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…

The ‘science’ of global warming

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 341 Comments

“The gravest challenge that we face is climate change . . . Every one of our compatriots must feel concerned”—Nicolas Sarkozy, president of the French Republic;

“The climate crisis threatens our very survival”—Herman Van Rompuy, “president” of “Europe”;

“We cannot compromise with the catastrophe of unchecked climate change”—Gordon Brown, prime minister of the United Kingdom;

“Generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children . . . this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”—Barack Obama, president of the United States.

The science is so settled it’s now perfectly routine for leaders of the developed world to go around sounding like apocalyptic madmen of the kind that used to wander the streets wearing sandwich boards and handing out homemade pamphlets. Governments that are incapable of—to pluck at random—enforcing their southern border, reducing waiting times for routine operations to below two years, or doing something about the nightly ritual of car-torching “youths,” are nevertheless taken seriously when they claim to be able to change the very heavens—if only they can tax and regulate us enough. As they will if they reach “consensus” at Copenhagen. And most probably even if they don’t.

How did we reach this point? Ah, well. Like the proverbial sausage factory, you never want to look too closely at how the science gets settled. The other day, a whole bunch of electronic documents most probably leaked by a disaffected insider from the prestigious Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia were posted online. Given that the CRU has conceded their authenticity, they provide a fascinating glimpse at the science underpinning the calm measured statements of Sarkozy, Brown, Obama, and wossname, the Belgian bloke—as well as of Kyoto, Copenhagen, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the “carbon credits” scam, the U.S. “cap and trade” monstrosity and every other major “climate change” boondoggle this century. They confirm what the soi-disant “skeptics” have long known:

1) The Settled Scientists have wholly corrupted the process of “peer review.”
Phil Jones, director of the CRU, writing to Michael Mann, creator (le mot juste) of the now discredited “hockey stick” graph, about two academics who disagree with him:
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Professor Mann on an academic journal foolish enough to publish dissenting views:
“Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.”
Professor Jones’s reply:
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”
And you’ll be glad to hear they did!

2) The Settled Scientists have refused to comply with Freedom of Information requests by (illegally) deleting relevant documents.
Phil Jones to Michael Mann on Feb. 3, 2005:
“The two MMs [McKitrick and McIntyre, the latter the dogged retired Ontarian who runs the Climate Audit website] have been after the CRU station data for years. 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 to anyone.”
And, indeed, the CRU subsequently announced that they had “inadvertently deleted” the requested data.

3) The Settled Scientists have attempted to (in the words of one email) “hide the decline”—that’s to say, obscure the awkward fact that “global warming” stopped over a decade ago.
Phil Jones, July 5, 2005:
“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”

4) The Settled Scientists have tortured the data into compliance with political requirements.

From the computer code for one of the “Mann” models:

“Plots (1 at a time) yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions of growing season temperatures. Uses ‘corrected’ MXD—but shouldn’t usually plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures.”

Yet perhaps the most important revelation is not the collusion, the bullying, the politicization and the evidence-planting, but the fact that, even if you wanted to do honest “climate research” at the Climatic Research Unit, the data and the models are now so diseased by the above that they’re all but useless. Let Ian “Harry” Harris, who works in “climate scenario development and data manipulation” at the CRU, sum it up. Mr. Harris was attempting to duplicate previous results—i.e., to duplicate all that science that’s supposedly settled, and the questioning of which consigns you to the Climate Branch of the Flat Earth Society. How hard should it be to confirm settled science? After much cyber-gnashing of teeth, Harry throws in the towel:

“ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently—I have no memory of this at all—we’re not doing observed rain days! It’s all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I’m going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?

“OH F–K THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.”

Thus spake the Settled Scientist: “OH F–K THIS.” And on the basis of “OH F–K THIS” the world’s enlightened progressives will assemble at Copenhagen for the single greatest advance in punitive liberalism ever perpetrated on the developed world.

Back in the summer, I wrote in a column south of the border:

“If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. There has been no global warming this century. None. Admittedly the 21st century is only one century out of the many centuries of planetary existence, but it happens to be the one you’re stuck living in.”

In response to that, the shrieking pansies of the eco-left had a fit. The general tenor of my mail was summed up by one correspondent: “How can you live with your lies, dumb­f–k?” George Soros’s stenographers at Media Matters confidently pronounced it a “false claim.” Well, take it up with Phil Jones. He agrees with me. The only difference is he won’t say so in public.

Which is a bit odd, don’t you think?

Phil Jones and Michael Mann are two of the most influential figures in the whole “climate change” racket. What these documents reveal is the greatest scientific scandal of our times—and a tragedy. It’s not just their graphs but their battle lines that are drawn all wrong. Science is never “settled,” and certainly not on the basis of predictive models. And any scientist who says it is is no longer a scientist. And the dismissal of “skeptics” throughout the Jones/Mann correspondence is most revealing: a real scientist is always a skeptic.

It may well be that Warmergate has come along too late. I won’t pretend to know the motivations of Jones, Mann and their colleagues, but judging from recent eco-advertising their work appears to have driven worshippers at the First Church of the Settled Scientist literally insane. A new commercial shows polar bears dropping from the skies onto city streets and crushing the cars below. To those of us who still quaintly recall 9/11, it evokes grotesquely those poor souls who chose to jump from the Twin Towers and die in one last gulp of air rather than perish in the fireball within. But who cares? Their plight is as nothing next to that of the polar bear. Why are they plummeting to their deaths from the heavens? As the ad explains, “An average European flight produces over 400 kg of greenhouse gases for every passenger. That’s the weight of an adult polar bear.”
Oooookay. It’s A Warmerful Life: every time they call your flight, a poley bear loses its wings.

Some in the political class go along because it’s too much effort to resist. A few are presumably true believers. But what a lot of the rest like about “global warming” is the “global” bit: you can’t do anything about it at town or county or even national level. No, sir, we need a “global” response. Fortunately, as Herman Van Rompuy, “president” of “Europe,” puts it: “2009 is the first year of global governance.”

That’s great news, isn’t it? I would urge the delegates at Copenhagen to listen to the experts and issue a comprehensive statement fully reflecting the rigorous scientific evidence. Here’s my draft:

“OH F–K THIS.”

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”.

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.”