An inconvenient lame excuse

Published by Tom

November 25, 2009

David Adam on controversy over leaked climate change emails | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

I am reserving my view on the "climategate" emails. Frankly, I am still finding it hard to believe that the University of East Anglia is as important as the furore suggests. Would anyone really jeopardise the global economy on the basis of research from such a – let's be polite – backwater of academia? Shouldn't someone from a proper university be checking this stuff, at least?

More seriously, while there was clearly unscientific zeal to suppress inconvenient evidence, it seems to have been driven by a conviction that the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory is true, rather than merely a good source of government funding. Scientifically, that's no excuse. I don't see how the academics in question can possibly stay in their jobs. They have been caught rigging their own data and conspiring to suppress or rubbish that of others. They are very clearly not fit to keep their salaries or the letters after their name. They are not worthy of the noble title of "scientist." Still, I have not yet seen the "smoking gun" the conspiracy theorists hoped for. They were zealous idiots, not frauds. The analogy is with over-enthusiastic policeman planting evidence on a guilty man to "make sure" of a conviction. Indefensible, but the man's still guilty.

Still, Environment Correspondent David Adam's explanations/excuses in the linked Guardian podcast are remarkably lame. They do seem to justify a much more critical stance in future when evaluating press coverage of Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. If AGW theory is true, we are therefore in real trouble now. The public had already sensed the dishonesty of the coverage. Having cried "wolf" so often, a real wolf could now stroll right in. Our press is just as much of a disgrace as East Anglia's academics. If we suffer all the horrors AGW theorists suggest, our last bitter thoughts may be of such fools as David Adam.

7 responses to “An inconvenient lame excuse”

Moggsy

November 26, 2009

This place used to be a Politechnic didn’t it?

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Jay

November 26, 2009

What I’m finding frustrating about the debate on this, especially online is how this is resolving into either ‘so scientists are people too, lets debate whether we should be surprised’ or ‘so the data is rubbish, knew it, now what can we do to stop the ongoing power grab’.
There’s simply not enough appreciation of the damage that these people have already done, or sufficient condemnation of their actions.
In the papers this week we have the news that 10’s of thousands of people died of cold this winter past, an increase on previous years and no doubt in part because they couldn’t afford to heat their homes, due to a variety of factors, but not inconsiderable in this is the fact that energy companies have been given permission to charge UK consumers to fund their ‘renewables’ developments, pushing up costs outside of the influence of energy prices.
We also have the coming crisis where the decommissioning of power plants will leave us with a serious energy provision problem, which will increase costs again and may result in even those able to pay being denied as much power as they require. This comes at a time when everyone (including the CRU) seems to accept that temperatures are declining. We haven’t commissioned new plants because apparently new coal would be evil and nuclear is the devil.
The reasoning behind the action on renewables and the inaction on new power plants is a direct result of political influence being thrown behind projections based substantially on the output of the CRU.
This is not simply a philosophical debate, or a case of the other team being ‘caught out’ people are actually dying in the UK as a result of these ‘true believers’ actions and their influence. It would be laughably ironic that people are dying of cold because we are panicking about catastrophic warming, if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s an absolute fucking tragedy.

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Diogenes

November 26, 2009

I’m having difficulty reconciling ‘They have been caught rigging their own data’ with ‘They were zealous idiots, not frauds’.
Granted they do appear to believe that AGW is a genuine threat but so what. The smoking gun is the rigging of the data and the attempts to hide how they did it.
The whole global warming farrago is premised on two ‘facts’.
1. The 0.7degreeC warming these scientists say occurred in the last century.
2. That current temperatures are unprecedented, these scientists proved that the medieval(and roman) warm period was not globally warmer than today.
If either of these ‘facts’ is put into doubt all the scary long term projections are just castles in the sky.
Jay [above] gives an excellent example of the damage these people have already done but it is as nothing to what they are planning.
Here is a pertinent example, from WUWT, of what happens when oversight is lacking from the scientific process…
http://tinyurl.com/y96uypk

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Fausty

November 26, 2009

Another overlooked issue is the lack of scientific rigour. A major factor in science is the testing of other people’s theories. This is done by reproducing the circumstances/methods on from which the hypotheses and theories originated and subjecting it to testing.
Firstly, the Met and CRU would not allow other scientists access to the data or software model code, even under hundreds of FOIA requests.
Secondly, they disallowed peer reviews by preventing alternative opinions from surfacing.
The damage they’ve done to science in this country is unforgivable. Science is already under threat, as it is.
In addition, these climate change scientists are publicly funded to the tune of billions, while their peers have to scrabble for funds. This has the Atlas Shrugged effect of the government dictating science – which means it is not worthy of its name!

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Ed

November 28, 2009

The story is really the code, not the emails. You can debate the motives of the authors for ever, but in the end it doesn’t affect the science so much. The code however – such a horrible mash of bodges it can hardly be described.
Had-CRU is important (however sniffy we are about former polytechnics). It makes one of the two main series for global instrumental data, and is high up there in both proxy reconstructions and modelling.
The global instrumental record is probably the most important of these (the other two areas rely on it to calibrate their work), and the now-famous Harry-read-me file (among others) demonstrates what a shambolic hack-upon-hack their methodology is. This isn’t exactly rare, for code written by physical science students, but it’s not a happy thing when the code really is the research. That it gave a plausible answer was enough – no outsider was going to see the code and to hold up new stuff to deal with the pre-existing can of worms would be embarrassing, hard to fund (unsexy) and potentially never ending.
Proxy reconstructions (Mann has a new one out) have their own problems – still mining for ‘hockey stick’ shaped proxies more than a decade after the eponymous paper. The preeminent tactic appears to be to throw any known proxy against the (instrumental) temperature record and see what sticks (to a linear fit!) – the vast number of degrees of freedom ensuring a good fit to the rising temperatures recorded in the last century, while losing and earlier variation under a mountain of spurious ‘signal’.
Global climate models? C’mon. They’re orders of magnitude more complex to handle that the previous two bits, and will be coded in the same haphazard way. They’re nothing but pretty pictures displaying the prejudices of the lead author. Not to disparage all models – looking at important processes on a smaller scale could be really useful (tropospheric clouds behaviour under different conditions, perhaps) – but to attempt to model the world, year by year? Really?

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RobinL

November 29, 2009

It’s a bit long, here’s my understanding:
The CRU at UEA, along with the Met Office Hadley Centre, have been instrumental in drafting the IPCC’s pronouncements on Climate Change since it’s inception. They are respectively the 9th (8000+) and 6th (9000+) most cited sources in the world in scientific papers on the topic 1999-2009.
http://sciencewatch.com/ana/fea/09novdecFea/
They often pool their findings, and are then referred to as HadCRU, as in HadCRUT3, for Hadley/CRU Temperature series 3, for example. James Hansen’s fiefdom, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is part of NASA, which is 2nd in the citation rankings, at 10000+, and top is the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, with 11000+.
So, the joint citations of Hadley and CRU are greater than those of NASA or NCAR, at 18000-odd. These citations are as authoratitive sources in scientific papers: their assertions are presented as corroborating other findings, in this case, that man-made warming exists.
Between them, NASA/GISS and HadCRU massively outnumber any other institutional source, by a factor of nearly three to one. And not many of the also-rans produce sceptical papers, something to do with the funding, perhaps, or the peer-review process.
Given that Hansen is a confirmed proponent of this view, and in close touch with Al Gore on the issue, and who is on record as recommending that sceptics should be put on trial for crimes against humanity, it is not so hard to join up the dots. Add in Dr Gavin Schmidt, also of GISS, and Dr Michael Mann, of discredited Hockey Stick fame, both featuring in the leaked emails, and reading the anguished remarks of Harry as he wrestles with scrambled and incomplete data as he tries to torture it into a nice warming curve…
http://www.devilskitchen.me.uk/2009/11/data-horribilis-harryreadmetxt-file.html
That’s not all, by any means. The whole IPCC case rests on the premise that man-made CO2 resides in the atmosphere for 50-200 years: this is an unproven hypothesis, and if it is in fact shorter, the IPCC itself accepts there is not a problem.
Well, some think it is, much shorter:
http://www.co2web.info/ESEFVO1.pdf
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ef800581r
(abstract only)
Then there’s the recent revelation that New Zealand’s climate data has been improved.. well, you get the idea.
Great blog, btw! I read here often – thanks.

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RobinL

November 29, 2009

oops, wrong link, second to last should have been
http://folk.uio.no/tomvs/esef/ESEF3VO2.htm
Scroll down to:
‘9. Problems for the dogma – CO2 residence time’
for the relevant paragraph

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