The Volokh Conspiracy

A draft report of the Department of Interior Inspector General has confirmed what many suspected: High-level White House officials edited an Interior Department report to create the false impression that Interior Secretary’s Ken Salazar’s decision to impose a deep-water drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico had been peer reviewed and approved by outside experts.  It had not been.  The NYT‘s Green Blog reports:

Mary L. Kendall, the Interior Department inspector general, interviewed all the officials involved in preparing and editing the report and reviewed the e-mails between Interior and the White House in the final hours before the report was issued. She found that officials in the office of Carol Browner, the White House coordinator for energy and environment, had changed some wording and moved around some of the report’s findings in a way that made it look as though the independent scientists had endorsed the moratorium recommendation. Officials from the White House and Interior told Ms. Kendall that they had not intended to do so.

The original report said that the recommendations in the report had been reviewed by the panel of seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering. That statement was moved in the final report to come directly after the announcement of the six-month drilling ban, rather than after the safety recommendations. Ms. Kendall said that the placement of the sentence “implied that the experts had also peer reviewed and supported this policy decision.”

More from Politico and the AP.

This is not the only instance of misrepresenting science in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon blowout, further demonstrating that politicization of science is not a partisan phenomenon.

UPDATE: More from Greenwire and Dot Earth.

[Note: Post edited in response to a comment below.]

Today’s NYT reports on how New York City’s health commissioner pressured his staff to create a scary anti-obesity ad campaign, featuring this ad, even if it meant stretching the available scientific evidence on the potential health consequences of drinking a can of soda per day.  In the end, they produced an ad that was “defensible” because, as one participant in the discussions  put it, the ad’s language was “broad enough to get away with.”

UPDATE: Althouse: “The government can’t get the science right. It can’t even get the English usage right.”

The AP and NYT report on draft reports from National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling critical of the federal government’s response to the spill.  Among other things, the reports accuse Administration officials of suppressing and misrepresenting scientific assessments of the spill and its potential consequences.

From the AP:

The Obama administration blocked efforts by government scientists to tell the public just how bad the Gulf oil spill could become and committed other missteps that raised questions about its competence and candor during the crisis, according to a commission appointed by the president to investigate the disaster. . .

Citing interviews with government officials, the report reveals that in late April or early May, the White House budget office denied a request from NOAA to make public its worst-case estimate of how much oil could spew from the blown-out well. . . .

The report shows “the political process was in charge and science really does not have the role that was touted,” said Christopher D’Elia, dean of environmental studies at Louisiana State University.

From the NYT:

In August, top administration officials said that 75 percent of the oil had evaporated, dissolved or been collected, implying that their efforts had been largely successful and that ecological damage had been limited. Carol Browner, the White House coordinator for energy and climate change, declared on Aug. 4: “I think it’s also important to note that our scientists have done an initial assessment and more than three-quarters of the oil is gone. The vast majority of the oil is gone.”

But the commission staff members said the government’s own data did not support such sweeping conclusions, which were later scaled back. A number of respected independent researchers have concluded that as much as half of the spilled oil remains suspended in the water or buried on the seafloor and in coastal sludge. And it will be some time before scientists can paint an accurate picture of the ecological damage.

More from FDL.

Yesterday the Inter-Academy Council, a consortium of the world’s leading national academies of science, issued a report highly critical of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  (Full report here.)  The report does not challenge the IPCC’s central findings about the science of climate change, but strongly criticizes the IPCC’s procedures and management structure, and urges fundamental reform.  Among other things, it urges the IPCC to acknowledge the degree of uncertainty and controversy surrounding certain aspects of climate science, to respond more fully to reviewer comments, and to make the entire IPCC process more transparent.  It also suggests that current IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri should step aside lest a single individual oversee the IPCC process for too long. (More here.)  Institutional reform, the Inter-Academy Council report concludes, is necessary to ensure the IPCC’s “credibility and independence.”

Over the past year the IPCC has been under siege.  The release of e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit and the discovery of several errors in the IPCC’s Working Group II report have reinforced the perception that the IPCC’s review of climate science is overly politicized.  The resulting decline in the IPCC’s credibility has fed skepticism about the likelihood of anthropogenic climate change.  Ironically, efforts intended to enhance the case for action have actually set climate policy back.  Only if the IPCC reforms itself, and confronts the biases and errors that have plagued prior reports, will it be perceived as an honest broker in climate science debates.

Here’s more coverage from the NYT, Ron Bailey, Roger Pielke, Jr., and RealClimate.

The Bush Administration was often accused of waging a “war on science” because of various instances in which government officials sought to alter, spin, suppress, or manipulate scientific inquiries or findings for political purposes.  Some of the charges were exaggeraged, but some were real enough.  My favorite was the effort by a political hack at NASA to muzzle James Hansen and edit the discussion of the “Big Bang” on the agency’s website.

Per the “war on science” meme, science politicization was predominantly (if not exclusively) a conservative or Republican enterprise.  So a “pro-science,” Democratic Administration would change things, right?  Not really.  As the Los Angeles Times reports, allegations of science politicization persist.  “We are getting complaints from government scientists now at the same rate we were during the Bush administration,” says Jeffrey Ruch of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.  According to the Times:

interviews with several scientists — most of whom requested anonymity because they feared retaliation in their jobs — as well as reviews of e-mails provided by Ruch and others show a wide range of complaints during the Obama presidency:

In Florida, water-quality experts reported government interference with efforts to assess damage to the Everglades stemming from development projects.

In the Pacific Northwest, federal scientists said they were pressured to minimize the effects they had documented of dams on struggling salmon populations.

In several Western states, biologists reported being pushed to ignore the effects of overgrazing on federal land.

In Alaska, some oil and gas exploration decisions given preliminary approval under Bush moved forward under Obama, critics said, despite previously presented evidence of environmental harm.

The most immediate case of politics allegedly trumping science, some government and outside environmental experts said, was the decision to fight the gulf oil spill with huge quantities of potentially toxic chemical dispersants despite advice to examine the dangers more thoroughly.

And the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based organization, said it had received complaints from scientists in key agencies about the difficulty of speaking out publicly.

This should not surprise.  The “GOP War on Science” argument was always overstated and sought a partisan explanation for a phenomenon generated by broader institutional pressures and incentives.  There were also early signs that the Obama Administration would replace science politicization of the Right with that of the Left.  Congress has also played along.

That science politicization has continued under President Obama doesn’t exonerate Republicans.  They’ve done their share, including some Republicans’ indulgence of anti-evolution nonsense.  But it helps show (as I argued here) that the “war on science” is a political and institutional problem, rather than a partisan one.

Last week, the UK Independent Climate Change Email Review (aka the Muir Russell Review) released its report on the alleged scientific misconduct of climate researchers revealed by the disclosure of e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University.  As the NYT reports, the review rejects the claims that the ClimateGate e-mails disclosed scientific fraud or chicanery in climate science, but also criticized some of the scientists involved for some of their conduct and concluded that a specific graph of past temperatures was “misleading,” even if not fraudulent.  In other words, the “trick” to “hide the decline” did produce a misleading graph, but the underlying scientific case for a human contribution to global climate change remains intact.

There’s lots of commentary out there, including thoughts from Bradford Plumer, Roger Pielke, Jr., and Ronald Bailey.  The Guardian rounds up some scientific reactions here.  I particularly like these comments by Mike Hulme (whose commentary on ClimateGate I’ve highlighted before, e.g., here and here).

I believe the CRU emails have been a game-changer for science – but have done little to alter the policy conundrums raised by climate change.

For climate science and scientists, three lessons must been learned: make sure to the extent possible that your analysis can be fully replicated by anyone who wishes to; as much rigour should be applied to communicating the “unknowns” as the “knowns” of scientific knowledge; and climate scientists need to re-emphasise (and maybe relearn) their public duty role as sceptics, scientific enquirers who, in the words of the Royal Society motto, “take nobody’s word for it”.

And for climate policy, I don’t think anything much has changed. We know humans have a significant role in changing the climate, but also that the future risks of such interventions cannot and will not be precisely described. The politics of climate change therefore remain, and will continue to remain, turbulent.

Meanwhile, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has also produced a review of the IPCC’s Working Group II report, finding several errors, most of which are rather small, including the overstatement of how much of the Netherlands is below sea-level.  For more on this report, see these items from The Economist, Plumer, and Pielke. Jr.

Slate‘s William Saletan, author of Bearing Right, writes on “Elena Kagan’s partial-birth abortion scandal,” concluding (as I did) that the events uncovered impugn the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists more than Kagan.  But he also thinks there is a broader lesson to be learned here.  He writes:

Kagan, who was then an associate White House counsel, was doing her job: advancing the president’s interests. The real culprit was ACOG, which adopted Kagan’s spin without acknowledgment. But the larger problem is the credence subsequently given to ACOG’s statement by courts, including the Supreme Court. Judges have put too much faith in statements from scientific organizations. This credulity must stop.

As Saletan details, Kagan’s suggested revisions did more than “clarify” the ACOG statement; they altered its emphasis, and the changes had their desired effect.  The revised statement was treated as an authoritative medical statement by in court.  Writes Saletan:

By reframing ACOG’s judgments, she altered their political effect as surely as if she had changed them.She also altered their legal effect. And this is the scandal’s real lesson: Judges should stop treating the statements of scientific organizations as apolitical. Such statements, like the statements of any other group, can be loaded with spin. This one is a telling example.

He concludes:

All of us should be embarrassed that a sentence written by a White House aide now stands enshrined in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, erroneously credited with scientific authorship and rigor. Kagan should be most chastened of all. She fooled the nation’s highest judges. As one of them, she had better make sure they aren’t fooled again.

Was “language purporting to be the judgment of an independent body of medical experts devoted to the care and treatment of pregnant women and their children” actually “nothing more than the political scrawling” of then Clinton White House staffer Elena Kagan?  That’s the charge made by former deputy Assistant Attorney General Shannen Coffin in this NRO essay.  Specifically, Coffin charges that recently released documents show that Kagan suggested the insertion of language into a statement on “partial-birth abortion” issued by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) to help justify the Clinton Administration’s opposition to a federal ban.  This language was relied upon by the Supreme Court in striking down Nebraska’s PBA ban in Stenberg v. Carhart and highlighted by those seeking to challenge the federal PBA ban once it was adopted.

According to Coffin, Kagan worked to alter the ACOG statement’s language so that it would provide stronger cover for opposing a federal PBA ban.

Kagan’s language was copied verbatim by the ACOG executive board into its final statement, where it then became one of the greatest evidentiary hurdles faced by Justice Department lawyers (of whom I was one) in defending the federal ban. (Kagan’s role was never disclosed to the courts.) The judicial battles that followed led to two Supreme Court opinions, several trials, and countless felled trees. Now we learn that language purporting to be the judgment of an independent body of medical experts devoted to the care and treatment of pregnant women and their children was, in the end, nothing more than the political scrawling of a White House appointee.s:

Her notes, produced by the White House to the Senate Judiciary Committee, show that she herself drafted the critical language hedging ACOG’s position. On a document [PDF] captioned “Suggested Options” — which she apparently faxed to the legislative director at ACOG — Kagan proposed that ACOG include the following language: “An intact D&X [the medical term for the procedure], however, may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.”

Powerline’s John Hinderaker thinks this is a “smoking gun” and Kagan “has a great deal of explaining to do.”  Glenn Reynolds thinks this is “at least” a scandal for ACOG, if not Kagan herself. If the allegations are true, it’s a clear example of the politicization of science by a Democratic administration (and further evidence that there are no clean hands on science politicization).

I expect we’ll hear more about this at tomorrow’s hearings, and I will be interested to see if there’s more to the story. If the allegations are true, I am sure we’ll hear that this sort of thing happens all the time in the White House, but does it really?  Are statements by purportedly neutral and apolitical professional organizations re-written by White House staff for political advantage?   Real “scandal” or not, this will fire up Kagan’s opponents and the GOP base, particularly social conservatives.

ADDENDUM: Assuming the allegations are true and do not omit key details, is this really a scandal?   I think it is, but not necessarily for Kagan.  Kagan was a White House staffer, so we would expect her to encourage outside groups to adopt positions that were amenable to Administration policy.  That’s not a scandal.  Encouraging a reputed professional organization to alter its factual claim in an official statement (e.g. whether the relevant procedure was ever the “most appropriate procedure available”) is a closer call, but probably not scandalous when done by a policy staffer for political purposes.  So this could be embarrassing for Kagan, and make abortion a larger issue in her confirmation, but it’s not the sort of thing that will stop her from being confirmed.

ACOG, on the other hand, comes out looking much worse.  If it actually let a White House rewrite an official statement of the organization on the necessity of a given medical procedure, its credibility will take a hit.  If ACOG categorically opposed any and all legislative impositions, that’s fine.  If it issued a specific statement based upon a White House staffer’s judgment of what was politically expedient, as opposed to what was true about the necessity or advisability of a given procedure, then it perpetrated a fraud and let itself be used for political purposes.

As a final note, there could also be interesting ethical issues if attorneys involved in any of the PBA suits were aware of the provenance of the relevant language in the ACOG statement.  This statement was presented to multiple courts as a definitive statement of a professional medical organization about whether a given medical procedure was ever necessary or at least the best available option for certain women seeking abortions.  If Coffin’s allegations are correct, however, it was a piece of political advocacy, not a statement of medical authority, and should not have been presented to courts as such.

MORNING UPDATE: A commenter below points to the full ACOG statement, suggesting that the changes to its wording were less consequential than Coffin’s account suggests.  I am not sure this fully clears ACOG, but it certainly lessens the gravity of the charge.

ADDITIONAL UPDATE: Shannen Coffin responds at The Corner, and suggests some questions Senators may wish to ask Kagan at her hearing.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: More from Shannen Coffin, and a summary of Senator Hatch’s questioning of Kagan on this issue. (And a post questioning Coffin post here.)

Yesterday, the New York Times reported on a sharp global decline in maternal deaths.  This is good news, right?  Not to some.  The Times also reported that some activists sought to pressure the Lancet into delaying or downplaying the findings.

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

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

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

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

Hat tip: Ron Bailey.  More from Matt Ridley.

The NYT reports on various efforts to restore the credibility of climate science and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the wake of “ClimateGate” and the discovery of a handful false claims and misrepresentation of scientific research in portions of the IPCC reports.

The unauthorized release last fall of hundreds of e-mail messages from a major climate research center in England, and more recent revelations of a handful of errors in a supposedly authoritative United Nations report on climate change, have created what a number of top scientists say is a major breach of faith in their research. They say the uproar threatens to undermine decades of work and has badly damaged public trust in the scientific enterprise.

The e-mail episode, dubbed “climategate” by critics, revealed arrogance and what one top climate researcher called “tribalism” among some scientists. The correspondence appears to show efforts to limit publication of contrary opinion and to evade Freedom of Information Act requests. The content of the messages opened some well-known scientists to charges of concealing temperature data from rival researchers and manipulating results to conform to precooked conclusions. . . .

A survey conducted in late December by Yale University and George Mason University found that the number of Americans who believed that climate change was a hoax or scientific conspiracy had more than doubled since 2008, to 16 percent of the population from 7 percent. An additional 13 percent of Americans said they thought that even if the planet was warming, it was a result solely of natural factors and was not a significant concern.

Climate scientists have been shaken by the criticism and are beginning to look for ways to recover their reputation. They are learning a little humility and trying to make sure they avoid crossing a line into policy advocacy. . . .

A number of institutions are beginning efforts to improve the quality of their science and to make their work more transparent. The official British climate agency is undertaking a complete review of its temperature data and will make its records and analysis fully public for the first time, allowing outside scrutiny of methods and conclusions. The United Nations panel on climate change will accept external oversight of its research practices, also for the first time.

Two universities are investigating the work of top climate scientists to determine whether they have violated academic standards and undermined faith in science. The National Academy of Sciences is preparing to publish a nontechnical paper outlining what is known — and not known — about changes to the global climate. And a vigorous debate is under way among climate scientists on how to make their work more transparent and regain public confidence.

These are all positive steps, but the problems for climate science are deeper.  As ASU’s Dan Sarewitz explains in Nature, part of the problem has been that participants in the climate policy debate have focuses on climate science, as if some climate consensus could translate into clear policy mandates.  This is fool’s errand, as climate science will not generate the requisite degree of certainty, let alone consensus policy prescriptions in the absence of a broader political consensus.  He writes:

The idea that a mounting weight of scientific evidence would gradually overwhelm ideological opposition to the climate policy regime is not just false but backwards. Science is muchmore pliable and permissive than deeply held beliefs about how the world should work. Scientific understanding of the complex, coupled ocean–atmosphere–society system is always incomplete, and gives the competing sides plenty of support for their pre-existing political preferences — as well as plenty to hide behind in claiming that those preferences are supported by science. Science can decisively support policy only after fundamental political differences have been resolved.

Science may tell us that certain emission projections create a risk of certain climatic changes, but it won’t tell us what (if anything) to do about it, as such policy prescriptions are also dependent upon normative judgments that may be informed, but not dictated, by scientific conclusions.  Sarewitz further argues that conservatives and liberals alike have to stop pretending as if science does — or even can — support only their preferred policy approach.

Speaking of those who pretend as if climate science supports their preferred policy agenda, and no other, Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress has been challenged to debate climate policy with Roger Pielke Jr. to be hosted by Foreign Policy. But it seems this debate won’t take place.  Romm regularly attacks Pielke’s work on his blog, for even though Pielke believes climate change is a serious problem, he disagrees with Romm’s policy prescriptions.  Yet even after several dozen anti-Pielke comments and blog posts, Romm is refusing to go mano-a-mano.

What’s going on?  Some advocates of steep emission reductions refuse to debate those who argue against the existence of an anthropogenic contribution to global warming because they don’t want to “legitimize” such perspectives, but not Romm.  He’s debated Marc Morano of Climate Depot, among other so-called “skeptics.”  Then why not debate a non-skeptic like Pielke?  Perhaps because this would require the admission that there is a greater diversity of mainstream liberal policy views about climate change.  Debating Pielke could force Romm to admit that one can believe climate change is a serious concern, and nonetheless believe there are problems with the IPCC process and conventional emission-reduction proposals.  Perhaps such an admission poses a greater threat to Romm’s narrative (and  “Climate McCarthyism”) than the actual skeptics. More from Ron Bailey here.

What does the “snowpocalypse” tell us about the likelihood of climate change?  Nothing.  As Roger Pielke Jr. explains:

What happens in the weather this week or next tells us absolutely nothing about the role of humans in influencing the climate system. It is unjustifiable to claim that a cold snap or heavy snow disproves or even casts doubts predictions of long-term climate change. It is equally unjustifiable to say that a cold snap or heavy snow in any way offers empirical support for predictions of long-term climate change. This goes for all weather events.

Further, it is professionally irresponsible for scientists to claim that some observed weather is “consistent with” long-term predictions of climate change. Any and all weather fits this criteria. Similarly, any and all weather is also “consistent with” failing predictions of long-term climate change. The “consistent with” canard is purposely misleading.

Knowledge of climate requires long-term records — on the time scale of a decade and longer. Don’t look to the weather to learn about climate, unless you have a long time to watch. Using the weather to score cheap political points in the climate debate appears to be a tactical area of agreement among those who otherwise disagree about climate change.

British news organizations are now combing through the IPCC reports, finding more errors and material sourced to non-peer-reviewed material, including student papers and reports by advocacy organizations.  Most of these errors continue to relate to the more policy-oriented aspects of the IPCC reports — practical consequences of climate change and potential policy responses.  This is further evidence that the more IPCC sought to make its reports relevant to policy-makers, the less reliable the reports became.

UPDATE: According to the Telegraph, former IPCC head Robert Watson believes the IPCC will lose credibility if it does not address its mistakes.

The Guardian‘s George Monbiot is again calling for resignations at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.

This is a tough time for climate science. The Guardian’s new revelations about the hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia might help to explain the university’s utter failure to confront its critics. They could also explain why the head of the unit, Phil Jones, blocked freedom of information requests and proposed that material subject to those requests be deleted. . . .

The vast body of climate science still shows that manmade climate change is real and that it presents a massive challenge to human survival. But those of us who seek to explain its implications and call for action must demand the highest possible standards from the people whose work we promote, and condemn any failures to release data or admit and rectify mistakes. We do no one any favours – least of all ourselves – by wasting our time promoting false claims.

Can a call for the resignation of IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri be far behind? [UPDATE: Nope.  Greenpeace UK is calling for him to step down.]

UPDATE: The NYT reports Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann has been “largely cleared” by an internal university investigation.

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office recently confirmed that the disclosure of e-mails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit revealed that some of the scientists violated the UK’s Freedom of Information law by failing to respond to legitimate document requests from other researchers.  I blogged on this development here.  Initial British news reports indicated that the scientists could not be prosecuted, however, as the legal violations occurred too long ago.  But is this really the case?  As the Telegraph reports, the relevant provisions in British law appear to preclude prosecution more than six months after authorities became aware of the misconduct, not six months after the misconduct occurred.  If this is correct — and I’m not expert on British law — some of the scientists could still be prosecuted for violating England’s Freedom of Information law.

Meanwhile, there are still more (more?!?) revelations of potential scientific misconduct by researchers connected to the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.  Details here and here.

2010 has not been kind to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  This U.N. sanctioned body is supposed to issue periodic reports that summarize the state of the science of global climate change based upon a comprehensive review and synthesis of the relevant peer-reviewed scientific literature.  In the past few weeks, however, it has been revealed that the IPCC’s 2007 Working Group II report on “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability” contains claims about the projected impacts of climate change that are completely unfounded, based upon non-scientific (let alone peer reviewed) sources, or misrepresent the underlying scientific literature.

The first revelation was that there was no scientific basis for the IPCC’s widely-hyped claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.  This projection is off by a few centuries, at best.   When an Indian climate researcher first challenged this claim, suggesting there is no evidence (yet) of warming-induced glacial retreat in the Himalayas, IPCC chief Rajenda Pachauri was dismissive.  Now, however, he’s changed his tune, and the IPCC has acknowledged the error.  This was more than a simple mistake, however, as it appears the IPCC was informed of the error before the report was finalized, but failed to make any changes, nor was Pachauri quick to acknowledge the error once it was brought to his attention.

It has also become clear that the IPCC report systematically misrepresents the peer-reviewed literature on the effect of climate change hurricanes and natural disasters.  Specifically, the report falsely claims there is evidence that human-induced climate change is producing an increase in extreme weather events and associated losses and includes a graph that is not based upon published, peer-reviewed work.  Yet the studies upon which the IPCC purports to base its claim — including one that was not peer-reviewed and should not have been cited at all — say no such thing. Worse, when the IPCC’s erroneous claims were challenged during the review process, an IPCC author fabricated a response to defend the erroneous claim.  In response, the IPCC now claims it “carefully followed” its official procedures. Yet as Roger Pielke Jr., one of the researchers whose work is misrepresented in the report, responds, this claim is simply false as the IPCC “relied on an unpublished, non-peer reviewed source to produce its top line conclusions in this section,” ignored the complaints of reviewers, and fabricated a defense of the claim. Indeed, when the then-unpublished, un-peer-reviewed paper upon which the IPCC purported to rely was eventually published, it rejected the climate-disaster loss link asserted by the IPCC.

But wait, there’s more.It turns out that other claims in the IPCC’s WGII report were also based upon non-scientific sources, including magazine articles and reports by advocacy groups.  For instance, the IPCC’s claim that climate change could endanger up to 40 percent of the Amazonian rain forest is based upon a report issued by an environmental advocacy organization, not a peer-reviewed scientific study, and the advocacy report misrepresented peer-reviewed studies to reach its conclusion.  It also appears other IPCC claims about glaciers in the Andes and Alps were based upon a magazine article and student’s dissertation.

What’ s interesting is that all of these errors are in the WG II report — the report that is supposed to highlight the practical effects of a gradually warming climate — as opposed to the WG I report, which focuses on the underlying scientific evidence that increases in greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to climate change.  For this reason, these revelations do not dissuade me that human activity is likely contributing to atmospheric warming.  But it does provide further evidence that many scientists have adopted an unscientific, advocacy stance in which they seek to convince the public that there is incontrovertable proof of an impending climatic disaster so as to build the case for drastic action.  This problem is actually exacerbated by the IPCC process, which seeks to formulate an “official,” government-approved, scientific “consensus,” as I explained here.

Climate change is a serious concern, even if it does not threaten to eradicate Himalayan glaciers in my lifetime or wipe coastal cities off the map.  If we are to have a serious and honest debate about climate policy, we have to have more honest and responsible conduct by climate scientists.  While ClimateGate and the above-mentioned IPCC errors may have been the work of only a handful of climate scientists, unless the climate science community does a better job of policing its own, and accomodating legitimate dissenting views, it will become increasingly unable to inform and enlighten the policy debate.

UPDATE: In the comment thread to a prior post, some asked why I still believe in anthropogenic global warming, and support certain climate policy measures, after repeated instances of misconduct by climate scientists.  Given the thrust of many comments below, I thought I’d restate my answer here:

My belief that human activity is contributing to climatic warming is based upon my understanding of the accumulated scientific evidence about how our climate works and the effect of increasing contributions of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that I have reviewed and considered over the past 15-plus years during which I’ve been following and often working on this issue, including the nine years I spent at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, during which time I edited this book on climate change policy and authored a 1998 National Review cover story on how many risks of climate change are overstated. Much of the relevant scientific research is summarized (if occasionally exaggerated) in the IPCC’s Working Group I report on the basic science of warming (which is a separate report from the Working Group II report on impacts, some claims from which are unfounded and/or not properly cited).

Most so-called “skeptics” within the scientific community also accept the basic claims about the likely anticipated effect of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. The primary areas of disagreement are over the nature and extent of various feedback mechanisms in the climate which could augment or dampen greenhouse warming and the practical effects of climatic warming. So, for instance, noted climate skeptics Patrick Michaels and Robert Balling Jr. write in their recent book for the Cato Institute, Climate of Extremes: The Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know, that there is a warming trend and that human activity shares some of the blame. As they summarize on page 27: “AGW (anthropogenic global warming), yes. But DAGW [dangerous anthropogenic global warming]? We think not!”

I believe that certain policy responses are justified because even if one accepts a fairly “skeptical” view of the science, the best estimate is that human activity will produce some warming that will have deleterious effects in some parts of the globe, particularly in areas that have not done much to contribute to the warming. As I explain in this paper (and in shorter pieces here, here, and here), these effects should be sufficient to justify a policy response, particularly if one believes in the importance of property rights, as I do. I also believe that taxes on consumption, including energy consumption, are preferable to taxes on income, and so would welcome a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

The UK Daily Mail reports:

Scientist at the heart of the ‘Climategate’ email scandal broke the law when they refused to give raw data to the public, the privacy watchdog has ruled.

The Information Commissioner’s office said University of East Anglia researchers breached the Freedom of Information Act when handling requests from climate change sceptics.

But the scientists will escape prosecution because the offences took place more than six months ago.

The London Times has more.

A spokesman for the ICO said: “The legislation prevents us from taking any action but from looking at the emails it’s clear to us a breach has occurred.” Breaches of the act are punishable by an unlimited fine.

The complaint to the ICO was made by David Holland, a retired engineer from Northampton. He had been seeking information to support his theory that the unit broke the IPCC’s rules to discredit sceptic scientists.

In a statement, Graham Smith, Deputy Commissioner at the ICO, said: “The e-mails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information.”

He added: “The ICO is gathering evidence from this and other time-barred cases to support the case for a change in the law. We will be advising the university about the importance of effective records management and their legal obligations in respect of future requests for information.”

As these stories make clear, several of the scientists whose e-mail and other documents were disclosed engaged in both unethical and illegal conduct.  As I’ve said many times, I do not believe this disproves global warming.  I still believe the balance of evidence supports the theory that human activity is causing the climate to become warmer than it would otherwise be, and I still believe that the threat of warming justifies a policy response.  But the ClimateGate revelations do provide further evidence that many prominent climate scientists have sought to suppress dissent and exaggerate certain warming-related claims.

In related news, new evidence has emerged of breakdowns in the IPCC drafting and review process that resulted in the inclusion of unsubstantiated claims in portions of the IPCC’s latest reports.  More on that later.

Among other things, the release of e-mails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit has laid bare the efforts of a handful of climate scientists to manipulate how the peer review process handled research that could undermine claims of a climate science “consensus.”  As climate scientists David Douglass and John Christy detail here, the CRU e-mails reveal a concerted effort to sandbag one of their publications, both in the peer-reviewed scientific literature as well as on the purportedly neutral climate science blog RealClimate.  Patrick Michaels and Roger Pielke Jr. have more.

What these and other episodes reveal was that there was a concerted effort to stage-manage the appearance of an ironclad consensus at the expense of the scientific process.  Rather than make an open and honest argument that, despite persistent uncertainties, there is substantial theoretical and empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to a gradual warming of the atmosphere, they focused on squelching dissenting scientific views, corrupting science in the process.  As I’ve noted many times on this blog, I believe there is sufficient evidence of human contributions to climate change to justify a meaningful policy response, including measures to accelerate energy sector innovation and a revenue-neutral carbon tax.  But such policies should be advanced on the merits, not scientific subterfuge of the sort engaged in by those at CRU.

[Note: I originally wrote "laid bear" instead of "laid bare," much to the amusement of some commenters below.]

Daniel Sarewitz and Samuel Thernstrom, of Arizona State University’s Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes and the American Enterprise Institute respectively, co-authored an op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times on how the debate over leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, and climate change more broadly, is colored by the mistaken idea that science can resolve contentious policy questions that implicate fundamental values.  As the note, “If ‘pure’ science dictates our actions, then there is no need to acknowledge the role that political interests and social values play in deciding how society should address climate change.”  It also leads to excessively politicized conflict over scientific findings and prevents honest debate over the underlying policy questions.

problems such as climate change are much more scientifically complex than determining the charge on an electron or even the structure of DNA. The research deals not with building blocks of nature but with dynamic systems that are inherently uncertain, unpredictable and complex. Such science is often not subject to replicable experiments or verification; rather, knowledge and insight emerge from the weight of theory, data and evidence, usually freighted with considerable uncertainty, disagreement and internal contradiction.

Thus, we write neither to attack nor to defend the East Anglia scientists, but to make clear that the ideal of pure science as a source of truth that can cut through politics is false. The authority of pure science is a two-edged sword, and it cuts deeply in both directions in the climate debate: For those who favor action, the myth of scientific purity confers unique legitimacy upon the evidence they bring to political debates. And for those who oppose action, the myth provides a powerful foundation for counterattack whenever deviations from the unattainable ideal come to light. . . .

The real scandal illustrated by the e-mails is not that scientists tried to undermine peer review, fudge and conceal data, and torpedo competitors, but that scientists and advocates on both sides of the climate debate continue to claim political authority derived from a false ideal of pure science. This charade is a disservice to both science and democracy. To science, because the reality cannot live up to the myth; to democracy, because the difficult political choices created by the genuine but also uncertain threat of climate change are concealed by the scientific debate.

According to press reports, Penn State University is conducting an inquiry to determine whether it should institute a formal ethical investigation of Michael Mann, the Penn State professor who was the lead author of the paper that invented the “Hockey Stick.” At issue are CRU emails and his role in ClimateGate.

Frankly, I am not a big fan of academic investigations.

First, academic investigations are not how science – or social science – is supposed to operate. They are a hard type of official coercion, which ought to be reserved for only the most egregious cases.

For one or more of these reasons, I fully expect Penn State not to bring formal charges against Professor Mann – and if it does, I expect him to be cleared by his colleagues. Though I have read only a few dozen CRU emails, in my opinion Mann’s errors should be corrected in the usual way, not by organized groups telling people what to think.

But if I were Professor Mann’s dean at Penn State, I would try to determine whether he has fully shared his data, metadata, and computer code. To the extent that he hasn’t already, I would try to make him do so – at least for his most important or most controversial articles in recent years. And, for reason #3 above, I wouldn’t take Mann’s word for it. I’d call his critics and ask them to name the few most important Mann papers for which the data and computer code are needed for replication.

If Mann is still withholding the data and code necessary for replication, I’d ask him to replicate his most important or most controversial recent work (certainly not everything) and to release the data and code so that others might do so. If Mann couldn’t replicate his own work, I would ask him to announce that fact to the scientific community, so that serious scientists would know whether his work is replicable.

Thus, if I were Professor Mann’s dean, probably the only power I’d use would be to further the scientific enterprise. And even that would not be necessary if ethical standards were higher in the subfield of paleoclimatology.

(For those who might be wondering, I did not call for a formal investigation of Michael Bellesiles back in 2000-2002. It was Bellesiles’s supporters who most frequently called for an investigation, though some of his critics did as well. Emory’s investigation was triggered by prominent members of its faculty pushing privately for a formal inquiry. Apparently, Bellesiles’s public supporters, being too lazy or too biased to bother checking the evidence that could be found in an hour or two in any major academic research library, miscalculated that Bellesiles would be vindicated. He wasn’t.)

Last night I was talking with a colleague about writing something on the “Precautionary Principle.”

This morning I see John Miller at the Corner writing about a Tom Friedman column pushing that very principle.

After raising Dick Cheney’s views on meeting low-probability threats from Al Qaeda and quoting Cass Sunstein on the precautionary principle, Friedman wrote:

When I see a problem that has even a 1 percent probability of occurring and is “irreversible” and potentially “catastrophic,” I buy insurance. That is what taking climate change seriously is all about.

If we prepare for climate change by building a clean-power economy, but climate change turns out to be a hoax, what would be the result? Well, during a transition period, we would have higher energy prices. But gradually we would be driving battery-powered electric cars and powering more and more of our homes and factories with wind, solar, nuclear and second-generation biofuels. We would be much less dependent on oil dictators who have drawn a bull’s-eye on our backs; our trade deficit would improve; the dollar would strengthen; and the air we breathe would be cleaner. In short, as a country, we would be stronger, more innovative and more energy independent.

But if we don’t prepare, and climate change turns out to be real, life on this planet could become a living hell. And that’s why I’m for doing the Cheney-thing on climate — preparing for 1 percent.

Miller responds:

The “precautionary principle” drives me batty. In principle (so to speak), I’m all for it. It’s a profoundly small-c conservative concept. It urges humility and restraint in all areas of life, including public policy, where it serves as a useful guard against the unintended consequences that so often accompany Big Plans.

Then there’s its actual application by guys like Thomas Friedman, who deploy it whenever they find it helpful to their political agenda and ignore it when they don’t.

In his NYT column today, Friedman says there’s a greater than 1-percent chance that our planet is in the midst of a human-made global-warming disaster. So he wants to take action, which he likens to buying an insurance policy. But the very same logic could be used against kneecap-and-trade and all of the other draconian schemes that the environmental left has concocted: There’s a greater than 1-percent chance that their hubris will impoverish the world through strangling regulations and accomplish nothing in the face of a phony problem. In this context, the precautionary principle urges us to avoid buying Friedman’s expensive and risky insurance policy.

It takes sound judgment to know when the precautionary principle makes sense and when it doesn’t. Everything else is just rhetoric.

What Friedman doesn’t seem to recognize is that cutting carbon emissions by 80% is highly likely to impoverish the world. And poverty kills real people–lots of them. So by government fiat we could achieve the “living hell,” the death and economic destruction, that he fears might happen if the Al Gores of this world are right about global warming.

Further, I suggest that people actually read the UN IPCC area reports on what might happen if global warming continues unchecked. Consider Chapter 14 on North American impacts. Given the corruption of the IPCC process, these should be taken with a grain of salt, but even these do not describe a “living hell.” We would have longer growing seasons and more rainfall over most of North America. The words “ski” or “skiing” appear five times in the report, but even there the report mentions snow-making machines offsetting the losses. (Perhaps because I don’t ski, I wouldn’t view even the total destruction of the ski industry as a significant contribution to a “living hell.”)

More seriously, the IPCC claims that there would be more frequent major storms, but the science behind that claim now looks more doubtful than it did when they wrote it. Among the many problems identified in the report, the biggest one would be threats to coastal communities from rising sea water — a problem to which North Americans would gradually adapt. (Unfortunately, this adaptation can be slowed by foolish governments pouring money into rebuilding areas below sea level, as the Bush Administration did in New Orleans after the floods.)

The “living hell” would presumably fall on areas of the globe where people are not rich enough to adapt to climate change. Personally, I doubt that impoverishing them further would help in this adaptation.

Of course, what the IPCC doesn’t adequately address is why warming would be so bad this time when warming periods in the past were on balance so beneficial to humans, plants, and agriculture. See, generally, Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science.

When the CRU at East Anglia disclosed that it had lost some of the raw temperature data, leaving only the “homogenized” data, some honest commentators expressed the hope that the homogenizing was competently done.

Anyone who has been following Climate Audit for the last few years knows that at least some of the adjustments to the raw data done by the major data depositories appear to have been incompetently done at best. The statistical techniques used in the scientific backwater of historical climatology are often ad hoc, bearing little relation to the techniques that are standard in other fields. In particular, their techniques for handling missing data are particularly unscientific.

Perhaps the most accessible blog post demonstrating the effects of homogenization adjustments on a set of temperature records is by Willis Eschenbach at Watts Up With That.

The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero

People keep saying “Yes, the Climategate scientists behaved badly. But that doesn’t mean the data is bad. That doesn’t mean the earth is not warming.”

Let me start with the second objection first. The earth has generally been warming since the Little Ice Age, around 1650. There is general agreement that the earth has warmed since then. See e.g. Akasofu. Climategate doesn’t affect that.

The second question, the integrity of the data, is different. People say “Yes, they destroyed emails, and hid from Freedom of information Acts, and messed with proxies, and fought to keep other scientists’ papers out of the journals … but that doesn’t affect the data, the data is still good.” Which sounds reasonable.

There are three main global temperature datasets. One is at the CRU, Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where we’ve been trying to get access to the raw numbers. One is at NOAA/GHCN, the Global Historical Climate Network. The final one is at NASA/GISS, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The three groups take raw data, and they “homogenize” it to remove things like when a station was moved to a warmer location and there’s a 2C jump in the temperature. The three global temperature records are usually called CRU, GISS, and GHCN. Both GISS and CRU, however, get almost all of their raw data from GHCN. All three produce very similar global historical temperature records from the raw data.

So I’m still on my multi-year quest to understand the climate data. You never know where this data chase will lead. This time, it has ended me up in Australia. I got to thinking about Professor Wibjorn Karlen’s statement about Australia that I quoted here:

Another example is Australia. NASA [GHCN] only presents 3 stations covering the period 1897-1992. What kind of data is the IPCC Australia diagram based on?

If any trend it is a slight cooling. However, if a shorter period (1949-2005) is used, the temperature has increased substantially. The Australians have many stations and have published more detailed maps of changes and trends.

The folks at CRU told Wibjorn that he was just plain wrong. Here’s what they said is right, the record that Wibjorn was talking about, Fig. 9.12 in the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, showing Northern Australia:

Figure 1. Temperature trends and model results in Northern Australia. Black line is observations (From Fig. 9.12 from the UN IPCC Fourth Annual Report). Covers the area from 110E to 155E, and from 30S to 11S. Based on the CRU land temperature.) Data from the CRU.

One of the things that was revealed in the released CRU emails is that the CRU basically uses the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) dataset for its raw data. So I looked at the GHCN dataset. There, I find three stations in North Australia as Wibjorn had said, and nine stations in all of Australia, that cover the period 1900-2000. Here is the average of the GHCN unadjusted data for those three Northern stations, from AIS:

Figure 2. GHCN Raw Data, All 100-yr stations in IPCC area above.

So once again Wibjorn is correct, this looks nothing like the corresponding IPCC temperature record for Australia. But it’s too soon to tell. Professor Karlen is only showing 3 stations. Three is not a lot of stations, but that’s all of the century-long Australian records we have in the IPCC specified region. OK, we’ve seen the longest stations record, so lets throw more records into the mix. Here’s every station in the UN IPCC specified region which contains temperature records that extend up to the year 2000 no matter when they started, which is 30 stations.

Figure 3. GHCN Raw Data, All stations extending to 2000 in IPCC area above.

Still no similarity with IPCC. So I looked at every station in the area. That’s 222 stations. Here’s that result:

Figure 4. GHCN Raw Data, All stations extending to 2000 in IPCC area above.

So you can see why Wibjorn was concerned. This looks nothing like the UN IPCC data, which came from the CRU, which was based on the GHCN data. Why the difference?

The answer is, these graphs all use the raw GHCN data. But the IPCC uses the “adjusted” data. GHCN adjusts the data to remove what it calls “inhomogeneities”. So on a whim I thought I’d take a look at the first station on the list, Darwin Airport, so I could see what an inhomogeneity might look like when it was at home. And I could find out how large the GHCN adjustment for Darwin inhomogeneities was.

Eschenbach proceeds to set out what an “inhomogeneity” is and show that the GHCN must have done something other than they claimed to have done to make the adjustments they did. In the course of this, he shows some stunning anomalies:

Then I went to look at what happens when the GHCN removes the “in-homogeneities” to “adjust” the data. Of the five raw datasets, the GHCN discards two, likely because they are short and duplicate existing longer records. The three remaining records are first “homogenized” and then averaged to give the “GHCN Adjusted” temperature record for Darwin.

To my great surprise, here’s what I found. To explain the full effect, I am showing this with both datasets starting at the same point (rather than ending at the same point as they are often shown).

Figure 7. GHCN homogeneity adjustments to Darwin Airport combined record

YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C.

Eschenbach goes on:

Intrigued by the curious shape of the average of the homogenized Darwin records, I then went to see how they had homogenized each of the individual station records. What made up that strange average shown in Fig. 7? I started at zero with the earliest record. Here is Station Zero at Darwin, showing the raw and the homogenized versions.

Figure 8 Darwin Zero Homogeneity Adjustments. Black line shows amount and timing of adjustments.

Yikes again, double yikes! What on earth justifies that adjustment? How can they do that? We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? They’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data! Now it looks like the IPCC diagram in Figure 1, all right … but a six degree per century trend? And in the shape of a regular stepped pyramid climbing to heaven? What’s up with that?

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

One thing is clear from this. People who say that “Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK” are wrong. At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.

So once again, I’m left with an unsolved mystery. How and why did the GHCN “adjust” Darwin’s historical temperature to show radical warming? Why did they adjust it stepwise? Do Phil Jones and the CRU folks use the “adjusted” or the raw GHCN dataset? My guess is the adjusted one since it shows warming, but of course we still don’t know … because despite all of this, the CRU still hasn’t released the list of data that they actually use, just the station list.

Another odd fact, the GHCN adjusted Station 1 to match Darwin Zero’s strange adjustment, but they left Station 2 (which covers much of the same period, and as per Fig. 5 is in excellent agreement with Station Zero and Station 1) totally untouched. They only homogenized two of the three. Then they averaged them.

That way, you get an average that looks kinda real, I guess, it “hides the decline”.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, care to know the way that GISS deals with this problem? Well, they only use the Darwin data after 1963, a fine way of neatly avoiding the question … and also a fine way to throw away all of the inconveniently colder data prior to 1941. It’s likely a better choice than the GHCN monstrosity, but it’s a hard one to justify.

Figures 7 and 8 are indeed stunners: “homogenizing” in effect changes slight temperature declines into huge temperature increases.

To get the full flow of the argument, please read Eschenbach’s whole post.

Turning declines in raw data into rises in one’s tables is one of the things that led to Michael Bellesiles’s resignation from Emory in the Arming America scandal.

Remember, people are usually at least somewhat circumspect in writing emails to professional colleagues around the world. Thus, is it likely that the corruption in this subfield of climatology is LESS serious or MORE serious than the scientists would disclose to their colleagues in their own emails?

While the wider world is just beginning to realize that the subfield of paleoclimatology is in shambles (and has been for the last decade), scientists in related disciplines are increasingly fighting back against the shoddy work and orthodoxy that was foisted on them.

A small group, including several prominent physicists, are asking the American Physical Society to rescind its political statement on climate change (tip to Bishop Hill):

Dear fellow member of the American Physical Society:

This is a matter of great importance to the integrity of the Society. It is being sent to a random fraction of the membership, so we hope you will pass it on.

By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen in our cumulative 223 years of APS membership. For those who have missed the news we recommend the excellent summary article by Richard Lindzen in the November 30 edition of the Wall Street journal, entitled “The Climate Science isn’t Settled,” for a balanced account of the situation. It was written by a scientist of unquestioned authority and integrity. A copy can be found among the items at http://tinyurl.com/lg266u, and a visit to http://www.ClimateDepot.com can fill in the details of the scandal, while adding spice.

What has this to do with APS? In 2007 the APS Council adopted a Statement on global warming (also reproduced at the tinyurl site mentioned above) that was based largely on the scientific work that is now revealed to have been corrupted. (The principals in this escapade have not denied what they did, but have sought to dismiss it by saying that it is normal practice among scientists. You know and we know that that is simply untrue. Physicists are not expected to cheat.)

We have asked the APS management to put the 2007 Statement on ice until the extent to which it is tainted can be determined, but that has not been done. We have also asked that the membership be consulted on this point, but that too has not been done.

None of us would use corrupted science in our own work, nor would we sign off on a thesis by a student who did so. This is not only a matter of science, it is a matter of integrity, and the integrity of the APS is now at stake. That is why we are taking the unusual step of communicating directly with at least a fraction of the membership.

If you believe that the APS should withdraw a Policy Statement that is based on admittedly corrupted science, and should then undertake to clarify the real state of the art in the best tradition of a learned society, please send a note to the incoming President of the APS ccallan@princeton.edu, with the single word YES in the subject line. That will make it easier for him to count.

Bob Austin, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Hal Lewis, emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
Will Happer, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics, Hartford
Roger Cohen, former Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil

Steven Hayward (of AEI) has an excellent article in the Weekly Standard on the CRU scandal (tip to Powerline and Adler below).

Hayward concludes:

The distinction between utterly politicized scientists such as Jones, Mann, and NASA’s James Hansen, and other more sober scientists has been lost on the media and climate campaigners for a long time now, and as a result, the CRUtape letters will cast a shadow on the entire field. There is no doubt plenty more of this kind of corruption in other hotbeds of climate science, but there are also a lot of unbiased scientists trying to do important and valuable work. Climate alarmists and their media cheerleaders are fond of warning about “tipping points” to disaster, but ironically this episode may represent a tipping point against the alarmists. The biggest hazard to serious climate science all along was not so much contrarian arguments from skeptics, but rather the damage that the hyperbole of the environmental community would inflict on their own cause.

Climate change is a genuine phenomenon, and there is a nontrivial risk of major consequences in the future. Yet the hysteria of the global warming campaigners and their monomaniacal advocacy of absurdly expensive curbs on fossil fuel use have led to a political dead end that will become more apparent with the imminent collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen process. I have long expected that 20 or so years from now we will look back on the turn-of-the-millennium climate hysteria in the same way we look back now on the population bomb hysteria of the late 1960s and early 1970s–as a phenomenon whose magnitude and effects were vastly overestimated, and whose proposed solutions were wrongheaded and often genuinely evil (such as the forced sterilizations of thousands of Indian men in the 1970s, much of it funded by the Ford Foundation). Today the climate campaigners want to forcibly sterilize the world’s energy supply, and until recently they looked to be within an ace of doing so. But even before Climategate, the campaign was beginning to resemble a Broadway musical that had run too long, with sagging box office and declining enthusiasm from a dwindling audience. Someone needs to break the bad news to the players that it’s closing time for the climate horror show.

University of Illinois climate scientist Michael Schlesinger threatens the NYT‘s Andrew Revkin with “the Big Cutoff” because he quotes and interviews the wrong people.  According to Schlesinger, this makes Revkin’s reporting “very worrisome to most climate scientists.”  Revkin’s offenses?  Noting that some Copenhagen prostitutes promised to give freebies to climate conference delegates (“gutter reportage”) and “giving space in [his] blog to the Pielke” [climatologist Roger Pielke Sr. and environmental studies professor Roger Pielke Jr.]  Pielke Jr. comments:

You’d think that after the actions of certain activist scientists to suppress certain perspectives was revealed in the CRU emails that there would be a little bit more self-awareness in this community.

Last week, Rajendra Pachauri, who heads the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told BBC Radio that there would be a full investigation of the revelations contained in e-mails and documents leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.  This must have been done awfully quickly, as the IPCC’s Working Group I released a statement on Friday announcing it “condemns the illegal act which led to private emails being posted on the Internet and firmly stands by the findings of the AR4 and by the community of researchers worldwide whose professional standards and careful scientific work over many years have provided the basis for these conclusions.”  Meanwhile, the UK’s Met Office announced it would fully reexamine its temperature records to ensure the records are accurate and reliable, even though the reexamination could take three years and is opposed by the British government.

The Washington Post has a follow-up story on the controversy, highlighting charges that prominent climate scientists have sought to marginalize dissenting views.  The story quotes NOAA’s Thomas Karl saying some climate perspectives, such as those of Roger Pielke Sr., are marginalized because they are not supported by the peer reviewed literature — but it appears this claim is false. (More here.)

For a more comprehensive overview of the ClimateGate controversy, see Steve Hayward’s cover story from the Weekly Standard.  Here’s a small bit:

The emails do not in and of themselves reveal that catastrophic climate change scenarios are a hoax or without any foundation. What they reveal is something problematic for the scientific community as a whole, namely, the tendency of scientists to cross the line from being disinterested investigators after the truth to advocates for a preconceived conclusion about the issues at hand. In the understatement of the year, CRU’s Phil Jones, one of the principal figures in the controversy, admitted the emails “do not read well.” Jones is the author of the most widely cited leaked e‑missive, telling colleagues in 1999 that he had used “Mike’s Nature [magazine] trick” to “hide the decline” that inconveniently shows up after 1960 in one set of temperature records. But he insists that the full context of CRU’s work shows this to have been just a misleading figure of speech. Reading through the entire archive of emails, however, provides no such reassurance; to the contrary, dozens of other messages, while less blatant than “hide the decline,” expose scandalously unprofessional behavior. There were ongoing efforts to rig and manipulate the peer-review process that is critical to vetting manuscripts submitted for publication in scientific journals. Data that should have been made available for inspection by other scientists and outside critics were released only grudgingly, if at all. Perhaps more significant, the email archive also reveals that even inside this small circle of climate scientists–otherwise allied in an effort to whip up a frenzy of international political action to combat global warming–there was considerable disagreement, confusion, doubt, and at times acrimony over the results of their work. In other words, there is far less unanimity or consensus among climate insiders than we have been led to believe.The behavior of the CRU circle has cast a long shadow over the entire climate science community, and many honest scientists will now undeservedly bear the stigma of Climategate unless a full airing of the issues is conducted. Other important climate research centers with close ties to the CRU–including NASA’s Goddard Institute and the Climate Change Science Program at NOAA–should not be exempt from a full-dress investigation. Such a reevaluation must begin with an understanding of the crucial role the CRU circle has played in the global warming drama.

UPDATE: The NYT‘s Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, weighs in on the Times‘ ClimateGate coverage. Among other things, Hoyt explains why the Times decided not to post the leaked e-mails on its website. Hoyt concludes: “So far, I think The Times has handled Climategate appropriately — a story, not a three-alarm story.”