Category: Climate cranks

Carterist “science”: Bob’s self-plagiarism, misrepresentation and misquotations

homer.jpgThe crank web is all atwitter with the news that Bob Carter’s been censored by Australia’s public broadcaster, the ABC. But an exclusive Hot Topicinvestigation reveals that the supposed “censorship” looks a lot more like prudent quality control. Carter’s submission plagiarises his own writings, misquotes and misrepresents James Hansen, and joins the recent baseless attacks on the NZ temperature record.

When the ABC’s Unleashed site turned down Carter’s offering — supposedly a reply or counterbalance to their recent five part series on climate denial by Clive Hamilton — it was quickly picked up by his frequent publisher, Aussie website QuadrantOnline. Titled Lysenkoism and James Hansen – Is Hansenism more dangerous than Lysenkoism?, it’s a crude attack on Hansen, currently visiting Australia. But it’s not only crude, it’s unoriginal.

 

Carter opens his ABC/Quadrant piece with an account of Hansen’s 1988 testimony to Congress:

On June 23, 1988, a young and previously unknown NASA computer modeller, James Hansen, appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr. Hansen used a graph to convince his listeners that late 20th century warming was taking place at an accelerated rate, which, it being a scorching summer’s day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm.

But back in 2005, in a talk to the Melbourne Rotary Club titled Global Warming Hysteria and the Deadly Disease of Hansenism (and in a paper available on his web site since), he had this to say about Hansen’s testimony:

Why Hansenism? Because James Hansen was the NASA-employed scientist who started the climate alarmism hare running on June 23, 1988, when he appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr Hansen used a misleading graph to convince his listeners that [words cut here] warming was taking place at an accelerated rate (which, it being a scorching summer’s day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm). [My emboldening of identical words.]

Strikingly similar, I think you’ll agree. The next two paragraphs share strong similarities with his 2005 paper, although he attributes a quote from Hansen somewhat differently: Here’s the Quadrant/ABC piece:

Fifteen years later, in the Scientific American in March, 2004, Hansen came to write that “Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic”.

This conversion to honesty came too late, however, for in the intervening years thousands of other climate scientists had meanwhile climbed onto the Hansenist funding gravy-train.

Once again, here’s Carter’s original version:

Much later (20032), Hansen came to write “Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate …. scenarios consistent with what is realistic”. But this astonishing conversion to honesty came too late, for in the intervening years thousands of other climate scientists had meanwhile climbed onto the Hansenist funding gravy-train.

Carter’s use of this quote is intended to show that Hansen had been dishonest. What else can a “conversion to honesty” be taken to mean? But the dishonesty is entirely Carter’s, and the many other climate deniers (Patrick Michaels prominent among them) who have ripped Hansen’s words from their context. Firstly, the quote is not accurate, the relevant sentences as published are:

Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue, and energy sources such as “synfuels,” shale oil and tar sands were receiving strong consideration. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic under current conditions. Scenarios that accurately fit recent and near-future observations have the best chance of bringing all of the important players into the discussion, and they also are what is needed for the purpose of providing policy-makers the most effective and efficient options to stop global warming. [Missing words emboldened]

Secondly, as in so many things, context is all important. Hansen is discussing the details of the forcing scenarios put together by the IPCC for use in climate model runs. The standard scenarios assume no actions to reduce emissions. Hansen is arguing that to be useful for policy makers, scenarios that include emissions reductions need to be developed, to provide an idea of what might happen if action were taken. No change of mind, no admission of dishonesty — just a call for policy-relevant emissions trajectories and forcing scenarios. Misquotation and misrepresentation in the same breath — nice one, Bob. [Interesting too to note that the AR5 modelling will be based on new, more realistic scenarios that will include emissions reductions]

Let’s move on to the next par in the Bob’s samizdat article:

Currently, global warming alarmism is fuelled by an estimated worldwide expenditure on related research and greenhouse bureaucracy of more than US$10 billion annually. Scientists and bureaucrats being only too human, the power of such sums of money to corrupt not only the politics of greenhouse, but even the scientific process itself, should not be underestimated.

That’s a lot of money. What did he tell the Rotarians five years ago?

Currently, global warming alarmism is fuelled by an estimated worldwide expenditure on related research and greenhouse bureaucracy of US$3-4 billion annually. Scientists and bureaucrats being only too human, the power of such sums of money to corrupt not only the politics of greenhouse, but even the scientific process itself, must not be underestimated.

Crikey Moses, that’s some climate inflation! Not a Hansenist gravy train, but a Carterist scary ghost train.

The sections on “Lysenkoism” in the two pieces are also more or less identical, but in the more recent article, Bob moves on to deliver his wisdom on the state of climate science and policy advice in Australia, and can’t resist a dig at the NZ temperature record:

And, across the Tasman, NIWAgate is developing apace, as the N.Z. National Institute of Water & Atmosphere battles to provide a parliamentary accounting for its historic temperature archive, which may yet prove to include the “dog ate my homework” excuse for the apparent absence of some records.

Bob’s clearly channelling Treadgold and Wishart, and just as clearly out of touch (or perhaps that should be unwilling to be in touch) with reality.
So what are the basic tenets of Carterist science, as revealed by the writings of the great communicator himself? Bob describes them perfectly in his Rotary Club talk:

HansenistCarterist climate hysteria is driven by relentless, ideological, pseudo-scientific drivel, most of which issues from greenright wing political activists and their supporters, and is then promulgated by compliant media commentators who are innocent of knowledge of true scientific method. Opportunistically, and sadly, some scientists, too, contribute to the HansenistCarterist alarmism.

Quite right Bob. I share your sorrow, if not your shame.

Merchants of doubt: Oreskes on the history of climate denial

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global WarmingScience historian Naomi Oreskes, well known for her work on consensus in science (and climate science in particular) has a new book, Merchants of Doubt, due out in a couple of months. Helpfully sub-titled How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, it digs deep into the historical roots of the campaign to create doubt abut the need for action on a host of environmental issues. The video above is of a talk she gave at Brown University recently, outlining the material in the book. If you’re interested in the roots of the campaign against action on climate, this is an excellent overview. We’ll have a review of the book soon after it’s available.

[Hat tip to Deltoid and Resilience Science]

Sorry seems to be the hardest word

homer.jpgLate last week Richard Treadgold, author and principal promoter of the recent attempt to cast doubt on the long term temperature record for New Zealand, popped up on Hot Topic to leave one of his typically rambling and pompous comments. Regular readers may recall that following the publication of his Climate Conversation Group/Climate “Science” Coalition “paper” last year, I told Treadgold (after a similar long comment) that he was no longer welcomeat Hot Topic:

Until you are prepared to withdraw and apologise for the incompetent analysis you released, and specifically apologise to the scientists whose good name you have felt free to smear, I will be forced to conclude that you remain a liar and a charlatan.

Until such an apology and withdrawal is made you are not welcome here.

His report has not been withdrawn, and no apology has been forthcoming. He therefore remains unwelcome here. I reminded him of this in an edit to his comment last week (the first he’s made since December), and deleted two subsequent attempted comments.

If you’re going to join the conversation at Hot Topic, you have to play by the house rules. Some of them are reasonably flexible — I like people to be polite, but I’m not too fussed if the language or argument are robust — but there is one thing that I don’t tolerate, and that is the casual smearing of working scientists, most of whom are in no position to defend themselves. Reputations are hard won things, and can be lost in a flash. Playing vicious politics with people’s careers is the worst aspect of the current campaign to delay action on climate change, and it’s a tactic Treadgold seems to have adopted with relish. Let’s look again at the CSC/CCG report Are we feeling warmer yet? and review some of his recent blog posts.

 

In a post titled Apologise? Why? back in February, Treadgold appeared to have forgotten my earlier remarks, and asserted that “there’s no reason for us to apologise”. Following my deletion of his comments last week, he posted this:

From the response, you’d think we’d committed a crime. The only crime I can identify is a certain bunch of public so-called “servants” in charge of NIWA engaging in pervasive obstruction and citing references to us and the New Zealand public which proved to be entirely empty. They said the material we sought was there and it was not there.

One day soon they must account for that. They must also account for misleading their minister in guiding him to false replies to the Parliament.

Note the language and the allegations, which border on the defamatory. A couple of days later, he attempted a tactical revision of history in this post, claiming that his paper had been misinterpreted:

The sceptics shouldn’t look to our paper to refute local warming, because it doesn’t. It presents no evidence on the quality of the national temperature graph — it merely questions the data, expresses strong doubts about their accuracy and wonders what adjustments were made to them.

What does the paper actually say?

  • …the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming…
  • We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2 — it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace.
  • Using NIWA’s public data, we have shown that global warming has not yet reached New Zealand (and what does that say for global warming?).

[My emphasis]

No misinterpretation at all. The paper was designed to make the public and the world believe that there were “problems” with the NZ temperature record, that there was no real warming. The press release that accompanied the paper was quite clear about it. Here’s the headline and opening sentence:

NZ climate scandal: NIWA “adjusts” records to show warming

New Zealand may have its own “Climategate”, including manipulation of temperature readings […] researchers claim that temperature readings from seven weather stations throughout New Zealand have been adjusted to show a higher degree of warming than is justified by a study of the original raw data.

And what was that about not supporting “no warming”? Here’s the press release again:

Spokesman for the group, Richard Treadgold, said that recent claims that New Zealand is warming have been proved wrong. “Official information clearly shows that temperatures in New Zealand have actually been remarkably stable since 1850.”

And here’s the attempt to smear Jim Salinger…

“NIWA’s official graph (done originally by Dr Jim Salinger, who features also in the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia) shows considerable warming, which they give as 0.92°C per century, saying this is consistent with global warming over the 20th century. But the actual temperature readings taken from the thermometers show an almost flat trend for 150 years.

Back to Treadgold’s attempt to rewrite history. Later in that post he dismisses calls for an apology:

Those apologists for NIWA who complain about our paper smearing the reputations of their scientists should reflect on this: that these changes were made in secret, are still, today, undisclosed (Hokitika has apparently been fully described, but we have not finished checking it) and, by NIWA’s own admission, these changes introduce warming to raw data that show no warming and NIWA have refused requests for them from bona fide scientists for decades.

That really is a disgrace.

The disgrace is Treadgold’s. Adjustments were never made in secret, the raw data is available, and the techniques used to combine station records are well-established in the literature and in the public domain. NIWA last communicated with the Climate Science Coalition on the subject of the adjustments made when homogenising station records in 2006, when Jim Salinger exchanged emails with Vincent Gray. Gray reviewed the CSC/CCG paper before release, according to Open Parachute blogger Ken Perrott, who has been diligently attempting to hold Treadgold to account in comments at his site. Here’s Treadgold, prompted by Perrott, talking about Gray’s review:

Please don’t use Dr Gray’s comment allegedly admitting a mistake. He was being his normal conservative self and I disagree with him. He, being a scientist, found it hard at first to grasp the essentially political objectives of our paper and looked at it from the normal scientific point of view. So he was of the view that we should be describing error limits, doing statistical analyses and quoting learned papers.

Those techniques were no help to us – they weren’t even necessary. We set out simply to motivate scientists to talk to us for the first time in 30 years.

Revealing, eh? The paper is admitted to be “essentially political”, so normal rules don’t apply. Let’s ignore the science, let’s not do the hard yards to understand the subject, let’s just fling mud. And then expect the scientists to cooperate…

This whole affair has never been anything other than a thinly disguised propaganda exercise, designed to capitalise on the noise about stolen CRU emails toplay politics in New Zealand. That it has been jumped on by parliamentary sceptics like Rodney Hide and John Boscawen is perhaps not surprising, given the fawning treatment of ACT and its luminaries by Treadgold. Here’s an exchange in comments at Treadgold’s blog this morning, apparently between Hide and Treadgold:

Hide: And on the basis of these numbers, and this advice, the government has committed to an ETS that will cost NZ conservatively a billion dollars a year.

We need to hold NIWA to account. Good work!

Treadgold: Yes, one’s tempted to call it shonky, but it isn’t. The ghastly thing is that AGW was created and the ETS introduced in the full light of consciousness to achieve ideological objectives.

We’re fortunate to have in high places men like you with the courage to speak the truth and to question error.

Thanks, Rodney.

Hide’s comment (if it really was Hide) is remarkable. Neither this government or the last committed to an ETS solely on the basis of NIWA’s New Zealand temperature record. The NZ numbers are just one tiny part of an immense jigsaw of evidence handily summarised by the IPCC, and accepted by every government involved in the IPCC process. Even if New Zealand were cooling, it would have no discernible impact on the global picture, either on the need for emissions reductions or for policy to encourage those reductions. The NZ temperature record is interesting — fascinating, even — but it is not crucial to anything, let alone national or international climate science or policy. And that fact, perhaps more than anything else, is what shows Treadgold to be little more than a tawdry propagandist for inaction.

Meanwhile, the taxpayers of New Zealand might want to know how much of NIWA’s time has been wasted dealing with frivolous freedom of information requests and ACT questions in Parliament. NIWA time is public money, and Treadgold and his courageous friend Rodney are wasting buckets of it. Perhaps there might be scope for a question in Parliament…?

Finally, unless and until Treadgold withdraws his paper, apologises for the attempt to mislead the public, and for the direct smears on Salinger and the scientists working at NIWA, he will take no further part in the climate conversation at Hot Topic.

[Elton John, before hair transplant]

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.

Denialism’s allies: nasty work in Australia

 Climate change denialism has plugged into some very sick strains in society according to  the behaviour described by Clive Hamilton in the first of a series of articles in the debate forum on the ABC website.  He describes how Australia’s most distinguished climate scientists have been subjected to a torrent of  aggressive, abusive and at times threatening emails each time they enter the public debate through a newspaper article or radio interview.  “Apart from the volume and viciousness of the emails, the campaign has two features – it is mostly anonymous and it appears to be orchestrated.”  I recommend reading his article to get a full picture of the attacks, though prepare yourself to be shocked by the blind hatred and anger expressed in the crudest of language. It’s cyber-bullying of a very nasty kind, apparently intended to intimidate  the targets, who also include some journalists, and to make them reluctant to participate further in the climate change debate. Last month I reported James Hansen writing in a recent essayof vicious personal messages being sent to principal scientists almost daily – he didn’t elaborate, but it’s apparently not a peculiarly Australian phenomenon.

 

In a second article Hamilton looks at who is doing the orchestrating.  “Without access to ISP logs, it is difficult to trace the emails to a source. However, it is clear that hard-line denialists congregate electronically at a number of internet nodes where they engage in mutual reinforcement of their opinions and stoke the rage that lies behind them.”  On such websites a frenzy of outlandish conspiracy theories and vilification of individuals often follows posts which make highly personal attacks on individuals who speak in favour of mainstream science and measures to combat global warming.  Hamilton doesn’t suggest that the sites he goes on to mention are responsible for organising the cyber-bullying attacks on scientists and others, but they provide the material which is tailor-made for the kind of psyche which is all too ready to pour out hatred and anger. He posits: “Climate denialism has been absorbed by an older and wider political movement, sometimes called right-wing populism.” The movement is driven by feelings of angry grievance. “Those who identify with it see themselves as anti-liberal, anti-elitist and anti-intellectual.” He considers that the energy of this wider populist movement has fed into climate change denialism, because it recognises familiar enemies in mainstream scientists and in people socially concerned by the prospect of global warming.

In his third article in the series, published today, Hamilton discusses the role of think tanks funded by oil money in the effort to discredit climate science and stop action on climate change. He refers to the carefully planned strategy developed in the mid-1990s,  commissioning “independent” experts to “make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate”, citing Jim Hoggan’s  book Climate Cover-Up (reviewed here on Hot Topic). Various Australian think tanks are surveyed which have served as “conduits for the stream of anti-science pouring out of their kindred organisations in the United States. They have also been instrumental in publicising and promoting the work of Australian sceptics such as Ian Plimer and Bob Carter.”  They need funding, but in the end their motives are political rather than commercial.

A hatred of environmentalism is what Hamilton sees as uniting the various arms of the denialist war on climate science. “Environmentalism is variously seen to be the enemy of individual freedom, an ideology of smug elites, an attack on capitalism and consumerism, and the vanguard of world government.”

In conclusion he appeals to conservative leaders who accept the science to speak out loudly and clearly about the need to take action. It is in their hands to break down the belief that global warming is somehow a left-wing cause.

There are two more articles to come from Hamilton in what will be a five-part series, but I’ll leave it to readers to follow him further if they wish.  The burden of his concern is pretty clear from what he has already written and I thought it worth communicating now.  Incidentally Hamilton’s latest book Requiem for a Species is due for publication in a couple of months and I expect to review it here.