From Channel 4 news in the UK:
‘Climate-gate’ review member resigns
By Tom Clarke
Within hours of the launch of an independent panel to investigate claims that climate scientists covered up flawed data on temperature rises, one member has been forced to resign after sceptics questioned his impartiality.
// In an interview last year with Chinese State Radio, enquiry panel member Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature said: “The scientists have not hidden the data. If you look at the emails there is one or two bits of language that are jargon used between professionals that suggest something to outsiders that is wrong.”
He went on: “In fact the only problem there has been is on some official restrictions on their ability to disseminate data otherwise they have behaved as researchers should.”
Dr Campbell, was invited to sit on the enquiry panel because of his expertise in the peer review process as editor of one of the world’s leading science journals.
The journal has published some of the leading papers on climate change research, including those supporting the now famous “hockey stick” graph, the subject of intense criticism by climate sceptics.
Dr Campbell has now withdrawn his membership of the panel, telling Channel 4 News: “I made the remarks in good faith on the basis of media reports of the leaks.
“As I have made clear subsequently, I support the need to for a full review of the facts behind the leaked e-mails.
“There must be nothing that calls into question the ability of the independent Review to complete this task, and therefore I have decided to withdraw from the team.”
The interview, posted on the Bishop Hill blog, run by climate sceptic Andrew Montford, will come as an embarrassment to the enquiry’s chair Sir Muir Russell.
At a press conference this morning to launch the panel, the experienced civil servant and former vice-chancellor of Glasgow University, emphasised his hand-picked panel’s impartiality.
A press release about the panel read: “They were selected on the basis that they have no prejudicial interest in climate change and climate science and for the contribution they can make to the issues of the review.”
Speaking this evening, Muir Russell said “I have spoken to Philip Campbell, and I understand why he has withdrawn. I regret the loss of his expertise, but I respect his decision.”
Read the complete story at Channel 4 News
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RockyRoad (15:29:41) :
“So here we have a petroleum-producing company supporting AGW?
Doesn’t this scuttle the idea of Big Oil supporting the deniers with big checks and research grants? ”
You decide.
At the bottom of this page:
www. cru. uea. ac. uk/cru/about/history/
From the Climate Research Units own web site you will find a partial list of companies that fund the CRU.
It includes:
British Petroleum, ‘Oil, LNG’
Broom’s Barn Sugar Beet Research Centre, ‘Food to Ethanol’
The United States Department of Energy, ‘Nuclear’
Irish Electricity Supply Board. ‘LNG, Nuclear’
UK Nirex Ltd. ‘Nuclear’
Sultanate of Oman, ‘LNG’
Shell Oil, ‘Oil, LNG’
Tate and Lyle. ‘Food to Ethanol’
Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, ‘Nuclear’
KFA Germany, ‘Nuclear’
World Wildlife Fund, ‘Political Advocates’
Greenpeace International, ‘Political Advocates’
You might what to check out what these and the other funding companies actually do.
These companies have been funding the CRU for years and years. British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell were in there right at the start in 1974.
I think that any organization that provided funding to the CRU must NOT be looking at the process or the outcome, since they already bought the processs and paid for the outcome.
It’s an 18-wheeler.
Here is what Miley is up to these days:
http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-iec-fusion-research-group-opens.html
‘Science’ fails another environmentalist. …
“Peter Garrett, who abandoned his rock star career to become Australia’s environment minister, was under mounting pressure Friday to resign over his handling of a government program to insulate homes that has seen four workers die while on the job.”
http://www.aol.co.nz/news/story/Australian-minister-under-pressure-to-resign/985491/index.html
Fasool Rasmin (18:33:57) :
The media quotes Dr Campbell who then quotes the media who quote Dr Campbell who………!
******************
Substitute Dr. Campbell with Climate Alarmist and the media with WWF, Greenpeace or just “the media” and you’ll get where many the facts come from supporting AGW.
“Phillip Campbell photo: Rockefeller University”
Rockefeller, this guys surely serves no special interests, he is fighting big oil which the Rockefeller’s are not part of.
I don’t think the British Government will be able to salvage what they would term a satisfactory result from the various Climategate inquiries with banning the internet.
Someone on another thread, a couple of days ago, said that there were 100 publications refuting this theory, but didn’t give a reference. I’ve seen a few refutations based on semantics, i.e. Miskolczi misquoted someone’s law or whatever. I’d like to ask that poster to perhaps provide the reference to the best scientific refutation, if it exists.
I think Anthony had a short article on this some time back, but this would seem like a great topic for an article for someone like Willis. I could certainly school up on the principle of maximization of entropy and minimization of energy of our piss-ant ball of rock, water and a bit of gas.
Also of note, Susan “1000 year carbon dioxide” Solomon was the first author on a paper in Science two weeks ago showing that water vapor levels in the stratosphere were down the past 10 years and, according to the press release, the conclusion was that this explained the leveling off of temperatures this decade. I need to read the original paper though (which is more difficult since I cancelled my subscription), but I’m still wondering if Miskolczi was referenced in that paper.
Oliver K. Manuel
I worked in academic libraries from the 70s up until the very late 80s. I am not sure about the reason but scientific and technical journals were hit with dramatic publishing and distribution costs during this time. It is also possible that academic libraries generally suffered budget cuts. I don’t recall that. Perhaps someone above my pay scale at the time will.
Libraries were able to keep up with these expenses for a while but I remember seeing hard choices being made and overall number of subscriptions being cut dramatically. Librarians particularly dropped magazines they could fetch for patrons from near by libraries with ILLs and RBAs. This was the biggest issue at the time and it was done with a great deal of craft and much discussion between libraries.
I remember being told that many of the big name journals found they could replace these subscription losses by writing on a more “popular level” and on subjects also more generally popular. Or at least by expanding their distribution base they could realize favorable economies of scale in production and distribution. That is, academic subscriptions became less important relative to these new individual subscriptions.
For myself, I gave up reading Scientific American as far back as the late 70’s and now you say Nature jumped the shark as early as 1983!
I feel I must say that this is about the most poorly written article I have ever read. If one were not familiar with the situation at hand one would be (as I am) lost. I manage to figure out only that another Campbell is humiliated, which pains me for reasons you might imagine.
It was actually a commenter at Bish’s blog that brought up the comments that forced Campbell to resign for the inquiry.
West Houston (20:29:45) :
“I feel I must say that this is about the most poorly written article I have ever read. ”
I think it was hastily posted as a “breaking” news story there and not edited wholly.
philincalifornia (20:03:06) :
Seems a shame that a longer period of a quiet sun, say eleven years, may have provided enough data to narrow the view on its merits one way or the other. This theory relies heavily on radiation balance. We have data from many years of the sun in active mode, seems he could use more data from many years while the sun remains quiet.
Quote: John G. Bell (20:23:02) :
“I worked in academic libraries from the 70s up until the very late 80s. I am not sure about the reason but scientific and technical journals were hit with dramatic publishing and distribution costs during this time. It is also possible that academic libraries generally suffered budget cuts. I don’t recall that. Perhaps someone above my pay scale at the time will.
Libraries were able to keep up with these expenses for a while but I remember seeing hard choices being made and overall number of subscriptions being cut dramatically. Librarians particularly dropped magazines they could fetch for patrons from near by libraries with ILLs and RBAs. This was the biggest issue at the time and it was done with a great deal of craft and much discussion between libraries.
I remember being told that many of the big name journals found they could replace these subscription losses by writing on a more “popular level” and on subjects also more generally popular. Or at least by expanding their distribution base they could realize favorable economies of scale in production and distribution. That is, academic subscriptions became less important relative to these new individual subscriptions.
For myself, I gave up reading Scientific American as far back as the late 70’s and now you say Nature jumped the shark as early as 1983!”
—–
Thanks, John, for your reminder of events in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
Yes, up to and including part of 1983 Nature published research articles and even published news reports as the old dogma was collapsing that Earth’s heat source is a Hydrogen-filled star.
In 1977 Science published this debate about the origin of the Solar System and the solar neutrino puzzle [“Strange xenon, extinct superheavy elements and the solar neutrino puzzle”, Science 195 (1977) 208-210].
http://www.omatumr.com/archive/StrangeXenon.pdf
It is intriguing that Nature, Science, and other major journals then abruptly reversed themselves and started publishing consensus opinions that led to the current climategate scandal.
As I vaguely recall, the late 70’s or early 80’s was about the time that federal research agencies started funding mostly “block grants” to large groups of researchers.
That produced climategate and a report by 178 scientists who coauthored the “discovery” that solar neutrinos from our Hydrogen-filled sun oscillate away before reaching detectors on Earth!
Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
“I made my remarks…on the basis of media reports”.
That’s an example Post Normal Science in its practical operation.
Another is the infinite repetition of the “consensus” and “the consensus about a consensus” memes – everyone knows there is a consensus.
“The Monkeys know it is true because they always say it is true.”
I say this without a trace of facetiousness, but it would seem that any group empaneled “to investigate claims that climate scientists covered up flawed data on temperature rises” should incorporate – as a numerical majority – individuals who have spent the past several decades promulgating coherent critiques of the AGW hypothesis, emphatically to include people like Anthony Watts, Timothy Ball, S. Fred Singer, and others of similar inclination and reputation.
To build upon a suggestion by an earlier poster, we might take the Wikipedia “hate list” of William Connolley – all those persons whom this mendacious [snip] has maligned on the issue of “climate change” in the Web pages of “Wiki-bloody-pedia” – and base initial recruitment on that criterion alone.
I trust Mr. Connolley’s bad opinion as a strong positive indicator of a skeptic’s intelligence, eloquence, and fund of knowledge on this issue.
—
JP (13:48:32) and others: Greenhouse effect?
How different is this from the point Joanne Nova makes in the Skeptic’s Handbook? Point #4, page 8.
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/sh1/the_skeptics_handbook_2-3_lq.pdf
Strikes me the forces of denial and darkness are trying to salt the panel to get their politically desired outcome.
Maybe Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature, could not continue the editoral and propaganda publishing push and serve on the investigating panel at the same time.
BAD FORM ah what? he would be of better value to the cause to stay independant.
Regarding Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi
His paper is somewhat opaque, but here is an attempt to explain his ideas in layman terms :
http://www.landshape.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=introduction
wayne (18:33:58) :
I have read the paper, twice, and the review by a physicist, Miklos Zagoni …
and the actual paper
http://met.hu/doc/idojaras/vol111001_01.pdf
It has some very deep implications if correct and evidently it has withstood scrutiny for some years now though I picked up some contention on Wiki.
———————————————————
Thanks for the links! I baed on paper and video I feel that this is quite solid theory and to none of the three studies which need to be disproved to disqualify this have not been disproved.
I’ve just browsed through the paper so I can’t answer to question about dry continents like Asia, but map in the study shows that measurements have been done also in Asia and Siberia. I guess that there are regional differences as the cloud cover varies between 0-100% regionally, but the constant 1.8676 would be the globe.
Global temperature would still vary based on variances of incoming energy (Sun / secondary effects) but the global greenhouse effect would be a constant and out of equation for warming or cooling, no problem if you double or triple the amount of CO2, it will be automatically compensated by less humidity (H2O).
This would also give a solid explanation why we have had 7x or 20x CO2 in the atmosphere in the past wo runaway AGW.
If this paper has withstood scrutiny for some years now, should we put some effort to get it checked by as many scientists we can and if the theory still seems to be robust, use this Information in connection with UK Hearing?
Then it would be something like “IPCC Scientists have been using questionable methods trying to defend their global warming theory, which is proven to be obsolete by Dr. Miskolczi ”
Hearing or not, who would then be interested about hearing how white is their whitewash?
It would really be science again if the whole AGW theorem would be crushed by these three papers. This would be similar to what happened to Ether when some Austrian patent office clerk came along.
I guess the only thing which is important about this story is whether the Nature editor tried to get away with it and stay on the panel to organise a whitewash.
And who asked him to be on the panel in the first place.
And why.
You’ll note I’m note saying he did, I’m saying it’s a possibility which needs to be determined and acted upon. Because if he did seek to organise a whitewash, then he may need to resign from his day job too……
Independent panel?
Aha ha ha ha ha ha!
I would not dismiss the ability of the British establishment to get to the truth. Sometimes it happens. There have been some interesting revelations in the Chilcot enquiry on the Iraq war. Just this week the appeal court ruled in the Binyam Mohamed case to release some confidential documents showing that the CIA was involved in torture of British suspects at Guantanamo, despite the fact that the British and US governments wanted that kept quiet.
The Sir Muir Russell enquiry is supposed to look into what was leaked or hacked. The Commons Select Committee, to be held in March, has more of a brief around the science. Select Committees are usually the place where the fur and feathers fly.
There’s a new mood of transparency in the UK based on:
The internet informing us all of the non-establishment views (thanks Anthony) including these enquiries being streamed and / or having their own websites
The Human Rights Act
The police, government, etc. having been caught out several times in outright lies, and the public being in no mood to hear any more of them.
What we have to do is to keep the issues we care about in front of the MSM , to ensure that the enquiries get the appropriate level of focus when they occur.
Editor-In-Chief Nature:Key words that seems to be forgotten here and (newspapers) everywhere else. This is extremely signbificant in the whole AGW saga. They seem to have been pushing the same agenda