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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@ur momisugly rbateman (11:11:27) :
And I assure you, Boxer will buy every last syllable of what McCarthy said hook, line & sinker, without so much as a single thought.
A quick look at her legislation efforts reveals that McCarthy told her exactly what she wanted to hear.
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Are you now, or have you ever been, a man-made global warming denier?
Yes Bob W. The argument can go on for decades and maybe both sides can share data and research funds to reach a consensus. However, the US selling out to the alarmists and spending trillions upon trillions of $ to achieve a fraction of a percent decrease in CO2 is insane. The majority of the worlds population is finally going thru their own industrial revolution and they won’t be sacrificing a dime to worry about the emissions that will result from their quest to compete in the world markets. This is orders of magnitude worse than funding the inept and futile “war on drugs”
As a skeptic, I agree with many of Sean’s points. However, I join many others in asking him to please provide his full name and credentials to back up his statements.
Tonight on BBC News Night an adherent of the Human induced Global Warming lobby was allowed to conclude the carefully controlled time assymetrical debate in favour of the pro human induced warming participant on “Climategate” to openly denigrate with an obscenity those they describe as sceptics.
I for one hear the marching sound of the jackboots when the BBC openly broadcasts such insults.
Hmmm … kind of the reason we are/have had issues with –WAIT FOR IT – climate science (and their data/code)?
Who needs coding procedures, code reviews, code check-in and check-out procedures, requirements documents, archival procedures and plans (for data, documents, and code) , etc., after all, all those traceability and accountability procedures “attempt to remove all creativity” huh?
I suppose that’s the way Michael Mann and Phil Jones see it too.
It’s been my experience that those who complain the loudest are USUALLY the ones that need it (the enforcement of standards, procedures, accountability) THE MOST.
And I’m a ‘user’ of these systems, for coding, for engineering documentation purposes, etc.; I am not a QRA/Quality guy …
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“Hmmm … kind of the reason we are/have had issues with -WAIT FOR IT – climate science (and their data/code)?”_jim
Sure! 😉 Sounds like a suitable punishment to me! It will make them long for free enterprise!
Let all government work be subject to ISO whatever!
Think of Climategate as the invasion of Poland or bombing of Pearl Harbor. The new “leaders” of the Second World War for Truth in Science (or Phase Two of The Next Hundred Years War for the same) are likely to be those who have already achieved security for themselves and their families. If they do not already have –or quickly grow– backbones and come forth and enlist, the war is going to be over before it begins. The decrepit main stream media have yet to pick up the issue and actually assign real reporters (if they could find any) to the conflict. The politicians have yet to face election on the issue and thus for them it does not exist. College students have no idea what it means to challenge stupidity or where to start if they wanted to. The West has become complacent and fat and the Sun is rising in the East.
“Who needs coding procedures, code reviews, code check-in and check-out procedures, requirements documents, archival procedures and plans (for data, documents, and code) , etc., after all, all those traceability and accountability procedures “attempt to remove all creativity” huh?” _jim
I needed requirements, a preliminary design, and an interface control document and diagram. That was about it. The preliminary design was a waste of time as were the code reviews, etc. Just time wasting hoops to jump through.
Hire good people and then trust them is the way to go. No amount of procedure can make up for talent and dedication.
The Wall Street Journal published a number of the hacked e-mails, one of which was particularly damning. It was an e-mail from Tom Wigley to Phil Jones and said:
“Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean—but we’d still have to explain the land blip. I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips—higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from.”
You can debate what “trick” means, and argue about what kind of decline you really meant to hide (although why any respectable scientist would want to hide any ternd is beyond me), but there is simply no way of explaining away the e-mail quoted above, in which Wigley is proposing a completely arbitrary correction value so as to massage the results so that inconvenient “blips” could be more easily explained away.
Were you isolated, living on an (a virtual) island, sure, you can ‘get away with’ coding like that. I’ve coded in that kind of a situation a number of times.
But try:
1) A project that has continuity spanning just under a decade,
2) presently in Phase 4 of the product development,
3) involving persons in two different primary countries,
4) 3 or 4 times that number of languages in personnel involved
6) umpteen different programmers and contract programmers over that period of time …
7) Product involving:
. a) infrastructure gear/transceivers (s/w and firmware from Phys (layer 1) through Layer 3)
. b) subscriber devices/transceivers
. c) EMS (Element Management Software) for infrastructure provision and control, supervision (alarms, etc)
. d) subscriber database management software
. e) Documentation, user guides, cust training docs and classes
And maybe you still don’t get the idea of the need for some ‘formalization’ and documentation needed in the process …
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_Jim,
Do you work with ISO or similar standards checking and application verification assessments?
If so it would be interesting to hear of your experiences.
It is tempting to see these quality guarantee schemes as a form of perpetual peer review for business operations but so far as I can tell from what I have seen in the past 25 years or so that may not be a wise assumption, just as ‘peer review’ may not be all that people assume.
The observations from Gail Combs and Back2Bat have a familar ring to them.
Isn’t there a ‘secret handshake’ that works amongst the RC crowd that circumvents the need for all that?
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I would say I agree that Sean should say who he is, in making these statements. On the other hand, the State of Fear that is in the Climate Science community has yet to lift, and even now, criticizing the Hockey Team will probably lead to ones own work being blocked from publication (as Eduardo Zorita expects will happen to him).
I don’t give credence to the fact that Professor McCarthy is from Harvard and therefore he must be suspect. Harvard also has Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon, two astrophysicists who have suffered much at the hands of the blackballing Hockey Team. I do give credence to the fact that Professor McCarthy is part of a long standing activist group (UCS) whose agenda is political and not scientific.
But Sean is correct – when the code is examined by knowledgeable people, the clear implication is clear that the resulting temperature index is the result of deliberately distorting the input data for no valid physical reason. This is ipso facto scientific fraud if there is no valid scientific reason to do it.
There are those who still think that because Steve McIntyre possessed the data therefore he could have reproduced the HADCRU3 index, but until these hardcoded fudge factors came to light, how could anyone possibly have known?
At the bottom of all of this, I fear for the credibility of the vast majority of scientists whose work is impugned by the machinations of Mann and Jones, and of the credibility of science itself as the best way to describe and understand the Universe. I really do fear that after this is all done, climate science will be damaged for a generation.
The best thing would be for climate scientists to come out and speak the truth to power – that the behaviour of the Hockey Team and the connivance of the IPCC has corrupted the entire field of climate science and that until this is all worked out, very little is to be trusted if it is derived or calibrated by the HADCRU dataset.
_Jim,
Ah, I see you partly answered my previous question in a post made since my last refresh of the responses.
As with peer review there will be places and times where the quality assessment is usefully applied and works as intended. But it seems to me that those who start the qualification process seeking to set themselves high standards often find that they create an expensvie and stiffling straitjacket for their operation and need to adjust to a more sustainable level.
How far thisa adjsutment takes them depends on who is managing theporocesses and what their personal take on it is. Ideally you appoint someone who crosses ‘t’s and dots ‘i’s, but the chance arises that you may cripple your production. I once worked for a software development company that was an early adopter of the BSI (British Standards Institue) regime and moved on to the ISO regime early as well. We got to a point where the documentation was quite tightly controlled (but never so much that the inspectors could not find some small ‘issue’ of course) which was fine, though time consuming and therefore costly. However towards the end of that business (which may or may not have been co-incidental) things became very difficult because the product managers – being both architects of the system and managers of the programmers – were in perpetual quality assurance meetings when they undertook a large product update that happened also to coincide with the Y2K ‘event’. The overall development manager insisted on having the meetings and running them ‘by the book’. There were times when development pretty much stopped for days at a time because people were not available to answer questions.
Later, as an independent consultant working more closely with clients on the other side of the fence, I was able to observe how larger organisations paying bigger assessment fees wrote simpler books to cover their operational matters as far as quality assurance was concerned.
In the end you have to consider what is ‘fit for purpose’ and try to match that to the available budget and, in the case of creative matters like programming, what the employees find acceptable to work with. (Assuming you want to attract the best and retain them.)
Even then the QA is only for the process not the ‘product’ it produces.
JT,
That seems to be a transcript or the narrative from this video:
Phil Clarke (15:22:40) and Kevin Davis (16:21:23) :
Are you both really so gullible that you can’t see WHY Sean has refrained from providing his full name? The climate of the scientific community now (no pun intended) is such that any person who openly doubts AGW dogma could seriously threaten his career. I do not blame Sean for choosing anonymity. It is unfortunate that hostility is the response to honesty about one’s sceptical views on AGW, because a full name would indeed add more credibility to Sean’s letter, but at the same time everything he said in his letter can be confirmed as true through a bit of research.
And to Sean — thank you, thank you, thank you! Coming from someone who is a physics and climate science graduate, you have my DEEPEST respect. Just when I was becoming extremely disillusioned with the whole field of climate science, and science in general, you and several others come along and express your disgust with the dishonesty that has occurred in this monstrous scandal. I suspect there are many other honest scientists out there who are also outraged, but know that it would be career suicide to speak about it. Still, I can’t see how it would be career suicide to at least acknowledge that what occurred was wrong and should be thoroughly and independently investigated. ALL scientists should be doing this, whether they subscribe to AGW or not. If all scientists did this, it would restore faith in the scientific process and in scientists themselves. By keeping silent, they are doing far more long-term damage to their reputations than the short-term damage that would come from speaking up.
The danger of any field is that you can end up only seeing the world through the lens you are trained in. You can lose sight of the forest because you are always in the trees. You can lose perspective — and common sense. Add to this money, politics, power, and fame and the possibilities of corruption and tunnel vision are in full play.
Sometimes submersion in a subject is just great; many breakthroughs come through this devotion. Hooray for the Aspergers type mind! But sometimes this narrow focus makes you just that, narrow minded. I look at the long term temperature record and see the MWP, the LIA and our present warming and think, “Wow, climate can really vary over a millennium.” If the MWP was truly a global phenomenon (and the evidence is pretty supportive), that would be so devastating to the alarmism. Why worry? In fact, why not realize our good fortune that an ice age is a bit further off? So, for me I cannot get the climate change alarmist drama and their demonization of C02. I am a gardening nut and love plants. I hope we will be able to live and prosper, and at the same time increase C02, have a little warmer planet, and grow healthier crops that will feed and support more people in our world.
How this climatology student has resisted the bandwagon is a miracle.
“I will grant him some credence. ” – Phil Clarke
I am sure he waits with bated breath.
“And maybe you still don’t get the idea of the need for some ‘formalization’ and documentation needed in the process …” _Jim
Whatever is appropriate. One size does not fit all. I suspect the huge size of government is mandating all the ISO requirements and adding enormously to expense. Thus we end up with $700 dollar hammers.
Let the people who actually do the work design the process and the work will get done. If you only knew hope much useless hoop jumping goes on when it usually boils down to a few key dedicated personal doing the work while the paper pushers imagine they are doing it.
Apparently this chap has already decided the science and the truth behind climategate for the world:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/fraction-too-much-fiction-in-climategate-20091205-kb9g.html
Why I do not take anything seriously anymore in the SMH and The Age. What a crock.
PS> Oh it’s OK folks… he’s a climate change expert after all:
http://www.directory.uwa.edu.au/view?dn=cn%3DStephan%20Lewandowsky%2C%20ou%3DSchool%20of%20Psychology%2C%20ou%3DFaculty%20of%20Life%20and%20Physical%20Sciences%2C%20ou%3DFaculties%2C%20o%3DThe%20University%20of%20Western%20Australia
Better scratch my criticism….
The Boston Globe is my regional newspaper, and I cringed in shame when reading the article – until I got to the response – that cheered me up a bit!
I think the concept of evil big business vs. ‘pure’ scientists is just so ingrained in the minds of many environmental journalists that it is near impossible for them to shift into investigative mode. Many environmental journalists don’t have scientific training, so the scientific method is just an abstract concept that ranks lower than the overall environmental cause. As a result, they don’t understand the level of outrage over the emails, and dismiss it as pre-Copenhagen denier noise.
In terms of patching up the scientific process, one aspect I haven’t heard too much about is the history behind all the GW position statements from the various professional societies. I would venture a guess that many of them were contacted and asked to produce a position statement, rather than coming up with one spontaneously. Maybe all this is turning me into a conspiracy theorist, but it would be interesting to know more. In future, it would be nice the professional societies were discouraged from making sweeping political statements. (maybe that is naive on my part, but I hate to see these societies being used in this way)
“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.”
Man, that’s the truth. I was doing my post-doc in a neurobio/pharm/phys lab that had some very important work challenging the current dogma about nicotinic acid receptors. There was no upregulation in the number of receptors in response to increased exposure to nicotine, though there was increased binding, indicating the presence of hitherto unknown additional binding sites. Presentation of the very solid data (I knew the researcher and her work was always impeccable–she now works for a “federal agency”) at various meetings was often accompanied by outrage from leading (and long in the tooth) proponents of orthodoxy culminating in throwing wadded up programs at the overhead screen, stomping out of the presentation, and yelling that such results, if true, would threaten people’s careers, people’s lives. Ha ha ha.
Gail Combs (14:48:57) :
“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…”
Those with ambitions for a Global Power Grab use the environmentalists to the dirty work.
It’s right that pulls the strings and their World Governance Doctrine is fascist, not Marxist.
Global Warmings new Clothes.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/global_warmings_new_clothes_1.html