- Bishop Hill blog

Readers may remember the mysterious Murphy et al paper on climate sensitivity, which used the same data as Forster and Gregory but came up with a much higher estimate of sensitivity. The paper did not attempts to explain the difference and Murphy subsequently failed to respond to requests for information.

Chris Horner has been doing sterling work trying to obtain any data and code and correspondence relating to the paper from NOAA, where Murphy works and one of his co-authors Susan Solomon worked at the time. This recently led to the release of a whole batch of Solomon correspondence, although little of it appeared to have any relevance to the paper. However, there were a few bits and pieces of interest.

One of these was a series of drafts of a Royal Society statement on the COP15 negotiations in Copenhagen around the time of of Climategate. I have compiled these into a single PDF which you can see at the link at the bottom of the post. What is interesting about them is that the drafts are annotated with what I assume must be Solomon's thoughts.

The Royal Society's various statements on climate change are often put forward as a reason why we should believe the IPCC "consensus" - if the independent academy in Carlton House Terrace is supportive of Pachauri et al, then reasonable people should be expected to accept their word too. But of course if senior IPCC officials such as Solomon are involved in drafting these statements then it makes a mockery of that "independence".

In my report on the Royal Society, I pointed out that its public statements are issued in the name of the fellows but without reference to them. I suggested at the time that they were simply the views of insiders in Carlton House Terrace. The Solomon FOI release suggests that it's worse than we thought: the Royal Society has just about reduced itself to the status of a mouthpiece.

[Updated to make it clear that Solomon has since moved from NOAA]