Tag: CRU

Weekend reading: dealing with noise

There’s no doubt that in the last few months the PR war against action on climate change has been fierce — and effective. Three articles I’ve read in the last couple of days throw some light on what’s been going on, and are well worth a few moments of anyone’s time. The first, and by far the most eloquent, is Bill McKibben’s The attack on climate science is the O.J. moment of the 21st century. McKibben likens the tactics of OJ Simpson’s lawyers, confronted with a huge pile of evidence that their client was guilty to the campaign against climate science:

 

If anything, [OJ’s lawyers] were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: In closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared [LA detective Mark] Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instil considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.

McKibben suggests that CRU head Phil Jones has been cast in the Fuhrman role, taking the full force of the attack. This personalisation of the process is exemplified by the McCarthy-like tactics of US senator James Inhofe, who has just released a report calling for investigations and prosecutions of leading climate scientists. Because they can’t change the evidence, however hard they try, they are reduced to shooting the messenger…

The robustness of the case for action is underlined in the new statement on climate science from NZ PM John Key’s science adviser Sir Peter Gluckman, Climate change and the scientific process, but Gluckman is also realistic about the difficulty of making policy in this area.

Although the risk to our future of not acting now is real, the scientific community has had and is having difficulty communicating both its uncertainty and the absolute need for action simultaneously. […] The ensuing political and economic debate on how best to respond to climate change should not be used as an excuse to gamble the planet’s future against the overwhelming evidence that humans are contributing to the world warming at an unsafe rate. The basic principle is no different to risk management in any other sphere of life.

The “debate”, such as it is, is not about the science. McKibben again:

…it’s a mistake to concentrate solely on the science for another reason. Science may be what we know about the world, but politics is how we feel about the world. And feelings count at least as much as knowledge. Especially when those feelings are valid. People are getting ripped off. They are powerless against large forces that are, at the moment, beyond their control. Anger is justified.

Feelings can do more: they condition the way the think about things. This recent National Public Radio story, headlined Belief in climate change hinges on worldview explains the work of The Cultural Cognition Project:

To social scientist and lawyer Don Braman, it’s not surprising that two people can disagree so strongly over science. Braman is on the faculty at George Washington University and part of The Cultural Cognition Project, a group of scholars who study how cultural values shape public perceptions and policy beliefs. “People tend to conform their factual beliefs to ones that are consistent with their cultural outlook, their world view,” Braman says.

“Basically the reason that people react in a close-minded way to information is that the implications of it threaten their values,” says Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale University and a member of The Cultural Cognition Project.

Kahan says people test new information against their preexisting view of how the world should work.

“If the implication, the outcome, can affirm your values, you think about it in a much more open-minded way,” he says.

And if the information doesn’t, you tend to reject it.

This is what is happening with climate change. The polarisation is all too obvious in the blogosphere and the wider media. The CCP has also identified what it calls the “messenger effect” — where people tend to believe information if it comes from people like themselves. In the climate “debate” this becomes a vicious, inward-looking circle, with sceptic and crank arguments endlessly recirculating around blogs, boards and mailing lists.

All of these articles illuminate one central truth: all the noise about emails, IPCC “errors” and crooked scientists has absolutely nothing to do with the underlying science. Those who want to delay action on climate change have no hope of dismantling what McKibben calls the haystack of evidence, they can only pretend that finding a needle means the thing is not made of hay. But they can change the politics — the willingness of politicians the world over to take firm action now.

The answer, if it can be found, will not come from climate scientists. They need to do what they do best — study the planet in all its complexity, define and delineate the implications of what we’re doing to it. But we should not expect them to win hearts and minds, to build a global public consensus on the need for urgent action. That’s a matter for politics, not science. The lead has to come from elsewhere. My own suspicion is that nothing much will get done until the damage from change becomes too great to ignore — and I found an eery echo of that fear in my morning paper, in a story lifted from the Times about a new British report on likely land use changes in the UK over the coming century. One scenario considered is described thus:

Mass migration northwards to new towns in Scotland, Wales and northeast England may be needed to cope with climate change and water shortages in the South East, according to an apocalyptic vision set out by the Government Office for Science. […] In the most extreme scenario, world leaders hold an emergency summit in 2014 when it becomes clear that the impacts of climate change are going to be far worse and happen much sooner than previously envisaged.

The sad fact is that if we wait until the damage is too obvious to ignore, it will be too late to stop much worse impacts in future decades. McKibben says we need courage and hope. But we also need leaders who are prepared to take the evidence and act on it — and who will not be swayed by the denialist noise campaign. They need to recognise empty vessels when they see them.

La-la Land again: Jim Hopkins gets it wrong

It must be sceptic idiot week at the Herald. Not content with allowing Garth George to make stuff up, today they unleash that mighty wit (or should that be twit?) Jim Hopkins, who has been reading the Daily Mail‘s daft coverage of a BBC interview with Phil Jones, the man at the centre of the beat-up over stolen emails:

Professor Jones discussed many things with the BBC, including the trouble he has “keeping track” of information, but the professorial concession the Daily Mail pounced upon – and our media ignored – was this: He said that for the past 15 years there has been “no statistically significant” warming. “No statistically significant warming”. None. It’s not happening. Since 1995, we ain’t got hotter. And that’s not the sceptics speaking. That’s from a man who garnered $22 million to prove we were getting warmer. Much warmer, worryingly warmer, “Lucy Lawless was right” warmer. But now he says we’re not. And haven’t been for 15 years.

I suppose we can’t expect a newspaper columnist and professional funny man to understand statistical concepts. Jones did not say that there had been no warming for 15 years. He said that the warming trend over the last 15 years just fails to meet one test for statistical significance. Here’s Jones in full:

Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods. [My emphasis].

The Daily Mail misunderstood and/or misrepresented what Jones told the BBC — and that’s been extensively covered on the web. Hopkins is happy to repeat that misinformation without checking his facts. Perhaps he doesn’t understand how to use Google? More coverage of Mailgate at Deltoid, In It For The Gold, Real Climate, and for a full explanation of what statistical significance means in this context, Tamino has an excellent article here. Meanwhile, Jim should stick to his knitting instead of repeating tabloid lies from Britain.

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.

Analysis of stolen CRU emails by NZ blogger shows tawdry manipulation of facts – Poneke’s credibility now in tatters

homer.jpgThis may be one of the least important posts I’ve ever written. It’s only 1,100 words (including quotes), but that’s all that was necessary. When a blogger makes as many simple mistakes, and indulges in so much gross distortion of the truth as seen in the last two posts by Poneke (aka former journalist David McLoughlin), then it really doesn’t take long to show him to be incapable of a fair-minded assessment of climate science, or the emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK. This is how he begins his first poston the subject of the stolen emails:

Having now read all the Climategate emails, I can conclusively say they demonstrate a level of scientific chicanery of the most appalling kind that deserves the widest possible public exposure.

Oh really? Let’s parse that post…

 The emails reveal that the entire global warming debate and the IPCC process is controlled by a small cabal of climate specialists in England and North America.

Rubbish. That’s not only untrue, it’s unfair to the cabal of NZ climate scientists who have played a key role in the IPCC process.

This cabal, who call themselves “the Team,” bully and smear any critics.

They were dubbed “The Team” by blogger Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit, as a reference to McIntyre’s persistent, but failed, attempts to discredit the so-called “hockey stick” graph of temperature over the last 2,000 years.

They control the “peer review” process for research in the field and use their power to prevent contrary research being published.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, this is simply not feasible. Poneke clearly has no idea how many journals publish climate-related material, or how the peer review process works. Grant at Code For Life does.

They falsely claim there is a scientific “consensus” that the “science is settled,” by getting lists of scientists to sign petitions claiming there is such a consensus.

Pardon? That’s what the deniers do to assert there’s no consensus — with their Oregon Petition. Perhaps Poneke is getting confused about the statements on climate change by all the world’s leading scientific bodies. But of course, they’re all controlled by Michael Mann and Phil Jones, even the Glorious Scientific Academy of the People’s Republic of Kazakhstan.

They have fought for years to conceal the actual shonky data they have used to wrongly claim there has been unprecedented global warming this past 50 years.

…followed by a considerable misunderstanding of ten year old discussions about paleoclimate studies.

They show Team members becoming alarmed and despondent at global temperatures peaking in 1998, then slowly falling to the present, while publicly trying to hide the fact that there was a peak and now a decline.

But… 1998 is only the warmest year in the CRU record, and they’re The Team who’ve been fiddling the data, so we can’t trust them can we? But never mind, it doesn’t matter which temperature record you choose, the first decade of the 21st century was warmer than the last decade of the 20th.

The Climategate emails (and accompanying computer data) were almost certainly leaked by a whistleblower inside the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (the “CRU” — the supplier of much key IPCC historic climate data), not hacked from there by an outsider, as initially thought.

He provides no evidence for that assertion, beyond wishful thinking. The computer forensic specialists of the UK’s National Domestic Extremism Unit are helping the East Anglia police with their investigation into the theft. The CRU servers were hacked at least twice, and the entire email database was stolen, my sources tell me. The released emails are a carefully edited selection of that database. An investigative journalist might ask who did the selection, and who stood to gain from their release? Poneke can’t be bothered.

McLoughlin then gets the Chris de Freitas/Climate Research story exactly the wrong way round (it was CdF perverting peer review to get shonky papers published, not “The Team” trying to prevent it – see Mediamatters report), further demonstrates his misunderstanding of the “hockey stick” controversy (not dropped by IPCC reports (it’s on p467, WG1, Chapter 6), explicitly endorsed by the US National Research Council review), and misrepresents what NZ scientist Kevin Trenberth meant by his comment on “cooling”. You can find out what Trenberth was talking about, in his own words, here. It was published before McLoughlin’s ill-advised and ill-educated rant.

To this outsider (I know no more about “Poneke” than can be gleaned by reading his blog), it looks as though McLoughlin has approached the stolen emails with a set of preconceptions — or perhaps knowledge of what what was being said in climate crank circles — and then managed to find his preconceptions confirmed. A modicum of research, of looking into what the scientists he so freely maligns have to say might have made for a less embarrassing article.

If any journalist produced a shoddy report like this — and claimed it to be the most important thing they’d written — any self-respecting editor would fire them on the spot.

Meanwhile, unhappy with being told he’s wrong by scientists who happen to blog at Sciblogs, he’s busy attacking the messenger:

…I really do question their using taxpayer’s money to push what looks suspiciously like shrill propaganda in support of their cause.

The only shrill propaganda in this sorry little episode is coming from a once-respected writer who has forgotten what looking at both sides of a story really involves.

[NB: Before DM complains, Hot Topic is syndicated to Sciblogs, not hosted there. I hold no brief for the SMC. They can look after themselves.]

CRU emails show fraud? Yeah, right.

Want to know just how much you have to read into the stolen CRU emails to uncover fraud? This excellent Youtube video explains the background to two of the more widely quoted passages — and in passing presents a few of the absurd accusations from the likes of Limbaugh and Beck in the USA. For members of the reality-based community, those sections may be painful. The whole thing’s well worth a watch — if only for the most creative use of the phrase “febrile nitwits” I’ve come across this year. Presenter “potholer54” has a Youtube channel devoted to climate and science issues, which is also well worth exploring.