Lord Oxburgh - Demigods of science - whiter than white - carbon trading wind farmer

Source: Telegraph; James Delingpole

How Lord Oxburgh of Persil washed the Climategate team whiter than white (pt 2)

Remember how the Climategate scientists did nothing wrong and were – I forget the exact words but this is from memory – “in fact shown to be men of such integrity, brilliance and scientific rigour that frankly they make Sir Isaac Newton look like some really crap alchemist you’ve never heard of who was on the take from his boss and couldn’t even grow a copper sulfate crystal, that’s how rubbish he probably was”? Good. That’s because you’ll have marked, learned and digested well the famous Official Inquiry into the affair conducted by a wind farming carbon trader – with obviously no bias in this matter whatsoever – called Lord Oxburgh.

But now we learn from Bishop Hill that support for a whitewash by Lord Oxburgh’s panel may not have been as unanimous as we previously thought. After putting in an FOI request, he has got hold of some of the panelist’ notes. The ones from Michael Kelly, Prince Philip Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge are particularly illuminating. Steve McIntyre has picked the most damning.

Here is Kelly noting the corruptibility of the peer review process:

(ii) I think it is easy to see how peer review within tight networks can allow new orthodoxies to appear and get established that would not happen if papers were written for and peer reviewed by a wider audience. I have seen it happen elsewhere. This finding may indeed be an important outcome of the present review.

Funny how wind-farming, carbon-trader Lord Oxburgh (did I mention that he was a carbon-trading wind farmer by the way?) found himself unable to agree with that last sentence.

Kelly, an engineer by training and therefore rigorous and good at detecting bull, also recognised the dubiousness of the “science” behind AGW alarmism:

(i) I take real exception to having simulation runs described as experiments (without at least the qualification of ‘computer’ experiments). It does a disservice to centuries of real experimentation and allows simulations output to be considered as real data. This last is a very serious matter, as it can lead to the idea that real ‘real data’ might be wrong simply because it disagrees with the models! That is turning centuries of science on its head.

None of this was even hinted at in the final report, whose most damning conclusion was: “We found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention.” Yeah! That told them!