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—an hir series—
Historical and Investigative Research – 17
July 2014 The
Climategate scandal erupted when thousands of emails of important IPCC
scientists were hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at University of
East Anglia. These email exchanges are troubling, for they appear to confirm
what many skeptics had charged: that IPCC scientists are playing a political
game, rather than doing science. █ Introduction █ Climategate :
some inconvenient emails █ Long before the Climategate emails: a pattern of
dishonesty ▄
The
‘warming’ of Antarctica ▄
The
‘hockey stick’ ▄
Where
did Phil Jones’ data go? █ How
did the media react to Climategate?
Introduction Is it
incompetence or dishonesty? The question must be asked. Al Gore
and the IPCC have been arguing for the ‘anthropogenic’ global warming (AGW)
hypothesis, according to which human-produced CO2 is responsible for current
warming trends. But there is a problem. In the
climax of his IPCC-advised movie, An
Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore proudly presented his ‘best’ evidence—650,000
years of climate history—backwards.
Strutting before a giant graph of the ups and downs of temperature and CO2
(as reconstructed from the Antarctic ice-core record) he claimed: “When there
is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer.” False. The temperature always rises before CO2—hundreds of
years before. CO2 is a consequence
of temperature changes, not the cause (Part 2). Al Gore
and the IPCC got it exactly backwards. Is this incompetence or dishonesty? In
science all relevant hypotheses must be examined. Here, incompetence is the most relevant.
Why? Because relevance follows from the current state of the culture. In our
culture, a media-supported bias holds that only the psychiatrically paranoid
will imagine power elites colluding to deceive us. Hence, a self-preservation
instinct will lead us to propose first that Al Gore (almost president of the
world superpower), and the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (a creation of the world’s top power elites), fumbled
out of sheer incompetence. But
there is a problem. This is
not rocket science. It isn’t even climate science. It is a question of
reading one simple graph and noticing which of two curves rises
first—temperature or CO2. Let’s
put that in context. According
to the media, IPCC scientists are the world’s ‘best.’ Some of them sat on Al
Gore’s ‘Science Advisory Board,’ and their job was to keep his movie honest.
Making a movie takes time: there is screenplay creation, storyboard work,
shooting, and post-production, all of which involves planning, review, and
editing sessions in iterated cycles. So in all this time, according to the incompetence hypothesis, IPCC geniuses
failed to notice that the scientific climax of An Inconvenient Truth, which would showcase Al Gore strutting
before a gigantic graph, would in fact present the key evidence backwards, as though it supported the
idea of man-made global warming when in fact it refutes it. Or else
they didn’t think to mention it. Or else they can’t read a simple graph
either.
IPCC
chairman Rajendra Pachauri and Al Gore To
avoid certain social consequences you may feel almost physically compelled to accept the incompetence hypothesis anyway. That’s fine. But here is the
logical implication: If IPCC scientists are this incompetent you shouldn’t believe a word they say about
climate. If you
dare to consider the alternative, the next question is this: Can we document
a pattern of willful deception? It appears we can. Climategate : Some inconvenient emails In 2009
more than 1000 emails stolen from the servers at the Climatic Research Center
(CRU) at the University of East Anglia (in the UK) were released on the
internet for public perusal. The resulting scandal was called Climategate.
Why a
scandal? Two reasons. First,
the emails were interpreted by many as evidence of unethical behavior by CRU
scientists. Second,
the most important scientists involved in producing IPCC reports show a very
considerable overlap with the scientists working at, or closely involved
with, the CRU. As climate scientist Tim Ball puts it in his book The Deliberate Corruption of Climate
Science, “the IPCC and CRU are essentially the same organization.”[1] Among
other things, the exposed emails reveal conversations between CRU/IPCC
scientists about how to: 1)
shut
skeptics out of the IPCC process; 2)
impede
skeptical examination of the data used in IPCC reports; and 3)
exert
control over the peer-review process to ensure that skeptics will not get
published in the most prestigious journals. As the Wall Street Journal reported: “The emails include discussions of apparent efforts to
make sure that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
[IPCC], a United Nations group that monitors climate science, include their
own [i.e. CRU] views and exclude others.”[2] Notice:
it is precisely because of the close identity between CRU and IPCC that CRU
scientists have the power to shut dissenting views out of IPCC reports. The WSJ
continues: “In addition, [the exposed] emails show that climate
scientists declined to make their data available to scientists whose views
they disagreed with.” And
then there is the issue of peer review. You may
have heard that the IPCC relies on peer-reviewed
scientific work. This has been overstated; we’ve seen embarrassing
episodes—such as the claim that Himalayan glaciers would soon melt—in which
the IPCC was found to rely on nothing more than alarmist rumor, with zero science—peer-reviewed or otherwise—behind it.[3] But even for IPCC claims based on
peer-reviewed papers, a problem remains. In one
of the exposed emails, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, “Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate
center [CRU], suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State
University that skeptics’ research was unwelcome: We ‘will keep them out
somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!’ ” What do
Jones and Mann seek to redefine? What is the traditional meaning of ‘peer review’? When a
scientist submits a paper for consideration to a scientific journal, his or
her peers (other scientists in the relevant field) comment on its merits to
decide whether it should be published. Those who comment must be independent of those whom they
evaluate, otherwise personal and ideological bias (which may result in undue
favoritism or contrarianism) will mar what should be an objective effort to
find errors and recommend solutions. For this reason ‘peer review’ is often
conducted anonymously. It is
generally considered that peer-review produces better-quality results, and so
the ‘peer review literature’ has higher prestige than the body of articles,
chapters, and books that have not undergone this process. But this can cut
both ways. When a paper appears in a peer-reviewed journal, especially if it
is very prestigious, the psychological impact on the reader—who assumes it
has been checked and vetted by the most competent experts—is considerable. Prestigious peer-review produces trust. So
if the ‘peer-review’ process can be corrupted, then even outright lies may
come to be generally accepted as ‘quality science’—perhaps even as a
‘scientific consensus.’ It
appears that CRU/IPCC climate scientists—just as CRU director Phil Jones
promised to Michael Mann (perhaps the most influential voice in IPCC
reports)—indeed have enough power to redefine the meaning of ‘peer review.’
As
requested by two US congressional committees, a team of statisticians led by
Dr. Edward J. Wegman performed a network analysis of the IPCC. They found
that a small circle of scientists co-author the key papers that the IPCC
relies on, and these same few also ‘peer-review’ their own papers and approve
them for publication.[4] Beyond
this, CRU/IPCC scientists appear to have considerable power over who gets
published in the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals related to climate.
Donna Laframboise, author of an investigation into IPCC corruption, comments
as follows: “ ‘We’re supposed to trust the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) because much of the research on which it relies was published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. But what happens when the people who are in charge of these journals are the same ones who write IPCC reports?’ ”[5] As
Laframboise documents, several IPCC scientists are also editors, or else on
the editorial board, of the prestigious Journal
of Climate.[5] But their influence is much broader.
As an example, Tim Ball quotes Climategate
emails to showcase the confidence with which CRU/IPCC scientists
discussed how to stop anything they didn’t like from getting published in Climate Research.[6] In this series we have seen that IPCC influence may have
compromised—at least on climate-related issues—the peer-review process at Nature, the most prestigious
scientific journal in the world (Part 3). What
are the implications of all this? Science
works (when it does) because scientists agree to do two things: 1)
Make
their own findings public so that
others can try to find error. 2)
Do
their best to find error in the unpublished and published work of others. But
when governments create powerful organizations claiming to speak for the
entire scientific community (e.g. IPCC), and the favored handful of
scientists within such organizations 1) get to pronounce themselves on the
quality of their own work and approve it for publication, 2) refuse to share
their data with critics, and 3) use their power to silence dissenting voices,
this is not science but the return of State-imposed religious dogma. One
symptom is that skeptics of the IPCC-supported view are called heretics—pardon me, ‘deniers.’ This is
not the language of science. Another
symptom is that IPCC scientists appear quite reluctant to debate skeptics in
public. At
Universidad del Medio Ambiente (Mexico), my colleagues and I tried to host a
debate on the AGW hypothesis. We had no trouble getting skeptics to agree.
And yet, as one of these skeptics—a prominent geoscientist at Mexico’s
National University (UNAM)—explained: “This will never happen.” Why not?
Because proponents of the AGW hypothesis, he told us, will not debate
skeptics in public. He was right. Neither
does Al Gore debate skeptics, nor do presenters trained by his Climate
Reality Project (Part 4). Capable,
confident, and honest scientists don’t collude with Power to corrupt ‘peer
review,’ they don’t present their ‘best’ evidence backwards (see Part 2), and they don’t run scared from
‘deniers.’ Long before the Climategate emails: a pattern of dishonesty The
media-defined ‘Climategate’ scandal is limited to the CRU emails exposed in
late 2009. The real Climategate,
much broader, involves issues that came to light long before that and which
are quite sufficient, by themselves, to question the honesty of CRU/IPCC
scientists. The ‘warming’ of Antarctica Antarctica
will not cooperate. It isn’t just the ice cores. IPCC computer simulations
have Antarctica warming, but
satellite data show it breaking ice-growth records year on year. For the
IPCC, this is a problem.
Antarctica: Cold, and getting colder. One way
to ‘fix’ it is to pretend that Antarctica doesn’t exist and raise hackles
instead over the loss of sea ice in the
Arctic, as if Arctic local weather
were the same thing as global warming.
The IPCC—and its supporting mainstream media—have done quite a bit of that. But
Eric Steig went one better. Steig
is a “University of Washington isotope geochemist …[who] reviewed the movie [An Inconvenient Truth] for… RealClimate,”[7] the very website created by CRU/IPCC
scientists to ‘educate’ journalists (see Part 2 and Part 4). Steig’s review gives Al Gore high
marks, and especially—get this—for his discussion of Antarctica. In
early 2009, Eric Steig and colleagues published a paper claiming to show, on
the basis of surface-weather-station data, that Antarctica was (really) warming. This made
headlines. And “Newsweek’s Sharon
Begley,” who takes dictation from RealClimate (see Part 4), “crowed [that it]... would really be
one in the eye for the ‘deniers’ and ‘contrarians.’ ” Great
news for the IPCC—until, that is, “a good many experts began to examine just
what new evidence had been used to justify this dramatic finding.” After all,
Antarctica has almost no surface weather stations, so where did the study’s
data come from? Steig and co-authors, it turns out, had programmed a
computer, “by a formula not yet revealed..., to estimate the data those
missing weather stations would have come up with if they had existed.”[8] That’s
a novel way to do science. No data? Make it up.
As it
turns out, “among the members of Steig’s team was Michael Mann.” Remember
him? It was to Mann, as you may recall, that CRU director Phil Jones promised
to redefine the meaning of peer-review. Consider it redefined: Michael Mann’s
made-up data made the cover of the
world’s most prestigious peer-reviewed science journal: Nature (see also Part 3). The ‘hockey stick’ This
same Michael Mann, the Sunday Telegraph
explains further, “is the author of the ‘hockey stick,’ the most
celebrated of all attempts by the warmists to rewrite the scientific evidence
to promote their cause.”
Mann’s
‘hockey stick’ graph, so called because the flat temperatures Now,
first, a bit of context. If you
want to claim that current warming is ‘anthropogenic,’ which is to say a
consequence of human-produced CO2, it helps if late 20th c. temperatures are
the warmest on record, because humans were not burning ‘fossil fuels’ way
back in the Middle Ages. Conversely, if the Middle Ages were warmer than
today’s temperatures, as (literally) thousands of converging scientific
studies argue, then it would mean that the planet hardly needs us to burn petroleum in order to get
this warm. So,
explains the Sunday Telegraph, “the
greatest embarrassment for the believers in man-made global warming is the
fact that the world was significantly warmer in the Middle Ages than now.”
(They were making wine in Northern England!) “ ‘We must get rid of the Medieval Warm Period,’ as one
contributor to the IPCC famously said in an unguarded moment. It was Dr Mann
who duly obliged by getting his computer-model to produce a graph shaped like
a hockey stick, eliminating the medieval warming and showing recent
temperatures curving up to an unprecedented high. This instantly became the warmists’ chief icon, and
[was] made the centrepiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report. But Mann’s selective
use of data and the flaws in his computer model were then so devastatingly
torn apart that it has become the most discredited artefact in the history of
science.”[8] So it’s
true, global warming is Mann-made
(but watch the spelling). The
exposure of the ‘hockey stick’ is in itself an interesting story. As Ian
Plimer, Australia’s top geologist, explains: “It took nearly eight years and direct action from the
US House of Representatives before the data and the computer programs for the
1998 Mann et al. ‘hockey stick’ were released.”[9] (Note:
anything not attached to a specific footnote in what follows comes from ftn [9], where we reproduce Ian Plimer’s
learned account.) Question:
Why was such extraordinary pressure necessary? Because Mann simply refused to
let others examine his work. But why did direct action from the US Congress
work? Because Mann’s research had been supported by US federal funds. Once
Mann’s data and methods were finally made public, two Canadians—Steve
McIntyre, a mining expert with a background in mathematics and statistics,
and Ross McKitrick, a Ph.D. in economics—found all sorts of problems with it. For
example, the data before AD 1421 were based on just one alpine tree. And “ ‘The flawed computer program can even pull
out spurious hockey stick shapes from lists of trendless random numbers.’ ”
In other words, it doesn’t matter what you
feed Michael Mann’s program, it will spit out a ‘hockey stick’ graph! As a
result of McIntyre and McKitrick’s criticisms, concern and political
posturing predictably grew in the US Congress, and so, as Plimer explains, “the House Science Committee asked the National Academy
of Sciences (NAS) to evaluate criticism of Mann’s work and to assess the
larger issue of historical climate data reconstructions.” That
was not all. “The House Energy and Commerce Committee appointed an
eminent team of statisticians led by Dr. Edward Wegman to investigate. The
conclusions of the Wegman investigation were confirmed by another independent
statistical analysis of Mann’s data.” Wegman
and colleagues, as they explain in their report, were asked to determine
“whether or not the criticisms of Mann et al.”—especially those of McIntyre
and McKitrick—“are valid and if so, what are the implications.”[10] Wegman et al. concluded as follows: “Overall, our committee believes that Dr Mann’s
assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the
millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be
supported by his analysis.” (p.7) “... the
criticisms of McIntyre and McKitrick, as well as those of other authors
mentioned are indeed valid.” (p.26) [10] At US
congressional hearings, members of the National Academy of Sciences team were
asked to comment on the conclusions of the Wegman team: Chairman
[Joe] Barton: Dr North, do you dispute the
conclusions or the methodology of Dr Wegman’s report? Dr
North: No, we don’t.
We don’t disagree with their criticism. In fact, pretty much the same thing
is said in our report. Dr
Bloomfield [also from NAS]: Our committee reviewed the methodology used by Dr Mann and
his co-workers and we felt that some of the choices were inappropriate. We had much the same misgivings about his work
that was documented at much greater length by Dr Wegman. In
short, Mann’s temperature reconstruction, according to which late 20th c.
temperatures are at historical highs, and which became a central pillar of
early IPCC reports claiming that recent global warming is human-induced, is
worthless. How did
Mann’s work become so prominent? Notice
what US Rep. Joe Barton says in the letter he sent to Michael Mann,
requesting that Mann make public his data and methods: “We understand that you were a lead author of the IPCC
chapter that assessed and reported your own studies, and that two study
co-authors were also contributing authors to this very same chapter.”[11] We see
here, once again, how Michael Mann benefits from Phil Jones’ redefinition of
scientific peer review—precisely the problem documented by Wegman’s network
analysis (mentioned earlier). But
that’s not the end of it. Can you guess which journal published Mann’s
‘hockey stick’ paper? That’s right: Nature.
Following
the analysis by McIntyre and McKitrick, as Ian Plimer remarks, “It seemed clear that no reviewer of the Mann et al.
paper in Nature had requested the original data upon which the paper
was based, for otherwise Nature would not have published a paper using
such incomplete data. This is not the place to speculate on whether this was
a lapse in editorial standards or whether Nature was following another
agenda. However, extraordinary conclusions and the dismissal of thousands of
previous scientific studies on the Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age should
have stimulated reviewers and editors of Nature to view the primary
data and calculations as a normal part of scientific due diligence.” (In Part 3 we take a closer look at the “lapse in
editorial standards” at Nature,
which extends even to lapses in the examination of the prose, allowing all sorts of absurdities and illogic so long as a
paper is pro-IPCC). It was
in the context of such embarrassments that some IPCC scientists decided they
would rather defect than participate in what they consider a corrupt process.
In 2008, Vincent Gray, “expert reviewer” for the IPCC, resigned in disgust
and published an exposé of what he claims is widespread and fraudulent manipulation
of data at the IPCC. In his exposé Gray charges that “dubious observations and some
genuine science has been distorted and ‘spun’ to support a global campaign to
limit human emissions of certain greenhouse gases which has no scientific
basis.”[12] Where did Phil Jones’ data go? The
work of Phil Jones, former director of the CRU (he stepped down as a result
of the Climategate scandal), is crucial to the temperature reconstruction now
known as the ‘hockey stick,’ and in 2003 he co-authored a paper with Michael
Mann on the last two-thousand years of temperatures. In
February 2010, in the wake of the Climategate email scandal, amid calls for
him to make his data available for public inspection, Jones reported that he
had lost it. The Daily Mail writes: “The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’
affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has
admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information. Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has
refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the
relevant papers. ...The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick
graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.”[13] Phil
Jones made some other interesting statements. “Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the
world was warmer in medieval times than now—suggesting global warming may not
be a man-made phenomenon. And he said that for the past 15 years there has been
no ‘statistically significant’ warming.” It is
now 2014, and still no warming, so it is now closer to two-decades of what is now referred to as the ‘global warming
pause,’ which has taken place right in the middle of dramatic growth in
human-produced CO2 emissions (see Part 0). Let me
rush to assure my readers that losing raw data is perfectly common. Scientists are very sloppy this way, so in
itself this should not raise an eyebrow. However, it is one thing to lose raw
data and quite another to lose the reference
to the data. Consider
the case of a historian. A historian will often rely on a great deal of
archival research. This involves traveling to the archives and making copies
of the documents, which are then used to support an argument. The historian
may or may not keep those pieces of paper in his office forever. But even if
he loses them, it would be absurd for him not to write down where they came from. After all, the
historian is professionally required to say, in his work, where each piece of
evidence came from, and to attach a reference, so that other historians can
consult the same material. It is troubling that Jones, despite repeated
requests, has refused to disclose which weather stations his data came from.[14] According
to the BBC journalist who interviewed Jones and his colleagues, “[Jones] had been collating tens of thousands of pieces
of data from around the world to produce a coherent record of temperature
change. That material has been used to produce the ‘hockey
stick graph’ which is relatively flat for centuries before rising steeply in
recent decades. …[C]olleagues of Professor Jones said ‘his office is
piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of
pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data
to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never
realised that 20 years later he would be held to account over them.’ ” Again,
these pieces of paper in themselves don’t matter. What matters is making a
record of the provenance of the data.
There is no special difficulty in making such annotations in “a central
database.” None at all. And such reference-keeping is elementary so that the
most basic principle of science—independent reproducibility of results—can be
ensured. Without independent reproducibility, we are asking for faith, and thus placing ourselves
automatically outside of scientific practice. CRU
scientists may protest all they want that Jones never imagined anybody would
ask for his pieces of paper, but
this is a red herring. They cannot pretend that keeping a record of the
provenance of the data is not crucial to the very practice of science. How did the media react to Climategate? Almost
immediately after the Climategate scandal broke, Newsweek’s Sharon
Begley came out with a December 2009 headline: “THE TRUTH ABOUT
‘Climategate’: Hacked e-mails have compromised scientists—but not the science
itself.” So the scientists are untrustworthy but you
should still trust their ‘science.’ That’s an interesting claim. Begley
writes: “Those of you who know I consider the science of anthropogenic global warming solid probably expect me to explain that the hacked e-mails don’t mean what they seem, and that, even if they did, it would not undercut the multiple lines of evidence showing that greenhouse-gas emissions are causing climate change. All true.”[15] Again
the same curious reasoning. The Climategate scandal concerns the allegedly
dishonest provenance of “the multiple lines of evidence” which purportedly
support the claim that “greenhouse-gas emissions are causing climate change.”
And yet Begley would have you believe that even if the hacked emails “mean what they seem”—i.e. that this is
junk science—you should still believe CRU/IPCC scientists? Begley
has advice for climate scientists who, after having their emails exposed, are
now the butt of jokes or the target of vitriol: “respond to misinformation with physics, data, and
analysis as, for instance, the RealClimate blog does.” Ah yes:
RealClimate. We showed in Part 4 that all Begley does is repeat anything
she reads in RealClimate, the website (did I mention this before?) that the very
CRU/IPCC scientists whose emails were exposed created to ‘educate’
journalists (see also Part 2). But I
know what you are thinking. That’s Newsweek. What
about a serious magazine—so serious you may socially index your astuteness by
announcing that you read it? So focused on research that it has Intelligence
Units on all sorts of things? So bold that every article is an editorial? So
clever it is full of mordant British wit? So authoritative its anonymous
oracles are penned by Ph.D.’s in economics? What about the Economist? In an
article titled “Mail-strom; Climate change” the Economist writes: “Is global warming a trick? That is what some saw in a huge batch of e-mails and documents taken from the servers of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, in England, and put up anonymously on the web. The result has been a field day for those sceptical of the idea of man-made climate change, who have combed through them, pouncing and pronouncing on snippets that seem to show scientific malfeasance.”[16] This is
careful prose. On a quick read the style may suggest impartiality, but
slowing down we can appreciate the art of subtlety: “pouncing and pronouncing”
is a rush to judgment; “snippets” are brief remarks taken completely out of
context; and if they only “seem to show scientific malfeasance” then there is
no real malfeasance. Next: “The CRU specialises in studies of climates past. For
parts of the past where there were no thermometers to consult, such studies
use proxy data, such as tree rings. Reconstructions based on these tend to
show that the planet’s temperature has risen over the 20th century to heights
unprecedented for centuries and perhaps millennia.” Well,
sure they do. But do you remember what two independent teams of scientists
concluded once the US Congress finally forced Michael Mann, after 8 years of
pulling teeth, to share his data and methods? They concluded his work was
worthless. And this matters because Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ is the CRU’s reconstruction of
temperature, partly elaborated with CRU director Phil Jones’ data, reportedly
lost (see above). Why
doesn’t the Economist share all
this with readers? Instead, the Economist
endorses the “tree-ring reconstruction known as the ‘hockey stick,’ which
shows unprecedented 20th-century warming,” and which was “featured
prominently in the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC).” For good measure, we are told that tree rings are “...far from the only evidence for believing in climate
change as a man-made problem, but they are important, and the sharp uptick
they show has taken on iconic value.” What is
this ample evidence—beyond Michael Mann’s tree ring—that establishes “climate
change as a man-made problem.” The Economist
doesn’t say. It cannot be the Antarctic ice cores, according to which CO2
concentrations have nothing to do with major planetary temperature shifts (Part 2). And neither can it be the multiple
converging lines of evidence, reported in thousands of scientific papers,
that point to a ‘Medieval Warm Period’ whose existence roundly denies that
late-20th c. temperatures are shockingly high. This Economist piece reads more like a PR
job than journalism. The British magazine condemns “...the eagerness with which bloggers fell on one of
the stolen e-mails, sent in 1999 by Phil Jones, the CRU’s director: ‘I’ve
just completed Mike’s [Michael Mann’s] Nature
trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e.
from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline [in
temperature].’ Trickery associated with Dr Mann was catnip to the sceptics.
But Dr Jones has clarified that ‘The word trick was used here colloquially as
in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to
anything untoward.’ The ‘hiding’ concerned the decision to leave out a set of
tree-ring-growth data that had stopped reflecting local temperature changes.
That alteration in growth pattern is strange, and unexplained, but
eliminating it is not sinister.” A real
journalist will examine statements from both sides and evaluate against the
evidence. A PR hack will simply take a statement by Phil Jones in his own
defense as a proper and sufficient answer to the accusations against him (“Dr
Jones has clarified...”) and will editorialize—without investigating—that
what Phil Jones did is “not sinister,” stating also that “none of this is
evidence of fraud.” Don’t
forget, however, that the “trick” mentioned was meant to “hide the decline” in temperature. In the same style as Newsweek’s Begley,
the Economist
goes on to say that even if some criticisms made by skeptics are reasonable,
none of them affect the fundamental claim of man-made global warming (of
course not—it’s a matter of faith). For good measure, the Economist adds: “[T]he idea of anthropogenic climate change rests on a
great deal more than just tree-ring records, useful as they are for providing
context to the current warming. A spate of recent claims of global cooling,
for example, rely on comparing 1998, the second-hottest year in the modern
record (going to 1880), with 2008, which was relatively cooler. Yet,
according to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a part of NASA,
America’s space agency, 2008 was the ninth-hottest year on record. 2009 is
shaping up to be the sixth-hottest. All of the ten hottest years recorded
have come since 1997. And retreating Arctic sea ice provides even more
visible data to support conclusions of warming.” Oh boy. First
of all, local weather in the Arctic, as pointed out earlier, does not make an
argument for global warming if
Antarctica is simultaneously breaking records for ice-growth (see above). Second,
let’s say we believe NASA’s numbers. Do they support the Economist’s argument? They do not. The Economist is not (merely) asking us to accept that there is
global warming but that it is “anthropogenic.” Thus, even if it were true
that “all of the ten hottest years recorded have come since 1997,” I would
say: so what? To document temperature
trends is not to show that humans have anything to do with them. But this
is a tried-and-true tactic: whenever anybody points out that the evidence
does not support man-made warming, alarmists shout hysterically that it is
getting really warm. And
guess what? It just ain’t that warm. Everybody—even
CRU/IPCC scientists—now recognizes that there has been no global warming
since 1997-98 (see Part 0). So why was NASA making such claims at
the time of this Economist article? A
report by the Science and Public Policy Institute explains the problems with
NASA’s numbers: “Recent revelations from the Climategate emails, originating
from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia showed how
all the data centers, most notably NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration] and NASA, conspired in the manipulation of global temperature
records to suggest that temperatures in the 20th century rose faster than, in
reality, they actually did.”[17] Are
scientists at NASA and NOAA also compromised?
Consider
that “Gavin Schmidt, a scientist at NASA,” as the Economist itself shares, is “the keeper of
realclimate.org, an anti-sceptic blog.” (In the Cimategate emails he appears
as the one who came up with the website’s name [18]).
But Schmidt is no mere “scientist at NASA.” As of June 2014 he is director of NASA’s Goddard Institute
for Space Studies (GISS), which studies climate.[19] Of
course, RealClimate is not a one-man show, and at the US congressional
hearings in which Michael Mann was called to testify, it was in fact referred
to as “Dr. Mann’s RealClimate.org website.”[20] Anyway,
that’s one heck of a blog. How many other blogs get free publicity on Newsweek and the Economist? And
just how much power is behind it? Let’s review. This blog was created by a
small handful of CRU scientists who manage it together with a small handful
of NASA scientists. This tiny group has tremendous censorship power at the
most important climate journals, and at Nature,
the most prestigious scientific journal in the world. They also decisively
influence what the mainstream journalists say. Lest I forget, this tiny group
determines what the all-important Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change prints in its reports. The
alleged international scientific ‘consensus’ looks more like a small cabal
with monopoly power—the power to shut others out. And yet the media has
consistently represented the skeptics as the ones with Great Power behind
them. Does that make sense? We turn
to this next.
____________________________________________________________ Footnotes and Further Reading [1] Ball, Tim (2014-01-17). The Deliberate Corruption of Climate
Science (Kindle Locations 2380-2381). Stairway Press. Kindle Edition. [2] “Climate Emails Stoke Debate:
Scientists' Leaked Correspondence Illustrates Bitter Feud over Global
Warming”; Wall Street Journal; NOVEMBER 23, 2009; by Keith Johnson [3]
In an article titled “World
misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown” the Sunday Times (London) reported as follows: “Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the
latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A
central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the
Himalayas could vanish by 2035. In the past few days the scientists behind the warning
have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a
popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report. It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was
itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known
Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was
‘speculation’ and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it
would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The
IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible
scientific advice on climate change. Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on
glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about
glaciers be dropped: ‘If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this,
or that it is a wrong presumption, than I will recommend that the assertion
about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments.’ The IPCC’s reliance on Hasnain’s 1999 interview has
been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who carried out the original
interview for the New Scientist. Pearce said he rang Hasnain in India in 1999
after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine. Pearce said: ‘Hasnain told
me then that he was bringing a report containing those numbers to Britain.
The report had not been peer reviewed or formally published in a scientific
journal and it had no formal status so I reported his work on that basis. ‘Since then I have obtained a copy and it does not say
what Hasnain said. In other words it does not mention 2035 as a date by which
any Himalayan glaciers will melt. However, he did make clear that his
comments related only to part of the Himalayan glaciers. not the whole
massif.’ The New Scientist report was apparently forgotten until
2005 when WWF cited it in a report called An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier
Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China. The report
credited Hasnain’s 1999 interview with the New Scientist. But it was a
campaigning report rather than an academic paper so it was not subjected to
any formal scientific review. Despite this it rapidly became a key source for
the IPCC when Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the
Himalayas. When finally published, the IPCC report did give its
source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the
glaciers melting was ‘very high’. The IPCC defines this as having a
probability of greater than 90%. The report read: ‘Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding
faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate
continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps
sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.’ However, glaciologists find such figures inherently
ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet
thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a
huge global temperature rise. The maximum rate of decline in thickness seen
in glaciers at the moment is 2-3 feet a year and most are far lower. Professor Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott
Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, said: ‘Even a small glacier
such as the Dokriani glacier is up to 120 metres [394ft] thick. A big one
would be several hundred metres thick and tens of kilometres long. The
average is 300 metres thick so to melt one even at 5 metres a year would take
60 years. That is a lot faster than anything we are seeing now so the idea of
losing it all by 2035 is unrealistically high.’ Some scientists have questioned how the IPCC could have
allowed such a mistake into print. Perhaps the most likely reason was lack of
expertise. Lal himself admits he knows little about glaciers. ‘I am not an
expert on glaciers, and I have not visited the region so I have to rely on
credible published research. The comments in the WWF report were made by a
respected Indian scientist and it was reasonable to assume he knew what he
was talking about,’ he said. Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously
dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as ‘voodoo science’. Last week the IPCC refused to comment so it has yet to
explain how someone who admits to little expertise on glaciers was overseeing
such a report. Perhaps its one consolation is that the blunder was spotted by
climate scientists who quickly made it public. The lead role in that process was played by Graham
Cogley, a geographer from Trent University in Ontario, Canada, who had long
been unhappy with the IPCC’s finding. He traced the IPCC claim back to the New Scientist and
then contacted Pearce. Pearce then re-interviewed Hasnain, who confirmed that
his 1999 comments had been ‘speculative’, and published the update in the New
Scientist. Cogley said: ‘The reality, that the glaciers are
wasting away, is bad enough. But they are not wasting away at the rate
suggested by this speculative remark and the IPCC report. The problem is that
nobody who studied this material bothered chasing the trail back to the
original point when the claim first arose. It is ultimately a trail that
leads back to a magazine article and that is not the sort of thing you want
to end up in an IPCC report.’ Pearce said the IPCC’s reliance on the WWF was
‘immensely lazy’ and the organisation need to explain itself or back up its
prediction with another scientific source. Hasnain could not be reached for
comment. The revelation is the latest crack to appear in the
scientific consensus over climate change. It follows the so-called
climate-gate scandal, where British scientists apparently tried to prevent
other researchers from accessing key data. Last week another row broke out
when the Met Office criticised suggestions that sea levels were likely to
rise 1.9m by 2100, suggesting much lower increases were likely.” SOURCE:
“World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown”; THE SUNDAY TIMES; January 17,
2010; by Jonathan Leake and Chris Hastings [4]
Geologist Ian Plimer, twice
winner of Australia’s highest scientific honor, the Eureka Prize, writes the
following in his book Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing
Science, (pp. 89-98): “The network analysis of Mann and 42 other authors by
Wegman’s statisticians shows diagrammatically how they formed a closed
coterie, who not only co-authored but also refereed each other’s
publications. This phenomenon is, of course, not new, but has never been so
powerful in world affairs. The report finds that: …A social network analysis revealed
that the small community of paleoclimate researchers appear to review each
other’s work, and reuse many of the same data sets, which calls into question
the independence of peer review and temperature reconstructions. It is clear that many of the proxies
are re-used in most of the papers. It is not surprising that the papers would
obtain similar results and so cannot claim to be independent verifications. …Authors of policy-related science
assessments should not assess their own work. It is especially the case that
authors of policy-related documents like the IPCC report, Climate Change
2001: The Scientific Basis should not be the same people that constructed
the academic papers. Policy-related climate science should have a more
intensive level of scrutiny and review involving statisticians.” SOURCE: Plimer, I. (2009). Heaven and Earth: Global
Warming, the Missing Science. New York: Taylor Trade Publishing. (pp.89-98). Those
wishing to read the Wegman report in its entirety may consult it here (note: the authors give
background on social network analysis in section 2.3 Background on Social Networks, and explain the results of
their analysis in Section 5. SOCIAL NETWORK
ANALYSIS OF AUTHORSHIPS IN TEMPERATURE RECONSTRUCTIONS): “AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORT ON THE ‘HOCKEY STICK’ GLOBAL
CLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION”, by Edward J. Wegman, George Mason University, David
W. Scott, Rice University, and Yasmin H. Said, The Johns Hopkins University.
(2006) [5]
Laframboise is quoted in: Ball,
Tim (2014-01-17). The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science (Kindle
Locations 2930-2932). Stairway Press. Kindle Edition. [6] Ball, Tim (2014-01-17). The
Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science (Kindle Locations 2966-2976).
Stairway Press. Kindle Edition. [7]
An Inconvenient Truth | From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [8]
From the Sunday Telegraph: “...[N]othing has been more disconcerting... than the
methods used by promoters of the warming cause over the years to plug some of
the glaring holes in their scientific argument. Another example last week was the much-publicised
claim, contradicting all previous evidence, that Antarctica, the coldest
continent, is in fact warming up, Antarctica has long been a major
embarrassment to the warmists. Al Gore and Co may have wanted to scare us
that the continent, which contains 90 per cent of ice on the planet, is
heating up because that would be the source of all the meltwater which they
claim will raise sea levels by 20 feet. However, to provide their pictures of ice-shelves ‘the
size of Texas'’ calving off into the sea, they have had to draw on one tiny
region, the Antarctic Peninsula—the only part that has been warming. The vast
mass of Antarctica, all satellite evidence has shown, has been getting colder
over the past 30 years. Last year’s sea-ice cover was 30 per cent above
average. So it predictably made headlines last week when a new
study, from a team led by Professor Eric Steig, claimed to prove that the
Antarctic has been heating up after all. The usual supporters were called in
to whoop up its historic importance. It was made a cover story by Nature and
heavily promoted by the BBC. This, crowed journalists such as Newsweek's
Sharon Begley, would really be one in the eye for the ‘deniers’ and
‘contrarians.’ But then a good many
experts began to examine just what new evidence had been used to justify this
dramatic finding. It turned out that it was produced by a computer model
based on combining the satellite evidence since 1979 with temperature
readings from surface weather stations. The problem with Antarctica, though, is that has so few
weather stations. So what the computer had been programmed to do, by a
formula not yet revealed, was to estimate the data those missing weather
stations would have come up with if they had existed. In other words, while
confirming that the satellite data have indeed shown the Antarctic as cooling
since 1979, the study relied ultimately on pure guesswork, to show that in
the past 50 years the continent has warmed—by just one degree Fahrenheit. One of the first to express astonishment was Dr Kenneth
Trenberth, a senior scientist with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) and a convinced believer in global warming, who wryly
observed ‘it is hard to make data where none exists.’ A disbelieving Ross
Hayes, an atmospheric scientist who has visited the Antarctic for Nasa, sent
Professor Steig a caustic email ending: ‘With statistics you can make numbers
go to any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific
community do this for media coverage.’ But it was also noticed that among the members of
Steig's team was Michael Mann, author of the ‘hockey stick,’ the most
celebrated of all attempts by the warmists to rewrite the scientific evidence
to promote their cause. The greatest embarrassment for the believers in
man-made global warming is the fact that the world was significantly warmer
in the Middle Ages than now. ‘We must get rid of the Medieval Warm Period,’
as one contributor to the IPCC famously said in an unguarded moment. It was
Dr Mann who duly obliged by getting his computer-model to produce a graph
shaped like a hockey stick, eliminating the medieval warming and showing
recent temperatures curving up to an unprecedented high. This instantly became the warmists’ chief icon, and
made the centrepiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report. But Mann’s selective use of
data and the flaws in his computer model were then so devastatingly torn
apart that it has become the most discredited artefact in the history of
science. The fact that Dr Mann is behind the new study is, alas,
all part of an ongoing pattern. But this will not prevent the paper being
cited ad nauseam by everyone from the BBC to Al Gore. So, regardless of the
science, and until the politicians wake up to how they have been duped, what
threatens to become the most costly flight from reality in history will roll
remorselessly on its way.” SOURCE:
The Sunday Telegraph (United Kingdom); January 25, 2009 Sunday; SCIENTISTS
FIND GAPING HOLES IN POLAR ICE FACTS; by Christopher Booker; 748 words [9]
Plimer, I. (2009). Heaven and
Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science. New York: Taylor Trade
Publishing. (pp 89-98, 482) Ian
Plimer is twice winner of Australia’s highest scientific honor, the Eureka
Prize. He is professor in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at
the University of Adelaide and Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at the
University of Melbourne. He is Australia’s best known geologist. Here follow
lengthy excerpts from his book, with my comments, concerning the independent
analyses of the ‘hockey stick’ graph: [Quote from Heaven and Earth begins here] The methodology of science is such that new data and
the resulting conclusions are critically analyzed, repeated, refined, or
rejected. This ‘hockey stick’ graphic was contrary to conclusions derived
from thousands of studies using boreholes in ice, lakes, rivers and oceans,
glacial deposits, flood deposits, sea level data, soils, volcanoes, wind
blown sand, isotopes, pollen, peat, fossils, cave deposits, agriculture, and
contemporary records. When extraordinary conclusions are made, there needs to
be extraordinary data in support. This is exactly what happened with the Mann study. It
was demolished on the basis of statistics. Two Canadians, Steven McIntyre and
Ross McKitrick, requested the original data from Mann that underpinned his
study. This was like extracting teeth. After much bluster, stonewalling and
hiding behind the veil of confidentiality, the data was provided in dribs and
drabs. The original data set provided for validation and repeatability, a
normal process of science, was incomplete. Because US federal funds had been
used to support Mann’s study, by law the data had to be made available. In
other jurisdictions, it may not be possible to obtain the primary data for
government-supported research. It seemed clear that no reviewer of the Mann et al.
paper in Nature had requested the original data upon which the paper
was based, for otherwise Nature would not have published a paper using
such incomplete data. This is not the place to speculate on whether this was
a lapse in editorial standards or whether Nature was following another
agenda. However, extraordinary conclusions and the dismissal of thousands of
previous scientific studies on the Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age should
have stimulated reviewers and editors of Nature to view the primary
data and calculations as a normal part of scientific due diligence. McIntyre and McKitrick found that the Mann data did not
produce the claimed results: “due to collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or
extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors,
incorrect calculation of principal components and other quality control
defects.” The IPCC used the Mann diagram in 2001 as the central
tool to show that human-induced global warming started in the 20th Century.
It is clear that Mann’s data used to construct the ‘hockey stick’ was
meaningless, that adequate due diligence was not undertaken by the authors,
reviewers and editors. …Mann et al. issued a ‘correction’ later which
admitted that their proxy data contained some errors but ‘none of these
errors affect our previously published results.’ This means that Mann was
quite happy to publish work that he had either not checked or he knew was
wrong. Mann was unable and unprepared to argue against the statistics of
McIntyre and McKitrick and dogmatically stated that he was correct. He did
not address the issue that bristlecone pine growth, his principal data set
for his ‘hockey stick,’ was unrelated to temperature. The ‘hockey stick’ graphic used by the IPCC sent a very
misleading message to the public. Furthermore, the 1996 IPCC report showed
the Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age. Mann’s ‘hockey stick was used in the
IPCC’s 2001 report and the Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age were expunged
from the record of modern climates. In the next IPCC report, the Medieval
Warming and Little Ice Age mysteriously reappeared. This suggests that the IPCC knew that the ‘hockey
stick’ was invalid. This is a withering condemnation of the IPCC. The ‘hockey
stick’ was used as the backdrop for announcements about human-induced climate
change, it is still used by Al Gore, and it is still used in talks, on
websites and in publications by those claiming that the world is getting
warmer due to human activities. Were any of those people who view this
graphic told that the data before 1421 AD was based on just one lonely alpine
pine tree? Mann had not released all his data and calculation
methods to McIntyre and McKitrick, and was reported in public as stating that
he would not be intimidated into disclosing the algorithm by which he
obtained his results. This attracted the interest of the US House Energy and
Commerce Committee. Its members read the McIntyre and McKitrick articles and
became concerned about allegations that Mann had withheld adverse statistical
results and that his results depended upon bristlecone pine ring widths, well
known to be a questionable measure of temperature. In June 2005, they sent
questions to Mann and his co-authors about verification statistics and
bristlecone pines, asked Mann for the algorithm he used, and asked pro
forma questions about federal funds used in their research. This caused a
storm with allegations of intimidation. Various learned societies, none of
which had been offended by Mann’s public refusal to provide full disclosure,
were outraged that a House committee (representing the taxpayers who had paid
for the results) should be trying to find out how Mann derived his results. A turf war started. The House Science Committee felt
its jurisdiction had been impinged upon. After a few months of battles, the
House Science Committee asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to
evaluate criticism of Mann’s work and to assess the larger issue of
historical climate data reconstructions. The NAS agreed but only under terms
that precluded a direct investigation of the issues that prompted the
original dispute – whether Mann et al. had withheld adverse results
and whether the data and methodological information necessary for replication
were available. [Quote from Heaven and Earth ends here] What
happened? The NAS assessment essentially agreed that the Mann et al. study
was deeply flawed: the ‘hockey stick’ was based on bad science. This is not,
however, what the NAS said in the press release, where they suggested
that there was no problem with the Mann et al. Ian Plimer
believes that: [Quote from Heaven and Earth begins here] “In the political heat, it would not have been
politically possible for the NAS to state that the Mann et al. papers
were fraudulent, wrong or biased. This would have unstitched the IPCC.
However, the detailed NAS report shows extensive criticism of the methodology
of Mann and states: “Some of these criticisms are more relevant than
others, but taken together, they are an important aspect of a more general
finding of this committee, which is that uncertainties of the published
reconstructions have been underestimated.” The House Energy and Commerce Committee appointed an
eminent team of statisticians led by Dr. Edward Wegman to investigate. The
conclusions of the Wegman investigation were confirmed by another independent
statistical analysis of Mann’s data. Wegman’s committee had some interesting
statements about the Mann et al. publication. “It is important to note the isolation of the
paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods
they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community.
Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and
results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there
was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent.
Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can
hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility. Overall,
our committee believes that Dr Mann’s assessments that the decade of the
1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest
year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.” It appears that the science of Mann is poorly
communicated. “The papers of Mann et al. in themselves are
written in a confusing manner, making it difficult for the reader to discern
the actual methodology and what uncertainty is actually associated with these
reconstructions. Vague terms such as ‘moderate certainty’ (Mann et al.
1999) give no guidelines to the reader as to how such conclusions should be
weighed. While the works do not have supplementary websites, they rely
heavily on the reader’s ability to piece together the work and methodology
from raw data. This is especially unsettling when the findings of these works
are said to have global impact, yet only a small population could truly
understand them. Thus, it is no surprise that Mann et al. claim a
misunderstanding of their work by McIntyre and McKitrick.” and “In their works, Mann et al. describe the
possible causes of global climate change in terms of atmospheric forcings,
such as anthropogenic, volcanic, or solar forcings. Another questionable
aspect of these works is that linear relationships are assumed in all
forcing-climate relationships. This is a significantly simplified model for
something as complex as the earth’s climate, which most likely has complicated
non-loinear cyclical processes on a multi-centennial scale that we do not yet
understand. Mann et al. also infer that since there is a part6ial
correlation between global mean temperatures in the 20th century and CO2
concentration, greenhouse-gas forcing is the dominant external forcing of the
climate system. Osborn and Briffa make a similar statement, where they
casually note that evidence for warming also occurs at a period where CO2
concentrations are high. A common phrase among statisticians is correlation
does not imply causation. Making conclusive statements without specific
findings with regard to atmospheric forcings suggests a lack of scientific
rigor and possibly an agenda.” and “Specifically, global warming and its potentially
negative consequences have been central concerns of both governments and
individuals. The ‘hockey stick’ graphic dramatically illustrated the global
warming issue and was adopted by the IPCC and many governments as the poster
graphic. The graphic’s prominence together with the fact that it is based on
incorrect use of PCA puts Dr Mann and his co-authors in a difficult
face-saving problem.” The network analysis of Mann and 42 other authors by
Wegman’s statisticians shows diagrammatically how they formed a closed
coterie, who not only co-authored but also refereed each other’s
publications. This phenomenon is, of course, not new, but has never been so
powerful in world affairs. The report finds that: Mann et al. misused certain
statistical methods in their studies which inappropriately produce ‘hockey
stick’ shapes in the temperature history. The claim that the 1990s were the
warmest decade of the millennium could not be substantiated. The cycle of the Medieval Warm Period
and the Little Ice Age disappeared from Mann et al. analysis, thereby
making it possible to make the claim about the hottest decade. A social network analysis revealed
that the small community of paleoclimate researchers appear to review each
other’s work, and reuse many of the same data sets, which calls into question
the independence of peer review and temperature reconstructions. It is clear that many of the proxies
are re-used in most of the papers. It is not surprising that the papers would
obtain similar results and so cannot claim to be independent verifications. Although the researchers rely heavily
on statistical methods, they do not seem to be interacting with the
statistical community. The public policy implications of this debate are
financially staggering and yet apparently no independent statistical
expertise was sought or used. Authors of policy-related science
assessments should not assess their own work. It is especially the case that
authors of policy-related documents like the IPCC report, Climate Change
2001: The Scientific Basis should not be the same people that constructed
the academic papers. Policy-related climate science should have a more
intensive level of scrutiny and review involving statisticians. Federal research should involve
interdisciplinary teams to avoid narrowly focused discipline research. Federal research should emphasise
fundamental understanding of the mechanisms of climate change and should
focus on interdisciplinary teams to avoid narrowly focused discipline
research. While the palaeoclimate reconstruction
has gathered much publicity because it reinforces a policy agenda, it does
not provide insight and understanding of the physical methods of climate
change. The Chairman of the NAS committee was later asked at
the US Senate House Energy and Commerce hearings whether or not the NAS
agreed with Wegman’s harsh criticisms. “Chariman [Joe] Barton: Dr North, do you dispute
the conclusions or the methodology of Dr Wegman’s report? [Quote from Heaven and Earth ends here] Despite
the above, Mann claims that the NAS vindicated him! Now,
are we talking about the honest mistakes of a group of 40 spectacularly
incompetent palaeoclimate scientists who organize around Mann, or are we
talking about deliberate deception? Here is Ian Plimer’s take on this: [Quote from Heaven and Earth begins here] In many fields of science, this would have been
considered as fraud. In many fields of endeavour, Mann would have been struck
off the list of practitioners. In the field of climate studies, he was
thrashed in public with a feather and still gainfully practices his art. Mann
should be grateful for being dealt with in such a gentle manner, given his
rather thuggish behavior in trying to prevent valid criticism being
published. I’m sure St Peter will judge Mann accordingly! A dispassionate reading of Dr Steve McIntyre’s exposure
of Mann shows the systematically dishonest manner in which the ‘hockey stick’
graph was used to show that it was far warmer today than in the Medieval
Warming. This was adopted as the poster child for climate panic by the IPCC
in 2001 and retained in the 2007 report despite having been demolished in the
scientific literature. The original work of McIntyre and McKitrick showing
that Mann et al. were, at best, misleading has been expanded and
independently validated by many others. After reading the history of the
‘hockey stick’ no one could ever again trust the IPCC or the scientists and
environmental extremists who author the climate assessments. The IPCC has
encouraged a collapse of rigour, objectivity, and honesty that were once the
hallmarks of the scientific community. McKitrick stated that had the IPCC
undertaken the kind of rigorous review that they boast of: “they would have discovered that there was an error in
a routine calculation step (principal component analysis) that falsely indentified
a hockey stick shape as the dominant pattern in the data. The flawed computer
program can even pull out spurious hockey stick shapes from lists of
trendless random numbers.” [Quote from Heaven and Earth ends here] [10] “AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORT ON THE
‘HOCKEY STICK’ GLOBAL CLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION”, by Edward J. Wegman, George
Mason University, David W. Scott, Rice University, and Yasmin H. Said, The
Johns Hopkins University. (2006) [11] Here follows the letter Michael Mann
received from the House Subcomittee on Oversight and Investigations, chaired
by Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield: [Text of the letter begins here] June 23, 2005 Dr. Michael Mann Dear Dr. Mann: Questions have been raised, according to a February 14,
2005 article in The Wall Street Journal, about the significance of
methodological flaws and data errors in your studies of the historical record
of temperatures and climate change. We understand that these studies of
temperature proxy records (tree rings, ice cores, corals, etc.) formed the
basis for a new finding in the 2001 United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report (TAR). This finding – that
the increase in 20th century northern hemisphere temperatures is “likely to
have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years” and that
the “1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year” – has since been
referenced widely and has become a prominent feature of the public debate
surrounding climate change policy. However, in recent peer-reviewed articles in Science,
Geophysical Research Letters, and Energy & Environment,
researchers question the results of this work. As these researchers find,
based on the available information, the conclusions concerning temperature
histories – and hence whether warming in the 20th century is actually
unprecedented – cannot be supported by the Mann et al. studies cited in the
TAR. In addition, we understand from the February 14 Journal and these other
reports that researchers have failed to replicate the findings of these
studies, in part because of problems with the underlying data and the
calculations used to reach the conclusions. Questions have also been raised
concerning the sharing and dissemination of the data and methods used to
perform the studies. For example, according to the January 2005 Energy
& Environment, such information necessary to replicate the analyses
in the studies has not been made fully available to researchers upon request. The concerns surrounding these studies reflect upon the
quality and transparency of federally funded research and of the IPCC review
process – two matters of particular interest to the Committee. For example,
one concern relates to whether IPCC review has been sufficiently independent.
We understand that you were a lead author of the IPCC chapter that assessed
and reported your own studies, and that two study co-authors were also
contributing authors to this very same chapter. Given the prominence these
studies were accorded in the IPCC TAR and your position and role in that
process, we seek to learn more about the facts and circumstances that led to
acceptance and prominent use of this work in the IPCC TAR and to understand
what this controversy indicates about the data quality of key IPCC studies. As you know, sharing data and research results is a
basic tenet of open scientific inquiry, providing a means to judge the
reliability of scientific claims. The ability to replicate a study, as the
National Research Council has noted, is typically the gold standard by which
the reliability of claims is judged. Given the questions reported about data
access surrounding these studies, we also seek to learn whether obligations
concerning the sharing of information developed or disseminated with federal
support have been appropriately met. In light of the Committee’s jurisdiction over energy
policy and certain environmental issues, the Committee must have full and
accurate information when considering matters relating to climate change
policy. We open this review because this dispute surrounding your studies
bears directly on important questions about the federally funded work upon
which climate studies rely and the quality and transparency of analyses used
to support the IPCC assessment process. With the IPCC currently working to
produce a fourth assessment report, addressing questions of quality and
transparency in the process and underlying analyses supporting that
assessment, both scientific and economic, are of utmost importance if
Congress is eventually going to make policy decisions drawing from this work. To assist us as we begin this review, and pursuant to
Rules X and XI of the U.S. House of Representatives, please provide the
following information requested below on or before July 11, 2005: 1. Your curriculum vitae, including, but not limited
to, a list of all studies relating to climate change research for which you
were an author or co-author and the source of funding for those studies. 2. List all financial support you have received related
to your research, including, but not limited to, all private, state, and
federal assistance, grants, contracts (including subgrants or subcontracts),
or other financial awards or honoraria. 3. Regarding all such work involving federal grants or
funding support under which you were a recipient of funding or principal
investigator, provide all agreements relating to those underlying grants or
funding, including, but not limited to, any provisions, adjustments, or
exceptions made in the agreements relating to the dissemination and sharing
of research results. 4. Provide the location of all data archives relating
to each published study for which you were an author or co-author and
indicate: (a) whether this information contains all the specific data you
used and calculations your performed, including such supporting documentation
as computer source code, validation information, and other ancillary
information, necessary for full evaluation and application of the data,
particularly for another party to replicate your research results; (b) when
this information was available to researchers; (c) where and when you first
identified the location of this information; (d) what modifications, if any,
you have made to this information since publication of the respective study;
and (e) if necessary information is not fully available, provide a detailed
narrative description of the steps somebody must take to acquire the
necessary information to replicate your study results or assess the quality
of the proxy data you used. 5. According to The Wall Street Journal, you
have declined to release the exact computer code you used to generate your
results. (a) Is this correct? (b) What policy on sharing research and methods
do you follow? (c) What is the source of that policy? (d) Provide this exact
computer code used to generate your results. 6. Regarding study data and related information that is
not publicly archived, what requests have you or your co-authors received for
data relating to the climate change studies, what was your response, and why? 7. The authors McIntyre and McKitrick (Energy &
Environment, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2005) report a number of errors and omissions in
Mann et. al., 1998. Provide a detailed narrative explanation of these alleged
errors and how these may affect the underlying conclusions of the work,
including, but not limited to answers to the following questions: a. Did you run calculations without the bristlecone
pine series referenced in the article and, if so, what was the result? b. Did you or your co-authors calculate temperature
reconstructions using the referenced “archived Gaspe tree ring data,” and
what were the results? c. Did you calculate the R2 statistic for the
temperature reconstruction, particularly for the 15th Century proxy record
calculations and what were the results? d. What validation statistics did you calculate for the
reconstruction prior to 1820, and what were the results? e. How did you choose particular proxies and proxy
series? 8. Explain in detail your work for and on behalf of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including, but not limited to: (a)
your role in the Third Assessment Report; (b) the process for review of
studies and other information, including the dates of key meetings, upon
which you worked during the TAR writing and review process; (c) the steps
taken by you, reviewers, and lead authors to ensure the data underlying the
studies forming the basis for key findings of the report were sound and
accurate; (d) requests you received for revisions to your written
contribution; and (e) the identity of the people who wrote and reviewed the
historical temperature-record portions of the report, particularly Section
2.3, “Is the Recent Warming Unusual?” Thank you for your assistance. If you have any
questions, please contact Peter Spencer of the Majority Committee staff at
(202) 226-2424. Sincerely, Joe
Barton
Ed Whitfield Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations cc: The Honorable John Dingell, Ranking Member [Text of letter ends here] SOURCE: US House of Representatives. [ NOTE: The above page no longer exists, but
the Way Back Machine, an Internet Archive, has stored an image of what the
page contained on 3 February 2008, when I accessed it. To see this archive’s
image, go to: http://archive.org/web/
and then cut and paste the above link into its search engine. ] [12]
ES ‘FALSO’ QUE EL CO2 CAUSE EL
CALENTAMIENTO: Un miembro del IPCC destapa la ‘gran mentira’ del cambio
climático; Libertad Digital; 1 de octubre, 2008 You may read Vincent Gray’s exposé
here: THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC):
SPINNING THE CLIMATE; by Vincent Gray [13]
“Climategate U-turn as scientist
at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995”; DAILY
MAIL; By Jonathan Petre; 14th February 2010 [14]
An Open Letter to Dr. Phil Jones
of the UEA CRU; Posted on November 27, 2011; by Willis Eschenbach [15] “THE TRUTH ABOUT 'Climategate'; Hacked e-mails have compromised scientists--but not the science itself”; Newsweek; December 14, 2009; U.S. Edition; By Sharon Begley; SECTION: ENVIRONMENT; Pg. 64 Vol. 154 No. 24 [16] The Economist; November 28, 2009 U.S. Edition; “Mail-strom; Climate change”; SECTION: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY; 1440 words; HIGHLIGHT: The climate-change e-mail controversy. [17] “SURFACE TEMPERATURE RECORDS: POLICY
DRIVEN DECEPTION?”; Science and Public Policy Institute; January 7, 2010; by
Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts; pp.4-7, 33. http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/ [18]
Ball, Tim (2014-01-17). The
Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science (Kindle Locations 2951-2958).
Stairway Press. Kindle Edition. [19]
http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/june/nasa-names-schmidt-director-of-the-goddard-institute-for-space-studies/
[20]
HEARING OF THE OVERSIGHT AND
INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE ENERGY AND COMMERCE COMMITTEE
SUBJECT: QUESTIONS SURROUNDING THE HOCKEY STICK TEMPERATURE STUDIES:
IMPLICATIONS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE ASSESSMENTS CHAIRED BY: REPRESENTATIVE ED
WHITFIELD (R-KY) WITNESSES: DR. MICHAEL E. MANN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AND DIRECTOR
EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE CENTER, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY; DR. RALPH J.
CICERONE, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; DR. JAY GULLEDGE, SENIOR
RESEARCH FELLOW, PEW CENTER ON GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE; DR. JOHN R. CHRISTY,
PROFESSOR AND DIRECTOR, EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE CENTER, NSSTC, UNIVERSITY OF
ALABAMA IN HUNTSVILLE; STEPHEN MCINTYRE, TORONTO, CANADA; DR. EDWARD J.
WEGMAN, DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR COMPUTATIONAL STATISTICS, GEORGE MASON
UNIVERSITY LOCATION: 2322 RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C. |
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