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
onlyme (06:17:50) :
Kadaka, Jim, thx for the correction. Guess I need to wait longer than I did for any review process to complete. My bad, and apologies to the Breitbart folks.
The Intense Debate system is “quirky,” and intensedebate.com seems overloaded to where assorted outages are all too common. A “normal” one is where it stops working on an article for awhile, leaving a bare unthreaded WordPress comment page coming from Breitbart. But it also drops comments, which may or may not come back. Others get unattached, usually at the high-volume breitbart.com news stories. All of the comments there can vanish. They may appear later, but elsewhere, and it was becoming almost ordinary at breitbart.com to see an ancient block of comments, many months old, suddenly appear with a new article.
Your comment could have been mislaid. However, the reply to it should have gone as well. The only normal “review process” comes with the “must be approved” message, and then it shouldn’t have shown up to be replied to. Without that or the “deleted” message, the only delay in posting is how long it takes to file it on the servers, which goes from instantaneous to perhaps twenty seconds when things are very busy.
Thus, as you were an unregistered commenter, I must surmise something was keeping you from seeing your comment. There was a reply to it, others saw it, but it was blocked from displaying on your end. I am registered, I don’t get the display problem you had, thus it seems related to being unregistered.
You might consider registering with Intense Debate. Not only do you get a nifty personal page that keeps track of all your comments, you also get a handy “Edit” button, usable until someone replies, and a “Delete” button that doesn’t leave a visible trace if you had no replies. This may help avoid similar comment displaying problems in the future.
Marc – yes it is a lot more about Pachauri – if you look at the thread on EUreferendum (30 pages now) you will see how the bloggers all contributed to putting the jigsaw together. This sort of group investigation is very new.
What I find so interesting and new is the way the forums have developed their individual strengths and gathered together groups of experts to work as teams on problems. On the WUWT forum a lot of scientists and engineers and statisticians and computer programers seem to tackle data together and find weaknesses in the science as well as suggest new points of view. I suppose this sort of thing must go on inside universities but on a forum like WUWT thte process is very open to the public (like me)
On Richard’s blog something equally important and interesting is going in in the political sphere. I find interesting to compare the way WUWT and EUref have each found their own voices and gathered their own groups.
Then there is a dialogue going on between the groups. What is exposed on WUWT is being picked up by EUref and from that we got the Pachauri scandal.
If you are a scientist you really want to keep out of politics. In a way that is what went wrong at the Uni of EA. Politics and science mingled and it produced pseudoscience.
I expect it would be possible for Pachauri financial affairs to be picked up by a groups of investigative accountants if such a blog exists and they would be even better that EUref (who are mostly political) at digging out the story and getting to the truth.
These open self-motivated self-organising groups that pass jobs from one to the other makes me optimistic. It seems to me (a small business person by the way) a much better system than peer to peer, groups of experts often all come from one field of science and are trapped into circles of group think, but the introduction of outside disciplines breaks that apart and brings in new attitudes.
I believe commercial businesses are now closing research departments and running competitions to find answers to problems. It is often the little guy on the outside who sees the solution first.
Additional information on:Oliver K. Manuel (02:11:04) :
‘As more climategate unfolds, don’t be surprised if you eventually uncover these words from a secret meeting about December 9, 2000:
“OK, GEORGE, YOU BE USA PRESIDENT; I’LL BE PRESIDENT OF THE WORLD!”
That’s what it looks like now,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA PI for Apollo’
For additional information on the Al Gore/US Government alliance, see:
1. Biography of Vice President Al Gore
a. http://clinton1.nara.gov/White_House/EOP/OVP/html/Bio.html
b. http://clinton1.nara.gov/White_House/Keepers/html/Keepers.html
“This WWW server is being operated and maintained by the Office of Science and Technology Policy”
2. Also read: Al 2008 Gore Support Center
http://www.algoresupportcenter.com/aboutal.html
“About Vice President Al Gore” explains December 9, 2000 events:
“He ran for President in 2000 . . . but was denied the Presidency when the United States Supreme Court halted all legal recounts in the state of Florida.”
Looks worse now,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA PI for Apollo
Re. Gavin:
Q:
In your opinion, what percentage of global warming is due to human causes vs. natural causes?
[Response: Over the last 40 or so years, natural drivers would have caused cooling, and so the warming there has been (and some) is caused by a combination of human drivers and some degree of internal variability. I would judge the maximum amplitude of the internal variability to be roughly 0.1 deg C over that time period, and so given the warming of ~0.5 deg C, I’d say somewhere between 80 to 120% of the warming. Slightly larger range if you want a large range for the internal stuff. – gavin]
http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=1853#comment-142358
Oh, I know what he means but read what he wrote. 😉
Nothing specific, eh, Oliver? Oh, you were paraphrasing maybe in that first post?
Ref paraphrasing:
a) Paraphrasing Quotations
b) Integration of Quotes/Paraphrasing
c) How to Punctuate Quotations
.
.
An alternate title I’d suggest for this might be “The Schmidt has really hit the fan now.” 8^)
Julian in Wales (11:19:47),
Excellent points. Those who intend to limit freedom of speech to only government-approved speech now have their sights set on the internet, which they refer to as “alternative media”.
And of course, government bureaucrats will decide what ‘differs radically’ from their tame pets in the ‘mass media’.
It is clear to WUWT readers that the mass media [the MSM: mainstream media] has been co-opted. They report in lock step what they want people to think, and they relegate to pages buried deep their scant coverage of the climategate issue — while reporting daily in alarming hyperbole on AGW scares — scares based on zero empirical evidence, but which provide a pretext that will result in drastically curtailed freedom, taxes raised by the $trillions, greatly expanded government bureaucracies, and national sovereignty forfeited to an opaque, unelected, unaccountable and kleptocratic world government.
Does anyone think that is an exaggeration? If so, please explain why the mass media is doing its best to cover up the biggest financial scam in world history; a scam, based on a repeatedly falsified conjecture, that makes Bernie Madoff look like a small time piker by comparison. I, for one, would like to hear a rationale for the deliberate negligence of our once free press, which used to compete with its peers to investigate and report on government scandals and fraud, but which now cooperates to shill for that fraud.
Now that the job of investigation is done by the internet, it has become a threat to the agenda of those who intend to control the citizenry by greatly restricting their personal freedom, and confiscating their wealth based on repeated lies. Look for upcoming schemes to regulate, and eventually to censor internet use that is deemed to be out of the government-approved “mainstream”.
anna v (04:23:46)
“Politicians, particularly in the EU are out on every occasion parroting AGW. Who trained them?”
Rational Debate (10:45:57)
“Folks, the one thing that I don’t get is why so many scientific professional societies have come out with statements supporting AGW…”
I don’t think they need training, I think they see it as being in their own self-interest. I read something somewhere (didn’t keep the link) that the AGW bandwagon is a pretty good thing for a politician/scientist to hop onto.
It gives him instant credibility with a number of groups: environmentalists & greens of all strips, socialists, other anti-capitalism groups, the Al Gore crowd, etc. Said Pol also gets to avoid the withering fire directed at the skeptic view. Assuming any given Pol starts from a neutral position (big given, I know) then the Warmist position becomes very tempting. Even if he’s aware of the skeptical view.
Then, of course, there’s the money issue. Lots and lots and lots of money. Don’t forget Power, fame, or glory either. Power’s even more tempting than money.
Galen Haugh (08:25:27)
“Sorry, Bob, but that IS the Gore effect. Better to place him permanently at either pole so it stays frozen forever…”
That’s a darn good idea! I second the motion. All in favor…
Kendra (10:22:01)
“…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…”
I agree totally. It’s one of the reasons I like blogs like this one as opposed to some others where questions aren’t allowed.
Rational Debate (10:45:57) :
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?
A valid question.
I will attempt an answer from my personal experience. I am a retired particle physicist. This means I have a lot of grounding in mathematical physics and also a long experience in using and evaluating models with computer programs. Until two and a bit years ago I had not been aware of the global warming band wagon except as a third hand story from news or some article briefly glanced through. Certainly I had no reason to doubt the integrity of the scientists proposing it, as I would not expect climate specialists to doubt my exposition on elementary particles. Had I been elected in a scientific body and somebody brought a supportive statement for global warming, I would have read through the blurbs and supported that action should be taken if possible, because I would be trusting on the scientific integrity of the people who proposed the theory on all levels: honesty in data handling, honesty in critical thinking, honesty in gauging the probabilities of truth in the propositions.
I think that is what has happened to the world’s scientific bodies. And once they have stuck their necks out, they do not want to lose face.
In my case, I started doubting the “science” in “climate science” gradually. First, hearing that there would be a six meter rise in the sea levels, I started worrying about my holiday cottage and started noticing news articles that had to do with global warming. Then noticed that they were talking of unprecedented warming ( hockey stick). Now it was fairly recently in the news, also because of global warming, that a hunter was discovered mummified in the Alps. For me, it was self evident that the present warming was not unprecedented! I started digging. When I reached the IPCC AR4 physics justification report I was stupefied at the deceptions and glossing overs and generally low level of scientific integrity in presentations.
Now the people in the committees have not gone through this road to change their minds. Possibly climate gate will open more and more scientist’s eyes as a shortcut to the long way it took me to stop trusting “climate science”.
Borderer (03:08:59) : “…Like most educated lay-persons – I had generally assumed that the Science establishment was fundamentally honest …”
As did we all at one time. Science as a pure discipline has died, starting many decades ago. There are tens of thousands of corrupt papers, most of which passed peer review without dissent, and some of which are still being quoted as holy writ in various fields. A few hideous early examples are described in the link below:
http://www.narth.com/docs/TheTrojanCouchSatinover.pdf
@Rational Debate
Society and people change, and one of the things that changes is people’s values and core beliefs, and how they see the world.
A person living in serfdom in the Middle Ages will be different to an entrepreneur living in Silicon Valley today. A person living in a shack in a township in South Africa today will have a different world view to a person living in authoritarian China. There are a number of psychology models that are like maps to these different worldviews.
One of the things that’s been found is that in the West about 50 years ago, a new world view arose, a sort of new current in culture, and that current manifested as Post Modernism in academia, as interest in New Age alternatives, in people traveling the world to “find themselves”, in Buddhism coming from the East, and so on. The details vary considerably, but on the whole, you can discern something changed around that time which shares a common pattern or core system of values.
Thing is, this is one current, alongside other currents, so not everyone changes. Typically it is confined to certain portions of certain generations in certain countries. But what it does, is it gives a large group a very common core belief and core values system. If you lookup Spiral Dynamics you can see the map and descriptions which they have produced from their research.
Basically, there’s no “conspiracy” as such, it is just that there are many people in academia in the West who’ve grown up with green values, and they can take that to various extremes. So you can have say, a whole generation of climatologists who happen to share a core green extreme culture, then what happens? well, they discover data, as any scientist does, but how they interpret that data, both individually and collectively by “peer review”, is affected by their core cultural beliefs and values.
Put it to you this way, if a modern Genghis Khan knew about climate change, his interpretation would be something about how to use it to starve his enemies. Green scientists on the other hand use it to talk about “saving creation”. Two utterly different takes on the same data.
Skeptics can be just as interested in raw data as anybody, but because we differ in our interpretation about what to do about climate change, even if it was man made, we get accused of being “anti-science”. We’re not anti-science, we’re anti a particular cultural current of beliefs about certain notions of “justice”. But for the green scientists who don’t realise they’re embedded in a particular green culture, they take it as “anti-science”. The irony is that they accuse everyone else of being embedded in capitalist greedy culture, and that we can’t see the data because of that. No, we see data. We just don’t interpret it through their culture of green “justice”.
What I find quite fascinating about Spiral Dynamics model, is that whilst it identifies green culture and its ascendancy over the last 50 years, they have data that indicates that a new wave of culture is already starting to emerge in the new generations. Being a new level or stage, it is beyond the previous stage, which gives it more perspective on the faults of the previous stage, the green stage.
The timing is kinda sweet. Just as the greens are getting into politics and trying to build a world government for “climate justice” and “for the children”, the children are heading off to a new project.
One of the criticisms of green in Spiral Dynamics is that it tends to value sensitivity so much that it becomes impractical and ineffective. You can see this everywhere. Here in the UK they’re tripping over themselves because they want to build a new high voltage line to the wind farms, but it runs across some very scenic beautiful countryside.
According to Spiral Dynamics, the new wave that’s starting to come in is ten times more effective at getting things done than greens. I’m pretty green myself and so I kinda know what they’re talking about.
This means that it won’t take many people at the new level to get far more done than the greens could ever manage. Expect to see a lot of “sensitivity” projects slashed in favor of what actually works and solves problems.
The new values are about flexibility and effectiveness, about recognising the complexity of the world on a much bigger level of scale and subtlety.
That’s the theory, anyway, as far as I can tell. Any misrepresentations and errors are my own.
Speaking of all this, one of those emails advocates setting up an “ethics panel” to regulate peer review.
charles the moderator
Here is the latest on Mann-made global warming.
—————————————-
Climate expert in the eye of an integrity storm
By Faye Flam
Inquirer Staff Writer
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/20100109_Climate_expert_in_the_eye_of_an_integrity_storm.html
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. – Michael Mann switched from physics to climate science back in graduate school because he thought climate offered a better chance to work “on a frontier.”
He got his wish, and now, as the director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center, he has experienced an aspect of frontier life more like the Wild West – a bounty on his head.
Then we’ll need a panel to monitor the Ethics Panel, then another committee to monitor that panel, then another….
Stefan (12:55:44):
Beliefs and values have no place in promoting the AGW hypothesis. Empirical data, methods and experiments, openly shared, is what matters. The data leads to conclusions, but the “green” scientists dishonestly assign a result [AGW], then look for any empirical data to support it. Finding none, they “adjust” the data — or completely fabricate it — until it fits their preconceived conclusions.
Please explain why these climatologists refuse to abide by the Scientific Method, which doesn’t just suggest a course of action; it requires those putting forth a hypothesis, such as CO2=CAGW, to fully and completely cooperate with other scientists in falsifying their hypothesis.
Indeed, it requires those putting forth a hypothesis to do their best to personally falsify their own hypothesis in any way they can. Scientific truth can only be derived by stripping out everything that can not be verified. What remains is as close to the truth as we can get. And the truth is all that matters in honest science. That is why everyone concerned has a duty to try to falsify any proposed hypothesis.
But rather than follow the Scientific Method, government and university scientists blockade requests for their data and methods, asking why they should share their methodologies, code, raw and adjusted data with those whose purpose is to try and ‘find something wrong’ with it.
That is not science. That is pure self-serving propaganda. Scientific skepticism is an absolute requirement of the Scientific Method, yet these same dishonest scientists and the sycophants who defend them here demonize the time honored term “skeptic.” The only honest scientist is a skeptic. The rest are just promoting an agenda for their own advancement and for financial rewards. They are not skeptics, they are writing propaganda in return for money and status.
If you disagree, tell us why the Scientific Method, which has resulted in fantastic advances in human health and wealth, is now being trashed by scientists who know better.
Stefan: “What I find so interesting and new is the way the forums have developed their individual strengths and gathered together groups of experts to work as teams on problems.”
I agree that blog science is an interesting development, but I dispute that it represents anything fundamentally new in science. People from outside a particular scientific field have always published their views in one way or another through pamphlets, books, letters etc. The internet is just a more immediate and wide-ranging medium for this practice.
Where these various informal means of publication fall down is in the areas of quality control and systemic development. Blog science is no exception.
WUWT and other blogs have published many studies by interested parties, but there’s little indication as to which studies make the grade and which fall by the wayside. This promiscuity penalises the better studies while supporting the poorer ones. And science is systemic, a process that takes place within social and organisational contexts.
As such, if an outside challenge to the scientific orthodoxy is to be successful, such a challenge would need to replicate the functions of the orthodoxy. In effect, that means that blog science would have to become the mainstream. Therefore, the underlying problem – how to overturn the orthodoxy — still remains.
simon (06:17:27) :
[Is it time to drop the “gate”? … the parallels of being encircled by reality on the frozen steppes are cherries waiting to be picked. So given that hubristic overreach is inevitably followed by epic downfall, would “Climategrad” now be more apropos?]
I have to agree Climategate was the opening breach of the battle for climate truth. I believe what we are seeing is the beginning phase of Climategard. Nice symbolism, good job.
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
You guys make me laugh so hard I missed my H1N1 shot!
“Anything worth doing is worth doing for money.” – Ferrenghi 13th Rule of Acquisition
Yes, I don’t disagree. What seems to have happened though, is that green culture has a certain amount of “ego” in saving the world. It is like their self worth is about whether they as individuals can “make a difference”. That’s kinda noble in one sense, but it can also be an ego trip in another. I mean, I’m just one person amongst six billion. That just crushes the ego. But make my life about “saving creation”, and there’s an ego project worth holding onto to. I am important because I can help save the world! My ethical choices as a consumer, are no longer about what brand of coffee I like the smell of, it is about what brand of coffee saves the poor from oppression!
OK, there is some truth to that, but it is not nearly as significant as ego-greens would like to believe, at least, it doesn’t seem that significant to me. There are far bigger forces at work influencing the state of the poor and their development than whether I buy one brand or another. But that’s how greenies see it.
“Can chocolate save the world?”
http://www.developments.org.uk/articles/can-chocolate-save-the-world/
But that just ain’t true. A well known mathematician wrote a piece about this regarding alternative energy (sorry don’t recall the name, you’ve probably read it), he said that the typical green notion was that “a lot of small changes add up to a big change”. But no, that’s wrong. A lot of small changes, he said, add up to a small change. Personally my ego is OK with that, but greens I can think of, they would throw up.
Now, as for science, I just googled “ethical scientist”. Remember, acting ethically is to some extent, an ego project. The first hit I get is to http://www.sgr.org.uk/
“promotes ethical science, design and technology, based on the principles of openness, accountability, peace, social justice, and environmental sustainability”
I just get the impression that it is no longer OK for any green cultured scientist to just research without questioning the application. Think about the horrors of nuclear bombs and biological warfare. No, green scientists are sensitive, and want to be ethical, some are probably even Buddhists or Evangelicals, and believe in earning an ethical livelihood. So the purpose of research is not just research for the sake of impartial knowledge, it is research for the sake of helping humanity.
So it quickly slides into a cultural and values project. It becomes about educating the public so you can move towards ethical lifestyles.
But personally I agree that research needs to be cold and objective. Then the moral implications can be assessed separately.
I guess what I’m saying is, if you really want to know what’s happening with the climate, the last person to ask is a greenie.
Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #190:
“Hear all, trust nothing.”
@BrendanH
I think you’re replying to
Julian in Wales (11:19:47)
The Hitler video is amusing. Too bad, though, that the caption writer put “pawned it off” (onto graduate students) instead of the correct “palmed it off”. [It’s a card-cheat expression.]
IanM
Well said;
http://www.independent.ie/world-news/tide-is-turning-on-climate-change-1973273.html
Alan F (05:02:59) :
I liken this to the outing of Catholic priests as child molesters. The majority of the faithful forgave them, a minority of the faithful questioned their faith and those who were delivering the message unto them while a small sect in the hierarchy of that religion worked at casting doubt on the accusations of children.
—————
What absolute hateful rubbish. The majority of faithful, including priests, are appalled by those elements in the Church hierarchy that have covered up for child molesters. This was done without the knowledge of the faithful, and had we been informed about this strategy, there would have been a massive revolt. As it is, in the U.S., Canada, Ireland, and elsewhere, certain Archbishops chose to ignore the problem or hide it without dealing with it. Others, such as in the archdiocese where I grew up, immediately removed the priests from positions in which they interacted with the public, and dealt with the issue. Priestly abuse of children has been a scandal to the faithful – and where you get the idea that these criminals have been forgiven I know not! Not by ordinary folk. The hottest anger is directed at the complicit archbishops and Cardinals (like Cardinal Law) who should face criminal sanctions. Under Pope John Paul II, there was no will to do this, because this was a rare blind spot for this pontiff: the communists in the Soviet Bloc used to tar priests with accusations of homosexuality and pedophilia as a means of discrediting the religion and alienating the populace from the faith, so Pope John Paul II saw these accusations from the perspective of his experience under communism. Unfortunately, the problem was also compounded by the liberal movement within the Catholic Church, which has viewed the faith through Freudian goggles, and saw the appropriate measure for abusive priests to be psychological counselling and supposed rehabilitation.