Egg/face interface for Hide and the climate cranks

What was it Richard Treadgold and Rodney Hide were saying? Here’s Hide, speaking yesterday in Parliament:

So, before Christmas, I asked NIWA to disclose the adjustments and their reasons. They said they would. But they have just told the Climate Science Coalition they don’t have the record of the adjustments.

And here’s Treadgold and the NZ Climate Crank Coalition:

This follows an admission by NIWA that it no longer holds the records that would support its in-house manipulation of official temperature readings.

Just to to provide a little balance, here’s NIWA, yesterday:

NIWA has added two new documents to its National Climate Centre web pages to outline how and why it made adjustments to its 7-station temperature readings in order to provide accurate and meaningful data to use in a time series of temperature information.

One document [PDF] lists all the adjustments made to the station records used in NIWA’s long term New Zealand temperature series, while the second [PDF] looks at one station, Hokitika, and explains in detail the rationale for that station’s adjustments.

I look forward to the prompt release of apologies from Rodney Hide, Richard Treadgold, Terry Dunleavy and the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition to NIWA, Jim Salinger and all the scientists involved in preparing and maintaining NZ’s climate records, but I won’t be holding my breath.

The annotated Rodney Hide: treating parliament with contempt

rodenymorph.gifHow far can a Minister of the Crown go in misrepresenting the facts of a matter before he is guilty of misleading the House? That’s not an easy question to answer, but any sensible reading of Rodney Hide’s speech in response to prime minister John Key’s statement to the House yesterday would suggest that if there’s a line to cross, Hide’s not just trodden on the chalk but taken a flying leap into touch.

Hide is certainly parliament’s highest-profile climate “skeptic” (his spelling), with a long track record of spouting the standard climate crank arguments, but yesterday Hide combined a complete misrepresentation of the so-called “climategate” affair with a scurrilous attack on the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, based entirely on the discredited smear campaign emanating from the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition and Richard Treadgold’s “Climate Conversation Group”. Here’s the relevant section of Hide’s diatribe, annotated by me to show just how far from the truth he strayed…

Continue reading “The annotated Rodney Hide: treating parliament with contempt”

Sunday Times opens another gate

Jonathan Leake at the UK Sunday Times has been swift to hail another supposedly damaging inaccuracy in the IPCC report.  Africagate, the headline calls it.  It occurs in the Working Group II report, which deals with the question of impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. I’ve looked up the section, which is in chapter 9 of the report, looking at possible impacts in Africa. The section is headed Agriculture (page 447-448 of the chapter).  It opens with this sentence:

Results from various assessments of impacts of climate change on agriculture based on various climate models and SRES emissions scenarios indicate certain agricultural areas that may undergo negative changes.

 

There follows some closely referenced accounts of possible negative effects, as well as some possible positive effects. It’s in the course of the negative effects that the offending sentence is found:

In other countries, additional risks that could be exacerbated by climate change include greater erosion, deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture of up to 50% during the 2000-2020 period, and reductions in crop growth period (Agoumi, 2003).

The Agoumi paper with which this sentence is referenced is apparently not peer-reviewed.  I’ve already pointed out in another post that it is not a requirement for IPCC authors that all references be to peer-reviewed material, and in the Working Group II and III reports it is likely that other literature will be cited as well. (Working Group III addresses mitigation possibilities.)  But not only is it not peer reviewed, it is a policy paper written in 2003 for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Canadian think tank. Professor Agoumi is Moroccan, and his paper apparently looks at prospects for Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.

I don’t know what sort of weight the Agoumi report should be allowed. A lengthy blog on the British Democracy Forum website, which I presume provided the material for the Sunday Times article, presents a case for doubting its reliability. I’ll suspend judgment in the meantime, since the same blog triumphantly links the matter to “Climategate”, “Glaciergate”, and “Amazongate” and suggests together they spell the demise of the IPCC and Dr Pachauri.  I’ve already said what I think of “Amazongate”, and Gareth has written on “Climategate” here and here.  Granted the Himalayan glacier reference was an error, which has been acknowledged by the IPCC.

However, even if it turns out to have been a mistake to have included the findings of the Agoumi paper in the IPCC report it hardly warrants the hyped up attention Jonathan Leake gives it in his Sunday Times article (yes, the same Jonathan Leake whose sloppy journalism I wrote about here and here).  I don’t read the IPCC reports as revealed truth and it has never occurred to me to take the Working Group II report as anything other than an outline of the kind of effects we can expect to see increasingly as global warming takes hold.  Nor does the report itself claim anything remotely approaching certitude  – words like ‘may’ and ‘could’ in the above extracts are typical of its statements.

However, bit by bit the public is being told that alarming cracks are opening up in the credibility of the IPCC report and of climate scientists generally. Even the Guardian seems to me to have flirted with the possibility in the extraordinary time and attention it has given to the email saga.   And if recent public opinion polls are anything to go by some of the public is buying it.

Trifles are being magnified at the cost of proper attention to the overwhelming reality of climate science.  The great danger threatening the human future has not gone away because journalists and others find it more interesting to focus on the pedigree of a few references or the workplace character of a small group among thousands of scientists. Journalists and their editors might ask themselves how they can justify giving so much attention to comparative trivia and allowing public attention to be diverted from the mounting threat ahead.

For those of us who accept that the threat is real and present there is no option but to keep affirming and trying to communicate the science and to hope that the ground currently being lost in public opinion can be regained and strengthened before we run out of even more time.

Treadgold and the NZ CSC: dogging a fled horse

The campaign by the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition and Richard Treadgold’s “Climate Conversation Group” to cast doubt on the NZ temperature record and to smear the scientists who have worked on it has stepped up a notch or two in recent days, following a response by NIWA to an Official Information Act request from NZ C”S”C secretary Terry Dunleavy. It seems Dunleavy and Treadgold didn’t like the answers they were given, because they immediately jumped on one small part of the response, and rushed out a press release throwing up their hands in in horror. Here’s Dunleavy:

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has been urged by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC) to abandon all of its in-house adjustments to temperature records. This follows an admission by NIWA that it no longer holds the records that would support its in-house manipulation of official temperature readings. [my emphasis]

In December, NZCSC issued a formal request for the schedule of adjustments under the Official Information Act 1982, specifically seeking copies of “the original worksheets and/or computer records used for the calculations”. On 29 January, NIWA responded that they no longer held any internal records, and merely referred to the scientific literature.

“Merely” referred to the scientific literature? That’s where scientific knowledge is to be found, not in worksheets or computer records. Treadgold developed the theme at his blog, under the heading FARCE: NIWA don’t have the changes:

Heads must roll – Turning into farce

In an astounding admission of ineptitude, after their former arm-waving and expostulations of injustice, NIWA have finally confessed that they cannot provide the adjustments they made to the original temperature readings in the official NZ temperature record.

Luckily for us, Treadgold later posted pdf copies of NIWA’s response, as well as Dunleavy’s original request, and so we can see for ourselves what NIWA said. Funnily enough, things are not quite as Dunleavy and Treadgold would wish us to believe.

Continue reading “Treadgold and the NZ CSC: dogging a fled horse”

Dominion Post editorial as shaky as Herald’s

When I was writing the post on the Herald’s acceptance of journalistic say-so in its editorial on the IPCC Gareth drew my attention to the fact that the Dominion Post had also produced an editorial claiming that the ethics and integrity of climate scientists is being called into question.  I was too engaged with the Herald to consider including the Dominion Postin the ambit of my attention at the same time, but now that I’ve had a closer look I rather wish I had.  The editorial is four days old, but still deserves taking apart.

The evidence the editorial draws attention to is first the publication of the stolen emails, suggesting, it claims, a conspiracy to hide data and play down information which didn’t fit the theories of the scientists concerned.  Then the Himalayan glacier error.  Nothing new here and comment familiar and predictable.

But the editorial had a  revelation (a different one from those offered by the Herald):

 

“Now it has been revealed that another IPCC warning –- that global warming could wipe out 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest –- was extrapolated from an unsubstantiated claim by two green campaigners who had no scientific expertise.”

Looks pretty serious.  Where did the revelation come from?  It turns out from the same journalist as one of the Herald’s revelations.  Yes, Jonathan Leake in a different article in  the UK Sunday Times.

I’m relieved of the need to track down the details of Leake’s supposed exposure of yet another bogus IPCC claim by Tim Lambert of Deltoid who has a detailed analysis of the shady process by which Leake got to where he did. It turns out that Leake had been told by the scientist concerned, Dan Nepstad, that the IPCC statement was correct, but there had been an error in the citations listed in the WWF report (yes, WWF – no prizes for guessing who’s been trawling through the IPCC references looking for the letters WWF). I won’t try to cover the details of the account Nepstad has given to Lambert, which you can read on Deltoid, but the essential point is that Leake in his article concealed the fact that he had been told by the scientist concerned that the statement was correct. Presumably it would have made his story unnecessary. Why bother telling the truth when it would interfere with a story which opens like this?

A startling report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.

The Dominion Post is as guilty as the Herald of uncritically passing round journalistic stories which drastically and groundlessly distort the work of the IPCC. Its editorial doesn’t draw the conclusion that climate change is not happening, but makes this extraordinarily sweeping and ignorant statement:

“Why trust a panel that confuses opinion and fact, wrongly attributes that opinion, tries to shout down critics and displays a determination to make the facts fit the theory rather than the other way around.”

Evidently in the editorial sections of our leading newspapers where the IPCC is concerned  ignorance and carelessness won’t be permitted to inhibit confident assurance.