Nature Communications published a paper last week that argues that the media pay undue attention to people who do not worry much about climate change. The journal and authors are now in all sorts of trouble because they identified those people, smeared their name, and released personal data. The journal editor confirmed that she did not check whether the paper had IRB approval.**

UC Merced confirms that the paper had no such approval*** and argues that it did not need such approval because no data were collected on political views or academic qualifications.**** Yet, paper and press release refer to views and qualification, the paper obliquely as "political origins" and "non-scientific experts", the press release explicitly with its "false authority" and "lack [of] scientific training".
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Elsevier Weekblad plaatste een interview met ondergetekende op 23 Maart 2019. Het gesprek ging over van alles en nog wat. Op de titelpagina roep ik dat een "CO2-heffing [op] bedrijven het domste [is] wat je kunt doen". Dat was voor mij een bijzaak, maar de redactie gooit natuurlijk graag olie op het vuur.

Research used to be open access. To read a learned paper, you went to a university library. Academics had privileged access because that library was near their offices. Papers have now moved online, often behind a paywall. Search has much improved and faculty (or their research assistants) no longer have to walk to the library. Others are not so lucky. This is wrong in principle, but the proposed solution, Plan S (Coalition 2018, Measey 2018, Thornton 2018, Rabesandratana 2019), is wrongheaded.
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Dear Professor van Dijck,

In November 2017, Professor Jeffrey Harvey of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, a KNAW institute, was the lead author on a paper published in the journal BioScience.

I requested the data behind the paper, and was pointed to the data archive. Unfortunately, the data released was incomplete.

The paper classifies blogs as “yellow” or “blue”. This classification is hardwired into the R code used to analyse the data.
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In their eagerness to discredit a colleague[1] Harvey et al. (2017) got ahead of themselves. The write-up shows signs of haste – typographical errors (“principle component analysis”, “refereces cited”) and nonsensical statements (“95% normal probability”) escaped the attention of the 14 authors, 3 referees and editor – but so does the analysis. The paper does three things: It creates a database, it classifies subjects, and it conducts a principal component analysis.
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Charles Mountbatten-Windsor BA, known for being heir to the throne and his barmy views on intensive agriculture and homeopathy, has teamed up with Tony Juniper BSc, an environmental activist, and Dr Emily Shuckburgh, an atmospheric scientist, to write a book, the Ladybird Book of Climate Change. There are 24 1-page chapters plus 24 pages with illustrations. The text is simpler than the typical report on a football match.

Simplicity is a virtue.

A journalist asked me about the latest report by the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures. Her questions are in blue, my answers in black.

In my view, the TFCRFD is primarily a vehicle for Mr Bloomberg to stay in the limelight, and for Mr Carney to save his marriage and promote his future political career.

My main questions are:- How important is it for companies to have data about climate change risks?

The TFCRFD distinguishes between two risks.

Dear Ms Caulfield,

Yesterday you voted against a motion that would guarantee the right of EU citizens already in the UK to continue to live and work here.

I am one of a family of four of such EU citizens. My wife builds sewage treatments plants, a vital if often underappreciated service, for Southern Water. I teach economics at the University of Sussex, probably one of the largest exporters in the area. Our alumni quickly find well-paid and secure jobs.
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The news that the government is considering turning the Nissan plant into a bonded warehouse -- essentially ceding part of Sunderland to France, much like part of Calais is governed from the United Kingdom -- so that Single Market rules continue to apply, reminded me of a more radical but ultimately easier proposal.

The Brexit vote was primarily about immigration. The Single Market has four Freedoms of Movement, for goods, capital, services and workers.
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The IPCC has published an erratum for our chapter in the Fifth Assessment Report.

Four data points were changed. Two relate to a paper by Roberto Roson and Dominique van der Mensbrugghe. Roson's key contribution was to introduce the impact of climate change on labour productivity into the analysis of the total cost of climate change. The concluding section of that paper presents two estimates per scenario: the total impact, and the share of labour productivity in that total.
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