Recent evidence that prominent climate scientists have tried to intimidate academic journals into not publishing papers submitted by “climate change” skeptics have caused a major brouhaha in the ongoing political battle over global warming. At least some of the scientists in question certainly seem to have put ideology above the search for truth. The effort to keep skeptical articles out of academic journals also raises the issue of whether the academic “consensus” supporting global warming theory is genuine, or a product of systematic exclusion of dissenting voices.
I lack relevant scientific expertise on global warming, so I don’t have anything useful to say about the scientific issues involved. The question I want to address is what impact these revelations should have on our views of the global warming issue. If, unlike me, you have enough expertise in climate science to assess the scientific literature for yourself, I don’t think “Climategate” should have any impact on your views at all. You can read the mainstream literature, as well as the skeptics’ writings (which certainly exist in print, even if the Climategate culprits have kept some of them out of peer-reviewed journals) and make an informed decision for yourself.
Most of us, however, lack expertise on climate issues. And our knowledge of complex issues we don’t have personal expertise on is largely based on social validation. For example, I think that Einsteinian physics is generally more correct than Newtonian physics, even though I know very little about either. Why? Because that’s the overwhelming consensus of professional physicists, and I have no reason to believe that their conclusions should be discounted as biased or otherwise driven by considerations other than truth-seeking. My views of climate science were (and are) based on similar considerations. I thought that global warming was probably a genuine and serious problem because that is what the overwhelming majority of relevant scientists seem to believe, and I generally didn’t doubt their objectivity.
At the very least, the Climategate revelations should weaken our confidence in the above conclusion. At least some of the prominent scholars in the field seem driven at least in part by ideology, and willing to use intimidation to keep contrarian views from being published, even if the articles in question meet normal peer review standards. Absent such tactics, it’s possible that more contrarian research would be published in professional journals and the consensus in the field would be less firm. To be completely clear, I don’t think that either ideological motivation or even intimidation tactics prove that these scientists’ views are wrong. Their research should be assessed on its own merits, irrespective of their motivations for conducting it. However, these things should affect the degree to which we defer to their conclusions merely based on their authority as disinterested experts.
At the same time, it’s important not to overstate the case. I don’t think we have anywhere near enough evidence to show that the academic consensus on global warming is completely bogus, or even close to it. Nor has it been proven that all or most prominent scientific supporters of global warming theory are as unethical as those exposed in this scandal.
On balance, therefore, I still think that global warming exists and is a genuinely serious problem. But I am marginally less confident in holding that view than I was before. If we see more revelations of this kind, I will be less confident still.
Unfortunately the debate over Climategate among laypeople is likely to be heavily influenced by political ignorance and irrationality, especially the tendency to overvalue any information that confirms one’s preexisting views and downplay or ignore anything that cuts the other way. Thus, global warming supporters are likely to claim that Climategate proves nothing at all, while skeptics will trumpet it as justification for rejecting mainstream climate research altogether. Both temptations should be resisted, though I’m not optimistic they will be.
UPDATE: I should note, as some commenters have, that the risk of ideological or self-interested bias increases when there are important policy issues huge amounts of funding at stake. Thus, climate scientists are more likely to be biased than, say, theoretical mathematicians. In this case, the funding bias seems to cut in favor of concluding that global warming is a major problem, because governments are more likely to fund research into a major issue than one that is minor or nonexistent. The bias need not take the form of scientists deliberately shading their results in order to increase funding. But it could result in subconscious rationalization of self-interest in decisions on how to structure their research, decisions on how to interpret results and, so on. That said, I don’t think we have anywhere close to sufficient proof of such bias to simply discount the dominant scientific view of global warming.
lucia says:
Ilya–
Actually, the label skeptic gets applied with a rather broad brush in the rather vitriolic discussions at climate blogs. Leaving the word aside, there are plenty of climate bloggers and climate blog visitors who are in a group referred to as “lukewarmers”. Most are saying the emails show something is not quite right in some circles of climate science, but also say that the emails are not justification to throw out mainstream climate research altogether.
Of course, this might just be confirmation bias, since “lukewarmers” buy into climate change, but tended to discount the more alarming presentations as over stating the chances of catastrophic change.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 5:52 pmMark Buehner says:
I think its very important to remember that this isn’t a question of whether global warming is happening or not. That is trivial. The important question is whether the globe is warming at a rate catastrophic to the survival and prosperity of mankind, and that is the domain of these particular scientists especially, because their studies examine just how warm the earth is today in relative terms, and if the speed with which it has warmed is unprecedented and hence potentially dangerous.
Those questions affect the political process. If the earth is warming at a slower rate than we have been warmed, necessarily our reaction should differ. The cost-benefit analysis changes. Think of the expense in going to a carbon-free society in 10 years as opposed to even 50, its night and day. These are the details that this clique was essentially fudging, and these are the details critical to our decision making in the political sphere.
This is a much smaller difference than the bigger question of ‘is there AGW’ at all– but its in fact a far more relevant question to our immediate circumstances. The question of whether we are warming 1 degree or half a degree a century is literally worth trillions of dollars and potentially millions of lives.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 5:53 pmSlocum says:
I’m more worried about the efforts to keep data out of the hands of skeptics (even to the point of deleting the data to thwart FOIA requests). The problem is the skeptics who might have been able to review the data and find flaws (or even fraud) were unable to do so. Those papers weren’t just kept out of journals, they could never have been written in the first place because of the data hiding. And if the data really is gone:
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/08/we-lost-original-data.html
Then those critical reviews can never be done.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 6:02 pmFrancis says:
gee, i wonder what the experts, not implicated in “climategate”, say?
hmm, where might I find such info?
Quote
November 24, 2009, 6:04 pmKazinski says:
The main impact of Climategate is casting doubt on paleoclimatology, that is trying to reconstruct the past few millennia of climate to assess how anomalous the current warming is. The researchers in question were suspected and some of the suspicions are confirmed, of trying to airbrush the Medieval Warming Period out of the climate record. This is important because if the MWP was warmer than current temps, and by some estimates it was much warmer, then the current warming is well within natural variation and not that big of a deal. The fact that they used tree ring data for the most part to tease this data out makes it highly suspect as there are lot more things than just temperature that affect tree growth.
One counter indicator is the tree line, research indicates that the tree line was further north during the MWP than it is now, however that only tells what the temperatures were in upper latitudes.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 6:06 pmJohnF says:
Mark is right. There is also the issue of what points have more or less “consensus.” As one moves from “the earth has warmed a bit” to “doom will be irreversible in 20 months, unless we reverse our CO2 emissions” the consensus is weaker and weaker.
So when you say “the academic consensus on global warming,” exactly what propositions are you saying there is a consensus on?
Quote
November 24, 2009, 6:07 pmPatHMV says:
I generally agree with your points, except that I do think that those with “enough expertise in climate science to assess the scientific literature” should also have their views changed, at least to the extent that they reexamine issues which they previously thought were settled. The e-mails and other documents reveal both concerted efforts to suppress some data and using the desired outcome to influence a variety of analyses. For example, it seems fairly clear that the CRU “scientists” selected 50 year rolling averages in some instances simply because that seemed to them to best smooth out data which they considered “glitches,” but which very well may be real, accurate data. Moreover, we are starting to see some preliminary analysis of the programming code which was included in the data dump, and that’s also starting to appear as if the coding was manipulated in ways which would make it more likely for warming to be predicted.
Moreover, there’s not very many “climate scientists” in the world, anyway. There’s ice core scientists, there’s tree ring scientists, etc. Some of this stuff could potentially undermine a great deal of the foundational work in those areas of paleo-climate data.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 6:07 pmroad2serfdom says:
Francis, do you realize Mann is listed as an author at your link? Or was your post sarcastic?
Quote
November 24, 2009, 6:11 pmCris says:
But if we can’t reject it, we certainly can’t trust it either, given the machinations to create/maintain the “consensus”. The proper view can be nothing other the null hypothesis (no AGW) until proven otherwise.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 6:17 pmSandy MacHoots says:
That’s not an apt comparison. Unlike the Newton/Einstein question, there are billions of dollars of grant money and trillions of dollars in cash and vast social engineering projects hinging on whether AGW is true. That means we do have some “reason to believe that their conclusions should be discounted.” Whenever government-sponsored science shows that government power should be increased, we should be especially careful.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 6:41 pmlucia says:
Cris– A null hypothesis is, to a large extent, an arbitrary choice when doing a statistical hypothesis tests. There is no rule or logic, science or statistics that says “no AGW” must be the null hypothesis. You can make any theory you like a null hypothesis; you just need to be able to state it quantitatively.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 6:45 pmDangerMouse says:
If the scientific process involves the testing of hypothesis to find verifiable, reproducable results, then it is clear that all of the so-called global warming work was not science. Stonewalling on producing the data, and manipulating data-sets, is not science. It is called fraud.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 6:47 pmJerb says:
At least some of the prominent scholars in the field seem driven at least in part by ideology, and willing to use intimidation to keep contrarian views from being published, even if the articles in question meet normal peer review standards.
I don’t like the word ideology there. I think it’s fair to say that the scholars involved are driven by a desire to promote their beliefs. But I don’t think there is any evidence that they hold those beliefs disingenuously. All evidence is that the positions they wish to promote are their conclusions about the nature of reality based on lifelong study in the field. This is rightly the ‘ideology’ of every academic scientist: figure out the truth and work as hard as you can to convince other people of it’s validity.
The scientists involved may have gotten over-zealous about their life’s work, and acted unethically, as humans will do from time to time. This is not specific to science, or climate science, or the current moment in time. The collective belief of scientists is still the best proxy we have for understanding reality. And these beliefs (regarding climate change) are clear.
Said another way, that (climate) scientists acted unethically affects my belief in (climate) science about as much as hearing that some doctors have acted unethically affects my belief in medicine: not at all. I’ve known for a long time that humans sometime act unethically. But I’m not going to a shaman anytime soon.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 6:49 pmray_g says:
Let’s not lose sight of how we got here. The original debate was never about just climate change, or even global warming. The debate was over the proposition that there has recently been and will continue to be global warming, that human activities are a large contributor, and disaster is imminent unless goverment(s) do something about it, and very soon. And the claimed ‘consensus’ was about this proposition.
Now, many claiming that have backed off as their positions became unsupportable, largely due to the work of the skeptics. That is when the subject changed from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’, weasel words. They still claim that large and expensive government interventions are required. But now their credibility should be blown to pieces.
You didn’t need to know anything about climate, just a little about science and history, to know that when they would not share data, release their computer models for independent review, and leveled vicious personal attacks against skeptics, that something very fishy was going on. These revelations just confirm what many of us inferred from their behavior.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 6:49 pmVolokh Groupie says:
As a scientist in a field not that far off from climate science (or at least atmospheric chemistry/physics) this entire ordeal is incredibly frustrating in terms of the damage it may do with respect to the reputation of scientists in general doing research and particularly modeling work. Even as a person who supports government action to combat climate change (though preferably in a cap and trade system which isn’t rigged or through a carbon tax) the emails are disturbing even if one discounts worrying discussions about how to adjust the numerical analysis. I don’t think I’ve ever seen scientists discussing how to wholesale deny acceptance of academic papers to particular journals, attempts to coordinate a firing of an editor (and someone as esteemed as Saiers), or attempts to coordinate a boycott of a journal by a number of scientists for political goals. This also doesn’t touch on the elimination of science related emails and FOIA related issues in the emails. The damage this scandal could do to the reputation on all scientists, the vast majority of whom work hard to validate data, are happy to share data when possible and who welcome criticism of their work in order to make it more rigorous is disturbing.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 6:52 pmB.D. says:
Four questions:
(1) Is the earth’s climate changing? If so, how is it changing?
(2) What are the actual consequences of the earth’s changing climate? How is it a threat to life on earth?
(3) To what extent is that change attributable to man? To what extent is the change natural?
(4) If that change is bad for life on earth, what can be done to effectively address the change?
We should answer questions (1)-(3) before we enact policies pursuant to question (4). The reason this climategate scandal is so huge is that it casts further doubt on the supposed consensus regarding these three preliminary questions.
My hunch has been that the answer to question (1) is fairly indisputable since it’s based on straightforward data collection: the average temperatures on earth have been rising over the last several decades, at an unusually rapid rate. Question (2) seems less resolved, aside from questionable speculation about island nations disappearing due to rising ocean levels or polar bears going extinct. Question (3) is the big one, and I have heard nothing to indicate that there is a satisfactory answer.
Question (4)–the policy response–is hugely important, since even if science tells us that the earth is changing due to man’s actions, with dire consequences for life on earth . . . the policy response HAS to actually work. Especially considering that everything that’s being proposed will surely make us less prosperous. This scandal makes me even less convinced of the need for wealth-damaging carbon taxes and international environmental treaties.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 6:53 pmVolokh Groupie says:
@ ray g
vicious personal attacks unfortunately are not specific only to this incident in the scientific community
conferences and talks can become fairly heated over issues that would seem absurd to the layperson, and entire departments or even teams of departments across the world will often pick sides on certain scientific debates and their hiring will often reflect that
the discussion regarding journals/Saiers/etc is however cringeworthy even in that context
Quote
November 24, 2009, 6:57 pmThe Ghost of Richard P. Feynman says:
Actually, it should have quite an impact. A major source of the data behind many papers is now revealed to have been intentionally destroyed to prevent outside review. As a result, pretty much every paper that used that data has to be treated as suspect, not because the authors of the papers did anything wrong, but because the data itself can no longer be trusted to be true.
The rest of the stuff (so far) doesn’t particularly touch on the science that has actually been published. But the email showing the loss of the raw data was not an accident, but a preplanned action to evade analysis? That forces a wide re-evaluation of what we thought we knew.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 6:59 pmHerb Spencer says:
It’s bad enough that these tactics have pervaded and perverted analyis of serious issues in the social sciences since the early 1960s, causing many of the problems we suffer today as a result of “finding solutions” without proper, all-encompassing analysis. But, to see them surface now in the “hard” sciences is even more troubling. Whatever happened to enforcement of academic honesty standards? Have they, too, become “relative?”
Quote
November 24, 2009, 7:04 pmGreg Barnes says:
The leaked/hacked emails suggest a concerted effort to thwart replication by withholding data. Replication is the gold standard of science, and the emails seem to indicate stonewalling, at minimum, on the software codes used to assemble the data that the IPCC relies on. Why fear replication unless you know your data can’t stand up to proper scrutiny?
The consensus is still intact? This stonewalling apparently relates to data at the heart of the “consensus.”
Quote
November 24, 2009, 7:07 pmLeo Marvin says:
Hippie.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 7:07 pmTodd says:
Michael Mann is one of the signatories, he’s been implicated in the scandal.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 7:12 pmmicdeniro says:
I date the beginning of the decline of intellectual discourse in the United States to the first time, after Watergate, the suffix “gate” was attached to the name of the scandal du jour, and the person who did the attachment thought he was a wit.
Climategate.
Come on, Professor Somin, is that all you got?
Quote
November 24, 2009, 7:15 pmray_g says:
@Volokh Groupie
Yes, I have seen that, and in my experience that usually leads to bad science and bad policy.
However, I was citing the combination of behaviors as worrisome.
As many others have said, the actions of the AGW proponents makes more sense if you view it as a relgion, with the ‘noble savage’ fallacy as one of the major tenets.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 7:17 pmray_g says:
Illya said — “I thought that global warming was probably a genuine and serious problem because that is what the overwhelming majority of relevant scientists seem to believe, and I generally didn’t doubt their objectivity.”
Part of the debate is whether the “overwhelming majority” actually believe that, or whether it just appears that way because the MSM, politicians, etc. just keep repeating the assertion that there is consensus and it is settled.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 7:25 pmLTEC says:
This is the main point. There is a great deal of other fishy behavior I could point to as well, such as the manipulation of the 1995 IPCC Summary. As far as “all or most prominent scientific supporters of global warming theory”: did they condemn the fishiness, or were they swimming right along?
Quote
November 24, 2009, 7:27 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Over 20 years ago I attended a lecture sponsored by the American Chemical Society whose speaker had been environmental before environmental was cool. He had started pushing for responsible waste disposal at the labs in his university and everyone thought he’d lost his mind. Lab waste disposal is a big deal now, of course.
After the talk, I asked him what he thought about global warming, which had been in the news, with a lot more back-and-forth than you see now. He said that he thought that politics had so tainted that issue that it was not possible to winkle out the truth.
...
Yes, it will take a while to replace our carbon with something else. Silicon is the obvious choice. And then we can all be hortas.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 7:38 pmConcerned Citizen says:
The main point isn’t about the emails, they show the state of mind of the senders at the time they were written. Explaining how the word “trickery” really meant something different than what everybody else thinks it means is something any good litigator can do to a judge or jury.
What CAN’T be explained away is how the *models*, with comments like these were used to defraud the world:
UNFORTUNATELY THE IDL5.4 p_correlate; FAILS WITH >1 SERIES TO HOLD CONSTANT, SO I HAVE TO REMOVE THEIR INFLUENCE; FROM BOTH INDTS AND DEPTS USING MULTIPLE LINEAR REGRESSION.
and
Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.
This adjusted the output to fit their ideology and gave the world wonderful graphs like this one:
The emails are mainly irrelevant to this discussion, providing only a bit of color and entertainment. The models are the smoking gun because many other papers relied on the results that were gained by fraud.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 7:40 pmRichard Aubrey says:
B.D. As to the answer to question 1. Wrong. That’s part of the fraud. They lied about the temperatures even now. That is, Mann, Hansen, and others. Did not correct for urban heat island effect.
The reason it’s now “climate change” is that they can’t support “warming”.
So if even the proponents know it’s false...it’s probably false. On L&O, it’s called an admission against interest and is considered to be Really Important.
Nevertheless, your point about answering the first three first is right.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 7:40 pmDangerMouse says:
Since Global Warming, or “climate change” as they like to call it now, is essentially a religion for many people, I don’t see any of these facts debunking the no-peer review, no-replicating, no-data producing so-called “science.”
It’s not science anymore if it ever was, it’s a religion.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 7:55 pmOdy says:
“it’s based on straightforward data collection”
Anyone familiar with our data collection techniques in the US would not say that... and we have the best in the world.
Our data collection system is slightly above sucky.
http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php
My college professor who worked on the original roll out declared it useless back in the early 90’s. The sad thing is that it hasn’t been improved since then... they have just used Math to justify their conclusions... not the data.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 8:14 pmJones' Cell Mate says:
East Anglia University has just confirmed that they will be retaining American legal heavyweight Michael Nifong to assist in the fight against these ridiculous charges.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 8:14 pmLeo Marvin says:
Danger Mouse,
How do you justify mocking someone else’s religion?
I know, “What’s good for the goose....”
But when you do it, you justify having it done back to you.
I know, “They’d do it anyway.”
Does it ever occur to you that when everything confirms your biases, nothing confirms your biases?
Quote
November 24, 2009, 8:19 pmblcjr says:
I think we need to examine the role of “peer review” in all of this. It is clear to anyone familiar with the debate over climate change that “peer review” has been promoted as the means by which lay people should take sides on complicated issues of science or technology policy. The perpetrators of “Climategate” both strongly pushed this notion, and then tried to manipulate the peer review process so that only their side would make it through. But what role should peer review play, if any, in issues of science policy? To use peer review this way goes well beyond its original purpose, which I take as determining who gets published in the “publish or perish” hell of academia. Peer review has never been sufficient, nor necessary, to guarantee good science or technology.
IANAL, but I work in a related field, and since this is a law blog I’d like to compare, or contrast, peer review to voir dire of expert witnesses. Voir dire is used to protect lay juries from quacks and charlatans. It doesn’t certify that the testimony of an expert witness is “right” or is “truth.” And yet we still trust lay juries to listen to the testimony of competing experts, both who have been “qualified” to testify through voir dire, and somehow come to a fair and just conclusion as to what weight to give to the testimony of the competing witnesses. At most, peer review can do no more than “qualify” the evidence submitted to influence public policy. And such evidence is no more the be all and end all of the debate than is the testimony of an expert witness before a lay jury. It is just part of the equation.
What Climategate exposes is a cabal who want to use peer review as a standard to “certify” the admissibility of expert opinion in the realm of public policy, as if that settles it and all other considerations are irrelevant. That would be like a judge telling a jury that they could listen to only one expert witness, and had to rule based on his testimony alone; no other evidence or considerations would be permitted to influence their decision.
The public policy implications of the climate debate are enormous. To think that they must be resolved by listening to only one side of a disputed scientific issue, and must ignore all other considerations is nonsense. Even if greenhouse gasses are creating global warming or climate change, there are numerous other parts to the public policy puzzle that non-experts have every right to participate in. We trust lay juries to weigh the testimony of competing expert witnesses. We can trust ordinary citizens to weigh in, and influence the climate change debate as well. The CRU crew, elitists that they are, want to shut out every opinion but their own, and hide behind a misuse of the peer review process.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 8:41 pmyankee says:
What about the biases of industry funding? Polluters stand to lose a money if regulation is imposed, and have been doling out bales of money to support “skeptics.”
Quote
November 24, 2009, 8:42 pmBlue says:
Professor Somin, I must disagree with your assertion that only those with expertise in “climate science” can have an opinion on these results.
First, many of us have experience with peer review more generally. We can–and should–compare what happened in the peer review process for global warming with what we are familiar with.
Second, many of us have been users/administrators of large data-driven research...and have used programs to query said data. Those insights are absolutely relevant to examining how these researchers manipulated their data.
Third, many of us have employed the basic scientific language of mathematics and statistics in other fields of endeavour. Bad math in “climate science” is no different than bad math in any science.
If peer review is corrupted, if data is being mishandled and misinterpreted, if mathematical techniques are being abused, I do not need to be a “climate scientist” to recognize that their research is flawed and wrong. The pool of people able to do that is far, far larger than the sub-sub-fields involved...and even now is tearing through the documentation to see what the fire is behind all the smoke.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 8:45 pmfrankcross says:
You sound like a good Bayesian, Ilya.
yankee, you overlooked the money being given out by the new alternative energy industry. That may bias results too.
But this isn’t driven by money from either side. I think it is somewhat ideological and somewhat tribal. I think a number of the climate change advocates have obviously become invested in their conclusions and are no longer open to true science. They see skeptics as an enemy to be defeated, not mere scientists with conflicting views. They are so sure they are right that they are more devoted to their conclusions than their data. But you see that a lot, among lawyers too, on legal issues.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 8:48 pmguy in the veal calf office says:
Its difficult to model coupled non-linear dynamic systems. When you model a natural system, you eliminate variables until you have what you believe is a fair approximation that can forecast results (i.e, predict), which results are verified through experimentation.
People who study genes, astrophysics, turbulence,
sociology, politics, etc are far more circumspect with their models, forecasts & predictions, more respectful of their uncertainties, and more ready to acknowledge their errors than the Hadley Center modelers.You don’t have to be a scientist to recognize the difference when reading about those fields.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 8:57 pmShelby says:
What Ilya said. Good job.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 8:57 pmbreitbart fan says:
Iowahawk over at bighollywood has the best article I’ve seen on climate scientists.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 9:00 pmJim Owen says:
B.D. asked -
(1) Is the earth’s climate changing? If so, how is it changing?
(2) What are the actual consequences of the earth’s changing climate? How is it a threat to life on earth?
(3) To what extent is that change attributable to man? To what extent is the change natural?
(4) If that change is bad for life on earth, what can be done to effectively address the change?
The answers to your questions –
(1) The earth’s climate is ALWAYS changing. Has been for the last several hundred millon years. Expectations that the climate will remain stable at the present level are foolish. Expectations that reductions of human CO2 production will halt climate change are also foolish. BUT – contrary to what you’ve been told, the global temp change (anomaly) over the last 100+ years (even by the estimate of the CRU and GISS) is on the order of 0.4 deg C (less than 1 deg F). Or less. For the last decade there has been no warming. Nor is there any assurance that there will be warming (or not) in the next decade – or century. The models that the catastrophic predictions are based on have been proved to be incapable of the kind of prediction claimed for them.
(2) Nobody can answer these questions. But think about this – humans live in the tropics – with temps of 110 – 120 deg F. Humans also live in the Arctic with temps that drop to –80 deg C. And we’ve lived with those temps, with inferior technology to what we now have, for several million years. Not only humans, but polar bears, monkeys, wolves and every other animal, bird, fish on Earth have also survived – or adapted – or evolved through that same period of time (or longer). Why would you believe that 1 deg (or 10 deg), either warmer or cooler, would be the catastrophe that’s been predicted in the “popular” press?
(3) These questions are NOT answerable at this time. Those who claim that human emissions/activity have no effect are wrong. Humans contribute energy to the Earth’s system. Thermodynamically, this has an effect. How much? That has yet to be determined. Those who claim that the “warming” is entirely human caused (AGW) are wrong. There are natural processes that affect the climate and we are just now discovering some of these processes. But they’re not trivial. Those who claim that the “warming” is entirely due to human CO2 production are more than wrong – there is no word to define the depth of their ignorance, regardless of their scientific knowledge, status or position. The position that reduction of human CO2 production will “cure” or “fix” or “reverse” Global Warming (i.e. – Climate Change) is a lie.
(4) CO2 reduction “may” mitigate warming to some very small degree. But is it worth the price (a return to a pre-industrial society) to reduce the average global temp by 0.05 deg over the next century? At a cost of many Trillions of dollars?
I don’t think so. I think we need different solutions — AFTER we do enough HONEST research, after we know more about the actual processes involved in climate change — and the degree to which each contributes. It may well be that the best solution is to do nothing. Or not. But that answer is still in the future -
Quote
November 24, 2009, 9:07 pmHugh says:
I’m not a climate scientist but I’ve done medical research and I have a master’s degree in environmental health. I know something about research and I know something about academic infighting. I’ve been skeptical about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) for quite some time. I’ve especially skeptical when I read global warming advocates claiming that there have been some 3000 scientific studies done and they all conclude that AGW is real. Do you have any idea how unlikely it is that 3000 studies will reach the same conclusion? It’s about the same odds as a banana republic dictator actually receiving 99.9% of the popular vote. And when you see either of those happen, it’s safe to conclude the fix was in from the beginning.
The other point about this is that the AGW alarmists have claimed the moral high ground because they’re supposedly objective and only interested in the truth, while they call everyone who disagrees with them an industry shill. I hope if nothing else comes out of “climate gate” that the public learns how bankrupt that claim is.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 9:07 pmSandy MacHoots says:
I’m not sure this is true. Governments spend money on things that are important to governments. Given that AGW has the potential to put vast new swaths of society under control of those governments, it’s entirely possible that governments will fund them lavishly even if more lives would actually be saved by research into how to reduce obesity.
There was no mockery. DM’s point was that it is a religion, and entitled to respect as such, but it’s not science.
Me, I’d put more stock in what the models say about 2050 if they could accurately predict 2010.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 9:10 pmFrancis says:
The odds of me persuading anyone on this thread of anything on this issue are likely microscopic, but here goes:
1. One principal theme of libertarianism is to minimize the existence of externalities. Social Security, Medicare, civil rights laws, environmental laws, workplace regulations and banking regulations interfere with liberty. The harms that these laws address are, often, minimized or denied. As global climate change is the result of multiple causes, including mobile and stationary power sources, cattle farming and land use practices, passing the array of laws necessary to capture these externalities is anathema to libertarianism.
2. That said, there is solid evidence to support the creation of legal systems to capture the externalities of the release of CO2 and CO2equivalent gasses.
A. The Keeling Curve is real.
B. The physics behind the warming effect of CO2 in the atmosphere is better understood than gravity.
C. The source code behind many of the climate change models is available. Ask Gavin Schmidt for the links. Go ahead and prove them useless; to date no one has. Koch has enough money lying around. Get a grant from him to do the work to challenge the models. Somewhere in the two threads discussing the CRU data theft, Gavin states that he has yet to receive a single substantive comment from a climate skeptic on the model he has authored .
D. There are an enormous number of different relevant data sets, including ground and atmospheric temperature globally and in key regions, size, depth and age of the arctic ice pack, mass and flow rates of the Greenland and Antarctic glaciers, CO2 uptake and temperature of various bodies of water at various depths, ice cores, tree cores, mud cores etc. While various bloggers have complained about the quality of various data sets (even, occasionally, correctly), none of these complaints have lead to a fundamental reevalution of the current consensus view.
E. The last IPCC report was challenged for ignoring the most recent available science at the time it was written. This was a fair criticism, as the report was intended to cover only those areas where there was broad consensus. The effect was that the report was too conservative! The impacts of climate change are being felt faster than was anticipated.
F. Yes, Mann is ONE of the authors of the report I linked above. Either he is a modern Moriarity/SPECTRE CEO, weaving his web of power throughout the scientific community, or he is just one scientist among many and the report should be considered the best available summary of the scientific data currently available.
Really, now, which is more likely?
Quote
November 24, 2009, 9:12 pmj.l. says:
BD– As said above, is the earth‘s climate changing? Of course it is, has, and always will. Remember the ice age? We didn‘t cause it, nor this. I‘m still waiting to hear why it was warmer during the Middle Ages than it is now. And what ever it was, how do you know that that same thing is not causing our “warming” now? (Of course no warming for several years now. Funny how that wasn‘t in their “models”). Co2 levels were up to nine times higher millions of yrs. ago than now– but we‘re still here. How? Early man during the ice age adopted, and evolved, but we, with all our technology, are doomed? Sure. I could go on and on. Total B.S. And 5,4,3,2,1... I can hear it now. Some lefty rebutting, but never, ever answering, at the least, the Middle age warming period question. And until then, you don‘t get to spend trillions.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 9:12 pmGeorge Larson says:
Controlling academic journals to control science is not new. Early statisticians in Britian could not get published in the Journal of the Royal Society so they started their own journal, Biometrica. American statisticians had to start their own journal Biometrics for similar reasons. It has also been suggested that Pearson kept Fisher’s papers from getting published in Biometrica. Fisher was a critic of Pearson
Quote
November 24, 2009, 9:13 pmEvan Thomas says:
Ilya, I take your point, but in the case of global warming, social validation appears to be a poor driver. Because the scientific consensus is at this point still ill-defined and the topic too controversial.
Climatology is not a very old field and there are very few Phd’s with the degree. Most individuals who function as climatologists are from the Earth Science department but not all, some are physicists. It is a complex group of people.
I’ve seen polls were a majority of scientists believe and the majority of Earth Science departments believe in anthropomorphic global warming. But I have never seen a study limited to only those who are, or function as, climatologists.
Looking at the literature I believe there are only a few hundred people around the world researching and publishing papers on global warming. And I have yet to see a study or poll of this specific group to see if they have a consensus view on anthropomorphic global warming. Is there? It is unclear.
There is another lesson here, social validation works poorly for solving controversial topics. The denials and decades of fighting over black holes, quantum mechanics, natural selection and continental drift come to mind. In each case the scientific consensus of the day was dead wrong.
So I think social validation works best on subjects that are largely settled or old. There is an inverse relationship between the controversial nature of the research and the ability of social validation (or rational ignorance) to predict which side will end up as the accepted scientific view.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 9:18 pmAlanW says:
This is by far the most reasonable thing I’ve read about Climategate, and one of the most reasonable things I’ve read about climate change in general. Thanks.
What strikes me is that many predictions of global warming have a fairly short time window — 10–20 years (and some even shorter than that). Most of the proponents and skeptics will still be around and still have reputations to be ruined. I imagine whoever’s wrong will try to change the goal posts, but there are a lot of pretty concrete claims on the record.
I certainly hope the worst case scenarios are overblown, because there’s no indication any country today is willing to move seriously to head off the problem.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 9:20 pmNevada says:
Thank you! Ilya conveniently ignored that. Go figure.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 9:25 pmDangerMouse says:
there was no mockery. DM’s point was that it is a religion, and entitled to respect as such, but it’s not science.
Bingo. But maybe a “true believer” would see any failure to prostrate as mockery.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 9:25 pmRichard Aubrey says:
Social validation usually gets shaky when somebody can say, with justice, “follow the money”.
And wrt AGW there was plenty of money to follow.
This will probably ruin any social validation of anything claiming to be science which includes deciding who gets gigabucks and who loses gigabucks.
Those with a darker view of humanity will also want to see if there are more or fewer opportunities for busy little ‘crats to run others’ lives just for grits and shins.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 9:25 pmShelby says:
Yankee: Polluters stand to lose a money if regulation is imposed, and have been doling out bales of money to support “skeptics.”
Sounds plausible, but surely you can provide supporting links?
Quote
November 24, 2009, 9:26 pmThoughts on ‘Climategate’ « The American Catholic says:
[...] on ‘Climategate’ I think Prof. Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy outlines a sensible approach to the recent ‘Climategate’ scandal: Most of us, however, lack [...]
MPS says:
I haven’t been convinced by any emails I’ve seen that what you claim they reveal they actually reveal.
It should be borne in mind that it is the purpose of peer-review to filter papers whose analyses do not justify their claims. Is there an email that indicates that anyone took a different approach to peer review, or encouraged someone else to?
The link you cite claims that the emails talked about suppressing data. That is not true. RealClimate.org explains that the instances where out-of-context quotes seem to indicate this all involve issues that are discussed in the peer-reviewed literature. Thus there is nothing secret about it, and contrarians are free to criticize any such procedures on their merits. They do no because contrarians are hacks, which is precisely why the scientific community seeks to exclude them. We also exclude young-earth creationists from cosmology conferences, for instance.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 9:33 pmDavid Kane says:
You don’t need to be a climate scientist to be very concerned about behavior like this.
Read the whole thing. You don’t have to understand statistics to see the problems.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 10:00 pmJim Owen says:
Francis –
As you said, the probability of my convincing you is vanishingly small. However, you need a few answers.
1. Libertarianism is not relevant here.
2. A. The Keeling curve is real but is not as relevant as you seem to believe. CO2 HAS been increasing – far less than expected or predicted. And temps have been decreasing – not as expected or predicted. This alone breaks the supposed relationship between the Keeling curve and temps.
B. The physics is NOT understood because the degree of climate sensitivity is unknown.
C. Nobody needs to challenge the code used in the models – one simply needs to look at the results. They are built to match past climate on the assumption that projecting forward will then predict the future. But they fail in that prediction. That is NOT questionable – Kevin Trenberth made that clear in the CRUtape Letters (the emails).
D. The publicly touted interpretations of the data sets you’ve mentioned have come exclusively from the Team (those “scientists” whose emails have precipitated this discussion). There are other interpretations, other views, that have been suppressed. In addition, — ice cores, tree cores, mud cores – have ALL been abused, in particular, by the Team, which is the principal source of public information.
E. The Team was a main contributor to the IPCC reports (yes – plural). As someone recently said – would you trust your retirement fund to people with the moral/ethical outlook illustrated by the Team in the emails under discussion here? The IPCC reports, in general, have been shown by “skeptic” scientists to be overblown, inaccurate and politically motivated. Let’s face it – the original IPCC charter was to prove the EXTENT of human influence on the climate – NOT whether there was any human influence. There’s a huge difference there.
F. Mann is one a group of 42 “scientists” that the Wegman Report showed to be an interconnected, self-reinforcing clique that published together, peer-reviewed each other’s papers and generally circled the wagons against outsiders. Moriarity/SPECTRE is closer to the truth than I think you’re comfortable with.
I’ll leave you with a quote –
Scientists, no less than others, are inclined to see what they expect to see, and an erroneous conclusion by a respected colleague often carries other scientists along on the road to ignominy. This is pathological science, in which scientists manage to fool themselves.
From – “Voodoo Science” by Robert Park
Quote
November 24, 2009, 10:03 pmJKB says:
Of course, all the questions of climate change end once the findings are replicated. The only fallout will be some scientists labeled as petty and vindictive.
Oh, that’s right, even these so called scientists can’t replicate their findings and they have conveniently misplaced the raw data. Add this to the fact that there is already independent research that shows the tree ring data was cherry-picked and you have real questions of the validity of the “consensus”. Consensus is suspect in that for the last 20 years you couldn’t get a grant if your hypothesis did not support warming.
What needs to happen is that all the damaging the economy needs to stop. Data needs to be opened up to a wide range of researchers with independent replication of results. If it is real, there is no need to hide research and all the reason to follow the scientific method.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 10:16 pmFrancis says:
Jim Owen:
Cites please. Here’s mine, from the Copenhagen Diagnosis, linked above:
“Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 were nearly 40% higher than those in 1990.”
and here’s Trenberth: “Given that global warming is unequivocally happening ...” (citing IPCC). Link here.
The Team, as you put it, seems a little bit larger than you suggest. According to Wikipedia, “no remaining scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate change”. That’s a little more than 42. what evidence do you got?
Quote
November 24, 2009, 10:17 pmAlanDownunder says:
Why mince words about climate change, Ilya? Why the mealy-mouthed rationalisations and clutching at straws? Australia’s senate opposition leader, Nick Minchin, is saying what every conservative sceptic feels in their bones:
Quote
November 24, 2009, 10:22 pmAdam says:
My wife (who is far more sciencey) reminds me that science’s battles have been more than just over funding. When people like Einstein or Velikovsky came along and challenged the existing consensus, they were violently opposed. And there was not the same funding issues that exist with climate change. If climate change turns out to be complete bunk, Michael Mann will go from one of the most respected scientists in the world to a tottering old fool overnight. His life’s work would be destroyed.
Scientists ALWAYS have a dog in the fight of their research.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 10:25 pmLTEC says:
(Insert appropriate SNL catch phrase here. Perhaps “Really!”, or maybe “Isn’t that special?”)
Any paper which fails to make public all of the source code and all of the data is of no value whatsoever.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 10:28 pmElliot says:
If climate models predicted ten years of warming, and that warming didn’t occur, is there some reason to restructure our society based on those models’ further predictions?
Quote
November 24, 2009, 10:29 pmflyovertard says:
Francis,
That’s a Crock
Externalities — Blah Blah
Solid Evidence — See CRU Scandal
Keeling Curve — Cause CO2 has always been constant — forever
Source Code — you’re flat out wrong — Realclimate (Gavin et al) links meaningless pre– and post-processing codes. It’s the salt and pepper where meat and potatoes are needed. Google “CBS Climategate” and read a MSM account of the meat and potatoes code (yes there are better references but even CBS has a devastating piece on the code used to create the foremost global temperature record in existence).
Consensus View: That’s a little tainted in light of the new revelations now isn’t it?
2007 IPCC Report: Have you looked at the updates since it was initially published? The corrections have huge implications — although the updates don’t delve into the impact of the updates on the actual report (wonder why??) Furthermore, the CRU folks were INSTRUMENTAL in its creation (and they are scientists so you better believe them).
Mann does tree rings — his expertise is tree rings — measuring the width of tree rings and drawing inferences — he’s not a physicist nor mathematician nor statistician nor computer coder nor horticulturist, he measures the widths of tree rings. His notoriety as an expert is more due to ideology and the inferences he’s willing to make. Tree rings have their value but as temperature indicators its hand waving. After all, tree ring width is only temperature not a decade of moist summers, or a herd of reindeer that frequented a sampling site (fertilizer), or any other of the multitude of factors that can impact plant growth.
I believe in anthropogenic climate change — See UHI, aerosols, nuclear winter, etc. CO2 — naw, sorry wrong animal.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 10:34 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
the CRUtape Letters
snort
Quote
November 24, 2009, 10:39 pmtickknob says:
All evidence is that the positions they wish to promote are their conclusions about the nature of reality based on lifelong study in the field.
This seems right but if true then their actions make no sense. They have studied the data and it led them to become AGW true believers. Then why do they not want to share the data with others? I don“t get it.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 10:41 pmmc1024 says:
If someone could make money from the earth being the center of the universe, astronomy would be cast into the same sort of doubt that basic biology and climatology have. It’s hilarious to see people claim that climatologists are in some global warming conspiracy for the money. It’s as though everywhere I look I see climate scientists in Ferraris, while those global warming skeptics who happen to ideologically aligned with Exxon struggle to make it by on table scraps.
Reading these comments, it’s almost as though a bucnh of lawyers would be willing to spout off about outside topics they have little to no understanding about. Ridiculous, right?
Asteroids could have catastrophic impact on the Earth. Where’s the near earth object cabal, lobbying for billion dollar research projects? Oh wait, there’s nobody with an interest in saying, categorically, that asteroids don’t exist. So we’re all willing to butt out and let people with actual knowledge about the subject determine a consensus. Strange that it’s only when billion dollar industries are opposed that the rubric changes.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 10:46 pmOnly sane one left says:
B.D says: My hunch has been that the answer to question (1) is fairly indisputable since it’s based on straightforward data collection: the average temperatures on earth have been rising over the last several decades, at an unusually rapid rate.
See, they got you BD. The emails show that they can’t figure out why the world has cooled during the last decade and they are trying to find ways to hide that fact!
Quote
November 24, 2009, 10:47 pmPatHMV says:
Francis, are you for real?
I clicked through to the first of your links. The very first chart included in Trenberth’s report is based on data provided by CRU. Have you gone through the footnotes of that article to determine just how many of the scientists which Trenberth relies on are implicated by the CRU frauds? Or do you accept their science is accurate simply on faith?
For that matter, let’s look at what Trenberth, the one YOU cited, says on the first page:
In short, he himself admits that their theory cannot explain why the last 8 years or so have not seen any increase in the global mean temperature. He still insists that global warming exists, but of course you have to trust the entire body of published papers on that, many of which rely on the now-discredited scientists at CRU.
Moreover, let’s just explore one other issue discussed by Trenberth. On the first page, he acknowledges that the mean global temperature has been stable from 2000–2008. But on page 5, he says that “evidence is strong that melting of major ice sheets has accelerated this century in Antarctica and Greenland especially from 2003 to January 2008...” (emphasis added) This means one of two things. Either the evidence of accelerated melting of the ice sheets is wrong, or the rate of ice sheet melting does not correlate with the global mean temperature. Either way, this calls out for an acknowledgement of the discrepancy there.
Keep reading Trenberth with a skeptical eye on the ultimate conclusions, and you’ll see plenty of reasons to distrust the “consensus.” He admits quite freely just how uncertain much of the early, basic data is. He himself seems to try to stick with only data from the relatively modern era, but again the first chart he uses dates back to the 1800s. Given that we’re talking about a swing of temperature of about 0.8 deg C, the sensitivity and consistency of the thermometers and data collection practices in the 19th century are exceedingly relevant. How sure are we that the data collected in the 19th century has a global level of certainty within a half a degree Celsius, compared to the collection techniques used today?
P.S. –10 points to you for citing to Wikipedia as an authoritative source.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 10:51 pmVolokh Groupie says:
The GCM code is available for a number of models. Everybody knows that. Your ‘go ahead and prove them useless’ is nonsense. Parameters within those models are constantly adjusted based upon new literature. So technically they are continuously proved ‘useless’. That’s the strength of climate science and these models, that they can be adjusted based upon new research to represent the system more accurately. There is no way anybody who knows anything about climate science wouldn’t know this, so you’re either woefully misinformed or being disingenuous with this statement. Of course you know that what others have requested are the proxy data from things related to ice core samples and tree ring proxies which play fairly large parts in IPCC reports, models (and not necessarily just the GCMs) and the daily news stories of predicted temperature increases because they are the only observational validation or basis for many of these models. They set many of the important parameters. It’s the raw data that has been obtained through government grants that people have requested and have been stonewalled on. I can understand not giving out data immediately or even for a certain period of time because researchers should be allowed preferential access to their own data for some time. Eventually however, such data should be available because research needs to be validated.
This is puzzling as well—if you’re referring to the current consensus view that warming is occurring I won’t debate that. However, there are countless issues of how quickly warming is occurring, how it is occurring regionally, what mechanisms are driving it or acting as sinks (that may influence potential solutions) and how it compares historically that are very dependent upon the findings of some of these studies. The long IPCC reports aren’t simply statement of ‘the earth is warming very quickly’, they address all of these. In any event, the enough of these secondary issues are areas of debate where a couple papers can influence the direction of research/consensus.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 11:11 pmJohn Moore says:
Francis babbles:
If you mean the fundamental radiative physics, yes, it is well understood. If you mean as applied to climate forecasts — utter and complete bilge. The forecasts are not based on well understood physics, they are based on very weak models operating on a non-linear dynamic system, major portions of which are not even included.
Then, you say:
Anyone familiar with the climate controversy knows that probably the most vicious and effective gatekeeper on Wikipedia is a warming alarmist. How anyone can cite Wikipedia on a subject of controversy is beyond me. Wikipedia is useful, often, for non-controversial subjects. On controversial subjects, it’s hopeless. I know — I have been involved in editing on controversial pages.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 11:15 pmcubanbob says:
There is an old computer adage “garbage in, garbage out”. Without the raw data for independent verification all the AGW conclusions are pure speculation.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 11:16 pmMorgan Price says:
As an evolutionary biologist, I have a lot of sympathy for climatologists who are trying to exclude “skeptics” from their
journals. The majority of Americans do not believe that my field’s object of study exists, so naturally we are a bit defensive about keeping creationists out of scientific journals (even ones that evolutionary biologists rarely look at). This is quite public (e.g., Sternberg controversy). Given the political attacks on climatology, it is not surprising that climatologists do the same.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 11:16 pmJohn Moore says:
mc1024 says:
Now that’s pretty odd. I haven’t seen any climate skeptics driving around in their Ferraris either. It doesn’t take a conspiracy to produce the common social tribal phenomenon that excludes all but true believers; however, the letters have revealed a true conspiracy.
As a skeptic, I’m surprised. I thought these guys were actually sincere, just misguided.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 11:17 pmJohn Moore says:
Morgan Price says:
Apples and oranges.
The attacks on Evolution are theological in nature, and not science based (except for ID, which has a bit of science in it).
The skeptics of AGW are often people looking at the science itself, and are frequently as qualified or moreso as the alarmists.
Nevertheless, if you had a paper by and ID’er whose science was valid (I don’t mean on ID itself, but some niche area), would you exclude it because it was from an ID’er? If so, you are a scientist but not a very good practitioner of the scientific ideal.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 11:20 pmJohn Moore says:
So, lawyers... can the EPA’s ruling on CO2 as a pollutant be challenged based on Climate-Gate? Senator Inhofe thinks so:
I think he’s right, but IANAL.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 11:24 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I suppose that you are conflating creationism with intelligent design, because that’s the usual thing. People do that, and then they conflate young-earth creationism with intelligent design too.
Do you keep articles out of scientific journals if they are written by people known to be somewhat sympathetic to intelligent design, even if the articles themselves have nothing to do with evolution or ID? Just asking, because I’m curious, really. And sorry to ask and then go to bed, which I must do now — I’ll look for your response in the morning.
I will comment, not out of curiosity: If you’re going to take your scientific work into the realm of politics, as the climatologists have done, and try to change policy that will affect both liberty and economics, then you can expect some pushback. I don’t see why that would surprise anyone.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 11:24 pmfreshlegacy says:
I think Kazinski above had a good summary of the impact of ClimateGate.
Human-caused global warming (AGW) has always been a good hypothesis to explain the increase in temperature over the last 150 years. But there has been another hypothesis: the world has been coming out of a Little Ice Age that reached its depth (and it was pretty darn cold) about 400 years ago. Palaeo– and dendroclimatology were enlisted to trivialize the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period before it, both periods of time when the human impact on global climate was arguably quite slim. Now we know that top scientists have been willing to play fast and loose with the evidence in order to make their case.
ClimateGate in no way disproves AGW. But, it sure discredits some of the proponents.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 11:24 pmJohn Moore says:
Laura(southernxyl) writes:
Well said...
BTW, a lot of the warmists aren’t climatologists, they are specialists in various contributing fields like plant growth, and projecting their expertise into areas where they are not, in fact, experts.
88’s & 73’s
Quote
November 24, 2009, 11:32 pmJim Owen says:
Francis -
Not to “pile on” here, but you asked —
Re: CO2 emissions — look here: 0926947295.txt
Your numbers “could” be correct — or not. You put a lot of trust in the IPCC. I learned better long ago. That email has some interesting things to say about the politicization of the subject. Nothing that I didn’t know years ago, but..... confirmation is always nice.
Re: Trenberth – look here: 1255352257
Oh, yeah — you probably don’t know where to find those — go here and use the search function: http://www.eastangliaemails.com/search.php
You’ll find other links that you won’t like here: http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/
and scroll down to :
The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose, JGL Edition
Hmm — if you don’t like calling them the “Team” maybe you’d like “the Wrecking CRU” better?
Quote
November 24, 2009, 11:44 pmCato The Elder says:
I mostly agree with the sentiments Ilya expressed here. Even though I’m philosophically against the leftist goal of socially engineering the economy via the trojan horse of AGW, I also think it a grave mistake to interpret the emails as completely discrediting the so-called IPCC consensus. The letters clearly show a departure from the scientific “spirit”, but as a previous commenter alluded to, history shows that this behavior is hardly novel even amongst well-regarded scientists. (Only the behavior of Phil Jones truly startled the conscience, IMHO.) Unfortunately, from time to time scientists do become overly wedded to their work; after all, they’re human like the rest of us, not automatons.
Yet I also think it amusing that the hacked individuals would be indignant that many AGW skeptics are using perhaps irrelevant emails to impugn their scientific integrity and much of the body of their work. Aren’t these same climatologists the ones who chose to stake out blatantly political positions in newspapers and “advocacy” campaigns, instead of confining their disagreements to the rarefied air of journals they claim they want to have the final word? Trillions of dollars are at stake and millions of lives also implicated, yet those who can easily toss about the “denalist” term like little bombs suddenly want to play under Marquis de Queensberry rules? Even if the AGW hypothesis is ultimately proven correct I would hold little sympathy for the beleaguered men; perhaps this episode will teach more academics to shut up about the “policy implications” of their work before they’ve hashed out a coherent and parsimonious theory able to back it up.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 11:53 pmJones' Cell Mate says:
ClimateGate in no way disproves AGW. But, it sure discredits some of the proponents.
I think this is the key point. The realities of our planet haven’t changed– however, a particular view of that reality has been found to be lacking in scientific rigor. That’s disappointing, but still OK (or it will be) because now people who actually take scientific inquiry seriously can grab the reins and see if “we” can track the actual reality.
For people who appreciate science, this is a great (albeit long overdue) turn. The poseurs will be destroyed, as they should be, and any other potential fudgers will get a first-hand look at the downside of this type of scam.
You might even say that the wheels of science grind slowly, but exceedingly fine.
Quote
November 24, 2009, 11:57 pmJim Owen says:
True — but have you looked at the code? I have. It’s unbelievably bad — and the comments make VERY clear that the input data files that the programmer had to work with were just crap (his word, not mine — while he was still trying to be nice). Those data files and bad software are the basis for the present political drive to restucture the world in “someone’s” image. I have a very large problem with that.
The analysis of the files goes on. I have some ideas about what will be found before this is all over. I don’t think it’ll be well received by anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:00 amGov98 says:
As an evolutionary biologist, I have a lot of sympathy for climatologists who are trying to exclude “skeptics” from their
journals. The majority of Americans do not believe that my field’s object of study exists, so naturally we are a bit defensive about keeping creationists out of scientific journals (even ones that evolutionary biologists rarely look at). This is quite public (e.g., Sternberg controversy). Given the political attacks on climatology, it is not surprising that climatologists do the same.
No shock...no shock at all... AGW requires a huge suspension of skepticism. Materialistic evolution requires the same suspension as well as the overarching predictions of the theory are not repeatable processes observed repeating, but instead explanations of “How we got here.” Which has (except for evolution) not really been the area of science, but this other discipline called “history.”
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:02 amOnly sane one left says:
ClimateGate in no way disproves AGW. But, it sure discredits some of the proponents.
But isn’t almost all of the AGW science based on data from these guys? If so, this is BIG. It’s all over, AGW is a fraud.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:08 amBlar says:
Ilya, the emails show scientists trying to keep specific skeptical articles out of the journals, not trying to keep skeptical articles in general out of journals. And those specific articles were bad articles. The one that sparked those emails made claims that weren’t supported by the evidence, and led to a big public controversy including editors at the journal resigning and the publisher of the journal admitting that the article should not have been published (at least not without revisions). See Real Climate for more details, and for explanations of what many of the other emails were actually talking about.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:08 am2¢ says:
If there is AGW, this is the best chance in the history of the world for governments and their agents to control every aspect of our lives. Energy goes into everything we own and everything we do. So no wonder all governments and even all political parties say they believe it.
But from this information, it all seems built on false data and false methods. And these aren’t just a few of the scientists, these are THE ONES who provide the data for everyone else. If the leftwing media and the politicos don’t manage to cover this up, it is all over.
But just think, without AGW, what a better place the world will be. We can burn all the coal we want. Make our cars big and safe instead of little death-traps. Have as gigantic a carbon footprint as we could aford. People in India and China can live first world lives. No more sack cloth or whipping ourselves on the back.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:23 amlisten to ed says:
Maybe you should listen to Ed Begley explain peer review here, in an interview with Stuart Varney (Ed Begley is the star of “Living with Ed”):
Stuart: Do you ever think that maybe you’re wrong about global warming?
Ed: I think the science is very clear on global warming...Those are the key words, “peer reviewed studies”. If those scientists have done something wrong, it will be found out and their peers will determine it...If it comes out in peer-reviewed studies that their peers are cooking the books, that will come out. Peer reviewed studies are the key words...Scientists, people with PhDs, get it from them.
Stuart: I had a Princeton professor on my program...
Ed: What is he, what is his degree in?
Stuart: He’s a physicist.
Ed: Physicist? I want people whose degree is in climate science!
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:34 amfreshlegacy says:
No, it’s not “all over.” Global temperatures increased in the 20th century. The increase is associated with declining Arctic Sea ice, longer growing seasons, northward migration of birds and other animals, milder winters, and so on.
The increase correlates with the increase in atmospheric CO2. Human CO2 emissions are reasonably suspected as a culprit in the temperature increase. But CO2 emissions aren’t the only reasonable suspect. The end of the Little Ice Age, a generally well-documented period of human history, is another suspect. In other words, it’s hard to balance the human climate forcings against the natural forcings. Even responsible AGW skeptics, such as Roy Spencer, have argued reducing CO2 emissions would be a good idea — if only it were easy to do.
AGW is not a fraud. But some scientists have proved willing to play games with what they know in order to market their view of the world. This is at odds with their smothering pieties about “settled science” and “denialism.” It not only gives their cause a black eye. It tarnishes scientists everywhere.
Yep. I’ve followed some of the saga of the “HARRY_READ_ME.txt” file. It IS awful. Worse than the emails, some say. But, I think my point stands. There’s enough evidence to take the AGW hypothesis seriously. Just not enough to drop everything we humans are doing in life to go on a war footing about it.
The debate is not over. The only thing settled is that some scientists are not worthy of the name.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:57 amPatHMV says:
Morgan Price... that defensiveness and political reaction in opposition to I.D. has led some evolutionary biologists into saying and doing some stupid things, too. The many flaws of “Intelligent Design” are so deep and obvious that any reasonably intelligent scientist should be able to debunk them with anybody who asks with little effort.
The claim that “the opposition hasn’t published in peer reviewed journals” is just a stupid way to support a scientific argument. If that’s all you’ve got, you’ve got zilch. Force the opponent to actually make specific claims, and then show how wrong they are. Especially in the realm of the I.D. debate, if your primary argument is “well, scientific journals say...,” then you’re just asking the audience to accept your assertion in faithful reliance on YOUR book rather than theirs.
Look at the many theories which were rejected by the scientific “consensus” of the time, which had trouble finding supporters, even getting published. Einstein was right because he was right, not because he got a stamp of approval from scientific orthodoxy.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:05 amroad2serfdom says:
“Hide the Decline:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiLgbBGKVk
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:06 ameyesay says:
Jim Owen asked, “Why would you believe that 1 deg (or 10 deg), either warmer or cooler, would be the catastrophe that’s been predicted in the ‘popular’ press?”
Because 1 deg warmer, or even less, corresponds to spring events happening a couple of weeks earlier and autumn events happening a couple of weeks later. And that can mean that insects that eat tree leaves, bark, or sap get one more breeding generation each year than before, which can tip the balance from trees thriving to trees dying out.
Because 1 deg warmer as a global average can mean much more than 1 deg warmer in some places and actual cooling in other places.
Because 1 deg warmer means a huge increase in the number of days each year warmer than, say, 100 deg F. It’s a big deal if there used to be two day a year when it got over 100 deg F, and that changes to ten days a year.
Because 1 deg warmer, or even less, can increase or decrease the annual rainfall, or increase the standard deviation of annual rainfall, or increase rain at the point when crops must be harvested, or any off a number of other effects that make reduce crop production or make it less predictable. Mild spring weather reduced production and thereby tripled the price of maple syrup in 2008. We do not know what has caused the surge in bee colony collapse since it started in 2006. Could it be related to global warming?
Small effect, big change: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.” — Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, 1849
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:10 amBlue says:
Blar, you’re wrong. The articles were determined to be bad because they were skeptical. And Realclimate is NOT a source that proves anything in this matter as they are part of the implicated cabal.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:10 amKirk Parker says:
eyesay,
Weren’t average temperatures at the peak of the Medieval warming more than one degree warmer than now? And likewise more than one degree cooler at the trough of the Little Ice Age? However did we survive, then?
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:36 amroad2serfdom says:
Kirk, they survived because Mann et al. got rid of that warming period for them.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:42 amA. Zarkov says:
In 1986 a group of 20 academics issued The Seville Declaration on Violence. In essence they declared invalid any theory which links war and violence to generic factors. “Wars” the declaration said “begin in the minds of men.” End of story. Case closed. Anyone with a different opinion or theory should just shut up. That year the American Anthropology Association adopted the declaration. Never mind this declaration contradicts the evidence. It made people feel good, therefore it must be true.
Sound familar? Group think in science is nothing new. What’s surprising is how a small group can gain power over an entire field through intimidation.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:42 amRelic says:
freshlegacy, no, the increase in temperature does NOT correlate with the increase in CO2 levels. It’s been mentioned here and elsewhere: we have, for the past decade, seen temperatures hold steady while CO2 levels kept rising. Furthermore, as was mentioned earlier, the Medieval Warming Period was as warm or warmer than this one. In addition, we’ve seen Anarctic sea ice levels rise. If warming were “global” we would see similar effects at both poles.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:46 amJim Owen says:
eyesay says:
A lot of things — some of which are true and some speculative.
All of which will change some things and none of which are the “catastrophe” predicted by the alarmists.
Note that I did NOT say that nothing would change — or that life would be the same as it is now or that you’d enjoy the experience. Nor did I say that GW is a crock and doesn’t/hasn’t happened. What I DID say was that it’s not the end of the world — and not likely to become so. And that the warming that HAS happened is not (nor is it likely to become) the catastrophe predicted by the alarmists/politicians.
And yes — I probably know more about some of the effects than you do. Have you been to Colorado lately? Or Alberta? The beetles have been busy there. It’s not a pretty sight. But it’s not the end of the world either.
OTOH — have you hiked in Alaska or the SoCal desert or Newfoundland in the last three years? I have — and the temps have been 10 to 20 deg cooler than “normal”. Actually, in Alaska they thought it was finally getting back to normal after a few warm years — and they were sorta glad to see it.
Enjoy what you’ve got — while you’ve got it. It WILL change. Whether you like it or not.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:52 amBlar says:
Blue, you have to at least consider the possibility that the articles were scientifically flawed. If they weren’t up to snuff, then would the climate scientists’ behavior have been inappropriate? If your answer is yes — even if these specific articles were junk, their behavior was still a serious threat to the scientific process — then you need to make a case for that claim. If your answer is no — their behavior would’ve been acceptable if they were dealing with junk; it’s only a problem because these papers weren’t junk — then you need to defend the claim that the papers weren’t junk. You’ll need more than the emails to make that argument, and Real Climate has a bunch of links (including a link to the skeptical paper that the scientists didn’t want published) which are relevant whether or not they’re in a cabal.
But I haven’t seen anyone make either of those cases. Most of the critical sites I’ve seen (including the ones linked by Ilya in this post) just quote the emails and treat the conclusion that the climate scientists acted improperly as self-evident. Explanations of various emails from places like Real Climate at least show that the conclusion is not self-evident. If there’s a problem here then someone needs to make that case instead of jumping to considering the implications of the problem).
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:53 ammc1024 says:
So many amateur climatologists here, very impressive. I for one agree that something I read on a blog one time happens to disprove the consensus arrived at by people who have devoted their life to studying climate. Are those so called experts working for free? I don’t think so! Besides, Exxon told the Republican think tanks who told the Republican Congressmen who told Rush Limbaugh who told me that AGW is fake– and I’m not getting paid a thing!
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:54 amDiversityHire says:
There’s a lot of truth in this malapropism. To over-generalize: global warmists personalize the subject of their work (earth) in ways unbecoming science. Real scientists would be excited to come across data that doesn’t fit existing models. Honest, competent scientists don’t mistake data emitted from computer simulations of complex, non-linear dynamical systems for facts about the system being modeled long enough to get a paper through peer review and into a journal.
At this point, climate change is a truism, global warming is a mistaken prediction, and anthropogenic global warming is a political agenda, funding mechanism, and religion for a group of individuals who cannot be fairly considered scientists.
We each have direct evidence that Newtonian physics is a good model of universe. We have, at least, indirect evidence that modern physics is a good model of the universe. Posting to this blog is evidence of scientific models sufficiently developed to support the required engineering. Everything from azithromycin to silly string is evidence for the usefulness of the underlying sciences and their affiliated engineering disciplines in understanding and manipulating the world around us. We have no need to consider the “the judgment or opinion reached by a group as a whole” to recognize that a body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by some force, or that the radiation chamber in the kitchen effectively overheats burritos.
We all have direct experience of the fallibility of human individuals and at least indirect experience of hysteria, group-think, repression, and exploitation in human groups formed around popular ideas ostensibly grounded in science or common sense. Faced with tainted data, methods akin to sociology or economics, redaction and elision, a dysfunctional peer group, massive propaganda efforts, and grotesquely high stakes, the weight of the evidence is against “climate science” as science regardless of what those in the field consider the nature of their work or its predictive or prescriptive value.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:00 amRelic says:
Well Blar, the best way to remedy this would be to link to the articles in question and let us see if their data validates their conclusions. Your word is not enough to damn these articles. Nor does this mean that the Team was justified in their behavior. Destroying scientific data to avoid an FOI request is not ethical behavior. Nor is using a “trick” to “hide the decline”.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:00 ameyesay says:
Kirk Parker, there have been many of natural disasters throughout history that resulted in considerable human deaths and economic downturns that made the U.S. Great Depression of the 1930s look like a picnic. The question is not how Homo Sapiens avoided extinction. A better question is, could climate change cause crises like the Potato Famine in Ireland to become more frequent?
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:35 ampmorem says:
On the validity of RealClimate, from 1139923663.txt:
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:40 amJames N. Gibson says:
This whole event reminds me of when it came out that Michael Bellisiles data for the book Arming America had been destroyed in a water system failure at his university. By that time the members of the historical community that backed his book were having trouble supporting his claims and worried about their own reputations. That event prompted a bit of soul searching on the part of that portion of academia, an action that is still going on.
As for peer review, I saw Ed Begley on Fox this afternoon talking about the peer review articles that support AGW. The only problem is Begley then kept repeating National Geographic as a scientific peer review journal. I could have added Popular Science for the Article on Global warming it did in 1990 (color graphics and all). Right now the actual peer review articles seem to be coming out of the skeptic camp not the believers.
Finally, not too long, ago there was a report that the satellite used to monitor Ice levels at the pole was showing clear water when there was actually ice. The believers responded that the satellite was out of calibration so the images had to be corrected before they are archived. Thus, if you want good data you couldn’t take the images directly (raw) you had to wait and get there massaged data. Then they replaced the Satellite in orbit this year with a new one that had been calibrated to produce the same data results as the older satellite (which was giving erroneous data). When the new Sat went on line there was a big drop in the ice level during this year’s melt. As an aerospace engineer that has used calibrated instruments, I didn’t like what I was reading, and now, after this, I really don’t like what I’m reading
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:42 amHavoc Jack says:
It’s come up a couple times that even a small change made by man might tip the balance and lead to catastrophic results. The thing is, unbalancing something doesn’t always mean it’s going to spiral out of control.
There’s a physics concept I’d like to cite here, it’s called stable or unstable equilibrium. Suppose I stand a hammer on it’s head. If I push on it slightly, it’ll tip and fall down. Now suppose I push on it again, where it’s already laying down. It can’t fall any further. The first position is unstable equilibrium. Theoretically it could stand up that way till it rusts, but a small shock pushes it past it’s tipping point and the hammer falls. The second is stable; small shocks might raise it a bit, but it’ll fall down again.
To take eyesay’s example, suppose those beetles get an extra generation in. If the system is in relatively unstable equilibrium, the beetle population will eventually overpower the trees. But if it’s actually in stable equilibrium, then one might expect other natural forces to deal with the overstretching beetle population. Perhaps the trees die mostly out, starving most of the beetles and allowing the trees to recuperate, albeit with a lower population. Or maybe the migrating birds stay a beetle generation longer in the fall, because after all it’s warm enough and there’s food available.
The point is, just saying that global warming might tip the balance doesn’t tell me anything; you also need to show me that, once the balance is tipped, it won’t return to normal.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:18 amThe Ghost of Richard P. Feynman says:
All of which are worthless, Francis, if the surface instrumental record they’re based on is wrong. The relationship between a specific instrument-measured temperature and a physical change in tree/ice/mud cores is calibrated against a surface instrumental temperature record. None of the three types of core are temperature data sets independent of a surface instrumental record. If a surface instrumental record is brought into question (say, by the fact that its raw data has been deliberately destroyed to prevent review, leaving no means to determine whether statistical methods were applied validly), then the proxies calculated against that data are no longer reliable, either.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:41 amEx scientist says:
Ilya,
You are quite up-front about your lack of expertise in client science, and cautious about your conclusions. Fine.
But you do have, I think it’s fair to concede, considerable expertise or experience in how people behave under social systems — be they political, economic, or legal. Much of what lawyers, and certainly politically attuned lawyers do, is figure out what the best way to construct a system of laws is that will get people to behave a certain way, or what the effect on behavior of a certain system of laws is.
Now, I’d like you to use what you learned from your experience in how people act in legal systems — how they respond to laws, how they evade them, how they respond to incentives, how groups behave — and apply that insight to the set of incentives for working scientists.
Currently, as a practical matter, virtually all funding for the vast majority of research scientists at universities and government labs comes from the government, typically one of a handful of agencies (NSF, NIH, DARPA, NASA). Promotion, tenure, students and labs are overwhelmingly tied to obtaining funding from these few sources. Some scientists do get private funding, but it’s tough to get and considered less prestigious, since the other government organizations fund the universities, as a rule.
Now, these agencies are obviously not able to assess in detail the validity and merit of each application. Each agency gets thousands and thousands of grant applications and cannot begin to fund them all. It’s impossible for a bureaucrat to really assess the merit of some new untried idea in most cases (not all). Look at how hard it is for the USPTO to decide on reasonable patent claims — well evaluating a research proposal is about 1000 times as difficult.
Typically then what the agencies do is they split up their budget into “programs” and have a small committee within each program select grants, or select people who select grants. These program committees can use proxies, like publication cite counts, to choose grants, but for visionary research there is no really good way they can assess the merits.
So what, based on your knowledge of politics, law and human nature is likely to happen in this system?
Well, here is what does happen. The funding and selection of programs is highly political. Within a program, it can take only a couple of highly placed people to completely determine funding for that program. They recommend some kinds of funding, and don’t recommend others.
Looking at this game-theoretically, the best strategy for a researcher to maximize his funding is to form a coalition: a group of people who will simply vote to fund each other’s work. In fact, it’s virtually a necessary strategy — if a scientist just goes off alone researching what he believes is the best science, he will just lose out on funding and jobs, and his institution will as well, to members of coalitions who fund each other.
And from your expertise in laissez-faire economics and politics, you probably believe that people generally will find the game-theoretic optimum, or something approaching it, in this kind of situation. That is, they will form coalitions.
So where does the science come in? How does good science ever get funded if we’ve just shown that that right way to get funded is to be political?
Well, the answer here is that in most fields of science there are external checks and measures on productivity. DARPA, for example, funds a lot of science but at the end of the day it actually wants something that works. If a coalition tries to get funding for something that is impossible, eventually it will fail and this failure will be externally verifiable. Similarly for most of physics, chemistry, even biology. Even the theoretical fields are checkable: someone has a proof or does not; someone finds a new particle or does not.
But climate science you see is completely different. There is no external check on its results. If anything, the funding agencies, or at any rate the government, will do better if the field predicts that huge government intervention is needed. No output of climate science can be verified within the lifetime of any of the game participants. There are absolutely no deliverables, no proofs, nothing except reports that ideally justify increased size of government.
Now, suppose for the sake of argument — and I know you are agnostic on this — that current climate science predictions are in fact not justified by the data. Don’t you see that the behavior of all the actors involved, all simply trying to maximize their utility, would be precisely identical under this scenario to one in which its dire predictions were justified? We would predict coalitions, we would predict tribalism, we would predict dire predictions, no matter what the actual facts were. So, the fact that climate science makes various predictions is not in itself, peer review or not, reason to believe those predictions are correct. There is simply no incentive for peer review to accept proposals that challenge the funding strategy (i.e. the dire predictions) or to reject those that support it.
The function of skilled lawyers then, it seems to me is not to assess whether climate change really is the threat that climate scientists claim. The function is to SET UP A SYSTEM that insures that scientists incentives (to have a job, to get funding, to get tenure, to have scientists, to do good science) are aligned with society’s incentives (to obtain good science, to reward good scientists).
Maybe these incentives involve FOIA claims and penalties for violating them. Maybe funding audit sites like Climate Audit. Maybe simply funding brilliant scientists at an early age to remove their incentive to get even more funding.
I do not know. But as a lawyer, your expertise should be in figuring how a system can be set up that does not allow the kind of obvious gaming of the system that the current system permits, in which a small coalition can create a new science and essentially self-fund in perpetuity without any external check on correctness.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:51 amDavid Schwartz says:
Ex scientist: If only there were some sort of mechanism that could pick winners and losers automatically and contain the damage so that those who picked losers couldn’t excessively harm others. Perhaps if people were spending their own money?
Quote
November 25, 2009, 4:28 amconiston says:
A reminder: In science, the AGW theorists have to PROVE their hypothesis is correct. They have prevented others from testing their proof by hiding, manipulating and ‘losing’ the data which form the proof.
It is impossible to replicate their results. Science requires that. Thus, there is no proof of AGW.
Why didn’t they release the data/code? The proof would have been in the pudding. Instead, they spent hours and weeks trying to hide and call the other side deniers. Where is the science in that?
Well, the data/code that was finally pried from the Team (after years of attempts) led to the hockey stick being proven to be statistically invalid.
AGW is a hypothesis — we are still waiting for the proof.
Free the data. Free the code.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 5:44 amArkady says:
As I recall, one of Popper’s criticisms of Kuhn was that Kuhn had imported the language of politics into the study of scientific change. Wonder if he’d revised that criticism in light of this dust-up?
Quote
November 25, 2009, 6:52 amL Nettles says:
Citing wikipedia on AGW is foolish. Its not like wikipedia is some impartial arbiter of TRUTH. The Hockey Team constantly monitors the wiki page to control their viewpoint
Quote
November 25, 2009, 8:16 amflyovertard says:
Nettles is correct. Evidence is nicely laid out in the Wegman Report, inclusive of social networking graphics.
And this cabal of alleged scientists self reference as “The Team” (as in hockey).
Quote
November 25, 2009, 8:32 amLeft_Wing_Lock says:
IMO, it is important to remember that there are three global warming issues. The first issue is whether global warming is actually occurring. The “proof” for this comes from real world data — temperatures measured around the world. The data shows pretty clearly that temperatures have increased during the last 25 years or so. The second and third GW issues are intertwined — they deal with whether GW is a man-made phenomenon (issue 2) and what future effects of GW will be (issue 3).
Clearly, the Climate Research Centre documents deal with issues 2 and 3. While more work needs to be done, it seems a very real possibility that the models have been cooked (or written so incompetently) as to always lead to a global warming solution. (To quote an old colleague of mine, “If you give me three parameters, I can history match anything.”).
Is there global warming? Almost certainly so. Is GW man-made and can changing our behavior “solve: the problem? The data from East Anglia shows the answer to these questions is far from certain.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 8:34 amThe Drill SGT says:
I’m clearly not a climate scientist type, but I am a modeller. In my business, when you want to validate and verify a model, one of the first questions you look at is “what and where are the knobs?” All models contain coefficents and other variables that are intended to synchronize and align data inputs from various sources. It seems clear from looking at CRU code comments that the “knobs” had to be tuned to achieve the desired outcomes. Bad dog!
AGW may well exist, but the current basis for much of the published science has collapsed like a house of cards, because the basis was the CRU and the NASA data sets, and it is clear that they are not dependable and objective. The biggest issue is that they were historical, and now that they have been contaminated, we have no good reliable source for historical temps on a worldwide basis. All those temp datasets are suspect, I think.
So science will need to pick itself up and start building a case again, avoiding references to CRU data sets.
These guys have destroyed themselves and in the process set all science backward.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 8:55 amflyovertard says:
LWL
“The data shows pretty clearly that temperatures have increased during the last 25 years or so.”
Starting point dependent. If you start at 1250, 1933, or 1998 you would say its cooling.
“Is there global warming, almost certainly so.”
Is there global cooling since 1998? Almost certainly so.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 9:01 amroad2serfdom says:
Left,
You could not be more wrong, “Hide the Decline”, Hockey Stick”, these have to due with your Issue 1. Is the earth warming or cooling?
It looks like they have been faking the graphs from the raw temperature data and even the data itself. (For example taking data on 60 trees and then pretending they took it only the 12 trees so they can get the results they want.)
The fact is no one knows if the earth will be warmer or colder 300 years from now even assuming we make no changes to our economy. We do know it has been warmer in the past. An that the idea of an “unstable equilibrium” seems at odds with the time necessary for human evolution. If the plant is so unstable how did it stay in bounds all those years to allow humans to evolve from cells?
Maybe we can we get the evolutionists and global warming alarmists fighting each other. That is a fight for which I would subscribe to the pay per view.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 9:15 amAbdul Abulbul Amir says:
Thats one reason. A better one is that Einsteinian physics makes predictions such as the orbit of Mercury or the bending of light near the sun that turn out true, but that Newtonian physics cannot explain.
The AGW computer models make predictions as well. However, those predictions turn out false.
The appeal to authority is not science.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 9:15 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Really? You mean “The peer-reviewed journals say it, I believe it, that settles it” isn’t science?
Quote
November 25, 2009, 9:20 amroad2serfdom says:
Any intellegent design people reading this please use the tipping point/ positive feedback / unstable climate equilibrium theory to prove evolution would not be possible.
It will not achieve your goal. You will not prove evolution false. However, you will be doing society a favor by causing thousands of scientist to wake up and prove that the climate is stable within ceartain bounds with negative feedback effects keeping it in check.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 9:32 amRichard Aubrey says:
If you are an evolutionist, riddle me this.
How come, in Michigan, we are still whacking deer trying to cross the road in the number of tens and tens of thousands?
Do you have any idea of what percentage of bump shop work comes from those two-hundred pound rats?
Quote
November 25, 2009, 9:42 amKirk Parker says:
Left_Wing_Lock,
Aren’t you leaving out something? Namely, is the current degree of change (notice, not ‘rise’ but change’) in average temperature unprecedented, or just more of the same in terms of how the earth’s climate constantly varies?
Quote
November 25, 2009, 9:53 amWidmerpool says:
I usually go by the wisdom of Gertrude Himmelfarb in situations like this: Think low. Why would climate scientists lie? Because if they don’t, they don’t get paid. Boy, that was easy. Next up: Why scientists working for the Tobacco Institute never could find the link between smoking and cancer.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 9:57 amRicardo says:
On that same note, of the two most public critics of the hockey stick paper, Ross McKitrick and Stephen McIntyre, the former is an economics professor while the latter is a businessman in the mining industry with no formal training in anything beyond a bachelor’s degree in math. How many skeptics can call themselves experts in the field of climatology?
Quote
November 25, 2009, 10:15 amCurious Passerby says:
Ilya, no I don’t think you are being rational to follow the alleged “consensus.” To paraphrase my late mother, “If everyone else jumps off the roof, will you jump off the roof?”
The proposed solutions to the alleged AGW are the biggest transfer of power from the people to the government in the history of mankind. Everything you do, from your transportation (deathtrap car or walk in rain to crowded bus) to your home (dim lights, poorly flushing toilets, dribbling shower heads) will be controlled by bureaucrats. You will go to jail if you install a powerful shower head because it is one of the joys of starting your day.
And there is a “consensus” because everyone thinks they will profit from it. Politicians will have more power (so even Republicans support it), manufacturers support it (everyone will have to buy new toilets, new light bulbs, etc.) laborers support it (someone will have to install your new toilet, insulation, etc.)
But your life will be much worse. everything will cost a lot more and you will have to buy everything new and destroy what you have (cash for clunkers). It is idiocy.
The rational reaction would be to believe this is the biggest scam in the history of mankind, and to demand absolute proof before sacrificing your liberty and your wealth to this new religion. Maybe absolute proof is impossible? Then don’t go with this horrible response to a possible problem.
And is it really a problem. Why is today’s temperature sacred? Humanity has lived through warmer and colder with much les technology. A little warmer and maybe Canada and Siberia are the breadbaskets of the world.
Maybe as someone said there is a religion gene that got in our system in pre-history when followers survived and loners perished. Maybe the decline of traditional religion due to science making it irrational has left a gap that if filled by the need to follow anyone who tells us we need to repent and sacrifice or be damned (note nonreligious leftists are more into the AGW religion than people on the right who already have a religion).
Quote
November 25, 2009, 10:19 amDuane Germaine says:
“The data shows pretty clearly that temperatures have increased during the last 25 years or so.”
I’m sorry, but that statement is patently false. In fact, that is the core subject of much of the email at the center of the climategate controversy. The correspondents are the “who’s who” of AGW science, and one of the central themes of their correspondence is how to “deal with” the fact that actual measurements of temperature have not increased. At several points, some of them actually confess to using “modeled” data, rather than actual measurements as the basis for further computer modeling. There aren’t polite ways to describe that action.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 10:22 amGov98 says:
Maybe as someone said there is a religion gene that got in our system in pre-history when followers survived and loners perished. Maybe the decline of traditional religion due to science making it irrational has left a gap that if filled by the need to follow anyone who tells us we need to repent and sacrifice or be damned (note nonreligious leftists are more into the AGW religion than people on the right who already have a religion).
Or you know...that could be a truth that’s hard encoded to us by a creator?! Just a possibility I know...Hmm...Let’s look
Ecclesiastes 12:14 — For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden whether it is good or evil.
Ecclesiastes 3:11–22 (condensed) — He (God) has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eterneity in their heart... for God has so worked that men should [fear] or be in awe before him... I said to myself God will judge both the righteous and the wicked man, for a time for every matter and for every deed is there.
Maybe the concern for judgment for our deeds is hardwired in us by our creator...
Quote
November 25, 2009, 10:32 amPablo Panadero says:
As a blog of lawyers, consider the old adage: “If the law is on your side, argue the law. When the facts are on your side, argue the facts. When neither is on your side, bang the table.” To make a corellary to this situation, consider that both the law (normal practice of science to have independent peer review and sharing of data for replication) and the facts (earth has been cooling for the last 10 years) are not favoring the Global Warming proponents, they are now banging the table. This time, they have been exposed in a dramatic fashion.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 10:35 amDuane Germaine says:
“How many skeptics can call themselves experts in the field of climatology?”
Part of the problem is that “climatology” is not really a widely recognized specific science, at least not under that name. The sciences that contribute to climate knowledge are very widely dispersed amongst a huge array of disciplines. So, basically, the question has no answer, and the people who have purported to answer it have generally based their submissions on politics. But I am a lawyer with a graduate degree in one of those disciplines, and I do work with about 60 scientists in related fields. In that small population, about 30% are ardent AGW believers, about 25–30% are ardent deniers, and the rest I would call “skeptics” in the positive scientific sense. Scientists are supposed to be skeptics. It’s been very sad to see that term used pejoratively.
What’s strange, though, is that the ardent believers have blinders that block all view of the others. If you ask them, they unabashedly tell you that “no one” doesn’t accept AGW. But all you have to do to find someone who doesn’t is to walk one door down the hall. The “deniers,” on the other hand, seem to have no difficulty recognizing that others don’t agree.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 10:39 amEric Rasmusen says:
A couple of thoughts I didn’t see on the first page of comments:
(1) THe Wegman report is relevant. A group of statisticians did a report for Congress on the Hockey Stick paper. As part of it, they did a social network analysis of who co-authored with whom, suggesting that the author of the paper and his friends constituted most of the field– and thus, most likely, all the journal referees. Thus, if they are not honorable men, peer reviewing can’t be trusted.
http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/others/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf
(2) As I understand it, East Anglia and NASA are the two sources of global climate data. NASA is run by the notoriously partisan James Hansen, refuses to release its method, and was found by complete outsiders to have messed up and overestimated post-2000 temperatures. Now we find that East Anglia is tainted. This casts into doubt *everything*. Are temperatures really higher now than in 1980? Look at individual weather station data and it’s hard to tell— we rely on the East Anglia and NASA aggregation and adjustment.
I’m an economist. This is as if we discovered that the US government had been fudging its GDP data for 50 years. Every business-cycle article would have its foundations crumble, whether the article was written by a good-faith user or not.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 10:40 amjgrif says:
No one is trying to reorganize the world economy for reasons based on Einstein’s theories. There are also very little if any current political implications of the theory of relativity therefore there is very little reason to suspect Einstein of having an agenda.
AGW however conveniently fits in with political agendas to control the economy, give greater power to government, stop industrialization, etc. that were around for many years before AGW became part of pop culture. These agendas were being pushed on us by the environmental movement, the anti-nuclear power crowd, and the massive demonstrations for unilateral nuclear disarmament (pro communist) rallies from the 70s and 80s. They will find another cause after this one is proven to be false.
We have plenty of reasons to be suspicious of the motives of AGW “scientists”, we have none with Einstein.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 10:47 amAri says:
Ilia, you don’t need to understand the science to believe this weakens the case for AGW. When key proponents are caught falsifying the data (via the manipulation they so sweetly refer to as the “nature trick”) literally everything they have ever said about the subject becomes unreliable.
As you do not know at what point Michael Mann stopped being a scientist and become first an foremost an campaigner for political change you do not know at which point he stopped publishing science. The reasonable assumption IMHO is that until proven otherwise you assume he’s always been campaigning.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 10:55 amedward says:
The point is that secrecy does not make good science. The fact that the temperature data and the way it is manipulated is secret and cannot even be shared publicly is an immediate red flag. This applies to GISS as well as CRU. Until this data and how it is manipulated is fully revealed you cannot even make a case that we know what degree of warming even has taken place much less understand if is “natural”, a product of UHI, a product of land use changes by man or solely a result of CO2. The science is clearly not settled since it is a closely held secret of a small cabal of climate partisans.
We should all call for for disclosure and transparency before we modify the world economy on the basis of this alarmism.
Shiny
Ed
Quote
November 25, 2009, 11:00 amMark Buehner says:
That analogy would only hold true if biologists were denying there were gaps in the fossil record and attacking the credibility of any scientist claiming otherwise, trying to destroy their careers.
Biologists embrace the contradictions and holes in the data because there are to be expected. Biologists welcome an argument because they have great faith in their science and methodology. These climate scientists are doing everything in their power to avoid that kind of confrontation. That is a big red flag.
As a biologist i would think you or all people would have your spider sense going off when these guys tell you they have a couple thousands studies that ALL line up perfectly. Doesn’t that seem odd? Shouldn’t there be some crazy outliers? For that matter, shouldn’t there be a few crazy climate scientists that aren’t in lockstep with the others? Doesn’t this unanimity seem artificial?
Quote
November 25, 2009, 11:04 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
I have a button that says: “I just hope God grades on a curve.” I suspect that most of us would think we’d be all right if God did that.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 11:05 amDmitry says:
From the records of the guy who tried for three years to reproduce their own results (“Harry”) and failed, it is clear that the results cannot be reproduced. This means that no scientist can trust these results, period.
It should be treated as an evidence in a court which judge decided to be inadmissible.
It is interesting to see how many articles remain standing without reference to their data and papers. I would guess that minority, but who knows. Meanwhile, any paper citing theirs data cannot serve as a scientific argument.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 11:08 amJEM says:
Your questions are correct but your conclusions are odd.
You say ‘straightforward data collection’. Please explain how it is ‘straightforward’. You didn’t have AWOS hardware at airports a hundred years ago, and the fact that so many present-day US stations are AWOS/ASOS/etc. at airports is part of the problem (they’re largely surrounded by seas of asphalt, which is good enough for determining how temperatuure impacts a landing aircraft but completely inadequate for measuring a 0.2degC change over time. Measurement techniques vary widely, please go look at surfacestations.org for some indication of the problems with surface temperature measurement over the last hundred years. Huge numbers of Soviet measuring stations disappeared altogether after 1990.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 11:28 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
It’s not only that. A scientist could unintentionally do a little hand-waving and “and then a miracle occurs” and not even realize it until a skeptic calls him or her on it. Questions are an opportunity to dig down and either reject conclusions, affirm them more credibly, or even come up with new ideas that would not have occurred otherwise.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 11:32 amChris of Rights says:
I think we have sufficient proof to discount that there IS in fact a dominant scientific view of global warming.
As you point out in the beginning of your article, suppression of dissenting views in peer reviewed journals, might make one wonder if there is indeed a consensus. In your conclusion, however, you state flatly that there IS a consensus.
You can’t have it both ways. Either there’s reason to wonder that or there isn’t. I’ll give you a hint. You were right at the beginning of your article, and not at the end.
The other problem is that there’s no science here. Never has been. Science requires reproducible results. Reproducible results requires data and processes be made available for review. Neither have ever happened from CRU (which might make one wonder how their own papers survived “peer review”, but I digress). If you don’t have reproducible results (and CRU unequivocally does not), then what you have is opinion, not science.
Now, CRU is entitled to the opinion that AGW exists. They’re even entitled to try to convince others of that. They aren’t entitled to call it science though. And since they can’t, others are entitled to believe that CRU’s opinion is as trustworthy as a politician’s promise.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 11:35 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
I found out a few years ago that “peer review” does not mean that the peer gets to look at the data. I found that out when it turned out that a falsified paper in a peer-reviewed medical journal was outed when someone noted that two supposedly different tables had the same (made-up) numbers in them. This would have been caught had anyone looked at the raw data and said “where did this number come from” and when I asked about that at work it was made clear to me that I was stupid for not understanding what “peer review” means. I would never sign off on something without looking at the data, myself, and therefore was somewhat horrified. Maybe that goes with only having a B.S., and if I had an advanced degree I would understand that I should take other people’s word for what they did.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 11:47 amAbdul Abulbul Amir says:
As far as I can tell McIntyre has never claimed any expertise in climatology.
However, he has discovered thing such as Mann’s algorithm for plotting data routinely produces a hockey stick shape for random data sets. A background in mathematics is really all that is required to discover mathematically unsound statistics.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 11:48 amJohnMc says:
But it could result in subconscious rationalization of self-interest in decisions on how to structure their research, decisions on how to interpret results and, so on. That said, I don’t think we have anywhere close to sufficient proof of such bias to simply discount the dominant scientific view of global warming.
——————-
Plot a trend line and see where it leads you. Not on the climate, but on the climate publication matrix. Much of science is referential, that is how a body of knowledge is built that leads to theories in science.
But there is a weak point with peer review referential methods. Should a series of false claims be instigated without proper challenge/review then those ‘facts’ become the baseline which other materials are built on. So a seed that gets planted in CRU ends up as ‘established science’ reports in NAS, NASA, NOAA, etc.
That’s a problem even before you add in the grants factor to the whole mix.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 11:50 amMLS says:
My hat is off to Messrs. Jones and Ex Scientist for bringing some insight into the workings of the reasearch community, Mr. Jones for his apparent technical experience and Mr. Ex Scientist for his elaboration on how USG funding for research actually works.
BTW, what is “AGW”? I am pretty sure what is means to the scientific community, but at the same time it seems to me that within the lay community it could equally mean “Al Gore Warming”.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 11:50 amLeft_Wing_Lock says:
Kirk Parker:::
I think we are saying the same thing. I phrased the issue as whether GW is “man-made” If it is not, then it is a natural occurrence (which may or may not have occurred in the past).
Quote
November 25, 2009, 11:54 amTomkow says:
A better long term remedy might be to face the fact that we must abandon the naive view of science and objectivity that Somin subscribes to.
That every empirical issue is empirically decidable is, not itself a scientific hypothesis. It is a philosophical dogma; a dogma thoroughly discredited by twentieth century philosophy.
(cf.
http://climatechange.thinkaboutit.eu/think2/post/global_warming_scepticism_as_an_instance_of_quinian_indeterminism/
)
Quote
November 25, 2009, 11:56 amGypsy Boots says:
The issue is not whether “global warming” (or “climate change”) is happening, but to what extent human activities drive it. It’s sloppy to ask people whether they “believe in global warming.” It may well be happening; the climate is always changing, both short-term and long-term temperature trends. In early medieval times, wine grapes could be grown in England, but 19th-century winters in England were colder than now.
But these changes have happened since long before the Industrial Revolution. I understand there’s renewed debate about what caused the massive die-off of large mammals in North America tens of thousands of years ago, with human activity (hunting) as only one of several hypotheses.
If we’re going to make job-killing, multi-trillion dollar global bets on anthropogenesis, I would like a bit more debate and a bit more humility forthcoming from scientists. I can’t help remembering that phrenology, eugenics, “scientific” racism, and radical population-control measures all once enjoyed substantial scientific support (which the latter still does, in spite of all contrary evidence).
If we’re going to spend trillions and suffer drastically reduced standards of living, let’s make sure it’s not for a social ideology masqerading as science.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:03 pmLee Moore says:
There’s nothing new here, especially in climate science. Who now remembers Stephen Schneider’s “Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.” Which is a very fair statement for a politician, but an odd one for a scientist. I expect “Climategate” will be swept under the carpet just as quickly as Scientific American’s attempt to trash Bjorn Lomborg, including the use of copyright claims to prevent him rebutting the criticisms. After that episode I can’t imagine why anyone would be surprised by the idea that some scientists and some journals might be eager to suppress dissenting voices. Indeed Climategate hasn’t really made the MSM, so it doesn’t really have to be swept under the carpet. Nothing to see here, move along.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:04 pmScott W. Somerville says:
I’m an interested layman but not an “expert.” I have no particular dog in the global warming fight, but I’ve been skeptical of the science for one reason and one reason only–IF the science is sound, why aren’t the scientists calling for nuclear power ASAP? Nuclear power is one obvious, immediate, economically-viable piece of any comprehensive answer, yet the people speaking out the most loudly about global warming are the most silent on that technology. The silence on nukes made me SUSPECT the rest of the science without giving me enough confidence to publicly challenge it.
The “Climategate” emails are a tipping point for me. I’m still just a layman, but my skepticism has just gone from “latent” to “metastasizing.” I’m going to question and challenge the AGW findings all I can. I think it’s good for science to do so.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:07 pmMPS says:
Wow there is a lot of hot air on this comment thread!
I think these are the questions you should ask about the emails: (1) do they bring to light any information that invalidates the conclusions of any of the many major peer-reviewed analyses that indicate unprecedented warming over the last several decades?, and (2) do they suggest that any alternative (to human-related CO2 emissions), robust explanation of said warming has been suppressed or otherwise unscientifically rejected by the community.
The answers, so far as I can tell, are “NO” on both accounts. This SUPPORTS the claim of consensus scientists that contrarians are hacks and thus legitimizes the behavior that these emails bring to light.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:10 pmDotar Sojat says:
Thanks to all for a reasoned and mostly snark free thread.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:23 pmEconRob says:
Two AGW tactical mistakes:
Keeping the models and data secret.
Absolutism.
Opening the data and models would produce more contrarian papers but also likely more supporting papers.
To say it is consensus or settled science means ANY mistake or derivation from predictions defeats the proposition.
These guys should have argued “we have compelling evidence (vs absolute proof) that AGW is real and we welcome opposing views.” They painted themselves into a corner. They got the criticism and opposing views and open themselves up to a pin prick
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:31 pmlucklucky says:
Funny...
“I lack relevant scientific expertise on global warming, so I don’t have anything useful to say about the scientific issues involved.”
Maybe just reading their: “Tim, Chris,
I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020.”...
“On balance, therefore, I still think that global warming exists”
—-
“not enough evidence to show that the academic consensus on global warming is completely bogus”
There is no academic consensus.Never was. There was Media consensus.
—-
“do they bring to light any information that invalidates the conclusions of any of the many major peer-reviewed analyses that indicate unprecedented warming over the last several decades?, and (2) do they suggest that any alternative (to human-related CO2 emissions), robust explanation of said warming has been suppressed or otherwise unscientifically rejected by the community.”
Hilarious. They show malfeasance, incompetence(not only now at begin of 2009 they announced that they lost all temperature data they relied to make calculations), unscientific behavior, what do you want more? Do you buy a car from someone that is hiding the rust, and lost the engine?
“Alternative”: There shows how unscientific you are, for you there always have been some explanation. What about unexplainable because we don’t have enough knowledge and or enough data?
Shows how much of this is emotional. You need to fill a void. Something must fill the void!
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:33 pmRichard Aubrey says:
MPS.
Your post presumes at least one fact not in evidence: The “unprecedented” warming of the last couple of decades. Point of all this backing and forthing is that there is no unprecedented warming and hardly any warming at all and even some cooling in the last several decades.
Indeed, some of the busted material shows an interest in hiding the cooling the perps seem to think might upset their plans.
And if there isn’t any warming, it’s hard to find a cause.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:36 pmJones' Cell Mate says:
MPS– if most of the conspirators didn’t have such a good sense of humor your post would be a bit frightening. As a practical matter, your point 1 is inaccurate. The entirety of the “peer-reviewed” material is now dubious as it relates to legitimate scientific inquiry. As a threshold matter, the raw data on which those papers are based has been shown to, at best, have been ineptly handled (see HARRY_READ_ME.)
Moreover, it’s abundantly clear that peer-review in this area was not functioning in a manner consistent with efforts at legitimate scientific inquiry. In short, we’re back to square 1 on this issue– save for the fact that we now have a pretty good sense of who should not have access to raw data going forward.
As far as point 2– there is no “robust” explanation. A substantial portion of the “science” supporting the AGW hypothesis is no longer valid. This remains so irrespective of the fact that no one else has a superior hypothesis and/or analysis.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:39 pmClaude Hopper says:
Here is the definition of a heretic:
One who believes the world will someday honor Big Oil for rejuvenating the earth. The earth had been slowly dying due to loss of plant food (CO2). Over the millennium, CO2 trapped in organic material has been deposited and trapped in sediments. This cycle has slowly depleted the food available for plants, which is sustenance for all higher order life on the planet. Big Oil is busy bringing those molecules back into the atmosphere where the cycle can be repeated. This is of course heresy and is the work of a heretic.
How’s that for a concise definition?
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:41 pmuh_clem says:
I’d just like to observe that there is an amazing difference in the comments in this thread compared to the comments in the Kopel “Climategate” threads.
This is why I continue to read this blog, and Ilya’s posts in particular even though I don’t agree with much I read here.
To Richard Aubrey,
The automobile has only been around about a century — that’s not long enough for evolution to select for car-avoiding deer. Meanwhile, the presence of humans has greatly reduced the number of natural predators causing the population to skyrocket. The observed phenomenon (i.e. thousands of kamakazi deer) is completely consistent with evolutionary theory.
Be careful driving at dusk, and when you see a deer slow down ’cause there’s probably another 5 nearby ready to leap in front of you.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:41 pmroad2serfdom says:
AGW means “Mann made Global Warming” It has three main causes:
1. Falsifying data, selectivly excluding data showing cooling, averaging over longer periods to elimate recent cooling trends, and ajusting data with algoritAGW means “Mann made Global Warming” It has three main causes:
1. Falsifying data, selectively excluding data showing cooling, averaging over longer periods to eliminate recent cooling trends, and adjusting data with algorithms that cause hockey sticks even in random data.
2. Having journal editors removed who allow papers to be published that don’t 100% agree with AGW, and creating enough fear that few will speak out, establishing a “consensus”.
3. Blacklisting journals that don’t go along, conspiring to stop submitting papers to or cite papers form those journals and then redefining them as not legitimate sources.
hms that cause hockey sticks even in random data.
2. Having journal editors removed who allow papers to be published that don’t 100% agree with AGW, and creating enough fear that few will speak out, establising a “consensus”.
3. Blacklisting journals that don’t go along, conspiring to stop submitting papers to or cite papers form those journals and then redefining them as not legitimate sources.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:45 pmGeoff says:
The burden of proof is not on me, the skeptic.
Global warming models make predictions. Those predictions have to come true AND people need to be able to have access to those models to see how they work.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:47 pmEconRob says:
“That said, I don’t think we have anywhere close to sufficient proof of such bias to simply discount the dominant scientific view of global warming.”
No, I think “discounting” the dominant scientific view is exactly what to do. Maybe for some they will hang on. But any rational person needs to ask more questions. At a minimum one has to ask why is this data locked up?
The burden of proof is on them. They have the theory.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:47 pmEric says:
I am a PhD physicist who has looked at the literature, particularly the guts of AR4. The alleged conclusions that humans are responsible for global warming, and that the globe will warm further, are complete baloney. The claim that the science points to this is a howler. This has to be obvious to any open minded scientist who looks into the matter (but that takes some days of effort, so many don’t.) See essays on the subject at my web page if you want a survey of where many howling holes are in the warmists arguments. The claims that humans have caused global warming and that warming will continue, are not only not consensus, but they are not publishable in the scientific literature under any kind of normal standards. Instead they are published in the summary for politicians of AR4, a document not written by scientists, and on which no individual scientist stakes his reputation. The ordinary science papers seem mostly ok– but they don’t imply the conclusions and most of the scientists in the field just publish technical results without worrying about the big picture. Drawing together into the conclusions only happens in the summary, for example, and not validly there. Also the claim that the earth has warmed already is a matter of definition and far from established itself. Warmed on what time scale, and in any unusual way? The surface record is wholly corrupted by microsite effects (which have been ignored) as well as by urban heat island effects, to the point at which nothing can be established from it.
Finally, one thing which has seemed very likely for a long time, but which now seems almost established based on this document dump, is that the computer codes at the heart of all the global warming hysteria have been debugged until they showed the desired trends and results, and no further, cf.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-computer-codes-are-the-real-story/
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/24/taking_liberties/entry5761180.shtml
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:48 pmChris of Rights says:
MPS,
Conveniently I just wrote a blog post which deals with your questions, or at least question #1.
You can find it here.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:49 pmroad2serfdom says:
Sorry I never hit “Submit Comment” on that last reply. I decided not to send it but it sent it automatically, with no edit option by the time I noticed.
Maybe I hit the enter key? I just figured out if you hit enter it submits the comment which seems like a bad design of this new software.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:55 pmWind Rider says:
To debate the validity of a particular view of the dynamic system within which we live misses the point of the uproar, and hard science is perhaps the least useful academic discipline to apply to the argument.
A better approach is historical — in that what is at stake here is not merely mankind’s understanding of the universe around him, but political and economic control. And history is replete with examples best analogized by the Greek subjugation of Troy — the Trojan horse.
Also, history indicates that this is not the first attempt by those desirous of political power and macro-economic control to use the device of diversion to achieve their ultimate aims. And thus it is happening again.
It’s not the fight for the survival of the planet, or of mankind; but on what, and by which terms, those which will dominate, and who will be servile in the next chapter of man.
That an elite group of academics may have been exposed to be merely courtesans in the service of a political agenda? A trivial, but important, footnote.
In the ongoing battle between the followers of Smith, and those espousing the utopia of Marx.
Of course, Marx was an unrealistic idealist, probably the first of those reffered to by Lenin as ‘useful idiots’.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:57 pmMinnesota Skeptic says:
I’ll admit that I don’t know how serious the CO2 situation is. Maybe it’s not serious at all, or maybe we’re on the edge of catastrophe. I suspect it’s closer to the first, but am certainly not certain. However, it seems to me that it would be fairly simple to diminish some of the more outlandish claims of the radical warmers: simply require that all monies that are to be spent on reducing CO2 go to the oil companies and polluters. So, Exxon, for example, would receive a huge amount of tax dollars and be required to use them to come up with alternatives to offending methods of energy production. Those tax dollars could compensate for any loss they might suffer through the reduction of oil sales/production. They certainly have the expertise to come up with great ideas. I suspect that, were that to happen a lot of the more outlandish claims would diminish because the radicals seem to hate big business. The last thing they’d want is for big business to have more money. Of course, this idea would never float politically because the underlying reason the warmers take such radical, unsustainable positions is that they and their followers want the money. A lot of people are getting very wealthy in this debate. In all things political the basic rule is: always follow the money.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 12:59 pmAppalachian says:
Francis made a point that should be clarified. He states that the physics of CO2-associated warming are understood better than gravity. True enough, if one looks only at the direct effects of CO2.
There is no serious dispute about the direct effects of CO2 as a greenhouse gas. The basic concepts are simple, and Ilya need not throw up his hands. Any layperson with a good high school physics background can understand them. Radiative energy returning to space from earth is absorbed (in a few wavelengths, at least) by CO2, and then re-emitted. This slows the process by which the energy exits to space. This direct effect of CO2 is indisputable, and, in fact, neither skeptics or warmists disagree on this point.
This direct effect is small, however. The direct effect of doubling atmospheric CO2 from its current value is roughly a degree Centigrade. This is, relatively speaking, negligible compared to natural variability. Again, there is no disagreement between warmists and skeptics on this point. Were we talking only about this small, uncontroversial direct of CO2 there would be no crisis, no IPCC, no Copenhagen, no talk of capping CO2 emissions, etc.
The argument is not about the direct effects of CO2, but what feedbacks will apply, and whether they will be positive or negative. In other words, will adding CO2 to the atmosphere cause effects that will tend to mitigate its effect on global temperatures (negative feedback), or amplify its effects (positive feedback)?
That’s the whole argument, and no one knows the answer to that question. And that is the only important question.
AGW proponents argue that there will be massive positive feedbacks. Skeptics point to the lack of any evidence that this is true. My own take at this point is that what evidence is available at this point, which is not much, supports the skeptics. Fifty years from now I suspect it will be clear that the feedback is either negative or close to neutral. Time will tell.
But Francis’ attempt to pass off the settled nature of the simple radiative physics of CO2 absorption as settling the question of CO2-associated global warming is uninformed at best, and deliberately misleading at worst.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:01 pmGretchen says:
Why haven’t scientists demanded to see the data sets before agreeing with the science? Isn’t this standard procedure? If the scientific community, and more specifically the AGW crowd is harmed it is self-inflicted.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:02 pmBob Young says:
While it’s always interesting to visit Volokh, particularly the comments, and read what my betters are thinking, the discussion on AGW seems to be of little more than academic interest.
With rogue, third world regimes daily gaining nuclear warfare capability; how can even a 10 deg. rise in global temperature over the century be cause for concern? As they advance their agendas, we may soon be standing in the radioactive ashes of our own cities.
The AGW debate seems like debating the quality of the HVAC system on the Titanic while it’s heading for the iceberg.
But this might be wrong. It might be that the AGW movement is a tool being used (wittingly or not) to so weaken the U.S. that it can no longer obstruct the plans of the nuclear upstarts. Looking at the possible effects of Cap and Trade measures, it would be the Western nations and the U.S. in particular that would be affected the most. That being the case, the world may have just dodged a nuclear bullet.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:03 pmAl Gore should be waterboarded says:
These people always wanted to raise your taxes and tell you how to live your life; AGW was just the excuse du jour.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:06 pmKen Arromdee says:
The problem here is that the reason that some methods for convincing others are considered unethical is that ultimately, they short-circuit the checks and balances that science is supposed to have. Stonewalling FOI requests, trying to keep opponents from being published in journals, etc. aren’t just bad because they violate some arbitrary rule; they’re bad because they prevent their conclusions from being properly questioned and examined. Whether they believe the conclusions themselves is irrelevant.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:07 pmdenton says:
My now rusted beyond much use degree is in physics. More recently, my professional work has involved a lot of statistical analysis, and I am pretty handy at that. I can still do some useful things, if I keep it quite simple. Fortunately, a lot of this really is quite simple.
The global warmers have skipped a good deal of the process they should have followed. The pertinent questions should be something like this:
1. Is the current condition and trend in Earth’s climate sufficiently different from past data to warrant an investigation into the causal factors? My analysis of available data leaves me unimpressed on this point. Earth’s past has been both colder and warmer than the present.
2. If the Earth is warmer than usual, is this harmful? Of course you shouldn’t get to this question without answering #1, but we already know the answer to this question. The answer is, probably not. The Medieval Warm Period was probably warmer than the present, and the world did not collapse. To the contrary, it was a relatively prosperous time.
3. If you can dispose of #1 and #2 in a way that leads you to worry, then the next question is, does mankind contribute substantially to the problem? The answer to this is not known. However, I do find it amusing that people who call themselves “green” want to substantially limit a vital plant nutrient, known to promote green growth: carbon dioxide. The elimination of this compound from that atmosphere would quickly kill almost all plant and animal life on the planet. I hold that to be a bad thing. (It’s a little bit of a joke, OK?)
4. If you can dispose of #1, #2, and #3 in a way that convince you that reducing mankind’s contribution to global warming is in our self-interest, then you have yet another question to answer: Is reducing emissions the most cost effective way to modulate climate? The answer to that question is almost certainly no.
One problem that the climate change enthusiasts have is that they have have skipped the middle questions and have jumped directly from half answering #1 to promoting a preferred solution to #4.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:11 pmSigivald says:
I don’t think we have anywhere near enough evidence to show that the academic consensus on global warming is completely bogus, or even close to it.
Well... to the extent the alleged (and yes, I think the term is justified at this point) consensus is based on the data we now know is completely unreliable and the models that we likewise know are meaningless (because they’re designed to model the bad data, and based on the bad data)... we can only assume it’s bogus.
Even if it turns out that somehow they’re right (by which I mean, right about the magnitude, future effects, and human causation — which seems unsupportable at the moment), it’s still bogus now, because the justification isn’t there. Getting the right result by luck with faulty data and models isn’t science, and a consensus based on that would still be bogus from a scientific point of view.
(That said, I agree that no actual ill-will or far-reaching conspiracy is required, so far, for anything I’ve seen.
Mere incompetence [for the data-mangling and bad programming], confirmation bias, and belief in the righteousness of the cause, combined with normal human foibles, explains everything well enough.
Plus, to amplify what Ken Arromdee said just before me, it’s not so much that the positions promoted are not “their conclusions on the nature of reality” that is the problem — it’s that the conclusions were generated with absurdly shoddy methodology, and then protected by means outside the scientific method (like denying publishing).
That is not how one does science. They’ve taken methods appropriate to brainstorming a hypothesis and tried to apply them to testing the hypothesis — to the extent there’s been any attempt to test at all.)
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:16 pmElliot says:
The withholding of climate data reminds me of the efforts to push through thousand page bills in the US Congress without giving anyone time to read and discuss them.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:18 pmJim Owen says:
I’d suggest that you learn a little more about the subject before asking foolish questions.
The answer to your first question is YES. Not so much in the emails, but certainly in the code files. I spent many years involved in large scale software development and this code is, without exception, the worst I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t do what they claim for it, what it does do, it does badly and only with major manual “massaging” of the data. For more on the subject go here: http://chiefio.wordpress.com/
For your second queston, —- uh, do you read? AT ALL? The emails provide evidence of major suppression of ANY view, data or science that questions or disagrees with the CRU/IPCC “party line”. When organizations like CRU/IPCC refuse to accept anything that has not been peer-reviewed and published — and then use their power to prevent opposing viewpoints from being published, then that’s specifically the evidence you should be paying attention to with regard to your second question. And the emails leave no doubt whatever that those tactics were used to silence “dissenters/skeptics/heretics/whatever”.
And I didn’t even mention the illegal circumvention of FOIA.
If you knew anything about the subject, you might realize that the only real “science” being done on CC/GW is being done by those “contrarians” that you so despise.
CRU (and GISS) are NOT scientific establishments. They have become bureaucracies and, as such, their main purpose is not science but self-preservation and self-aggrandizement.
Your conlusions have no basis in fact, logic or ethics.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:19 pmAli says:
I’m a biomedical scientist, and although I have no expertise in this specific area, I do think the most disturbing aspect of this is not whether they fudged their data in the first place, or “hid declines”, etc, but that they’re actively trying to use their clout to suppress the publication of dissenting papers.
In my view, the peer-reviewed literature is a conversation. Some papers are bound to be wrong, either because the instrumentation wasn’t as good in the past, the conventional wisdom led to fallacious conclusions, or there were just mistakes made in the data collection itself.
All of that may lead to some wasted time and money from other labs relying on those papers for their future projects, but the truth will eventually be found one way or another... when some future experiment doesn’t work like it should’ve if the previous paper was correct, then someone will publish a new paper with different conclusions. And someone else will support that, if their data aligns with it, and soon the conventional wisdom has righted itself.
What’s truly disturbing about these emails, to me, is that the scientists are actively working to prevent that self-correcting process. They don’t want papers published that disagree with them, or data published that suggest that their ideas aren’t 100% sound. And when you start manipulating the process like that, especially in a field which seems to rely so heavily on saying, “There’s a CONSENSUS, dammit!” to convince the laypeople, that’s a major blow.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:20 pmA. Zarkov says:
I don’t think we can say that. See here.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:25 pmBuckland says:
As a life long computer geek that has spent lots of years around research (working for researchers in government, biotech, and mining, and computer hardware industries), a couple of comments:
1> There have been lots of comments about the fortran code at the bottom of much of this debate. Indeed it does look pretty bad. However a more basic question should be asked — Why are you still using fortran? The last job that I actually used fortran was about 1987. If asked to guess what language climate models were written in I would have guessed some dialect of C. Universities were the first to move lots of stuff, including research to Unix and C. Exactly why was this done in such an anachronistic language?
2> Point 1 leads to point 2 — It’s obvious that these guys needed to get out more. It’s easy to succumb to group think when the only people you discuss your ideas with believe as you do. I think this is especially bad with a field like climatology, where there’s not a lot of revolving doors between the private and public sector. In other industries ideas would flow between public and private sectors by publications from both and even people crossing the lines. Sure, some people move from a climatology position in government to one in academia, but virtually no flow of new blood from the private sector. Government and university positions profit from government funding, and that comes more readily to those who believe a certain way.
2b> It’s also easier to justify acts against heretics of one’s religion. Actions to freeze out skeptics from the peer review publication process may have seemed justified when discussed at cloistered meetings. However they’re hard to defend to outsiders that really don’t have a dog in the hunt.
2c> I’ve been involved in a number of product launches over the last 30 years. Some succeeded, some failed. One constant is that up to the launch everybody involved is excited about the assured success. Management believes in it, everybody knows we’re golden. When the success doesn’t happen it’s not because of our work, but some outside power — Marketing didn’t do good enough job creating awareness, customers don’t understand our genius, etc. The AGW debate over the last 5 years has been akin to one long product launch, however there were no actual customers to tell the team where they’re failing. Only congratulations for success on papers published or predictions made. That lack of market discipline has lead to a perceived infallibility that’s neither healthy nor justified
3> It’s always dangerous to accept data as definitive when it’s at the edge of instrumental precision. In that case it allows researchers to see what they want to see in the data. That was the problem in the whole cold fusion mess in the late 80’s and probably an issue now. Such data becomes a Rorschach test of what you believe and can construct.
My first job out of college in the early 80’s was as a programmer for a climatology group withing the US Air Force. We did non interesting work like Russian wheat studies where we predicted how many bushels would be coming from the Ukraine and heating/cooling studies for new DoD buildings. Probably very little of value came from those efforts, but we convinced ourselves that we were one of the most important cogs in fighting communism. I’m guessing when the whole world tells you how important your work is it can become very easy to believe that anything that advances your work is warranted. This past week may be a rude shock to those folks.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:25 pmdenton says:
If you’re proposing a major change in the world’s economy, then you jolly well have the burden of proof. That has not been met.
I really liked Eric’s comments about how science is really done.
To me, good science is completely open. You cannot expect to have your ideas widely accepted until they have been questioned, picked apart, and independently verified. To do that, you have to be completely open with your data, methods, and conclusions.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:25 pmNikFromNYC says:
No WONDER an early consensus was formed: everybody trusts what is in top journals pretty well, absent skeptical rebuttals in the same journals. Since they hid data for a full decade after the original Hockey Stick or two came out, no wonder as well that even in lesser journals there could not by rights appear much valid debunking. What is a wonder is that once the major Hockey Sticks were all debunked within 2–3 days of the data being finally released (Mann’s original and Briffa’s sparkling one that turned out to rely on ONE “outlier” tree to give a frightening result)...that all those scientific bodies that had already made “the science is finished” statements...failed to retract said statements. That was *before* this scandal. I now realize that even after it that there really is massive inertia and avoidance of humiliation at work here. They all act as if this even hasn’t happened!
Here is the biggest scandal of all: VERY LONG RUNNING THERMOMETER RECORDS EXISTS ACROSS EUROPE GOING BACK UP TO 350 YEARS INSTEAD OF JUST 150 AND THEY FAIL TO SHOW “GLOBAL WARMING” AT ALL.
Here is the oldest one, ironically showing the temperature near the CRU for 350 years: http://i45.tinypic.com/iwq8a1.jpg
As for “hide the decline”, here are visual versions of two “clever methods” to do that:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/mk8113.jpg
http://i49.tinypic.com/m9vcxv.jpg
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:28 pmdenton says:
A. Zarkov, flyovertard is almost certainly correct. But you have to be very careful in the question you ask and the statement you give. I think the two of you are trying to answer different questions.
The data are pretty clear that the last 10 years have been progressively cooler.
The question of interest, though, is does this mean that we can expect more cooling in the future? That is, can we generalize? We do not have a factual basis for making the desired generalization. So the interesting question is unanswered.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:32 pmuberVU - social comments says:
Social comments and analytics for this post...
This post was mentioned on Twitter by timgier: Ilya Somin @ volokh.com has an informative take on how to evaluate the recent Climate Change email “scandal” http://bit.ly/6T5h8u...
Richard Aubrey says:
uh-clem.
I don’t think so.
Case in point. Some time ago, a Russian biologist worked with farm-raised silver foxes. They were difficult to manage, being grumpy, as you would be in their shoes.
He succeeded in breeding more sanguine foxes. Unfortunately, he bred them to stop developing in adolescence and so their pelts remained spotted.
Point is, he did it rapidly with ruthless culling.
Michigan usually gets about 300,000 legal kills, maybe 100,000 poached says a friend of mine in the know, and about 100,000 killed by cars. You don’t really know, since the mortally injured stagger away and are not dead by the side of the road.
We have a population which can sustain that kind of mortality plus natural causes.
Knocking the dumbest 100,000 out of that population is not “ruthless” culling, but it’s a hell of a lot more severe than almost any environmental pressure. And, as you point out, it’s been going on for a century.
I should have made the “joke” emoticon.
Sorry.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:42 pmA. Zarkov says:
There’s nothing wrong with using Fortran for scientific computing. I also suspect they have a lot of legacy code in Fortran, and don’t want to rewrite it. I’ve seen people re-code from Fortran to C with no benefit, sometimes it even runs more slowly. Look at Los Alamos, and Livermore, they still run a lot of stuff in Fortran. Like all their radiation transport stuff. Legacy.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:44 pmken in sc says:
I once had a sociology professor tell the class that any agreement among a population of humans above 60% was most likely coerced, trivial, or invalid for some other reason. I think AGW fits this rule of thumb.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:46 pmJohn Skookum says:
Yes and yes.
Look at this snippet of code. These come from a document entitled “FOIAdocumentsosborn-tree6briffa_sep98_d.pro”, which you may read for yourself on anelegantchaos.org.
I think this document is soon to become very famous.
———-
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
———-
This is part of the data massaging program suite that was applied to raw atmospheric measurements to make it match Briffa’s tree ring data. This means it is one of the programs that produced the famous “hockey stick” graph in 1999, and it’s also one of the programs that has been subject to repeated FOIA requests but has continually been stonewalled by CRU.
What they are doing here is dividing the years 1904 to 1994 into half-decade increments, then applying a hard-coded “fudge factor” (they even say so!) to each half decade.
Where did those “VERY ARTIFICIAL” fudge factor numbers come from? It’s not documented anywhere in the scientific literature. These were numbers pulled out of Briffa’s or Mann’s arse to make the data look better.
Note the –0.25 and –0.3 to smooth out the “blip” of warming in the 1940’s, and the string of “2.6″ factors to warm up the years since 1960. Five 2.6 factors in a row, does that sound like random data to you?
For a more detailed discussion see:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/crus_source_code_climategate_r.html
Thousands of papers written since 1999 depend on this data. Their foundations just crumbled into dust.
———-
This hacker, or leaker, has saved civilization from a new Dark Age.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:46 pmken in sc says:
I hope Skookum is correct in that we are saved from a new dark age. The potential is certainly there.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:52 pmuh_clem says:
The data are pretty clear that the last 10 years have been progressively cooler.
No they’re not.
The basis for the claim is that 1998 was unusually warm and that most years since have been cooler. While this is true, anyone can look at the actual data graph
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png) and see the trend. If you see a cooling trend your tin foil hat is on too tight.
If you cherry pick the data carefully, you can make just about any assertion you want, but it’s just that: cherry picking. That this is being done in this thread is truly ironic, perhaps as ironic as the phalanx of people poring over stolen emails looking for ethical lapses.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 1:59 pmSG says:
3. If you can dispose of #1 and #2 in a way that leads you to worry, then the next question is, does mankind contribute substantially to the problem?
Nope, this question is not relevant. If the earth were warming and it was on net bad for humanity, but it was entirely naturally caused (solar forcing), that’s doesn’t provide justification to ignore the problem. It certainly might change the nature of the solution — perhaps we should be adding particulates to the upper atmosphere instead of talking about CO2 reduction.
Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s not a problem and doesn’t mean the problem can’t be mitigated. Earthquakes are natural events, yet building codes in earthquake prone areas are strengthened to take that into account.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:01 pmuh_clem says:
The data are pretty clear that the last 10 years have been progressively cooler.
No they’re not.
The basis for the claim is that 1998 was unusually warm and that most years since have been cooler. While this is true, anyone can look at the actual data graph
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png) and see the trend. If you see a cooling trend your tin foil hat is on too tight.
If you cherry pick the data carefully, you can make just about any assertion you want, but it’s just that: cherry picking. That this is being done in this thread is truly ironic, perhaps as ironic as the phalanx of people poring over stolen emails looking for ethical lapses.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:01 pmJohn Skookum says:
Correction, it was applied to Briffa’s tree ring data to make it match atmospheric measurements.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:02 pmanonymous says:
irrespective isn’t a word –_–
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:08 pmConstitution First says:
What is not in question is that since the great ice age, the planet has warmed; hence the reason why we don’t live on mile-high glaciers in Maine. With reasonable certainty, we can assume SUVs and power plants didn’t cause the glaciers to retreat. Planet Earth has had wild temperature swings in the past, and certainly has some tricks left up her sleeve. Any recitation of our recent past: medieval warm period, the little ice age, 1816, are stark reminders of how wild our wether can get. But that’s the whole point; nothing out-of-the-ordinary is happening here, today, yet our no-nothing-about-science politicians are ready to exploit this “man-made crisis” to it’s full economic potential. “Redistributing income for climate debt” anyone? This has Cloward — Piven written all over it.
ilya did you even read the emails? The emails tell us pointedly: their are not seeing their theory in the data, they have to throw out data that doesn’t fit, add “fixers” to manipulate the data, then actively persecute scientists who actually try to question their (false) findings! They shred documents rather than turn them over for “freedom of information” requests!!! That doesn’t sound off a klaxon in your head? It blows my mind in the face of all this scandal, you still think that, maybe, there really is a Santa Claus? The emails all but come out and say “yeah, isn’t this great, we get paid billions to create a global crisis based on anything we can conjure up”
“You are welcome to believe what you want to believe, but you are not welcome to your own facts.”
The “scientists” in question came right out and said: “global warming ceased 15 years ago” words like “Plateaued” “declined” are used, and finally: “rapid decline for the last nine years” “it’s a travesty we can’t prove otherwise” I don’t know how you can go on thinking otherwise, the AGW promoters themselves are telling you AGW isn’t happening!
In other words, in their own words: as much as they wish it so, AGW can not be proven, because it is not happening for the reasons proposed in their theory, period. You are welcome to believe in fairy tales, but the AGW pooch is still screwed.
That AGW dog can’t hunt, not because it doesn’t want to (not enough facts are in), but because it is dead. (it’s very promoters are the one’s who have said so).
AGW is over, there is nothing left to hang your hat on. The whole thing smelled of rat, right from the start. When the Sun and the Earth decide it’s time to go tropical or Arctic, there not much we can do about it, that’s nature. We’ll do what we’ve always done: Adapt or die. But please stop perpetuating the myth there is still a reason to destroy the worlds economy in the impossibly unlikely event man is “changing the climate”. You’ll only look foolish trying.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:08 pmJeff says:
Ilya,
You are missing the point completely ...
“If, unlike me, you have enough expertise in climate science to assess the scientific literature for yourself, I don’t think “Climategate” should have any impact on your views at all. You can read the mainstream literature, as well as the skeptics’ writings (which certainly exist in print, even if the Climategate culprits have kept some of them out of peer-reviewed journals) and make an informed decision for yourself.”
If the data manipulation and suppression that appears to be revealed in the emails, code and data is true then NOBODY, I repeat NOBODY in the world including every climate scientist, hobbyist or just curious amateur has been working with good data. Thousands of academic papers and nearly every main stream media article is based in some way on this data. Its not that anyones mind should be changed, its that they have to throw out their current opinion because it is based on fraudulent data.
Global Warming does not equal AGW …
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:11 pmJSmitan says:
Near the top of the article the author states that ‘I lack relevant scientific expertise on global warming, so I don’t have anything useful to say about the scientific issues involved.’ Unfortunately, this is a large part of the problem. The priestly class has always used this argument to silence opponents, critics and skeptics, and the CRU emails provide evidence of similar behaviors.
Those who fully support the theory of AGW (and yes, it is simply a theory) have the most to gain by making accessible all of the data and methodology used to formulate the theory’s predictions. Successful theories withstand the full scrutiny of the scientific method. Unsuccessful theories do not. In the theory of AGW, both ‘consensus’ and ‘skepticism’ are completely irrelevant. Physicists do not rely on consensus to assign a value to the atomic weight of hydrogen. Mathematicians do not fear skepticism of the Pythagorean Theorem.
The ‘skeptics’ seek to further knowledge by subjecting AGW theory to the rigors of the scientific method. But the ‘consensus’ of climate researchers and their supporters is to deny access to the data and methodology. Most curious. And most unscientific.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:12 pmJohn Skookum says:
Those documents were liberated, not stolen. They belong to the citizens of the USA and UK. They were produced on publicly owned computers, as part of publicly funded research, by men who were working on the public’s dime.
Every word of their work product is subject to scrutiny under freedom-of-information acts on both sides of the Atlantic. And the emails contain prima facie evidence that the CRU researchers were defying this law and refusing to release the requested documents.
Such a lame defense will get you nowhere. This is the end of the line for global warming alarmism.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:18 pmdenton says:
um_clem:
What you and I are engaged in is what science is about. Isn’t it fun?
I’m not confident in the WikiPedia data. That source has a great many errors in it, particularly in areas where someone has a vested commercial or political interest.
The data I tend to rely on is here: http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/comparison.html
These data do show a downtrend for the past decade or so.
Since the data are smoothed, we also know that the smoothed version will be late identifying the changes. If the smoothed data show a change in direction, it is after the fact.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:18 pmRoy Lofquist says:
Michael Crighton on Global Warming
http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-ourenvironmentalfuture.html
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:23 pmRod says:
uh_clem’s data link is an example of the sleight of hand typically employed to “prove” AGW.
Why is the data on the y-axis reported as “Temperature Anomaly”? Presumably it is the anomaly from some base-line. What is the base-line? Why not just plot the actual average earth temperature for each year? The anomaly from base-line is a fudge factor on the most basic level.
Look more closely at the data in the graph. It appears that 2005 is the warmest year on record. However, I don’t believe the common temperature series state 2005 is the warmest year ever. If the actual 2005 average temperature is slightly lower than 1998, but the anomaly on the graph is greater, then the base-line for the anomaly must be trending lower (cooling).
In my opinion, if the data were any good, they wouldn’t be trotting out this BS to try to prove their case.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:24 pmLogicalUS says:
Reading the comments of the flat-earthers of the Global Warming movement reaction to these revelations it is easy to see where they are headed.
Fake but Accurate.
Yeah, sure the data and analysis are bogus but WE KNOW that it is the truth. Ronald Reagan becomes more and more brilliant everyday with his statement of these loons....
“It isn’t that Liberals are stupid, but only that so much of what they KNOW simply isn’t true.”
The jig should have been up and this hoax over when NONE of the models which they built to forecast their doomsday were able to predict current conditions when they were tested with historical data. But they were too far along their scam by then to stop.
The only question left is Bernie Madoff was convicted and given long jail time for his ponzi scheme, how much time does Albert Gore get for his theft of billions of dollars from the rubes who fell for his swindle.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:28 pmKurmudge says:
VG, it seems to me that the right response is to redouble the research aspects of this– immediately– but open it up completely to vacuum away the politics and scandal aspects. That means that every person copied on the Trenberth e-mail should be barred from participating in the priamry review, but could provide “friend of the court” briefs based on work funded by the alarmist NGOs. The key is that absolutely every model and every data analysis be 100% open and published on-line for critique by anyone, based on critique content, not CV of the critic.
Slowrr paced? Sure. A bit unwieldy, perhaps? Yes– but they have earned it. Live with it..
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:29 pmdisconnect says:
I trust relativistic physics because it can be (a) experimentally demonstrated and (b) used to make falsifiable predictions. Furthermore, relativistic kinematics reduces to classical (“Newtonian”) equations for v « c (pretty much any velocity we’re likely to achieve), adding to my trust level.
I don’t see either of those two conditions with AGW, and I have no experience with climate modeling. The general response I’ve seen from “climate scientists” is an angry, “We have the data! Our models show this! Anybody who looks at this data can only come to one conclusion, and we’ve already done it!”
WHICH IS FINE, IF YOU GIVE UP THE DATA.
If someone were to take the last 100 years of temperature data and CO2 levels and what have you, and say, “Here’s a bunch of data, here’s the model we came up with, here’s the temperatures for the last 10 years predicted by the first 90 years’ worth of data, and here’s the comparison to the actual data, see how the experimental data meshes with the model’s predictions,” then I’d be very likely to agree with those results, even without actually going through the math myself. But that’s not what we have.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:40 pmR.C. says:
Yes, by all means, let’s keep in mind:
There isn’t any question really whether there was warming over the last hundred years or so.
Indeed, coming out of the “Little Ice Age,” one could hardly expect anything but warming! When you start your measurements at a low point, you should expect the measurements to start climbing.
The relevant questions are:
1. How much warming can we expect in the future?
2. Given the likely warming in the future, what will the impact be, for good and for ill? (It will certainly have a mix of advantages AND disadvantages, after all.)
3. Is any portion of the warming human-caused? What proportion? Does the fact that some of it is human-caused mean that it is also human-preventable? Even if humans contributed nothing to the existing warming, and it’s all– or mostly-natural, is it, nevertheless, preventable? If so, at what cost?
4. If the warming will have detrimental results, what options do we have to reduce the detrimental results, apart from preventing the warming altogether?
5. Of the options determined in item 3, are any of them less costly and more beneficial overall than preventing the warming altogether would be?
Now Mann and other mainstream climate-change folk give us the following answers to those five questions:
1. It’s going to get a lot warmer;
2. The good impact of the warming is outside our field of study, but the bad is not; thus, we assume the impact is uniformly bad;
3. A lot of the warming is human-caused, through carbon, which we hope means it’s preventable through carbon reduction;
4. We aren’t bothering to consider any actions other than attempting to prevent the warming;
5. We aren’t bothering to consider any actions other than attempting to prevent the warming.
Anyone think that looks shaky? That’s because it is.
The problem with this is that Mann & Co.‘s answers to Questions 1 & 3 were already highly suspect prior to the e-mails being released, and are now even more so, and their answer to Question 2 is the result of paying attention only to what their own disciplines tell them (e.g. rising sea levels) and not considering how complex the question is.
Yet our politicians are adopting Mann & Co’s answers to Questions 1–3 without question. They are also jumping over Questions 4 & 5 entirely as if they didn’t exist, jumping straight to the conclusion that “We all have to reduce our carbon footprint or we’re all going to die!”
If that sounds like pretty foolish behavior on the part of our politicians, it’s because it is.
Just A Mania
This global warming panic is a mania. In twenty years, folks will look back at this episode with shaking heads, the way we look back at the UFO scares of the 70’s and the satanic cult scares of the 80’s.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:47 pmEd Sunder says:
Ilya,
When you say, “Nor has it been proven that all or most prominent scientific supporters of global warming theory are as unethical as those exposed in this scandal.” I think you are technically correct, it has not been proven. But if you think through the implications of the leaked information, I think there’s a strong case to be made that until it is shown otherwise, this information has undermined the credibility of the entire “academic consensus on global warming”.
Assuming:
1) CRU is not the only agency on Earth doing the kind of research that they do and that other scientists are attempting to do the same research in an independant manner in order to further science
2) the raw data used by CRU is similar (if not identical) to other climate scientists
3) the raw data results in inconvenient things like the Midieval Warming Period as well as other things requiring forcing, “tricks” or programming “artificial adjustments” (as the code commenting says) in order to get the results they are looking for
My question is: What do other climate scientists do with this data that isn’t forcing, “tricks” or “artificial adjustments” in order to “hide the decline”? Or, if their data does not need to hide the decline and their data shows an increase, why did CRU’s not show that and why did CRU feel the need to do these things?
It also seems to me that if CRU is NOT representative of other top climate science agencies, that they would not have had the influence in the IPCC and with the various journals that they seem to have had. When they had to do all of these modifications in order to get their data to look the way it did, other scientists must have been doing the same thing, which would seem to indict the whole discipline.
It has been said that CRU’s data was among the best and most complete of any climate lab in the world. Assuming that at a minimum their data was very good, wouldn’t the other climate scientists who are doing work independent of CRU be forced to do the same things to modify the output in order for their data to comport with CRUs? Or did other labs get significantly different results and they changed them to look like CRUs because of peer-pressure?
This situation reminds me of Pons and Fleischmann (though this would be a much longer running fraud). Remember how after their experiment other labs (including Georgia Tech and Stanford University) confirmed that they too had achieved cold fusion? Ultimately, it was determined that their experiment was not repeatable and therefore their claim was judged to be false. Once Pons/Fleischmann was shown to be false, no one had to do very much to show that other universities and labs that had gotten the same results were also false. That’s because it was clear that since they all had gotten the same results from what they claimed were the same experiments, once one was falsified, they pretty much all were.
In the end, any agencies whose data and conclusions match CRU are forced to argue that while CRU had to do lots of bad science to reach the conculsions they did, that CRU just happened to stumble into the right answers, which these other agencies got the right way and so the data is not suspect and the conclusions are correct. At a minimum, it forces other similar agencies to publish their code and data so that it can be compared to CRU to see if it has the same flaws. Heck, that’s what should have been happening all along.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 2:56 pmCurious Passerby says:
uh clem, you can’t use Wiki because their warming info is controlled by The Team. They had all the bases covered!
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:03 pmpeter jackson says:
Why are virtually all supporters of AGW theory—practically to a man—leftists?
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:04 pmMontjoie says:
“[G]overnments are more likely to fund research into a major issue than one that is minor or nonexistent.” You have a lot more faith in governments than I do. Perhaps instead, governments may choose to fund things that will yield them more power and money.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:04 pmEl Presidente Castro says:
This ‘Climategate’ is academic fraud on a massive scale and it threatens to undermine all that climate scientists have worked on for dozens of years. It is the role of responsible climate scientists to review each and every piece of data, each experiment, model and paper that came out of the CRU.
The basic understanding of good faith research is gone for everyone that worked for the CRU and it is time for climate scientists to own up to that fact. In any field of science, not overwhelmed by ideology and pay for play funding, responsible researchers would be making statements about how all of this is very troubling and would be getting to work proving or disproving the research from the CRU. The fact that this has not yet occurred makes me skeptical of the professionalism of other climate scientists.
I hope that climate scientists are in the denial phase of these revelations and will quickly get through to acceptance and get to work. Every researcher in the field of cold fusion was harmed by the work of Fleischmann-Pons even though their claims were debunked fairly quickly. Climate scientists must work and work quickly to avoid damage to their reputations and the field of climate science itself.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:06 pmsk says:
I will give you the scientific knowledge necessary to understand the vacuousness of climate change in one blog post: Error Bars.
Look at your watch. What time is it? (assume it says 10:34). But what time is it really? Your watch says 10:34, but it could really be between 10:34 and 10:34.59 (or between 10:34 and 10:34 and 59 seconds). Your watch has some error built in-plus or minus 59 seconds (note that if you had an old fashioned dial watch, with no second hand, the actual time could probably be even more wide-probably between 10:33 and 10:35).
In addition to that, how do you know what time it really is-whether your watch is exactly right to begin with? You probably set your watch by looking at a clock at work, or your clock radio, or the time on your computer. You probably did not set it by looking up Greenwich Mean Time. So, how ‘right’ is your watch according to Greenwich Mean Time? We don’t really know. We’ll say, for argument, it is within 4 minutes of Greenwich Mean Time.
Now, assume you are making measurements with your watch, and the accuracy of those measurements depends not only on the accuracy of your watch, but the accuracy of other people’s watches: say, on the other side of the world. If your watch says 10:34, and a colleagues’ watch in Singapore says 10:36, how confident are you that there is really a 2 minute difference in what you are measuring (say, sunrise, or high tide, or moonset, or whatever)?
Now, assume you are comparing measurements with someone who looked at his watch in 1875. How confident are you that those measurements are truly measuring the same thing?
All these errors add up. When you look at your watch, and you think it is 10:34, you know that it is really, say 10:30–10:38. But greater accuracy isn’t necessary, so you don’t worry about the error. In engineering, where greater accuracy in measurements are often important, they do worry about that error-thus, Error Bars.
Global warming proponents claim that the earth’s temperature has risen around 0.5 degrees Celsius-or, approximately 1 degree Fahrenheit, over the last 100+ years. How accurate are thermometers from the year 1875? How accurate is your thermometer? How comparable is the data? Frankly, the amount of temperature rise is well within the error bars for the experiment.
You don’t have to be a scientist or an engineer to know that a British naval officer taking temperature readings in Polynesia in the year 1880 with a thermometer used at that time has some built in error-and when he measured 98.5 degrees, he really meant 98.5 +/- 1, or 1.5 degrees (in other words, his measurement of 98.5 really meant ‘somewhere between 97 and 99 degrees). Nor that all the other error (equipment error, human error, and so on) account for more than one degree fahrenheit (this may not be true given the technology over the last 30 years or so, but certainly over the last 100–150).
Short answer: the amount of change professed by
global warmingclimate change activists is so small, it falls within the error of the experiment: an honest assessment of the experiment would conclude that there has been nowarmingclimate change at all-EVEN IF WE ACCEPT THEIR DATA LEGITIMATE.Sk
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:08 pmDarkHelmet says:
Props to many of the above, especially Claude Hopper! No props to MPS:
“I think these are the questions you should ask about the emails: (1) do they bring to light any information that invalidates the conclusions of any of the many major peer-reviewed analyses that indicate unprecedented warming over the last several decades”
Uh, well yes, in fact. The e-mails invalidate ALL the conclusions based on CRU studies because they show that both the data and models from CRU were fraudulent. Bad/missing/fabricated data + fundamentally flawed models (Hello, Readme.Harry!) = no valid conclusions of any sort can be drawn. Well, actually we can draw one conclusion with a high degree of confidence: the Team cannnot be trusted.
Now here are my questions:
1) Exactly how much carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere every year from all sources, natural and man-made? How much carbon in other forms? I want an exact answer. Okay, round it off to the nearest gram. Okay, okay, round it off to the nearest kg. Or ton. Or kiloton. Show me the number.
2) Now, who exactly measures that carbon output? What methodology do they use? Do they monitor every smokestack? Every set of vertebrate lungs? Every cow’s tail pipe? Every rice paddy? Every bit of decomposing goo at the bottom of the ocean or in the bogs of northern Wisconsin? Every hobo’s campfire under a bridge? Are there any sources of potential error in those measurements? How much error?
3) Exactly how much carbon is taken out of the atmosphere each year by all sources? Show me accurate readings by source, and give me the measurement methodology.
4) Now, show me accurate global average temperature readings for every year for the last 10,000 years. No proxies, now, just validily measured temperature from a reliable set of thermographs distributed around the world. What, no thermograph readings back that far? Well, how about for 1,000 years? Still no thermometers? Okay, how about 100 years of clean, measured, well distributed surface data not contaminated by heat islands and other spurious factors. Not possible? Well, can you give me ten years of clean data? If so, show me the data and document exactly where it came from, latitude and longitude, time-stamped and verified. I’m particularly interest in the clean data from Zimbabwe, Eritrea, North Korea and Haiti.
4) Provide a list of all the factors that influence mean global temperature. Show a convincing, theoretically sound and empirically supported explanation for the specific effect of each. Show convincing evidence that no other variables are required to explain the historical record and make accurate predictions of future temperatures.
I could go on, but the point is simple: figures for carbon emissions and global temperature readings are tossed around like shortstop batting averages — i.e. as if they had actually been verifiably recorded as opposed to estimated, or modeled, or communicated in a dream, or made up out of wholecloth.
Personally, I have no confidence in any of the raw data. If I did I would then begin to worry about the incredible set of equations that would be required to model global temperature climate.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:09 pmJim Owen says:
Uh — Clem —
If you want to see the real data go to woodfortrees.org and play with the software. If you aren’t totally incapable of learning, you’ll find that the temp decline over the last 10 years is NOT dependent on the 1998 spike. In fact in the absolute worst case (NASA GISS), the cusp (where the temp anomalies maxed out) is Jan 2001. There have been some spikes (as expected) but the trend since the turn of the century has been generally negative (downward).
In fact, if you’d read the emails, you’d have found several of them that specifically state that the temps are NOT warming.
BTW, one of the Wrecking CRU is the gatekeeper for Wikipedia on ALL CC/GW matters — and he’s VERY good at keeping out ANY views or information that might be inimical to the CRU dogma. Only the ignorant or incurably biased use Wikipedia for information on CC/GW.
BTW2, if you really want to understand a few of the problems with the CRU “data dump” that you’re not getting other places, look here:
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11420
and here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/
Uh — I won’t mess with your tin hat.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:10 pmHummer time! says:
It’s all over, baby! Bit the dust.
Now we need show trials and long prison terms for the perpetrators.
And a Nobel Peace Prize for the hacker.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:20 pmWayne R. Dunham says:
If this scandal does not cause one to reassess to reliability of the peer review process in climate science, then that person is simply refusing to consider relevant evidence to judging the research output of climate scientists.
However, I am more concerned about the support for the following statement in Ilya’s article, “In this case, the funding bias seems to cut in favor of concluding that global warming is a major problem, because governments are more likely to fund research into a major issue than one that is minor or nonexistent.” There is nothing in Public Choice economics or Public Finance economics to suggest that this is a proper inference from the level of public funding of climate research. Can we infer from the level of funding for the Dept. of Agriculture that our food supply is at risk?
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:25 pmHummer time! says:
peter jackson says:
Why are virtually all supporters of AGW theory—practically to a man—leftists?
Because as someone pointed out, the leftist dream is to raise taxes and control our lives and this would have been a great excuse to do it.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:34 pmMark Buehner says:
This has always bother me as well. Show me the data and let me make up my own mind.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:34 pmnewscaper says:
Eisenhower was quite prescient about those govt funded “scientific and technological elites” hijacking policy.
Poking around online I found this ‘per reviewed’ article in the journal Nature: (abstract), blowing the ‘unprecedented warming’ crap further out of the water (I trust ice cores more than tree rings):
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7271/full/462295a.html
Palaeoclimate: Kink in the thermometer
David Noone1
AbstractTemperature estimates derived from isotopes in polar ice cores reveal much about Earth’s past climate. According to the latest analysis, interglacial periods were rather warmer than previously thought.
For the past million years or so, the transition between glaciations and warm interglacials has been dominated by a cycle of about 100,000 years. The last warm period, the Eemian, occurred around 128,000 years ago, and from various proxy measurements it is widely accepted that temperatures then were higher than those during modern pre-industrial times.
– REST DESCRIBES HOW THEY WERE EVEN *WARMER* THAN THAT
1.David Noone is in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:35 pmA. Zarkov says:
The reason they report temperature anomalies instead of temperature has to do with biases introduced by the instruments and other factors. But we should have the original data for every station so we can see if the individual time series make sense. It’s a lot easier to doctor an anomaly than a whole time series.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:50 pmJim Treacher says:
If their views are right, why do they need to use intimidation tactics to protect them? Shouldn’t their evidence be able to withstand scrutiny? Isn’t that what science is all about?
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:57 pmJoe Raab says:
Let me state up front that I have a background in meteorology and have been generally pretty skeptical of AGW from the beginning.
However, a point I think most folks are missing is the implications of this beyond the climate change debate. Ilya Somin’s point about the “Social Validation of Knowledge” goes well beyond political or societal issues and applies to a lot more than your Average Joe who lacks “knowledge of complex issues we don’t have personal expertise.”
The climate experts at the center of this scandal did more than just try to exclude “skeptic” research from the peer-review process. There is also strong evidence that they were pre-selecting their peer-reviewers from a small “incestuous” group to minimize any chance of dissenting opinions. Then they apparently withheld access to the basic data that hindered independent replication of their results (a prerequisite of scientific inquiry) but also minimized the potential of “the other side” refuting their conclusions.
Apart from any damage this does to the scientific specialty of climate research, this has a lot of ugly potential. If you think about it, most science depends too a large degree on the same type of social validation of knowledge. For example, how many anthropologists have significant expertise in chemistry or physics? However, much of their research and conclusions depends upon carbon (or other element) dating for support. The anthropologists may grasp the basic concepts and find the methodology reasonable but at some level they take on trust the scientific rigor that developed these dating techniques.
I’m not saying one scandal will make our entire scientific research structure collapse. But we’ve been able to make increasingly rapid advancements because the “gold standard” of peer-reviewed science allows specialization within various fields where no one needs to be an expert in everything. If the peer-review process can be so easily hijacked, the “gold standard” comes under doubt.
I find it interesting that some commenters here mentioned the evolution/intelligent design debate. Many folks are shocked at the number of people who are still willing to doubt the validity of evolutionary theory. What happens the next time ID comes up for debate? The argument that ID is not really scientific is going to quickly be countered with a reference to “climategate” and how the whole peer-review process is a centrally controlled conspiracy.
What about the Large Hadron Collider and similar research? After all, I’ve never personally seen a hydrogen molecule, let alone an electron or a Higgs bosun. How do I know that isn’t all just a grand excuse to spend a lot of money and build neat toys with lots of flashing lights and stuff? Maybe I’ll write my Congressman and make sure none of my tax dollars are spent on “invisible” research.
We’ve been complaining for a while about the “politicization” of science. Once we start to break the social contract of “rigorous, peer-reviewed science,” watch how political things get. That’s the danger that goes well beyond whether or not AGW is true.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 3:59 pmJim Treacher says:
And if they’re skeptical, how can they call themselves climatologists? No true Scotsman...
Quote
November 25, 2009, 4:00 pmDavid Schwartz says:
And for those of you who say “I’m not scientist or not a scientist in this field, what can I do but take the opinion of experts”, it’s worth pointing out two things:
1) The guys at CRU *are* experts.
2) What they say to each other in private reveals what they really believe.
Yeah, a barber will tell you that you need a haircut. But when he tells his friends he just gave you a haircut you didn’t need, that’s going to be closer to the truth.
If they really believed their data and hypotheses were solid, why would they fight so hard to keep them closed? All that does is give skeptics ammunition.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 4:02 pmdavod says:
An earlier poster asked why the skeptics did not profer their arguments.
Here is one reason from the Canadian Free Presss about why you do not see many contrary opinions Obbama’s Science Czar John Holdren involved in unwinding “Climategate” scandal [As you read this remember — Obama — Change you can believe in]
[Sorry for the length]
“There is a multitude of small but frightening stories in the massive files,” Ball writes. “For example I’ve known solar physicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon for a long time. I’ve published articles with Willie and enjoyed extensive communication. I was on advisory committees with them when Sallie suddenly and politely withdrew from the fray. I don’t know if the following events were contributing factors but it is likely.
“Baliunas and Soon were authors of excellent work confirming the existence of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) from a multitude of sources. Their work challenged attempts to get rid of the MWP because it contradicted the claim by the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Several scientists challenged the claim that the latter part of the 20th century was the warmest ever. They knew the claim was false, many warmer periods occurred in the past. Michael Mann ‘got rid’ of the MWP with his production of the hockey stick, but Soon and Baliunas were problematic. What better than have a powerful academic destroy their credibility for you? Sadly, there are always people who will do the dirty work.”
Indeed, Holdren’s emails show how sincere scientists would be made into raw “entertainment”.
How the deed was done
“A perfect person and opportunity appeared. On 16th October 2003 Michael Mann, infamous for his lead in the ‘hockey stick’ that dominated the 2001 IPCC Report, sent an email to people involved in the CRU scandal; “
Dear All,
Thought you would be interested in this exchange, which John Holdren of Harvard has been kind enough to pass along…” At the time Holdren was Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy & Director, Program in Science, Technology, & Public Policy, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is now Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology—informally known as the United States Science Czar.
““In an email on October16, 2003 from John Holdren to Michael Mann and Tom Wigley we are told:
”“I’m forwarding for your entertainment an exchange that followed from my being quoted in the Harvard Crimson to the effect that you and your colleagues are right and my “Harvard” colleagues Soon and Baliunas are wrong about what the evidence shows concerning surface temperatures over the past millennium. The cover note to faculty and postdocs in a regular Wednesday breakfast discussion group on environmental science and public policy in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences is more or less self-explanatory.”
The Wednesday Breakfast Group
“This is what Holdren sent to the Wednesday Breakfast group.
“I append here an e-mail correspondence I have engaged in over the past few days trying to educate a Soon/Baliunas supporter who originally wrote to me asking how I could think that Soon and Baliunas are wrong and Mann et al. are right (a view attributed to me, correctly, in the Harvard Crimson). This individual apparently runs a web site on which he had been touting the Soon/Baliunas position.”
“The exchange Holdren refers to is a challenge by Nick Schulz editor of Tech Central Station (TCS). On August 9, 2003 Schulz wrote;
“In a recent Crimson story on the work of Soon and Baliunas, who have written for my website [1 techcentralstation.com, you are quoted as saying: My impression is that the critics are right. It s unfortunate that so much attention is paid to a flawed analysis, but that’s what happens when something happens to support the political climate in Washington. Do you feel the same way about the work of Mann et. al.? If not why not?”
“Holdren provides lengthy responses on October 13, 14, and 16 but comments fail to answer Schulz’s questions. After the first response Schulz replies, “I guess my problem concerns what lawyers call the burden of proof. The burden weighs heavily, much more heavily, given the claims on Mann et.al. than it does on Soon/Baliunas. Would you agree?” Of course, Holdren doesn’t agree. He replies, “But, in practice, burden of proof is an evolving thing-it evolves as the amount of evidence relevant to a particular proposition grows.” No it doesn’t evolve; it is either on one side or the other. This argument is in line with what has happened with AGW. He then demonstrates his lack of understanding of science and climate science by opting for Mann and his hockey stick over Soon and Baliunas. His entire defense and position devolves to a political position. His attempt to belittle Soon and Baliunas in front of colleagues is a measure of the man’s blindness and political opportunism that pervades everything he says or does.
“Schulz provides a solid summary when he writes, “I’ll close by saying I’m willing to admit that, as someone lacking a PhD, I could be punching above my weight. But I will ask you a different but related question. How much hope is there for reaching reasonable public policy decisions that affect the lives of millions if the science upon which those decisions must be made is said to be by definition beyond the reach of those people?”
“We now know it was deliberately placed beyond the reach of the people by the group that he used to ridicule Soon and Baliunas. Holdren was blinded by his political views, which as his record shows are frightening. One web site synthesizes his position on over-population as follows, “Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A “Planetary Regime” with the power of life and death over American citizens.”
“Holdren has a long history of seeking total government control. He was involved in the Club of Rome providing Paul Ehrlich with the scientific data in his bet with Julian Simon. Ehrlich lost the bet. Holdren’s behavior in this sorry episode with Soon and Baliunas is too true to form and shows the leopard never changes his spots,” Ball concludes.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 4:02 pmJRL says:
Fortunately I did not drop out of school before the 5th grade. Had I done so, I would not have learned the basic principles that explain why rising global temperatures would lower sea levels, not raise them. I am able to sleep well at night.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 4:06 pmJEM says:
And therein lies the rub.
We are talking about a wide range of different forms of temperature measurement, carried out with widely variable standards of quality control, from a variable and changing array of sources.
The only data sets that anyone without an ax to grind could consider truly reliable are the satellite surface-temperature measurements — in large part because there’s three of them, from differing sources but largely overlapping, and they can be directly evaluated against one another. But they cover only the past thirty years. And once again you need to be careful; the raw data is trustworthy, but in NASA’s case the ‘adjusted’ data that comes out of GISS is infected by warmism.
Some ocean-buoy data is trustworthy. Only a small fraction of surface-station-measured data is (see surfacestations.org for more info on that) and when looking at historical data you have to look at the impacts of changes in measuring-station siting. Use of proxies (plant growth, sediments, ice cores, etc.) are only useful when used with enough data from enough sources to wash out any selection bias, and you still have to argue whether proxy studies are good enough to do anything but back up observational data.
This is a true garbage-in, garbage-out situation; you have not just apples and oranges but everything from Bartlett pears to avocadoes being compared to one another, and for far too long the guys attempting to paint the avocadoes red have been able to dodge questions about why it’s still so big and the skin is so rough.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 4:12 pmJEM says:
I invite you to go look at the email exchange between Ben Santer and Phil Jones.
Santer’s got a great line in there about how if the LLNL brass actually forces him to answer questions about his work, he’ll quit.
As a taxpayer funding his salary, I think that’d be an absolutely wonderful idea.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 4:19 pmWill J. Richardson says:
Dear Francis,
Paragraph by Paragraph
You assume that the “externalities” exist, are anthropogenic, and are negative. That is the issue in question and your statement “begs the question”.
Your assertion of “evidence” again begs the question. The CRU emails, data, and code call the very “evidence” you rely on into question.
And although the curve (of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere) continues to rise, over the last decade temperatures are stable to falling.
Then why do all of the climate models paramaterize the effect of clouds as a positive feedback to warming? If the physics were understood, the effects of clouds would applied by a computer algorithm based on understood physical relationships, not postulated by a tweakable constant.
The source code of the models reveal that all provide for the tuning of certain variables which are again paramatarized because the physics are not well understood. For example, the contribution of the Sun to warming is entered as a guestimated constant.
Let us take an example; the tree ring “divergence” issue. Many tree ring proxies used to reconstruct ancient climate “diverge” from temperature in the modern era yet are assumed to be accurate treenometers before the modern period. The dendro-climatologists simply cut off the divergent data and justify that “solution” by assuming that the divergence is singularly recent, and often of anthropogenic origin.
Another “trick” used by climatologists to select proxies for ancient temperature is to program algorithms which reject all data which does not “calibrate” to modern temperature. In climatology, “calibration” is achieved by correlation of the proxy to modern temperature sets, such as the CRU temperature index. The selected proxies are assumed to have a similar relationship to temperature during the entire time span of the proxy. In statistics this process is called “data mining” because you keep only that evidence which supports your theory and throw away the rest. For example, in M. Mann’s 2008 “peer reviewed” paper, simply feeding red noise, with no signal, into Mann’s algorithm will produce a “hockey stick” showing unprecedented modern temperatures.
The evidence is far more mixed than you believe. You should allow yourself to consider some of it. The leading sea level expert in the world says the IPCC estimate of prospective sea level rise is fantastic. Indian scientists studying Himalaya glaciers contradict the studies of western scientists who conclude otherwise. Who is right?
Specifically, the emails reveal that the authors of the paleotemperature and attribution parts of the IPCC report excluded conflicting peer reviewed papers from the IPCC report. As one IPCC author stated: X and I will keep them out even if we have to redefine the meaning of peer review(paraphrased quote).
What is more likely is that Mann is behaving exactly as revealed in the emails. If this is the “best available summary” of the evidence, it is “more likely” that the books have been cooked.
Regards,
WJR
Quote
November 25, 2009, 4:38 pmHarryEagar says:
uh clem sez, re recent cooling: ‘If you cherry pick the data carefully, you can make just about any assertion you want, but it’s just that: cherry picking.’
Well, first you have to realize that there are NO — nil, nada, zip, zero, not any — global surface temperature records earlier than the 21st century. This cannot be repeated too often, since hardly anybody — no matter what form their opinion takes — seems to realize this.
The ONLY global surface temperature record we have shows steady cooling. This is not particularly interesting, since it doesn’t go back even 10 years, but you are not entitled to claim for ersatz the same value as genuine just because all you have is ersatz.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 4:55 pmSergey says:
Unfortunately, faked consensus of the faked scientists based on faked data can not prove or disprove anything. Everybody still will believe exactly what one liked or used to believe.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 5:13 pmLTEC says:
There may be solid arguments for the creation of these legal systems, and these arguments may appeal to certain factual assertions for which there is solid evidence. But no amount of science constitutes an argument for any policy. Confusing science and policy might be a bad idea.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 5:33 pmSenatorX says:
Why are virtually all supporters of AGW theory—practically to a man—leftists?
I am curious about this too. I am not sure though if it is something like a certain psychology lends itself to the acceptance of some ideals or maybe it’s more that once you adopt some main ideals others that are similar are easily accepted. There are some common grounds between AGW and socialism. The most obvious being the pie in the sky goal and acceptance that the ends justify the means. There are others.
I even see the same arguments being used in these comments to excuse the AGW fraud that are used to excuse socialism. Like the cause is still good but unfortunately some bad apples were in charge. As if the problem with the AGW concept wasn’t the concept itself but just that the wrong leaders were guiding us.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 5:46 pmGuaman says:
Evolution isn’t being used as a reason to regulate human behavior. It has all the relevance of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin; sorry you’ve wasted your intellectual gift on something that just doesn’t matter. Fraudulent statistics based science used to justify state control of free men is a case of arrogant academics being handmaidens to fascists.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 6:22 pmHoosierHawk says:
Wow,
Some of the posters on this blog are lying to themselves.
We are talking about “scientists” who understood that if they released the data and methodologies used, that they would be debunked. Every time Steve McIntire got his hands on the actual data behind these studies, he demostrated that they were not valid. Remember Mann’s Hockey Stick?
Even worse these were “peer reviewed” studies (?). They didn’t provide data and methods — how the hell could they have been peer reviewed, and what the hell were these studies doing making up the IPCC assessments, totally bogus. If you can’t trust their temperature series because they had been tampered with — what does this say about their models of future warming?
The author writes “Their research should be assessed on its own merits, irrespective of their motivations for conducting it. However, these things should affect the degree to which we defer to their conclusions merely based on their authority as disinterested experts.”
That is completely missing the point — it wasn’t possible to assess the merits of their research, they wouldn’t provide the data and methods that are absolutely required to make any judgement of “merit”. They did so in order to hide the truth — and that tells you what their own assessement of merit was.
Any scientist that feels compelled to hide from legitimate peer review has already told us everything we need to know. That’s what science is all about.
The author doesn’t think that this means they were wrong, just that we shouldn’t blindly trust them in the future, since they no longer will be considered impartial. This is deep stupidity — they won’t be doing any future research they should be getting lengthy prison terms, it wasn’t just unethical it was seriously illegal.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 6:41 pmAlanDownunder says:
SenatorX:
A classic piece of right wing projection. Find me one non-right-wing denialist.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 6:44 pmHarryEagar says:
‘Evolution isn’t being used as a reason to regulate human behavior.’
Sure it is. See arguments for/against regulating homosexual behavior, for example.
’ Find me one non-right-wing denialist.’
Here I am.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 6:48 pmFredP says:
There are many undecided questions:
1. Is there Global Warming? Recent evidence lays doubt.
2. If so, is it caused by man or is it mostly natural?
3. If there is AGW, is that really harmful or might it be helpful? There were many, many periods when the Earth was warmer and those warm periods were more beneficial than the many cold periods.
4. Is limiting CO2 likely to reduce warming?
5. Is it feasible to limit CO2?
6. Are there other more feasible ways to reduce warming? (At least one of the Climategate emails suggests a different, less costly way to reduce warming.)
Most of these questions have not been addressed, much less answered in a convincing fashion.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 7:17 pmRetired Scientist says:
The essence of science is to develop new methods that provide data that solve difficult scientific problems AND THEN to publish the data and methods such that other scientists can indpendently confirm the new discoveries and the new methodologies.
Global Warming is fraud in science because the “alleged” scientists did not provide total, complete access to their methods and their data which are in the public domain.
Fraud in Science is when any part of the process is manufactured, when any willing, capable scientist cannot replicate the published data.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 7:23 pmaliesterrand says:
This is completely wrong. Scientists should remain agnostic, even to their own hypothesis. Anything else can lead to confirmation bias, just ask the CRU.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 7:30 pmRPT says:
Disclaimer:
I am not a scientist. I do not have the time or expertise to review and understand the vast amount of disclosed emails. With these limitations, I think I can summarize the majority consensus in the multiple AGW posts and comments as follows:
1. The disclosures prove that there is no AGW. It is not happening.
2. All AGW data, publications and proponents are now proven dishonest and/or without credibility.
3. All AWG critics/skeptics are motivated only by scientific curiosity and integrity and not by any association or affiliation with industry, financial interests.
I have however found that outside the already anti-AGW community there is an equally assertive group that disputes each of the above. How, then, does a non-expert know what to believe?
Quote
November 25, 2009, 7:45 pmKazinski says:
Temperature anomaly is actually the right way to do it, and is not controversial or biased. Neither skeptics or believers have a problem with it.
It is meaningless to average temperatures in the tropics with temps in the arctic, so what they do for a weather station or a gridcell for satellite data is figure the min max and avg temps for a set period for each locaton, then they calculate the difference for the recorded temps from the benchmark to get the anomoly. That way you can them compare the Arctic to the tropics, if the Arctic temp is 1 > “normal”, and the tropic temp is 1 < “normal” they average out to 0, and that tells you global temps are basically normal. If you average out –131 and 96, what information does that impart? Not to mention that the anomaly method automatically adjusts for seasonal variation too.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 8:25 pmfreshlegacy says:
It really is a shame Crichton died before the recent ClimateGate revelations.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 8:28 pmdennymack says:
I would like to see a chart that shows where all the major reports on AGW got their data. How much of what has formed the consensus on global warming is based on the data we see in the East Anglia Intercepts?
The emails and comments on the modeling program seem pretty damning. They appear to be trying to hide fluctuations that contradict their belief.
My understanding is, the CRU is basically THE source for our understanding of climate history. Take that away, and AGW is a castle built on air.
At the very least, a view inside their modeling shows us how limited their view of such a complex system really is. I have constructed my own mathematical model of global warming. At least I am willing to share the code and data:
dubiousness of the historic data
inability of models accurately predict
bold certainty with which doom has been predicted
+hostility to scrutiny
___________________________________________________
=There is reason to believe in AGW
Quote
November 25, 2009, 8:46 pmJEFF says:
This is so retarded. There is debate in medicine. World wide. Data is shared. Experiments are peer reviewed. Medicine wants to advance. It wants to help people. AGW is all politics and obfuscation. If you can’t tell the difference between science and superstition, then you are a fool.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 8:57 pmA. Zarkov says:
The famous physicist Freeman Dyson.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 9:01 pmDavid Schwartz says:
I’ve made this argument in much more detail elsewhere, but I think it’s worth pointing out again the problem with using taxes or other government-imposed systems to internalize negative externalities:
If you don’t similarly create systems to internalize positive externalities, a lot of good things will not be done. And if you do similarly create system to internalize positive externalities, you get a very heavily regulated economy.
Plus, the inaccuracy in the calculations and the fact that the money doesn’t go to the right people just adds more distortion and inefficiency.
In many cases, letting both the positive and negative externalities fall where they may will produce the best results because at least it doesn’t add its own sources of transaction costs, inefficiency, drag, and error.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 9:03 pmgeokstr says:
Hah! That’s all us apocalyptic alarmists needed to know. Another “scientist” on that list of over 30,000 who are “denialists” who have no expertise in the relevant fields.
Everyone who isn’t a brain-dead capitalist roader knows that the study of meteors has nothing to do with “climate change” (with some really, really big exceptions like Chicxulub.)
:-)
Quote
November 25, 2009, 9:08 pmLTEC says:
RPT —
Most people have biases.
Group A is deemed by the media and our governments to be speaking the truth, that no reasonable person could disagree with. Group A also wants to completely overturn the entire economy of the world, because of that truth. But Group A won’t release its data or its computer code, and it launches nasty attacks on it’s critics — the members of Group B.
Group B lauches nasty attacks on Group A. Group B didn’t start this, and just wants to leave the economy alone.
The point is that things are not symmetrical between Climate Alarmism and Climate Complacency. We shouldn’t just flip a coin in order to decide whether or not we should destroy the world in order to save it. The burden of proof should be on Group A, and our concentration should be on their ethical status.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 9:26 pm—26/11: How to silence sceptics, The Australian Herald Sun reports/ Sådan udelukkes skeptikere « Climate Sense says:
[...] associate professor at George Mason University School of Law, explains why the Climategate emails undermine the faith non-experts have about man-made warming: I thought that global warming was probably a genuine and serious problem [...]
sceptic says:
Start with the basic requirement: to take the temperature of the earth over millennia.
Now put some error bars on those measurements.
Now run those through any model.
Results are useless for the changes even the most extreme models predict.
Think of the real human lives that could be saved if the money wasted on global warming research was put into water purification in the third world.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 9:40 pmAlanDownunder says:
This will change no minds.
Neither, even, will this graph. Someone will rabbit on about error bars or something ... anything.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 10:25 pmMike M. says:
“On balance, therefore, I still think that global warming exists and is a genuinely serious problem.”
On balance, therefore, what you are is a self-important jackass moron who doesn’t know shyte.
You have no cause to “think” that (if such a dignified word can be attached to your idocy) except that it is fashionable and you are a twit.
Period.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 10:39 pmbeagle says:
Ilya,
What a bunch of nonsense from you! Let’s not abandon mainstream science on climate change especially when there’s a smoking gun to show exactly how that science has been falsified. Get a clue. The Aztecs ripped out 7000 hearts at a go to propitiate the cause of climate change: solar activity. While their efforts were fruitless at least they knew what to blame. Surely today you have to note that UEA’s climate model has almost no role for solar activity and gets wrong what it does.
Chemistry is science, physics is science, math is science and art. Climate change is bunkum.There won’t be any doubt if there is a model that accurately predicts climate otherwise known as the weather. Such a thing would be a license to print money on the world’s commodity and stock markets and would not need taxes for public funding.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 10:45 pmLeo Marvin says:
I suppose this is your idea of respectful:
As for my own beliefs about GW, I agree with the OP. If that makes me a true believer by your definition, I’ll leave it to others to decide whether that says more about my beliefs or yours.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 10:52 pmJohn Moore says:
RPT says:
Gross exaggeration. Few are asserting #1 or #2. #3 is routinely but not universally asserted by warminsts.
A better set of 1& @:
1) The disclosures prove that the “science” of AGW is far from settled, because what was settled was based on fraud.
2) A number of AGW publications, including IPCC reports, are based on the fraudulent results and should be withdrawn and reworked.
Given the enormous volume of AGW work, most of it remains valid. Most of it is of the form: “If the climate warms by X, the impact on [surfing, yellow bellied sap suckers, malarial spread[ would be...”
IOW the vast bulk of “AGW science” is derivative — it is work in other fields using AGW for a funding lift and to provide a hypothetical scenario.
There is still lots and lots of AGW actual climatology work being done that has not been falsified. For example, a huge amount of work goes into creating and testing paramaterizations, which are then built into the models. This work is not damaged by these revelations. They also don’t, per se, prove AGW.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 11:07 pmQuite Rightly says:
You are correct, I think, in fearing that this scandal will damage the reputation of other scientists. In their ham-handed, self-serving cornering of the market for the view of impending climate catastrophe, the outed climatologists have turned global warming (something that’s been going on since the Great Ice Age) into a bludgeon handily employed by the world’s power-mongers to beat Western economies into submission until Western freedoms collapse. Every schoolchild believes the bunk they have been peddling, which plays right into the plans of these scientists’ spendthrift political dopplegangers, as people in first-world nations race to dismantle their energy infrastructures to prevent the oceans from rising an inch in the next 100 years.
One’s heart aches for the kindergartener who can’t sleep for worrying about a drowning polar bear (who didn’t drown), but it is indefensible that most people educated in the sciences have swallowed the climate catastrophe story hook, line, and sinker, despite rafts of evidence to the contrary. For this reason you might want to re-examine your belief that “the vast majority” of researchers “work hard to validate data.” If that were true, the hockey stick graph would have been laughed into the trash bin long ago. In my experience, standards have been lowered to the point that those capable of validating their data, even when they desire to do so, aren’t all that numerous. I sweat blood making sure that my research reflects fact, but I know many so-called scholars who couldn’t be bothered, and their peers are often all too happy to look the other way.
Quote
November 25, 2009, 11:24 pmSir Thinks Alot says:
One must remember that in the days of Christopher Columbus, the scientific consensus was that the earth was flat.
Just because alot of people think something, doesn’t make it true. Global Warming just like the “global colding” of the 60’s is bunk...
Quote
November 26, 2009, 1:17 amOrson says:
I am an environmental scientist who has spent much of his time living in the nearest US equivalent to CRU, the university and federal research institutions on atmospheric science in and around Boulder, Colorado. And I have found myself on both sides of this issure through two decades. Here is what I’ve found.
A good beginner place to catch up on the science and politics of global warming is Chris Horner’s “Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming” — especially chapters 5 “The ‘Consensus’ Lie” and 6 “Getting hot in Here?”
The current CRU scandal is, as Iain Murray says, a lot like the Pentagon Papers, published on the front page of the New York Times in 1971. This was a top-secret DOD history of the Vietnam War, leaked by an insider, casting deep doubts about the veracity of authorities. In the CRU data dump, the leaker, again, is most likely an insider. And in the world of global warming science, CRU is analogous to the Pentagon — defacto headquarters of the IPCC. Accordingly, many lead IPCC report authors are either from CRU or else inside the cabal (eg, Keven Trenberth now at NCAR in Boulder or Ben Santer at Lawrence Livermore).
Nows, what is at stake? Nothing less than almost everything the IPCC wants the world to do. Why? Because CRU (and NASA Goddard Institute of Space Science, home of James Hansen) manage the world’s surface temperature records claiming unprecedented warming in the last few decades. And everything predicted to happen and the costly choices they are pressing depend on these being true.
Here’s what is claimed by the IPCC, based on CRUs work:
Global Mean Temperatures
Increases in temperature are accelerating, it shows ominously. (Never mind that IPCC co-chair Dr Susan Solomon admitted in Denver this August that recent years have indeed been cooler in the world.) Despite this claim, attempts to check this work and spring raw data and methods from CRU (as well as GISS) have failed. They claim these are either already public or else subject to confidentiality agreements. Neither is true, and satellite measurements do not support these surface temperature claims.
To simplify where this is going and why, lets look at another concurrent scandal breaking in New Zealand. The government there also claims unprecedented recent warming, and this alarm is used to justify its support of Cap and Trade policies to control CO2 emissions.
Here is the Official Temperature History the government cites. The rate of rise is 0.92C degrees per century.
But the actual RAW temperature compiled shows something quite different. A 0.06C degrees rise per century. Almost flat (and in this case, consistent with the satellite data).
What’s happened? Investigation shows that a number of “adjustments” in the Official Record have pushed done earlier 20th century temperatures, and pushed up later 20th century temperatures.
A similar “adjustment” procedure has been evident in US temperature records as kept by GISS. Suspicions have long been aroused that similar “adjustments” are going on with world temperature records kept by CRU. For example, Canadian statistics expert Steven McIntyre and Guelph University environmental economist Ross McKitrick have published this chart, showing that the 1990s CRU temperature rise was a result of station drop off from colder high latitude locations like Siberia, hotting up mean numbers, as the Fall of Communism closed shop on remote weather stations. Curious minds want to know more!
The first to file FOIA requests was Willis Eschenbach. This maybe 28 page email document-rich account is compiled from past attempts to spring the relevant records aided by the new cache, but it ended in 2007. Perhaps a couple of lawyerly Volokh readers know where to go from here?
There sure seems to be collusion to deny FOIA records between scientists and FOI officers at the University of East Anglia, where CRU is located. Eschenbach rightly argues that transparency is the basis of all sound science, because only then is replication possible. And only then should IPCCs serious claims be accepted and acted upon.
For background or general readers, here is sequential primer — the best three set of articles I’ve come across. I’ve been sharing them with naive friends to ”get them up to speed” on the scandal.
1) ”ClimateGate: The Fix is In”-ROBERT TRACINSKI
2) ”ClimateGate: Violating the Social Contract of Science”-CHARLIE MARTIN
Martin updates with news that CEIs Chris Horner has filed notice of intent to file against NASAs GISS to liberate data and code from US sources.
3) ”Three Things You Absolutely Must Know About Climategate”-IAIN MURRAY
Quote
November 26, 2009, 5:22 amOrson says:
ARE THERE CRIMES in the CRU scandal?
“Jones, Briffa [both at CRU] and Mann [at Penn State] seem to have committed several criminal offences” reports Joanne Nova from Australia, with a climate scientist based in Britain as her source:
These include:
1. Misappropriation of public funds
They deliberately falsified data then used the results of the falsification to obtain additional research funding. This is criminal fraud under English Law.
2. Deliberate attempt to prevent disclosure of information that was requested under the FOI Act. They colluded to destroy information that was the subject of an FOI request. This is a criminal offence under English Law.
These two offences will do for starters, but there are others, too. Indeed, both of the above offences can be doubled by charging the alleged miscreants with conspiracy in each case. Jones, Briffa and Mann should be prosecuted as a warning to others who would pervert science as a method to promote a political agenda.
However, there is little probability that the Crown Prosecution Service will charge the alleged miscreants. It is more likely that they will be awarded Knighthoods.
And those like [George] Monbiot [the Al Gore of the UK] who colluded in all of this will say, “We did not know”.
Monbiot has repeatedly vilified those of us who have been championing the cause of science against the unfounded climate scare. He is not alone in such behaviour.
Climate realists and our work have been vilified and smeared. Entire web sites have been established to tell lies about us. Publication of our scientific work has been inhibited, and personal attacks have been the norm: for example, I have had computer systems damaged by concerted attacks, Lomborg has had a pie pushed in his face, some (e.g. [Hans] Tenekes [in the Netherlands], [Pat] Michaels [at UVa], etc.) have had their employment terminated, and Tim Ball [prof emeritus, University of Winnipeg, Canada] has had death threats.
Monbiot seems to be covering himself now what has been happening is plain for all to see as a result of the stolen (?) CRU files having been released.
In a side meeting organised by Fred Singer at an IPCC Meeting in London in 2001 I said; “When the ‘chickens come home to roost’ – as they surely will with efluxion of time – the journalists and politicians won’t say, “It was our fault”. They will say, “it was the scientists’ fault“, and that’s me, and I object!
I can still see no reason to change that opinion.
Richard Courtney
Quote
November 26, 2009, 9:30 amRichard Aubrey says:
wrt flat earth and columbus. See Eratosthenes.
Of all the work done on AGW, define “work”.
I’m getting the impression that it’s like an inverted pyamid, all this “work” based on a small amount of the basic data, much of which has been compromised.
That means everythng above it is compromised.
NASA, CRU, now New Zealand’s lab.
If there are other sources of the basic data which are not compromised but whose data agree with the bogus stuff. what are we to think?
Quote
November 26, 2009, 9:45 amgeokstr says:
And why should they? When is the last time that you were open enough to let someone on the right change your mind about, well, just about anything? And aren’t you the “Marxist economist”, whatever that is? (My apologies if I’m getting you mixed up with another commenter. If I got it right, apology withdrawn.)
Quote
November 26, 2009, 9:57 amJohn Moore says:
There are several areas of work. Here are some major ones, only one of which has been seriously damaged by the scandal:
1) Paleoclimatology and CO2 — the work to determine past global temperature, CO2 levels, and their relationship. This has been clobbered by the scandal.
2) Modeling — this is an attempt to predict future climate — specifically temperature in this case. The scandal only impacts this if it affects model calibration. Modeling has major problems in this realm, however: the phenomena are extremely difficult to model — maybe impossible; the models cannot be calibrated; the models are subject to cherry picking of parameters — conscious or far more likely, unlikely. Most work in this area involves the creation of parameterization for those phenomena which cannot be directly modeled (almost all of them, in other words), and the calibration of those parameters.
It is the modeling which produces the alarming forecasts, because basic physics cannot (it produces 1.2C/doubling). It is also the modeling which is the least reliable (if it means anything at all). The weakness of the modeling is why the paleoclimatic record has become so critical to AGW proponents, and why the last few decades especially are so emphasized (and, we now know, subject to cheating).
3) Instrumentation — the development and deployment of instruments which measure various climate variables — CO2 concentration (easy), ocean temperature and energy content, the earth’s albedo (hard), global temperature (hard), etc. Direct global temperature measurement has only been available for the last couple of decades — by satellites — and contradicts the surface warming records that produce the hockey sticks (leading to very strong attacks on the satellite researchers). Most other parameters are also measured for only very recent times (albedo, ocean energy storage).
4) Derivative work — this is work which does not address the prediction of global temperature, but rather the consequences of it. There are huge numbers of papers on this subject in every field imaginable. I did a google scholar word search and found some amazing (if not terribly precise) results — at http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2009/03/15/climate-change-gold-mine-for-all-kinds-of-scientists/. This derivative research shows one of the strong financial drivers for AGW — it produces funding for researchers in every field of science and quasi(pseduo?) science (latter category includes a lot of social “science.” etc).
Quote
November 26, 2009, 1:16 pmM. Simon says:
Who is Heidi Cline?
Quote
November 26, 2009, 1:49 pmM. Simon says:
Did I mention that her middle initial is D. ?
Quote
November 26, 2009, 1:51 pmepignosis says:
Important to note that models used to predict AGW cannot explain the relative decline for the past decade. Coupled with obvious attempts to stifle dissenting opinions, this is a colossal indication that intellectual dishonesty permeates this endeavor. The public should demand impartial adjudication of this prior to expending another dime.
If you live for two more decades, you will have an opportunity to see this type of crusader arrogance reborn in some other guise. There will always be some group shouting that “the sky is falling” and demanding immediate action. Perhaps it will be killer asteroids or alien invasions next.
Quote
November 26, 2009, 6:01 pmepignosis says:
SenatorX
Socialist believe that society’s ills can be managed by depriving many of some measure of liberty and property to benefit a few. It is self-delusional arrogance that we can craft a solution to social ills that will not diminish the personal responsibility of the targets nor diminish the productivity of the victims.
Since rational beings will modify their behavior in response to such actions, many will not work hard to contribute to the “great storehouse”, if they can take from the storehouse without working.
Both derive from an arrogance of mind that maintains that “I know best how to control other people and how to spend their money for their benefit.” As with all forms of arrogance, those that disagree simply are not as intelligent and informed.
Quote
November 26, 2009, 7:33 pmRichard Aubrey says:
John Moore
Thanks for the definitions. Seems to me that all the categories except the technology of building instruments have been clobbered.
Still looks like an inverted pyramid to me, especially if you consider the derivative and popular writings.
They’ve been clobbered.
You can’t, or shouldn’t be able to, sell AGW when you can’t show warming, and when it turns out you’ve been cooking the books.
End of story.
Quote
November 26, 2009, 8:30 pmJohn Moore says:
RA,
I suspect that it won’t take too long for people to reconstruct the time series in a documentable way. Whether they do or not, and what results they come up with, is another matter.
The models aren’t killed by this, but they are already on thin ice, so to speak.
If this were not something so important, I’d more or less give it a pass — scientists are human too. But it is terribly important, and hence this stuff needs to be precise. The reviewers of the papers of these folks need to be publicly exposed for their failure to demand better disclosure. The editors of the journals need to be challenged.
We can hope that this will force paleoclimatologists and scientists in lots of other fields to be a whole lot more careful with their data and their processing of it, and their “peer reviewers” to be a whole lot more demanding. In fact, hopefully this will serve as a wakeup to big-science that in this modern age, where they can’t record their data in bound lab books, they need to be as careful with it as if they were doing so. They need to get the message that work will not be published unless the data, the meta-data and the software related to it is publicly available on the internet.
Just as the internet now challenges the main stream media and other institutions, it should be available as a medium to challenge scientific results. The strongly held idea by many scientists that they are the priests in the temple, and nobody else can understand the mysteries, needs to go.
Quote
November 26, 2009, 8:42 pmAlanDownunder says:
Apology accepted.
Ideology ordains that this graph is fraudulent. “Proof” to follow.
Quote
November 26, 2009, 9:06 pmJim Owen says:
If you’re gonna diss error bars, you should learn a little about them first -
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11523
Quote
November 26, 2009, 11:47 pmRichard Aubrey says:
John Moore
As my brother used to say when someone was holding forth...“All that you say is true, except in the south.”
I would be inclined to say, all that you say is true except for the gazillions of of dollars, deutschmarks, euros, yuan, available to those on the inside of fighting AGW.
Compared to that, science, even if correct, is NOTHING.
Had a nap after a trypophan-laced dinner, now into manhattans until I feel sleepy.
Happy Thanksgiving
Quote
November 27, 2009, 12:00 amAlanDownunder says:
Jim Owen, November 26, 2009, 11:47 pm,
I wasn’t dissing error bars in general, Jim, and some points made about their relevance further upthread were well taken.
The graph I linked to illustrates very well when error bars are relevant by being a glaring example of when they are not relevant — in this case because a more sensitive method of measurement has supplanted a less sensitive one, as well as because the smoothed trend overwhelms potential error bar distortion.
I’d have thought that was obvious from the graph. I’ll respect your intelligence by venturing that you didn’t bother to follow the link to it.
Quote
November 27, 2009, 4:34 amJohn Curran says:
If we can’t rely on scientists to pursue the truth and to engage in political and religious wars, why would we give them any public funds?
Quote
November 27, 2009, 10:29 amJohn Curran says:
On realclimate.org I saw this entry in response to the recent disclosures:
http://www.realclimate.org/
“CRU data accessibility. From the date of the first FOI request to CRU (in 2007), it has been made abundantly clear that the main impediment to releasing the whole CRU archive is the small % of it that was given to CRU on the understanding it wouldn’t be passed on to third parties. Those restrictions are in place because of the originating organisations (the various National Met. Services) around the world and are not CRU’s to break. As of Nov 13, the response to the umpteenth FOI request for the same data met with exactly the same response. This is an unfortunate situation, and pressure should be brought to bear on the National Met Services to release CRU from that obligation. It is not however the fault of CRU. The vast majority of the data in the HadCRU records is publicly available from GHCN.”
If there is information in the data sets that the contributors don’t want released, redact that data. Redaction is part of the FOIA process. I have a very hard time believing that temperature records can be anything but public domain information.
Quote
November 27, 2009, 10:44 amzuch says:
Prof. Somin:At least some of the prominent scholars in the field seem driven at least in part by ideology, ...If this is reason to be sceptical of the conclusions, I’d say it argues much more strongly when applied to the AGW deniers, who, by and large, show a rather strong ideological bias WRT government and policy and/or have their pockets lined overtly or covertly by those with strong financial interests in the outcome.
Cheers,
Quote
November 27, 2009, 3:02 pmschizuki says:
For Heaven’s sake, why?
I mean, seriously — why?
Quote
November 27, 2009, 3:03 pmTed says:
Some clear-thinking folks still aren’t getting the picture. It’s needles and haystacks. Saying the data is there is meaningless unless you show WHICH datasets you used. That’s a fact. CRU is drastically culling and allegedly cherry-picking data. But they are not releasing their cherries or algorithms and then tell us to trust them. They’re just waving their arms in the general direction of data. That’s not science, not even a little bit.
It’s like a composer pointing to a piano and saying, “that’s my data, reconstruct my symphony.”
Quote
November 27, 2009, 3:24 pmzuch says:
This would be true if all studies were published, and in fact, all reached the same precise conclusion. That’s not true, though.
In fact, “Sir” Cyril Burt was unmasked in his fraud because his data were just too damn good: His correlation coefficients kept coming up identical to many decimal places for new sets of data.
But I think that you have a more difficult case to make to say that because essentially all studies are showing some warming, that this is because of fraud, and not instead because in fact the warming is a very solid and significant fact. Amongst other things, the studies are being done by many different scientists in a number of different ways.
I wouldn’t be surprised in the least by a study that said that pennies dropped fall down rather than up, and that this happens in essentially all studies that were ever done of the effect. That’s not suspicious ... and you might consider whether the strong consensus on warming is A similar phenomenon.
Cheers,
Quote
November 27, 2009, 3:52 pmJohn Moore says:
The problem is that the total suppression of skeptical studies. Just because the pro-AGW folks nit-pick over each others data doesn’t mean that the skeptics are not being suppressed. The CRU emails are clear evidence of that suppression.
Furthermore, most studies in the field are not about verifying past warming or showing future warming — they are about the myriad of technical details involved in such a complex subject. Hence the “weight” of studies is hardly a satisfying argument.
What makes the CRU fraud so important is that recent paleoclimatic data is the final leg left standing in the AGW crusade. Modeling was and is used to produce alarming forecasts, but nobody with any sense believes these models. OTOH, records of past warming, if they meet certain criteria, are far more suggestive of the CO2->AGW hypothesis (although they are subject to criticism on short term trend basis). When you also realize that the CRU data is at the heart of so much of the paleoclimatic case, it’s even more significant.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that this data is the most manipulated and most protected. Without it, the AGW alarmist case crumbles.
And guess what, the number of crumbs on the plate is starting to get bigger than the AGW pie.
Quote
November 27, 2009, 4:52 pmzuch says:
There’s an assumption here that needs to be addressed: That any such studies that allegedly show no AGW are worth publishing. They may well be just mostly fluff and “crap”.
How so? And what “fraud”?
Modeling was and is used to predict nuclear explosions. It’s immensely successful; even so for the modeling of the Pu-239 bomb (Fat Man) done by calculators and slide rule. And where do you get this “nobody with any sense”?
Huh? How so? Please explain.
Cheers,
Quote
November 27, 2009, 5:05 pmzuch says:
Ummmm ... the RealClimate page you linked to says:
Isn’t that what you’re asking for?
Cheers,
Quote
November 27, 2009, 5:12 pmDaily Right 11/27/09 « The Quantum Conservative says:
[...] *ClimateGate and the Social Validation of Knowledge, by Ilya Somin. [...]
John Moore says:
That would be a huge statistical unlikelihood, given the history of other, less politicized branches of science. For example, when cold fusion first appeared, there were a raft of peer reviewed papers in normal journals giving various theories to explain it — even though the whole thing was strongly against consensus. In that case, the hypotheses were testable in a lab, so science won the day. The idea that there are no skeptical papers of merit is so totally absurd as to be laughable.
The unjustifiable biasing of data sets, and the cherry picking of data shown both in the software code and the emails.
That’s pretty rich. Modeling does X, so modeling in field Y must be reliable!
If you know anything about climate models and GCM’s, then you could understand my statement. GCM’s are indeed useful — for helping forecast weather. They are grossly less than credible for giving climate forecasts far into the future, and the scientists working with them know that and discuss some of the “embarassing” lapses.
As a simple example, they failed to predict the recent global cooling.
Finally, to get into modeling a bit... the kind you mention are finite element (or finite difference) models. So are GCM’s. The differencis include: the GCM’s are modeling a far more complex and less well understood system than those you mention; the GCM’s cannot be calibrated for high CO2, since there is no experimental data; the GCM’s are many orders of magnitude too coarse in their spatial and temporal resolution to resolve processes important for what they are modeling; the GCM’s do not account for many known (but not well understood) phenomena such as ENSO, PDO, NAO and others; the GCM’s cannot handle carbon budgets, because we don’t know the carbon processes well enough. That’s a few of the reasons no rational person would believe the model based climate predictions for far into the future.
BTW, these same models are used for weather forecasting. Here’s an example of yesterday’s model usage from NWS Phoenix AZ — note the uncertainties for the very short term:
GFS and ECMWF are two of the most commonly used weather GCMs.
Quote
November 27, 2009, 6:24 pmzuch says:
“Cold fusion” had no “politic[al]” implications?!?!? And I don’t remember a “raft” of such. I’d say that excrement tends to float to the top, so that may have been what you saw, but I noticed no such thing in the real literature.
Huh? What “unjustifiable biasing of data sets”? What “cherry picking of data”? Anything like the “cherry picking of data” of the people that claim that the last 8 years have been getting cooler (even though anti-AGW scientists have said that this “trend” is not significant [if it even exists])?
Don’t be a doofus here. This was in response to your denigration of modeling as a technique. I never said what you suggest here. All I said was that modeling is hardly something to be scorned, as you in fact did.
As I’m sure you know, the models used to predict weather a couple of weeks in advance are far different from the models used to predict GW in decades ahead. Right?....
What recent “global cooling”?
Huh?!?!? Do you really think that the models can’t account for at least the known physical characteristics of high CO2 concentrations?!?!? And what makes you think there’s no experimental data? Do you think that the models rely on historical environmental data alone (and exist independent of any laboratory data or even known physics)?
Argumentum ad ignorantiam, eh? You know the models are wrong because you don’t know enough about these things?!?!? And how can you say the models don’t account for this kind of stuff? Examples, please? I’d note that oscillations are just that. Do you say that the oscillations will cease in the future under more extreme conditions? Do you say they will counteract the overall GW? If so, out with your data. Otherwise, why should we pay attention to you when you say that the effects of these have not been taken into account ... when you don’t know WTF you’re talking about YOURSELF!!!!.
Cheers,
Quote
November 27, 2009, 10:21 pmMarty says:
I only read the post and the first dozen or so commnets, so maybe I’m writing soemthing someone wrote before me; if so, I apologize. But, to Ilya and the first dozen or so commenters:
What part of “It’s all lies” don’t you get?
Why do you still think AGW is real, and this is only a marginal issue?
The commenter who wrote that just because some doctors are unethical doesn’t mean he’s going to go to a shaman—in this case, it’s YOUR doctor who has been proven unethical and while that doesn’t mean go to a shaman it does mean throw out everything he’s told you and find a better doctor.
Let me make this simple enough for even a lawyer:
We don’t know ANYTHING trustworthy about long-term climate forecasting, except anecdotal information, and we don’t have a good context in which to place those anecdotes.
The data is all bad and corrupted. We have no way to differentiate any good data from the bad, so we have to assume it’s all unreliable until it can be reviewed and validated.
The models never worked very well and now we see the problem is even worse than that, the people who are supposed to run them can’t even get them to work, let alone produce results of any worth. Of course, since the input data isn’t reliable and the modelers won’t share and explain their code, we already suspected this. We have to assume all the modeling is wortrhless, and we need to validate the models at the same time as the data, so at some future date good data can be run through validated models.
The “consensus” has been produced by greed for research funds and status, and enforced through intimidation.
These people (the climate scientists et al, who are implicated) want to rearrange the world economy for the next century and beyond and destroy trillions of dollars of economic value, in some cases while taking advantage and enriching themselves as they impoverish others, and have been lying to you in order to get this accomplished.
Doesn’t that BOTHER you?
What do you folks not understand about all this?
Quote
November 27, 2009, 11:39 pmJohn Moore says:
Zuch:
Cold fusion didn’t last long enough to have the sort of political chaos that is happening with AGW. I’m sorry you missed the articles, but they were in theoretical physics journals. As it turned out, the experiments were bunk, but the theorists had already published the “how” of cold fusion before the “what” was shown to be junk.
The “real scientists?” There are some climate scientists (AGW proponents) who have expressed concern because their models failed to predict the current trend. Saying it is not specific, when it invalidates your models, is pretty absurd.?
And don’t be such a toad. I never said modeling was something to be scorned — I said that future climate prediction models were not credible. I hope you can understand the difference.
They are, and they aren’t. They use the same basic atmospheric modeling approaches (except for the ocean coupled climate models which add in some others). One difference that you obviously missed is that the weather models are used for prediction, while the global models do NOT. At best, they attempt to measure sensitivity. Chaos guarantees that you cannot use finite element models of the atmosphere for prediction decades in the future.
John Moore:
The differencis include: the GCM’s are modeling a far more complex and less well understood system than those you mention; the GCM’s cannot be calibrated for high CO2, since there is no experimental data;
Anyone who has worked with atmospheric physics knows that lab experiments (which establish basic physical relationships) are simply not where you test complex atmospheric interactions (which is to say, any real atmospheric phenomenon). There is NO experimental data for an atmosphere with high CO2. None. Unless you have a time machine.
John Moore:
... the GCM’s do not account for many known (but not well understood) phenomena such as ENSO, PDO, NAO and others; the GCM’s cannot handle carbon budgets, because we don’t know the carbon processes well enough.
Argumentum ad hominem.
Your last paragraph is ranting. But respond to the threads of logic mixed into it. I don’t know the models are wrong. I know that, since the models do not take these things into account, and because science (not just me) doesn’t understand these oscillations (and lots of other large scale, long term things) well enough, that the models are necessarily suspect. If they are right, it would be because even a military clock is right once a day. If you claim to know how to predict, lets say, the PDO, then out with it. If you claim to know its effect on model accuracy, and even more, on model calibration, out with it. If you know that these oscillations will integrate out to zero effect, perhaps you should lay that evidence out while you are at it. Oh, and the same applies to carbon budgets, if that is what you are ranting about. Or, maybe you’d like to take your hand at predicting the CO2 sensitivity of cloud droplet size contribution to earth’s albedo, since you’re so confident. Or maybe you would just admit that the science is in its infancy, that the all important feedbacks are not well understood, and that the “science is settled” is about as accurate as it was when “physics is finished” was bandied about in the late 19th century!
But you don’t know that, because NOBODY knows that.
Quote
November 27, 2009, 11:47 pmJohn Moore says:
I should be more accurate. I wrote:
Actually, the Jones experiment was not bunk — it just failed to work out in replication attempts — but Jones was very honest about the whole thing. The Pons/Fleischmann experiment used abominable technique (I’m not an electro-chemist, but it didn’t take me long to see a few major holes in it — open cell calorimetry and rapid replacement of D2O with H2O through normal evaporation) and their paper committed the sin of generating it’s main claim (high levels of energy gain) by dividing by the difference of two unre