Category: Climate cranks

CRU cleared of scientific malpractice – so much for “climategate”

Phil Jones and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have been cleared of any scientific malpractice by the investigation chaired by Lord Ron Oxburgh, a former chairman of Shell. From the Guardian news report:

At a press conference earlier today Lord Oxburgh said, “Whatever was said in the emails, the basic science seems to have been done fairly and properly,” although his panel did criticise the scientists for not using the best statistical techniques at times.

The report concluded: “We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal.”

See also: BBC, UEA official response. I look forward to the fulsome apologies for unfounded allegations of fraud from the usual suspects — especially Christopher, Viscount Monckton, who dubbed Jones et al as criminals, fraudsters and profiteers. I won’t be holding my breath, but I will checking my understanding of the laws of libel as they apply in Britain.

Hook, line and stinker

homer.jpgRichard Treadgold has been attempting a sceptical deconstruction of Professor Keith Hunter’s new statement on Science, Climate Change and Integrityfor the Royal Society of New Zealand. It’s not a pretty sight.

Professor Hunter should be ashamed of this shoddy piece of research. The lowliest undergraduate would do better than he.

[…]
The senior scientists who’ve made misleading public statements about global warming include Peter Gluckman, David Wratt, James Renwick, Brett Mullan, Andrew Reisinger and Jim Salinger. Their cheeks are smooth and their mouths are smiling but their breath stinks.

Meanwhile, “tenacious” Ian Wishart issued a press release entitled Errors in Royal Society of NZ climate change paper:

The Royal Society of New Zealand has again nailed its sorry little tail to the mast of a sinking global warming ship, with a statement designed to convince news media, politicians and the public that the science behind climate change is sound.

That’s the “sorry little tail” of the nation’s leading scientific society, but Wishart’s not finished. He sums up:

If this is the best evidence the Royal Society of New Zealand can muster in support of climate change, God help the Key administration and his beleaguered science advisor Peter Gluckman, because the people advising National and Gluckman on climate are NIWA and the Royal Society.

New NZ CSC chairman Barry Brill weighed in with his own devastating critique. Prepare to be savaged by a dead sheep:

The paper is unusual in that Professor Hunter lays out the scientific arguments for all to see. But what is even more unusual is the rather obvious fact that the arguments are transparently wrong – to the point of being a serious embarrassment for both your author and your Society.

Treadgold piles it on:

That Hunter presents his statement under the imprimature(sic) of the Royal Society does not imbue it with authority but debases the Society. A mud pie made by the King is still just a mud pie.
[…]

Together they give Professor Hunter nowhere to hide. His egregious statement has no leg to stand on and he can only withdraw it and apologise.

There’s blood on the floor — but it’s Treadgold, Wishart and Brill’s blood clogging up the drains, because in their rush to dismantle Professor Hunter’s statement, they not only get their facts wrong, but they have demonstrated the very point Hunter was making:

Debate, and scepticism are healthy and to be encouraged, as is transparency of information. However, vicious personal attacks on the integrity of experienced scientists, and indeed their critics, serve only to detract from the real issues and are out of place in a rational society.

Let’s see if I can avoid making vicious personal attacks on Treadgold, Wishart and Brill (TWB) as I point out the errors they make…

 

TWB concentrate their efforts on Professor Hunter’s list of multiple lines of evidence supporting the case that change is occurring, and that action would be prudent. Wishart objects to this section:

“The amount of extra carbon accumulated in the ocean and the atmosphere matches the known quantity emitted by the combustion of fossil fuels.”

Professor Hunter has set a little trap here, and Wishart falls for it:

Except, he appears to have forgotten that there’s a discrepancy between what’s been emitted and how much remains in the atmosphere, known as “the missing carbon sink”. In other words, the Royal Society is wrong. The emissions don’t match.

Brill attempts something similar:

Rebuttal: Oceanic carbon has never been measured, and cannot be estimated. The biosphere also takes up CO2 from fossil fuels (eg forests). There is a well recognised “missing carbon sink”, estimated to be as high as three trillion tonnes per annum.

Treadgold can only manage incredulity, but devotes a whole post to it.

TWB are wrong, and Hunter’s precise point is correct: the measured increase in carbon storage in the ocean and atmosphere is equivalent to the amount of fossil fuels burned since the beginning of the industrial era. Hunter does not mention other anthropogenic sources of carbon — primarily from chopping down forests — but they are roughly in balance with terrestrial carbon sinks (which have been called “missing sinks” because the exact details have proved hard to pin down). The “discrepancy”, as Wishart calls it, is irrelevant to the central message: that the increase in atmospheric carbon is our fault. In fact the “missing sink” and oceans have been doing us a big favour by storing away a very big chunk of our emissions…

Why Brill thinks we can’t measure or estimate ocean carbon content or uptake is a mystery. We’re certainly never going to be able to count all the carbon atoms one by one, but we do understand a very great deal about ocean chemistry — and Keith Hunter is an expert in that field.

TWB also take exception to Hunter’s comments on ocean heat content:

It is also clear that the oceans absorb about 85% of the excess heat resulting from this radiative forcing by greenhouse gases (as well as about 40% of the carbon dioxide). Detailed measurements of the changes in oceanic heat content, and the temperature rise that accompanies this, agree quantitatively with the predicted radiative forcing.

Wishart thinks the oceans aren’t warming much:

Which would be fine, except that the oceans are not warming up much at all, which the Argo project, discussed in Air Con, found, and which has also been detected in another study last year.

Hilariously, the study he quotes (Towards closure of regional heat budgets in the North Atlantic using Argo floats and surface flux datasets, Wells et al, Ocean Sci., 5, 59–72, 2009 [PDF]) says nothing about global ocean heat content, but is concerned with detailed modelling of the heat budget of the North Atlantic.

Wishart moves on to reference Skeptical Science (an “appalling” site, apparently) on ocean heat content, and chooses to quote the final paragraph, but not the complete final paragraph. I wonder why?

Independent analysis seem to indicate that over last half dozen years, the ocean has shown less warming than the long term trend… but nevertheless, a statistically significant warming trend. [my emboldening of the bit Wishart leaves out]

So the oceans continue to warm… Wishart is careful not to state that there’s actual cooling going on (though he’d love you to leave you with that impression) but Brill, however, goes the whole hog.

Rebuttal: Oceanic heat content has decreased steadily since the ARGO programme commenced measuring it in 2004 – despite sharply rising GHG emissions.

More than slightly out of date, Barry. Try reading Wishart’s reference. Can’t you sceptics agree on anything? Meanwhile, all Treadgold can do is recycle Brill’s comments on it being “physically impossible” for the greenhouse effect to heat the ocean. As ocean heat content has been steadily increasing, it would seem that physics is not on Brill’s side. Here’s a graph TWB would probably prefer you didn’t see:

Total-Heat-Content.gif

Not only is ocean heat content increasing, it accounts for the vast majority of the energy accumulating in the system, as Prof Hunter says. (Graph comes from Murphy et al, 2009, via Skeptical Science’s excellent post on measuring the earth’s energy imbalance).

Next, TWB get shirty with Hunter’s assertions about sea level rise. Wishart refers to one of his own posts as a reference that allows him to declare:

If he’s trying to suggest sea level increase is unusual or rapidly increasing, then in a word, “rubbish”.

What Hunter is saying is none of those things, but that observed sea level rise is consistent with the observed increase in ocean heat content. In any event, Wishart’s “rubbish” link is to a “CO2 Science” (sceptic site noted for its creative reinterpretation of what papers actually say) report on a paper by Wöppelmann et al. When you read the abstract, you see it refers to a refinement of the sea level data for the last century, which the authors state is in line with earlier work. CO2 Science adds a gratuitous “Hence, it would appear that 20th-century sea level rise has not been in any way unusual, even over the most recent decade of supposedly unprecedented warmth.” Pure invention, in other words. They just made that up, and Wishart swallowed it whole. Par for the course, I suppose, for the deep throat of climate denial.

Brill’s offering repeats his earlier mistake on ocean heat content, but does include this:

Rebuttal: Sea levels have risen by about 18mm/decade for the past 100 years, having extremely poor correlation with either GHG concentrations or fossil fuel use.

Sea level shows an extremely good correlation with ocean heat content and with global temperature, as a recent paper explains. Both of those things are intimately tied into to atmospheric carbon levels and as recent increases are due to human action, you’d have to say that Brill is 100% wrong.

In one respect, and one respect only, does Brill have a point — and it’s a small one. Hunter’s original statement referred to “outgoing solar radiation reflected off the Earth’s surface”. This was an error, missed in proof-reading (or prof-reading), and has since been corrected to “outgoing infra-red radiation”, which renders Brill’s comments on albedo irrelevant (Wishart didn’t notice the obvious mistake!). Brill goes on to say that the “The “simple physics” of 1.5W/m2 is flat wrong.” Which only proves that he’s flat wrong. It’s straightforward if not particularly simple physics, but the basic principles involved have been understood since Fourier and Tyndall first investigated the subject 150 years ago. Perhaps Barry has trouble keeping up with the latest work…

So what are we left with? Three attempted rebuttals of Keith Hunter’s statement on climate change, each of which makes fundamental errors — misleading or misrepresenting the facts — in service of a scurrilous attack on a respected academic and the nation’s top scientific body. Here’s Brill closing his “open letter”:

It will be with a sense of anticipation that we put our fact-based arguments over the very existence of dangerous human-caused global warming to the gatekeepers of our public science academies and at last expect their reasoned response.

What facts are those Barry? The ones you’ve made up, or the ones other people have made up for you? You’re going to have do a lot better than that if you want the world to take you seriously.

There is an important lesson here for the scientific community in New Zealand. The aggressive ignorance on display in the TWB papers is no longer something you can afford to treat with lofty disdain. These people are playing dirty — happy to publicly impugn your work and reputations, based only on their imperfect and ideologically blinkered interpretation of reality, and happy to see their views echoed in Parliament by Rodney Hide and ACT. What’s at stake is not science itself — that great endeavour is quite safe from the intellectually and morally bankrupt attacks of the sort launched by Brill and his pals — but the public perception of science and its value to society. At a time when we will need all our reason to steer a path through a rocky and uncertain future, scientists cannot afford to sit on their hands. Time to hit back, to show the community at large that the age of reason is not dead.

[Zappa]

Monckton is a crock

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Impossible to resist posting this: Peter Sinclair, maker of the excellent Climate Crock Of The Week series of videos takes on the potty peer. Essential viewing, especially for the mathematical moves in the middle… And there’s a part two, coming later this week. Can’t wait. Only one complaint: where’s Scrotum?

Hat tip to Deltoid.

Putting the F back in ACT

It’s hardly news that New Zealand’s parliamentary climate deniers — the ACT party — have difficulty understanding climate science, but an astonishing leaflet from the party being stuffed into letterboxes around the country demonstrates that they are now losing touch with reality. The leaflet calls for opponents of the Emissions Trading Scheme to “rise up” and attend a series of public meetings. It gives an alarmist account of the costs of the scheme, and then offers this amazing justification:

ACT-ETScrop.gif

That’s right: “scandal after scandal” at the IPCC “has unearthed evidence of a global fraud to create mass hysteria and transfer trillions of dollars from countries like New Zealand to largely corrupt dictatorships.” I wonder why this amazing revelation isn’t making front page news all round the world. Could it be that it’s a figment of the fertile imagination of John Boscawen, whose portrait adorns the leaflet? Let’s see your evidence John. I’m sure you must have plenty, because you wouldn’t publish and distribute something that was untruthful, would you? Just to help you out a little, here’s the truth about those IPCC “scandals”.

[Hat tip to HT reader Le Chat Noir, who received the leaflet this morning and forwarded it to me.]

A walk on the supply side

 “…we tend to assume that the public are confused because they have a deficit of scientific knowledge, education and cognitive skills. That is to say that they’re scientifically illiterate.”

In these words science historian Naomi Oreskes, speaking with others at a symposium at the recent American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting, depicts the reaction of most scientists to the puzzling gap between scientific knowledge and public perception of climate change. I might add that although I’m no scientist I share the assumption she describes, since it was reading climate science (at the lay level) which made me aware of  the reality of the crisis.

 

She goes on to critique the response of the scientific community:

“So if the problem is a deficit, then the remedy for it is a surfeit. So it seems to me that the scientific community has succumbed to or fallen into or pursued what I would call a supply side response… we try to supply good information with public outreach efforts…And there are many examples of this, but since we’re here at AAAS, one of my favourites is our AAAS Press Room… If you actually read this web page you find it’s filled with fantastic information, but how many people are going to take the time, how many people in the public even know that we have a AAAS Press Room?”

The supply side model has failed.

“…our message has not gotten through to the American people. In fact a completely different message has gotten through which is that scientists are arguing, that there is still a lot of scientific uncertainty, that more research is needed, and that a lot of what we’re seeing can be explained by natural variability.”

She has tried to understand how this message of uncertainty and doubt is the one that has got through to the public and has found that for the past 30 years the American people have been subject to a very organised and systematic campaign to spread that alternative message.  Her forthcoming book, co-authored with Erik Conway, will document the campaign. (The book will be reviewed on Hot Topic.) But in the meantime she offered the symposium an example which the book doesn’t cover.

After the first President Bush signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Western Fuels, a consortium of coal producers, launched one of many campaigns to challenge the scientific evidence. They did this by hiring a PR firm, a group known as Bracy Williams & Co, and a set of market researchers, Cambridge Reports, to specifically plan a strategy, to test that strategy, and if it were successful, to implement it. The main point of this strategy was to reposition global warming as theory, not fact.

They began with a series of print ads. Oreskes sums up the message of those ads as follows:

“’Who told you the Earth was warming?’ Chicken Little, so there’s your alarmism argument. ‘Some say the Earth is warming, some also said the Earth was flat.’ So scientists are now cast as the opposite, as the anti-science. And ‘How much are you willing to pay for a problem that may not exist?’ That’s an argument that we’ve seen repeatedly over the last 20 years.”

Then they organised public relations tours in combination with this ad campaign

“and a big part of this public relations tour was to get scientists who could appear on TV, so arrange television appearances by sceptical scientists, usually not climate scientists, but people who had what appeared to be relevant credentials.”

Next step was to analyse the results through focus groups, which showed that yes, you could market attitude change. But it worked best if the evidence was presented as facts by technical spokespeople, that is to say people who were scientists or who appeared to be scientists. Therefore that it was essential to recruit scientists to deliver the message.

The scientists were duly found and incorporated into step two of the campaign, the production of a video called The Greening of Planet Earth.  Most of them weren’t climate scientists, but mostly actually agronomists from the US Department of Agriculture making the claim that we know for a fact that carbon dioxide increases agricultural productivity, and in fact not just agricultural productivity but productivity of all plants.

“So it’s a very, very positive message, it’s all good, the scientists are all very kindly-looking, they’re very nice, they’re very calm, and they just tell this good news message over and over again.”

In a weird way, Oreskes comments, the opponents of scientific information have been more scientific than the science community. They studied and tested and built on the evidence they gathered from the testing. More scientific, more organised, more aggressive  The scientific community meanwhile has relied on peer reviewed journals and websites which are too technical for the general public.

People are not confused, she argues, because they are ignorant of the science. They are confused because people have tried to confuse them. Successfully. The misinformation campaigns get reported in the mass media.  The scientists’ responses are made in peer reviewed journals.

What’s to be done? Oreskes raises PR possibilities, but recognises they may not enhance scientific credibility. But at least, she says, since what the scientific community has been doing in the past has clearly not been effective, it might be worth considering some alternatives. Yes indeed, but what?

Oreskes is doing an excellent job of revealing the enormity of what the science has been up against over the past two decades. It certainly isn’t scientific scepticism. But I don’t see any possibility of science matching the kind of organised campaigns that Western Fuels mounted and others have continued. They are highly unethical.  They are cynical and manipulative.  They have no scientific basis.  Those and many other considerations make it impossible for the scientific community to even think of doing battle on that ground.  Science is the only weapon the scientists have.  Not that they have to confine themselves to peer reviewed papers.  These are critical times and it would be good to see more of them entering into the public arena, seeking out journalists, expressing their fears, writing op-eds, badgering editors, publishing books.  But when all is said and done it is only the dawning realisation of the seriousness of the science that will tell against the false assurances of the deniers. It seems to me we’re stuck with that.