Category — Climategate

Editor’s note: Bradley’s op-ed appeared in the December 8th Washington Times under the title “Alarmists Cold-Shoulder Facts”)

Facts are awfully stubborn things. And global-warming alarmists—who generally don’t let facts get in the way of a good, agenda-driven argument—recently lost a key ally in the run-up to the U.N. global-warming pep rally opening today in Copenhagen. They lost actual data supporting their claims.

In defiant acts of desperation, many out-of-the-mainstream environmental alarmists quickly moved to plan B. Some cite the current El Niño—a natural climate variation—warning of “record” high temperatures just on the horizon.

Others continue to trumpet “studies” that paint terrifying environmental fairy tales if world governments do not immediately criminalize carbon, ban fossil fuels, and ration energy.

But these tactics are not new. Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” of the 1960s predicted food riots in the United States and around the world. Today, obesity is a bigger problem.

Remember the Club of Rome’s 1972 prediction of resource exhaustion? Fifty-seven predictions were made regarding 19 minerals, and all either have been proved false or will be.

Perhaps most hypocritical is the global-cooling scare promoted by, among others, Mr. Obama’s science czar, John Holdren. Today, Mr. Holdren says a billion people may perish from global warming by 2020.

It’s understandable why public opinion continues to squarely reject the apocalyptic vision of climate change. In Washington, pragmatic politicians of both parties balk at even watered-down proposals to cap greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that will bring higher energy costs and more government control.

There simply is not an appetite for this social-engineering project. And despite the dire warnings of an intellectual cadre, the public is getting it right. The Earth’s average temperature is virtually unchanged from a dozen years ago—a result not predicted by climate modelers or activists.

The rate of sea-level rise has slowed to a crawl, throwing cold water on ice-melting scares. Global hurricane activity is near a 30-year low. Fatalities from tornadoes across the United States this year are on course to be the lowest in more than a decade. (Yes, some scientists link global warming to tornadoes.) In 2009, much of the Midwest and Northeast shivered through the coldest summer in recent memory. [Read more →]

[see bottom of post for an update]

Steve McIntyre, chief blogger and workhorse at the blog ClimateAudit, has a recent post which is grabbing a lot of attention across the web and being trumpeted by some as a triumphant unmasking of the fraudulent behavior in the preparation of the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR).

Science/science policy blogger Roger Pielke Jr. covers Steve’s post, with a post of his own, under the title The “Trick” in Context. However, I think the post should more accurately have been titled The “Trick” in “Context.” For the “context” is one supplied by Steve McIntyre. My read of the relevant emails surrounding the incident in question doesn’t lead me to the same conclusions as Steve.

Context must be supplied in this case. For as anyone who has looked through any of the leaked/stolen Climategate emails (available here) quickly realizes, most of the email threads are not complete from start to finish, and, as is typical of most conversations, they assume the participants already know a lot of what is being discussed, including the context. To outside parties peering in, often the context must be derived, inferred, or guessed at.

The topic in question has to do with development of the discussion and graphics to be included in the paleoclimate section of Chapter 2 of the IPCC’s TAR. (The IPCC has since published its Fourth Assessment Report [AR4], which dedicates an entire chapter to paleoclimate rather than a brief section of a single chapter.) The discussion taking place in the emails highlighted by McIntyre is about what the best scientific understanding (at the time) of what the earth’s temperature behavior was during periods that pre-date the widespread direct temperature measurements made by thermometers (in this case, the past 1,000 years or so).

This is relevant to the issue of anthropogenic climate change because quantifying the degree of “natural” variability of the earth’s temperature helps to understand how unusual our current warmth might be. To some people, it is also important because they want to use it to try to argue that the earth’s temperature has gotten to be as high as it is now solely because of natural process. But this view is almost certainly wrong.

The Temperature ‘Trick’ Revisited

McIntyre has dedicated a phenomenal amount of time and energy into trying to decipher just how paleoclimate researchers have come to assemble their millennial temperature reconstructions—which are necessarily built upon uncertain data, relationships, and interactions—and then trying to determine whether the methods (and thus the ultimate results) are robust. [Read more →]

Roger Pielke Sr. is a well respected climatologist and professor. His blog is a top go-to place on the Internet for those searching for the happy middle of the contentious climate-change debate. (His son, Roger Pielke, Jr., also has a must-read blog for Climategate students.)

Here at MasterResource, Chip Knappenberger covers climate science. Knappenberger is skeptical of ultra-skepticism and trenchantly challenges exaggerated science in the service of climate alarmism.

In this tradition, I recently read a very interesting post on Pielke senior’s blog, titled “Three Distinctly Different Climate Science   Perspectives,” that is worth sharing with MasterResource readers. Here is what he wrote, and my critical comment is at the end.

There needs to be recognition that there are three distinctly different viewpoints with respect to the extent that humans alter the climate system.

(This subject is discussed in our paper: Pielke Sr. et al., Climate change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413.

I have listed the three viewpoints below: [Read more →]

A powerful argument against climate alarmism is the failed worldview of modern neo-Malthusianism, which has promoted fear after fear with an intolerant, smartest-guys-in-the-room mentality. Remember the “population bomb” where many millions would die in food riots? Well, obesity turned out to be the real problem.

Remember the Club of Rome’s resource scare? In 1972, 57 predictions of exhaustion were made regarding 19 different minerals. All either have been falsified or will be.

Remember the global-cooling scare promoted by, among others, the Obama administration’s science czar, John Holdren? (Yes, global cooling was a big deal, although it was not a “consensus.”)

And all of the above doom merchants were uber-confident and still are loath to admit they were ever wrong. Holdren, for example, is sticking to his prediction that as many as one billion people could die by 2020 from (man-made) climate change. That’s about ten years, folks.

Climategate/Climate McCarthyism

Now to today. Error and intolerance rule in the global warming scare. Read the flaming emails from the principals of Climategate. Read about Joseph “Climate McCarthyism” Romm by his critics on the Left.  Read the latest from (non-Climategater) Michael Schlesinger, who lost his cool against New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin.

And of course there is John Holdren, now science advisor to President Obama, who said this to me when I asked him to critically review my essay evaluating his 2003 criticism of Bjorn Lomborg, “The Heated Energy Debate.”  Holdren responded:

What exactly entitles you to the evidently self-applied label of ‘energy expert’?  …. You are of course entitled to (verbally) attack me in any legal way you like, but please don’t then pretend in personal notes to me that we are colleagues, each doing our best to get at the truth…. [Y]ou appear to be … lacking both discernible qualifications in the real world and the ability to tell a good argument from a bad one. I want nothing further to do with you.

A strange intellectual dude.

Remember Julian Simon

Today’s Climategate is predictable with some of the same players at work–and many new ones as well. Remember how Paul R. Ehrlich treated his intellectual rival Julian Simon? The Stanford University biologist refused to debate Simon or even meet him in person. He insulted Simon repeatedly in print. Ehrlich even scolded Science magazine for publishing Simon’s 1980 breakthrough essay “Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of Bad News,” with the words: “Could the editors have found someone to review Simon’s manuscript who had to take off this shoes to count to 20?” (quoted in Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource II, 1996, p. 612). [Read more →]

But even if the IPCC’s iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm….The potential (and only the potential) for alarm enters with the issue of climate sensitivity—which refers to the change that a doubling of CO2 will produce in [global mean temperatures]. –Richard Lindzen, Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2009

Defenders of the IPCC position on climate science have adopted different strategies in dealing with the scandal of the CRU emails and computer code.  Some authoritative voices, notably Judy Curry, have engaged in dialog with skeptics and have reassured PhD students that the “tribalism” revealed in the CRU emails has no place in science.

On the other hand, another very common reaction has been to mock the “deniers” for taking certain phrases out of context. This circle-the-wagons strategy tries to convince the public that the CRU episode has absolutely no bearing on the actual science, and that at worst it reveals petty personality flaws. This spin is epitomized in sarcastic pieces which take on the voice of the “deniers” and claim that the laws of physics are all a socialist hoax too.

These defenses are self-evidently absurd to anyone who has read the actual CRU emails in question. The public’s faith in the sacrosanct “peer-review process” will be understandably shaken when they read just how this “consensus” was enforced. Furthermore, the real debate was not between ultra-skeptics who say “global warming is a hoax” versus professional climate scientists who say “anthropogenic climate change is real.” [Read more →]

In science, as in most disciplines, the process is as important as the product. The recent email/data release (aka Climategate) has exposed the process of scientific peer-review as failing. If the process is failing, it is reasonable to wonder what this implies about the product.

Several scientists have come forward to express their view on what light Climategate has shed on these issues. Judith Curry has some insightful views here and here, along with associated comments and replies. Roger Pielke Jr. has an opinion, as no doubt do many others.

Certainly a perfect process does not guarantee perfect results, and a flawed process does not guarantee flawed results, but the chances of a good result are much greater with the former than the latter. That’s why the process was developed in the first place.

Briefly, the peer-review process is this; before results are published in the scientific literature and documented for posterity, they are reviewed by one or more scientists who have some working knowledge of the topic but who are not directly associated with the work under consideration. The reviewers are typically anonymous and basically read the paper to determine if it generally seems like a reasonable addition to the scientific knowledge base, and that the results seem reproducible given the described data and methodology.

Generally, reviewers do not “audit” the results—that is, spend a lot of effort untangling the details of the data and or methodologies to see if they are appropriate, or to try to reproduce the results for themselves. How much time and effort is put into a peer review varies greatly from case to case and reviewer to reviewer. On most occasions, the reviewers try to include constructive criticism that will help the authors improve their work—that is, the reviewers serve as another set of eyes and minds to look over and consider the research, eyes that are more removed from the research than the co-authors and can perhaps offer different insights and suggestions.

Science most often moves forwards in small increments (with a few notable exceptions) and the peer-review process is designed to keep it moving efficiently, with as little back-sliding or veering off course as possible.

It is not a perfect system, nor, do I think, was it ever intended to be.

The guys over at RealClimate like to call peer-review a “necessary but not sufficient condition.”

Certainly is it not sufficient. But increasingly, there are indications that its necessity is slipping—and the contents of the released Climategate emails are hastening that slide. [Read more →]