Remember this song by Manfred Mann: 

I could never quite follow the words, but it has some great moments. Bruce Springsteen wrote it.

A good note (so to speak) to begin 2010. Because here is Norman Fraser, again, moaning about my latest observations on Climate and all:

This is a fairly typical post from you in that you try to blind your readers with the depth and range of your reading. In that you share methodology with Mr Craig. The reality is that you probably know just as much about physics and statistics as I do, thus you have a very limited capacity to criticise the studies you link to and tend to choose them on the basis of your ideological prejudice.

You also link to posts that, whilst seemingly authoratative in terms of vocabulary and length, are in fact often clearly technically defective and indeed sometimes childishly wrong.

My protests were against your irresponsibility in smearing scientists with the aim of downplaying the real risks involved in global warming. I also find regrettable your rather patrician cynicism that any international solutions can be found. If your view represents a consensus amongst your erstwhile colleagues in the diplomatic corps then god help us all.

So readers, please put on your best shades – these are very good – this year when reading this website lest you get blinded by the depth and range of my reading (nifty mixed metaphor!).

Sure. I do not know much about physics and science. What little I do know is probably a tad more than most people know. But still too little.

So as a voter listening to politicians demanding more of my money and liberty to pay for benefits for people far in the future who are likely to be richer than me, I only can do my humble best to look at arguments made on all sides of the case and form a view.

My one private encounter with a very top UK government scientist on a Climate mission to Poland who really was in deep denial about something I knew a lot about was not reassuring as to this man’s general approach to Facts and Truth.

Norman suggests that I tend to choose scientific analyses based on my own ideological prejudice. But since he generously admits that he too knows little about the science concerned, perhaps he is just doing the same?

I at least declare my prejudices, thusly:

  • I incline against massive collectivist centralised government schemes, since they rarely succeed and skew huge resources away from private initiative and creativity
  • I believe that senior civil servants (domestic or international) or others engaged in any sort of public office should not be benefiting privately from that privileged work, or using their position to raise funds for private organisations. Total integrity and transparency here, please, as a condition for getting these jobs
  • I will tend to trust people who make all their data and underlying methodology available for rigorous scrutiny by people both supportive and sceptical of their results. I reject this sort of attitude (emphasis added):

In response to a request for supporting data, Philip Jones, a prominent researcher {University of East Anglia} said “We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”  Stephen McIntyre before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce (July 2006 hearings)

All in all, I am pretty comfortable with the friendly, positive, greenly undogmatic but undoubtedly expert style of Anthony Watts.

As, it seems, are a whole lot of other people.

And heck, it’s a blog, not a research thesis. Personal online musings, shared with those who might value them, based upon many long years at the coal-face of diplomacy trying to fathom what works when and why.

Which is why, albeit from afar, I find the Copenhagen disaster (the EU Presidency’s description, not mine) so impressive as an example of how not to do it.

The tragedy for Norman is that if someone with my admittedly somewhat sceptical approach had been i/c the UK planning for Copenhagen, we might have achieved a better overall result. The cynical zeal of British Ministers egging on the EU to exaggerate the likely problem for the planet when the EU had no intention of putting up the sort of money needed to solve the problem as they had defined it was somewhere between hubristically incompetent and recklessly unwise.

See?