This piece by Tyler Hamilton, energy and technology columnist for the Toronto Star, was first published  here.

My apologies for those who use Internet explorer and had trouble accessing Climate Progress today.

I copied Dr. Curry’s post from MS Word — and that brings in a whole host of hidden HTML, which screws up the page for IE, but doesn’t seem to bother Firefox, which is why I didn’t notice it.

It should be fixed now and I will endeavor to avoid that mistake again.

The terrific climate cartoonist Marc Roberts has a humorous take on Copenhagen.  It’s a big image to load, so I’m putting it all below the jump — Click to Enlarge:

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In an open letter published [last week] on a full page of the Washington Post, members of WWF’s current and past Boards of Directors call for “a clear bipartisan blueprint from the Senate prior to Copenhagen, followed by final passage of legislation early next year,” saying that it is “vital to securing corresponding actions by other countries in a new global pact to head off the worst impacts of climate change. “

That’s from the World Wildlife Fund’s news release on their “Bipartisan Call for Climate Action.”  The video is from one of the signers, The Honorable William K. Reilly, Chairman Emeritus of WWF and EPA Administrator during the entire Bush Sr. presidency.  Another signer is The Honorable Russell E. Train, Founder Chairman Emeritus of WWF and President Nixon’s and Ford’s EPA Administrator from 1973-1977.

The text of the letter and list of signers follows (PDF here):

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I have known Dr. Judith Curry, Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, for many years.  I have interviewed her a number of times and quoted her work on the hurricane-warming connection at length for my 2006 book, “Hell and High Water:  Global Warming — the Solution and the Politics.”  Later, I spent a day giving talks with her in various Florida cities.  She is a first rate scientist (CV here) and someone I have great respect for.  Her past public statements and articles on climate change can be found here.  As is the case with other guest bloggers on CP, I do not agree with everything she writes here.  But the hacked CRU emails raise important issues, I believe scientists should keep maintaining considerably higher standards than their critics, and I think her views deserve to be read and debated widely.  Comments are greatly desired, as always.

­An open letter to graduate students and young scientists in fields related to climate research

Based upon feedback that I’ve received from graduate students at Georgia Tech, I suspect that you are confused, troubled, or worried by what you have been reading about ClimateGate and the contents of the hacked CRU emails. After spending considerable time reading the hacked emails and other posts in the blogosphere, I wrote an essay that calls for greater transparency in climate data and other methods used in climate research. The essay is posted over at climateaudit.org (you can read it at http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/curry-on-the-credibility-of-climate-research/).

What has been noticeably absent so far in the ClimateGate discussion is a public reaffirmation by climate researchers of our basic research values:  the rigors of the scientific method (including reproducibility), research integrity and ethics, open minds, and critical thinking.  Under no circumstances should we ever sacrifice any of these values; the CRU emails, however, appear to violate them.

My motivation for communicating on this issue in the blogosphere comes from emails that I received from Georgia Tech graduate students and alums. As a result of my post on climateaudit, I started receiving emails from graduate students from other universities. I post the content of one of the emails here, without reference to the student’s name or institution:

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