Climate Skeptic

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.

Steve McIntyre explains the “trick” referred to in the CRU emails.  The trick is subtle, which allows the scientists to weasel out, saying things that are technically true but in essence false and misleading.

Most of the proxy series are smoothed in some way.  Most smoothing algorithms adjust a data point by averaging in data both forwards and backwards in the series.  A simple algorithm puts high weights on nearby data points in this averaging and relatively lower weights on data points further away.

The problem occurs when the series reaches its end.  There are not points forward in the data series to average.  By the last point in the series, fully half the data necessary for smoothing does not exist.  There are various techniques for handling this, all of which have trade-offs and compromises (at the end of the day, you can’t create a signal when there is no data, no matter how clear one’s math tends to be).

The trick involved taking instrumental temperature records and using these records to provide data after the end point for smoothing purposes.  This tends to force the smoothed curves upwards at the end, when there is no such data in the proxy trend to substantiate this.  The perpetrators of this trick can argue with a semi-straight face that they did not “graft” the instrumental temperature record onto the data, but the instrumental temperature records does in fact affect the data series by contributing as much as half of the data for the smoothed curve in the end years.

Another Problem

I have always considered the “we-don’t-graft” claim disingenuous for another reason.  This is driven in large part because I have spent a lot of time not just manipulating data, but thinking about the most effective ways to represent it in graphical form.

To this end, I have always thought that while folks like Mann and Briffa have not technically grafted the instrumental data, they have effectively done so in their graphical representations — which is the form in which 99.9% of the population have consumed their data.

Below is the 1000-year temperature reconstruction (from proxies like tree rings and ice cores) in the Fourth IPCC Assessment.  It shows the results of twelve different studies, one of which is the Mann study famously named “the hockey stick.”

All the colored lines are the proxy (tree ring, ice cores, sediments, etc) study results.  The black line is the instrumental temperature record from the Hadley CRU.  There is no splice here – they have not joined proxy to instrument.  But they have effectively done so by overlaying the lines on top of each other.  The visual impact that says hockey stick is actually driven by this overlay.

To prove it, lets remove the black instrumental temperature line as well as the gray line which I think is some kind of curve fitted to all of the above.  This is what we get:

Pretty different visual impact, huh?  The hockey stick is gone.  So in fact, the visual image of a hockey stick is driven by the overlay of the instrumental record on the proxies.  The hockey stick inflection point occurs right at the point the two lines join, raising the distinct possibility the inflection is due to incompatibility of the two data sources rather than a natural phenomenon.

More here.

A lot of folks have asked me why I wasn’t more energized initially about the climate emails.  One reasons is that they don’t really reveal much that I and others who did not go along blindly with the orthodoxy knew for years.  The emails are kind of like getting a written confession from OJ Simpson to Nicole Brown’s murder-  newsworthy, but it wouldn’t be confirming anything I didn’t already know.

Here is a good example.  I wrote this November 10, 2007:

By the way, here is a little lesson about the integrity of climate science.  See that light blue line [in this graph from the IPCC Fourth Assessment]?  Here, let’s highlight it:

For some reason, the study’s author cut the data off around 1950.  Is that where his proxy ended?  No, in fact he had decades of proxy data left.  However, his proxy data turned sharply downwards in 1950.  Since this did not tell the story he wanted to tell, he hid the offending data by cutting off the line, choosing to conceal the problem rather than have an open scientific discussion about it.

The study’s author?  Keith Briffa, who the IPCC named to lead this section of their Fourth Assessment.

The recent data release apparently includes this chart of Briffa’s proxy data discussed above (from Steve McIntyre via Anthony Watts):

For the very first time, the Climategate Letters “archived” the deleted portion of the Briffa MXD reconstruction of “Hide the Decline” fame – see here. Gavin Schmidt claimed that the decline had been “hidden in plain sight” (see here. ). This isn’t true.

The post-1960 data was deleted from the archived version of this reconstruction at NOAA here and not shown in the corresponding figure in Briffa et al 2001. Nor was the decline shown in the IPCC 2001 graph, one that Mann, Jones, Briffa, Folland and Karl were working in the two weeks prior to the “trick” email (or for that matter in the IPCC 2007 graph, an issue that I’ll return to.)

A retrieval script follows.

For now, here is a graphic showing the deleted data in red.

Figure 1. Two versions of Briffa MXD reconstruction, showing archived and climategate versions. The relevant IPCC 2001 graph, shown below, clearly does not show the decline in the Briffa MXD reconstruction.

Contrary to Gavin Schmidt’s claim that the decline is “hidden in plain sight”, the inconvenient data has simply been deleted.

I think his hockey stick looks a little flacid.  Fortunately someone invented Tiljander sediments, a form of data Viagra (as long as one flips it upside down) and such games were no longer necessary.

Pay no attention to those guys behind the curtain.   Its all settled science.  There is total consensus among tens of thousands of scientists.  Which is why these guys were so hesitant to let anyone else view the details of their work, or allow anyone to criticize them in print.  The social network of the climate emails, via Warwick Hughes.

From Lou Glazner via Anthony Watts

1. The scientists colluded in efforts to thwart Freedom of Information Act requests (across continents no less). They reference deleting data, hiding source code from requests, manipulating data to make it more annoying to use, and attempting to deny requests from people recognized as contributors to specific internet sites. Big brother really is watching you. He’s just not very good at securing his web site.

2. These scientists publicly diminished opposing arguments for lack of being published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. In the background they discussed black-balling journals that did publish opposing views, and preventing opposing views from being published in journals they controlled. They even mention changing the rules midstream in arenas they control to ensure opposing views would not see the light of day. They discuss amongst themselves which scientists can be trusted and who should be excluded from having data because they may not be “predictable”.

3. The scientists expressed concern privately over a lack of increase in global temperatures in the last decade, and the fact that they could not explain this. Publicly they discounted it as simple natural variations. In one instance, data was [apparently] manipulated to hide a decline in temperatures when graphed. Other discussions included ways to discount historic warming trends that inconveniently did not occur during increases in atmospheric CO2.

4. The emails show examples of top scientists working to create public relations messaging with favorable news outlets. It shows them identifying and cataloging, by name and association, people with opposing views. These people are then disparaged in a coordinated fashion via favorable online communities.

What the emails/files don’t do is completely destroy the possibility that global climate change is real. They don’t preclude many studies from being accurate, on either side of the discussion. And they should not be seen as discrediting all science.

Free speech and transparency are meaningless unless they apply to the critics of the government as well as to its supporters.  Here is the heart of the scandal:

Wei-Chyung and Tom,
…
1. Think I’ve managed to persuade UEA to ignore all further FOIA requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit.
2. Had an email from David Jones of BMRC, Melbourne. [EMAIL NOT FOUND IN CRU EMAILS – Willis] He said they are ignoring anybody who has dealings with CA, as there are threads on it about Australian sites.
3. CA is in dispute with IPCC (Susan Solomon and Martin Manning) about the availability of the responses to reviewer’s at the various stages of the AR4 drafts. They are most interested here re Ch 6 on paleo.
Cheers
Phil [Phil Jones, head of the University of East Anglia CRU]

Climate Audit is a site dedicated to science.  You will seldom see any political polemic there, even in the comments.  Unlike sites like RealClimate, dissenting voices are not edited out of the comments.  And it is a site that has dedicated itself (thus the title) to backchecking, verifying, and attempting to replicate various climate studies, particularly historic temperature records and paleo-climatology work.

Essentially, Phil Jones is saying that, as a government official, he is going to ignore legal information requests under FOIA from certain groups that seek to hold him accountable — information requests, I might add, that should not have even been necessary in the first place by any reasonable rules of scientific openness.

Update: You really have to read the whole long post above.  It is a story of the CRU trying to stay one step ahead of those who want to make them accountable, as most scientists are to replication efforts.   One approach they took that really requires chutzpah – in response to the constant CRU stonewalling, more and more people began pinging them with FOIA’s.  Remember, this deluge of FOIA’s was only necessary due to the CRU’s constant stonewalling.  Their next tactic – use the volume of FOIA’s as evidence that it is somehow a concerted attack and therefore can be ignored:

I’ve saved all three threads as they now stand. No time to read all the comments, but I did note in “Fortress Met Office” that someone has provided a link to a website that helps you to submit FOI requests to UK public institutions, and subsequently someone has made a further FOI request to Met Office and someone else made one to DEFRA. If it turns into an organised campaign designed more to inconvenience us than to obtain useful information, then we may be able to decline all related requests without spending ages on considering them. Worth looking out for evidence of such an organised campaign

Update #2: I am curious how many other scientific fields support this attitude towards defending and replication one’s work

Dear Tom,
…
One of the problems is that I’m caught in a real Catch-22 situation. At present, I’m damned and publicly vilified because I refused to provide McIntyre with the data he requested. But had I acceded to McIntyre’s initial request for climate model data, I’m convinced (based on the past experiences of Mike Mann, Phil, and Gavin) that I would have spent years of my scientific career dealing with demands for further explanations,
additional data, Fortran code, etc. (Phil has been complying with FOIA requests from McIntyre and his cronies for over two years). And if I ever denied a single request for further information, McIntyre would have rubbed his hands gleefully and written: “You see – he’s guilty as charged!” on his website.

You and I have spent over a decade of our scientific careers on the MSU issue, Tom. During much of that time, we’ve had to do science in “reactive mode”, responding to the latest outrageous claims and inept science by John Christy, David Douglass, or S. Fred Singer. For the remainder of my scientific career, I’d like to dictate my own research agenda. I don’t want that agenda driven by the constant need to respond to Christy, Douglass, and Singer. And I certainly don’t want to spend years of my life interacting
with the likes of Steven McIntyre.

I hope LLNL management will provide me with their full support. If they do not, I’m fully prepared to seek employment elsewhere.

With best regards,
Ben [Ben Santer]

Anthony Watts has a statement from the American Meteorological Society about the Hadley CRU emails.  The basic message is “nothing to see here, move along:”

For climate change research, the body of research in the literature is very large and the dependence on any one set of research results to the comprehensive understanding of the climate system is very, very small. Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true — which is not yet clearly the case — the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited.

I sent this letter to their executive director:

I really believe your group’s statement is missing the point.  Your group’s position seems to be that this episode can be safely ignored as it taints only a small volume of a large mass of research.  But a large body of research is not useful if that body systematically excludes any work critical of the orthodoxy.  In fact, you should re-reread this paragraph from your own letter:

The beauty of science is that it depends on independent verification and replication as part of the process of confirming research results.  This process, which is tied intrinsically to the procedures leading to publication of research results in the peer-reviewed literature, allows the scientific community to confirm some results while rejecting others.

The Hadley emails describe a large conspiracy to corrupt exactly this process.  We see scientists conspiring to keep secret results and working papers that would have allowed their worked to be checked, verified, and replicated.  We see researchers working to prevent publication of any research that might falsify their work.

Sure, we see a few examples of researchers fudging their work.  But the issue is not necessarily the specific cases of fudging — in fact, I don’t care if its sloppiness or chicanery — from a science standpoint it almost doesn’t matter.  The problem here is the creation of a system and a culture where such fudging and sloppiness can occur without any of the independent scrutiny you seem to laud as part of the scientific process.  How much more exists?  We’ll never know, until organizations like yours stop enabling this climate Omerta and start demanding true scientific openness.

A reader wrote me that the comments found in the Hadley CRU program code are possibly far more damning than the emails, and in fact this appears to be the case given these excerpts at Anthony Watts’ site.

In the past, I have written that as an experienced modeller, I am extremely suspicious when anyone’s models very closely match history.  This is a common modelers trick – use various plugs and fudge factors and special algorithms to force the model to match history better (when it is used to “back-cast”) and people will likely trust the model more when you use it to forecast.   For a variety of reasons, I have been suspicious this was the case with climate models, but never could prove it.  One example from the link above

Looking back over history, it appears the model is never off by more than 0.4C in any month, and never goes more than about 10 months before re-intersecting the “actual” line.  Does it bother anyone else that this level of precision is several times higher than the model has when run forward?  Almost immediately, the model is more than 0.4C off, and goes years without intercepting reality.

Now we are closer, with programming code comments in the various climate programs that say things like this (from the code that apparently does some of the tree ring histories)

. FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\mann\oldprog\maps12.proFOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\mann\oldprog\maps15.proFOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\mann\oldprog\maps24.pro ; Plots 24 yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions
; of growing season temperatures. Uses "corrected" MXD - but shouldn't usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.

or this

• FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\briffa_sep98_d.pro;mknormal,yyy,timey,refperiod=[1881,1940]
;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
(...)
;
; APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,x)
densall=densall+yearlyadj

The link above has 30+ similar examples.  The real insight will be when folks like Steve McIntyre and his readers start digging into the code and replicating it — then we will see what it actually does and what biases or plugs or overrides are embedded.  Stay tuned.

I am disappointed to see folks like Lord Monkton calling for scientists to go to jail over what has been discovered in the Hadley CRU emails.  No one is going to jail, at least based on what we know so far.  Laws were broken, but of the type that perhaps people lose their jobs but not their freedom.  And demanding that people go to jail just paints skeptics as opportunistic, over-the-top and vindictive.   We sound like the looniest of the alarmists when we say stuff like this.

This is not to say that the emails (as well as the source code, which Steve McIntyre and his readers are starting to dig into) don’t give us useful insights about the climate science process.  And what they really point to for me is the danger of a monoculture.

For years, with the media’s active participation, criticism of the mainstream scientific position on global warming has been painted as somehow outside the bounds of reasonable discourse.  Skeptics are called “deniers,” with the intent to equate them with those who deny the Holocaust.  At every turn, global warming activists with the help of the media, have tried to make it uncomfortable, even impossible, to criticize the science of catastrophic man-made global warming.  In the extreme, this has degenerated into outright threats.

NASA’s James Hansen has called for trials of climate skeptics in 2008 for “high crimes against humanity.” Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lashed out at skeptics of 2007 declaring “This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors” In 2009, RFK, Jr. also called coal companies “criminal enterprises” and declared CEO’s ‘should be in jail… for all of eternity.”

In June 2009, former Clinton Administration official Joe Romm defended a comment on his Climate Progress website warning skeptics would be strangled in their beds. “An entire generation will soon be ready to strangle you and your kind while you sleep in your beds,” stated the remarks, which Romm defended by calling them “not a threat, but a prediction.”

In 2006, the eco-magazine Grist called for Nuremberg-Style trials for skeptics. In 2008, Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki called for government leaders skeptical of global warming to be thrown “into jail.” In 2007, The Weather Channel’s climate expert called for withholding certification of skeptical meteorologists.

The examples go on ad infinitum.  Several folks have emailed me and asked why I have not joined the feeding frenzy over the “climategate.”  In part, this is because I don’t think there is anything in the emails that is a whole lot worse than what many of the actors have been saying publicly.  The media has played along not only because many of its members were sympathetic to the message, but because the catastrophe played well into the “if it bleeds, it leads” culture.  Even when the media was not “picking a winner” in the science, it supported the catastrophist message in its editorial decisions, choosing to cover (for example) ad nauseum a 30-year low in Arctic sea ice but failing to even mention a 30-year high in Antarctic sea ice which occurred on nearly the same day (more here).  Ditto hurricanes, tornadoes, floods droughts, etc — only events and records in one particular tail of the normal distribution were covered.  Even when they worked to be fair,  the media were frequently criticized by alarmists for  allowing even a mention of the skeptic position in an article otherwise generally supporting the orthodoxy.  The term “false balance” was coined.

The result was a group who were effectively exempt from criticism — and knew it.

The most amazing thing to watch has been the absolute scorn and obstructionism piled on Steve McIntyre and his readers and partners.  I  have read Steve’s work for years, and find it to be incredibly fair and deeply analytical.  I took as one of my early roles at my climate site the explanation to laymen of exactly what McIntyre was talking about in his posts.  He often challenged the climate orthodoxy – which in most scientific disciplines is highly valued, but in climate science is a crime.  In the emails we even see scientists within the monoculture raising the exact same issues that they have blasted McIntyre for — apparently it is OK to raise such issues as long as 1) you are an insider and 2) such concerns are suppressed in any public document.

Perhaps the single most abusive part of the monoculture has been its misrepresentation of peer review.  Peer review was never meant as a sort of good housekeeping seal of approval on scientific work.  It is not a guarantee of correctness.  It is really an extension of the editorial process — bringing scientists from relevant fields to vet whether work is really new and different and worthy of publication, to make sure the actual article communicates the work and its findings clearly, and to probe for obvious errors or logical fallacies.

Climate scientists have tried to portray peer review as the end of the process–  ie, once one of their works shows up in a peer-reviewed journal, the question addressed is “settled.”  But his is never how science has worked.  Publication in a peer-reviewed journal is the beginning, not the end.  Once published, scientists attempt alternatively to tear it down or replicate its conclusions.  Only work that has survived years of such torture testing starts to become “settled.”

The emails help to shed light on some aspects of peer review that skeptics have suspected for years.  It is increasingly clear that climate scientists in the monoculture have been using peer review to enforce the orthodoxy.  Peer review panels are stacked with members of the club, and authors who challenge the orthodoxy are shut out of publication, while authors within the monoculture use peer review as a shield against future criticism.  We see in the emails members of the monoculture actually working to force editors who have the temerity to publish work critical of the orthodoxy out of their jobs.  We are now learning that when alarmist scientists claim that there is little peer-reviewed science on the skeptic’s side, this is like the Catholic Church enforcing a banned books list and then claiming that everything in print supports the Church’s position.

History teaches us that whenever we allow a monoculture – whether is be totalitarian one-party rule or enforcing a single state religion, corruption follows.  Without scrutiny of their actions, actors in such monocultures have few checks and little accountability.  Worse, those at the center of such monocultures can become convinced of their own righteousness, such that any action they take in support of the orthodoxy is by definition ethically justified.

This, I think, is exactly what we see at work in the Hadley CRU emails.