A great deal of time has been spent drafting a witness statement for the Leveson Inquiry which has now been published as part of the official record of proceedings. It is a joint effort over the signatures of Andrew Montford of Bishop Hill and myself and we are grateful to the Inquiry for giving a couple of climate sceptics a fair hearing, something that experience has taught us not to expect.
The submission can be found here in the MS Word version submitted to the Inquiry, with all the links working, and here at the Inquiry website in a PDF version without live hyperlinks produced by the Inquiry. I have 
requested that the official version should be reformatted to included the links as their absence is confusing to readers and gives the impression that we have failed to reference important documents that we have quoted from.
This submission is, necessarily, a long document as its purpose is to provide evidence to a judicial inquiry chaired by a law lord and administered by a team of lawyers. So at an early stage it was agreed between us that there was a lesser risk in being long than in failing to be thorough. After all, the submission’s intended audience are primarily people accustomed to reading long and complicated documents presenting evidence.
That said, our efforts seem to have received some praise in comments at Bishop Hill and I was interested to note that several people reckoned that there was material for a book in the subject matter we covered. That was my feeling too, and one of the reasons the submission took so long to write was the constant need to select things to leave out so that the document didn’t become unmanageably long. Many of these topics were quite interesting and could bear further exploration.
I apologise for the number of typos that have survived into the finished text. This is in spite of proof reading by Andrew, my wife, and myself. It’s strange how often commenters on blogs focus on such shortcomings in a document rather than its content. And funnier still that when one tries to enlist such people as voluntary copy editors there never seem to be any takers!
I have already posted my congratulations on Andrew’s site. It is a fine piece of work, cogently argued and elegantly presented.
[TonyN says: Thanks Mike!]
Just to echo what Mike has written, and to add that I think there’s definitely material there for a book (an ebook would be great). If you need a volunteer proof-reader, by the way, I could have a go at that.
[TonyN says: Many thanks Alex, and your very kind offer will certainly be taken up. The next priority is a holiday but after that I hope, at last, to get started on a book, and back to blogging too.]
Hi Tony I have yet to read the submission, but have got it firmly on my to do list. Sounds like it is well worth the read and if its as perceptive as your Blog posts it will be very good indeed.
I myself have been bogged down at work and had little time to follow much in the climate world. Many blogs move too quickly and leave little time for considered replies, something I enjoyed with your blog. I have been doing much digging into the financial scandals, and have to say they have much in common with the climate scandal. And just like the climate scandal the root cause is the same; politics.
I look forward hopefully in the future once you have the blog up and running again to being able share some of the ideas I have that I hope will help people make sense of whats happening.
Peter,
I’m still waiting for the Leveson Inquiry to update our submission file on their website to a version where all the links to supporting documents work and incorporating a minor correction. It would seem that the financial crisis will shape government policy across the board for the foreseeable future, so I’m sure that you are on the right track. However the cold light of economic reality seems to be a little bit slow reaching UK (or for that matter EU) energy policy.