Thursday, September 02, 2010

Wake up to global warming - Letters And Emails - Peterborough Today
The world is the hottest it has been for the last million years!
...
Thomas Karl, a prominent climate scientist in the US government, is extremely concerned about our weather.

A few days ago he said he believes there is a strong connection between such events and climate change and that humans are having a major effect.
Die Klimazwiebel: Redefining peer review - again
It is noteworthy that Horton in the above passage says that external pressure is brought to bear on journal editors and that this is entirely normal. On the other hand he speaks of a line being crossed occasionally without making clear what this might be. He refers to a recent case at the Lancet but does not develop criteria for distinguishing ‘normal’ from ‘improper’ interference (when 'a line is crossed'). We can only guess that it might be when ‘non-scientific reasons’ are at play. This begs the question of how to deal with situations where scientists try to block papers from colleagues for reasons of politics, career advancement, or prestige--and how the controversial behaviour around CRU relates to it.
William M. Briggs, Statistician » InterAcademy Council Rebukes IPCC: Pachauri To Resign?
Pachauri’s appointment would have been fine, but he made the mistake of assuming it was based on merit. This delusion caused all the usual symptoms, such as his holding forth idiotically on all sorts of matters of which he had not a clue.

In one recherche episode, Pachauri called another man’s work “voodoo science” because that man’s careful observations on the rate of melting of Himalayan glaciers was not consonant with the rate quoted in the IPCC report. But it turned out that the IPCC’s source for the melting rate was culled from an environmentalist propaganda brochure written by a pal of Pachauri.

So he will resign. But I repeat, this will be no victory because the UN is unlikely to make the same mistake twice. They’ll still appoint a True Believer as boss, but whoever it is will almost certainly be a scientist. The net effect will be a lessening in the comedic output of the IPCC, but that’s about it.

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