James Delingpole
Telegraph [UK]
22 Mar 2010
The Royal Society (Motto: Nullius in Verba Unless It’s About Global Warming In Which Case We’re Happy To Believe Whatever Unsubstantiated Drivel We’re Fed By Michael Mann, Phil Jones, et al) has announced who’ll be chairing its “independent” inquiry into the science behind the Climategate scandal.
And guess what? The man could scarcely be more parti pris if they’d given the job to Al Gore.
His name is Lord Oxburgh and, as Bishop Hill reports, he is:
• President of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association
• Chairman of wind energy firm Falck Renewables
• A member of the Green Fiscal Commission
So the chairman of this “independent panel” has a direct financial interest in the outcome.
Oh and here, Bishop Hill has also noted, is another member of the panel – Kerry Emanuel – at an MIT debate already showing the kind of open-mindedness we can expect in his judgement on the significance of the Climategate emails:
“What we have here,” says Kerry Emanuel, are “thousands of emails collectively showing scientists hard at work, trying to figure out the meaning of evidence that confronts them. Among a few messages, there are a few lines showing the human failings of a few scientists…” Emanuel believes that “scientifically, it means nothing,” because the controversy doesn’t challenge the overwhelming evidence supporting anthropogenic warming. He is far more concerned with the well-funded “public relations campaign” to drown out or distort the message of climate science, which he links to “interests where billions, even trillions are at stake…” This “machine … has been highly successful in branding climate scientists as a bunch of sandal-wearing, fruit-juice drinking leftist radicals engaged in a massive conspiracy to return us to agrarian society…”
* * * * * * *
MPs begin the Climategate whitewash
The Commons committee seemed unable even to understand the evidence, says Christopher Booker
Telegraph
3 Apr 2010
To anyone who watched or read the hearings of the Commons committee looking into “Climategate”, the scandal over leaked documents from the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, two things might have been obvious. The first was that all but one of the MPs (Labour’s Graham Stringer) were hopelessly out of their depth in their efforts to understand this not very complex story. The other was that their chief purpose was to find that the CRU and its director, Professor Philip Jones, had done nothing wrong and that the case for man-made global warming remained intact.
Both points were amply confirmed by the slipshod report rushed out by the MPs last week (which only Mr Stringer opposed). One cannot say the MPs deliberately missed the points raised by the Climategate scandal, because they so clearly didn’t grasp what these were in the first place. For instance, they justified Jones’s famous “hide the decline” email, by claiming that he had deleted data because it was “erroneous” – when the whole point was that he hid the data, not because it was wrong, but because it didn’t fit in with the case he and his colleagues wanted to put across.
Arguably the most interesting revelation from this non-inquiry was the admission by Professor Julia Slingo of the Met Office that it uses the same computer models for short-term weather forecasting as it does to predict climate 100 years ahead. Three years running these models have come so unstuck with their predictions of “barbecue summers” and “milder than average winters” that the Met Office has now abandoned its seasonal forecasts. Had the MPs asked her why, therefore, the models’ long-term forecasts should be regarded as any more reliable, they might have shown a spark of intelligence. As it is, when it comes to official inquiries into Climategate, we are now one pointless whitewash down with two more to come.
H/T Orange Punch: Tinkering with U.S. global warming data? Say it ain’t so! and HillBuzz: “STUNNING: NASA admits its climate data is ‘garbage’ ”
