Cartoon by Josh.

Bishop Hill has been interviewed by The Register’s Andrew Orlowski about his new book The Hockey Stick Illusion:

In 2001 the IPCC published its Third Assessment report prominently featuring a graph that became “the logo of global warming”. Previous historical reconstructions didn’t show our modern warm climate as particularly anomalous. This was very different, and was hailed as a “call to action”. Yet Michael Mann’s studies were deeply flawed. Omit one or two proxies, for example, and the scary warming ’spike’ disappears. Mann’s model could produce hockey stick shapes using random data, such as baseball scores, or red noise. Critics alleged that Mann’s choices of data and statistical tools all cooled the Medieval Warm Period, and emphasised late 20th Century warming.

Read the lengthy, comprehensive article: Bishop Hill: Gonzo science and the Hockey Stick

The Abstract states:

Previous studies of the recent drought in the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) have noted that low rainfall totals have been accompanied by anomalously high air temperatures. Subsequent studies have interpreted an identified trend in the residual timeseries of non-rainfall related temperature variability as a signal of anthropogenic change, further speculating that increased air temperature has exacerbated the drought through increasing evapotranspiration rates. In this study, we explore an alternative explanation of the recent increases in air temperature. This study demonstrates that significant misunderstanding of known processes of land surface – atmosphere interactions has led to the incorrect attribution of the causes of the anomalous temperatures, as well as significant misunderstanding of their impact on evaporation within the Murray-Darling Basin.

See also:

 American Thinker – Droughtgate: Study Finds IPCC had Temperature – Drought Connection Backwards

Andrew Bolt: No, Prime Minister. That drought wasn’t man-made, either

The Observer: Robin McKie v Benny Peiser

On his international missions, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), called for radical action to stave off environmental disaster.

He urged people to eat less meat, pay aviation taxes and even ban giving iced water in restaurants. But in order to get his message across, the former railway engineer, who lives in Delhi, created an enormous carbon footprint of his own.

Dr Pachauri has been the chairman of the panel since 2002. Documents available on its website showed that in one 19-month period, he clocked up more than half a million miles in the air as he travelled the world on official business.

Between January 2007 and July 2008, he took more than 120 long-haul flights and 43 short-haul trips, taking in countries such as New Zealand, America and Fiji.

Dr Pachauri’s trips would have produced 121.1 tons of carbon dioxide, according to calculations by ClimateCare, a carbon offset provider.

It is estimated that the average Briton produces around 8.6 tons of carbon dioxide a year, while the average Indian produces just over one ton.

The Daily Telegraph: Rajendra Pachauri: head of UN climate change panel clocks up half a million miles of air travel

The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), of which Dr Rajendra Pachauri is the director-general, has given corporate awards to companies such as Pepsi and Honda, as well as Indian businesses.

Those same companies have given financial backing to Teri through grants or paid-for consultancy work.

According to Teri’s own website, Dr Pachauri and his wife are on the jury panel for the 2010 awards. Dr Pachauri has been on the jury panel for the awards in previous years.

The disclosure will lead to further questions over possible conflict of interest against Dr Pachauri, whose position as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is already under threat over errors in its reports.

The Department for International Development (DfID) has pledged to give Teri up to £10 million in grants over five years but will subject the institute to an “institutional assessment”, expected to take at least five months, before handing over any of the money.

Among the companies that have received Teri corporate awards is Hero Honda, a joint venture between the Japanese car company and an Indian firm that manufactures millions of motorbikes every year.

It is described on the institute’s website as a major sponsor and was joint second in Teri’s Environmental Excellence Award in 2008.

Another major sponsor, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, won the Corporate Social Responsibility Award in 2004.

PepsiCo India, which received first prize in 2009 for its business response to Aids, pays Teri for a project studying water quality in a local community.

It has also emerged that Teri’s biggest single sponsor, BP India, which has provided £6 million, paid for dinner and drinks at an event publicising Dr Pachauri’s debut novel. A BP spokesman said it was entirely legitimate to fund the dinner, the company having enjoyed a “long association with Dr Pachauri”.

He confirmed that the firm gave Teri $9.5 million (£6.1 million) between 2006 and 2009 for planting 8,000 hectares of jatropha, a type of bush, as part of a bio-diesel research project.

Dr Pachauri has repeatedly denied any conflict of interest between his work for the IPCC and his work for Teri. In a recent letter to The Sunday Telegraph, he said there was “no question” of either himself, the IPCC or Teri being influenced by associations with organisations.

Read the entire Sunday Telegraph article: Climate change research bungle

Professor John Mitchell, the Met Office’s Director of Climate Science, shared responsibility for the most worrying headline in the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning IPCC report – that the Earth is now hotter than at any time in the past 1,300 years.

And he approved the inclusion in the report of the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a steep 20th Century rise.

By the time the 2007 report was being written, the graph had been heavily criticised by climate sceptics who had shown it minimised the ‘medieval warm period’ around 1000AD, when the Vikings established farming settlements in Greenland.

In fact, according to some scientists, the planet was then as warm, or even warmer, than it is today.

Early drafts of the report were fiercely contested by official IPCC reviewers, who cited other scientific papers stating that the 1,300-year claim and the graph were inaccurate.

But the final version, approved by Prof Mitchell, the relevant chapter’s review editor, swept aside these concerns.

Now, the Met Office is refusing to disclose Prof Mitchell’s working papers and correspondence with his IPCC colleagues in response to requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The block has been endorsed in writing by Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth – whose department has responsibility for the Met Office.

Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveal that the Met Office’s stonewalling was part of a co-ordinated, legally questionable strategy by climate change academics linked with the IPCC to block access to outsiders.

Read more in The Mail on Sunday: How Met Office blocked questions on its own man’s role in ‘hockey stick’ climate row

STRIKING parallels between the BBC’s coverage of the global warming debate and the activities of its pension fund can be revealed today.

The corporation is under investigation after being inundated with complaints that its editorial coverage of climate change is biased in favour of those who say it is a man-made phenomenon.

The £8billion pension fund is likely to come under close scrutiny over its commitment to promote a low-carbon economy while struggling to reverse an estimated £2billion deficit.

Concerns are growing that BBC journalists and their bosses regard disputed scientific theory that climate change is caused by mankind as “mainstream” while huge sums of  employees’ money is invested in companies whose success depends on the theory being widely accepted.

The fund, which has 58,744 members, accounts for about £8 of the £142.50 licence  fee and the proportion looks likely to rise while programme budgets may have to be cut to help reduce the deficit.

The BBC is the only media organisation in Britain whose pension fund is a member of the Institutional Investors Group on  Climate Change, which has more than 50 members across Europe.

Its chairman is Peter Dunscombe, also the BBC’s Head of Pensions Investment.

Prominent among its recent campaigns was a call for a “strong and binding” global agreement on climate change – one that fell on deaf ears after the UN climate summit in Copenhagen failed to reach agreement on emissions targets and a cut in greenhouse gases.

Read more in The Sunday Express: £8BN BBC ECO-BIAS

Related  1st February 2010 CRN post: BBC Pension Funds Linked to Climate Policy

At best, this is a wild exaggeration, unsupported by any scientific research, referenced only to a report produced by a Canadian advocacy group, written by an obscure Moroccan academic who specialises in carbon trading, citing references which do not support his claims.

Unlike the glacier claim, which was confined to a section of the technical Working Group II report, this “50 percent by 2020″ claim forms part of the key Synthesis Report, the production of which was the personal responsibility of the chair of the IPCC, Dr R K Pachauri. It has been repeated by him in many public fora. He, therefore, bears a personal responsibility for the error.

In this lengthy post, we examine the nature and background of this latest debacle, which is now under investigation by IPCC scientists and officials.

Read the entire article at EU Referendum: And now Africagate by Richard North

See also The Sunday Times: Top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility

The saga then continues at EU Referendum:

No sooner is the Africagate piece up then Bishop Hill comments on it. That brings up further comments which identify this article from the National Geographic News.

Confirming the observations of the Tunisian government in its “initial national communication”, the National Geographic article is headed: “Sahara Desert Greening Due to Climate Change?” It states that, contrary to the picture painted of “desertification, drought, and despair “, emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent.

Scientists, we are told, are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall. If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities. Furthermore, it seems, this desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago.

Crucially, much of this relies on work done in 2005, when a team led by Reindert Haarsma of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute in De Bilt, the Netherlands, forecast significantly more future rainfall in the Sahel. The study in Geophysical Research Letters predicted that rainfall in the July to September wet season would rise by up to two millimeters a day by 2080.

Haarsma now says that satellite confirms that during the last decade, the Sahel is indeed becoming more green. Nevertheless, as one might expect, climate scientists don’t agree on how future climate change will affect the Sahel: Some studies simulate a decrease in rainfall. “This issue is still rather uncertain,” Haarsma says.

Max Planck’s Claussen says North Africa is the area of greatest disagreement among climate change modellers. Forecasting how global warming will affect the region is complicated by its vast size and the unpredictable influence of high-altitude winds that disperse monsoon rains, Claussen adds. “Half the models follow a wetter trend, and half a drier trend.”

That precisely reflects the uncertainty projected by Professor Conway and others, and completely contradicts the doom-laden certainty offered by Dr Pachauri and his IPCC colleagues. More to the point, since Haarsma was carrying out his studies in 2005, when the IPCC was in the throes of writing up the Fourth Assessment Report, it could or should have been aware of the work.

Instead, it relies on a secondary source written by an obscure Moroccan academic, and published by an advocacy group, which did not even accurately reflect its own primary sources. Yet, it takes bloggers to bring this to the fore, and more bloggers to expand and develop the theme. In the free (and rapid exchange of information and ideas) it is us who are most closely approaching the scientific ideal.

This is, of course, why we are winning the intellectual argument. The political battle, though, has yet to come.

EU Referendum: The beauties of blogging

As a climate change agnostic – and I suspect most of us are, especially now, and more especially after the Guardian series this week – I’ve been bothered by two aspects of the argument. The first is the religious overtone. Humankind has always wanted to blame its own behaviour for natural events, whether Noah’s flood, plagues of frogs, or volcanos which demonstrate that the gods are angry.

Three years ago a British bishop announced that gay marriage had caused our floods. I’ve often wondered whether global warming is another example of this, an irrational belief designed for a rationalist world.

And there is an element of religious faith in the true believers. Those who disagree are “deniers”, with its echo of fanatics who don’t believe in the Holocaust. Years ago I saw a sceptic howled down at a British Association meeting; scientists shouldn’t behave like that. If people disagree with you they might not be morally wrong, or agents of Satan. (Or big oil, as the believers often claim.) This ties in with my second worry. Clearly many believers have played fast and loose with the data: since what they believe is true beyond doubt, they have a right – no, a moral duty – to suppress any evidence that might contradict them.

Years ago I cowrote a book, Bizarre Beliefs, about various crazy things people believe in, such as astrology, the Bermuda Triangle and spiritualism. Most of them generated vast amounts of data from which believers simply cherry-picked whatever suited their case. The world’s climate produces millions upon millions of facts and figures, and it’s very easy to select the ones that suit you and ignore all the rest.

Of course I don’t know who’s right. But I’m not surprised to see the true believers struggling.

Read more in The Guardian: Is climate change the new faith?