A Johnsonian Blog: by Professor Philip Stott

Why Scientists Do Not Talk to Journalists

Mon, 8 Feb 2010 17:24:06 +0000

Guilt by association - the classic Association Fallacy [Fallacy Map created by Benedict Spearritt, reproduced under the GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.2].

“It is because of this lazy reporting and repeating of memes that I refuse to talk to any newspaper journalist including Paul Bignell of the ‘Independent on Sunday’.” [The scientist, Paul Dennis, in response to an attempt to smear him by association in the ‘Independent on Sunday’ article (February 7 ), entitled: ‘“Think-tanks take oil money and use it to fund climate deniers”’.

There is nothing angrier than a scientist scorned, or misreported, or misrepresented. I am often asked why so few scientists are willing to appear in the media. There are a number of reasons, of course, including career pressure and a general lack of confidence in the public communication of science, but, unquestionably, one of the most significant is that many practising scientists simply do not trust reporters one micron, even when the journalist appears to be on their side. Journalists are perceived to have little interest in reporting the complexities and uncertainties of the science, and to be out to distort, or to cherry-pick, what the scientist states merely to obtain a ‘good’ story, or one that fits the current media fashion.

Yesterday, we witnessed a classic, and, in my opinion, entirely justified, angry response from one scientist, namely Paul Dennis, Head of the Stable Isotope and Noble Gas Geochemistry Laboratories, Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia (UEA), with respect to an article published in the Independent on Sunday [February 7], in which Dennis was clearly smeared by that old journalist trick of guilt by association:

“Speakers at the event [a Meeting of the world's leading climate sceptics held in New York last March (2009), and called "Global Warming: Was It Ever Really a Crisis?"] also included two prominent climate bloggers who associate with Paul Dennis, a 54-year-old climate researcher at the University of East Anglia who has been questioned by police investigating the theft of climate data.

In a posting on the blog of the climate sceptic Andrew Montford on Friday, Mr Dennis insisted: ‘I did not leak any files, data, emails or any other material. I have no idea how the files were released or who was behind it.’

But he confirmed that he had been in email contact with Stephen McIntyre, who runs climateaudit.org - a site that was one of the first to receive an anonymous link to the original leaked data from UEA.”

“Hm!”

The Riposte

Paul Dennis has now responded with entirely understandable vigour at Independent Minds, the online community dedicated to the discussion of issues surrounding the Independent newspaper’s topical news area. Dennis writes [I have edited this very slightly for clarity]:

“I am growing tired of the lazy, careless and vacuous journalism that seeks to smear by insinuation ...

... I don't know what the Independent is trying to insinuate but to me ‘associate’ in this context strikes of conspiracy, subterfuge etc.

A few minutes checking archives would have revealed that my association is that I have written several comments relating to isotope geochemistry and how it may be used to determine past climates at several websites, including climate audit, WUWT, and Air Vent. I am passionate about the public understanding of science and making my science accessible to others. One way, in this modern age, is to engage in blogs [“Well said, Sir!”]. A little more research might have shown the journalists that I also hold some small grants to enable me to develop science education programmes that involve schools in some of my research and that are also to develop 'open notebook' science methods in teaching and research. For those who are unaware open notebook science is the complete publishing of lab notebooks on the web, raw data, successful and unsuccessful experiments, comments etc. It is the laying out of the genesis of ideas, development of hypotheses and tests, the experimental approach through to interpretation, write up, publication. In addition my laboratory is completely open to anyone who would like to visit and see how we use isotope geochemistry as a tool to understanding natural processes.

I have never met any of the bloggers referred to in the article. I sent Jeff Id a copy of an important paper I wrote with colleagues on climate at the southern end of the Antarctic Peninsula, which by the way showed a strong warming. I wrote to Steve McIntyre once to invite him to give a seminar, and I also wrote to ask if he was aware of anything on the web that could have been hacked from UEA computers. Attempts to paint me a ‘denier’ (see the article headline are way clear of the mark and I take it very much as an insult).

It is because of this lazy reporting and repeating of memes that I refuse to talk to any newspaper journalist including Paul Bignell of the Independent on Sunday.”

My Complete Sympathy

I have complete sympathy for Paul Dennis. We may not agree on everything to do with climate change, but I know exactly how he must feel, and he is precisely the type of scientist we need to promote a better public understanding of difficult scientific research. Sadly, it is just such crass and cheap reporting that is helping to close down much-needed openness in science.

For years, unscrupulous journalists and activists have been equally desperate to ‘associate’ me with ‘Living Marxism’, or ‘Big Tobacco’, or ‘Big Oil’, or ‘Big GM’, or some right-wing pressure group. They just could not cope with the fact that, although a strong critic of ‘global warming’, I have voted Labour all my life, I am passionately anti-smoking, I have never taken a penny from ‘Big Oil’ or ‘Big GM’, and I didn’t even know what ‘Living Marxism’ was until pretty recently! I have never forgotten one particular interview I did for Sky News, when, immediately after I had finished speaking, an agitated producer phoned, desperate to find out which oil company funded my research. The disbelief, and horror, in his voice when I replied, “I have no contacts whatsoever with oil companies”, was palpable.

Gutter Journalism

I suspect that Paul Dennis and I share a characteristic: a fierce independence, and an openness to make up our own minds about the science. Sadly, it seems that some journalists find this to be totally beyond their seedy grasp.

Instead, they all too readily resort to smearing by association, which is not only, as Dennis correctly points out, “lazy journalism”, it is also distasteful, and the more journalists do this, the less scientists, of all ilks, will feel able to trust them.

The Independent claims to be a serious newspaper, a ‘heavyweight’, one above the tabloid herd. Yet, as Andrew Montford has trenchantly observed at his influential Bishop Hill blog in: “Paul Dennis responds to the Indy”:

“The Independent is exhibiting the worst kind of gutter journalism and seems incapable of understanding that it is possible to believe in manmade global warming while having an abhorrence of secret data, withheld code and all the shenanigans of journal nobbling and publication gatekeeping that seem to be a feature of Hockey Team science.”

Two Fallacies

Guilt by association is a classic inductive formal fallacy [picture], which asserts that the qualities of one thing or person are actually the qualities of another simply by an irrelevant association.

Regrettably, journalists also fall for a second fallacy by failing to understand that: “The truth value of a message is not dependent on the messenger.”

Unfortunately, this is all somewhat of a disaster for the successful public communication of science, but especially for reasoned debate around the topic of ‘global warming’.

And, as I have mentioned already, it is a prime reason why so few scientists will ever speak to the media.

Who’s for the Chop?

Sun, 7 Feb 2010 17:26:15 +0000

George Grossmith as Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, in the first performance of ‘The Mikado or, The Town of Titipu’, at the Savoy Theatre, London, 1885.

Oh dear! As global warming fanaticism wanes in the Town of Titipu, Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, is on the warpath for likely customers. So, whom then has Ko-Ko in mind for the chop? Here is his famous list:

"As someday it may happen that a victim must be found"

The tune is available HERE (courtesy of Boise State University)

Ko-Ko

As someday it may happen that global warmin’ bites the dust,
I’ve got a little list - I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders whom I’d really love to bust,
And who never would be missed - who never would be missed!
There’s the banker who sells carbon to any who will buy -
All ranters who do lecture but then still go on to fly -
And climate chiefs who drive a mile within their limousine -
An’ politicos with heated pools, and Charles with train of steam -
The marketers of CSC and windmills where they twist -
They’d none of ‘em be missed - they’d none of ‘em be missed!

Chorus

He’s got ‘em on the list - he’s got ‘em on the list;
And they’ll none of ‘em be missed - they’ll none of ‘em be missed!

Ko-Ko

Those dim and dingy light bulbs, with mercury at the core,
And hempen spun for pants - I’ve got them on the list!
And all self-righteous young’uns, who criticise your fridge,
They never would be missed - they never would be missed!
Then the idiot who discounts, with enthusiastic tone,
Every form of energy we need to heat the home;
The European Union with its love of biofuels,
That votes for carbon capping, just like a ship of fools;
And that singular anomaly, the eco-journalist -
I don’t think he’d be missed - I’m sure he’d not be missed!

Chorus

He’s got him on the list - he’s got him on the list;
And I don’t think he’ll be missed - I’m sure he’ll not be missed!

Ko-Ko

And the lazy TV luvvies who show us all the time
Polar bears on melting ice - I’ve got them on the list!
All smokin’ chimneys, hot exhausts, and weeping teddy bears -
They’d none of ‘em be missed - they’d none of ‘em be missed.
An’ all those interviewers of the snooty biased kind,
Such as - “I’m so Green!” - “PC too!”, and likewise - “Never Mind!”
And “Tut, Tut, Tut!” - “Your Carbon Foot”, an’ “Recycle-All-The-Time” -
The Milibands, and Albert G., Ms Lucas, and the rest.
But it really doesn’t matter whom you put upon the list,
They’d none of ‘em be missed - they’d none of ‘em be missed!

Chorus

You may put ‘em on the list - you may put ‘em on the list;
And they’ll none of ‘em be missed - they’ll none of ‘em be missed!”

The End
[With deep apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan]

Blows upon a Bruise

Sun, 7 Feb 2010 11:55:30 +0000

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies/But in battalions” [Claudius, ‘Hamlet’, Act IV, Scene V]

This Sunday may prove to be one of the more important in the collapse of the Global Warming Grand Narrative, newspaper after newspaper striking blow upon blow as the already bruised science, economics and politics totter before a near-perfect storm. I thought it might thus be useful to place on record just a few of the main stories of the day:

+ “How Met Office blocked questions on its own man's role in 'hockey stick' climate row” [Mail on Sunday]

“The Meteorological Office is blocking public scrutiny of the central role played by its top climate scientist in a highly controversial report by the beleaguered United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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.”

And the damning final line: “Despite repeated requests, the MoD and Met Office failed to comment.”

+ “New errors in IPCC climate change report” [The Telegraph on Sunday]

“The publication of inaccurate data on the potential of wave power to produce electricity around the world, which was wrongly attributed to the website of a commercial wave-energy company.

Claims based on information in press releases and newsletters.

New examples of statements based on student dissertations, two of which were unpublished.

More claims which were based on reports produced by environmental pressure groups.

They are the latest in a series of damaging revelations about the IPCC’s most recent report, published in 2007.

Last month, the panel was forced to issue a humiliating retraction after it emerged statements about the melting of Himalayan glaciers were inaccurate.”

+ “Top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility” [The Sunday Times]

News of yet more blunders: “The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim.”

+ “Nigel Lawson: if climate change is real, we must adapt, not fight Nature” [The Sunday Express]

“The collapse of the Copenhagen summit was largely because China and India, quite rightly, are saying they will not pursue these policies.

Since the particular policy which this country and others are committed to only could make sense, even if you believed it did, in the context of a global agreement, that completely kiboshes it anyway. When we had this great G20 meeting in London, what they were trying to do was find how they could work together to get out of this recession. If they really believed that the most important thing in the whole world was curbing the growth of carbon emissions, surely they would have had a meeting about how they can prolong the recession?”

+ “£8BN BBC ECO-BIAS” [The Sunday Express]

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

+ “Climate scepticism grows among Tories” [The Observer]

“Most Conservative MPs, including at least six members of the shadow cabinet, are sceptical about their party's continued focus on climate change policies, it has been claimed.

The recent furore around ‘Climategate’ has hardened the views of Tory MPs, many of whom were already unconvinced by the scientific consensus, and has led to increasing calls for the issue to be pushed down the priority list.

Tim Montgomerie, founder and editor of the ConservativeHome website, said climate change had the potential to be as divisive for the party as Europe once was. ‘You have got 80% or 90% of the party just not signed up to this. No one minded at the beginning, but people are starting to realise this could be quite expensive, so opinion is hardening.’”

[In the light of my earlier comment on the Tories, this is interesting, but not unexpected.]

For more in The Observer, see my last posting here: then, even The Indy gets in on the act with Leading article: “Sceptics have their uses” [Independent on Sunday]

“The climate change sceptics have done us all a favour. This may seem a curious view for a newspaper so committed to the cause of environmental sustainability. But, by challenging the consensus view of global warming, the sceptics have tested the flabbier assumptions of that consensus and forced the proponents of the majority view to sharpen their arguments.”

+ And, just to finish with a laugh, this lovely cartoon, The great global warming collapse, and article from Canada’s The Global and Mail.

Have a splendid Sunday luncheon. A few toasts today, I think ... “Now, I wish we had a bottle of Petrus around!”

Why The Observer is Wrong

Sun, 7 Feb 2010 10:01:27 +0000

Today, The Observer hosts a vitriolic ‘Debate’ [pp.28 - 29] between its long-standing Science Editor, Robin McKie, and Dr. Benny Peiser, Director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). The fact that this newspaper is now holding a debate is in itself indicative of the media change with respect to ‘global warming’, and I congratulate Dr. Peiser on being willing to enter the lion’s den. However, and perhaps inevitably, the debate is then followed by a highly-predictable Observer ‘Comment’ [p.34].

Nevertheless, this ‘Comment’ is more intriguing than Robin McKie’s aggressive debating stance, because, unfortunately for The Observer, it inadvertently reveals precisely why its arguments are fallacious:

“But deniers deal not in the balance of risk but the exposure of uncertainty. Tiny doubts on the periphery of the case, they say, undermine the whole story, banishing the threat.”

This could not be farther from the truth. Indeed, it is somewhat ironic that The Observer should claim this when Dr. Peiser, Mr. McKie’s nemesis, is, in part, a social anthropologist of risk, who wisely responds in one of his exchanges as follows:

“You ask whether I doubt that global warming poses a potential risk. Of course it does. So do asteroid impacts, nuclear warfare and ice ages, to name just a few. What these potential risks have in common is that they have a low probability but a high impact. Just because we cannot rule out any of these risks doesn't mean that there is a need for panic measures.”

The Attempt To Make Global Warming A Cost-Benefit Zero Has Failed

Part of the visceral anger of people like Robin McKie is that their goose has been cooked. For some 20 years now, there has been a ruthless, and at times disgraceful, attempt to make ‘global warming’ a zero in any cost-benefit analysis with regards to political and economic actions relating to climate change, which would mean that there is no balancing of risks at all, but simply the one risk of ‘global warming’. This fundamental flaw was first brilliantly exposed by none other than Bjørn Lomborg [right] in his devastating The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, which appeared as early as 2001. The fury heaped on Lomborg was inevitably proportional to the threat that his arguments posed to the ‘Green’ agenda over this key issue. He had exposed the true agenda for what it was.

Today, many more people are fully aware of this fatal weakness, and newspapers like The Observer, despite their continued bluster, can no longer hide the fact that the ‘global warming’ risk has to be balanced against many other competing risks, not to mention against the serious risk to the world economy, and to the poor, posed by precipitate and ill-judged political and economic actions. This is why Robin McKie, The Observer, and their ilk are growing increasingly desperate to maintain a zero status for ‘global warming’. It is also precisely why Dr. Peiser - “the sceptic” - presents a far more reasoned and nuanced analysis of risk:

“I am not advocating political inaction. Far from it. While I reject economically damaging and, for that reason, politically unattainable climate policies, I am in favour of adapting to a changing climate and making our societies more resilient, as mankind has throughout its existence.”

Risk And Science

The Observer and Robin McKie are just plain wrong. They are also wrong with respect to risk when we specifically address the science. There can be no predictable outcomes for fiddling at the margins with one single human factor in a system such as climate, the most complex, coupled, non-linear, semi-chaotic known. What climate will Mr. McKie and The Observer produce for us? And, won’t it change when we get there, in any case? They can have no idea.

No, The Observer and Robin McKie are deeply, even naively, misguided.

Scepticism and risk assessment go together naturally; faith, by contrast, is an absolute definition of risk, and one appropriate in neither science nor economics.

The Day of the Blogger: the Fifth Estate Comes into its Own

Thu, 4 Feb 2010 09:48:36 +0000

In a major article in today’s ‘The Spectator’, Matt Ridley identifies the Watts Up With That? web site [picture], founded in November 2006 by a former Californian television weather forecaster, Anthony Watts, as one of the major new forces wresting legitimacy from both the mainstream media and even mainstream science in the ‘global warming’ debate. The BBC’s Roger Harrabin then comes in, right on cue, with pertinent observations about the future of the IPCC.

Today should be an uncomfortable one for both the so-called mainstream media and for so-called mainstream science. Two extremely significant comment pieces have just appeared, both indicating a partial transfer of legitimacy to the Blogoshpere, which we may increasingly come to regard as the citizens’ Fifth Estate.

Matt Ridley On The Vital Role Of Bloggers

The first article, by Matt Ridley, one of our finest science writers, is the main cover story [right] in this week’s issue of The Spectator magazine. It is entitled ‘The global warming guerrillas’, and I suspect that it may well become an important document in both the history of science and the story of science reporting in the media. In his seminal analysis, Matt argues that it is the bloggers who have changed the climate debate, while most of Fleet Street has uncritically kowtowed to the ‘green’ lobby. The mainstream media has left the real job of investigative journalism and reporting to the online amateurs, who have uncovered the spin and deception that will finally crack the artificially-contrived ‘consensus’. Matt goes on to say that the mainstream media have been left playing catch up. He further points out that this pattern is not new to journalism, but that journalists can no longer get away with it, above all because of the democratic internet:

“Of course, reporters have been going native for decades. The difference is that they cannot now get away with it. When acid rain was all the rage in the 1980s, I was a science editor and I relayed all sorts of cataclysmic predictions from scientists and greens about its effect on forests. (Stern magazine said in 1984 that a third of Germany’s forests were already dead or dying and that experts believed all - all! - its conifers would be gone by 1990.) Today, we know that these predictions were wildly wrong and that far from dying out, forests in Germany, Sweden and North America actually thrived during that decade. I should have been more sceptical.

Yet, this time round, despite 20 years of being told they were not just factually but morally wrong, of being compared to Holocaust deniers, of being told they deserved to be tried for crimes against humanity, of being avoided at parties, climate sceptics seem to be growing in number and confidence by the day. What is the difference? In a word, the internet.”

Matt is scathing about the defensive and slow response of the mainstream media to the breaking news of ‘Climategate’, noting a sequence that I have already explored in two postings on this blog [here and here]:

“When Climategate broke, the mainstream media, like knights facing archers at Crécy, mostly ran dismissive pieces reflecting the official position of the Consensus. For example, they dutifully repeated the line that the University of East Anglia’s global temperature record was vindicated by two other ‘entirely independent’ records (from Nasa and NOAA), which was bunk: all three records draw from the same network of weather stations. Editors then found - by reading and counting the responses on their blog pages - that there was huge and educated interest in Climategate among their readers. One by one they took notice and unleashed their sniffing newshounds at last: the Daily Express went first, then the Mail and the Sunday Times, last week the Times and this week even the Guardian.”

Yet, even more significantly, Matt notes that the bloggers have not only held the mainstream media to account, they have also thrown down the gauntlet to mainstream science itself:

“‘It seems inconceivable to the commentariat,’ says Andrew Orlowski of the online newspaper of the IT industry, the Register, ‘that scientists have prejudices too, and that the publication process (peer review) is not some Kitemark of quality but is vulnerable to being hijacked.’ Chip Knappenberger, who blogs at masterresource.org, believes the rise of blogs as repositories of scientific knowledge will continue if the scientific literature becomes guarded and exclusive. ‘I can only anticipate this as throwing the state of science and the quest for scientific understanding into disarray.’”

Enter Stage Left The BBC’s Roger Harrabin

At the very end of his piece, Matt challenges Aunty itself, the good old BBC, with a throw-away hope: “Who knows, one day even BBC News may ask tough questions.”

And, right on cue, here comes the BBC environment correspondent, Roger Harrabin [left], with a second major comment, ‘Reforming the IPCC climate body’, in his Series called Harrabin’s Notes.

In this piece, Roger makes a number of worthwhile points, some of which do indeed chime in remarkably with Matt’s trenchant analysis. Three observtaions are especially noteworthy.

First, Roger highlights the extraordinary defensiveness of some of the IPCC scientists in the face of the new world order:

“The co-chairs who oversaw WGII [Working Group 2 on Impacts] have served their term. They were the British scientist Professor Martin Parry and Argentinian meteorologist Dr Osvaldo Canziani.

Professor Parry has repeatedly refused to answer my questions about the genesis of the errors, and his out-of-office assistant now says he is travelling for a month.”

Secondly, Roger rightly focuses his piece on the problems of reforming the IPCC:

“China is demanding that future IPCC reports contain ‘sceptical’ points of view, which will go some way to satisfying complaints from sceptics that their views are brushed under the carpet in the name of consensus. It will be hard to resist this demand; but if granted, it will place more onus on the main authors of the report to draw up a synthesis of opinions and explain why they favour one over another.”

Yet, thirdly, and perhaps most significantly in the light of Matt Ridley’s analysis, Roger - a BBC man remember - admits that bloggers will have to have a role in any future IPCC:

“But, for all its frequent vitriol and false accusations, the blogosphere has been proven at least partially right on occasions. Any future iteration of the IPCC will have to find a way of taking the serious bloggers seriously.”

So, as Matt devoutly hoped, some parts of the BBC are indeed beginning to ask some of the right - some of the “tough” - questions.

The Day Of The Blogger

I believe this to be a pivotal day. It has been coming for some time, but, as ever, it has taken a seminal piece of writing to bring the necessary focus.

As I said earlier, Matt Ridley’s article could well become a classic in pin-pointing the moment when the democratic internet wrested elements of legitimacy from both the mainstream media and from science itself.

This is truly the Day of the Blogger. It is precisely why I have blogged: “to ensure that the mainstream media cannot exclude critical voices which deserve to be heard.”

It now appears that bloggers are becoming a Fifth Estate, a new, and vital, balance in the realm of politics, correcting and curbing the failures and excesses of the Fourth Estate, the press, which is too frequently subservient to the forces of the State, and of their wealthy, and often ruthless, proprietors.

This is why it is absolutely necessary that the internet remains free and open to all. This is why some newspapers need to apologise, such as The Times for its shameful editorial on “village idiots”. Above all, this is why Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband should be ashamed of, and apologise for, their recent attacks on the critics of climate-change science.

Some Stern Words for the Tories

Wed, 3 Feb 2010 10:04:09 +0000

"If a student of mine were to hand in this report [the ‘Stern Review’] as a Masters thesis, perhaps if I were in a good mood I would give him a 'D' for diligence; but more likely I would give him an 'F' for fail. There is a whole range of very basic economics mistakes that somebody who claims to be a Professor of Economics simply should not make. [...] Stern consistently picks the most pessimistic for every choice that one can make. He overestimates through cherry-picking, he double counts particularly the risks and he underestimates what development and adaptation will do to impacts.” [The environmental economist, Dr. Richard S. J. Tol, Research Professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), Dublin, Professor at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, and Associate at Hamburg University. Photo credit: base photo by M. Holland, reproduced here under the Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0 Unported License]

UK politicians rightly fear The Sun newspaper; when it sends out solar flares, they know that the political cycle may well be about to change. It has a magnetic fascination for them, like rabbits before a stoat. I am thus certain that the few Conservative politicians still remaining in Scotland blanched somewhat when they read last Saturday’s Scottish edition over their oats: ‘Inconveniently for the experts, global warming IS a con’:

“THE lies, the untruths, the paranoid statements, the political point-scoring, the abuse of power, the secretive communications and the cover-ups - not to mention the huge cost to the taxpayer.

No, I don't mean the Chilcot Inquiry.

Though let's face it, that liars' convention should have been sponsored by Dulux given the amount of whitewash being used.

Nope. On this occasion my ire has been drawn to the rather inconvenient truths that have been uncovered, or should I say forcibly squeezed, from those whose main purpose in life has been to hysterically overstate the facts on the supposed threat of man-made global warming ...”

Yesterday evening, I suspect that many more Tories, this time throughout Old Blighty, gulped on their G & Ts when they heard the bizarre reports that their Shadow Chancellor, the ‘Boy’ George Osborne [pictured], had blithely announced that one of Gordon Brown's most influential environmental advisers is now to assist a Conservative working group - none other, indeed, than Lord Stern himself [“For it is he!”]. Apparently, the noble Lord would help with the founding of a Green Investment Bank, and ‘Green’ may well be the mot juste. The post-G & T reaction on the Tory blogs was incandescent - here are two classics for you to enjoy later over a pint: ‘Oh no, the Tories are consulting Lord Stern’ and ‘Cameron and his suicidal eco-rats clamber aboard sinking ship’.

This morning, however, things have just got a lot worse for Boy George, as, suddenly, everybody has noticed that Sky News Online is reporting that ‘Climate Change Expert Denies Tory Party Role’:

“Nicholas Stern, a highly influential crossbench [non-party political] peer who has played a key part in creating the Government's global warming policy, says he will be working not just with the Tories, but also with Labour and anyone else who is interested.

‘I should stress that I am not, and have no plans to be, an adviser to any political party,’ Lord Stern said in a statement.”

“Crikey, what a shambles, Lord Snooty! You need to get your chaps in order!” It really is like dealing with the spotty Remove.

Has Lord Snooty’s Sidekick Gone Stark Raving Bonkers, Readers?

So, what has happened to the Tories? Have they taken leave of their senses? Why on earth was Osborne even approaching Lord Stern in the first place?

That big Conservative beast, Lord Lawson, has described the Stern Review as “quite the shoddiest pseudo-scientific and pseudo-economic document any British Government has ever produced”. Only during the last week, it has been alleged that the Review [issued October, 2006] misused important work on risk, and that, post-publication, information had to be excised because it was just plain wrong:

“... it can be revealed that when the report was printed by Cambridge University Press in January 2007, some of these predictions had been watered down because the scientific evidence on which they were based could not be verified.”

Ring any bells! Moreover, the Review has been treated scathingly by key environmental economists, witness the damning quotation from Professor Richard Tol heading this posting. William Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, is likewise critical, particularly with respect to the Review’s low discount rate:

“The Review’s unambiguous conclusions about the need for extreme immediate action will not survive the substitution of discounting assumptions that are consistent with today’s market place. So the central questions about global-warming policy - how much, how fast, and how costly? - remain open.”

Electoral Suicide

But Osborne’s lack of political judgment and timing go even deeper. One cannot believe that the Shadow Chancellor has been so stupid as to make this now seemingly-unfounded pronouncement at the very moment when the Global Warming Narrative is collapsing on every front, political, economic, and scientific; when, in the US, even President Obama is retreating from from the cap-trade bill; when most of his own Tory party are highly critical of the whole ‘global warming’ scenario; when polls show that the public everywhere is increasing in its scepticism; and, when The Sun is once again flaring forth ...

On February 1, that Old Tory trooper, Lord Tebbit of Chingford, writing in the Conservative house rag, The Daily Telegraph, warned that “'Camp Cameron' should worry about the steady erosion of the Tory lead in the polls” - the latest YouGov product has the Conservatives on 38 per cent, down two points on last month. I am sure Tebbit is correct, and I can further warn Boy George that this latest nonsense over Lord Stern will not have helped one iota.

Indeed, Britain is now screaming out for a leading political party that will begin to talk real economic sense on climate change. That way, there might actually be some votes in the topic.

Now, however, it is surely time to get Tory Boy into the Headmaster’s Study for a stern beating -er -talking to [“Very unPC Stotty!”].

“I’m off for commons, chaps!”