Climate Skeptic

Weather is a chaotic stochastic system.  Outcomes that we typically like to measure – severe storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, temperatures, snowfall — all have mean or average behavior with a large bell-curve or normal distribution around that mean.

With all the talk of record snow in Washington or light snowfall in certain Olympic venues, I feel that a reminder is in order:  There is very little one can deduce about changes or drift in the mean from one or two isolated events in the tail ends of the distribution.   If a kid in your high school gets a perfect score on her SAT, does this mean that the average kid is getting higher SAT scores, that this kid’s score is a symptom of “global smartening?”  Or is this kid’s performance just an isolated event in the tail of the test score distribution?   Katrina and the Washington blizzard seem to occasion a lot of climate conclusions, when in fact I think those conclusions are virtually impossible from such events.

The only really useful role I can see that these extreme events play in the scientific debate is to weed out the credible climate commentators from the charlatans.    If an alarmist says, for example, that the heavy snows in Washington are not necessarily inconsistent with global warming, then he or she is probably relatively safe.  But run away quickly from anyone who says manmade CO2 caused Katrina or, even more incredibly, the Washington snowstorms — they are just nuts.

Of course, the argument typically morphs into folks arguing that extreme events themselves are more prevalent, in other words somehow the standard deviation of the distribution has expanded.  This, in my mind, is one of the weakest arguments in the alarmist arsenal.  The evidence for this is extremely weak (example), and a number of metrics (such as for hurricane activity and large tornadoes) have actually declines over the last decade.  What tends to happen is that the reporting frequency of such events increases, which increases the general perception of having more extreme events — but scientists are supposed to be able to see past such observation biases.

A corollary to this is that extremes in one part of the world do not necessarily mean that the world average is moving in that direction.  Those of us in the US would have sworn January was a cold month, but globally it turns out January was actually a pretty warm month, at least on the historic scale of the last 30 years.  I remember when agricultural futures were first popularized, farmers often went bankrupt forgetting just this corollary.  They would see weather in their area terrible, with terrible crop yields ahead, and they would go long on these crops in the futures markets, only to find the weather in other areas was quite good and they lost a fortune on their futures.

Almost everywhere someone looks in the last IPCC report, they find claims that are either not substantiated by the citations or citations to non-peer-reviewed sources.    Two more examples:

Climate Quotes finds that the claims that wildfires were hurting tourism were all to non-peer-reviewed sources, and the source for the Canadian claim actually said virtually the opposite.

Bishop Hill looks at a random paragraph on climate change and food production, and finds, surprise surprise, non peer-reviewed sources and claims not backed by the citations.

Climate Quotes is keeping up a list of questionable or outright odd citations in the IPCC AR4 and AR3  Many are barely more than press releases from influence groups.

The Guardian has an amazing series of articles about the Jones 1990 urbanization study that has been quoted by all subsequent IPCC reports as authoritative that urbanization has negligible effect on the historic temperature record. It is pretty clear that while denying the FOI requests and calling skeptics lazy and liars and irritants (etc.) they actually knew full well there were problems with the study.  This is what they were saying publicly:

n American colleague, and frequent contributor to the leaked emails, Dr Mike Mann at Pennsylvania State University, advised him: “This crowd of charlatans … look for one little thing they can say is wrong, and thus generalise that the science is entirely compromised. The last thing you want to do is help them by feeding the fire. Best thing is to ignore them completely.”

Another colleague, Kevin Trenberth at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, urged a fightback. “The response should try to somehow label these guys and [sic] lazy and incompetent and unable to do the huge amount of work it takes to construct such a database.”

This is what they were saying privately:

Those concerns were most cogently expressed to Jones by his ex-boss, and former head of the CRU, Dr Tom Wigley. In August 2007, Wigley warned Jones by email: “It seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (W-C W at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect.”

Wigley was concerned partly because he had been director of the CRU when the original paper was published in 1990. As he told Jones later, in 2009: “The buck should eventually stop with me.”

Wigley put to Jones the allegations made by the sceptics. “Wang had been claiming the existence of such exonerating documents for nearly a year, but he has not been able to produce them. Additionally, there was a report published in 1991 (with a second version in 1997) explicitly stating that no such documents exist.”

…Wigley, in his May 2009 email to Jones, said of Wang: “I have always thought W-C W was a rather sloppy scientist. I would …not be surprised if he screwed up here … Were you taking W-C W on trust? Why, why, why did you and W-C W not simply say this right at the start? Perhaps it’s not too late.” There is no evidence of any doubts being raised over Wang’s previous work.

Interesting.  Intriguingly, Jones did “penance” in some sense for this sloppy work by finding as much as a 1C per century urbanization bias in Chines temperature records in a later study.

Why it matters

The Guardian writes:

t is important to keep this in perspective, however. This dramatic revision of the estimated impact of urbanisation on temperatures in China does not change the global picture of temperature trends. There is plenty of evidence of global warming, not least from oceans far from urban influences.

This is correct.  Further, it is absurd to deny the world has warmed over the last 150 years as the little ice age of the 17th and 18th centuries was one of the coldest periods in thousands of years, and thus it is totally natural that we have seen warming in recovery from these frigid times.

But here is what it is important to understand:  The real debate between skeptics and alarmists is not over whether the Earth has warmed over the last century or whether CO2 from man contributes incrementally to warming.  The real debate is over whether the climate’s sensitivity to CO2 is high or low.  Skeptics like me argue for low sensitivity, on the order of 0.5-1.0C per doubling once all feedbacks are taken in to account.  Alarmists argue for numbers 3C and higher.

The problem alarmists have is that it is very, very difficult to reconcile past warming to high-sensitivity forecasts.   It takes a lot of mathematical contortions, from time-delays to cooling aerosols to ignoring ocean cycles and natural recovery from the little ice age to make the numbers reconcile.  Halving the actual historic warming by attributing the other half to measurement biases makes it even, uh, more impossible to reconcile high sensitivity models to actual history.

I cannot believe that we skeptics have caught grief from these folks for years for our science not being sufficiently peer-reviewed.  But forget about peer-review for a moment (I think it is overrated anyway) — At least the analyses we skeptic have been doing have some kind of rigor, rather than just being surveys of a few random individual perceptions.

In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

What next?  Are we going to ask a random group of parachuters how fast they thought they were free-falling to reset the of g (9.8m/sec/sec)?  My son did more rigorous climate science for his eighth grade science fair project.

A reader wrote me:

Authors complained that although Crichton used their findings correctly, their own intention when writing was not to ‘dispute global warming’. That is the whole problem that seems to keep coming up – so what if someone ’supports’ the consensus in their own private life and ideology? The point of science is to make judgements on data.

I wrote back something I have meaning to post here.   Why do so many scientists from various fields, who may have less knowledge of the details of climate science than a layman like myself has, sign onto all these petitions and letters supporting the science?

One thing that helps explain some of this behavior is that there is a very strong social cost in academia to challenging global warming, so that even when findings in certain studies seem to undercut key pieces of the argument, the researches always add something like “but of course this does not refute the basic theory of global warming” at the end of the paper.  In universities, being identified as having criticized catastrophic man-made global warming theory is sort of like standing up in a Harvard faculty meeting and announcing that one is a devout Baptist and a Sarah Palin supporter.  So on the flip side, publicly declaring for climate catastrophe is a badge of honor and sophistication.

In fact, the lumping of climate skeptics with fundamentalist evolution doubters/deniers actually helps to explain a lot of academic behavior.  We see all of these open letters and surveys that are signed by all kinds of scientists and academics from multiple fields supporting catastrophic global warming theory, but in fact many have not delved even a little bit into the science.  Partially this support is professional courtesy to their peers, but in large part when academics sign these letters, they feel they are supporting science per se, rather than the specific science of global warming (which they have not really inspected) against the anti-science barbarians at the gate.

People often take public positions for what that position communicates about themselves, rather than based on any kind of rigorous analysis.  I would argue that a solid chunk of the Obama votes in the last election were not based on any real understanding of the candidate but on the desire to say, “look what an enlightened person I am, I have voted for a black man for President.”

From the Times in London via Planet Gore:

THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month’s Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions.

Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods — such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 — could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: “More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.”

Last month Gordon Brown, the prime minister, told the Commons that the financial agreement at Copenhagen “must address the great injustice that . . . those hit first and hardest by climate change are those that have done least harm”.

The latest criticism of the IPCC comes a week after reports in The Sunday Times forced it to retract claims in its benchmark 2007 report that the Himalayan glaciers would be largely melted by 2035. It turned out that the bogus claim had been lifted from a news report published in 1999 by New Scientist magazine.

This severe weather proposition is one particularly amenable to shoddy science, as all-too-often folks try to portray statistical events at the tails of the normal distribution as evidence that the mean and/or standard deviation of the distribution is shifting.  The current lawsuit blaming oil and coal companies for Katrina is one such example.

I personally was involved in a fracas over another shoddy analysis that was most definitely not peer-reviewed in the recent US Global Climate Change Impacts  (or synthesis) report, where the report attempted to use a faulty metric of electrical grid disturbances as evidence of increased severe weather.  My original criticisms were here and here and my response to the authors’ response was here.

By the way, the evidence is growing that much of much of the IPCC report did not come from real peer-reviewed work, but from advocacy pieces by groups such as the WWF (which seems to practically be running the IPCC from the number of citations).

Well it turns out that the WWF is cited all over the IPCC AR4 report, and as you know, WWF does not produce peer reviewed science, they produce opinion papers in line with their vision. Yet IPCC’s rules are such that they are supposed to rely on peer reviewed science only. It appears they’ve violated that rule dozens of times, all under Pachauri’s watch.

Anthony has a specific list of citations culled by Donna Laframboise from the IPCC reports, but I am sure the list will grow as folks poke and prod the report again.  These two citations in the IPCC were particularly laugh-inducing:

• Jones, B. and D. Scott, 2007: Implications of climate change to Ontario’s provincial parks. Leisure, (in press)
• Jones, B., D. Scott and H. Abi Khaled, 2006: Implications of climate change for outdoor event planning: a case study of three special events in Canada’s National Capital region. Event Management, 10, 63-76

My sense that if we really trace the sources, we will find that most of the IPCC report rests on the work of 10-20 guys.

I have written a number of times about climate science and post-modernism, where taking the politically correct position and pushing for the “right” government actions is more important than fact-based analysis or the scientific method.  This is a great example of the IPCC acting as just such a post-modernist institution:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action….

Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’

In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air.

Of course, IPCC leader Pachauri is unrepentant

Last night, Dr Pachauri defended the IPCC, saying it was wrong to generalise based on a single mistake. ‘Our procedure is robust,’ he added.

It was Pachauri who originally lashed out with these words at folks who originally criticized the Himalayan glacier claim:

However, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, told the Guardian: “We have a very clear idea of what is happening. I don’t know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement.”…

Pachauri dismissed the report saying it was not “peer reviewed” and had few “scientific citations”.

“With the greatest of respect this guy retired years ago and I find it totally baffling that he comes out and throws out everything that has been established years ago.”…

In response Pachauri said that such statements were reminiscent of “climate change deniers and school boy science”.

All too often, people mistake other people’s confidence in a particular proposition as sufficient evidence for they themselves to believe the proposition.  No where is this more evident than in global warming.  But the recent IPCC flipflop on Himalayan Glaciers provides an excellent example of just how flimsy the basis can be for other people’s public confidence.

Just 2 months ago, IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri was saying this:

A leading climate scientist [IPCC Chariman Rajendra Pachauri] today accused the Indian environment ministry of “arrogance” after the release of a government report claiming that there is no evidence climate change has caused “abnormal” shrinking of Himalayan glaciers….

Today Ramesh denied any such risk existed: “There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening in the Himalayan glaciers.” The minister added although some glaciers are receding they were doing so at a rate that was not “historically alarming”.

However, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, told the Guardian: “We have a very clear idea of what is happening. I don’t know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement.”…

Pachauri dismissed the report saying it was not “peer reviewed” and had few “scientific citations”.

“With the greatest of respect this guy retired years ago and I find it totally baffling that he comes out and throws out everything that has been established years ago.”…

In response Pachauri said that such statements were reminiscent of “climate change deniers and school boy science”.

So Pachauri is coming out firing.  His science is well-established, theirs is “school boy” and not “peer reviewed.”  Pachauri not only says this guy is wrong, but he that he is a bad guy for even bringing it up.  You see him actively questioning his motives, as if this is somehow a scheme and Pachauri just hasn’t figured it out yet.

But now, two months later, we know exactly the quality of science that Pachauri was defending:

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

In effect, Pachauri was defending a proposition based on, effectively, a cocktail-party quality speculation reported in a telephone interview in a throwaway, non-peer-reviewed article in a popular magazine.

Via Carpe Diem:

Last quarter I taught Atmospheric Sciences 101 at the University of Washington, a large lecture class with a mix of students, and gave them a math diagnostic test as I have done in the past. The results were stunning, in a very depressing way. This was an easy test, including elementary and middle school math problems. And these are students attending a science class at the State’s flagship university–these should be the creme of the crop of our high school graduates with high GPAs. And yet most of them can’t do essential basic math–operations needed for even the most essential problem solving.

Here’s a link to a PDF version of the full test and results, and here’s a blank version to give your kids and friends.

Consider these embarrassing statistics from the exam:

The overall grade was 58%

43% did not know the formula for the area of a circle

86% could not do a simple algebra problem (problem 4b)

75% could not do a simple scientific notation problem (1e)

52% could not deal with a negative exponent (2 to the -2)

43% could not do simple long division problem with no remainder (see above)!

Actually, I am just having fun with this.  My guess is that this is a general college problem and not one limited to the atmospheric sciences, though I will say that my experience in engineering is that the “trendy sciences”  (whatever the trend might be at the moment, when I was in school it was a new energy program) tend to attract students less prepared for mathematical rigor.  Perhaps this is true of climate today?

From the Times Online:

In fact, the Met [UK meteorology office] still asserts we are in the midst of an unusually warm winter — as one of its staffers sniffily protested in an internet posting to a newspaper last week: “This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”

Look, I think some of these guys’ process is nuts, but this is too crazy to believe.  Any other background on tis?

In the American Thinker, Davide Douglass and John Christy follow the saga of the publication of one of their papers (referred to in the article as DCPS for its four author’s initials) and a response by Santer, et. al.  To be clear, the DCPS paper was a critique in certain flaws in then-current climate models and how they do or don’t accurately match actual observations, while Santer et. al is a sort of who’s-who of climate alarmist scientists in the inner core who were rallying the troops to defend the mother ship.

The article needs to be read in total to get the gist of the whole sorry story, but it is very clearly a tale of two entirely different publication and review rules — one set for skeptics, and another far more congenial set for alarmists.  I think the article pretty clearly tells the tale of a process tilted strongly against one side in a scientific debate.

I hope you will check it out.  One of my favorite parts is about 2/3 through the story.  Santer et al’s main criticism is that DCPS cherry-picked data sets (basically left one particular set out).  Unlike alarmist cherry-picking, though, DCPS had actually clearly stated why the data set had been left out and referred to other peer-reviewed literature that backed their point.  The Santer team never addressed these reasons, but simply repeated the original charge.  But the rich part is where Santer et al. are uncomfortable using certain parts of the data set themselves that don’t tell their story for them, so they explicitly edit this data out, in a manner very reminiscent of Keith Briffa and his proxy series.  Emails from the CRU demonstrate that this removal was for no good reason other than the data did not make the point they wanted it to make.

The whole thing is really frustrating.  One side is denied information, while the others are spoon fed their opposition’s work in progress nearly every week.  One side’s publication is rushed, while the other’s is delayed.  One side gets to essentially pick its own reviewers, and in an incredible breach, have a prickly reviewer simply removed from the process (again for no good reason than he wasn’t giving the answer they want).  This is like watching the inside mechanics of an election in North Korea.

Martin Cohen sent me an email with a series of links that all look at global warming alarmism as a phenomenon.

In defence of scepticism

By Martin Cohen, editor of the Philosopher

Climate Hysterians have been redoubling their efforts to portray the debate as one between a few cranks (especailly right-wing ones) and ’scientists’, whereas the truth is very different.  Here, for example, are just four recent substantial articles challenging climate change science, from a neutral or ‘philosophy of science’ perspective.

1. Professor John David Lewis of Duke University, USA, has challenged many of the claims made by proponents of man-made climate change theory, in an article in the prestigious journal Social Philosophy and Policy (Volume 26 No. 2 Summer 2009), saying: ‘Those predicting environmental disasters today focus on particular issues in order to magnify the gravity of their general claims, and they push those issues until challenges make them untenable. Rhetorical skill and not logical argument has become the standard of success.’

2. In a separate review article, published in the Times Higher on the 03 December 2008, Professor Gwyn Prins, the director of the Mackinder Programme for the Study of Long Wave Events at the London School of Economics, says that the ‘principle product of recent science is to confirm that we know less, less conclusively – not more, more conclusively – about the greatest open systems on the planet’, and goes on to predict that for this reason, the ‘Kyoto Flyer’ is about to hit the buffers at Copenhagen.

3. Professor Mike Hulme’s defence of scepticism in the December Wall Street Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574571613215771336.html

4. And (last but not least!) my own feature article ‘Beyond Debate?’, is in the current (10 December 2009, and not on the website, timeshighereducation.co.uk until that date – but well worth a look!) issue of the scuprlously neutral Times Higher Education. None of these accounts are motivated by either improper influence or a right-wing agenda. As my article explains, climate change lobbyists such as Al Gore (and now Gordon Brown!) are:

* Using images, such as the polar bears supposedly trapped on a melting iceberg, ships in a dried up sea as crude propaganda to appeal to people?s fears rather than their reason.

* Presenting irrelevant ‘data’, such as unusual weather events of high summertime temperatures, as though these were connected to the main climate change hypotheses, of carbon dioxide trapping heat, even though this theory in fact only concerns night-time temperatures. All these articles point out that the supposed causal link between carbon dioxide levels and temperatures has no historical basis, and relies instead on computer models that have been shown to be unreliable and misleading. It says that if, for those at, the Copenhagen summit, the idea of manmade global warming is incontrovertible, the consensus is less a triumph of science and rationality than of PR and fear- mongering.

The full text is at:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=409454&c=2

Cross-posted from Coyote Blog:

I am sort of the anti-conspiracy theorist. I have written a number of times that events people sometimes explain as orchestrated conspiracies often can be explained just as well by assuming that people with similar preferences and similar information and similar incentives will respond to these incentives in similar ways.

I think the great herd-think around climate alarmism is a good example, and the Bishop Hill blog brings us a specific illustration from the comment section of Watts Up With That. A commenter observed that it was pretty hard to believe that thousands of scientists could be participating in a conspiracy. Another commenter wrote back:

Actually not so hard.

Personal anecdote:
Last spring when I was shopping around for a new source of funding, after having my funding slashed to zero 15 days after going public with a finding about natural climate variations, I kept running into funding application instructions of the following variety:

Successful candidates will:
1) Demonstrate AGW [ed: Anthropogenic Global Warming]
2) Demonstrate the catastrophic consequences of AGW.
3) Explore policy implications stemming from 1 & 2.

Follow the money — perhaps a conspiracy is unnecessary where a carrot will suffice.

If only alarmist results are funded, then it should not be surprising that only alarmist studies are produced.

By the way, it is probably incorrect to think of climate science really being driven by 2500 scientists. Here is an analogy: Strategy at General Motors is in some sense driven by thousands of workers – salesmen who know the market, channel managers who know their distribution partners, planners who watch econometric trends, manufacturers who know what can and can’t be done with costs, engineers who see what the next technological opportunities, etc. — you get the idea.

But realistically, there are probably 20-25 people who are really setting and driving and communicating the corporate strategy for GM. And those 20-25 people will likely say to the public that their strategy is supported by all those 200,000 workers. But in fact there are thousands, maybe even a majority, that would say that they don’t support the strategy and don’t think that strategy is consistent with their bit of knowlege.

I think climate science works roughly the same way. The same 20-25 people are lead authors on the IPCC, write key reports, contribute to Al Gore’s movie, get quoted in the NY Times, run the Realclimate web site, and, of course, feature prominently in the CRU emails. And while these 25 may claim thousands of scientists support their conclusions based on the mere fact that these other scientists contributed to an IPCC report that had these conclusions, many of these scientists, when actually asked, will disagree.

Here is one thing that is never mentioned — most of the scientists outside of climate science who have gone on the record somewhere as supporting catastrophic man-made global warming theory, if you really talked to them, would say they made their statement in support of science, not global warming theory. Most of these folks really haven’t dug into the details, but the problem was presented to them as one of science vs. anti-science. They are told by their peers and the media that AGW skeptics are all fundamentalist super right-wing anti-science evolution deniers who think the Earth is 4000 years old.

By saying they support AGW, these scientists are really trying to make the statement that they support science. The bitter irony is that they are doing the opposite, enabling those in the core of the climate community who are trying to duck criticism and replication by demanding unquestioning respect for their authority. The fact is that nearly every time one of these outsider scientists – a physicist or a geologist or a statistician, say – digs into the science, they are appalled at what they find and how bad the science behind catastrophic AGW theory really is.

For anyone who has paid attention, the dendroclimatology field has been rife with bad practices for years – cherry picking data sets, hiding modern data that shows “the wrong answer,” using bizarre statistical approaches, flipping data sets upside down, and utter resistance to data requests and any attempts at replication.   Most of the really damning CRU emails are about various dendroclimatology studies, and Keith Briffa, lead author of this section of the last IPCC report, is right in the middle of it all.

The Bishop Hill blog has the story of Briffa’s Yamal data set that has many of these elements.  I have been following this story for years at Steve McIntyre’s blog, but this is a very readable narrative.  It will really put a lot of what in in the CRU emails in context.  I highly recommend it.  Seriously.  In fact, I would go read some of John Holdren’s testimony in front of Congress on Climategate first, then read the Bishop Hill piece to get a sense for the whitewash.

Postscript: I have to laugh — when you see insiders in the alarmist community discussing the resistance to data sharing that really has no excuse, the excuse they use nonetheless among themselves to salve their conscience is the meme that “the FOIA’s were meant to be just harassing them and aimed at reducing the time they had to do real work” — ie they were (as the meme goes with skeptics) based on anti-science rather than any real desire to do science.

Here are a couple of bits from the Bishop Hill piece.

Meanwhile, however, McIntyre could begin to look at what Briffa had done elsewhere. It was not to be plain sailing. For a start, Briffa had archived data in an obsolete data format, last used in the era of punch-cards. This was inconvenient, and apparently deliberately so, but it was not an insurmountable problem — with a little work, McIntyre was able to move ahead with his analysis. Briffa had also thrown a rather larger spanner in the works though: while he had archived the tree ring measurements, he had not supplied any metadata to go with it — in other words there was no information about where the measurements had come from. All there was was a tree number and the measurements that went with it. However, McIntyre was well used to this kind of behaviour from climatologists and he had some techniques at hand for filling in some of the gaps….

Eventually, though, Briffa’s hand was forced, and in late September 2009, a reader pointed out to McIntyre that the remaining data was now available. It had been quietly posted to Briffa’s webpage, without announcement or the courtesy of an email to Mcintyre. It was nearly ten years since the initial publication of Yamal and three years since McIntyre had requested the measurement data from Briffa. Now at last some of the questions could be answered.

I am going to violate my own rule for one post.  I council everyone I know not to get pulled into the absolutely pointless activity of engaging in dueling headcounts of scientists in the climate debate.  This has zero utility, and means virtually nothing.  Science is not settled like a football game, or an election.

But since I keep getting the “2500″ scientists number thrown at me by alarmists, I am starting to believe the number is closer to 25, not 2500.  Sure there are many folks who have participated in work that has become a part of the IPCC, but it is old news that though those folks are counted as believers, many reject key aspects of the IPCC findings.  It is becoming increasingly clear than when people talk about the consensus, it is a position being espoused and communicated and driven by a handful of folks over and over in different outlets.  The same folks were advisors on Gore’s movie and run Realclimate and are advisors of the President and  were leaders of the IPCC process and were featured in many of the CRU emails.

Myron Ebell has an interesting article on this:

But when asked about some of his own extreme statements and predictions, Holdren replied that scientific research had moved on from the latest UN assessment report in 2007. The most up-to-date scientific research was contained in a report written by some of the world’s leading climate scientists and released last summer. Holdren mentioned and referred to this report, Copenhagen Diagnosis, several times during the course of the hearing….

I’m sure it will come as a shock that the two groups largely overlap. The “small group of scientists” up to their necks in Climategate include 12 of the 26 esteemed scientists who wrote the Copenhagen Diagnosis. Who would have ever guessed that forty-six percent of the authors of Copenhagen Diagnosis belong to the Climategate gang?  Small world, isn’t it?

The existence of this small core does nothing to prove or disprove catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.  The same statement about, say, string theory could be made about thousands of scientists working around the margin of the problem but a handful driving the train.  But it does mean that the CRU email scandal is not an irrelevant sideshow involving less than 1% of the climate community — it is a window on poor scientific profess engaged in by a group that makes up perhaps a third or half of the core driving the “consensus”.  Which makes it a big deal.

Finem Respice takes on a number of the insider responses of the “nothing to see here, move along” type.  My favorite:

“The language used by scientists in the emails in question is indicative of scientists under a great deal of political pressure from the outside.”

The heart bleeds with an anguish and despair so palpable, so imbued with the darkly iridescent and sickly sweet venom of suffering that it is plainly visible out to 50 meters as a colorful aura, brightly fluorescing through the ribcage, glowing like a beacon of sorrow to any empath with the skill level of a Freshman at Vassar who thinks she remembers once reading a book on shamanism.

As a group one rarely sees scientists (or, indeed, any vocational group other than politicians) so deeply in love with the by-hook-or-by-crook of politics, the grand import of jetting off to Nice for the next climate meeting and the limelight that accompanies all these world-saving goings on as those few, those lucky few exposed in the CRU emails. (Just throw in a bit of expense scandal and you might as well be in the House of Commons- oh, wait a second….) It is all but impossible not to come away with a sense of what is plainly a naked lust for naked ambition simply oozing out of those texts. I am utterly devoid of sympathy for any such that later claim to have been forced to compromise their composure, their decorum or their data because of the unfortunate realities of politics.

When I think back to all the thousands of words I have written on positive feedback on this site, only to have it all said in two lines of a post at the same site:

On Positive Feedback

Name three positive feedback systems in nature. Get back to me on that when you’re done.

I might have said added “long-term stable” between name and three, but its pretty close.

The issue of non-publication agreements has come up before as an excuse for EAU-CRU not to release FOIA’d data.

The U-turn by the university follows a week of controversy after the emergence of hundreds of leaked emails, “stolen” by hackers and published online, triggered claims that the academics had massaged statistics.

In a statement welcomed by climate change sceptics, the university said it would make all the data accessible as soon as possible, once its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had negotiated its release from a range of non-publication agreements.

This excuse had a certain credibility problem even before the email release, as it was something like the fifth or sixth excuse, used only when the others failed.  Now we see from the emails it was more of a “strategy” for avoiding scrutiny rather than a real concern.

These aren’t corporations arguing over iPod code.  These are universities and public institutions.  Where was the outrage from East Anglia?  Where was the guy saying “What do you mean non-publication agreement – this is scientific information gathered at public expense affecting enormous public policy decisions — of course its going to be freaking published.”  Instead, EAU’s response to the request for non-publication seems to be “good, that gives us another excuse not to release anything so that skeptic’s can pick us apart.”

As a public service, I will translate the double speak coming out of Phil Jones and the CRU

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building…

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

By “value-added,” the CRU means raw data where arbitrary scaling factors and adjustments have been added to the data in a totally opaque and non-replicable sort of way.  From past experience in other locations (see this post on New Zealand and the US), the adjustments to the raw data tend to drive 80-100% of the global warming signal.  In other words, in areas where we have been able to check, these data adjustments account for 80+% of what the scientists call “global warming.”  Without these adjustments, warming has been more modest or non-existent.

By destroying the raw data and thereby hiding the amount of massaging and adjustment that has been made to the data (“value add”) we are therefore unlike to be able to scrutinize the source of 80% of the warming signal.  More from Anthony Watts here.

Update:  This does not mean that there has been no warming, just that it has been exaggerated.  Satellites have shown warming over the last 30 years and are unaffected by the same biases and issues as at the CRU.  But the whole point is the exaggeration.  Skeptics generally don’t think there is no warming from man’s CO2, just that it is greatly exaggerated.  And this matters.  Ten degrees of warming vs. a half degree of warming over the next century have very very different policy implications.  See my video here for more.

Excellent.  Hard to excerpt because it is all so spot on.  I will give two examples:

2. “Climate change denier”. A first cousin to the first annoyance. Again, thirty years ago, “climate change denier” would have meant someone who denied that the Medieval Warm Period ever happened. Or that the Little Ice Age ever happened. What a kook fringe thing to believe that would have been! And now, those of us who still believe in natural climate change are called “climate change deniers”?? ARGHH….

6. A lack of common sense. Common sense can be misleading, of course. But when there is considerable uncertainty, sometimes it is helpful to go ahead and use a little anyway. Example: It is well known that the net effect of clouds is to cool the Earth in response to radiant heating by the sun. But when it comes to global warming, all climate models do just the opposite…change clouds in ways that amplify radiative warming. While this is theoretically possible, it is critical to future projections of global warming that the reasons why models do this be thoroughly understood. Don’t believe it just because group think within the climate modeling community has decided it should be so.