After something of a hiatus over the weekend, there has been a rush of new comment on the Damian Green affair, including this rather good piece by Henry Porter over at the Graun. I get the impression that this whole affair may well run and run. Wednesday's statement to Parliament by Michael Martin promises to produce some real fireworks - it might well turn out to be one of those rare occasions when it is worth watching it all live on TV. With a bit of luck a few heads might roll. God, there might even be some bloodshed.

It's fair to say that this isn't a black and white issue. The argument that MPs should not be above the law seems to me to be a fair one. The problem is that the law is not designed with the interests of the public in mind - it's been written solely to protect the interests of the state. By outlawing the leaking of government information, the opposition are left weaponless in the fight to hold the executive to account. If the government mean to enforce the laws on leaking it will mean that yet another plank of the British Constitution has been torn up and tossed aside by a government that cares nothing for the public, but only for its narrow partisan self. What point is an opposition that has no access to the information it requires? We desperately need a sweeping new Freedom of Information Act that will make nearly every state document public (with the obvious few narrow exceptions). Only then can we be sure that the government can be held to account.

The actions of the police may or may not have had a sinister motive behind them. What the commentariat has made clear is that, after 90 days detention and 42 days detention and 28 days detention and ID cards and cash for honours and databases and snooping on all and sundry, people are no longer willing to give Gordon Brown and his motley crew the benefit of the doubt.

It's about time too.

Steve McIntyre has pointed out before that paleoclimatologists actually have two divergence problems rather than one. Most people who follow the climate debate are aware of the fact that tree ring widths have not responded to the rise in temperatures in the second half of the twentieth century, a fact which completely undermines the case for their use as proxy thermometers. This inconvenient truth has been neatly avoided by simple dint of not reporting any proxy data later than 1980, truncating the series where necessary.

The second divergence problem is the fact that tree ring widths, and ring wood densities (which are also used in temperture reconstructions), having tracked each other quite well through most of the record, have also diverged in recent decades. Here the solution here has been to "adjust" the record, pretending that the divergence never happened.

Now (and I'm grateful to a reader for pointing this out to me) the BBC has reported a study in Science which has analysed a Chinese stalagmite and has linked its growth to the Asian monsoon.

The monsoon record also matched up nicely with the advance and retreat of Swiss glaciers.

Scientists say the natural archive shows that climate change can have devastating effects on local populations - even when this change is mild when averaged across the globe.

In the cave record, the monsoon followed trends in solar activity over many centuries, suggesting the Sun played an important role in the variability of this weather system.

To a lesser extent, it also followed northern hemisphere temperatures on a millennial and centennial scale. As temperatures went up, the monsoon became stronger and, as they dropped, it weakened.

Great. More evidence that we're going to be fried alive very shortly. But wait, what's this?

However, over the last 50 years, this relationship has switched.

Oh, oh! Start thinking up stories to explain it guys....

The researchers attribute this to the influence of greenhouse gas emissions and sulphate aerosols released by human activities.

That should do it. Another divergence problem neatly disposed of.

With the first October snow recorded in London for seventy years, I just feel that it's incumbent upon me to point out that the Met Office has forecast that it's going to be a mild winter again.

Tee hee.

(Busy on some stuff, so blogging may remain pretty light).