Category: Climate science

A blast from the past

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Two years ago I took part in the World Peace Summit: Climate Change – What To Do? in Wellington, at the Westpac St James Theatre. I blogged about it at the time (before and after), and promised to link to the video of my talk when it was available. Of course, I then completely forgot to check, and so when I stumbled upon myself on Youtube earlier today, I thought I’d finally keep my promise. Given that I was talking in 2008, I think my comments stand up quite well (I’m rather pleased with my remarks about warmer winters being snowier winters), though my technological optimism is now tempered by pessimism both about the state of the climate system and our ability to come up with policies to reduce emissions. If you follow the “more from” links on the Youtube page, you can also watch David Wratt, Pene Lefale, Rod Oram, Andrew West, and Rachel Brown’s presentations.

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..”]

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]

Al Gore going strong

That travesty of a news outlet, Fox News, carried an article last Thursday (in its science and technology section, believe it or not) which opened as follows:

“Al Gore won a Nobel Prize and an Oscar for his film, An Inconvenient Truth. But in the last three months, as global warming has gone from a scientific near-certitude to the subject of satire, Gore – the public face of global warming – has been mum on the topic.”

The writer elaborates in the rest of the article, with such choice pickings as this quote from the Investors’ Business Daily:

“The godfather of climate hysteria is in hiding as another of his wild claims unravels – this one about global warming causing seas to swallow us up. We’ve not seen or heard much of the former vice president, Oscar winner and Nobel Prize recipient recently as the case for disastrous man-made climate change collapses.”

No doubt this kind of taunting is rife in the fevered madness of some of the right-wing media in America. It’s not a world I willingly dip into.

But they’re as wrong about Gore’s reticence as they are about the science he communicates.  He contributed a lengthy opinion piece to last weekend’s New York Times.  In it he recognises the recent attacks on the science of global warming, even says it would be an enormous relief they were true. But they’re not.

Continue reading “Al Gore going strong”

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.