Articles Tagged "Andrew Montford"
Wednesday, March 13th 2013, 10:00 AM EDT
This message from FOIA was forwarded to me. (Andrew Montford)
It's time to tie up loose ends and dispel some of the speculation surrounding the Climategate affair.
Indeed, it's singular "I" this time. After certain career developments I can no longer use the papal plural ;-)
If this email seems slightly disjointed it's probably my linguistic background and the problem of trying to address both the wider audience (I expect this will be partially reproduced sooner or later) and the email recipients (whom I haven't decided yet on).
The "all.7z" password is [redacted]
DO NOT PUBLISH THE PASSWORD. Quote other parts if you like.
Releasing the encrypted archive was a mere practicality. I didn't want to keep the emails lying around.
I prepared CG1 & 2 alone. Even skimming through all 220.000 emails would have taken several more months of work in an increasingly unfavorable environment.
Dumping them all into the public domain would be the last resort. Majority of the emails are irrelevant, some of them probably sensitive and socially damaging.
views 69,135
Saturday, March 9th 2013, 6:15 AM EST
The Lindzen debate at the Oxford Union was, I think, a rather significant moment in the climate debate. One in which sceptic views got a fair hearing in an open debate. Lindzen was to be accompanied by a panel of invited experts consisting of David Rose, Mark Lynas and Myles Allen. Part 1 was an interview of Lindzen with interjections from the panel, while part 2 opened up the debate to the floor.
A few of us sceptics - Josh, Tallbloke, David Holland and others had met up beforehand and I think it's fair to say that we all expected little from the evening. Mehdi Hasan, the left-wing journalist who was to compere the event had been using the d-word a couple of evenings ago and had said he wasn't a neutral. This didn't bode well. In the event he ran through the gamut of "questions you ask sceptics" - denialism, big oil funding and do on - and in a way that was quite aggressive (but not unfairly so), but I think it fair to say that didn't go the way he expected. I should add that Hasan's handling of the Q&A was exemplary.
Lindzen's laid-back style does not make for good TV and I think Hasan and the TV people might have wished for a more flamboyant figure. However, it does lend him an air of authority and many of the barbs from the chair seemed to simply bounce off Lindzen's avuncular force-field.
The debate was very wide-ranging, covering everything from peer review to climate sensitivity to Milankovitch cycles to policy matters and US libel laws. Lindzen certainly knows his stuff and there was nothing that threw him and only a couple of moments when his quiet calm seemed disturbed.
views 46,694
Tuesday, November 13th 2012, 5:41 AM EST
Maurizio Morabito has obtained the details of the BBC climate 28. It had been published by the International Broadcasting Trust.
Greenpeace, Tearfund, Television for the Environment (one of the companies involved in the BBC free programming scandal), Stop Climate Chaos, Npower Renewables, E3G, and dear old Mike Hulme from UEA. Just the group you’d want guiding climate change coverage. Read the whole thing.
[For those who don't know what this is about, read the back story here.]
Read also:
BREAKING: The ‘secret’ list of the BBC 28 is now public – let’s call it ‘TwentyEightGate’ - Anthony Watts
views 35,673
Thursday, November 1st 2012, 4:30 AM EDT
Over a year left to listen Duration: 28 minutes First broadcast:Wednesday 31 October 2012
Climategate was the term quickly applied in 2009 to the mysterious appearance on the internet of large numbers of emails and documents belonging to some of the world's leading climate scientists.
This happened just a month before the Copenhagen climate change conference, which failed to meet the expectations of many for agreement on international action. The timing may not be coincidental.
views 32,894
Sunday, July 8th 2012, 6:46 AM EDT
SIR – In your special report on the Arctic (“The melting north”, June 16th) you said polar bears are “struggling” and it is “nonsense” that they are thriving. Anything other than a cursory reading of the data shows no such thing.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates, polar bear numbers are at least twice as high as in the 1960s. Of the eight populations said to be decreasing, the official data table and map produced by the Polar Bear Specialist Group shows that two are only “thought” or “believed” to be declining entirely due to hunting; four are in decline only according to computer models, despite some claims by “traditional ecological knowledge” (ie, locals) that they are thriving; one has more than doubled but is now said to be “currently declining” because of crowding; and one showed a real decline that has recently been reversed. Meanwhile, the four populations you described as unknown include the huge Barents Sea population, which has seen dramatic increase in sightings, damage to huts and devastation of barnacle goose colonies on the west coast of Svalbard, all prima facie evidence of “thriving”. There is a strong smell of “policy-based evidence making” here.
Since the 1970s the population of white whales around Svalbard has increased, as have walrus and barnacle geese numbers. Protection from hunting has had, and is likely to have, a much bigger impact on Arctic wildlife than climate trends.
Matt Ridley
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Andrew Montford
Milnathort, Kinross-shire
Benny Peiser
London
views 26,686
Thursday, November 22nd 2012, 10:30 AM EST
The 28gate seminar’s finding that global warming science is settled and that “due balance” requires dissenting views to be seen and heard less is insidious. In this post I’m going to try to set out why.
What is the consensus? That carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas? Yup. That man’s activities are increasing carbon dioxide levels? Certainly. That temperatures went up at the end of the twentieth century and have not gone up since? Definitely. That human beings can affect the climate? Without a shadow of doubt.
Anything else? I don’t think so. Even simple questions like whether observed temperature rises are anything out of the ordinary remain hugely controversial. The extent to which mankind has affected and will affect temperatures is likewise unknown, a great amphitheatre of ignorance dimly illuminated by a handful of aged CFLs – the climate models that scientists have pinned their hopes on – and little else. That these models are wrong is not in doubt – all models are wrong after all – but how wrong and how useful they are as tools to guide public policy is just another mystery. How can there possibly be consensus in these circumstances?
The impacts of climate change and the economics of climate change and policy responses to climate change are likewise entirely up in the air, with new hypotheses flown every day and shot down every evening and a mishmash of often contradictary empirical observations lending colour to the chaos. A glance tells you that there is no consensus.
views 23,065
Wednesday, November 28th 2012, 11:00 AM EST
Institutional Bias’ on sale today for only £0.99 ($1.60)
Shock new email revelations show that since 2007 senior members of the UK’s prestigious Institute of Physics (IoP) cynically locked down any debate about man-made global warming. Now seasoned writer, Andrew Montford, draws on hundreds of leaked emails exposing how a clique of Big Green activists hijacked one of Britain’s most venerated institutions to shamelessly promote a one-sided version of the hottest environmental issue.
In his startling new pamphlet, ‘Institutional Bias’ Montford lays out the evidence selected from a vast body of leaked internal emails. Two whistleblower insiders were the source, Peter F. Gill, formerly the chairman of the IoP’s Energy Group and Terri Jackson (MSc Mphil), former science adviser to Northern Ireland’s First Minister, Rev. Ian Paisley and Founder of the IOP’s Energy Group.
The incredible correspondence details a conspiracy to silence any and all dissent challenging the alarmist mantra of human-induced climate change. Self-serving senior figures within the IoP are shown to have harassed and harangued every attempt for a grassroots debate among members over the global warming controversy.
Montford, a well-respected figure on the skeptic side of the debate and author of the best seller ‘The Hockey Stick Illusion,’ the book that exposed climatologist, Michael Mann’s iconic ‘hockey stick’ graph, is damning in his assessment of this fiasco. Montford argues the leaked emails prove, “The voice of the membership is increasingly being silenced, with headquarters staff having arranged to abolish the annual representatives meeting, at which grievances had formerly been aired.”
views 19,629
Thursday, July 19th 2012, 11:11 AM EDT
I'm off to Edinburgh in a short while. I'm due to appear on the Jeremy Vine show (around 12:30). George Monbiot and I will be discussing the recent wet weather.
(I'm not sure how the invitation fits with the Jones report and its conclusions on sceptics appearing on the airwaves. No doubt outrage will ensue.)
Update on Jul 18, 2012 by Bishop Hill
Click source link below (for UK listeners) Fast Forward to about 33 mins.
H/T
bishophill.squarespace.com
views 17,823
Friday, March 9th 2012, 2:36 PM EST
The evidence for the abandonment of the Society’s core tenet of faith is compellingly presented in Andrew Montford’s recent hard-hitting report, ‘Nullius in Verba (On the Word of No One): The Royal Society and Climate Change’. As leading climate scientist Richard Lindzen(2) observes in the introduction, the report delivers an “unembellished chronology of the perversion not only of the Royal Society but of science itself.” No small accusation given the influence the Royal Society continues to wield with the UK Government – not to mention the UN IPCC.
views 17,175
Thursday, March 29th 2012, 2:36 PM EDT
It should be welcomed that the Met Office is engaging with critics of climate science.
We hear a lot these days about the need for scientists – particularly climate scientists – to engage more with the public and better communicate their findings. Without such dialogue, their work can be misunderstood or, worse, misrepresented. Just saying, "I let my science do the talking", no longer cuts it in the rough'n'tumble world in which we now live of cherry-picked soundbites, online echo chambers, and bruising culture wars. Scientists need to not only explain their work, but defend it, too.
I think we should applaud the fact, then, that there now appears to be more of what I call "Rapunzel" scientists; those that choose to (metaphorically, at least) let down their long hair and allow us to climb up into their ivory tower to converse with them and to see how they operate. Many scientists now publish their own blogs and an increasing number are taking to Twitter.
A good example is Professor Richard Betts, a climate scientist who is head of the climate impacts research team at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter and a lead author on both the 4th and 5th Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in Working Groups 1 and 2. By being positioned at the heart of both the Met Office and the IPCC, he is a scientist placed very much under the scrutiny of climate sceptics.
But rather than defensively pull up the drawbridge, he routinely posts explanatory comments on blogs that are hostile to climate science and engages in debates on Twitter with sceptics.
views 14,162
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