I’m sure Bishop Hill won’t mind if I pinch this, it shows a rather head in the sand attitude that pervades the people who get money to study global warming, such as the Pacific Institute’s Dr. Peter Gleick. I agree with Bish though: “subterfuge” looks out of place in a scientific report, OTOH so does the use of a “trick”. He writes:
The Heartland Institute’s NIPCC interim report has just been published – see here. This is a summary of the new scientific literature since 2009.
I’ve taken a glance through the paleoclimate bits and it appears to have been put together in a very professional manner. I was blissfully unaware of just how much evidence has been emerging for the existence of a MWP in the world outside Europe.
If I had a criticism based on what I have read, I would say it’s over the authors’ tendency to slip into editorial mode – discussion of Mann being engaged in “subterfuge” looks out of place in a scientific report.
Lots of people are not going to like the report of course. Peter Gleick, the president of the Pacific Institute, tweets that the report makes him sick and refuses to link to it. Barry Woods and I have politely asked which bits in particular he is concerned with and he has told us that he doesn’t need to do this when someone is arguing that the Earth is flat.
Gleick’s head in the sand choices seem to be selective, for example, he’s written a book titled Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water. Gleick argues against bottled water on the grounds of it being environmentally unsound and just another profit grab by corporate interests selling to a gullible public.
Yet, in one of the most widely publicized environmental protests this year, what do we see? Yep, water bottles everywhere behind Gleick’s hero, Jim Hansen, seen going to the big house after his third arrest above.
I can just hear Gleick going “la la la la la la la la la” as he tries to reconcile climate protest with those protestors leaving water bottle rubbish all over the protest site. It’s a “Joe Romm head exploding moment”, which is why Gleick hasn’t said anything about it.
I suppose the message is “we should be concerned about the environment when those who lecture us on environmental concern actually do as they say”.
Speaking of protests…perhaps we should go Al Sharpton on Gleick, and stand outside his office and read him the NIPCC report through a bullhorn.
After all, such methods are widely accepted in Berkeley.
I have excerpted the passage from chapter 3 below, judge for yourself:
3.1.7. Northern Hemisphere
In the 27 November 2009 issue of Science, Michael Mann and eight coauthors (Mann et al., 2009) describe how they used a global climate proxy network consisting of data derived from ice core, coral, sediment, and various other records to reconstruct a Northern Hemispheric surface air temperature history covering the past 1,500 years for the purpose of determining the characteristics of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period. They used Mann’s “Nature trick” of Climategate fame, truncating the reconstructed temperature history near its end and replacing it with modern-day instrumental data, so the last part of the record cannot be validly compared with the earlier portion.
This subterfuge is unwarranted. And in its current application, it’s not just from 1981 or 1961 onwards that the ruse is applied; it’s applied all the way from 1850 to 1995, the period of overlap between the proxy and instrumental records that was used to calibrate the proxy data. Therefore, since the proxy data were available to 1995, the reconstructed near-surface air temperature history should also have been plotted to 1995, in order to be able to make valid quantitative comparisons between the degree of warmth of the Current and Medieval Warm Periods.
For those interested, Chapter 3 is available here NIPCC_chap03_PaleoTemperature (PDF)
The entire report is available here (PDF)
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I’m sure Gleick wouldn’t have tweeted “[the Heatland Institute] still deny climate change in recycled 430-page compilation of lies, bad science, misrepresentations” if it wasn’t true, would he?
All we need to know is the “experts” reject and refuse to read the entire report.
/sarc
REPLY: his twitter feed is quite revealing, why, he can just recycle old stereotypical arguments without any need to read it at all:
Maybe we should send Buzz Aldrin and Dr. Harrison Schmitt over to ‘splain it to him – Anthony
Heh, the use of the word “subterfuge” is quite accurate here. Gleik is nuts. If the data that was replaced because it was wrong, brings into question whether or not the data that supports the thesis of temp versus tree rings growth is merely coincidental and not predictive. Cutting out the data that shows no correlation is deceitful.
He probably has an illegitimate relationship with Heidi de Klein.
OT? There is an Enso meter on this home page. It has been stuck on dead center neutral for maybe 60 days. What is it telling us? The meter is not working? Or, if it is working, how can it be in one place for so long?
REPLY: It tell us that the source of it, NOAA, is asleep at the switch. See here:
http://www.noaawatch.gov/ (see left sidebar) – Anthony
Gleick is head of the Pacific Institute; according to wikipedia, they have discovered “peak water”. While reading about it, I accidentally found a list of peak-somethings on this wikipedia page (near the end):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_water
I like especially “peak soil”. I think it’s time to declare “peak BS”; the moment the production of BS cannot conceivably go any higher and future BS production will dwindle until mankind runs out of BS.
subterfuge — n; a stratagem employed to conceal something, evade an argument, etc
What was done quite concisely fits the definition of subterfuge. In fact, I cannot think of a better word.
If he hasn’t read it, how can it make him sick? Oh yes because Gaia told him it was evil!
I read the The Heartland Institute’s NIPCC interim report and didn’t think much of it.
I think my comment was “I lost the will to read on” …. perhaps because I was looking at climate sensitivity and they weren’t making the point that the scaling up of the CO2 warming was based on no science at all. Indeed, the only rational to make it around 3x what the science permits, is to make it fit the temperature curve.
But if the basis for scaling up is to “make it fit”, then when all the models predict warming and it palpably doesn’t occur, it clearly doesn’t fit and so the whole justification for scaling up CO2 warming fall flat.
If a report like this can’t clearly explain the single biggest supporting argument for the sceptic cause, what it explain?
DirkH says: “…I think it’s time to declare “peak BS”; the moment the production of BS cannot conceivably go any higher and future BS production will dwindle until mankind runs out of BS.”
Excellent thought, Dirk. Unfortunately, BS will continue to rise until we surpass Peak-Chinese-willingness-to-let-Obama-borrow-money. Then we may have to get real. (Right after we kill the messenger, of course.)
There’s nothing to explain to the arrogant faithful who know categorically that they are right no matter what the contrary evidence. They are unassailable as they will consistently refuse to even read the material of the other side and, thus, never have to even address it or come up with a cogent response. Dismissal of the opposition is what they consider an adequate rebuke.
Replacing the portion of the proxy record that doesn’t show what you want with another record that does, without explicitly pointing that out on your graph sounds like a pretty good definition of subterfuge to me.
“Subterfuge” is appropriate. Although perhaps a bit mild.
The 2009 report involved 39 people, incl lead authors, contributors and editors. The 2011 report involved 14 people.
Why have their ranks been so badly depleted?
REPLY: It’s a smaller, interim report. Think update. – Anthony
Peak Water? Give me a break. 70% of this planet is covered with the stuff. True, it may not be where you want it to be nor in the condition you want, but those are engineering problems.
Just think of how much water a gigawatt nuclear power plant could distill per day. Use the waste heat in the daytime and add in the electric power at night.
The words subterfuge and ruse and trick are all out of place in a report like this. Those words imply knowledge of motive. You can say the same thing without imputing motives to people. In fact in a scientific report you’re better off not using their approach. Their approach, I should remind everybody, is to assume that skeptics are all Oil shills.
You might personally believe that you know their motives. you might think you can see into their souls, but that is exactly and precisely the mistake they made when denying data to McIntyre. That is the mistake they made when they read CA and thought the everybody there was the same kind of person.
If there is one thing there is a global consensus on it is that there cannot be peak BS.
It is limitless.
In mass, frequency and stench.
I can see the problem that the warmist scientists have. They have spent years, half of a working lifetime some of them, promulgating a sort of pseudo-theory. Whether they are there for the money, the prestige, simple belief, or all three, they are now painted into a corner. Their pseudo-theory is crumbling away, day by day. It must be difficult, to say the least, for a man who claims the appellation “scientist” (as it would be indeed for any of us) to acknowledge that he has spent much of his working life promoting a major intellectual error.
That their thinking early on was in error is, of itself, no disgrace. The disgrace lies in the fact that they produced no hypothesis that could be falsified. They are painted into a corner because of not what they did, but because of what they failed to do. When is man to come to appreciate that a computer is no more than a super fast version of the Facit calculating machine which I used for currency conversions back at the beginning of the ‘fifties. Correct answers come automatically, but only if you put in the right numbers. What a pity it is that we don’t know all the “right numbers”, but in the meantime collectively we can spot numbers in there that give us pause.
The style is so weird for something that claims to be a science report. What’s with those huge chunks of quoted text? Looks like someone in high school padding their essay to reach a word limit.
Those water bottles have been in the presence of the High Priest, so they are Holy Water and cannot commit environmental sin.
REPLY: It’s a smaller, interim report. Think update. – Anthony
Right, thanks.
What is the author recruitment and peer review process for these reports? How do they incorporate feedback? Where are review comments published?
Regarding the tweets, It’s a pure and simple case of confirmation bias by a true believer. Would anyone expect more from Peter Gleick?
As for as the report, the Heartland Institute need to get their act straight. I agree with Steve Mosher where he says:.
DirkH says @ur momisugly September 1, 2011 at 11:38 am:
DirkH with all due respect, I think you seriously underestimate the amount of BS intellectuals are capable of producing. Given that the current younger generation is undergoing, what I shall charitably call PC-programming, I think we are on the threshhold of a whole new wave of BS. Certainly if the teachings available on the Australian (Government) Department of Climate Change web site are anything to go by:
http://www.climatechange.gov.au/en/what-you-can-do/teachers-and-students.aspx
Yes, I am sad to say that is my tax dollars hard at work…
Personally I think Einstein had it right:
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
Much like BS, human stupidity is the only thing greater in quantity.
Anthony, thanks again for pointing out that this is an interim report. Looking more closely, the scope of the report is as follows: “Research published before 2009 is included if it did not appear in the 2009 report or provides context for the new research. Nearly all of the research summarized here appeared in peer-reviewed science journals.”
Looking at section 3.3, “Recent Temperature Trends”, which I assume is of immediate interest to folks here, they are indeed relying mainly on the peer reviewed literature, which is good.
But they only summarized 11 papers, if I’m counting correctly. Is that it? Were there no other relevant papers on recent temperature trends? How did they whittle it down to those 11? Where do they publicly describe how these decisions are made? The NIPCC is rather mysterious this way, no?
Cognitive dissonance can be a real problem……
Seeing the quality of water in most cities, at least bottled water gives you the assurance that you won’t poison yourself. If you do at least you will know who to sue. This is not the case with municipalities. Sure it is a simple idea but it costs to have quality water. It is not the water problem but a bottle problem. It is like the plastic bag problem. They cost much less and their production is much less polluting than the alternatives, and they usually get recycled many times either in alternative use or at the bottle depot. The real polluters are those leaving the bottles everywhere and not recycling them… see picture above.
What about those companies that were selling ice in the old days… man, they were using a lot of straw and putting horse manure everywhere. /sarc