Tag: CRU

Dogged Pearce still hounding Jones

Fred Pearce is a fine one to speak of a rush to judgment. Many of his Guardian articles on the UEA emails did just that. (See Pearced to the Heart and Defending the Indefensible on Hot Topic) Yet that is the accusation he levels at yesterday’s report of the parliamentary committee’s investigation into the matter.  Essentially because, he claims, they avoided investigating the more complex charges such as those raised by him in the Guardianseries.

What he seems most concerned with is that Jones got off lightly.

“The MPs are clear that there are serious issues to address both in climate science and in the operation of freedom of information law in British universities. But in their desire not to single out Jones, they end up bending over backwards to support a man who is the pillar of the establishment they are criticising.”

Here is what the report concluded:

“The focus on Professor Jones and CRU has been largely misplaced. On the accusations relating to Professor Jones’s refusal to share raw data and computer codes, we consider that his actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community. We have suggested that the community consider becoming more transparent by publishing raw data and detailed methodologies. On accusations relating to Freedom of Information, we consider that much of the responsibility should lie with UEA, not CRU.”

Not enough for Pearce.  It lets Jones off too lightly:

“… whatever standard practice may be, surely as one of climate science’s senior figures, Jones should take some responsibility for its misdemeanours? Jones has worked for the CRU for more than 20 years and been its director for six. The MPs found there a “culture of withholding information” in which “information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure.” It found this “unacceptable”. Doesn’t its director take responsibility?”

What does Pearce want?  Resignation?  Dismissal?  The parliamentary committee received submissions, examined Jones, affirmed that it had seen nothing which suggests the science from the CRU is faulty, said Jones should be reinstated and made recommendations for changed practices in  future in the interests of the science being irreproachable.  There are further investigations to come.  Meanwhile the globe continues to warm.  It seems to me that Pearce as an environmental journalist ought to be able to find more useful occupation for his talents than arguing with the verdict of the committee. Jones might have earned a period of respite. The Guardian should call off its dogs.

Jones and CRU exonerated by parliamentary inquiry

The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report into the disclosure of climate data by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has just been released [PDF, via DeSmogBlog], and it clears Phil Jones and the CRU on all charges. From the press release:

The focus on Professor Jones and CRU has been largely misplaced. On the accusations relating to Professor Jones’s refusal to share raw data and computer codes, the Committee considers that his actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community but that those practices need to change.

On the much cited phrases in the leaked e-mails—”trick” and “hiding the decline”—the Committee considers that they were colloquial terms used in private e-mails and the balance of evidence is that they were not part of a systematic attempt to mislead.

Insofar as the Committee was able to consider accusations of dishonesty against CRU, the Committee considers that there is no case to answer.

The report calls for greater transparency and availability of climate data. Committee chairman Phil Willis said:

What this inquiry revealed was that climate scientists need to take steps to make available all the data that support their work and full methodological workings, including their computer codes. Had both been available, many of the problems at CRU could have been avoided.

More coverage at the Guardian, Times Online, The Independent and New York Times. Prepare for a deluge of spin from the denialist camp: Benny Peiser, head of Lord Lawson’s shiny new British sceptic think tank (you may remember Lawson refusing to disclose his backers when questioned by the inquiry — so much for transparency) is already on the job, as the the Guardian discovered: “It doesn’t look like an even-handed and balanced assessment. It looks like an attempt to whitewash and I fear it will be perceived exactly as that. I fear this will backfire because people will not buy into it.” And of course Benny’s already out there doing his best to create that very perception. No “fear” involved, it’s the impression he wants to create.

Business Roundtable lies about climate, according to The Economist

You might expect the Business Roundtable to be avid readers of that august weekly news magazine The Economist, and yet BR head honcho Roger Kerr was happy to write this in an op-ed published last month, apparently relying on British tabloid the Daily Mail as a source:

On top of all this is Climategate, which started with the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Its suspended director Phil Jones has admitted that there has been no global warming in the past 15 years.

No he didn’t. Here’s The Economist on the subject:

Since I’ve advocated a more explicit use of the word “lie”, I’ll go ahead and follow my own advice: that Daily Mail headline is a lie. Phil Jones did not say there had been no global warming since 1995; he said the opposite. He said the world had been warming at 0.12°C per decade since 1995.

The Economist’s writer goes on to note that:

Anyone who has even a passing high-school familiarity with statistics should understand the difference between these two statements

One must presume, therefore, that Roger Kerr lacks that attribute, or is perhaps prepared to allow a good story to trump the facts. Not surprising when he lists in a Dominion Post opinion piece the experts the BR has brought to New Zealand to “balance” the debate:

Over the past 15 years the Business Roundtable has brought Richard Lindzen, Robert Balling, Patrick Michaels, David Henderson, Bjørn Lomborg and Nigel Lawson to New Zealand in an effort to inject some balance into the debate.

By their friends shall we know them.

Michael Mann fights back

One sometimes wonders how the scientists most reviled by the denial industry are bearing up under the onslaught.  Michael Mann is one of them, so I was interested to listen to him being interviewed by Chris Mooney on a recent Point of Inquiry podcast. Here is a summary of some of Mann’s responses (not an accurate transcript, though mostly in his words):

On the science:

The bottom line is the basic physics and chemistry of the greenhouse effect. Observation that the globe is warming and that the warming is unusual in the long term context fits what the basic physics and chemistry says. After decades of work by thousands of scientists round the world pursuing every lead – thinking of all the possible different explanations of the phenomena they observe – there is literally no evidence that calls into question the basic radiative properties of greenhouse gases.  You increase greenhouse gas concentrations, you will warm the atmosphere. Questioning that basic reality is almost like questioning the spherical nature of the Earth.

What scientists actually spend time debating and pursuing are issues like feedbacks – the processes that might amplify or diminish that warming. There are open questions relating to such matters as clouds, El Ninos, hurricanes, and so on, which are being actively pursued. But on the basic issue – the scientific community moved on from that question decades ago.

 

On the strategy of attacks on the science:

The critiques almost never actually discredit a line of evidence or a basic conclusion. They take some small technical part of an analysis, try to manufacture a controversy about that to essentially discredit the work by finding some small potential flaw with one part of an analysis.

On the hockey stick:

There are more than a  dozen reconstructions; every one of them comes to the same conclusion as our decade-old work that the recent warming is anomalous in at least 1000 years.  Our attackers never want to look at the big picture, never want to look at whether they have any impact on the bottom-line conclusions, because they know that they don’t.

Even if they had been successful in taking down the hockey stick, which they haven’t been, it still wouldn’t amount to undermining the central case for the science.

On concealing data:

All of our data was available in the public domain and any claim to the contrary was dishonest.  The question of making codes public is different and is not considered required as general practice. However I and my collaborators have made a decision to put every scrap of code as well as every scrap of data in public domain at the time we publish a paper.  We’ve gone beyond what the standards of the community are.

On Phil Jones request to delete emails:

It was an email he wrote in the heat of the moment. He was under attack.  Keep in mind this guy  received something like 40 freedom of information demands over a weekend. He was being harassed intentionally and the freedom of information demands that were being made were for materials that CRU legally could not even distribute.  These were frivolous demands. Under that sort of harassment people sometimes say foolish things – we certainly didn’t delete any emails and I don’t think he did himself

On the “trick”:

This is a good example of how those working to make mischief can take a term that they probably fully know is perfectly innocent in scientific lingo, but exploiting the fact that it sounds very different to a non-technical person. It shows the disingenuousness of those leading the attack. They intentionally misrepresent words and phrases cherry-picked from thousands of emails in a cynical attempt to distort the scientists’ views and cast aspersions on a scientific discipline.

On fighting back:

The idea that scientists under siege should unilaterally disarm, give in to the sometimes criminal attacks of the anti-science forces looking to discredit them and their science, not stick up for their science and their colleagues, not fight back against these criminal efforts to misrepresent them and to impugn their integrity – it would be terribly misplaced if scientists were not to do all they can to fight back

On the difficulties:

Our detractors are extremely well funded, extremely well organised, they have had an attack infrastructure for decades. They developed it during the tobacco wars, they honed it further in other efforts to attack science that industry or other special interests find inconvenient. So they have a very well honed, well funded, organised machine that they are bringing to bear in their attack now against climate science.  It’s like a marine in a battle with a cub scout when it comes to the scientists defending themselves.  We don’t have the resources, the experience: we haven’t been trained, we’re not public relations experts, lawyers, lobbyists, we’re scientists. It’s a classic example of asymmetric warfare.

Many of us didn’t believe it would come to this – the scientific case for the reality of human-caused climate change has been clear now for several years, though there is much we have still to learn. Many of us thought, perhaps somewhat naively that in the end science would carry the day, that the strength of the scientific consensus would be enough. I wasn’t so sure. But what we all underestimated was the degree, the depth of dishonesty, the dirtiness, and cynicism to which the climate change denial movement would be willing to stoop to advance their agenda.

*****************

A stout defence from Michael Mann.  What he wasn’t asked and doesn’t say is how high the stakes are.  But anyone who has taken the trouble to understand the basic science knows they are very high indeed.  The attack on climate science is an attack on all humanity.  Not one for which the perpetrators are likely to be called to account, and perhaps it won’t really matter that they’re not.  What matters more is that they call off the campaign, though one suspects that even if they wanted to, the forces they have loosed have so committed themselves that they will not heed any call to come to heel. Meanwhile those of us who are not climate scientists but can see the danger we are in must offer strong support to the science and opposition to the insidious campaign of denial.

CRU’s Jones on the stand: Pearce offers opinion as news

Fred Pearce is obviously unrepentant over the unjust treatment he meted out to Phil Jones in his unfortunate series of artices on the UEA emails, one of which I commented on here. He has just produced an extraordinarily slanted accountof Jones’ questioning from the Parliamentary committee set up to look into the affair. How’s this for openers?

“Jones did his best to persuade the Commons science and technology committee that all was well in the house of climate science. If they didn’t quite believe him, they didn’t have the heart to press the point. The man has had three months of hell, after all.”

Then Pearce offers two highly prejudicial descriptions of Jones’ actions, each linked to one of his own articles:

“Jones’s general defence was that anything people didn’t like – the strong-arm tactics to silence critics, the cold-shouldering of freedom of information requests, the economy with data sharing – were all “standard practice” among climate scientists.”

Pearce expresses disappointment that one of his own pet projects was not pursued by the committee:

“Nobody asked if, as claimed by British climate sceptic Doug Keenan, he had for two decades suppressed evidence of the unreliability of key temperature data from China.”

Gavin Schmidt has comprehensively dealt with this claim on Real Climate (see his comments on part 5). If Pearce is aware of what Schmidt wrote he is undeterred by it and again links to his own article as demonstrating the topic worthy of the attention of a parliamentary committee.

Then Pearce apparently leaves the scene of the parliamentary committee and offers his own account of what he claims Jones has conceded publicly about the 1990 China study, translating Jones’ ‘slightly different conclusion’ into his own ‘radically different findings’.

There are other important Pearce conclusions which the committee failed to investigate, again expressed in prejudicial terms:

“Nor did the MPs probe how conflicts of interest have become routine in Jones’s world of analysing and reconstructing past temperatures. How, as the emails reveal, Jones found himself intemperately reviewing papers that sought to criticise his own work. And then, should the papers somehow get into print, judging what place they should have in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where he and his fellow emails held senior positions.”

Pearce takes comfort from his feeling that the committee will have to pay closer attention to the issue in the light of the written submission from the Institute of Physics which is highly critical of the emailers.  He doesn’t mention that John Beddington, the government’s chief scientific adviser, told the committee the institute’s view was “premature” and that they should wait until the Russell inquiry publishes its findings in the spring.

Pearce’s Guardian report is clearly an opinion piece but not presented as such. It is an extraordinary example of the authority some journalists have taken upon themselves to declare judgment on matters of which they have shown very little knowledge. Pearce is not a climate change sceptic, but he is hounding a group of climate scientists and seems fired up by the thrill of the chase. It’s a sad spectacle in a leading newspaper.

[GR adds: The Guardian’s David Adam provides a more balanced overview here, and the paper’s live blog of the session is worth a look.]
[GR update: Simon Hoggart’s take: “Whatever your view on man-made global warming, you had to feel sorry for Professor Phil Jones..”]