Guest post by John A
The usual armwaving denial that we should not trust our own lying eyes was delivered by a Harvard Professor in the Boston Globe:
James McCarthy, a respected Harvard professor who was a former Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lead author, sent a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) today stressing that e-mails stolen from climate scientists do not undermine the evidenc[e] for manmade global warming.
McCarthy is board chair of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).
The letter reads “The scientific process depends on open access to methodology, data, and a rigorous peer-review process. The robust exchange of ideas in the peer-reviewed literature regarding climate science is evidence of the high degree of integrity in this process. The body of evidence that human activity is prominent agent in global warming is overwhelming. The content of these a few personal emails has no impact what-so-ever on our overall understanding that human activity is driving dangerous levels of global warming.”
In the words of Frank Drebin: “Nothing to see here, move along!”
And then comes this response (comment 13) to which I’ve added a few paragraph breaks and one piece of emphasis:
I am a climate scientist, and it is clear that the evidence that “human activity is prominent [sic] agent in global warming” is NOT overwhelming. The repeated statement that it is does not make it so. Further, even if we accepted the hypothesis, cap-and-trade legislation does not do anything about it.
Here are the facts. We have known for years that the Mann hockey stick model was wrong, and we know why it was wrong (Mann used only selected data to normalize the principal component analysis, not all of it). He retracted the model. We have known for years that the Medieval Warm period occurred, where the temperatures were higher than they are now (Chaucer spoke of vineyards in northern England).
Long before ClimateGate it was known that the IPCC people were trying to fudge the data to get rid of the MWP. And for good reason. If the MWP is “allowed” to exist, this means that temperatures higher than today did not then create a “runaway greenhouse” in the Middle Ages with methane released from the Arctic tundra, ice cap albedo lost, sea levels rising to flood London, etc. etc.), and means that Jim Hansen’s runaway greenhouse that posits only amplifying feedbacks (and no damping feedbacks) will not happen now. We now know that the models on which the IPCC alarms are based to not do clouds, they do not do the biosphere, they do not explain the Pliocene warming, and they have never predicted anything, ever, correctly.
As the believers know but, like religious faithful, every wrong prediction (IPCC underestimated some trends) is claimed to justify even greater alarm (not that the models are poor approximations for reality); the underpredictions (where are the storms? Why “hide the decline”?) are ignored or hidden.
As for CO2, we have known for years that CO2 increases have never in the past 300,000 years caused temperature rise (CO2 rise trails temperature increase). IPCC scientists know this too (see their “Copenhagen Diagnosis”); we know that their mathematical fudges that dismiss the fact that CO2 has not been historically causative of temperature rise are incorrect as well. We have also known for years that the alleged one degree temperature rise from 1880 vanishes if sites exposed to urban heat islands are not considered.
We have long known that Jones’s paper dismissing this explanation (Jones, et al. 1990. Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land, Nature 347 169- 172) is wrong and potentially fraudulent (see the same data used to confirm urban heat islands in Wang, W-C, Z. Zeng, T. R Karl, 1990. Urban Heat Islands in China. Geophys. Res. Lett. 17, 2377-2380). Everyone except Briffa knows that the Briffa conclusions are wrong, and why they are wrong; groups in Finland, Canada (lots of places actually) show cooling by this proxy, not warming; the IPCC even printed the Finn’s plot upside down to convert the fact (cooling) into the dogma (warming).
Prof. McCarthy is, of course, part of the IPCC that has suppressed dissenting viewpoints based on solid climate science. His claim to support by “peer review” is nonsense; he has helped corrupt the peer review process. We now have documentary evidence that Jones, Mann, and the other IPCC scientists have been gaming peer review and blackballing opponents. On this point, the entire IPCC staff, including Prof. McCarthy, neither have nor deserve our trust.
We have tolerated years of the refusal of Mann and Jones to release data. Now, we learn that much of these data were discarded (one of about 4 data sets that exist), something that would in any other field of science lead to disbarment. We have been annoyed by Al Gore, who declared this science “settled”, refused to debate, and demonized skeptics (this is anti-science: debate and skepticism are the core of real science, which is never settled). The very fact that Prof. McCarthy attempts to bluff Congress by asserting the existence of fictional “overwhelming evidence” continues this anti-science activity.
All of this was known before Climategate. What was not known until now was the extent to which Jones and Mann were simply deceiving themselves (which happens often in science) or fraudently attempting to deceive others. I am not willing to crucify Jones on the word “trick”. Nor, for that matter, on the loss of primary data, keeping only “value added” data (which is hopelessly bad science, but still conceivably not fraud).
But the computer code is transparently fraudulent. Here, one finds matrices that add unexplained numbers to recent temperatures and subtract them from older temperatures (these numbers are hard-programmed in), splining observational data to model data, and other smoking guns, all showing that they were doing what was necessary to get the answers that the IPCC wanted, not the answers that the data held. They knew what they were doing, and why they were doing it.
If, as Prof. McCarthy insists, “peer review” was functioning, and the IPCC reports are rigorously peer reviewed, why was this not caught? When placing it in context made it highly likely that this type of fraud was occurring?
The second question is: Will this revelation be enough to cause the “global warming believers” to abandon their crusade, and for people to return to sensible environmental science (water use, habitat destruction, land use, this kind of thing)? Perhaps it will.
Contrary to Prof. McCarthy’s assertion, we have not lost just one research project amid dozens of others that survive. A huge set of primary data are apparently gone. Satellite data are scarcely 40 years old. Everything is interconnected, and anchored on these few studies. Even without the corruption of the peer review process, this is as big a change as quantum mechanics was in physics a century ago.
But now we know that peer review was corrupted, and that no “consensus” exists. The “2500 scientists agree” number is fiction (God knows who they are counting, but to get to this number, they must be including referees, spouses, and pets).
The best argument now for AGW is to argue that CO2 is, after all, a greenhouse gas, its concentration is, after all, increasing, and feedbacks that regulated climate for millions of years might (we can hypothesize) be overwhelmed by human CO2 emissions. It is a hypothesis worthy of investigation, but it has little evidentiary support.
Thus, there is hope that Climategate will bring to an end the field of political climatology, and allow climatology to again become a science. That said, people intrinsically become committed to ideas. The Pope will not become a Protestant even if angel Gabriel taps him on the shoulder and asks him to. Likewise, Prof. McCarthy may claim until the day he retires that there remains “overwhelming support” for his position, even if every last piece of data supporting it is controverted. As a graduate student at Harvard, I was told that fields do not advance because people change their minds; rather, fields advance because people die.
Posted by Sean December 2, 09 11:26 PM
Wowza! I can only hope that more people in the climate field stick their heads above the parapet and tell it like it is.
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Claude Harvey (09:19:29): Sean’s response it just a beautiful piece of work! It encapsulates just about everything I think I know about the failed case for AGW.
I sincerely support this point of view. Still, the AGW supporters would respond that the 10 warmest years since 1850 was all recorded after 1997. The trivial response to that objection is, OBVIOUSLY, it takes time to change the temperature of the oceans, the thermal mass of the oceans is huge!
He has a point that CO2 may overwhelm feedbacks, though that hasn’t happened yet…
Why didn’t water vapor do it? All I found in the TAR was that water vapor ~ “is not discussed” as a green house gas. Or why would CO2 make water vapor do something it couldn’t do before?
Negative feedbacks.
Was this prof. McCarthy the model for the emperor in the IPCC cartoon? He’s got the nose-in-the-air attitude down pat. (I wish that cartoon could get posted at the head of this thread.)
========
Here is an important extract from one of the comments above. It also should be given wide circulation, because it undermines the alarmists’ strongest point, The Scientific Consensus. (A similar undermining was performed by a recent comment that argued that the field of climate science tends to disproportionately attract environmental activists):
peat (09:31:04) :
“My colleagues … use the ‘authority’ argument a lot. The immediate instinct of scientists is to trust other scientists outside their field who are mainstream and knowledgeable. …
“I can say by watching progress in my own field of laser physics, that there arise fashions and trends in science that tend to self perpetuate for a time. My impression is that the present field of climate science in large part was developed in response to the global-warming hypothesis. This means that young scientists trained in this field generally need to accept the premise before they can even start. Otherwise, they have no access to a graduate research stipend nor an adviser (with a few exceptions). This is a strong feedback mechanism that seems to have passed a tipping point years ago.”
“Political climatology.” Says it all.
Alba (09:27:20) :
This would be a good article if the author had avoided admitting that he has prejudices. Admitting you have prejudices can undermine other things you say.
——
“As the believers know but, like religious faithful, every wrong prediction (IPCC underestimated some trends) is claimed to justify even greater alarm …”
========
Sean was alluding to a limited subset of believers, members of a tiny millennial / doomsday cult, who were described in the book, When Prophecy Fails.
Linda (09:43:51) :
I suggest we refer to our Climategate whistle blower as ‘Deep Temp’…
Or Disstempered.
Wondering Aloud (10:11:09) :
The letter reads “The scientific process depends on open access to methodology, data, and a rigorous peer-review process.”
Absolutely the point. since this is proven to be lacking the hypothesis is unsupported. In other words catastrophic climate change due to human activity is NOT supported by science.
That’s counterpunching!
Anthony, the following post by Q at #40 is as pertinent as that from Sean.
You the environmentalists, you the activists, you the campaigners.
You who have watched with growing concern the ways in which the world around us has been ravaged in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.
You who are concerned with the state of the planet that we are leaving for our children and our grandchildren and those generations yet unborn.
This is not a message of divisiveness, but cooperation.
This is a message of hope and empowerment, but it requires us to look at a hard and uncomfortable truth:
Your movement has been usurped by the very same financial interests you thought you were fighting against.
You have suspected as much for years.
You watched at first with hope and excitement as your movement, your cause, your message began to spread, as it was taken up by the media and given attention, as conferences were organized and as the ideas you had struggled so long and hard to be heard were talked about nationally. Then internationally.
You watched with growing unease as the message was simplified. First it became a slogan. Then it became a brand. Soon it was nothing more than a label and it became attached to products. The ideas you had once fought for were now being sold back to you. For profit.
You watched with growing unease as the message became parroted, not argued, worn like a fashion rather than something that came from the conviction of understanding.
You disagreed when the slogans–and then the science–were dumbed down. When carbon dioxide became the focus and CO2 was taken up as a political cause. Soon it was the only cause.
You knew that Al Gore was not a scientist, that his evidence was factually incorrect, that the movement was being taken over by a cause that was not your own, one that relied on beliefs you did not share to propose a solution you did not want. It began to reach a breaking point when you saw that the solutions being proposed were not solutions at all, when they began to propose new taxes and new markets that would only serve to line their own pockets.
You knew something was wrong when you saw them argue for a cap-and-trade scheme proposed by Ken Lay, when you saw Goldman Sachs position itself to ride the carbon trading bubble, when the whole thrust of the movement became ways to make money or spend money or raise money from this panic.
Your movement had been hijacked.
The realization came the first time you read The Club of Rome’s 1991 book, The First Global Revolution, which says:
“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”
And when you looked at the Club of Rome’s elite member roster. And when you learnt about eugenics and the Rockefeller ties to the Kaiser Willhelm Institute and the practice of crypto-eugenics and the rise of overpopulation fearmongering and the call by elitist after elitist after elitist to cull the world population.
Still, you wanted to believe that there was some basis of truth, something real and valuable in the single-minded obsession of this hijacked environmental movement with manmade global warming.
Now, in November 2009, the last traces of doubt have been removed.
Last week, an insider leaked internal documents and emails from the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University and exposed the lies, manipulation and fraud behind the studies that supposedly show 0.6 degrees Celsius of warming over the last 130 years. And the hockey stick graph that supposedly shows unprecedented warming in our times. And the alarmist warning of impending climate disaster.
We now know that these scientists wrote programming notes in the source code of their own climate models admitting that results were being manually adjusted.
We now know that values were being adjusted to conform to scientists’ wishes, not reality.
We now know that the peer review process itself was being perverted to exclude those scientists whose work criticized their findings.
We now know that these scientists privately expressed doubts about the science that they publicly claimed to be settled.
We now know, in short, that they were lying.
It is unknown as yet what the fallout will be from all of this, but it is evident that the fallout will be substantial.
With this crisis, however, comes an opportunity. An opportunity to recapture the movement that the financiers have stolen from the people.
Together, we can demand a full and independent investigation into all of the researchers whose work was implicated in the CRU affair.
We can demand a full re-evaluation of all those studies whose conclusions have been thrown into question by these revelations, and all of the public policy that has been based on those studies.
We can establish new standards of transparency for scientists whose work is taxpayer funded and/or whose work effects public policy, so that everyone has full and equal access to the data used to calculate results and all of the source code used in all of the programs used to model that data.
In other words, we can reaffirm that no cause is worth supporting that requires deception for its propagation.
Even more importantly, we can take back the environmental movement.
We can begin to concentrate on the serious questions that need to be asked about the genetic engineering technology whereby hybrid organisms and new, never-before-seen proteins that are being released into the biosphere in a giant, uncontrolled experiment that threatens the very genome of life on this planet.
We can look into the environmental causes of the explosion in cancer and the staggering drops in fertility over the last 50 years, including the BPA in our plastics and the anti-androgens in the water.
We can examine regulatory agencies that are controlled by the very corporations they are supposedly watching over.
We can begin focusing on depleted uranium and the dumping of toxic waste into the rivers and all of the issues that we once knew were part of the mandate of the real environmental movement.
Or we can, as some have, descend into petty partisan politics. We can decide that lies are OK if they support ‘our’ side. We can defend the reprehensible actions of the CRU researchers and rally around the green flag that has long since been captured by the enemy.
It is a simple decision to make, but one that we must make quickly, before the argument can be spun away and environmentalism can go back to business as usual.
We are at a crossroads of history. And make no mistake, history will be the final judge of our actions. So I leave you today with a simple question: Which side of history do you want to be on?
Posted by Q December 3, 09 11:32 PM
I wondered when Frank Drebin would make an appearance.
Now, where’s Comical Ali?
Lucy quoted:
“When thy song is shield and mirror
To the fair snake-curl-ed Pain,
Where thou dar’st affront her terror
That on her thou may’st attain
Persean conquest
…..”
Here’s a link to the famous statue of Perseus.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/PerseusSignoriaStatue.jpg&imgrefurl=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PerseusSignoriaStatue.jpg&h=2272&w=1704&sz=1130&tbnid=kzTGnHzNEnw6GM:&tbnh=260&tbnw=195&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dperseus%2Bstatue&usg=__GqnoXcIc00oUTW7lXzHOt3UCSbc=&ei=XXAZS5mUO5LotgPFmPD8BA&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=1&ct=image&ved=0CAsQ9QEwAA
@ur momisugly Roger Knights (12:03:21)
These incoming graduate students face the tyranny of research funding instead of the liberty of free and open inquiry. The tyranny is overt and completely offensive to the scientific process.
But Popper would say that this area of climate research is a “pseudoscience” and dismiss its truth-seeking value outright.
That is pretty devastating.
If Sean and his colleagues are aware that so much of this area is based on big lies (or at least errors and hype) morale must be a problem. I for one could not stay with a job or area of research I could not believe in.
It would be really interesting to hear from Sean what he thinks the current research challenges are or should be for climate science and climate scientists – or what is left of this field. Better understanding of past and present climate sounds great, but lets hear the research goals and possible applications without the spin of climate change.
U.N. Deletes Documents, Won’t Come Clean on Costs of Greening World Offices
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,579108,00.html
_Jim (10:52:19) :
…
And you and Luap Nor propose going back on the GOLD standard?
Strawman!!! I have never supported a gold standard. Gold IS a barbaric relic. (I guess that makes central banks barbaric since they own so much of it.)
All I seek is liberty in money creation and banking with the usual laws against fraud and insolvency. Legal tender laws would be abolished and also the FDIC. The Fed would have to compete as a genuine private entity without government privilege.
Try again.
I agree with some of what Sean wrote, but I question two things:
1. It seems uncontroversial science that CO2 (and water vapour, methane and a few other gases) absorb longwave radiation from the earth and re-emit energy both up and down, thus having a warming effect at the earth’s surface.
Clearly anthropogenic CO2 wasn’t a factor in any previous climate swings! And CO2 increases would naturally follow warming because the oceans outgas CO2 when they warm.
— However, the fact that previous climate changes were not caused by CO2 doesn’t mean that the CO2 we are emitting can’t have a warming effect now.
That also doesn’t mean CO2 is all or some of the explanation for the last century of warming. Clearly the climate is created by very complex processes, including strong positive feedbacks at times, hence the chaotic temperatures of the last 1,000,000 years.
But you would expect CO2 to have a *first-order warming effect* on the GMST. Whether that is cancelled out by feedbacks, natural variation already in place, or will be amplified by positive feedbacks that exist – who can know.
2. Sean also said “We have also known for years that the alleged one degree temperature rise from 1880 vanishes if sites exposed to urban heat islands are not considered.”
UHI definitely exists. I would love to know its total effect (and have found Anthony Watts work on surface stations really excellent). But the fact that some influential climate scientists produced a dodgy paper and kept citing it doesn’t mean the earth hasn’t been warming.
SST show a warming effect over the last century. And sea level rise shows an upward trend. Clearly there is some warming of the earth’s surface. How much is the question (as well as when and where) along with how big the error bars really are – e.g. Pielke’s work on night-time temperature measurements affected by wind speed.
-Maybe these are minor points (and maybe I’m wrong?) for an interesting post – but in the politicization of climate science, overstating a case can simply re-affirm the other side that their points of view are correct.
JT (12:13:50) :
Even more importantly, we can take back the environmental movement
Not so fast buddy!, you quote the Club of Rome, etc., however you forget something we all have read here:
http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html
JT (12:13:50) : Anthony, the following post…
I’ve captured BOTH posts here, headed up by Pallas Athene, the Statue of Liberty and Lady Justice who presides over The Old Bailey (London seat of justice).
The eloquence of both these pieces is worthy of Churchill. And that eloquence is born in that same deep, dark place where fear, despair and depression are not unknown.
b.poli (07:44:33) :
Harvard? On the way to a 2nd class university?
What do students learn at Harvard? 2nd class science? Religion? Does anybody know? Is there a discussion among students? Do they ask questiones?
Reply
I was told, with pride I might add, that Boston (HAaarvard) has the foremost Marxist Scholars in the world. They also produce “Harvard business school grads” who excel in generating high profits by cutting unnecessary costs…. Like equipment maintenance. They then move on to bigger salaries at larger companies and severe equipment malfunction plagues the factory after they leave. (personal experience at more than one plant, I dreaded seeing a Harvard grad assume a management position)
Let’s see: “The best argument now for AGW is to argue that CO2 is, after all, a greenhouse gas, its concentration is, after all, increasing, and feedbacks that regulated climate for millions of years might (we can hypothesize) be overwhelmed by human CO2 emissions. It is a hypothesis worthy of investigation, but it has little evidentiary support.”
I find the argument for CO2 to be extremely weak, vanishingly small, even virtually nonexistent. Don’t I remember WUWT commenters noting that human activity accounts for ~4% of atmospheric CO2, or ~15 ppm (using the current 387.75 ppm base)? That leaves an awful lot of CO2 that we humans can’t do anything about, doesn’t it? What about the 20% reduction that Waksman wants for the US? 2006 data (the last I’ve seen) show that the US produces ~25% of anthropogenic CO2 (~4 ppm) among the top 20 producers, with only China slightly greater. Reducing this level by 20% = a reduction of ~0.8 ppm. And this is supposed to help the climate? Get a life, AGW supporters!
This is a good piece of work John A, which well illustrates just how bizarre the whole CAGW scam has become. Copenhagen is now a lame duck and will be just another Kyoto.
@ur momisuglyAllen (12:31:00) :
[“@ur momisugly Roger Knights (12:03:21)
These incoming graduate students face the tyranny of research funding instead of the liberty of free and open inquiry. The tyranny is overt and completely offensive to the scientific process.”]
“But Popper would say that this area of climate research is a “pseudoscience” and dismiss its truth-seeking value outright.”
Reply: It’s worst than “pseudo science”, it’s exactly the same as went on in Nazi Germany and the USSR – it’s propaganda towards a specific end. It is the political manipulation of humanity and it is designed to lead to the grand goal of World Government, with Obama groomed for the presidential chair. It will be a completely unelected body, which will enslave us all under the auspices of preventing war, starvation and disease. The people behind this genuinely believe that this is the only way to prevent us all destroying ourselves.
However, recent polls show that changes to weather patterns over the last 10 years have made a large proportion of people sceptical about AGW. The group who want to have world control know that we have to come willingly to the idea, otherwise there will be much strife, and it could cause the very thing they fear. This particular stratagem has run its course, but keep an eye out for the next one, it will be here soon.
They know that we are many, but they are few.
Alvin (10:04:55) :
The Union of Concerned Scientists has been trying to blame “deniers” on Big Oil backed groups for years. Again, political agendas and science mixing.
Reply:
Exxon who often gets the blame is owned by the Rockefellers. The Rockefeller foundations (4) are founded on Standard Oil Money which in turn funds Greenpeace, Sierra Club and WWF. http://activistcash.com/foundation.cfm/did/166
Pot meet kettle…
I would have to classify this kind of account as purely anecdotal; MUCH loose talk occurs out there ‘on the production floor’ that often has little relation to reality or facts (some more or less due to one gender specifically, but I won’t go there).
Plant engineering weren’t summarily fired in ALL probability so the machinery critical to production in all likelihood still received periodic greasing, new sleeves and bushings as required; to meet ISO requirements (for ISO certification) certain minimums/certain practices and procedures are still required by the Quality people.
Then there are ISO Management standards:
I don’t think minimizing plant maintenance is part of ISO ‘guidance’.
.
.
.
If anyone has access to the addresses, please publish them so we can send them a barrage of emails.
Dan
Reply
Check out activist cash for a listing of foundations and who they fund such as Greenpeace, WWF, Sierra club et al
http://activistcash.com/foundation.cfm/did/166
Then check out
http://www.sourcewatch.org
The people who are really worth tracking are the financiers and bankers, Council on foreign relations, Council on Economic Development, and the IPC who wrote much of the WTO agreements http://www.publiceyeonscience.ch/images/the_wto_and_the_politics_of_gmo.doc
Check into the list of Bilderberg participants
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bilderberg_participants
The Club of Rome http://www.clubofrome.org/eng/useful_fact_bank/1/
Adnan Khashoggi is a real interesting bird to look into especially when you track his friends. http://www.politicalfriendster.com/rateConnection.php?id1=174&id2=297
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Adnan_Khashoggi
Adnan Khashoggi friends (this is a bit paranoid but fun) http://www.slate.com/id/2058706/
http://brainmind.com/AmericaBetrayedRootsTerrorism.pdf
That should get you started. Have fun
I note that this site encourages the use of real names. cool. Just as soon as ‘Sean’ reveals his full and real name, his credentials, his funding, his affiliations, his publication record, his complete raw data and code [naturally], gives away his intellectual property and posts all his professional email traffic for the last decade, I will grant him some credence.
Fair’s fair after all.
I remember ISO standards, they attempt to remove all creativity. I also remember vaguely, “Total Quality Management” and a few other magic, expensive and pain in the ass bullets.
They were a total diversion from getting the job done. Thanks for reminding me _Jim of the relief of not having to deal with that BS.