Steve McIntyre has dipped his toe into the murky waters of the ongoing furore about the Lawson/Hoskins interview and the BBC's decision that Lawson's position on last winter's floods was not (allegedly) supported by the scientific evidence. Amusingly, McIntyre finds that Lawson's views on the UK floods is entirely supported by Hoskins' prior statements on the subject.

In respect to the linkage between the floods and global warming, [BBC editorial complaints guy] Fraser Steel’s views are unequivocally wrong. Even IPCC – surely the most fervent advocate of climate models imaginable – stated that GCMs did not provide useful information on precipitation extremes (and, a fortiori, floods)...

The conclusion is clear:

If Hoskins and the Grantham institutes want to persuade more people of the seriousness of the issues, Hoskins’ obligation is to do a better job, rather than have Lawson silenced by a Grantham apparatchik. I think that Hoskins should write to the BBC Complaints Unit, separating himself from Ward’s complaint and, at a minimum, conceding that Lawson’s position on the (lack of) linkage of floods and global warming is either correct or one that can be reasonably argued.

It is, of course, vanishingly unlikely that Hoskins would do anything so gracious. Hoskins was the go-to person for the University of East Anglia when the Royal Society laundered the list of articles for the Oxburgh inquiry: although Hoskins himself had no informed knowledge of the literature, he immediately endorsed the UEA. Later, he acted as a supporting authority for refusing FOI requests.