Changing Climate

Stephen McIntyre

People that matter is a list of the top 50 people who matter in 2010 according to the New Statesman.  Reaching the list for the first time is Stephen McIntyre who, with his blog Climate Audit, has probably done more than anyone else to challenge shoddy science in the IPCC.  Not unexpectedly, the New Statesman suggests his influence might not be positive, but I suspect the time is not far off when Universities will be offering him honorary degrees.  

(Whilst on the subject of of honorary degrees, I understand McIntyre's co-author Ross McKitrick was proposed for just such an honorary degree at one of the Edinburgh Universities. Perhaps the climate has not changed quite that much yet.)

The Financial Times carried an opinion piece last week-end by Andrew Turnbull, UK Cabinet Secretary from 2002-2005.   I doubt if they would have carried such an article a year ago.   Here is an extract - the whole article is well worth reading.

To restore trust, it was essential that the government, parliament, the University of East Anglia and the Royal Society should respond quickly to get to the truth. They set up three inquiries but did those inquiries resolve the issues? A report by Andrew Montford for the Global Warming Policy Foundation shows serious flaws in the inquiries, which it says were marred by the failure to ensure independence in the panel members; by the refusal to take account of critical views; and by the failure to probe some serious allegations.

Stephan Budiansky is a science commentator.  He suggests the current climate change catastrophists come
as the current manifestation of a long succession of predictors of imminent doom, including

". . . award winner Paul Ehrlich — who in addition to insisting in 1971 that the world had already lost the race to feed an expanding population and that mass starvation in the 1970s and 1980s would cause death rates to soar and world population to collapse to 2 billion, also declared around the same time that because of exposure to cancer-causing chemicals that had already occurred, "the U.S. life expectancy will drop to forty-two years by 1980, due to cancer epidemics." 

Again, the whole article is well worth considering.

Finally, this blog noted that the Australian opposition leader Tony Abbot had set the agenda in the lead up to the election last month.  His repudiation of the emissions trading scheme proposals was one of the key influences on both parties.  In the event, although all that was true, after two weeks of negotiations, the cliffhanger result was resolved in favour of Prime Minister Julie Gillard's Labour Party.