Author: Bryan Walker

Pearced to the heart: Fred gets it wrong

I have been a reader of the Guardian newspaper for 55 years and was more than a little astonished when they ran a series of articles by prominent environmental journalist Fred Pearce on the stolen University of East Anglia emails. For that matter I was surprised that Fred Pearce wrote them. He is no climate change denialist, and makes it perfectly clear that the emails in no way alter the case that humans are warming the planet. But he seems to have taken them at the face value the hackers presumably hoped for, and drawn some unjustified and unfair conclusions. The Guardianobviously thought he was on to something significant. A “major investigation” they proclaimed, getting at the “real story”. Revelations and exposures abound.

 

Let’s take a closer look at one of the revelations. It’s an article claiming that the emails reveal “strenuous efforts by the mainstream climate scientists to do what outside observers would regard as censoring their critics”.  It was the one chosen for inclusion in the latest Guardian Weekly. As a reader of that paper I’d been quietly hoping we’d be spared the sight of any of the articles, but there it was, on the science page, with the lurid headline “Research red in tooth and claw.”

Pearce claims that there have been obvious cracks in the peer-review system for years, mentioning an open letter from 14 stem cell researchers to journal editors to highlight their dissatisfaction with the process, alleging a small scientific clique is using peer review to block papers from other researchers.

From there he jumps to the emails, where he claims “many will see a similar pattern.”  Phil Jones, as a top expert in his field, was regularly asked to review papers “and he sometimes wrote critical reviews that may have had the effect of blackballing papers criticising his work.”

Pearce quotes from a 2004 email in which Jones mentions that he had recently rejected two papers from people saying CRU (his climate research unit) has it wrong over Siberia.  “If either appears I will be very surprised.”   Pearce acknowledges that Jones doesn’t say why he rejected the papers (might it have been that they were poor science?).  Pearce also doesn’t know what the papers were, but announces that the Guardian has established that one of them was probably from Lars Kamel, a Swedish astrophysicist who analysed temperature records from parts of southern Siberia and claimed to find much less warming than Jones.

Pearce admits that Kamel’s paper could be criticised as being slight and lacking in detail about its methods of analysis.  However, he surmises, Jones would have known that Kamel called mainstream climate research “pseudo-science” and that publication of the article in a serious journal would have attracted the attention of professional climate sceptics. (Presumably suggesting that this would prejudice Jones in his estimation of the paper?) In spite of the paper’s inadequacy Pearce says that because it was a rare example of someone trying to replicate Jones’ analysis “some would have recommended its publication.”

So is Pearce suggesting that if a scientist of Jones’ stature considers papers to be lacking scientific rigour he shouldn’t say so, lest he might be instrumental in persuading an editor not to publish them?  Or is he suggesting that Jones deliberately sets out to prevent publication of anything which questions his own position?  He hardly makes himself clear, but succeeds, on the basis of much conjecture, in casting a slur on Jones’ integrity.

He later makes a good deal of Jones’ “harsh criticism” of the journal Climate Research for publishing papers he “disagreed with”.  It seems to me that Jones and others had every reason for their criticism. Chris de Freitas, the editor responsible for publishing the Soon and Baliunas paper, is our well known crusading climate change denier. He constantly seeks and gains publicity for standard denialist claims (one might not unreasonably say lies) that increases in carbon dioxide don’t dangerously change the climate, that there is no acceleration in sea level rise, that climate scientists exaggerate for the sake of money, and so on. If he accepted the paper against the advice of four reviewers there is every reason to suspect the quality of the journal’s editorship.  But no, Pearce manages to imply that Jones and Mann did something improper and damaging to the publication of scientific papers.

It’s one thing for Pearce to discuss the general question of the mechanics of peer review, but quite another to use Jones as an example of the abuse of the system. That’s a rush to judgment which I find hard to believe the Guardian allowed.

I was pleased to discover that the Guardian at least invited climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of NASA to comment on Pearce’s article.  If you click on the highlighted yellow sections of the article (linked to above) you can see his annotations.  He roundly rejects much of what Pearce has to say. I’m no scientist, but it seemed apparent to me as a general reader that Pearce was pushing the email material way beyond anything it justified.  It was good to have that view confirmed by a working scientist.

I’m left wondering why this sort of “investigation” was ever supported by the Guardian.  It pre-empts the independent review the University has arranged.  It treats stolen and possibly selected emails as evidence, though to do so it has to make all sorts of assumptions about what the authors might have meant. It is manifestly unjust to the scientists concerned and trivialises their work.

Note:  Jones has recently been interviewed by Nature and although there are aspects of the Climategate allegations that he is not able to comment on he defends himself against some of the accusations made against his work.

Greed to Green

greed to green

We can’t successfully tackle climate change without changes to the corporate regime which has been in place in America since the Reagan presidency. That’s the underlying message of  Charles Derber in his latest book Greed to Green: Solving Global Warming and Remaking the Economy. It’s a message he delivers with directness in a book much more readable than I expected from an academic sociologist.

He accepts the position of scientists like Hansen and others who point to the ominous dangers of tipping points in climate and conclude that we are already above a safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which they consider no more than 350 parts per million.  It’s not a happy acceptance. “No sane person would wish it to be the scientific truth.” He recounts the terrible difficulty he had, after realising with despair the seriousness of climate change, in dealing emotionally with the prospect of mass, collective death – “more difficult than dealing with my own personal death”.

The only good news he discerns is that the scientific truth may be spreading and leading to a tipping point in the world’s social and political awareness. But any realisation of the scientific truth by a majority of the community has not passed beyond cognition to what he calls gut acceptance. He acknowledges the difficulties of such acceptance, drawing on his own experience. The reality is so serious it intensifies the psychological pressure to deny.

Nevertheless he identifies some factors that make gut acceptance of climate change tolerable: we have the power to stop or mitigate it, tackling it can also contribute to solving more immediate social problems, and there are benefits in the green lifestyle. Meanwhile the denial industry has been powerfully influential, though he notes that it is now moving from Stage 1 denial, that global warming is a hoax,  to Stage 2, that human-caused global warming exists but must be solved gradually with a slow phasing out of fossil fuels. “If the new denial succeeds, civilisation will be destroyed in the name of green incremental reform.”

In sectors of America greening is partly under way thanks to the actions of long-term thinkers. However the frontal long-term attack is insufficient to gather wide enough public support. It needs to be accompanied by a second path – what he calls a “time-tricking” strategy that seeks to solve the long-term crisis by hitching a ride on the back of short term issues worrying the majority of Americans. He sees this as a key strategy for the Obama administration – and one which Obama himself understands and is already employing.

But there has to be a systemic shift in power. A change from the current corporate regime, in place since the Reagan presidency, is essential if climate change is to be tackled. Unrestrained capitalism creates climate change. It externalises environmental and social costs. It is destructive of the commons. Derber urges a new green regime, which he describes as the best blend of different economic models with surviving corporations restructured and subject to greater public accountability.

Socialism by stealth I can hear the denialists proclaiming. Certainly Derber associates himself with the welfare of working people and sees the necessity for organised labour to play a significant part in a green regime. He laments the way American jobs have been degraded under the corporate regime, many outsourced and others casualised. One of the important  attractions of a green regime is that it will be rich in secure jobs, many of them associated with renewable energy. He also proposes pragmatic temporary nationalisation of some banks and of giant dysfunctional oil and coal companies.  But not  on the basis of any socialist ideology. The banks have already required enormous injections of public money to keep them afloat. The fossil fuel energy giants such as Exxon are already effectively on the public dole.

Essentially Derber is urging a transformation of America away from an increasingly unstable economy based on ever-growing consumption of unnecessary goods and ever-expanding suburban housing. Coerced consumerism he calls it, which has locked Americans into a pattern of insecurity and overwork. In its place he urges an economy solidly based on the production of green energy and its efficient use. Those jobs stay local and secure. And there’s plenty of room for market-inspired innovation within such an economy. The transformation is necessary to fight climate change, and at the same time it works to alleviate America’s current social justice crises.

Derber’s book is focused on the US “because a green revolution here will be a shot heard around the world.”  In discussing the ways in which the green revolution becomes global he points to “a new posthegemonic order of green security and globalisation”.  He’s firm on the need for the West to take responsibility for the poverty and environmental degradation it has foisted on the rest of the world. The West must finance massive aid and technology transfers that allow the remaining nations to develop a green strategy without giving up their rights to achieve a decent standard of life.  He offers several suggestions for finding the money for this purpose: cut the bloated American military budget; implement a green Tobin tax on currency movements; cancel dirty debt in exchange for green development; create a new “commons” of clean energy technology.  The importance of a global carbon tax is explained.  An interesting take on going local, not to abolish globalisation but to reduce its space, sees Derber use the term glocalism, favouring local economies wherever possible and reserving global production only for those areas where local production cannot work.

Derber is impressed by much that Obama has said about climate change and much that he has set in place. He particularly welcomes the respect he has accorded to science and scientists who understand the reality of global warming.  But it would be a mistake to think he won’t need a big push from social movements.  Derber himself is a lifelong social activist. He considers that today’s social and environmental movements are the best last hope for solving global warming on the urgent time scale required. It has always been social movements  which have awakened America to urgent systemic crises such as slavery, women’s disenfranchisement, or the capitalist exploitation of workers.  Derber discusses the ways in which movements can face up to the existential truth of the emergency of climate change and take swift radical action to mobilize the largest number of people including the president.

Derber is a lively writer. He has a go at a short Greek drama in the course of his book, with the Oracle reminding foolish people that time is running out.  He also provides the text of several fireside chats for Obama to have with the American people, in the fashion of Franklin Roosevelt. In an engaging short personal account he answers any who wonder whether he walks his talk – a mixed case, he reports, not a couch potato but not a hero-activist either.  His talk made good sense to me, whether he walks it assiduously or not.

Sunday Times opens another gate

Jonathan Leake at the UK Sunday Times has been swift to hail another supposedly damaging inaccuracy in the IPCC report.  Africagate, the headline calls it.  It occurs in the Working Group II report, which deals with the question of impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. I’ve looked up the section, which is in chapter 9 of the report, looking at possible impacts in Africa. The section is headed Agriculture (page 447-448 of the chapter).  It opens with this sentence:

Results from various assessments of impacts of climate change on agriculture based on various climate models and SRES emissions scenarios indicate certain agricultural areas that may undergo negative changes.

 

There follows some closely referenced accounts of possible negative effects, as well as some possible positive effects. It’s in the course of the negative effects that the offending sentence is found:

In other countries, additional risks that could be exacerbated by climate change include greater erosion, deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture of up to 50% during the 2000-2020 period, and reductions in crop growth period (Agoumi, 2003).

The Agoumi paper with which this sentence is referenced is apparently not peer-reviewed.  I’ve already pointed out in another post that it is not a requirement for IPCC authors that all references be to peer-reviewed material, and in the Working Group II and III reports it is likely that other literature will be cited as well. (Working Group III addresses mitigation possibilities.)  But not only is it not peer reviewed, it is a policy paper written in 2003 for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Canadian think tank. Professor Agoumi is Moroccan, and his paper apparently looks at prospects for Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.

I don’t know what sort of weight the Agoumi report should be allowed. A lengthy blog on the British Democracy Forum website, which I presume provided the material for the Sunday Times article, presents a case for doubting its reliability. I’ll suspend judgment in the meantime, since the same blog triumphantly links the matter to “Climategate”, “Glaciergate”, and “Amazongate” and suggests together they spell the demise of the IPCC and Dr Pachauri.  I’ve already said what I think of “Amazongate”, and Gareth has written on “Climategate” here and here.  Granted the Himalayan glacier reference was an error, which has been acknowledged by the IPCC.

However, even if it turns out to have been a mistake to have included the findings of the Agoumi paper in the IPCC report it hardly warrants the hyped up attention Jonathan Leake gives it in his Sunday Times article (yes, the same Jonathan Leake whose sloppy journalism I wrote about here and here).  I don’t read the IPCC reports as revealed truth and it has never occurred to me to take the Working Group II report as anything other than an outline of the kind of effects we can expect to see increasingly as global warming takes hold.  Nor does the report itself claim anything remotely approaching certitude  – words like ‘may’ and ‘could’ in the above extracts are typical of its statements.

However, bit by bit the public is being told that alarming cracks are opening up in the credibility of the IPCC report and of climate scientists generally. Even the Guardian seems to me to have flirted with the possibility in the extraordinary time and attention it has given to the email saga.   And if recent public opinion polls are anything to go by some of the public is buying it.

Trifles are being magnified at the cost of proper attention to the overwhelming reality of climate science.  The great danger threatening the human future has not gone away because journalists and others find it more interesting to focus on the pedigree of a few references or the workplace character of a small group among thousands of scientists. Journalists and their editors might ask themselves how they can justify giving so much attention to comparative trivia and allowing public attention to be diverted from the mounting threat ahead.

For those of us who accept that the threat is real and present there is no option but to keep affirming and trying to communicate the science and to hope that the ground currently being lost in public opinion can be regained and strengthened before we run out of even more time.

Dominion Post editorial as shaky as Herald’s

When I was writing the post on the Herald’s acceptance of journalistic say-so in its editorial on the IPCC Gareth drew my attention to the fact that the Dominion Post had also produced an editorial claiming that the ethics and integrity of climate scientists is being called into question.  I was too engaged with the Herald to consider including the Dominion Postin the ambit of my attention at the same time, but now that I’ve had a closer look I rather wish I had.  The editorial is four days old, but still deserves taking apart.

The evidence the editorial draws attention to is first the publication of the stolen emails, suggesting, it claims, a conspiracy to hide data and play down information which didn’t fit the theories of the scientists concerned.  Then the Himalayan glacier error.  Nothing new here and comment familiar and predictable.

But the editorial had a  revelation (a different one from those offered by the Herald):

 

“Now it has been revealed that another IPCC warning –- that global warming could wipe out 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest –- was extrapolated from an unsubstantiated claim by two green campaigners who had no scientific expertise.”

Looks pretty serious.  Where did the revelation come from?  It turns out from the same journalist as one of the Herald’s revelations.  Yes, Jonathan Leake in a different article in  the UK Sunday Times.

I’m relieved of the need to track down the details of Leake’s supposed exposure of yet another bogus IPCC claim by Tim Lambert of Deltoid who has a detailed analysis of the shady process by which Leake got to where he did. It turns out that Leake had been told by the scientist concerned, Dan Nepstad, that the IPCC statement was correct, but there had been an error in the citations listed in the WWF report (yes, WWF – no prizes for guessing who’s been trawling through the IPCC references looking for the letters WWF). I won’t try to cover the details of the account Nepstad has given to Lambert, which you can read on Deltoid, but the essential point is that Leake in his article concealed the fact that he had been told by the scientist concerned that the statement was correct. Presumably it would have made his story unnecessary. Why bother telling the truth when it would interfere with a story which opens like this?

A startling report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.

The Dominion Post is as guilty as the Herald of uncritically passing round journalistic stories which drastically and groundlessly distort the work of the IPCC. Its editorial doesn’t draw the conclusion that climate change is not happening, but makes this extraordinarily sweeping and ignorant statement:

“Why trust a panel that confuses opinion and fact, wrongly attributes that opinion, tries to shout down critics and displays a determination to make the facts fit the theory rather than the other way around.”

Evidently in the editorial sections of our leading newspapers where the IPCC is concerned  ignorance and carelessness won’t be permitted to inhibit confident assurance.

Herald censures IPCC on flimsy grounds

In the current open journalistic season on IPCC sniping the NZ Herald has joined in with an editorial taking up new accusations made by the UK’s Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times.

The editorial begins with the Himalayan glacier error, which the IPCC itself has accepted and expressed regret for.  But the Herald has the scent of blood and moves on to take up the claims of the UK newspapers with uncritical enthusiasm.

“If the Himalayan debacle was bad enough, the panel references to disappearing ice in the Andes, the European Alps and Africa are even more embarrassing.

They turn out to have been based on a student dissertation and an article in a climbing magazine.”

This absurd accusation probably originates with a Sunday Telegraph article, though it is not cited. Let’s look at what is involved.  In chapter 1 of Working Group II’s report there is a section on observed changes in the cryosphere.  In the course of the section a short table (page 86) of selected observed effects is provided. Included among them is the loss of ice climbs in the Andes, the Alps and Africa. It is in relation to this minor observation that the student dissertation and climbing magazine article are cited by the IPCC. But somehow the Herald manages to imply that the IPPCC references to disappearing ice are based on these two sources.

The reality is that the Working Group I report in chapter 4 (pages 356-360)  deals with observed changes glaciers in a section densely packed with scientific information, whereas the Working Group II report in which this report is found describes the observed effects on the environment and on human activities due to these recent cryospheric changes. And the loss of ice climbs is a tiny part of those effects.

But, says the Herald, the articles fall some way short of scientific evidence.  Admittedly they are anecdotal, but I imagine the IPCC authors regarded that as not unreasonable in a matter more likely to be noticed by climbers than researched in scientific papers. The author of one of the articles commented: “I am surprised that they have cited an article from a climbing magazine, but there is no reason why anecdotal evidence from climbers should be disregarded as they are spending a great deal of time in places that other people rarely go and so notice the changes.” Worth noting too that the magazine article was written by Mark Bowen, a keen climber and author of Thin Ice, the excellent story of Lonnie Thompson’s efforts to drill cores in high altitude tropical glaciers. Bowen went with Thompson on a number of expeditions, so knows his stuff.  IPCC authors are not, as is commonly thought, entirely restricted to peer-reviewed literature. Their instructions include the following:

“The authors will work on the basis of peer reviewed and internationally available literature, including manuscripts that can be made available for IPCC review and selected non-peer reviewed literature. Source, quality and validity of non-peer reviewed literature, such as private sector information need to be critically assessed by the authors and copies will have to be made available to reviewers who request them. Disparate views for which there is significant scientific or technical support should be clearly identified in IPCC reports, together with relevant arguments. Expert meetings and workshops may be used to support the preparation of a report.”

Maybe their judgement can be faulted in this particular case. Not by me, I hasten to say. But it is hardly a matter of any great substance. Indeed it is tiny. The Herald editorial grossly exaggerates its significance.

And there is more, says the Herald. There has been a critical examination of the IPCC’s ”attempts to link natural disasters to global warming”.  The Herald doesn’t mention that this ”critical examination” was conducted by the UK Sunday Times.

“ [The IPCC’s] claim in 2007 that the world had ‘suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s’ turns out to have been based on a paper that had not been peer-reviewed or published at that time.”

The words in quotes look as if they are from the IPCC report.  They’re not.  They’re from the Sunday Times article. The IPCC report is restrained and cautious. The Sunday Times article is sloppy and wildly inaccurate.  You can read what I wrote about it on Hot Topic here.  I won’t repeat myself. I described it as simply untrue. But it has evidently entered the journalistic canon.

I guess we should be relieved that the Herald shows no inclination to join the denialist community as a result of its uncritical acceptance of the Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times articles, but it should think again about the strictures which it was lavish with.  The IPCC reports are massive in size and massive in value.  It may be asking a bit much that editorial writers should spend time acquainting themselves with them, but if they are not going to do that they should at least treat with great caution the ”revelations” of its failures in scientific rigour. There will no doubt be more of those, since I suspect the denialist community is going through the IPCC references with a fine comb. If they prove correct the IPCC will again acknowledge error and express regret, as it did over the Himalayan glaciers. But the Herald should make sure it is dealing with matters of reasonable substance before it rushes to judgement.