Climate Skeptic

This is really some crazy-bad science in a new study by Welch et al on Asian rice yields purporting to show that they will be reduced by warmer weather.  This is an odd result on its face, given that rice yields have been increasing as the world has warmed over the last 50 years.

Now, it is possible that temperature-related drops in yields have been offset by even larger improvements in other areas that have increased yields, but one’s suspicion-meter is certainly triggered by the finding, especially since the press release on the study says that yields have already been cut 10-20% in some areas, flying in the face of broader yield data.

Willis Eschenbach dove into it, and found this amazing approach.  How this passed peer-review muster is just further evidence as to how asymmetrical peer review is in climate (ie if you have the “right” findings, they will pass all kinds of slop)

First, it covers a very short time span. The longest farm yield datasets used are only six years long (1994-99). Almost a fifth of the datasets are three years or less, and the Chinese data (6% of the total data) only cover two years (1998-1999)….

But whichever dataset they used, they are comparing a two year series of yields against a twenty-six year trend. I’m sorry, but I don’t care what the results of that comparison might be. There is no way to compare a two-year dataset with anything but the temperature records from that area for those two years. This is especially true given the known problems with the ground-station data. And it is doubly true when one of the two years (1998) is a year with a large El Niño.

In fact, he goes on to point out that simultaneous to the two-year trend in China showing yields falling  (I still can’t get over extrapolating from a 2 year farm yield trend) temperatures in China did very different things than their long-term averages might predict

For example, they give the trend for maximum temps in the winter (DecJanFeb) for the particular location in China (29.5N, 119.47E) as being 0.06°C per year, and the trend for spring (MarAprMay) as being 0.05°C per year (I get 0.05°/yr and 0.04°C/yr respectively, fairly close).

But from 1998 to 1999, the actual DJF change was +2.0°C, and the MAM change was minus 1.0°C (CRU TS Max Temperature dataset). As a result, they are comparing the Chinese results to a theoretical trend which has absolutely no relationship to what actually occurred on the ground.

Further, though Eschenbach only mentions it in passing, there likely is another large problem with the data.  The researchers do not mention what temperature station they are using data from, but if past global warming study methodology is any guide, the station could be hundreds of miles away from the farms studied.

I have followed Roy Spencer’s work for a while on trying to measure climate feedback effects from satellite data.  In general, I give him Kudos for actually working on what is really THE critical problem that separates climate catastrophe from climate rounding error.  It is good someone is working on this, rather than, say, how global warming might affect toad mating, or whatever.

I have never been totally convinced by this part of Spencer’s work.  Again, I give him kudos for trying to isolate the effect of single variables in a complex system through actual observation, rather than the lazy approach of running experiments inside computer models of dubious accuracy.  I am not convinced he has achieved this, but I must admit I have not spent a ton of time working it through.

Anyway, Spencer has a long discussion of his methodology in answer to some critics.  I reserve judgment until I have studied it further.  But I was captivated by this bit:

On the positive side, though, MF10 have forced us to go back and reexamine the methodology and conclusions in SB08. As a result, we are now well on the way to new results which will better optimize the matching of satellite-observed climate variability to the simple climate model, including a range of feedback estimates consistent with the satellite data. It is now apparent to us that we did not do a good enough job of that in SB08.

Really?  You shared your data, were criticized, and are modifying your approach based on this criticism?  I thought from the study of the habits of mainstream climate scientists the correct scientific procedure was to 1) hide your data like it was Russian nuclear secrets; 2) prevent any opposing view from getting published; and 3) defend a flawed methodology by getting 10 of your friends to use the same methodology and summarize it all in an IPCC spaghetti graph.

Greg Mankiw on scoring the federal stimulus package:

the CEA took a conventional Keynesian-style macroeconomic model and used those set of equations to estimate the effect the stimulus should have had.  Essentially, the model offers an estimate of the policy’s effect, conditional on the model being a correct description of the world.  But notice that this exercise is not really a measurement based on what actually occurred.  Rather, the exercise is premised on the belief that the model is true, so no matter how bad the economy got, the inference is that it would have been even worse without the stimulus.  Why?  Because that is what the model says.  The validity of the model itself is never questioned.

Does this sound like climate science or what?  The same models that are used to predict future temperature increases are used to decide how much of past warming was dues to Co2 and how much was due to natural effects.  Here is the retrospective IPCC chart which assigns more than 100% of post-1950 warming to CO2 (since the blue “natural forcings” is shown to go down, see more here)

Here is the stimulus version, showing flat employment, but positing that the stimulus created jobs because employment “would have gone down without it” (sound familiar?)

This kind of retrospective look at causality has the look of science but in fact is nothing of the sort, and can be not much more than guesses laundered to look like facts.

But this may in fact be worse than guessing.  In both cases, these graphs are drawn by folks who think they know the answer (in the first case that CO2 caused all warming, in the second that the stimulus created millions of jobs).  Since in both cases the lower “without” case (either without CO2 or without stimulus) is horrendously, almost impossible to derive and totally impossible to measure, there is good reason to believe it is merely a plug, fixed in value to get the answer they want.  But if I plugged it just on the back of an envelope, everyone would call me out for it, so I plug it in an arcane model where numerous inputs can be tweaked to get different results, to avoid this kind of unwanted scrutiny.

Readers of climate sites will also recognize this criticism of Obama’s self-serving stimulus analysis

Moreover, the fact that other organizations simulating similar models come to similar conclusions is no evidence about the validity of the model’s simulations.  It only tells you the CEA staff did not commit egregious programming errors when running their computer simulations.

Sounds like the logic behind the hockey stick spaghetti graphs, no?

I know I am late on this but I am trying to spool back up on this site so allow me to catch up.  It turned out that that the IPCC’s Amazon claim (that 40% of the rain forest was at risk from global warming) came from the Facebook page of a 12-year-old girl.  OK, just kidding, it didn’t, but the source is not much better — apparently the claim was just thrown up on a web page of a Brazilian activist organization in 1999, and then pulled down in 2003.  Everything since has been one long game of “telephone.”  The whole story is fascinating and worth reading.

It would be an understatement to say that much of the focus in villifying skeptics has been on the skeptic’s funding.  The storyline goes that skeptics are only fighting the obvious because they are paid off by oil and coal companies.

But of course, it turns out that global warming alarmists get far more funding than skeptics, likely 100x as much or more (funding for skeptics is at most a million dollar or two a year, and that may be high — funding for alarmists by governments alone is in the billions a year).  The quick reply of leading alarmist scientists is that the money is incidental.

I am generally willing to take them at their word — I find trying to look into other people’s hearts to be a hopeless exercise.  And besides, does anyone really think the folks who, say, believe in or oppose string theory are taking those positions for the money.  If I really had to discuss incentives, I would argue that prestige and wanting to belong are actually stronger motivations for alarmist scientists, as preaching doom seems to lead to fame while being a skeptic seems to lead to academic shunning.

So I have generally avoided the topic of monetary motivation of alarmists, but what am I to think when Penn State makes the case in its report on Michael Mann?  In a rather straight-forward way, they make the case that Mann is a good climate scientist because he is good at obtaining funding

This level of success in proposing research, and obtaining funding to conduct it, clearly places Dr. Mann among the most respected scientists in his field. Such success would not have been possible had he not met or exceeded the highest standards of his profession for proposing research…

Had Dr. Mann’s conduct of his research been outside the range of accepted practices, it would have been impossible for him to receive so many awards and recognitions, which typically involve intense scrutiny from scientists who may or may not agree with his scientific conclusions…

Clearly, Dr. Mann’s reporting of his research has been successful and judged to be outstanding by his peers. This would have been impossible had his activities in reporting his work been outside of accepted practices in his field.

This argument is OK as far as it goes, but implicitly defines a great academic as “someone who goes along with the pack.”  Note that skeptics cannot claim to get  a lot of research grants, because the alarmists control the funding.  Skeptics can’t get into peer-reviewed journals, because, as the East Anglia emails make clear, a small group of alarmist scientists are blocking their publication.  Mann’s research has been judged outstanding by his peers because he agrees with his peers.

In a large sense, Penn State’s only test of Mann’s ability is that he is currently a member in good standing of the small in-crowd that dominates climate science.  His science is good because it comes to the right conclusions.

Unlike many skeptics, I have no desire to “get” Professor Mann.  I don’t need him fired or even investigated by Penn State.  The way to refute him is to refute him, not haul him in front of tribunals.

That being said, Penn State did start and investigation and as such has some responsibility to do the thing right.  And boy was this a joke.   The most charitable thing I can say is that his work is fraught with more questionable decisions and practices and approaches than anything I have ever seen that was taken this seriously.  We could talk about it for days, but here is one example to get you thinking.

You can find a lot of different definitions of post-modernism.  Here is one from Wikipedia, which seems appropriate because in some sense at its very core Wikipedia adopts a post-modernist approach to truth.  Post-modernism rejects objective truth, or at least man’s ability ever to identify such truth.   As applied to science, post-modernists would say that what we call scientific “truth” in in fact the results of social, cultural, and political forces within and acting on the scientific community.

Some elements of post-modernism actually provide a useful critique of science.  Its focus on biases and resulting observational blindness to certain results that falsify ones pre-conceived notions are useful caveats in a scientific process.  But the belief that a rational scientific process is not just difficult but impossible leads to all kinds of crazy conclusions.  Many in hard core postmodern circles would argue that since objective truth is impossible anyway, scientific findings should be guided by what is most socially useful. As Steven Schneider of Stanford says vis a vis climate:

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

And speaking of Steven Schneider, he is coauthor of a recent study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that has really made it plain to me that climate is becoming the first post-modern physical science.  Just note the incredible approach to his study, and how much it mirrors the precepts of post-modernism:  To decide who is right and wrong in climate science between skeptics and alarmists, the study authors have … wait for it .. counted them and measured their relative influence in academic circles.  Since the authors count more alarmists than skeptics, and judge that the alarmists are more influential in academic circles, then they must be right!  After all, truth is determined by those with the most political and cultural influence, not by silly stuff like testing hypotheses against observational data.

Postscript: I think a lot of the skeptic backlash against this study is overwrought, examples here and here.  To paraphrase another climate publication, this study is “not evil, just silly.”

I don’t want to make the mistake of over-interpreting fairly balanced remarks by Michael Kelly of Cambridge, nor of taking quotes out of context as daggers to throw at climatologists.  But I did find his reactions interesting as he read through some Briffa and Jones papers — they seem to match the reactions of many non-climate scientists who tend to have the same type reactions if they really read through some of the work, rather than just issuing statements of moral support without much investigations.

All that being said, here are some of his admittedly offhand reactions after reading through some of the papers.  The entire document is worthy of reading through, as linked by Bishop Hill.

There are however some more detailed qualifications:

(i) I take real exception to having simulation runs described as experiments (without at least the qualification of ‘computer’ experiments). It does a disservice to centuries of real experimentation and allows simulations output to be considered as real data. This last is a very serious matter, as it can lead to the idea that real ‘real data’ might be wrong simply because it disagrees with the models! That is turning centuries of science on its head.

(ii) The reading of the papers was made rather harder by the quality of the diagrams, and the description of the vertical axes on a number of graphs. When numbers on the vertical axis go from -2 to +2 without being explicitly labelled as percentage deviations, temperature excursions, or scaled correlation coefficients, there is potential for confusion.

(iii) I think it is easy to see how peer review within tight networks can allow new orthodoxies to appear and get established that would not happen if papers were written for and peer reviewed by a wider audience. I have seen it happen elsewhere. This finding may indeed be an important outcome of the present review….

(2) On a personal note, I chose to study the theory of condensed matter physics, as opposed to cosmology, precisely on the grounds that I could systematically control and vary the boundary conditions of my ob-ject of study as an integral part of making advances. An elegant theory which does not fit good experimental data is a bad theory. Here the starting data is patchy and noisy, and the choices made are in part aesthetic, or designed to help a conclusion. rather than neutral. This all colours my attitude to the limited value of complex simulations that cannot by exhaustively tested against ‘real’ data from independent experiments that control all but one of the variables.
(3) Up to and throughout this exercise, I have remained puzzled how the real humility of the scientists in this area, as evident in their papers, including all these here, and the talks I have heard them give, is morphed into statements of confidence at the 95% level for public consumption through the IPCC process. This does not happen in other subjects of equal importance to humanity, e.g. energy futures or environmental degradation or resource depletion. I can only think it is the ‘authority’ appropriated by the IPCC itself that is the root cause.

These questions to Briffa could have come from McIntyre:

(I) How can we be reassured about the choice of which raw data from which stations are to be selected, detrended and then included in the tree-ring data bases? Is there an algorithm that establishes the inclusion/exclusion? If I were setting out to establish the lowest possible net temperature rise over the last century is consistent with the available data, what fraction of tree-ring-data would then be included/excluded? Could I coerce the data to support a null hypothesis on global warming?

(2) In the range of papers we have reviewed, you have used a variety of statistical techniques in what is a heroic effort to get signals from noisy and patchy data. To what extent has this variety of techniques be reviewed and commented upon by the modern statistical community for their effectiveness, right use and possible weaknesses?

I received this press release via email.  The title is:

Carbon Dioxide Has Played Leading Role in Dictating Global Climate Patterns

OK, so I read.

Increasingly, the Earth’s climate appears to be more connected than anyone would have imagined. El Niño, the weather pattern that originates in a patch of the equatorial Pacific, can spawn heat waves and droughts as far away as Africa.

Now, a research team led by Brown University has established that the climate in the tropics over at least the last 2.7 million years changed in lockstep with the cyclical spread and retreat of ice sheets thousands of miles away in the Northern Hemisphere. The findings appear to cement the link between the recent Ice Ages and temperature changes in tropical oceans.

Apparently, I must not understand something.  The study seems to trumpet as a huge finding that tropical ocean temperatures on Earth dropped at the same time that temperatures dropped in the upper latitudes and Earth experienced ice age glaciation.  Uh, OK.  Is it really surprising that when part of the Earth got much colder, other parts of the Earth got colder too.?  Isn’t the simplest explanation that whatever made it cold in the poles made it cold at the equator too?  Wouldn’t a solar change act this way?

The research team, including scientists from Luther College in Iowa, Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and the University of Hong Kong, analyzed cores taken from the seabed at four locations in the tropical oceans: the Arabian Sea, the South China Sea, the eastern Pacific and the equatorial Atlantic Ocean.

The cores tell the story. Sedimentary cores taken from the ocean floor in four locations show that climate patterns in the tropics have mirrored Ice Age cycles for the last 2.7 million years and that carbon dioxide has played the leading role in determining global climate patterns. The researchers zeroed in on tropical ocean surface temperatures because these vast bodies, which make up roughly half of the world’s oceans, in large measure orchestrate the amount of water in the atmosphere and thus rainfall patterns worldwide, as well as the concentration of water vapor, the most prevalent greenhouse gas.

Looking at the chemical remains of tiny marine organisms that lived in the sunlit zone of the ocean, the scientists were able to extract the surface temperature for the oceans for the last 3.5 million years, well before the beginning of the Ice Ages. Beginning about 2.7 million years ago, the geologists found that tropical ocean surface temperatures dropped by 1 to 3 degrees C (1.8 to 5.4 F) during each Ice Age, when ice sheets spread in the Northern Hemisphere and significantly cooled oceans in the northern latitudes. Even more compelling, the tropics also changed when Ice Age cycles switched from roughly 41,000-year to 100,000-year intervals.

Again, so what?  What am I missing here guys? Why is this astonishing?  But the interesting part to me is that all the data is on developping a proxy for sea surface temperatures.  Don’t know if it is accurate, but it seems a good endeavor.  Fully worthwhile of the effort.

But remember the title.  What about CO2?  And through the article we keep getting teasers like this:

Based on that new link, the scientists conclude that carbon dioxide has played the lead role in dictating global climate patterns, beginning with the Ice Ages and continuing today.

And this

Candace Major of the National Science Foundation agrees: “This research certainly supports the idea of global sensitivity of climate to carbon dioxide as the first order of control on global temperature patterns,” she says. “It also points to a strong sensitivity of global temperature to the levels of greenhouse gases on very long timescales, and shows that resulting climatic impacts are felt from the tropics to the poles.”

All they did was develop a tropical temperature proxy and show the tropics got colder during ice ages.  Duh.  I mean, isn’t this really just a reality check — we developed a proxy and we think its pretty good because the temperatures drop right when we think they should.   I kept waiting for the evidence that CO2 had anything to do with this.  This is all I get, and comes not from their study but a link to data from a completely different data set having nothing to do with their study:

Climate scientists have a record of carbon dioxide levels for the last 800,000 years–spanning the last seven Ice Ages–from ice cores taken in Antarctica. They have deduced that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere fell by about 30 percent during each cycle, and that most of that carbon dioxide was absorbed by high-latitude oceans such as the North Atlantic and the Southern Ocean. According to the new findings, this pattern began 2.7 million years ago, and the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbed by the oceans has intensified with each successive Ice Age. Geologists know the Ice Ages have gotten progressively colder–leading to larger ice sheets–because they have found debris on the seabed of the North Atlantic and North Pacific left by icebergs that broke from the land-bound sheets.

“It seems likely that changes in carbon dioxide were the most important reason why tropical temperatures changed, along with the water vapor feedback,” Herbert said.

What?  How does he determine this?  My sense is that we are back to the old 800-year lag / ice core issue where scientists are confusing cause and effect between temperature and CO2 levels.  I am willing to credit dropping CO2 levels (through ocean absorption) as a positive feedback effect, though I would argue that it is small just as they seem to argue that it is large.   The key, though, is that nothing in their data supports a sensitivity number for CO2 at all, just a rough possible causal relationship where even the direction of the causation is unknown.

One fatal flaw of this argument is that while people can make an argument for CO2 as an amplifier (either weak or strong), no one can explain how it might trigger the beginning of an Ice Age or warming recovery, and without this there is no way to call CO2 the main driver of these changes.  Maybe these guys have found the evidence of the trigger?

Herbert acknowledges that the team’s findings leave important questions. One is why carbon dioxide began to play a major role when the Ice Ages began 2.7 million years ago. Also left unanswered is why carbon dioxide appears to have magnified the intensity of successive Ice Ages from the beginning of the cycles to the present. The researchers do not understand why the timing of the Ice Age cycles shifted from roughly 41,000-year to 100,000-year intervals.

Oops, maybe not.  But surely they understand the mechanism

“We think we have the simplest explanation for the link between the Ice Ages and the tropics over that time and the apparent role of carbon dioxide in the intensification of Ice Ages and corresponding changes in the tropics,” said Timothy Herbert of Brown University and the lead author of the paper in Science. Herbert added, “but we don’t know why. The answer lies in the ocean, we’re pretty sure.”

Oops, maybe not.

OK, as a public service, I will create a more truthful summary of the study:

Some clever scientists discovered a way to use the remains of marine organisms in core samples to develop a proxy for ocean surface temperatures over the last 2.7 million years.  These temperature proxies seem to reality check well, dropping during exactly the periods we believe to have been ice ages.  The reconstructed temperature record is not inconsistent with theories of high climate sensitivity to CO2, which, though the scientists did not actually study the problem, they felt the need to mention to get attention and funding.

This came to me via email today from an email address at Mount Allison University:

Funny thing that you are going againts 99% of peer reviewed journal. It is why we do not give retards like you any place it the academic world.

I must confess to an error.  I am having a very stressful, busy time at work, and yes… though I usually ignore this stuff, I went and fed the troll.  I wrote back

Fortunately I slipped my way through Princeton and Harvard before the academic world realized I was a “retard.”  I suppose academia works differently in California — back in the day when I was back East, the correct academic response to something one did not agree with was to actually cite the offending passage as well as to muster proof of one’s position.  I suppose it does not surprise me that scholarship in California Canada is now defined as yelling “retard.”  Perhaps you could refer to a specific chart at this link so I get a better idea where my heresy is:  http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2010/01/catastrophe-denied-the-science-of-the-skeptics-position.html

Warren Meyer

Update:  Sorry, of course the University is in Canada, not California.  I love the name – one wonders if it is named for a local landmark or an annual event.

Claiming “scientific consensus” and “peer reveiw” for findings that have neither

The seven experts who advised President Obama on how to deal with offshore drilling safety after the Deepwater Horizon explosion are accusing his administration of misrepresenting their views to make it appear that they supported a six-month drilling moratorium — something they actually oppose.

The experts, recommended by the National Academy of Engineering, say Interior Secretary Ken Salazar modified their report last month, after they signed it, to include two paragraphs calling for the moratorium on existing drilling and new permits.

Salazar’s report to Obama said a panel of seven experts “peer reviewed” his recommendations, which included a six-month moratorium on permits for new wells being drilled using floating rigs and an immediate halt to drilling operations.

“None of us actually reviewed the memorandum as it is in the report,” oil expert Ken Arnold told Fox News. “What was in the report at the time it was reviewed was quite a bit different in its impact to what there is now. So we wanted to distance ourselves from that recommendation.”

Salazar apologized to those experts Thursday.

Bishop Hill Blog writes, concerning the truncation of recently divergent data by Keith Briffa and others:

The point at issue is Mike’s Nature Trick and the question of whether it amounts to scientific fraud. Der Spiegel describe the trick as follows:

But what appeared at first glance to be fraud ["hide the decline"] was actually merely a face-saving fudge: Tree-ring data indicates no global warming since the mid-20th century, and therefore contradicts the temperature measurements. The clearly erroneous tree data was thus corrected by the so-called “trick” with the temperature graphs.

Many of Roger’s readers take issue with the description of the divergent data as “erroneous” and I tend to agree with them here. The data has been processed in the same way in the twentieth century as in earlier periods, so it is not erroneous, but anomalous. The reason for the divergence is unknown and the divergence therefore needs to be disclosed and discussed since it potentially undermines all tree-ring based temperature reconstructions.

Here is an example of data you might reasonably throw out as erroneous:   Drop a ball a thousand times from a building and measure its acceleration.  We know its going to be something like 9.8 m/sec/sec.  If four or five times we measure it as 5 m/sec/sec, we will likely treat those measurements as erroneous, since we have hundreds of years of historical measurements to confirm the acceleration near the Earth’s surface due to gravity.

Here is another example:   You have ten identical compasses.  Nine of them say north is in the direction of the tree in your backyard.  The tenth say it is behind you.  We might reasonably throw out the tenth observation as erroneous.

Here is a different kind of example.  From 1936 to 2000, the winner of the last Washington Redskins home game accurately predicted the winner of that year’s presidential election.  Then, in 2004 the relationship between Redskin’s performance and the presidential election did not hold.   So, should we throw out the data point as anomalous, or should we use this data point to force ourselves to reconsider whether the relationship was ever really a valid causality?

The Mann/Briffa/etc. tree ring analyses assume the following:  That tree ring growth varies linearly with average temperatures; that the temperature-growth relationship is far stronger and more dominant than relations between soil conditions, rain, sunlight, or any other environmental factor and tree growth; and that this relationship remains fairly constant over the life of a tree.

The question is, do we believe these assumptions in the same way that we believe that the acceleration of gravity is 9.8 m/sec/sec?  By throwing out the data after a certain date, which by the way was gathered from the exact same trees by the exact same methodology as the earlier data, Briffa and others are in effect saying that their assumptions about the relationship between tree ring growth and temperature are unassailable, despite the fact that these analyses have only really been done for a few years.

Reasonable people instead will tend to conclude that it is instead very possible that the divergence problem the author’s sought to hide is in fact evidence that tree rings make poor thermometers – than one or all of the assumptions about tree rings and their relationship with temperature are flawed.

The New Scientist (“new” in most magazine titles meaning “socialist”) has yet another whole issue aimed at slamming climate skeptics.  You might start to think they felt threatened or something.

I found the cover hugely ironic:

The implication I guess is that climate skeptics are somehow trying to silence real scientists.  This is enormously ironic.  With a couple of exceptions, including the unfortunate legal crusade by the Virginia AG against Michael Mann, it is climate alarmists rather than skeptics who have generally taken the position that the other side of the debate needs to be silenced.

By the way, as I said in the intro to my last video, I have chosen to embrace the title of denier – with one proviso.  Being a denier implies that one is denying some kind of proposition, so I am sure thoughtful people would agree that it is important to be clear on the proposition that is being denied.  For example, I always found the term “climate denier” to be hilarious.  You mean there are folks who deny there is a climate?

I don’t deny that climate changes – it changes all the time.  I don’t deny there is global warming – global temperatures are higher today than they were in 1900, just as they were higher in 1200 AD than they were in 900.  I don’t even deny that man is contributing somewhat to the warming, not just from CO2 but from effects like changes in land use.  What I deny is the catastrophe — that man’s actions are leading to catastrophic changes in the climate.  I believe many scientists have grossly over-estimated the sensitivity of temperatures to CO2 by grossly overestimating the net positive feedback in the climate system.  And I think much of the work assigning consequences to even small increases in global temperatures – from tornadoes to hurricanes to lizard extinction – is frankly crap.  While I think the first mistake (around sensitivity) is an honest error, some day scientists will look back on the horrendous “science” of the consequences of warming and be ashamed.

It strikes me that a real scientific magazine that was actually seeking truth would, if it wanted to dedicate a whole issue to the climate debate, actually create a print debate between skeptics and alarmists to educate its readers.  If the alarmist case is so obvious, and its readers so smugly superior in their intellect, surely this would be the most powerful possible way to debunk skeptics.  Instead, the New Scientist chose, in a phrase I saw the other day and loved, to take a flamethrower to a field of straw men.

For those who want to watch the straw men go up in smoke, The Reference Frame has an index to the articles in this issue.

From Virginia:

No one can accuse Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli of shying from controversy. In his first four months in office, Cuccinelli  directed public universities to remove sexual orientation from their anti-discrimination policies, attacked the Environmental Protection Agency, and filed a lawsuit challenging federal health care reform. Now, it appears, he may be preparing a legal assault on an embattled proponent of global warming theory who used to teach at the University of Virginia, Michael Mann.

In papers sent to UVA April 23, Cuccinelli’s office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann’s receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann— now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State— was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.

If Cuccinelli succeeds in finding a smoking gun like the purloined emails that led to the international scandal dubbed Climategate, Cuccinelli could seek the return of all the research money, legal fees, and trebled damages.

Yeah, I get it that this was public money, so one can claim this is an accountability exercise, but in practice this is pure intimidation and harassment of an academic whose work one disagrees with.  Errors in Mann’s work should be dealt with through criticism and replication, not through legal actions by grandstanding politicians.

I am the last one to defend the dumb ass academic projects that government money often goes towards funding, but once granted, scientists and academics need some room to pursue truth (even incorrectly) without being harassed by elected officials.  I would have no problem with the entire state grant program being evaluated for effectiveness, or some investigation into UVA’s financial or academic controls it exercises over its research.

For skeptics cheering this on, would you be OK with Eric Holder going after, say, Roy Spencer in the same way?  Do you really think that if the guys in Virginia establish the precedent, the Chicago-trained folks in the White House aren’t willing and able to go one better?

Update: This seems a more productive approach.  Why not go after the University for its data sharing practices on publicly funded studies, rather than try to go after a scientist one disagrees with on criminal charges.  If we tried every academic for not fully disclosing data potentially contradictory to their pet theory, we would empty out the universities.  We handle these issues by replication and challenge by other academics.  Therefore, the better approach is to focus on release of data required to do the replication and verification.

Tycho Brahe was perhaps one of the greatest observational astronomers in history.  He amassed a tremendous amount of absolutely critical data on the motion of bodies within our solar system.  Interestingly, Brahe never accepted the Copernican heliocentric view of the solar system.  For years, he was incredibly protective of the data, refusing to share it with anyone.  Given that he (with historical hindsight) was wedded to a dead-end view of the solar system, his data was not initially valuable.

It was not until Keppler, and later Newton and others, were able to get access to his data that the data was truly useful, and it became the foundation of one of the greatest revolutions in thinking and understanding in human history.  Had Brahe insisted on the confidentiality of his data to his death, developed as it were with significant financial contributions from the state and various universities, his work would have been irrelevant, applied narrowly to support a failed theory.

I am reminded of this story when I read this:

In a landmark ruling, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office has ruled that Queen’s University Belfast must hand over data obtained during 40 years of research into 7,000 years of Irish tree rings to a City banker and part-time climate analyst, Doug Keenan.

This week, the Belfast ecologist who collected most of the data, Professor Mike Baillie, described the ruling as “a staggering injustice … We are the ones who trudged miles over bogs and fields carrying chain saws. We prepared the samples and – using quite a lot of expertise and judgment – we measured the ring patterns. Each ring pattern therefore has strong claims to be our copyright. Now, for the price of a stamp, Keenan feels he is entitled to be given all this data.”

I guess I am confused as to what the point of a public university is, if its not to contribute knowledge to the public domain.  Had Mike Baillie formed his own company with private investors to gather and monetize tree ring data, he would be absolutely correct, and I would be the first to defend him.   I would love to see the grant application or funding proposal he submitted for this work.  “We would like public funds in the amount of X to gather tree ring data and keep this data absolutely secret so that no one can check or replicate our results.”   Actively fighting replication is not a very positive indicator of confidence in one’s scientific results.

I thought this was an interesting analog to some activities in climate science:

some advocates for women’s health tried to pressure The Lancet into delaying publication of the new findings, fearing that good news would detract from the urgency of their cause, [Lancet editor] Dr. [Richard] Horton said in a telephone interview.“I think this is one of those instances when science and advocacy can conflict,” he said.

Dr. Horton said the advocates, whom he declined to name, wanted the new information held and released only after certain meetings about maternal and child health had already taken place.

He said the meetings included one at the United Nations this week, and another to be held in Washington in June, where advocates hope to win support for more foreign aid for maternal health from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Other meetings of concern to the advocates are the Pacific Health Summit in June, and the United Nations General Assembly meeting in December.

some advocates for women’s health tried to pressure The Lancet into delaying publication of the new findings, fearing that good news would detract from the urgency of their cause, [Lancet editor] Dr. [Richard] Horton said in a telephone interview.“I think this is one of those instances when science and advocacy can conflict,” he said.

Dr. Horton said the advocates, whom he declined to name, wanted the new information held and released only after certain meetings about maternal and child health had already taken place.

He said the meetings included one at the United Nations this week, and another to be held in Washington in June, where advocates hope to win support for more foreign aid for maternal health from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Other meetings of concern to the advocates are the Pacific Health Summit in June, and the United Nations General Assembly meeting in December.

“People who have spent many years committed to the issue of maternal health were understandably worried that these figures could divert attention from an issue that they care passionately about,” Dr. Horton said. “But my feeling is that they are misguided in their view that this would be damaging. My view is that actually these numbers help their cause, not hinder it.”

“People who have spent many years committed to the issue of maternal health were understandably worried that these figures could divert attention from an issue that they care passionately about,” Dr. Horton said. “But my feeling is that they are misguided in their view that this would be damaging. My view is that actually these numbers help their cause, not hinder it.”

At the United Nations, whose general hostility to free speech is fairly well established, a proposal is on the table to allow the prosecution of people, like myself, who publicly disagree with the UN’s position on climate science:

The proposal for the United Nations to accept “ecocide” as a fifth “crime against peace”, which could be tried at the International Criminal Court (ICC), is the brainchild of British lawyer-turned-campaigner Polly Higgins.

The radical idea would have a profound effect on industries blamed for widespread damage to the environment like fossil fuels, mining, agriculture, chemicals and forestry.

Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute “climate deniers” who distort science and facts to discourage voters and politicians from taking action to tackle global warming and climate change.

Donna Laframboise and Richard Tol have some pretty devastating criticisms of the IPCC working group 3 report.

Phil Jones is now on the record saying that he doesn’t consider it normal scientific practice to share data and results with other scientists who wish to replicate his findings.  And, it is pretty clear that Hughs tended to get a big fat pass from all his reviewers of published works, stating that no reviewer ever asked for his data, methodoloby, or computer code.

Warwick Hughes makes a pretty good case that in fact Jones was quite open with his data and working papers, as long as he thought the requestor was on his side.  Once he found out certain people were working to replicated and find errors in his work, those people were locked out.   The impressin one gets from his article is that there is now a pretty easy answer to “how can all these climate scientists be so wrong?”  The answer is that they have never had any scrutiny whatsoever on their results, and anyone who attempted such scrutiny were marginalized and vilified by the inner core community.

Stephen Mosher writes:

When it comes to deciding whether to share data or not, standards have nothing to do with the decisions Jones made and he knows that. He knows he shared confidential data with Rutherford while he denied it to McIntyre and Hughes. He knows he regarded the confidentiality of those agreements quixotically. Violating them or hiding behind them on a whim. This was scientific malpractice. Lying about that now is beyond excuse.

Glenn Reynolds brings an interesting example of post-modernist science, where getting the right answer is more important than being factually correct:

Bellesiles, for those who don’t remember, was a historian at Emory who wrote a book making some, er, counterintuitive claims about guns in early America — in short, that they were much rarer than generally thought, and frequently owned and controlled by the government. Constitutional law scholars who expressed doubts about this were told to shut up by historians, who cited the importance of “peer review” as a guarantor of accuracy, and who wrapped themselves in claims of professional expertise.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Bellesiles had made it up. His work was based on probate records, and when people tried to find them, it turned out that many didn’t exist (one data set he claimed to have used turned out, on review, to have been destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake). It also turned out that Bellesiles hadn’t even visited some of the archives he claimed to have researched. When challenged to produce his data, he was unable to do so, and offered unpersuasive stories regarding why.

Bellesiles eventually lost his job at Emory (and his Bancroft Prize) over the fraud, but not until his critics had been called political hacks, McCarthyites, and worse. But what’s amazing, especially in retrospect, is how slow his defenders — and the media — were to engage the critics, or to look at the flaws in the data. Instead, they wrapped themselves in claims of authority, and attacked the critics as anti-intellectual hacks interested only in politics. Are we seeing something similar with regard to ClimateGate? It sure looks that way to me.

I am a bit late on this (I have family over for the weekend) but on the off chance you have not seen it, make sure to check out the notes from the interview of Phil Jones of the CRU.  Here is the BBC Q&A.    Anthony Watt has as good a summary as anyone.

Anthony summarizes as follows:

Specifically, the Q-and-As confirm what many skeptics have long suspected:

• Neither the rate nor magnitude of recent warming is exceptional.
• There was no significant warming from 1998-2009. According to the IPCC we should have seen a global temperature increase of at least 0.2°C per decade.
• The IPCC models may have overestimated the climate sensitivity for greenhouse gases, underestimated natural variability, or both.
• This also suggests that there is a systematic upward bias in the impacts estimates based on these models just from this factor alone.
• The logic behind attribution of current warming to well-mixed man-made greenhouse gases is faulty.
• The science is not settled, however unsettling that might be.
• There is a tendency in the IPCC reports to leave out inconvenient findings, especially in the part(s) most likely to be read by policy makers.

I think some of these conclusions are a bit of a reach from the Q&A. I don’t get the sense that Jones is abandoning the basic hypothesis that climate sensitivity to manmade CO2 is high (e.g. 3+ degrees per doubling, rather than <=1 degrees as many skeptics would hypothesize).  In particular, I think the writing has been on the wall for a while that alarmists were bailing on the hockey stick / MWP-related arguments as indicative of high sensitivities.

The new news for me was the admission that the warming rate from 1979-present is in no way unprecedented.  This is important as the lead argument (beyond black box “the models say so” justifications) for blaming anthropogenic factors for recent warming is that the rate of warming was somehow unprecedented.  However, Jones admits (as all rational skeptics have said for some time) that the warming rate from 1979 to today is really no different than we have measured in other periods decidedly unaffected by CO2.

I have made this argument before here, with the following chart:

Again, from Anthony:

Period	Length	Trend (Degrees C per decade)	Significance
1860-1880	21	0.163	Yes
1910-1940	31	0.15	Yes
1975-1998	24	0.166	Yes
1975-2009	35	0.161	Yes

Here, by the way, was my attempt to explain the last 100 years of temperature with a cyclical wave plus a small linear trend (my much more transparent and simple climate model)

Not bad, huh?  Here is a similar analysis using a linear trend plus the PDO