Lord Oxburgh heads CRU Enquiry

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A few more damning details courtesy of Bishop Hill bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/3/24/the-missing-story-of-o.html and The Register www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/24/climategate_oxburgh_globe/

“Lord Oxburgh, a leading proponent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, is to head an investigation into the veracity of the science behind Anthropogenic Global Warming organised by the Royal Society.

But already his appointment has been attacked by climate sceptics, as he has strong business interests in biofuels, is chairman of the wind company Falck Renewables, and a board member of Climate Change Capital, a major investor in carbon credits. Critics say this is enough to ensure his view of the science is biased, and have called for his removal.

Lord Oxburgh, a geologist by training and the former scientific advisor to the Ministry of Defence, was appointed to lead the enquiry into the scientific aspects of the Climategate scandal on Monday. But Oxburgh is also a director of GLOBE, the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment.

GLOBE may be too obscure to merit its own Wikipedia entry, but that belies its wealth and influence. It funds meetings for parliamentarians worldwide with an interest in climate change, and prior to the Copenhagen Summit GLOBE issued guidelines (pdf) for legislators. Little expense is spared: in one year alone, one peer - Lord Michael Jay of Ewelme - enjoyed seven club class flights and hotel accommodation, at GLOBE's expense. There's no greater love a Parliamentarian can give to the global warming cause. And in return, Globe lists Oxburgh as one of 23 key legislators.

Chairman of the board of GLOBE is the Rt Hon Stephen Byers MP. So is Lord Oxburgh just another 'taxi for hire'?

GLOBE's worldwide secretary Elliott Morley and its British branch secretary David Chaytor were two of three MPs to face criminal charges last week. Brent MP Barry Gardiner, co-chairman of the GLOBE Dialogue on Land Use Change & Ecosystems claimed for a second home eight miles from Westminster, and worked the system for £200,000.

In 2007 Lord Oxburgh won a Lifetime Achievement Award from Climate Change Capital. The judges said they were also impressed by ‘his very high ethical standards".



That's alright then! More of the UK Establishment Enquiring into its own peccadilloes.

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Lord Oxburgh, the climate science peer, ‘has a conflict of interest’

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7071751.ece


A member of the House of Lords appointed to investigate the veracity of climate science has close links to businesses that stand to make billions of pounds from low-carbon technology.

Lord Oxburgh is to chair a scientific assessment panel that will examine the published science of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

The CRU has been accused of manipulating and suppressing data to overstate the dangers from climate change. Professor Phil Jones, its director, has stood down from his post while a separate inquiry, chaired by Sir Muir Russell, takes place into the leaking of e-mails sent by him and his colleagues.

Climate sceptics questioned whether Lord Oxburgh, chairman of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association and the wind energy company Falck Renewables, was truly independent because he led organisations that depended on climate change being seen as an urgent problem.

Andrew Montford, a climate-change sceptic who writes the widely-read Bishop Hill blog, said that Lord Oxburgh had a “direct financial interest in the outcome” of his inquiry.

Lord Oxburgh has said that he believes the need to tackle climate change will make capturing carbon from power plants “a worldwide industry of the same scale as the international oil industry today”.

The CCS Association has stated that carbon capture could become a “trillion dollar industry” by 2050, but this would happen only if governments made reducing emissions a top political priority. In an interview in 2007, Lord Oxburgh said that the threat from global warming was so severe that “it may be that we shall need . . . regulations which impose very severe penalties on people who emit more than specified amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere”.

The university appointed Lord Oxburgh, a geologist and former chairman of the Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology, after consulting the Royal Society, of which he is a fellow.

Professor Trevor Davies, the university’s pro-vice-chancellor for research, said that the university had been aware of Lord Oxburgh’s business interests but believed that he would lead the panel of six scientists “in an utterly objective way”. The panel will meet in Norwich next month.

He added: “We all have an interest in seeing alternatives to fossil fuel energy sources. This is going to be an issue for us all in future regardless of climate change.

“The choice of scientists is sure to be the subject of discussion, and experience would suggest that it is impossible to find a group of eminent scientists to look at this issue who are acceptable to every interest group which has expressed a view in the last few months. Similarly it is unlikely that a group of people who have the necessary experience to assess the science, but have formed no view of their own on global warming, could be found.”

He said the scientists has been selected because they had “the right mix of skills to understand the complex nature of climate research and the discipline-based expertise to scrutinise CRU’s research”.

Lord Oxburgh, a former chairman of Shell UK, said: “The shadow hanging over climate change and science more generally at present makes it a matter of urgency that we get on with this assessment. We will undertake this work and report as soon as possible.”

The university expects his report to be published before the summer.


www.parliament.uk/about/podcasts/biofuels/lordoxburgh.cfm

The science of biofuels - Lord Oxburgh, House of Lords


Lord Oxburgh is a renowned scientist and parliamentarian with a keen interest in biofuels as well as a member of the board of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. He explains why "second generation biofuels" - obtained by processing anything from algae to urban garbage - could be where the future of biofuels lies.

This recording is 40 minutes long.

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Just to remind you of ONE of the matters revealed in the Climategate emails mentioned in Lord Oxburgh’s report.

From: Phil Jones <[e-mail]>
To: ray bradley <[e-mail]>,[e-mail], [e-mail]
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: [e-mail],[e-mail]

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers Phil

Here is Lord Oxburgh’s Report
www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/Report+of+the+Science+Assessment+Panel
It is a perfuctory document. It won’t takwe for than a couple of minutes of your time to scan.

Oxburgh states in para 7 page 5

CRU publications repeatedly emphasize the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century, but presentations of this work by the IPCC and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue. While we find this regrettable, we could find no such fault with the peer-reviewed papers we examined.

This is Steve McIntyre’s judgement of that particular para from Lord Oxburgh’s statement:

Without specifically mentioning the famous “trick …to hide the decline”, Oxburgh subsumes the “trick” as “regrettable” “neglect” by “IPCC and others”. But watch the pea under Oxburgh’s thimble. The Oxburgh Report regrettably neglected to highlight the fact that CRU scientists Briffa and Jones, together with Michael Mann, were the IPCC authors responsible for this “regrettable neglect” in the Third Assessment Report. They also regrettably neglected to report that CRU scientist Briffa was the IPCC author responsible for the corresponding section in AR4. Oxburgh pretends that the fault lay with “IPCC and others”, but this pretence is itself a trick. CRU was up to its elbows in the relevant IPCC presentations that “regrettably” “neglected” to show the divergent data in their graphics.
It is also untrue that CRU authors, in their capacity as IPCC authors, “regrettably” “neglected” to show the divergent data in the IPCC graphics. The Climategate emails show that they did so intentionally – see for example IPCC and the Trick, climateaudit.org/2009/12/10/ipcc-and-the-trick/ which show awareness on the part of CRU scientists that showing the decline would “dilute the message” that IPCC wanted to send. The eventual IPCC figure, as reported here on a number of cases, gave a false rhetorical message of the veracity of the proxy reconstructions.....

In this respect, the Oxburgh report is a feeble sleight-of-hand that in effect tries to make the public think that the “trick” was no more than “regrettable” “neglect” by the “IPCC and others” – nothing to do with CRU. In other words, Oxburgh is using a trick to hide the “trick”.

Read more here
climateaudit.org/2010/04/14/oxburghs-trick-to-hide-the-trick/#more-10713

0000000

Fred Singer, in American Thinker states

We know that Jones and his gang largely succeeded in "hiding the decline" of temperature by using what he termed "Mike [Mann]'s trick." Most assume that this refers to CRU tree-ring data after 1960, which do show a decline in temperature. However, I believe that it refers to Michael Mann's "trick" in hiding the fact that his multi-proxy data did not show the expected warming after 1979. So he abruptly cut off his analysis in 1979 and simply inserted the thermometer data supplied by Jones, which do claim a strong temperature increase. Hence the "hockey-stick" graph in his Nature (1998) paper suggesting a sudden major warming period since the late '70s. 

www.americanthinker.com/2010/04/climategate_whitewash.html

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Beddington and the Oxburgh Inquiry
by Steve McIntyre

climateaudit.org/2010/05/19/warming-up-the-oxburgh-inquiry/