The Volokh Conspiracy

Economist David Friedman has an insightful post on the problems inherent in deferring to the views of “authoritative” scientific bodies: A pattern I have observed in a variety of public controversies is the attempt to establish some sort of official scientific truth, as proclaimed by a suitable authority—a committee of the National Academy of Science, [...]

I wouldn’t take this prediction to the bank if I were a betting man. But, like co-blogger David Bernstein, I give Obama a slight edge, perhaps a 60-65 percent chance of victory. In the contest between national polls favoring Romney and battleground state polls favoring Obama, I give slightly greater credence to the latter. My [...]

Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, he of the infamous “Hockey stick” graph, is threatening to sue Mark Steyn and National Review for a blog post on NRO in which Steyn (quoting Rand Simberg) compared Penn State’s investigation of scientific misconduct allegations against Mann with the same university’s initial investigation of Jerry Sandusky and the Penn [...]

The folks at the Heartland Institute are mad, and that seems to have driven them a little mad. For years environmental activists have compared climate skeptics and those who raise questions about the likelihood of a warming-induced apocalypse to Holocaust deniers and worse. In 1989, then-Senator Al Gore famously compared those who downplayed the climate [...]

The revelation that Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute posed as a Heartland Institute board member to obtain confidential board documents and then distributed these documents, along with an almost-certainly-fake “Climate Strategy” memo continues to reverberate through climate science and policy circles.  Folks that might otherwise be discussing the new study claiming climate change could [...]

In 2010 and 2011 the climate science community was rocked by the release of e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit showing that climate scientists can be just as petty, political and (at times) unethical as any other group.  To this day, it has not been determined who obtained the e-mail files [...]

The NYT on the new release of climate scientists’ emails: The new e-mails appeared remarkably similar to the ones released two years ago just ahead of a similar conference in Copenhagen. They involved the same scientists and many of the same issues, and some of them carried a similar tone: catty remarks by the scientists, [...]

On the eve of another UN climate summit, it appears that another batch of potentially embarrassing e-mails by various climate scientists have been released to the public. The Guardian reports: The emails appear to be genuine, but the University of East Anglia said the “sheer volume of material” meant it was not yet able to [...]

At an American Association of Law Schools panel that I took part in at this year’s annual conference, we briefly discussed the question of whether scholars’ motives for writing an article should be relevant to our evaluation of its quality. Often, people make claims such as the following: “Professor X only wrote that article to [...]

Last week, the UK Independent Climate Change Email Review (aka the Muir Russell Review) released its report on the alleged scientific misconduct of climate researchers revealed by the disclosure of e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University.  As the NYT reports, the review rejects the claims that the ClimateGate e-mails disclosed scientific [...]

The NYT reports on various efforts to restore the credibility of climate science and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the wake of “ClimateGate” and the discovery of a handful false claims and misrepresentation of scientific research in portions of the IPCC reports. The unauthorized release last fall of hundreds of e-mail messages from [...]

Co-Conspirator DB notes the continuing controversy over Amnesty International, with Salman Rushdie now weighing in. Side note:  Although until I come out with my own longer account of my views of the NGO movement, including the human rights monitors, I tend to avoid saying much about human rights groups, I have written a bit about [...]

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office recently confirmed that the disclosure of e-mails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit revealed that some of the scientists violated the UK’s Freedom of Information law by failing to respond to legitimate document requests from other researchers.  I blogged on this development here.  Initial [...]

2010 has not been kind to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  This U.N. sanctioned body is supposed to issue periodic reports that summarize the state of the science of global climate change based upon a comprehensive review and synthesis of the relevant peer-reviewed scientific literature.  In the past few weeks, however, it has [...]

The UK Daily Mail reports: Scientist at the heart of the ‘Climategate’ email scandal broke the law when they refused to give raw data to the public, the privacy watchdog has ruled. The Information Commissioner’s office said University of East Anglia researchers breached the Freedom of Information Act when handling requests from climate change sceptics. [...]

The recent Copenhagen Conference on global warming has led to renewed claims that we cannot effectively combat global warming without “global governance,” or perhaps even a full-fledged world government. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon recently claimed that “A [climate change] deal must include an equitable global governance structure” and many other political leaders and environmental [...]

Daniel Sarewitz and Samuel Thernstrom, of Arizona State University’s Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes and the American Enterprise Institute respectively, co-authored an op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times on how the debate over leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, and climate change more broadly, is colored by the mistaken [...]

According to press reports, Penn State University is conducting an inquiry to determine whether it should institute a formal ethical investigation of Michael Mann, the Penn State professor who was the lead author of the paper that invented the “Hockey Stick.” At issue are CRU emails and his role in ClimateGate. Frankly, I am not [...]

One major problem with most invocations of the precautionary principle is that people tend to apply it to whatever danger they want to prevent, but largely ignore it in considering the potential dangers created by the policies they advocate. For example, Dick Cheney applied a version of the principle to the threat of terrorism, arguing [...]

When the CRU at East Anglia disclosed that it had lost some of the raw temperature data, leaving only the “homogenized” data, some honest commentators expressed the hope that the homogenizing was competently done. Anyone who has been following Climate Audit for the last few years knows that at least some of the adjustments to [...]

This afternoon, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will announce that it has made a formal determination that, in the judgment of the EPA Administrator, the emission of greenhouse gases cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.  This is the so-called “endangerment finding” which will trigger [...]

NASA’s James Hansen, one of the most prominent (and alarmist) climate scientists, argues against cap-and-trade plans in today’s NYT.  While I don’t quite agree with every point in his analysis, I agree with his bottom line.  Cap-and-trade is unlikely to produce meaningful emission reductions, but will require the creation of a massive regulatory bureaucracy and [...]

In his post below, Eric Posner asks why ozone depletion and the phaseout of CFCs and other ozone-depleting substances did not produce the same degree of backlash as does global warming. Where were the Climate Skeptics back then?  Or was ozonegate, like asteroidgate, a non-event because the climate is a “complex system” whereas, um….  Why [...]

While the wider world is just beginning to realize that the subfield of paleoclimatology is in shambles (and has been for the last decade), scientists in related disciplines are increasingly fighting back against the shoddy work and orthodoxy that was foisted on them. A small group, including several prominent physicists, are asking the American Physical [...]

Steven Hayward (of AEI) has an excellent article in the Weekly Standard on the CRU scandal (tip to Powerline and Adler below). Hayward concludes: The distinction between utterly politicized scientists such as Jones, Mann, and NASA’s James Hansen, and other more sober scientists has been lost on the media and climate campaigners for a long [...]

Last week, Rajendra Pachauri, who heads the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told BBC Radio that there would be a full investigation of the revelations contained in e-mails and documents leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.  This must have been done awfully quickly, as the IPCC’s Working Group I released [...]

Because a big part of the scientific misconduct in ClimateGate involves Michael Mann’s now discredited “Hockey Stick” thesis, I thought it might be good to review a couple of the better posts outlining some of the misbehavior. The first is a long post from 16 months ago at the Bishop Hill blog (tip to Andrew [...]

The National Journal‘s Neil Munro has an interview with climatologist Judith Curry (featured in this, this, and this prior post).  The interview is a must read for those interested in the ClimateGate story and the broader questions about the intersection of science and politics.  There’s lots of good stuff in the interview — so you [...]

ABC, CBS and NBC have yet to air anything on the leaked e-mails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, but The Daily Show did — and they got the story right.

Climatologist Mike Hulme, who worked at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, gets the big picture in a WSJ Europe op-ed.  Some excerpts: One thing the episode has made clear is that it has become difficult to disentangle political arguments about climate policies from scientific arguments about the evidence for man-made climate change [...]

Last night, the University of East Anglia announced that Phil Jones, a central figure in the e-mails and other documents disclosed last month, would temporarily step aside as head of the Climate Research Unit pending an independent review of the matter.  Penn State University has also announced an investigation regarding the conduct of Michael Mann, [...]

MIT’s Richard Lindzen is one of the world’s leading climate scientists.  He is also a climate “skeptic,” rejecting claims that anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are likely to create a climate catastrophe.  Above all others, he is the climate skeptic environmental activists most fear, as he has unimpeachable credentials.  As a prominent climate scientist who [...]

Noah Sachs, over at PrafsBlawg, is kind enough to respond to my post on the Copenhagen meetings and collective action problems.  It is worth reading the whole thing, but here is a chunk of it.  (If you comment, please remember that Professor Sachs is my guest here, so be courteous.  And my thanks to him [...]

Here’s what Crook writes: I admire expertise, and scientific expertise especially; like any intelligent citizen I am willing to defer to it. But that puts a great obligation on science. The people whose instinct is to respect and admire science should be the ones most disturbed by these revelations. The scientists have let them down [...]

The NYT has a follow-up story on the continuing controversy triggered by the leak of e-mails and internal documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.  The story provides a quick summary of the central issues in the controversy. The most serious criticisms leveled at the authors of the e-mail messages revolve around [...]

Rajendra K. Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, responds to the leak of e-mails and other documents from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit with a statement (posted on Dot Earth).  He writes in part: The unfortunate incident that has taken place through illegal hacking of the private communications of [...]

George Monbiot has a follow-up to yesterday’s column on the lead of e-mails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.  It begins: I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) [...]

Recent evidence that prominent climate scientists have tried to intimidate academic journals into not publishing papers submitted by “climate change” skeptics have caused a major brouhaha in the ongoing political battle over global warming. At least some of the scientists in question certainly seem to have put ideology above the search for truth. The effort [...]

Noted environmental writer George Monbiot, author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, calls the leaked documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit a “major blow.” On his website and in The Guardian, he writes: The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of [...]

Someone hacked into the computers at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, downloaded various files and e-mails posted on the web.  Now the climate blogosphere is all atwitter over whether the resulting disclosures are a scandal or much ado about nothing.  Excerpts and reactions from Roger Pielke Jr., Real Climate, Climate Audit, Watts [...]