Thanks to Paul Baines for emailing this across. You can even buy a full size print version from his website.

2. John Redwood looks back on a seismic shift in politics this week.

3. Obselete reports on the government’s war against evidence of torture.

4. Samizdata discusses the joys of climate change tyranny.

5. Unenlightened Commentary finds evidence that Harman’s crime rampage was premeditated.

- writer Martin Amis, who once described the glamour model, aka Jordan, as “two bags of silicon”.

…or so says a spokesman for Greenpeace, who are fighting back in the furious row over hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world’s leading climate scientists during the past 13 years that have been stolen by hackers and leaked online.  The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from the University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on climate change and lead by Professor Phil Jones.  Climate change sceptics allege the emails provide “smoking gun” evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real, and is being largely caused by mankind. In one email, dated November 1999, one scientist wrote: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”  Some of the other incriminating email remarks, listed in full at Bishop Hill’s blog, include:

Michael Mann (creator of the infamous and now discredited ‘hockey stick’ graph showing global temperature rises in recent years) discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.

Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results.

Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as “cheering news”.

Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.

Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.

Mann thinks he will contact BBC’s Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.

Kevin Trenberth says they can’t account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can’t.

Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too.

Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to ‘”contain” the putative Medieval Warm Period’.

Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.

Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it’s insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre’s sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many “good” scientists condemn it.

Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.

Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at the Real Climate blog.

Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be “hiding behind them”.

Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”. Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.

Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the “increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage” he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.

Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman’s admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit website findings.

Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather and has threatened to resign.

Reaction to McIntyre’s 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper’s editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. [Note - Saiers was subsequently ousted]

Jones says he’s found a way around releasing AR4 review comments to David Holland.

Wigley says Keenan’s fraud accusation against Wang is correct.

Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4]

Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn’t be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don’t want in the hands of those who might distort it.

Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data”. Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.

Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner.

Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.

Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.

Funkhouser says he’s pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn’t think it’s productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.

Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible.

Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.

Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.

Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.

David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn’t be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm.

Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it.

Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.

If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the climate change ’sceptics’ salivating in unison.  Even as a relatively undecided blogger when it comes to climate change theory, I can see that this is big - really really really big.

2. Adam Collyer thinks work should pay in self-respect as well as money.

3. John Ward finds a bunch of Labour candidates clasping at electoral reform.

4. Next Left thinks Eurosceptics resemble something of a parliamentary Taliban.

5. Tory Outcast highlights more Labour media inaccuracies.

- Dan Hannan takes aim at Baroness Ashton, newly appointed EU foreign affairs supremo (full article HERE)

Despite the Guardian and BBC’s best efforts to bury the story, the news that you are to be prosecuted over a minor car accident in your south London constituency is to be welcomed.  Even so, I have this bizarre sense of sympathy for you all the same.

You face prosecution for allegedly driving without due care and attention and driving while using a mobile phone, as the Crown Prosecution Service has said there is sufficient evidence and it is in the public interest to prosecute.  “I’m Harriet Harman – you know where you can get hold of me” is what you allegedly said to a witness who approached your car after you hit a parked vehicle while talking on your mobile phone.  The accident happened in Dulwich, south-east London, not far from your home on July 3rd.  Your car is said to have collided with another vehicle, which was parked beside the kerb. The sound of the collision drew a small crowd of bystanders, and witnesses saw you ending a phone conversation and a neighbour of the person whose car was damaged then approached your car.  The 1988 Road Traffic Act states that drivers must stop and give their name and address, details of the vehicle’s owner and its registration number, but instead you drove off.  Your spokeswoman said that you ”strongly refutes the allegations and will deny the charges”.

2. Old Holborn discovers a new breed of government bureaucrat.

3. The Adam Smith Institute loves Mormons.

4. Enemies of Reason enjoys some panic porn.

5. A Tangled Web discusses Sarah Palin’s thoughtless slogans.

- David-Michel Davies, executive director of the ‘Webby Awards’ that were awarded last night by the New York-based International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences to recognise the top 10 Internet moments of the decade.  The winners were:

- Craigslist online classified site expands outside San Francisco (2000)

- the launch of Google AdWords (2000)

- the launch of online encyclopedia Wikipedia (2001)

- the shutdown of file-sharing site Napster (2001)

- Google’s initial public offering (2004)

- the online video revolution led by YouTube (2006)

- Facebook opens to non-college students and Twitter launches (2006)

- Apple’s iPhone debuts (2007)

- the use of the Internet in the US presidential campaign (2008)

- the use of Twitter during the Iranian election protests (2009)

Baroness Buscombe, the new chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, has ambitions for her organisation that go beyond the traditional newspaper companies.  She wants to examine the possibility that the PCC’s role should be extended to cover the blogosphere, which is becoming an increasing source of breaking news and boasts some of the media’s highest-profile commentators, such as the political bloggers Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes. Do readers of such sites, and people mentioned on them, deserve the same rights of redress that the PCC offers in respect of newspapers and their sites?

“Some of the bloggers are now creating their own ecosystems which are quite sophisticated,” Baroness Buscombe told me. “Is the reader of those blogs assuming that it’s news, and is [the blogosphere] the new newspapers? It’s a very interesting area and quite challenging.”

She said that after a review of the governance structures of the PCC, she would want the organisation to “consider” whether it should seek to extend its remit to the blogosphere, a process that would involve discussion with the press industry, the public and bloggers (who would presumably have to volunteer to come beneath the PCC’s umbrella).

The PCC regulates the press online as well as in print, and its remit also extends to the Sun’s radio operation, SunTalk.  Blogging, with its tradition of being free and unregulated, sees itself as very different. But is it really?

Here are my quickfire observations:

1. The blogosphere may be unregulated but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to abide by the laws of this country.  Regulation surely implies controlling the content over and above what the law demands.

2. Which blogs would be covered?  Does Letters From A Tory produce ‘news’ ? Surely not many blogs would consider themselves equivalent to the press in terms of being the source of news, although the likes of Guido are obviously very different.

3. The PCC is funded by the newspaper industry.  Blogs are funded by bloggers. To suggest that the PCC should therefore extend its reach to individuals outside of its sphere seems highly contentious.

What do you think?