'The very opposite of intellectual totalitarianism'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 26, 2010 at 1:09 AM - 168 Comments

Maxime Bernier considers the reaction to his comments on climate change and rallies his supporters.

This is why it is so important to have an open and balanced public debate. This is the very opposite of the intellectual totalitarianism of those who would like to stamp out every dissident voice.

As I said in my Calgary speech some weeks ago, we should be the lobby of the silent majority, this majority which is not represented by the interest groups that we hear about all the time in public debates, but who will pay for the policies being adopted in the end. I encourage all those who feel concerned by this question to make themselves heard, either by leaving a comment on this blog, writing to your elected officials or to newspapers. Thank you to those who’ve done it. I can assure you that you are having an impact.

'I totally support my government'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 1:49 AM - 65 Comments

Maxime Bernier posts some of his interview with La Presse.

Question: Should the scandals involving the IPCC serve as a reason for the Canadian government to abstain from doing anything until we know more about the issue?

Answer: I quoted Prof Patterson who said this. I believe however it would be unrealistic to do nothing, for many obvious political reasons. My position is that we should be cautious instead of ambitious when tackling this issue. That’s why I totally support my government, which has shown caution even if it brought us criticism and condemnations from environmental activists.

Bernier, uncut

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 4:59 PM - 35 Comments

CBC has the unedited version of the letter Maxime Bernier sent to La Presse.

Data from tree rings in the forests even show some cooling; that’s why they were replaced by temperatures considered more accurate from meteorological stations in the IPCC graphs. This is what the famous quote about the trick “to hide the decline” by British researcher Phil Jones, which created such controversy during the “Climategate” episode, refers to.

For whatever it is worth, here is Time magazine’s primer on the so-called Climategate emails.

Populism, tea parties, constitutions, climate change

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, January 9, 2010 at 6:49 AM - 109 Comments

Does the U.S. face a period of indiscriminate populism in its political life? New York Times columnist David Brooks thinks so:

Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year. The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

…The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.

When I got to end of the column I said to myself, “Okay, so Brooks thinks the financial crisis has created a general crisis in social authority.” But look closely: Brooks doesn’t actually mention the financial crisis or the recession at all. He provides a prediction without a shred of diagnosis. He doesn’t, technically, get beyond mentioning a “sour mood” in pinpointing the reasons for populist reaction.

I don’t know that his story holds up. Is opposition to abortion stronger in the United States now than it was in, say, 1982? There are a lot of evangelical Tea Partiers, but what appears to make the Tea Partiers different from the old Moral Majority is precisely the lack of shared religious premises. The premise is, “Get off our backs.” The movement is an instinctual, angry resistance to political engineering by centralized, distant authority, whether it’s the engineering of communities, individuals, or small businesses.

To a first approximation it looks libertarian. It’s actually subsidiarist: it’s against big central authority because it is big and central, not because it’s authority. Procedurally, a lot of libertarians are practical subsidiarists on the grounds that this is the best way of broadly guaranteeing liberty. Small local authorities have natural limits to their power (they can’t become totalitarian), they can be shamed by comparison to immediate neighbours, and they are easier to vote against with one’s feet. But subsidiarism should not be confused with libertarianism or classical liberalism. They are, to some degree, orthogonal quantities.

And in some ways they are inherently in tension with one another. In the U.S. context (and in ours), some federal interventions, Roe v. Wade being an obvious example, are designed to protect the individual from her community. The essential comic heart of all American politics, beating loudly in the breasts of every Tea Partier, is that the U.S. Constitution is the big, centralized, dumb, unconditional, non-local authority to end all such authorities—a personal guarantee, to every living soul from sea to sea, of liberal republican government whether he likes it or not. The Constitution is often considered to have the stamp of divinity upon it, and is spoken of that way even by people who may not literally believe such a thing; and every party cites the Constitution (leaning on its spirit or its letter, as the occasion requires) against every other, just as opposition parties in monarchies used to argue that the king needed “rescuing” from his evil advisors.

(Don’t snicker too loudly, by the way: Canada shall end up that way before too long. We have already seen our Charter of Rights dissociated from the modest, limited intentions of its framers, some of whom are still alive, and cited against them. The document is acquiring a nimbus of divinity before our eyes.)

Anyway, what was I talking about? Right, David Brooks. He raises the interesting possibility, though tacitly, that the economic train wreck of 2008-09 may have helped promote or dignify climate-change doubt. Politicians and policymakers, listening carefully to the best advice of a consensus of accredited experts and considering the implications, led us headlong into a bramble of bad mortgages and crazy debt-commoditization instruments over the objections of a few commonsensical skeptics. But don’t worry: when it comes to the climate, those same educated people are really really sure they’re right!

There are all kinds of reasons laymen should beware of making a connection like this, but some certainly are. To the degree that the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is a product of “hard science”, that science does not deserve to be compared to macroeconomics, where first principles are still poorly confirmed and subject to wide disagreement. “Hard science” is, in general, the most successful intellectual project in the history of the species. On the other hand, there’s hard and then there’s hard. AGW actually involves a chain of propositions ranging on the “hardness” scale from stainless steel to porridge, it can only be as strong at most as the weakest of those propositions, and any practical policy recommendation concerning AGW inherently involves another layer of goopy softness. There is also the problem that the “hard science” reaches us largely through summaries and reports concocted, and perhaps distorted (consciously or otherwise), by the politicians and policymakers at the front line of the process.

The science-media-politics network (I sound like a Tea Partier calling it that, I guess) deserves trust: it has helped bring us out of a world of hookworm, typhoid, and killer smogs. It also had us eating trans-fatty margarine instead of butter in the name of health for 20 years, waiting in terror for a North American heterosexually-transmitted AIDS epidemic that never turned up, and gulping Vioxx like candy. In other words, what we have is a good old-fashioned Hegelian dialectic: we forget very easily how much “expert” scientific knowledge invisibly enhances every hour of our lives, and yet “experts” working at the margins of established knowledge do sometimes grow overconfident and execute pratfalls. This, I guess, brings us only as far as where Andrew Coyne already started out.

The truth is out there. Somewhere.

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, January 7, 2010 at 11:05 AM - 495 Comments

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t . . .
We will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! . . .
If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I’ll delete the file rather than send it to anyone . . .

And so on. Since their release last November, the famous hacked emails from scientists in the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia have provided a rich source of such incriminating phrases. Participants, including some of the leading figures in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), discuss how to prevent skeptics from publishing in peer-reviewed journals, plot to destroy or suppress the raw data underlying their studies, suggest ways to massage the figures for better effect, and generally carry on in a tone more evocative of the “war room” than the common room.

To many, the emails offer disturbing evidence that a number of prominent climatologists have crossed the line, from science into activism. It is clear they view dissenters, not as critics to be engaged, but enemies to be beaten. But in fact there is a more fundamental problem at work: a breakdown of trust between scientists and large sections of the lay public.

Continue…

The emperor’s new carbon credits

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 218 Comments

For a small country, Denmark sure attracts a lot of attention. A Chicago Muslim, David Headley, was recently arrested at O’Hare International Airport en route to Copenhagen to kill the commissioning editor and artists of the Danish Muhammad cartoons. Alas, a far bigger group flying in to Copenhagen for a massive suicide bombing were permitted to board their flights: these were the jet-setting bigwigs of the climate-change circuit en route to Denmark to blow up the global economy and individual liberty in order to get back to paradise and enjoy their reward of 72 virgin-growth forests.

Both the radical Islam of David Headley and the Church of Settled Science of David Suzuki seem almost parodic responses to the hollowness of the modern multicultural West and the search for alternative, globalized identities. Indeed, it is hard to say which is wackier. Take Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Prince of Wales. One’s a millenarian apocalyptic loon, and the other’s president of Iran. On balance, widening the streets of Tehran for the imminent return of the Twelfth Imam seems marginally less deranged than insisting the planet is doomed in 96 months unless humanity abandons the evils of capitalism and “the age of convenience.” (This from a man who has never drawn his own curtains.)

Ah, well. When I compare the eco-cultists to the humourless fanatics of the jihad, I get barraged by stern emails denouncing me as a “denier.” Apostate! And Mr. Suzuki wants deniers jailed. Call the Inquisition! Continue…

Oh boy. Here we go.

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 119 Comments

My profile for dead-tree Maclean’s of Steve McIntyre, Canada’s amateur critic of mainstream climate science, has hit the web at a moment when the temperature outside my door is -36°C. I am firmly resisting the temptation to see any providential message in this. The piece was written and edited with the intention that it would be of interest to readers no matter what their beliefs about man-made climate change. It contains a short argument for McIntyre’s importance, but if you are convinced he’s a charlatan or a bungler, think of it as a sincere effort to tell you what kind of charlatan or bungler he is. As far as I am aware, it is the first profile of McIntyre, of even medium length, that anyone in Canada has ventured to write.

Centre of the storm

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 8:56 AM - 302 Comments

The private emails and logs leaked last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia can’t tell us whether industrial activity is really heating the earth’s atmosphere and endangering civilization. But they have settled the identity of the Great Satan of climate science. Torontonian Stephen McIntyre, a gentle, persistent amateur who had no credentials in applied science before stepping into the global warming debate in 2003, is mentioned more than 100 times.

In the emails, leading climate researchers dismiss him as a capitalist hireling or a hapless “bozo,” and argue about the relative merits of ignoring him versus counterattacking him, even as others acknowledge that his criticisms have merit and imitate his use of the Web as a venue for hyper-detailed scientific discussion. At one point in 2005, CRU director Phil Jones, now under suspension, ponders the possibility that McIntyre might use U.K. freedom-of-information laws to obtain raw weather-station data compiled by the CRU. He grumbles: “I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.” The overall impression is that of 100 elephants stampeding in confusion and panic around a mouse.

The political stakes are now so high when it comes to the “Climategate” scandal, and motives are being questioned so loudly on both sides, that few are noticing the remarkable story at the heart of it all: a 62-year-old mining executive and squash enthusiast has, for better or worse, found his way into the centre of a major scientific melée—almost by accident—and been able to make legitimate contributions. Continue…

Norwich, we still have a problem

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 9:06 AM - 357 Comments

Laymen who have understandably decided to accept what much of the media now treats as axiomatic–that humans are causing potentially catastrophic global warming–must now be suffering some anxiety over the leaked e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit. Is an opinion leader like George Monbiot right to view this as a serious matter, or should they believe the reassurances of somebody like, say, Toronto Star environment columnist Peter Gorrie?

I ask solely as a matter of media-consumer interest, because, realistically, what Gorrie writes doesn’t matter to a climate-change skeptic, or to anyone with the time and the quantitative training to follow a scientific debate on his own. It matters to the guy on the subway who avoided Stats 101 as if it had horns and fangs, and that guy is now getting conflicting signals. I presume Gorrie would agree that his job is not just to confirm that reader’s prejudices–though people do like having their prejudices confirmed, and any argument a columnist can make will confirm somebody’s.

Like other columnists covering the CRU leak, Gorrie zooms in on just one “example” from the e-mails; although the etymology and sound of that word “example” would seem to imply some element of randomness in the selection, many of these columnists are choosing the same e-mail, because it contains an apparent faux pas that is relatively easy to explain away:

In one email, the research unit’s director, Phil Jones, refers to work by another scientist, Michael Mann, published in the journal Nature: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series … from 1961 … to hide the decline.”

“Trick” doesn’t refer to sleight of hand; it’s jargon for a good, useful solution to a research problem. The problem in question relates to the fact that one method used to estimate temperatures over centuries – measuring tree rings – doesn’t give good recent results. But actual observations, the “real temps,” were available.

It’s much easier to understand “scandal” than even that simplified explanation.

He’s right about the word “trick.” Scientists do use the word to describe simple solutions to sincere research problems. It does not, on its own, imply deception. The real problem with the Jones e-mail is the part about “hiding the decline.” The issue, really, is right there in Gorrie’s paragraph: tree rings appear to have serious problems as a means of inferring global surface temperatures from before human records were kept. As an abstract of the Briffa study Jones was discussing notes:

…tree-ring density records become de-coupled from temperature after 1950, possibly due to some large-scale human influence that caused wood densities to decline. Thus, the reconstructed temperature record after 1960 is considered unreliable.

Jones’ “trick” was to graft observed temperature data from after 1960 onto a line showing temperatures merely inferred from tree rings. If you just reported the tree-ring data straight-up, they would suggest that the earth has cooled since 1960, which conflicts with what we know was happening (assuming there are no biases in the temperature observations, but that’s another battleground several miles away).

In one sense you could argue that this is a “trick” in the innocent meaning of the term, a real answer to a real problem: Jones only meant to “hide” a presumptively nonexistent “decline”. But an ordinary person looking at a graph doesn’t expect the underlying data to be spliced together from two different sources if the point of the graph is to highlight what one source (the tree rings) tells us. Moreover, the divergence between the predictions of the tree-ring model and real post-1960 temperatures is a legitimate problem in paleoclimate reconstruction. (“Some large-scale human influence” on “wood densities”? Oh, hell, what about the fairy hypothesis? Couldn’t woodland sprites have sprinkled magic dust on those trees?)

In “hiding the decline”, Jones was thus proposing to “hide” a weakness in the research itself. IPCC peer reviewers squawked about this “hiding” when it was done in another way, by simply cutting off the data at 1960. As a matter of scientific ethics, Jones’s “trick” sucks. Though it’s still probably not one of the four or five most ethically troubling statements in the leaked CRU e-mails, even considering just the ones made by Jones.

Gorrie could have minimized the offence in dealing with this cherry-picked example of malfeaseance; instead, he handwaved it away completely. But then there’s a lot of handwaving in this column, like the obnoxious complaint that environmental reporters are being asked to “parse e-mails” (which, as described above, he goes on to do in a tendentious, half-hearted way) instead of “focusing on the evidence of human-made climate change”. As if the debate over the CRU e-mails was anything other than an argument about the provenance and quality of the most important body of a posteriori evidence for human-made climate change.

Gorrie also says, sympathetically, that climate scientists “resent having to respond to skeptics.” Well, who the hell doesn’t? That’s like saying that prosecutors resent the threat of having unfairly acquired evidence excluded from the courtroom, or that ballplayers resent the danger of getting picked off first base. They can resent it all they like, but it’s there in the rules of the game, for good reasons. Q: What do you call a scientist who can’t accept criticism from “skeptics”? A: Anything you like, as long as it’s not “scientist”.

Notes on a climate-research scandal

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 12:22 PM - 274 Comments

The responses to the leaked emails from the climate-change research centre at the University of East Anglia typically come in two modes. First, there’s the deliberate pose of high-minded innocence (“I’m shocked that scientists would behave this way”). Second, there’s the heavy sigh of the world-weary cynic (“How could anyone be shocked that scientists would behave this way?”).  James Taranto of the WSJ is an example of the former;  Colleague Cosh’s post is an example of the latter.

I’m not super-comfortable with either pose. It strikes me (this is an ungainly analogy but you can sort of see where I’m going) as no different from the two schoolboys who find out the high school princess they worship from afar is sleeping around. “I can’t believe she’s a whore”, says one. “I always knew she was a whore,” says the other. They don’t agree on anything except that the object of their eternal frustration is, indeed, a whore.  And so it is with wondrous glee that both the innocents and the cynics have come to discover that a group of climate researchers have been revealed as nothing but scientific prostitutes, selling their brains to eco-pornographers like Al Gore and David Suzuki.

There are two main issues here, the political and sociological questions (of both the internal politics of academia, and how academia relates to politics) and the substantive question of what it all means for the facts about the climate. I’m more qualified to talk about the first set of questions than the second. Continue…

Norwich, we have a problem

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 3:28 PM - 427 Comments

I can’t say I am spectacularly surprised at the emerging scandal over private e-mails obtained from the servers of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which is at the heart of the process that produces IPCC reports on climate change. Some of the controversial practices revealed by the leaked e-mail corpus, such as fidgeting with visual presentations of statistics in order to make them as impressive and sensational as possible, are just evil habits that nonetheless form part of the standard operating procedure of applied science. But others—ignoring requests for data sets from one’s scientific adversaries, playing politics with scientific editorial boards, denouncing criticisms as not being peer-reviewed while working behind the scenes to ensure that those same criticisms are shut out of the peer-reviewed literature—were already known parts of the climate-panic industry’s playbook.

The CRU e-mails, whose veracity has so far held up to intense worldwide scrutiny and been generally confirmed by the University of East Anglia, reveal top IPCC contributors to be supercilious, inquisitorial, paranoid, nasty, thuggish, hypocritical, and, in general, trapped in an echo chamber of very modest dimension. If you didn’t already have a sense that all of this was true, you haven’t been paying close enough attention to the debate.

If, on the other hand, you instinctively think that “Climategate” isn’t going to be a big deal in the long run, I would suggest contemplating the very earliest reactions of the climatology nerds at ClimateAudit.org, the global-warming skepticism site edited by Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre (who is mentioned dozens if not hundreds of times in the CRU e-mails as a particularly intractable bête noire). In the hours immediately after the CRU leak, many members of the Climate Audit community, confronted with evidence of malfeasance and scumbaggery by the scientists who have been attacking skeptics as lunatics and astroturfers for two decades, at first reacted with… well, skepticism. And, in some cases, even sorrow. Sample quotes from the comment thread:

• An ideological hacker smart enough to hack CRU is smart enough to manufacture a bombshell or two and seed it amongst the rest of the data. Treat “too good to be true” material with a lot of caution initially from such a source.
• Folks I would run, not walk, away from this as quickly as possible. To think they would be stupid enough to not cover their tracks on this is not credible IMO. While parts are likely real, some could be added as embellishments meant to create the furor it is already creating in the skeptic community. Let’s not make any judgements on the authenticity until we are sure what we have here is real and not a plant.
• I find this really quite shocking and distrubing. I mean it is one thing to think that such subversion is going on; it is quite another thing – if this is all undoctored – to read it. I don’t know whether to be elated (as a skeptic) or a little sad that this will reflect badly on science regardless.
• …I have concerns like others that this entire archive may be a “spiked” version of an otherwise legitimate (hacked) archive …but much of my concern is driven by the fact that I assume that things can’t be this blatant.

More such examples could be cited. The point is that the skeptics suspected the contents of the CRU leak were too “good”—that is, too damaging to the cause of the global warming hypothesis and the IPCC—to be true. It now seems nearly certain that they are true. Under the circumstances, what George Monbiot calls “climate rationalists” can hardly maintain a posture of indifference and dismissiveness. Monbiot himself, displaying a courageous spirit of openness that his critics may not have anticipated, has been arguing as much: but voices of agreement on his side of the debate are so few that he admits “I have seldom felt so alone.”