Stocker’s “expert” opinion regarding how this should be read [2440.txt Stocker to Jones circa May 5/09]:

However, the Arhus Resolution (sic), it seems to me, had another motivation: open access to environmental data associated with damage, spills, pollution; the latter word is mentioned twice -”climate” never. So to take this convention and turn it around appears to me like a perversion.

One important point to consider is whether Arhus really applies to the IPCC activities. In no way are we involved in decision making. We assess and provide scientific information. The decision makers are elsewhere. More than ever need we be aware of this separation! [emphases added -hro]

I suppose it’s possible that Stocker’s “Arhus Resolution” (sic) is different from the 1998 “Aarhus Convention”; but somehow I doubt it. With such a “creative” interpretation – notwithstanding the IPCC’s willingness to permit anyone to self-nominate as an “expert reviewer” – I shall be very surprised if any of the WG reports produced over the next few years will demonstrate anything other than that the Climate Change Game™ continues to be Monopoly: the IPCC version.

OTOH … in the past few years the IPCC seems to have fallen off its pedestal; as I noted the other day, even its ‘primary customer’, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) doesn’t appear to care too much what the IPCC has to say.

Notwithstanding the Norfolk Constabulary’s inexplicable – and very heavy-handed – raid on a U.K. blogger’s “home and castle” last week, there are other indications that the world may yet unfold as it should.

I note with some irony that this incident seems to have generated more far more interest from the MSM (including the CBC!) than the actual release of the CG2 emails on Nov. 22, and I suspect will encourage even more people to begin their own exercises in due diligence regarding the messages of doom and gloom.

Pierre Gosselin advises that in February 2012, a new book by two German scientists will be published that is likely to upset those of the green persuasion. According to Gosselin’s paraphrase, this book – which includes citations from WUWT and ClimateAudit – concludes (as would anyone with an open mind who has read Laframboise’s The Delinquent Teenager …):

“The IPCC is in error, the models are bogus, and the climate catastrophe is not coming. The climate debate has to be started anew.” [emphasis added -hro]

And closer to home, on the heels of Canada’s announced withdrawal from the Kyoto Accord, Dr. Ross McKitrick made a very timely (Dec. 15) presentation to the Canadian Senate Committee on Energy,the Environment and Natural Resources. In concluding his ten-minute testimony, McKitrick noted:

[...] One of the most telling emails in the so-called Climategate 2.0 archive that was just released last month involves one IPCC expert warning another that their efforts to finesse this issue by deceptive trend analysis is a “fools paradise.”

Today you have a chance to hear from a number of serious Canadian scientists about work that they and their colleagues have done that also calls into question aspects of the IPCC party line. The fact that you have learned little of what they are about to tell you does not indicate any deficiencies in the research they or their colleagues have done. Instead it points to the deficiencies in the process that was supposed to have brought this information to your attention long before now. [emphasis added -hro]

[You can watch a replay of the proceedings (fast forward to approx. 20 minutes for start of hearing)]

All in all – despite IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri’s oh-so-humourous pronouncement that skeptics should be given a one-way ticket to outer space – it’s been a good week for those of the climate realist persuasion.

Poetry on Bishop Hill, Christmas 2011

While the world waits to see what “agreement” might emerge when the puff of green smoke is sent up from Durban (“time is not on their side”, according to the President of the meeting) … John Shade has pulled together an “anthology” of poetry from Bishop Hill commenters:

Climate Lessons: Poetry on Bishop Hill, Christmas 2011.

The following, written on Dec. 1, is the contribution from yours truly :-)

‘Twas the night before doomsday when all through the House
Not a creature was demurring, not even a scouse
The pleadings were hung in many churnalisms with scare
In the hope that Devil Carbon would permeate the air

The peons were resting, safe in their beds
Far away from the troll-posts of BBD and ZEDs
And many in innocence, and others more jaundiced
Watched them fall into debates oh-so-weighted
With factoids neo-warmist

When out on the interweb there arose such a clatter
My mouse sprang from its mousepad to see what was the matter
Away to the Google it flew like a flash
Where it watched quite intently
As excuses were hatched

From Acton and Jones and across the Atlantic
Were excuses from Mann that seemed somewhat frantic
While coolly The Saint watched with far from dismay
Happy reading to all, s/he said, but do not delay.

UPDATE 12/12/2011 I have restored the verse-breaks that appeared in my original post on Bishop Hill, where I had also noted that this is much shorter than that which I was parodying, and my occasional exercise of poetic/rhythmic licence :-)