Homeopathic association misrepresented evidence to MPs

Scientists in every field are having trouble with credibity now - Perhaps they only have themselves to blame.
Scientists are angry that the British Homeopathic Association cited their research to a committee of MPs as proof homeopathy works when their studies showed nothing of the sort

The way homeopaths presented research to MPs was grossly misleading, say scientists. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

As several friends have noticed, I'm still alive. In fact there were no fatalities as a result of the mass homeopathic overdose last weekend, to the annoyance of some of the more vocal critics of the 10:23 campaign. Homeopathy organisations have been trying to respond, often finding amusing and creative ways to dig themselves deeper into a hole, as the New Zealand Council of Homeopaths did when it issued a press release admitting that their remedies contain no "material substances".

None has dug harder or faster than the British Homeopathic Association, which must now face some very serious questions about its misrepresentation of evidence to MPs, and to the public. Angry scientists are asking why studies they published that did not find in favour of homeopathy have been presented as if they had. Read more.

Credibility is what’s really melting - Mark Steyn

Take the disappearing Himalayan glaciers. Turns out that ‘research’ was idle speculation.

Whenever I write about “climate change,” a week or two later there’s a flurry of letters whose general line is: la-la-la can’t hear you. Dan Gajewski of Ottawa provided a typical example in our Dec. 28 issue. I’d written about the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit’s efforts to “hide the decline,” and mentioned that Phil Jones, their head honcho, had now conceded what I’d been saying for years—that there has been no “global warming” since 1997. Tim Flannery, Australia’s numero uno warm-monger, subsequently confirmed this on Oz TV, although he never had before.

In response, Mr. Gajewski wrote to our Letters page: “Steyn’s column on climate change was one-sided, juvenile and inarticulate.”

Yes, yes, but what Steyn column isn’t? That’s just business as usual. A more pertinent question is: was any of it, you know, wrong?

Well, our reader didn’t want to get hung on footling details: “The disproportionate evidence supports the anthropogenic cause of global warming,” he concluded.

Yes, but how did the “evidence” get to be quite so “disproportionate”? Read more.

Climategate: Is It Criminal?

The potential criminality of the Climategate scandal is exactly the issue that is being investigated by authorities in Britain. The British Parliament has convened hearings to investigate East Anglia University and the Climate Research Unit to uncover unethical and illegal activities. As more information is revealed, the whole Climategate affair begins to take on the makings of a good mystery novel. Like any good mystery or crime plot, the web of involvement is widespread.

But in order for a reader to be drawn in, the author must establish the motive and opportunity for the crime to be believable. To understand Climategate, we must start at the center of the web. At the center is the now-discredited Dr. Phil Jones of East Anglia University and the work he orchestrated at the Climate Research Unit (CRU). This is exactly where the British Parliament has started its investigation for possible criminal wrongdoing.
The British investigation, headed up by Phil Willis, M.P., focuses on four areas: data manipulation, data suppression, violations of the Freedom of Information Act, and data integrity. Clearly, the recently uncovered e-mails will play a big role in this investigation. A new thread in this web has appeared recently concerning a separate investigation conducted by the European Law Enforcement Organization Cooperation (aka Europol). Investigators have found evidence of a complex carbon-trading scam on the European Climate Exchange. Just three short weeks ago, three British subjects were arrested in an apparent scam worth billions of dollars. Much of the criminal activity alleged involves tax evasion. Read more.

Guardian Daily: Climate science under siege

Following a special investigation by the Guardian this week, we discuss the hacked climate change emails at the University of East Anglia, and the issue of trust in the global warming debate
As the consensus on climate change comes under sustained attack following more revelations from leaked emails and a climbdown on melting glaciers from the UN climate agency we ask: can the trust in the science be restored and how solid is the consensus? Read more.

New Episodes Of Scientists Behaving Badly

Scandals just keep pouring from the laboratories
This has not been the proudest of weeks for science. Twelve years after publishing an article purporting to prove a link between childhood vaccines and autism, the prominent British medical journal Lancet finally retracted the paper in its entirety. But only after Britain's General Medical Council found that the author of that article had been "irresponsible and dishonest" in his research, bringing medical science "into disrepute."

That wasn't the only controversy involving scholarly journals and the repute of researchers to flare up this week. Also in Britain, two prominent stem-cell researchers went to the BBC with their complaint that the peer review system has become corrupt. Flawed and unoriginal work gets published and promoted, while publication of truly original findings is often delayed or rejected, according to Austin Smith of Cambridge University and Robin Lovell-Badge of the National Institute for Medical Research.
Why would that happen? To sabotage one's academic competitors, Prof. Smith said. For example, the scientists judging a paper submitted to a journal may be working on similar work themselves, he told the BBC, and can publish their work first if they succeed in hobbling the competition. "It's hard to believe, except you know it's happened to you that papers have been held up for months and months by reviewers asking for experiments that are not fair or relevant."
Those who have followed the tawdry "Climategate" spectacle won't find such allegations all that hard to believe. The more journalists dig into the internal emails of top climate scientists—communications hacked and made public last year—the more examples of manipulation of scholarly journals they find. Just this week, the Guardian newspaper noted that Prof. Phil Jones, then head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, bragged about scuttling the work of scientists who might have called his own work into question. "Recently rejected two papers [submitted to scholarly journals] from people saying CRU has it wrong," Prof. Jones crowed to another prominent global-warmist, Prof. Michael Mann. "Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. " Prof. Jones and his defenders have suggested that anyone shocked by such machinations is naive about the ways of science. That's not exactly the most reassuring of assertions.
Read more.

India forms new climate change body

The Indian government has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own Nobel prize-winning scientist Dr R.K Pachauri.

Scientists believe it could take more than 300 years for the HImalayan glaciers to disappear Photo: ALAMY

The move is a significant snub to both the IPCC and Dr Pachauri as he battles to defend his reputation following the revelation that his most recent climate change report included false claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Scientists believe it could take more than 300 years for the glaciers to disappear.

The body and its chairman have faced growing criticism ever since as questions have been raised on the credibility of their work and the rigour with which climate change claims are assessed.

In India the false claims have heightened tensions between Dr Pachauri and the government, which had earlier questioned his glacial melting claims. In Autumn, its environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh said while glacial melting in the Himalayas was a real concern, there was evidence that some were actually advancing despite global warming.

Dr Pachauri had dismissed challenges like these as based on “voodoo science”, but last night Mr Ramesh effectively marginalized the IPC chairman even further.
He announced the Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world’s ‘third ice cap’, and an ‘Indian IPCC’ to use ‘climate science’ to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.
“There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses… they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.
“I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA),” he said. Read more.

Hot times in Zombieland - Goldstein

Watching our politicians and media lurching to and fro on the issue of global warming can best be compared to the comedy-horror movie Zombieland, released on DVD this week.

If it isn't Zombie Environment Minister Jim Prentice careening wildly between bashing and coddling Alberta's oil sands, it's the Zombie Opposition Leaders demanding job-killing greenhouse gas (GHG) emission cuts not even Barack Obama would be crazy enough to try in the U.S., assuming he could get a climate change law through the U.S. Congress, which he can't.
Kyoto Kool-Aid
Meanwhile, our Zombie Media, having drunk of the Kyoto Kool-Aid without knowing what was in it, fret over utter irrelevancies such as whether Canada's latest made-up GHG emission target should be 20% below 2006 levels by 2020 (last week's position) or 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 (this week's position), matching the made-up American target.
Further, our Zombie Media flatly refuse to even acknowledge the ongoing, global controversy over the credibility of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (go online to any major paper in the U.K. and read all about it), where the daily revelations are exposing not just an appalling lack of scientific standards in much of the IPCC's so-called "peer-reviewed" research, but how the IPCC abandoned its proper role of research-gathering, to become just another radical green group preaching warmist hysteria.
The best advice for our Canadian Zombies is, first, shut the !@#$#^ up about the oil sands for two minutes and go read a book on climate change. Then, possibly, they'll understand that while the oil sands are a Canadian problem we need to manage much more responsibly for domestic environmental reasons, they are irrelevant to global warming, presuming the Zombies still believe the IPCC "science" they keep defending.
The oil sands account for one-tenth of 1% of global GHG emissions. Canada accounts for 2%. Even if oil sands production -- 5% of Canadian emissions -- triples, it will be insignificant. Read more.

Real deal on Canada's environmental ranking: Goldstein

For the “bash Canada” crowd of journalists and environmentalists lusting to portray us as the worst country on Earth when it comes to polluting, the release of the third biennial (every two years) Environmental Performance Index (EPI) last week was a mixed blessing.

Canada placed 46th out of 163 countries — actually 46 out of 192, since many nations don’t provide enough environmental data to be ranked in the global survey by researchers from Yale and Columbia universities.
They gather information that countries submit to bodies like the UN and World Bank.
Unlike some others, Canada is extremely transparent in its data reporting, along with Europe and the U.S., notes EPI research director, Christine Kim.
The good news for the Canada bashers is that this year we placed well behind Sweden (4th), Norway (5th), UK (14th) and Germany (17th), which they love to throw in our faces as examples of environmental purity.
Then again, Iceland, where the economy completely collapsed over the past two years, finished first, an indication massive recession is a great way of dramatically reducing pollution emissions fast, although one doubts Icelanders approved.
As for the Canada bashers, alas, 46th out of 192 still isn’t “worst on Earth” (George Monbiot, and his Canadian acolytes, please note) seeing as how we finished one place ahead of Netherlands, not exactly Mordor, and way ahead of the U.S., in 61st.
China, that wonderful environmental leader, according to the greens — placed ... uh ... 121st and since it doesn’t tolerate questioning of its data, or anything else, who knows how much lower it would have been if its information could be trusted?
Ironically, the story the Canada bashers missed was that we dropped precipitously from eighth and twelfth place respectively in the EPI’s 2006 and 2008 rankings. Of course, to know that, they’d have to have read and reported on past EPI rankings, as I have, but why would they, so long as the news about Canada was good? Read more.

Climategate spreads like an ozone hole

Scientists at the heart of the Climategate controversy face new allegations which cast further doubt about global warming. Analysis shows researchers had tried to suppress key details of their findings for twenty years.

New allegations swirl in Climategate, which began last November with an email leak at the University of East Anglia, suggesting that one of the world’s foremost centres for climate research had been manipulating data to prove the existence of man-made global warming.
Now, it turns out data manipulation has been going on since at least 1990.
The head of the university’s climate research unit, Professor Phil Jones, has come under fresh suspicion due to a paper he released 20 years ago, claiming urban warming wasn’t a factor in higher temperature readings he’d recorded. But he doesn’t seem to be able to show where his information came from.
“That research was paid for with public money so everyone should have access to it, and if we’re spending that kind of money to stop climate change then the fundamental data should be open to anyone who wants to check it,” International Climate Science Coalition executive director Tom Harris says. Read more.

Climate consensus under strain

Even the Guardian is wondering if there is a consensus left to defend. But George Monbiot will never give up on this dead horse.
We ask a range of experts: what damage has been done by recent criticisms of climate science credibility?
Tremendous damage is done

These scandals have done tremendous damage. This is not because they threaten the canon of climate science – that would require similar exposés of tens of thousands of scientific papers – but because they create an atmosphere of opacity and evasion. Rajendra Pachauri's initial dismissal of questions over the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Himalayan glacier date suggests a failure to listen, which is inimical to scientific discourse. I am also amazed to learn that the IPCC doesn't pay its chairman, obliging him to work elsewhere, which has caused the other scandal in which he's embroiled. Anyone would think that running the organisation was a full-time job. This isn't a task for amateurs. Read more.

BBC Newsnight on IPCC - Roger Pielke

Roger Pielke is a professor of environmental studies at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He also has an appointment as a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University and is a Senior Fellow of The Breakthrough Institute, a progressive think tank.

Tonite I was on BBC Newsnight  with Professor Chris Field, the (new) head of IPCC Working Group II. I knew that the interview was not going to go well when Professor Field explained, not-so-accurately, that as soon as the IPCC heard about the glacier error it quickly came out with a statement clarifying the matter. No mention of "voodoo science" or "schoolboy science" or the extended period of denial of error by the IPCC leadership.

I had a chance to summarize the problems in the IPCC associated with its creation of the "mystery graph" and the outright falsification of my views in the IPCC review comments. Professor Fields completely ignored these issues and instead chose to obfuscate and deny any problem whatsoever. This is remarkable because all Professor Field would have had to say was something like the following, "These are serious allegations, especially about the misrepresentations of Roger's views in the review process. We should tighten up our procedures to make sure this sort of thing does not happen again." And then the IPCC should follow it up with some improvements to the process.

Instead, Professor Field tried to talk over me and deny, deny, deny. As I said in the interview, this issue is not ambiguous. The studies are not equivocal. There is no signal of rising temperatures in the disaster record. Period. Maybe there will be in the future, but there wasn't in 2006, when the IPCC deadline for publication occurred and there is not now. Further, both the "mystery graph" and the falsification of my views are unambiguous failures of the IPCC process to ensure that accurate information is included in its reports. How can this be denied? Read more.

Top Climate Adviser Calls for More Openness in Global Warming Debate

Britain's chief scientific adviser Professor John Beddington (center) says climate researchers must be more honest and open about the uncertainties surrounding climate change. (Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

In the wake of a string of embarrassing blunders by global warming researchers, the chief scientific adviser to the British government has said scientists must be more “honest and open” about the uncertainties surrounding climate change.

Professor John Beddington said that although it is “unchallengeable” that carbon dioxide is warming the planet, climate researchers should be less hostile to those who seek to question their findings.

“I don't think it's healthy to dismiss proper skepticism,” he told the Daily Mail Reporter. “Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can't be changed.”

Beddington also said that computer climate modelling is susceptible to “quite substantial uncertainties” that should be made clear.

The professor’s comments follow the “Glaciergate” revelations two weeks ago in which Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was forced to apologize for the erroneous claim that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. Read more.

Kurt Holle's ecolodge employs locals while slowing the devastation of the Amazon

A victory for the Market? But I suspect there is a government grant in there somewhere.
...Holle might be forgiven for puffing out his chest while the accolades roll in, but that's not his style. He prefers to speak about the details of his business, and he likes to remind people he's not there for charity. "The market is giving us an opportunity to give value to the forest," he says matter-of-factly. "We've always been frank that this is a moneymaking operation."

His preference for action over talk is a big part of his success. Perhaps more important, though, is his ability to hear the concerns of his Indian partners and make unorthodox business decisions based on them. Read more.

Airplane contrails and their effect on temperatures

Good grief - what next?
Contrails from airplanes impact temperatures at Earth's surface. But do they raise or lower them?

Maybe you did some airplane travel over the holidays, and maybe, once your plane reached cruising altitude, you noticed the vapor trails from other jetliners crisscrossing your path. Or possibly one day recently, you simply looked up and noticed many thin, white clouds crisscrossing the sky.

These are contrails, perhaps one of the most directly observable ways human activity can change the weather. They form when, as exhaust spews from jet engines, moisture condenses on particles of soot in the subfreezing air.

They usually appear above 26,000 feet where the air is less than -40 C (also -40 F.) But factors besides altitude also play a role in their formation. Depending on how much moisture is in air, for example, contrails last shorter or longer. Moisture availability also dictates whether they form at all, and how much they grow after formation.
As it turns out, they also impact temperatures at Earth's surface, although by how much and in which direction — up or down — is still being worked out. Read more.

Nuclear waste storage in limbo as Obama axes Yucca Mountain funds

Funding for the nuclear waste repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain was eliminated in the president's budget proposal. Planning begins anew for long-term storage even as Obama urges a nuclear-power expansion. Read more.

Change of Climate [Mark Steyn]

You have to assume that America's dying monodailies are now actively auditioning for state ownership. How else to explain the silence of the massed ranks of salaried "environmental correspondents" on the daily revelations emerging from the fast disintegrating "scientific consensus" on "climate change"? You get livelier coverage from the Chinese press.

But in competitive newspaper markets they still know a story when they see one. Surely the most worrying sign for the thuggish enforcers of "settled science" is that even the eco-lefties at The Guardian and The Independent, two of the most gung-ho warm-mongers on the planet, are beginning to entertain doubts. From The Independent:
Professor Jones and a colleague, Professor Wei-Chyung Wang of the State University of New York at Albany suggested in an influential 1990 paper in the journal Nature that the urban heat island effect was minimal – and cited as supporting evidence a long series of temperature measurements from Chinese weather stations, half in the countryside and half in cities, supplied by Professor Wei-Chyung...
However, it has been reported that when climate sceptics asked for the precise locations of the 84 stations, Professor Jones at first declined to release the details. And when eventually he did release them, it was found that for the ones supposed to be in the countryside, there was no location given. Read more.

The Death of Global Warming

The global warming movement as we have known it is dead. Its health had been in steady decline during the last year as the once robust hopes for a strong and legally binding treaty to be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Summit faded away. By the time that summit opened, campaigners were reduced to hoping for a ‘politically binding’ agreement to be agreed that would set the stage for the rapid adoption of the legally binding treaty. After the failure of the summit to agree to even that much, the movement went into a rapid decline.

The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics.
After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data, and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all. This latest story in the London Times is yet another shocker; the IPCC’s claims that the rainforests were going to disappear as a result of global warming are as bogus and fraudulent as its claims that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. It seems as if a scare story could grab a headline, the IPCC simply didn’t care about whether it was reality-based.

With this in mind, ‘climategate’ — the scandal over hacked emails by prominent climate scientists — looks sinister rather than just unsavory. The British government has concluded that University of East Anglia, home of the research institute that provides the global warming with much of its key data, had violated Britain’s Freedom of Information Act when scientists refused to hand over data so that critics could check their calculations and methods. Breaking the law to hide key pieces of data isn’t just ’science as usual,’ as the global warming movement’s embattled defenders gamely tried to argue. A cover-up like that suggests that you indeed have something to conceal. Read more.

Climate change targets 'disappointing'

The fact that anyone thinks they can do anything about climate change is disappointing.
The climate change deal signed in Copenhagen last year is looking weaker than ever after fewer than half of the countries that took part in negotiations managed to meet the latest deadline to fight global warming
The two week long conference ended in a political 'Accord' that asked just over 190 nations to come back by the end of January with targets to cut emissions.

However the United Nations body which runs the talks has received just 55 submissions, with no signs that any major country is willing to increase its ambition at this stage.
The major polluters China and America have not budged from their positions.

Environmental groups said the current targets will not prevent global warming but world leaders insisted it is another step forward in the complex negotiations.
Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UN climate change body, said greater ambition is required.
“The commitment to confront climate change at the highest level is beyond doubt," he said.
"These pledges have been formally communicated to the UNFCCC. Greater ambition is required to meet the scale of the challenge.
"But I see these pledges as clear signals of willingness to move negotiations towards a successful conclusion.”
Read more.

The IPCC Under Siege

2010 has not been kind to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This U.N. sanctioned body is supposed to issue periodic reports that summarize the state of the science of global climate change based upon a comprehensive review and synthesis of the relevant peer-reviewed scientific literature. In the past few weeks, however, it has been revealed that the IPCC’s 2007 Working Group II report on “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability” contains claims about the projected impacts of climate change that are completely unfounded, based upon non-scientific (let alone peer reviewed) sources, or misrepresent the underlying scientific literature.

The first revelation was that there was no scientific basis for the IPCC’s widely-hyped claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. This projection is off by a few centuries, at best. When an Indian climate researcher first challenged this claim, suggesting there is no evidence (yet) of warming-induced glacial retreat in the Himalayas, IPCC chief Rajenda Pachauri was dismissive. Now, however, he’s changed his tune, and the IPCC has acknowledged the error. This was more than a simple mistake, however, as it appears the IPCC was informed of the error before the report was finalized, but failed to make any changes, nor was Pachauri quick to acknowledge the error once it was brought to his attention. Read more.

Climategate emails 'stolen by foreign spies'

I guess we have a bigger problem than we thought - unless it was just the French.
The stolen emails at the centre of the 'climategate' scandal were probably hacked by spies from a foreign intelligence agency, the Government's former chief scientist has said.
Sir David King, who for seven years was Tony Blair's foremost scientific adviser, said the "extraordinarily sophisticated" hacking job was most likely an intelligence operation by foreign spies.

He said the hacking of hundreds of emails dating back thirteen years from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, and the subsequent leaking of the information, was unlikely to be the work of an ordinary hacker.
The emails, which included private messages between scientists that implied possible scientific misconduct, were stolen from a university server and leaked shortly before the Copenhagen climate conference in December, when they could have maximum impact.

Sir David told The Independent: "There are several bodies of people who could do this sort of work. These are national intelligence agencies and it seems to me that it was the work of such a group of people."
About 1,000 emails and 2,000 documents were stolen from the university's backup server – which is difficult to access remotely – but these represented a fraction of the total information stored for the 13-year period. Read more.