Tag: UEA

How I Totally Crushed the Ocean Acidification Alarmist Loons

Delingpole
Meet Dr Phil Williamson: climate ‘scientist’; Breitbart-hater; sorely in need of a family size tube of Anusol to soothe the pain after his second failed attempt to close down free speech by trying to use press regulation laws to silence your humble correspondent.
Williamson – who is attached to the University of East Anglia, home of the Climategate emails – got very upset about some articles I’d written for Breitbart and the Spectatorpouring scorn on his junk-scientific field, Ocean Acidification.

In my view Ocean Acidification is little more than a money-making scam for grant-troughing scientists who couldn’t find anything more productive to do with their semi-worthless environmental science degrees. The evidence that Ocean Acidification represents any kind of threat is threadbare – and getting flimsier by the day.

But if, like Williamson, you are being paid large sums of money to conduct a research programme into Ocean Acidification, you’ll obviously want to defend your mink-lined, gold-plated carriage on the climate change gravy train. So first he wrote a long, earnest defence of his income stream in Marine Biologist.

Then, when no one cared, he made a formal complaint about one of my articles to the UK press regulatory body IPSO. And to judge by the punchy tone of this piece he published in Nature before Christmas, he fully expected to win.

Tragically, though, he just lost.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Green Scientists Caught Tampering with Historical Record. Again

Ever since Climategate, the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has enjoyed just international renown as a world centre of data-fudgin’, scientific-method-abusin’, FOI-dodgin’, decline-hidin’, grant-troughin’, junk-science-endorsin’ global warming propaganda.

But did you know that the chap who founded the institution, Hubert Lamb, was a committed sceptic who would without a shadow of doubt have been perfectly appalled by the way the CRU has since prostituted itself in the bankrupt cause of climate change alarmism?

No, of course you didn’t – and with very good reason.

Here, for example, is what one of the CRU’s subsequent directors, Trevor Davies, had to say when he wrote Lamb’s obituary in 1997:

“[Lamb experienced] the satisfaction of convincing the remaining doubters of the reality of climate variation on time-scales of decades and centuries.”

Here is what the Climatic Research Unit’s website says in its biography of its founder:

He did more than any other scientist of his generation to make the academic community aware of climate change. However, in the years after his retirement the emphasis of research shifted towards evaluating the role played by human activities. He was well acquainted with the pioneering works of Svante Arrhenius in Sweden, and G.S. Callendar in England, and wrote in 1997 that, ‘it is now widely thought that the undoubted warming of the world climate in the twentieth century is attributable to the increased concentration in the atmosphere of so-called greenhouse gases’

Yes, it’s true that the obituary goes on to mention that: “However, he always referred back to the instrumental record, and his attitude to greenhouse warming remained guarded.”

But it would, I think we can agree, be very easy to read both those obituaries and come away with the impression that Hubert Lamb was, to all intents and purposes, one of the founding fathers of “climate change” theory and that he would largely have been on the side of the current scientific “consensus” on the global warming.

However, as a fascinating new paper produced by Bernie Lewin for the Global Warming Policy Foundation reveals, nothing could have been further from the truth.

Lamb’s big thing during his period as a climate scientist was “natural variation.” It’s thanks largely to Lamb’s seminal work Climate: Present, Past & Future that we know about the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age. These eras are key to the climate change debate because what they demonstrate is that our planet has shown itself perfectly capable of dramatically warming and cooling without any anthropogenic input. And if it was true in Medieval (and Roman, and Minoan times), then how can we sure it isn’t also the case with Twentieth Century warming? This is why – as we saw in the Climategate emails – the alarmists are so desperate to erase the Medieval Warming Period (“MWP”) from history. It is, as they might say the most inconvenient of truths)

If you want to read more about what Lamb thought and believed read the GWPF report or this piece by Paul Homewood.

As you do, you will surely relish the bitter irony that the climatologist who did more than anything to put “climate change” studies on the map was about as sceptical and sceptical as can be. During his lifetime, he saw the way the wind was blowing and loathed it: his field, he realised, was being hijacked by computer modelers with pre-determined views on the causes of climate change. These models were anathema to Lamb, who maintained that there could be no real understanding of what climate might do in the future until we could first find an explanation for the natural variations in the past.

The chutzpah with which the alarmists have claimed Lamb as one of their own is breathtaking – if not altogether surprising given their known fondness for tampering with the historical record.

Exactly the same thing happened with Roger Revelle, the lecturer cited by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth as the expert who first alerted him to the problem of man-made global warming.

Read the rest at Breitbart London

Related posts:

  1. Lying, cheating climate scientists caught lying, cheating again
  2. ‘Global warming’ was always far too important to be left to the scientists
  3. Sir David King condemns green scaremongering; Herod condemns child abuse; Osama Bin Laden condemns Islamist terrorism; etc
  4. Climategate goes SERIAL: now the Russians confirm that UK climate scientists manipulated data to exaggerate global warming

 

Press regulation only helps the bad guys

Should the state protect the Establishment?

Press regulation? Bring it on!

Should the state be doing more to protect the interests of the corrupt, powerful, mendacious, rapacious, self-serving establishment? I don’t think so. And neither, I suspect, do the vast majority of those useful idiots agitating for more stringent curbs on the media. Yet if Leveson’s statutory regulations are implemented, that will certainly be the net result. How do I know? Because I’ve experienced for myself the results of this law of unintended consequences at the hands of our current regulator the Press Complaints Commission.

Don’t get me wrong: I believe the PCC is run by decent, fair-minded people anxious to strike a balance between the need to preserve a free press and the need to defend the vulnerable from its wilder excesses. Its decisions – as I can personally testify – are often very sensible, sometimes even bravely counter-intuitive. I was genuinely surprised when it found in my favour after a complaint by the University of East Anglia. This wasn’t because I didn’t believe in the strength of my case. Rather, it was because the current establishment viewpoint – everywhere from the print media and television to the seats of academe to organisations like the Institute of Chartered Surveyors to local and national government – is so heavily biased in favour of the “man-made global warming consensus” that I didn’t think I’d get a fair hearing.

But I did. And that is to the PCC’s credit.

What isn’t to the PCC’s credit is the way it is used by vested interests as a bully pulpit to harass and intimidate journalists whose opinions those vested interests find inconvenient.

A journalist friend of mine suffers this with distressing frequency. Scarcely a month goes by when he is not being asked by his newspaper’s lawyer to provide detailed rebuttals to some vexatious complaint or other which has been made against him by some well-funded lobbyist on behalf of some dodgy industry or organisation – usually connected with the great Climate Change Gravy Train. These rebuttals take time. Unpaid time. My own response to the UEA’s complaint took up most of a weekend I’d been hoping to spend with my son back from boarding school. And to what end? All so that, eventually, the PCC could come to the conclusion that I had no case to answer; in other words, that this case should never have been brought.

Too right it bloody shouldn’t. In Climategate, the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit was caught red-handed in one of the biggest and justly notorious cases of malfeasance, incompetence and corruption in science history. Its department – the recipient of over £13 million in government grants: ie OUR money – was implicated in everything from the illegal breach of FOI laws to the persecution and harassment of dissenting scientists to the losing of vital data to the abuse of the scientific method. And never mind that it was supposedly vindicated by a number of whitewash inquiries: the naked truth remains – as authors such as Andrew Montford have clearly and unimpeachably demonstrated in books like Hiding The Decline – that UEA’s the CRU, several of its staff, and a number of their counterparts in the US, Australia and New Zealand were quite clearly guilty as sin.

Could the PCC have been expected to know this in advance? Probably not. Perhaps it imagined that the UEA was a thoroughly respectable institution which would never dream of vexatiously persecuting an innocent journalist for telling the truth. But, in a way, that only makes the point I’m trying to argue here even stronger, viz: whether unwittingly or not, our current media regulation system is being used, by and large, not to protect the little man from the ugly establishment but as a cynical way for that ugly establishment to try to entrench its power.

By “ugly establishment” I don’t, of course, mean the old, pretend-powerful establishment of popular caricature (belted earls, retired colonels from Tunbridge Wells, men in bowler hats, etc) . I mean the real establishment that rose to prominence under Tony Blair and now increasingly dominates our culture: the activist judges, the media lefty-luvvies, the bien-pensant axis of the Guardian and the BBC, the post-normal scientists, the corporatists and banksters. These are the types agitating most heavily for Leveson style regulation because they’re the ones who are not only going to be implementing it but whose grubby dealings are most likely to be concealed by it.

Toby Young – late of this parish and much-missed – summed it up perfectly in a Tweet today:

Problem with #leveson is that the people he wants to “guard the guardians” are the same people the guardians are supposed to keep in check.

Amen, bro. Press regulation is already quite dangerous and counterproductive enough as it is. Imagine how much more dangerous it would be if it actually had teeth.

Related posts:

  1. North reports the Press Complaints Commission to the Press Complaints Commission
  2. UEA: the sweet smell of napalm in the morning…
  3. Why money-printing is like ‘global warming’
  4. Eat local organic food if you like, but don’t kid yourself that it’s ‘green’

 

Murdoch, Hackgate, Climategate, the Guardian and the vile hypocrisy of the Left | James Delingpole

August 19, 2011

The liberal-Left has many vices. But surely the most noisome one of all (in a crowded field) is its rank hypocrisy. If you’re going to take the moral high ground – as Lefties will insist on doing at every opportunity – the very least you owe the world in return if you have a shred of compunction, decency or intellectual consistency is to demonstrate more integrity than those you are impugning. And if you can’t do that, then bloody well shut up.

In the last few months, you can’t have helped noticing, the liberal-Left media, led by the BBC and the Guardian, have been dwelling on the News International phone hacking scandal with a shrillness and hysteria and foaming moral outrage out of all proportion to the nature of the offence.

Am I defending phone hacking or the leaking by police of confidential information to newsapers? Of course I’m not. I think it’s a horrible, grubby practice which must have left all the people who were victims of it feeling soiled and discomfited. But a) as we saw in the cities of Britain last week (and we’re also seeing on the stock markets) there are many problems far more deserving right now of the media’s crusading attention. And b) it’s not as if News International’s imprints which were the only newspapers playing this game. The gutter end of journalism is, of necessity, an unscrupulous, highly competitive business. Tabloid hacks stand or fall on the number of scoops they get over the opposition. It would be stretching the bounds of credulity to claim that other papers, besides those owned by Murdoch, have not engaged in similar dirty tricks.

And possibly not just tabloid ones, either. This is a very important, wide-ranging story which I meant to cover earlier but couldn’t, first because I was on holiday, then because the riots took over as the issue of the hour. It’s a scandal which deserves far wider coverage than it has had so far.

A good place to start is with the excellent Autonomous Mind blog, which has been wondering just how it is that the Guardian seems to be getting so much insider information on the Hackgate scandal.

Throughout the ‘phone hacking scandal’ there was a constant and unscrutinised theme… The Guardian newspaper was accessing or being given access to information no one else but the police had about the investigation, to break new stories and run exclusives.

A story this weekend show the seriousness of such behaviour, with the Independent Police Complaints Commission investigating a claim that an officer on the Milly Dowler murder case gave information to the News of the World newspaper.  If it is right for the IPCC to investigate an officer feeding information to the News of the World, then surely the IPCC should also turn its attention to the raft of stories published in the Guardian that appear to have originated with police sources.

Autonomous Mind is especially suspicious of a Guardian journalist named David Leigh. And he’s not the only one. Guido, too, has been on the case. He points out that, despite recent denials, Leigh confessed in a 2006 Guardian article to having been involved in phone hacking. (Good, noble, phone hacking it goes without saying – because it’s only bad when Right-wing newspapers do it.)

It has now emerged that in 2006 David Leigh admitted in the pages of the Guardian, when hacking was less controversial, that he did it and just as we claimed, he taught his students about it.

There is certainly a voyeuristic thrill in hearing another person’s private messages… unlike the News of the World, I was not paying a private detective to routinely help me with circulation-boosting snippets. That is my defence, when I try to explain newspaper methods to my current university journalism students, and some of whom are rather shocked.

And then there’s the Climategate connection, unearthed by some inspired sleuthing from  Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit.

In February 2010, a couple of months after Neil Wallis of Outside Organisation had been retained by the University of East Anglia to help them strike back against critics, Leigh authored a smear against Paul Dennis of the University of East Anglia, entitled:

“Detectives question climate change scientist over email leaks: University of East Anglia scientist Paul Dennis denies leaking material, but links to climate change sceptics in US drew him to attention of the investigators.”

Leigh’s smear began by reporting that Norfolk police had interviewed Paul Dennis (as, presumably, other faculty of the University of East Anglia). However, Dennis had “refused to sign a petition in support of Jones when the scandal broke”. Furthermore, according to Leigh’s apparently disapproving “university sources”, Dennis was reported to have sent a letter to UEA head of department Jacquie Burgess “calling for more open release of data” – suspicious activity indeed. Dennis had also refused to observe the fatwa against communication with climate blogs that were critical of CRU and the Team and had even sent an article on isotopes to Jeff Id.

Leigh’s article disclosed two pieces of information that were not in the public domain.

First, Leigh “outed” Jeff Id by name, occupation and hometown. To that point, “Jeff Id” had been anonymous. His registration at WordPress was anonymous and his gmail account was anonymous. To Jeff’s knowledge, there was no public information that would enable Leigh to identify him. [Update 2.30 pm: A reader points out that Jeff Id had been publicly identified as Jeff Condon in a blog article on Jan 10, 2011. This does not explain all the facts. David Leigh identifies Id as “Patrick Condon, aeronautical engineer” from Illinois and located his telephone number. In addition, there are 34 Jeff Condons on LinkedIn – how did Leigh get to the right one?]

A few days before the article, Leigh had telephoned Jeff. Jeff asked Leigh how he had located him; Leigh refused to say. Jeff expressly asked Leigh not to disclose his personal information, which were then not on the public record. Leigh disregarded the request and then proceeded to “out” him as collateral damage in their smear of Paul Dennis.

Murky enough for you, yet? It gets worse. Note the abovementioned Neil Wallis. Remember who Neil Wallis is? He’s the irascible tabloid hack – deputy editor of the News of the World under Andy Coulson and nicknamed the Wolfman by his terrified staff, who was arrested during the Hackgate scandal. Wallis was the man employed in September 2009 as a £1,000-a-day “adviser” by the Met’s former chief Sir Paul Stephenson, who resigned as a result of the Hackgate scandal. How odd that very shortly afterwards, the University of East Anglia should have chosen to hire Wallis as a flak catcher to defend its reputation after the Climategate scandal.

Steve McIntyre has examined the Climategate connection more thoroughly I have space for here. You can read his inspired sleuthing here, here, here and here. I certainly agree with his assessment that UEA’s decision to recruit a man like Wallis represents a very strange use of public money. Surely, if you were an academic institution of genuine probity your first priority were one of your departments (in this case the CRU) to be implicated in skullduggery would be to investigate the allegations properly, rather than see it as a PR issue to be covered up by a hard man from the world of rock n roll and tabloid newspapers.

What can we conclude from all this? At the very least that the whole business stinks. I wonder, for example, whether it was at Wallis’s instigation that the UEA launched its baseless and vexatious complaint to the PCC about my coverage of its behaviour in the Climategate affair and of its subsequent whitewashes. Perhaps – who knows – he might even have inspired the cynical, junk science hatchet job on climate sceptics staged in collaboration between the BBC and activist scientist Sir Paul Nurse. Certainly it seems that the kind of smearing, conspiring, abuse of power and misuse of public money exposed in those Climategate emails did not come to an end with Climategate. And that the Left-wing MSM – notably the Guardian and the BBC – are at best acting as useful idiots for this shabbiness, at worst as its cheerleaders and co-conspirators.

So what exactly is the difference between the kind of behaviour condemned by the Guardian in the Murdoch press and the kind of behaviour it seems happy to indulge in itself?

Well I’ll tell you a couple of differences: never at any stage have any News International publications boasted about being run by a charitable trust which guarantees their independence and absolute integrity; never have the profits of the News of the World or the Sun been largely dependent on money extracted from the taxpayer and spent on public sector recruitment advertising.

Related posts:

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  2. Greenpeace and The Guardian: yet again, sticking up for the bad guys
  3. Climategate: George Monbiot, the Guardian and Big Oil
  4. Luvvies for hypocrisy, intellectual dishonesty and lazy groupthink

One thought on “Murdoch, Hackgate, Climategate, the Guardian and the vile hypocrisy of the Left”

  1. James W says:21st August 2011 at 3:55 pmI loath the left.

    Really, I do; more than I loath Manchester United or Elton John.

Comments are closed.

UEA: The Sweet Smell of Napalm in the Morning…

napalm1-460

I wasn’t going to crow, really I wasn’t. But I’m afraid I can’t resist, especially since it’s my last blog post for a while and this is an event of some significance. I’m talking about the Press Complaints Commission’s ruling on a complaint brought against this blog by our old friends at the University of East Anglia. They lost. We won. (And I do mean we: I’m hugely grateful to my legal advisers, as well as to experts including Steve McIntyre, Andrew Montford, Richard North and Christopher Booker.)

Because I’m about to dash off to Devon for some vital surfing R & R, I’ve only time to sketch in why this matters so much. Basically the UEA were trying to use the PCC as a way of gagging this blog from speaking unpalatable truths about the shoddy goings-on in its notorious Climatic Research Unit.

To its enormous credit the PCC stuck up for fair comment and freedom of speech. This is a massive victory not just for me and Telegraph blogs, but for bloggers everywhere especially those doughty souls around the world who are battling against Establishment lies, bullying and cover ups to try to reveal the truth about the corrupt, mendacious Climate Change industry.

If it sounds like I’m overdoing it, consider this: the PCC’s ruling must be among the first by any quasi-official body anywhere in the world to take the side of a Climate Change sceptic rather than that of the Warmist establishment. This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Now that ruling in full:

Commission’s decision in the case of
University of East Anglia v The Daily Telegraph

The complainants, acting on behalf of the University of East Anglia (UEA), complained that three blog posts by James Delingpole were inaccurate and misleading and contained distorted information in breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code.  In particular, the complainants were concerned that the blog posts described Professor Phil Jones as “disgraced, FOI-breaching, email-deleting, scientific-method abusing”.  They explained that Professor Phil Jones had been exonerated of any dishonesty or scientific malpractice by a series of reviews.  They were concerned that a second blog post repeated accusations that had been demonstrated as untrue, concluding that the University’s scientists were “untrustworthy, unreliable and entirely unfit to write the kind of reports on which governments around the world make their economic and environmental decisions”, and a third blog post referred to the scientists’ work as “shoddy” and “mendacious”.

The Commission emphasised that the articles in question were blog posts and were clearly identifiable as such to readers generally, as they were posited in the ‘Telegraph Blogs’ section of the website and written under the columnist’s prominent by-line.  The Commission was satisfied that readers would be aware that the comments therein represented the columnist’s own robust views of the matters in question.  Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code permits the publication of such comment provided it is clearly distinguished from fact and does not contain significantly inaccurate, misleading or distorted information.  The Commission has previously ruled [North v The Guardian] that “In the realm of blogging (especially in cases touching upon controversial topics such as climate change), there is likely to be strong and fervent disagreement, with writers making use of emotive terms and strident rhetoric.  This is a necessary consequence of free speech. The Commission felt that it should be slow to intervene in this, unless there is evidence of factual inaccuracy or misleading statement.”

Through its correspondence the newspaper had provided some evidence in support of the statements under dispute, and the columnist had included some of this evidence in the second blog post under discussion.  In relation to the columnist’s description of Professor Jones as “FOI-breaching, email-deleting”, the newspaper had provided extracts from an email from Professor Jones in which he had written “If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone”, and another email in which he had written “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?”.  With respect to the columnist’s assertion that Professor Jones was “scientific method-abusing”, the newspaper had provided an extract from an email from Professor Jones in which he had written “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline”.  In view of this, the Commission considered that there were some grounds for the columnist’s opinion – which readers would recognise was subjective – on these points.

The complainants emphasised that Professor Phil Jones and the other scientists discussed in the blog post had been cleared by a number of independent reviews.  The Commission noted that the columnist had referred to these reviews, and that readers would therefore have been aware that they had taken place.  In the first blog post complained of the columnist had referred to “unconvincing attempts to clear the Climategate scientists”, and noted that one scientist, Mike Hulme, had “managed to emerge from the Climategate scandal smelling of violets”.  He had also noted in the first blog post that Professor Jones had granted interviews “presenting himself as a man far more sinned against than sinning”.  The columnist in the second blog post complained of had expanded on his comments and made clear that the scientists had “apparently… been ‘exonerated and cleared of all malpractice by a series of independent reviews’”, although he made clear that he did not consider these reviews to have been “independent”, citing a report by Andrew Montford which was critical of the reviews.  While the complainants had expressed concern that the Montford report was “partisan”, the Commission considered that the columnist was entitled to agree with the report.

The Commission was satisfied that readers would be aware of the context of the columnist’s robust views – clearly recognisable as his subjective opinion – that the scientists were “untrustworthy, unreliable and entirely unfit to write the kind of reports on which governments around the world make their economic and environmental decisions”, and that their work was “shoddy” and “mendacious”.  In the circumstances, it did not consider that there had been a breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code.

The Commission noted that the newspaper had offered the complainants an opportunity to respond on the blog post.  It considered that this would inform readers of the full context of the dispute and the complainants’ position.  The Commission welcomed this offer, and hoped it would remain open to the complainants.

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3 thoughts on “UEA: the sweet smell of napalm in the morning…”

  1. A K Haart says:9th April 2011 at 4:04 pmExcellent news. Sighs of relief all round I think. People like me, supporters on the periphery, don’t always remember the professional risks you run when you take on institutions with deep pockets and tell it as it is. Thank you.
  2. Nige Cook says:10th April 2011 at 8:19 amCongratulations James! Let’s hope someone will fund a proper study of the anti-greenhouse effect of CO2 now.
    http://vixra.org/abs/1104.0013
  3. Nathaniel Courthope says:18th April 2011 at 2:44 pmIndeed climate gate reflected poorly on those involved. But they’re not the only scientists in the world. I don’t see that the whole AGW agenda is sunk by a few idiots. Damaged, yes, but no more.

    After all, your pal Ian Plimer has been pretty soundly discredited by failing to answer any of his critics. You promised us his book was going to change everything. Do you still stand by your original review of it?

Comments are closed.