When you're feeling bugged...

Several fine denizens of the blogosphere have commented unfavourably on the discovery that three million households in Britain have now been "bugged" - that is their bins been equipped with microchips so that the council can monitor how much you've thrown away and how much you've recycled.

Apart from lynching your local council leader, I wonder if the only correct response to this is to start bugging the recycling so you can find out just how much of it is shipped abroad, how much is landfilled and how much actually goes to be recycled. Perhaps if you put one of those Tracker devices in the glass bin, you would end up tracing it to Felixstowe docks.

Only the guilty have anything to fear. 

The hitchhikers guide to the IPCC

The IPCC has finally released the reviewers comments on its recent 4th Assessment Report. If you want to study them they are available in hard copy only at the Littauer Library of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. You may think that this means that if you are a hard up climatology student from, say, India, you are completely stuffed. But no, the IPCC have thought of everything. The staff at Harvard will arrange to copy up to 100 pages for you at a cost of $34 plus $0.40 per page. If you can afford to employ a researcher they are happy for someone to come in to see which pages might be of interest. Otherwise you will have to make do with 100 pages at random...so maybe the Indians are stuffed after all.

Does this situation remind you of something? 

 

PROSSER
But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.

ARTHUR
Oh, yes, soon as I heard of this plan, I went straight around to see them yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call much attention to them, had you? Such as maybe telling someone about them?

PROSSER looks more uncomfortable.

PROSSER
Well, the plans were on display –

ARTHUR
On display? I had to go down to the cellar to find them!

PROSSER
That’s the display department.

ARTHUR
With a flashlight.

PROSSER
Well, the lights had probably gone.

ARTHUR
So had the stairs.

PROSSER
Er – well – you did find them, didn’t you?

ARTHUR
Oh, yes. Yes, I did. The plans were on display, in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory, with a sign on the door reading “Beware of the Leopard.”

It is not known if the Littauer Library has stairs, or whether the Environmental Science and Public Policy Archives are, in fact, located in a disused public convenience.

(Source here. Hitchhikers Guide reference shamelessly ripped from the comments). 

Encouraging

Labour Home has a thread up about David McLean's outrageous bill to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information Act. Encouragingly the punters there are pointing the finger at their own MPs and condemning them in no uncertain terms. I had expected lots of cringeworthy party loyalty from LH, so if the message is getting through that politicians are the problem, not the solution, then we may have a major step forward on our hands.

In related news, Alistair Darling is trying to emasculate the FoI Act even further. 

More cackhanded greenery

The BBC wonders if a bit of over-strident campaigning by the greens alienated Japan at just the point where it was about to give up whaling. Result: lots more whaling.

It's starting to look as if environmentalists would actually achieve more of their aims if they just went back to their tofu plantations and kept quiet.

Episcopal hysterics

Further to my story on the greens getting upset over proposals to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere using genetically modified plants, here is another story to get our environmentalist colleagues choking on their herbal infusions.

Senior cabinet ministers are pushing for Britain to be the first nation in the world to get much of its power from the tides, as part of a massive new expansion for renewable energy. The Environment Secretary, David Miliband, Welsh Secretary Peter Hain and Trade and Industry Secretary Alistair Darling want a giant £14bn barrage to be built across the Severn.

This would generate about 5 per cent of Britain's electricity without producing any of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

Their move is not meeting any serious opposition within the Cabinet but will spark off a furious row with environmental bodies, which say that the barrage would devastate the estuary's wildlife.

You couldn't make it up could you? Can I suggest to all my environmentalist friends: You've been 'ad mate!

(Hat tip: EU Referendum) 

Quaequam

I've often wondered what "quaequam" means - as in James Graham's Quaequam Blog. My latest theory is that it must be something along the lines of "eviscerate with maximum prejudice" which is what he has done to Tom Watson's ridiculous attempt to justify his support for the FoI amendment bill. Watson is surely the only man in the UK blogosphere who can rival Mike Ion for toe-curlingly unquestioning party loyalty. Truly a revolting specimen.

18 Doughty Street on climate change

There's a very interesting section on 18 Doughty Street's "End of the Day Show" with Dominic Lawson taking on Professor Ivor Gaber on the subject of climate change. Lawson seems to be very well informed. Gaber seems to treat it as an issue of faith. He also thinks that the crisis in Darfur is caused by climate change! Amazing what a difference a half degree rise in temperature can make.

The moral measure of David Cameron

The behaviour of politicians is usually revolting and their actions in trying to hide their expenses behind an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act is more than usually stomach churning.

This is a black and white issue. Honest people respond by saying "No". Anything else is just another way of admitting that you're a crook. David Cameron responds by saying he's neutral. This tells us something about him. Either he doesn't know right from wrong, or he has good reasons for tolerating a certain level of corruption among his MPs.

It also tells us that we shouldn't under any circumstances, vote for him or the pondlife that surround him.

Another reputation on the line

New Scientist has published a Climate Myths Special today which has been welcomed with open arms in some corners:

"I have already forwarded links to my local FoE and Social Forum lists, to draw other people's attention to it." says one particularly diligent commenter in the NS Environment Blog.

I don't know why a publication like New Scientist would take sides like this in such a controversial issue. If they're wrong, they end up with their reputation in tatters, and nobody will notice if they're right. Climate Audit has already pointed out the excision of embarrassing data from their 1000 year temperature graph, (compiled for them by Dr Rob Wilson of the University of Edinburgh).

Click for full size 

If you follow the dark blue line (Briffa 2001) into the choke point of the graph in the 1960s you will notice that it doesn't actually come out again. It's hard to see because it has been stopped right on the choke point so that you can't make out where the line ends. Was there no data after 1960? Unfortunately for the commercial reputation of New Scientist there was. In a previous paper using the same raw data, Briffa had shown the full set of results through to 1994. And of course, the proxy suggests that temperatures were in fact falling throughout most of the rest of the century (the green line on this second chart).

Click for full size 

Enclosure

More on peer review

Via Nature Peer to Peer Blog, this is an interesting article by a philospher of science called Janet D. Stemwedel, which throws a little light on some of the issues around the idea of replication of scientific results before publication.

Stemwedel wonders if it might be possible to create a paid job of "peer reviewer". This would solve the problem of having your work reviewed by your scientific rivals. But the biggest gain might come from having these reviewers actually try to recreate the science - hence replication would take place prior to publication. There's a very interesting comments thread which is well worth reading too.

Whether this would work or not would depend on the specialism. For many studies, the idea of collecting the data a second time is, frankly, ridiculous, but even for these cases there would still be immense value in reproducing the trail from raw data to results. It would certainly make cherry-picking of data and dodgy adjustments to the numbers much harder to get away with.

Government influence over the judiciary

The Times is reporting that the Lord Chancellor maintains a list of judges and magistrates who have been disciplined for misuse of their computers. The offences apparently include the viewing of pornography.

I'm amazed that the article doesn't discuss the obvious implication of the existence of this list, which is that the judges and magistrates concerned can no longer be considered to be independent of the government. They are so obviously open to blackmail that they must be considered incapable of performing their jobs.

The Government is currently refusing to release even the numbers of judicial staff or offences involved - someone more cynical than me would point out that this conveniently retains the power of blackmail with the government. But there is no doubt that at the very least, the names and offences will have to be released, or the culprits quietly released from their positions.  While the information is secret, these people are tainted with the suspicion that they can be influenced, and that strikes hard at the independence of the judiciary.

Calm down dear, it's only a bit warmer.

Alarmist messages about global warming are counter-productive.

So says Mike Hulme, the head of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. Obviously the Tyndall Centre is exemplary in its level-headed pronouncements. Take these for example (try clasping the hands together to help achieve the right tone of scholarly detachment....)

EVERYONE'S CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS MUST GO TO ZERO.....[!!!!!!]

CAN THE NATURAL WORLD COPE WITH THE DAMAGE ALREADY DONE....[!!!!!]

WILL CLIMATE CHANGE KILL THE AMAZON?

I wonder if their future press releases are going to be any different?

No feed, no read

RSS. It's not difficult, is it? REALLY SIMPLE syndication, yes?

So why, oh why do otherwise well-organised campaigning organisations completely fail to publish a feed? Can it have escaped their notice that this is the way people do things now? The Taxpayers' Alliance is a case in point. This is allegedly one of the best-organised campaign groups to have emerged in recent years. They seem to have an unerring ability to get themselves in the MSM, to be sure. But their "blog" doesn't have a single solitary feed. What are they thinking of? I'd read it every day if only I knew there was something there for me to look at. As it is, I'm there once every six months or so. What a waste.

Education Otherwise is another. Get with the twenty-first century guys!

There are lots more too, but I can't remember who the hell they are. And there's a lesson there isn't there. If I can't remember who you are when I really want to slag you off, what are the chances that I'll be able to recall your name when I'm interested (but only vaguely) in what you have to say. 

Get a feed...please?

Well that was exciting...

The post before last seems to have excited an awful lot of interest - there were more hits in the last twenty-four hours than in a typical week. We're not used to this level of interest here in the episcopal palace. So,  thanks are due to The Englishman, Junkscience.com and, as ever, the Adam Smith Institute for the links. Expect some interesting developments on the climate front in coming weeks too.

Thought for the day

Rio, Kyoto and now Bali. Climate scientists get to visit some very swanky places don't they? I wonder if, back in the good old days before the earth turned into a furnace, they had their get-togethers in more earthy places? Hull, perhaps. Or Dusseldorf.