Posted by Patrick Courrielche Jan 8th 2010 at bigjournalism.com
How a tiny blog and a collective of climate enthusiasts broke the biggest story in the history of global warming science – but not without a gatekeeper of the climate establishment trying to halt its proliferation.
It was triggered at the most unlikely of places. Not in the pages of a prominent science publication, or by an experienced muckraker. It was triggered at a tiny blog – a bit down the list of popular skeptic sites. With a small group of followers, a blog of this size could only start a media firestorm if seeded with just the right morsel of information, and found by just the right people. Yet it was at this location that the most lethal weapon against the global warming establishment was unleashed.
The blog was the Air Vent. The information was a link to a Russian server that contained 61 MB of files now known as Climategate. Within two weeks of the file’s introduction, the story appeared on 28,400,000 web pages.
Not entirely the “death of global warming” as many have claimed – what happened with Climategate is much more nuanced and exponentially more interesting than the headlines convey. What was triggered at this blog was the death of unconditional trust in the scientific peer review process, and the maturing of a new movement – that of peer-to-peer review.
This development may horrify the old guard, but peer-to-peer review was just what forced the release of the Climategate files – and as a consequence revealed the uncertainty of the science and the co-opting of the process that legitimizes global warming research. It was a collective of climate blogs, centered on the work of Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, which applied the pressure. With moderators and blog commenters that include engineers, PhDs, statistics whizzes, mathematic experts, software developers, and weather specialists – the label flat-earthers, as many of their opponents have attempted to brand them, seems as fitting as tagging Lady Gaga with the label demure.
This peer-to-peer review network is the group that applied the pressure and then helped authenticate and proliferate the story.
Now, as expected, the virtual organism that is the global warming establishment resisted release of the weapon. At the first appearance of the Climategate files, which contained a plethora of emails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, the virtual organism moved to halt their promulgation. Early on, a few of the emails were posted on Lucia Liljegren’s skeptic blog The Blackboard. Shortly after the post, Lucia, a PhD and specialist in fluid mechanics, received an email from prominent climatologist Gavin Schmidt from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). It said in part, “[A] word to the wise… I don’t think that bloggers are shielded under any press shield laws and so, if I were you, I would not post any content, nor allow anyone else to do so.”
In response to my inquiry about his email, Schmidt posited, “I was initially concerned that she might be in legal jeopardy in posting the stolen emails.” Gavin Schmidt was included in over 120 of the leaked correspondence.
Gavin Schmidt
When asked if she thought the Climategate documents were a big deal at first sight, Lucia responded, “Yes. In fact, I was even more sure after Gavin [Schmidt] sent me his note.”
Remember these names: Steven Mosher, Steve McIntyre, Ross McKitrick, Jeff “Id” Condon, Lucia Liljegren, and Anthony Watts. These, and their community of blog commenters, are the global warming contrarians that formed the peer-to-peer review network and helped bring chaos to Copenhagen – critically wounding the prospects of cap-and-trade legislation in the process. One may have even played the instrumental role of first placing the leaked files on the Internet.
Read the rest of the story here.
h/t to Ed Scott from a correctly admonished charles the moderator
“Steven Mosher, Steve McIntyre, Ross McKitrick, Jeff “Id” Condon, Lucia Liljegren, and Anthony Watts”
There are a few others, but I want to thank the above named.
I’m an engineer who has worked with climate for more than 40 years. I have a few stats of my own. I HAVE A FEW OF MY OOOOOOOOOWN
Our local (formerly major) daily newspaper, the Kansas City Star has not yet printed a single news article about Climate Gate or its impact. They did publish an editorial saying Climate Gate was a non-issue.
I suppose they didn’t publish any news about it because it was a non-issue? Its meaningless, so no needs to write about it? Funny that it rated an editorial, isn’t it?
Borderer,
An excellent post. This is exactly how the New Labour project works. I recommend Simon Raven’s novels of the late ‘fifties where he foretells the saprophitic nature of the left-liberal takeover of our Universities and by extension the whole scientific process.
But stand by for the whole rotten structure to fall apart as the money ain’t there any more.
And, one has to make the point that the great past science you quote was done mainly by private individuals usually working alone, but in correspondence with each other. In other words real science is not actually dependent on large government-funded teaching institutions with their formal hierarchies and politics, and will survive the equivalent of ‘the dissolution of the monasteries’
We have all had enough of the hermetic bulls***t that passes for intellectual progress in such places as UEA and CRU. Enough of this secretive ‘consenting adults in private’ stuff.
And now with the web, we can hopefully look forward to the re-emergence of the kind of science practiced in the time of Faraday, which was done in front of adults in public.
PS for someone who did start ‘barking in the night ‘.. I suggest you try Prof. Philip Stott’s excellent blog:
http://web.mac.com/sinfonia1/Clamour_Of_The_Times/Clamour_Of_The_Times/Archive.html
This post is very insightful in pointing out that the “peer review” process, or at least the ability of warmists to wave peer review as a talisman to ward off criticism has been changed by Climategate. Warmists chronically touted papers that supported their position as pure science and above challenge because they were peer reviewed. The papers may have contained unproven hypotheses and untested models but because they were peer reviewed the warmists felt they were scientifically rigorous. Climategate demonstrated to all that the peer review process in climate science was corrupted.
Even in non-corrupted areas of science peer review does not insure that a published paper contains truth. The posting below recounts how there are multiple contradictory versions of string theory in physics journals, all of which passed peer review and virtually all of which must be false. It describes what peer review is and is not and states that merely passing peer review is a very bad basis for making public policy.
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/10481.html
Interesting how Gavin would like to censure [edit, snip, etc.] others from giving opinions, as his “RealClimate?” site does on a regular basis. Of course it’s under the “real science” cover, or you ignorant fool ( multiple engineering degrees, patents, national & international papers) don’t bother us.
-17 F, -34F windchill this A.M., where is Al when you need him?
Bob: “-17 F, -34F windchill this A.M., where is Al when you need him?”
Sorry, Bob, but that IS the Gore effect. Better to place him permanently at either pole so it stays frozen forever (or alternate him with the seasons so the N. Pole is extremely cold in that hemisphere’s winter and move him to the S. Pole so it’s extremely cold in that hemisphere’s winter). I don’t think he’s welcome in Copenhagen anymore.
yeah,
julian in wales, you can’t tease us like this and then not tell us. I read the telegraph all of the time so i don’t want to miss it.
Hilarious that a climate scientist is trying to hide behind the legal profession! Meanwhile, these guys are feeding the right wing of tomorrow because it’s all going to collapse eventually and, so far, it’s pretty much the right wing fanatics that are pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.
Let me be perfectly clear:
We have started another cold war.
Snow and ice vs the B.S. from the warmists
thousands of schools closed in Britain. How can they teach about that white wonderfull warming when the kiddies stay at home?
Climate change activists have defended themselves by accusing critics of three things:
“not in the field”
“not peer reviewed”
“anti-science”
None of these made much sense.
Is a statistician in the field of climate which is statistics of weather?
Is peer review functionally a double checking of results?
Is disagreement over one subject a rejection of the scientific method?
I must say, it is the weakness of climate change activist’s arguments that is so troubling. If they had something more solid to back up their case, why aren’t they using it?
However, these three defenses in effect boil down to a claim that climatology is somehow “special”.
Climate change activists like to claim that skeptics nitpick. Climate change activists claim that skeptics are unreasonable for expecting “perfection”.
And yet, the big three defenses (“in the field”, “peer review”, “the science”) are stated by climate activists as if they were perfect answers and absolute blocks to any criticism.
Once they play “not in the field” card, they act like they no longer need to listen; case dismissed!
They say skeptics are unresonable for expecting perfection, whilst they themselves act as if their three blocks are indeed perfect.
But skeptics aren’t asking for perfection anyhow, we’re asking for practical and workable knowledge.
Basically, climate change activists are part of a movement to “change the world” and maybe its got all sorts of interests, and maybe it’s just a generational thing (average people with inflated egos), but “maturity” here means divorcing science from vested interests and agendas.
Of course, everyone can be biased to some extent, and I am biased, simply because I as a human have a culture and a point of view. Others have other points of view. Cultures and sub-cultures have “perceptual filters” and points of view.
That isn’t to say that knowledge is not possible. The antidote is openness and checking. Get as many different views involved, and as much checking and double checking as possible.
Peer review is just one form of checking. There need to be multiple forms of checking. Climatology is just one science. There need to be multiple disciplines involved (having the word “climate” in the title has no bearing on anything). And there needs to be more interest in pure science for its own sake, rather than how it supports “the agenda”.
Peer review is not the problem – the way the peer review process was perverted is, and that is a problem with people not systems. Peer review seems to work fine enough in other arenas of science.
“Roger Carr (03:10:01) :
E. M. Smith: May I slip my one-liner under yours?
“The truth needs no Gatekeeper.” -E.M.Smith
“There is no concern of man, either real or imagined, which cannot be manipulated for profit.” -Roger Carr”
Let me add one more that applies:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. ”
-H. L. Mencken
Except that Steven Mosher and Steve McIntyre aren’t “global warming contrarians”. Poor reporting.
With news organizations going to a fee structure for their original news content, maybe the folks that write erroneous or fictitious content about AGW won’t be so welcome by readers who will have to pay for it:
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/01/08/rupert-murdoch-vs-the-internet/
someone mentioned the “government-science-industry complex” above, but i think you’re forgetting that media is as big a part of this as any other…
i liked how crichton described it in state of fear, as the “politico-legal-media complex” or PLM
Here’s another one a buddy of mine, John “Hondo” Hicks, used to go around announcing at every odd opportunity, or completely out of the blue, back in 1963:
“It’s fun to be fooled, but it’s more fun to know the truth.”
Here’s a link to the Simon Raven page on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Simon+Raven&x=0&y=0
If scandals continue to grow (with “Choo-Choo” maybe being the next domino to fall), if the MSM continues in denial about Climategate with Fox news (etc.) being the only outspoken outlet, if the current cooling trend (or blip, if you prefer) continues until November, if a few more scientific bigshots like Freeman Dyson speak out against AGW, etc., then the GOP will have a winning issue. (Although they may not explicitly become disbelievers yet, out of prudence. I.e., they may let activists not formally associated with the party carry the ball.)
The more long-term effect, if this cool blip turns into a trend, and the alarmists’ talking points (glaciers, sea levels, etc.) are more and more widely discredited, is that the “have-a-problem? / get-a-program!” left will be have an albatross around its neck for decades. (E.g., they will be tainted by their association with their bullyboy Joe Romm, as the GOP was by its association with Joe McCarthy.) It’s amazing to me that some of their strategists haven’t sensed the fantastic risk of riding this issue if they are ever forced to dismount it. It’ll be hard for them to peel off this tarbaby, with so much of the documentation of their commitment to it embedded in the amber of the Internet.
They can’t escape by claiming that Al Gore was a GOP agent provocateur. (Can they?)
I am glad to see the light of day for ideas that come from people that do not fit the mold, required to submit to the peer review process.
What about the well founded and timely researched ideas that come from Joe public, that do not attend a University, are not on faculty lists, or supervised by a PhD who is on the faculty at a major university. (Thus not eligible for funding and grants).
What recourse do these people with good ideas have, but to struggle alone, working day jobs while they contemplate the greater marvels of how the universe works. Einstein worked a desk job as a patent clerk for years until he was able to get someone to listen to what he thought about all day long.
The process of getting into collages and universities, to start with in fraught with stumbling blocks for the economically disadvantaged geniuses, who are overlooked for the preppy well to do kids, who are sent automatically into the best schools, where they just party and come out with a degree, that guarantees them a job, doing that other who are more interested, would be better able to do.
Gate keeping starts in the applications process, and continues in the schools and PhD programs post grad. Conforming to the prejudices of the teacher wins them favored positions and better grades, when some time the “True” answer is not the one the teacher is looking to hear.
There have been a lot of good studies, that did not find what the reviewers were expecting to find, so were not further funded, or not followed up on, until at some point, funding for whole areas of inquiry were just not available, and to mention certain key words in applications for funding automatically rejected them.
This unjustified bias to some areas of study, still affect decisions on what is funded, published, and added to textbooks, and subsequently taught to beginning level students, for inclusion into accepted schools of thought.
In meteorology in the 50’s the concept of building models to forecast the weather gained steam, then when the first computers came on line, over riding the search for some sort of repeating patterns, in the weather based on natural cyclic variables. The struggle for funding for buying computers shifted to the modelers side of the argument, less attention was paid to the search for the fabled “Natural Analog” weather forecast.
As the years went by the claims of usefulness, from using models became the battle cry for funding grant applications, selections of those to be promoted into management positions were based on their papers written on models and applications.
Today the individuals in the whole upper echelons of the weather services in most countries were put into place due to their respective ability to use and further develop improved models, and techniques.
Climate models are just the extension of this mode of thinking, and as such still bear with them all of the problems inherent, in the assumptions made, because they are needed to pare down the data inputs, to a manageable size, in order to get them to run at all.
Somewhere along the way, the tracking of the scent of the full spectrum the real forces driving the weather was lost, and is still not understood well enough to make the current models work past 7 to 10 days. The problems seen in the CRU team at EA are just another manifestation of the frustration inherent in using a flawed process, to replicate natural processes.
It is only by finding the real atmospheric driving forces of nature, that we will find the relationships, between the laws and the effects, that make the weather and it’s long term average, the climate predictable.
New ideas and new paradigms are needed, instead of continued rehashing of the incomplete set of parameters, that need to be considered to get it right, for a change for the better to occur. This new open atmosphere of peer to reader review, and compilation of new prevalent methods, is what is going to save us, not more big government programs and controls, by funding input guidance.
But we do know man-made global warming is real!
All the pal-reviewed literature says so!
More on the integrity of scientists from the Institute of Physics propaganda wing here http://environmentalresearchweb.org/blog/ – they still don’t seem to get it!
Invariant,
I couldn’t manage to finish the article as I began to slowly get alienated – I started to notice certain presumptions, certain judgments.
What is it I should be looking for – you give the quote, which I didn’t get to, is it that?
I want to bring up this flat earth business that keeps coming up – I have the impression that not only do we have complicated mathematical evidence that the world is round (I think sextants are also involved!) but there actually are pictures of earth from space. Or is it supposed to be that we don’t believe them? Isn’t there something about Gore saying we also all think the moon landing was staged in the Arizona desert?
I’m totally sick of this attitude – there may very well be flat-earthers around, people who find it important to believe the earth is only 6000 years old, whatever. But the implication that there is no layperson like me out in the real world who isn’t a victim of some kind of propaganda, incapable of intelligent critical thought, is wearing me down.
And somewhere even Intelligent Design is brought in? Isn’t that a whole different thing? Doesn’t that have to do with theories of beginnings?
Some of us would just be happy to know what actually is. We are capable of handling conflicting theories. But we want facts and evidence. Especially when it becomes a question of power and authority. Some of us also want facts and evidence just because we like to know things.
Right now, everyone has to drop whatever they were doing and learn about the things that are being used to control them. For me, it’s a pleasure too, as I’ve discovered theories that entrance me, such as Svensmark’s. I guess that old saw, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely is the operational theme. But I’m just lucky in that. What about the people who wanted to paint, to garden, to contribute in some non-scientific way? No, they have to drop it all or accept control by liars.
But what a world when we have no time to concentrate on what we wish to learn, for our own pleasure and growth, because the controllers never stop. It takes all your energy just to keep on top of finding out the basis for the next totalitarian scheme.
I did notice in the article the issue of trust was brought up, excuse my being judgmental but it seemed condescending. Well, faith has been broken for sure. I found that out, though, several years ago in issues that only affected a minority of us – I say “only” with some sarcasm – every life ruined for whatever reason is still a life. Now we have an issue of global proportions – still, each life affected is an individual life.
I AM furious. I thought science could be trusted and my contribution or at minimum neutral in its effect, hopefully positive in small ways, existence on earth could be spent following my own pursuits, with honor, trusting that those following other stars did the same – with the occasional rotten apple quickly rooted out.
Well, shall I try to finish the article or will it just get worse?
A rarely noted aspect of COP15 is the way the time lock was used before the meeting; “We must act now”, “time is running out” and so on and so forth, ad nauseam.
The time lock is a sales technique (“limited time only,” “only three models left at this price,” etc. etc.). Whenever it is seen you can be quite certain that the persons implicated have abandoned all scientific rigor, and are out to strong-arm public opinion.
Julian doesn’t seem to have looked in again yet.
His reference is to the Blog “EUreferendum” whose owner, Richard North got his fangs into Pachauri’s arse very early, and right up to his gums.
Richard has a big article to be published in the Sunday Telegraph. It was to be published tomorrow, the 10th, but has been held over for a week.
By the time it appears, the piece should be even beefier.
A Happy New Year to all here.
Richard Holle:
“I am glad to see the light of day for ideas that come from people that do not fit the mold, required to submit to the peer review process.”
As one who’s has some scientific background-not used in my carreer choices.
I agree,The internet has had a lot to do with this change.Like the printing press,
it is that driver of revolutionary ideas.Think Ben Franklin,Tom Payne,John Adams.
Folks, the one thing that I don’t get is why so many scientific professional societies have come out with statements supporting AGW – and they’re apparently for the most part still standing by those positions for their societies. I understand fully that some (most? all?) of those positions are likely coming from the board or some committee and not any polling of membership – but still having troubles wrapping my little mind around why such bodies would categorically come out in support of AGW. What’s the motivation? Can anyone enlighten me? Is this really just all piling onto the bandwagon? That in and of itself would be quite disturbing coming from scientific professional societies, so I tend to discount that as being the likely explanation…. I’m even more dumbfounded considering the utter debunking of the hockey stick graph and much more recently the tree-ring proxies (perhaps tree ring debunking still too recent to have affected prof. society position statements).
These society boards can’t all or even mainly be part of the ‘good ‘ol boys’ Hockey Team club, I wouldn’t think, so what is going on? Thoughts?