What's going on here then?

One of the most important scientific documents in the global warming debate is Jones et al 1990 on the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. This was long claimed by sceptics to be a major factor in the apparent rise in global temperatures - essentially they were saying that as urbanisation took place, many formerly rural weather stations ended up surrounded by buildings. These gave off heat and raised the local temperature. In other words it looked like global warming, but wasn't.

Jones' letter to Nature in 1990 was widely claimed to have killed this argument off by presenting three temperature time series from rural weather stations.  By comparing these to another wider set of data, it was possible to show that the wider series had no significant UHI effect.

The story has suddenly come to the fore again because the UHI effect has attracted the interest of Steve McIntyre, a  prominent sceptic and something of a thorn in the side of the mainstream. He has been asking the author, Phil Jones for his raw data - specifically he wants to identify which weather stations were used his work - presumably he means to test if they were genuinely rural or not.

And thus far, Jones has refused to release the information, despite a formal request under the Environmental Information Regulations.

Now to anyone who knows anything about science, this is pretty exciting stuff. It's pretty much a given that you release your data on request so that others can test it. Nature, which published the orginal letter, makes prompt availability of data a condition of publication. So the refusal is likely to be viewed in a pretty dim light by the scientific community, or at least I hope it is.

There are other lines of enquiry for McIntyre to pursue in order to get the data, but in the meantime let's just notice the startling fact of a "real" scientist refusing to release his data to someone who is alleged to be a fake and the equivalent of a creationist.  

Bowland Dairy Reminder

DK has a reminder up on his site about the Bowland Dairy Case. The case is so horrific, it's worth reminding ourselves of it. If there are any Liberal Democrats passing this way, I would value your comments.

One size fits all

The latest wizard wheeze from the Government is today's announcement: "Seven year olds to take languages".

"I want languages to be at the heart of learning", Mr Johnson said. 

"The earlier you start learning a language the better. Making language study compulsory from 7 to 14 will give pupils seven years to build up their knowledge, confidence and experience."

Now while I'm sure lots of people think this is a good thing, it's surely worth contrasting this lurch towards compulsion with the government's stated wish to personalise the school system to the needs of each child. I don't suppose Mr Johnson has even considered the possibility that some children might not be cut out for learning a foreign language. Their time might be better spent learning, say, literacy or numeracy? Or speaking?  Not according to Mr Johnson.

He was on the radio this morning, telling us that language learning would be for at least one hour a week (!), and rhapsodising at length about all the exciting languages that would be seen in schools in the future. Apparently schoolchildren will become proficient in Mandarin Chinese on the back of their hour of teacher time. Colour me unconvinced. 

The problem with this announcement is that I'm sure it will have plenty of parents squealing with excitement (if they have not been jaded by the last ten years of exciting new initiatives). But if it ever comes to pass it will fail the children - even the bright ones. When will they learn that, no matter how hard you try, one size never fits all.

Volcanoes

Frank O'Dwyer tells me that the claim made in the Great Global Warming Swindle about volcanoes releasing more CO₂ into the atmosphere than humans is wrong. I've not been able to make a lot of progress in getting to the bottom of either Frank's claim, or the GGWS one, but I did come across something quite interesting.

74,000 years ago, the Toba volcano erupted in a VEI 7 explosion that pumped more than 10,000 times as much CO2 into the air as Mt. St. Helens did. At the maximum, Mt. St. Helens was giving off 22,000,000 kg of C02 daily, so Toba was putting out at least 22 billion kg per day. The ash cloud was so thick that it caused cooling that nearly wiped out the human race.

There are indications in the ice core records that show the cooling from Toba, but where is the global warming that should have resulted from all the CO2 put into the atmosphere? According to what I've read, the CO2 should have remained in the air long after the ash settled and that should have caused at least a warming spike, but there's no sign of extraordinary warming in the climate records. Shouldn't there always be a cooling/warming cycle after a volcano erupts? Cooling from the ash cloud, warming from the CO2 that lingers?

 Source

Quote of the day

"There is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis. However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility."

Statistician Edward Wegman on climate scientists in a report to the US House of Representatives.

H/T Climate Audit 

US Gun Laws

A federal appeals court has come down on the side of an individual right to bear arms and ruled that Washington DC's gun control law is unconstitutional.

Most commentators seem to think this is a big deal. DC is has some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the US together with very high crime levels. No doubt the crime figures for the capital will be watched extremely closely in coming months. 

Update:

The Cato Institute are saying that it is likely that a stay will be put in place, so it may still be years before there is any impact on the man in the street. 

A lie flies half way round the world....

....before the truth has got its underpants on. Or something like that.

The Great Global Warming Swindle appears to be issue du jour on many blogs today, and there have been a lot of interesting contributions on both sides. Unoftunately a fairly blatant attempt to discredit some of the contributors has been wending its way round the LibDem blogs, and I have done what I can to nip it in the bud, but it may be too late now.

In a comment on Liberal Polemic, Thomas Papworth stated that some of the contributors to the programme were "not what they seemed". This appeared to be based on this comment at a blog called Ballots Balls & Bikes made by another LibDem blogger called Joe Otten.

Apparently they had fake academics from non-existent departments in that programme.

I left a comment at Joe's blog, asking where this had come from. The source was this thread at Bad Science. Comment 43 stated:

What I found most infuriating however, was the use of so-called experts with non-existing university affiliations. For example, Philip Stott is not a professor at the “Department of Biogeography ” at the “University of London”. No such department exists. He used to be a professor at the Geography Department at SOAS (an institution better know for its cultural studies than climate change research).

Equally, Tim Bell can’t be affiliated with the “Department of Climatology” at the University of Winnipeg, because this department does not exist, nor does he work at the University of Winnipeg. Apparently, he left in 1996 to become a consultant.

As far as Philip Stott goes, I knew this to be absolute nonsense. Professor Stott is well known to anyone who follows science in the UK, particularly bloggers, and he is a regular commenter on BBC programmes about science. To suggest that he is a "fake" in this way strikes me as potentially libellous. I would have thought BB&B would want to consider removing the comment. Philip Stott's Wikipedia page is here.Can anyone really suggest that labelling him as Professor in the Department of Biogeography is a misrepresentation?

Tim Ball (not Bell), I hadn't come across before, but he also has a Wikipedia page which is here. There seems to be some doubt as to whether he was the first Canadian PhD in climatology but it is undisputed that he was a professor at the University of Winnipeg and did research into the historic climate. He is clearly qualified to speak with some authoritaty on the subject of climate change. Again, calling him a fake appears somewhat risky, particularly as he appears to know his neighbourhood libel lawyer's telephone number.

This all looks to me like an attempt to play the man rather than the ball. Given that one of the central claims of the programme was that climate heretics were persecuted, this rather proves the point, doesn't it?

Quote of the day

In the light of the Patrick Mercer affair, this is worth revisiting. 

Our merely social intolerance [of dissentient opinion], kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any active effort for their diffusion. With us, heretical opinions do not perceptibly gain or even lose, ground in each decade or generation; they never blaze out far and wide, but continue to smoulder in the narrow circles of thinking and studious persons among whom they originate, without ever lighting up the general affairs of mankind with either a true or a deceptive light. And thus is kept up a state of things very satisfactory to some minds, because, without the unpleasant process of fining or imprisoning anybody, it maintains all prevailing opinions outwardly undisturbed, while it does not absolutely interdict the exercise of reason by dissentients afflicted with the malady of thought. A convenient plan for having peace in the intellectual world, and keeping all things going on therein very much as they do already. But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind. A state of things in which a large portion of the most active and inquiring intellects find it advisable to keep the genuine principles and grounds of their convictions within their own breasts, and attempt, in what they address to the public, to fit as much as they can of their own conclusions to premises which they have internally renounced, cannot send forth the open, fearless characters, and logical, consistent intellects who once adorned the thinking world. The sort of men who can be looked for under it, are either mere conformers to commonplace, or time-servers for truth whose arguments on all great subjects are meant for their hearers, and are not those which have convinced themselves. Those who avoid this alternative, do so by narrowing their thoughts and interests to things which can be spoken of without venturing within the region of principles, that is, to small practical matters, which would come right of themselves, if but the minds of mankind were strengthened and enlarged, and which will never be made effectually right until then; while that which would strengthen and enlarge men's minds, free and daring speculation on the highest subjects, is abandoned.

John Stuart Mill On Liberty 

Equation blogging

I've never blogged about Maths before - my reader numbers are quite small enough already. But I came across this today, and it is pretty amazing. If you take the following equation

(where mod and x are particular mathematical functions) and you plot a graph of it you get this:

Which you have to admit is pretty amazing. The equation, which is called Tupper's Self-Referential Equation is from here. 

Patrick Mercer

I find the whole farrago over Patrick Mercer completely unedifying. We can't go on having people like Mercer and Bob Piper driven out of their jobs because they touch on race in some unapproved way. It's stifling any sensible debate, and the only winners will be the BNP.

Fact of the day

According to a survey conducted by Harvard economists Michael Kremer and Karthik Muralidharan, 80% of Indian government school teachers send their children to private schools.

The state is not your friend. 

H/T Mercatus

Office of National Lies & Distortion

Back in 2005 I noted Labour's declaration that they would legislate for the operational independence of the Office of National Statistics. The ONS would be run by an independent board of governors Gordon said. It would have a similar degree of independence as the Bank of England we were told.

At the time I pointed out that it was unlikely ever to happen, which is why I was thrilled to read in the Times this week that I was largely correct. The bill has now almost completed its progress through Parliament and the Economist has reported its key features.

• A new National Statistics Board will be set up. This body will be responsible for preparing lies on behalf of the government and can take the blame if they get found out.
  
• Its remit will not cover all statistics - only "national" ones, thereby avoiding any unpleasantness over say, crime figures or other politically risky lies.
• It will not be allowed to collect any figures that ministers find inconvenient. The ONS is to concentrate on lying in non-critical areas.
  
• It will not be allowed to dictate the timing of the release of figures - the correct timing of a lie is often crucial in ensuring it goes unnoticed ("burying bad lies").
  
• Ministers will continue to see figures before release in case the ONS try to sneak anything truthful out.
  
• Explanation of the figures is not to be prepared by the board in case they try to explain what the figures actually would have shown if the government weren't lying about them.
  

Really though, this has been a masterful piece of politics. Announce a policy to take the sting out of the opposition, then delay and obfusc like your life depended on it before producing an emasculated shred of legislative nothing. Then just keep on lying.

Voices from Blair's Britain

We are supposed to be a 'free country' yet it's always like we have to answer to 'Big Brother' I'm really sick of it! I'm sick of being petrified of my postman, sick of being 'scared' to answer my phone! Sick of being answerable to anyone and everyone about what I choose is best for my own child! When will people realise that when you have a child, you have the right, as the parent, to choose what is best for your child, and your decisions should not be questionable?!

A home educator, writing on a private online forum.

There are now apparently between 100,000 and 200,000 home educating families in the UK, most of whom have a healthy scepticism of the good intentions of the state, and particularly of the current incumbents. That could easily be 100,000 votes for any political party which says it will make it easier to home educate and will prevent local authorities from oppressing those who choose to educate "otherwise".

Why don't you stick that in your manifesto DK? 

E-petition

There is an e-petition up on the Downing Street site calling for the NHS to be scrapped. The authors want it replaced with private health insurance. While I think a Singapore-style individual provident fund would be better, the point that the NHS must go has to be made and made loudly.

I've signed it. I think you should too. 

Recess Monkey & the wisdom of crowds

Amidst all the hilarity over Recess Monkey's "Maggie Dead" post, the question was put of whether this discredited bloggers. Certainly Iain Dale commenting on the Blogger TV show on 18 Doughty Street thought so.

I must say that anyone who thinks this is missing the fundamental point about the blogosphere. Wisdom is found in the crowd as a whole, not in any particular member of it. For every sloppy blogger claiming that Margaret Thatcher is dead, there is another fool saying that she will live for ever. Both are wrong but their errors cancel each other out. The crowd as a whole moves quickly to the more accurate position that she is alive, but she's getting on a bit. 

So as I commented on Blogger TV, the blogosphere did exactly what it is supposed to do. We shouldn't expect any more from it.