Guest Post by Steven Mosher
All processes are subject to hacking, both from external and internal entities. The IPCC process is no exception, neither is the process of writing for science journals exempt. As recent reports show Pachauri hacked the IPCC processes to make them work against themselves and bend the system to his financial ends. An inside hacker, like Pachauri, can be especially dangerous since he plays a role in structuring the very system that they hack. Not only do they exploit a system they were meant to protect, but they also act in ways to prevent detection of their hacks.
What the recent disclosures about Pachauri show is that the IPCC process is now totally compromised, compromised from the inside. Like a system exploited by a destructive hack, that system may be beyond repair. It’s time to reformat the hard drive and start from scratch, as climate scientist Hulme, spotted 101 times in the Climategate files and closely tied to Pachauri, suggested–perhaps in a moment of clarity after the discovery of the emails:
Just how was the CRU system hacked? And can such hacks be prevented or are they a very part of the nature of authoritarian systems? As discussed in our book “Climategate: The Crutape Letters , now available on Kindle and in Ebook format, the “hacks” were focused on the publication process.
The IPCC reports were intended to be summaries of the science, both what we know and what we don’t know. These summaries were written for policy makers who would use the science and its findings to take action: action to prevent climate change, mitigate it, adapt to it, and to fund new studies where knowledge was uncertain. And action is where the money is. Every hack of the system cashes out into some form of compensation to the hackers: more money for their organizations or more prestige for themselves.
As the mails show the hacking of the CRU process and the scientific process itself was exposed primarily because of the “pressure” put on the hackers by the FIOA process. And as the mails also show, the hackers moved to thwart the FOIA process by corrupting FOIA officers. In fact, the most egregious hack of the system, Jones’s request that people delete mails, came as the direct result of trying to cover up a hack of the process, the hack surrounding the ‘Jesus Paper.’
During the course of writing the account of Climategate, we noticed that Pachauri, was named directly in the files 11 times and he’s mentioned by title in others. Before canvassing those mails it’s key to understand how the hackers worked to subvert the IPCC process and the scientific publishing process. And finally, it’s important to understand that they are planning counter measures that will allow them to continue hacking the system with the upcoming fifth assessment report due in 2013. As Jones indicates in late 2009 ,Pachauri and Thomas [Stocker] an IPCC Co Chair took up the issue of FOIA with the full IPCC. One can’t imagine that they argued for full disclosure or full compliance with disclosure laws. As detailed in this mail Jones’ alerts Stocker, who works at Bern in Switzerland, to measures Holland suggests for the next IPCC report. Jones alerts Stocker to specific comments on Climate Audit, arming him for the next battle.
Tricks of the Trade.
The high level hacks of the IPCC system include the following: changing chronologies, altering the appearance of graphics to tell a different story making up science out of whole cloth , and citing non peered reviewed literature when they could not keep contrarian papers out of the IPCC documents.
The IPCC reports are supposed to be objective summaries of the state of the science and are supposed to reference only works that are published in the peer reviewed science that met specific time deadlines. The deadlines are critical to have a fair and open process, ensuring that papers referenced have, in fact, been published and reviewed by others. Jones, however, finds such procedures to ensure fairness an impediment to his determining what is important.
Hacking the deadlines to get the ‘Jesus paper’ into Chapter 6 of the 4th assessment report of the IPCC was easiest hack to uncover. As the hackers left a paper trail of their activities that exists outside of the climategate mails. The mails, merely confirm what Steve McIntyre had already figured out. The mails of course add some background that strengthens the case, including the hacker’s knowledge that McIntyre was on to their game as well as Jones suggestion to cover up the hack by changing the “received date” on the paper.
By hacking the deadlines of the process, and shoe horning in a paper that would not be fully reviewed and published for over a year, a paper that contains references to another paper published after the fact, the hackers could ensure that lead author Briffa had the ammunition he needed to write the chapter the way Overpeck, his overlord, wanted it written: with a punch line more compelling than the ‘Hockey Stick’, that iconic figure of the global warming religion which “shows” that the current warming is “unprecedented in human history.” This hack is akin to check kiting or akin to planting older fossils with younger fossils as occurred in the Piltdown Man hoax.
To further the promotion of the ‘Hockey Stick’ message the Chapter 6 team also manipulated graphics, “hiding the decline,” even when one reviewer explicitly demanded that they show the graphic as it appeared in the original science. And finally, after keeping one skeptical paper out of the first two drafts of the report, as they had threatened to, the scientists finally resorted to making up facts on the fly.
Those are the user level hacks, but they go deeper. At the IPCC level the hacking is open to scrutiny, and as we see, the journalists following the references in the IPCC document are now finding these user level exploits. The deeper hacks, like a rootkit hack, involve the operating system of science, the science journals themselves. Manipulation of the science at the IPCC level is easy to document, but corrupting the journal process, the process that is supposed to feed the IPCC process with “trusted” information, is tougher to document.
Without the mails which detail how these hacks work, one could imagine that the IPCC could be made “hack proof” merely by adopting more controls and a more open process. The mails, however, indicate that the science publishing process has also been hacked. Editors have been compromised, and the system of peer review has been corrupted. Very simply, one can make the IPCC process as open and transparent as one likes, but as long as it is fed by a corrupt journal process, you will still get garbage science out of the IPCC process. And further, you could reform the journals all you like and the process can still be corrupted by the individual influential researcher who hides his data and his code.
Eleven Mails
The 11 mails mentioning Pachauri by name, only give hints at how the system was worked to his advantage. Reading them now in hindsight is instructive. The first from Rob Stewart to Pachauri in 1998, before Pachuari’s tenure begins, details the process of communicating about IPCC matters. As it notes, all communication should happen within the structures set up so that a traceable chain of evidence can be created. As the Climategate files show, this policy was violated, violated precisely so that the 4th assessment could be shaped in a way not reflective of the underlying science.
In the second mail Pachauri invites Hulme to a conference, initiating a relationship with Hulme that will culminate in Pachauri and Hulme working together to on UEA’s effort to win a government bid on the creation of a climate change center in England, as detailed in the third mail in the stack. That effort results in the founding of the Tyndall Centre, a center named no less than 11 times in the mails.
The interests of Hulme and Pachauri are clear. Use the science arm at CRU to drive conclusions in the IPCC that will drive funding into Tyndall and drive money into TERI, Pachauri’s organization, and CRU. The importance of funding should not be underestimated. Money works to corrupt science, not by changing the answer, but by changing the questions that get asked.
The fourth mail shows some of the TERI organization’s interests and one can see from the articles promoted in their newsletter that the agenda is clearly one of using the threat of climate change to drive a particular developing nation’s agenda.
The fifth Pachauri mail is interesting for a variety of reasons. The mail contains other mails, notably mails from Tom Wigley and Phil Jones who question the appointment of Pachauri, as they apparently believed that Pachauri was put in place by political forces, namely Bush, to serve corporate interests. This typical kneejerk reaction of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who alerted Wigley to the issue, on reflection, is somewhat laughable now. Hulme, as the mail show, defends Pachauri, his Indian partner, in the bid to get the Tyndall center, on rather odd grounds. Simply: Wigley points out that the “bushies” are behind this and Hulme defends Pachauri by arguing that perhaps Watson ,a Brit and the previous IPCC secretariat, has gone too far; and Hulme wonders why an Indian and an engineer should not be considered. Hulme strangely turns a political attack on Pachauri into an attack on his back ground. The defense seems entirely misplaced, unless of course there has been some other communications where these concerns were raised.
So why does Hulme go “racial?” Whatever the reason it’s apparent that discussions about Pachauri’s appointment don’t continue. Hulme played the race card and issue ends there. Perhaps Hulme played the race card so he would not have to explain how having Pachauri “on board” would be beneficial. Hulme’s partner is now in charge of the IPCC; and as Hulme writes, recalling the language of the conference Pachauri invited him to back in 1998, it will be a good thing to have someone in charge who understands that climate change is a North/South issue. It will also be good to have someone in charge who can funnel benefits your way.
The sixth Pachauri mail is from Tom Wigley in 2003. The topic of the mail is the strategy for responding to a single paper by Soon and Baliunas. It’s hard to fathom why a scientist would include the head of the IPCC as well as many other scientists on a mail that lays out the strategy for responding to lone contrarian paper. The Soon and Balinunas paper, did have the notoriety of being a skeptical paper accepted by the peer review science, but it was hardly a crushing blow to “the science.” Still, Wigley lays out for Pachauri, what the goal is. Rebut the paper to make the job of writing the next IPCC report, due years down the road, easier. So, the practices of just letting bad science die, or of letting individual scientists rebut the bad paper as they see fit are brushed aside. Wigley believes that there must be some sort of orchestrated effort to provide the future writers of the IPCC reports with specifically targeted ammunition. Science gets turned to producing papers to make the job of the science summarizers easier.
In the seventh mail in the stack Michael Mann appears to weigh in with his opinion. Included in the mail, is Stephan Schneider. Schneider, whose name appears at least 71 times in the mails, will later prove instrumental in getting the Jesus Paper into Chapter 6 of the 4th Assessment. He is a Trojan horse inside the journal system. But for Schneider, who “knows the drill” , the Jesus paper would never make it into the report. What Schneider and Pachauri see, of course, is that Mann is making the contrarian paper a political issue and David Halpern of the OSFT has been contacted. In the eighth mail, Jim Salinger will add his voice to the choir of those suggesting that the “bad” science be refuted rather than merely ignored. Again, one has to ask what is the head of the IPCC doing on these mails? Why do Mann and Salinger think that he will be remotely interested in the fate of a single paper?
In the ninth Parchuari mail, we see Hulme and Pachauri starting to take advantage of their connection through the Tyndall Centre, and Hulme suggests a joint publishing project. So we have Hulme, who brushed off Wigley and Jones’s political concerns about his partner Pachauri, actively engaging with the head of the IPCC to work on projects that both of their organizations will benefit from.
The 10th mail is interesting for one reason. It provides some rich irony and it shows what men of character do when a publishing process is subverted. The file contains an email from Mann and from Salinger, and both reference the turmoil cause by the Soon paper. Notably Hans Von Storch is reckoned a hero for resigning his editorship at Climate Research over the incident. The journal that he worked for had published the suspect paper, and his response and the response of other editors was resignation. Simply put, those who worked on the IPCC reports took the same stance as Von Storch, they would take their names off the IPCC report. Just as Climate Research erred in publishing the flawed Soon paper, the IPCC process has also published bogus science, even invented science where there was none.
In 2003 that one simple error was enough to get men of character to resign. Authors of the IPCC report would do well to follow their example. The incident bears some striking similarities to what we see today. The Wall Street Journal editorial by Antonio Regalado, is included in the mail from Mann.
“This week, three editors of Climate Research resigned in protest over
the journal’s handling of the review process that approved the study;
among them is Hans von Storch, the journal’s recently appointed
editor in chief. “It was flawed and it shouldn’t have been
published,” he said”
And most importantly, the flawed science found its way into an EPA document much as flawed science has made its way into the IPCC report:
“A reference to Dr. Soon’s paper previously found its way into
revisions suggested by the White House to an EPA report on
environmental quality. According to an internal EPA memorandum
disclosed in June, agency scientists were concerned the version
containing the White House edits “no longer accurately represents
scientific consensus on climate change.” Dr. Mann’s data showing the
hockey-stick temperature curve was deleted. In its place,
administration officials added a reference to Dr. Soon’s paper, which
the EPA memo called “a limited analysis that supports the
administration’s favored message.”
In 2003 the journal Climate Research let through a bad piece of science that challenged the “hockey stick.” That bad science made its way into an EPA document because it favored the administrations view. Clearly this was wrong. And Von Storch took the right action. And now, with the evidence that bad science has made its way into the IPCC report, its time for the responsible parties to follow the fine example of Von Storch.
The 11th mail which mentions Pachauri is important for understanding the events leading up to Phil Jones’ refusal to give data to Warwick Hughes, but its relation to Pachauri is tangential, except for the hint it contains about the kind of rhetoric Pachauri would use to further his cause, an early clue into his character. Buried in a series of editorials about Michael Mann forward by Briffa to Jones, we find the following 2005 gem from Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute:
“Not long ago the IPCC’s chairman, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, compared
eco-skeptic Bjorn Lomborg to Hitler. “What is the difference between Lomborg’s view of humanity and Hitler’s?” Pachauri asked in a Danish newspaper. “If you were to accept Lomborg’s way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing” Lomborg’s sin was merely to follow the consensus practice of economists in applying a discount to present costs for future benefits, and comparing the range of outcomes with other world problems alongside climate change. It is hard to judge what is worse: Pachauri’s appalling judgment in resorting to reductio ad Hitlerum, or his abysmal ignorance of basic economics. In either case, it is hard to have much confidence in the policy advice the IPCC might have.”
Looking at the Pachauri mails in the Climategate files doesn’t provide any new examples of wrongdoing. We don’t need any. What it does do is give a sense of how the men who hacked the climate science operated. How they reasoned, how they strategized and what they viewed as threats and opportunities. If we want to improve the science in climate science and build a trusted system, we need to understand the “black hats.”
Building a trusted system for climate science
With the IPCC’s reputation in tatters, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion of Pachauri’s man at CRU, Hulme. Perhaps the IPCC has run its course. If trust is to be rebuilt in climate science it must start from the bottom up, with the fundamental data and code of climate science. The IPCC process will always be hackable, and so to will the climate science journals. Cleaning up the mess must start at the foundation of science with open access to the data and the code used in climate science.
The notion that science can move forward while individual climate scientists hide data from their critics is antithetical to the dictates of reason. CRU and others have no more excuses. All and any data used in climate science should be published under a Creative Commons like license, free for anyone to view and use. Confidential data should not be used; it is not necessary to the science. Phil Jones should be removed as an advisor to NOAA on data archiving and access. That’s having a black hat hacker in charge of the hardware. The code of climate science should likewise be freely available. In particular, we should press climate science to adopt a GPL license, one that enforces sharing of code. In part GPL is required because on more than one occasion some climate scientists have used the public code of others without re-sharing it. For example, they have used public code, modified it in undocumented ways, and refused to share the derivative work.
At the level of the journals trust can only be rebuilt by changes in people and principles. The list of people who need to go is easy to draw up. More importantly the Journals need to adopt principles of reproducible research. If a reviewer or official “replication” expert cannot recompile the science from source, both data and code, the science needs to be rejected.
Above the journal level at the IPCC level of course Pachauri needs to go. But the risk of him being replaced with a less crude hacker is high. The issue is that trust cannot be blindly placed in people. The entire IPCC process must be opened. We want to watch that process first hand and be eyewitness to every word.
The Hackers
All processes are subject to hacking, both from external and internal entities. The IPCC process is no exception, neither is the process of writing for science journals exempt. As recent reports show Pachauri hacked the IPCC processes to make them work against themselves and bend the system to his financial ends. An inside hacker, like Pachauri, can be especially dangerous since they play a role in structuring the very system that they hack. Not only do they exploit a system they were meant to protect, but they also act in ways to prevent detection of their hacks.
What the recent disclosures about Pachauri show is that the IPCC process is now totally compromised, compromised from the inside. Like a system exploited by a destructive hack, that system may be beyond repair. It’s time to reformat the hard drive and start from scratch, as climate scientist Hulme, spotted 101 times in the Climategate files and closely tied to Pachauri, suggested–perhaps in a moment of clarity after the discovery of the emails:
Just how was the IPCC system hacked? And can such hacks be prevented or are they a very part of the nature of authoritarian systems? As discussed in our book “Climategate: The Crutape Letters , now available on Kindle and in Ebook format, the “hacks” were focused on the publication process.
The IPCC reports where intended to be summaries of the science, both what we know and what we don’t know. These summaries were written for policy makers who would use the science and its findings to take action: action to prevent climate change, mitigate it, adapt to it, and to fund new studies where knowledge was uncertain. And action is where the money is. Every hack of the system cashes out into some form of compensation to the hackers: more money for their organizations or more prestige for themselves.
As the mails show the hacking of the IPCC process and the scientific process itself was exposed primarily because of the “pressure” put on the hackers by the FIOA process. And as the mails also show, the hackers moved to thwart the FOIA process by corrupting FOIA officers. In fact, the most egregious hack of the system, Jones’ request that people delete mails, came as the direct result of trying to cover up a hack of the IPCC process, the hack surrounding the ‘Jesus Paper.’
During the course of writing the account of Climategate, we noticed that Pachauri, was named directly in the files 11 times and he’s mentioned by title in others. Before canvassing those mails it’s key to understand how the hackers worked to subvert the IPCC process and the scientific publishing process. And finally, it’s important to understand that they are planning counter measures that will allow them to continue hacking the system with the upcoming fifth assessment report due in 2013. As Jones indicates in late 2009 ,Pachauri and Thomas [Stocker] an IPCC Co Chair took up the issue of FOIA with the full IPCC. One can’t imagine that they argued for full disclosure or full compliance with disclosure laws. As detailed in this mail Jones’ alerts Stocker, who works at Bern in Switzerland, to measures Holland suggests for the next IPCC report. Jones alerts Stocker to specific comments on Climate Audit, arming him for the next battle.
Tricks of the Trade.
The high level hacks of the IPCC system include the following: changing chronologies, altering the appearance of graphics to tell a different story making up science out of whole cloth , and citing non peered reviewed literature when they could not keep contrarian papers out of the IPCC documents.
The IPPC reports are supposed to be an objective summary of the state of the science and are supposed to reference only works that are published in the peer reviewed science that met specific time deadlines. The deadlines are critical to have a fair and open process, ensuring that papers referenced have, in fact, been published and reviewed by others. Jones, however, finds such procedures to ensure fairness an impediment to him determining what is important.
Hacking the deadlines to get the ‘Jesus paper’ into Chapter 6 of the 4th assessment report of the IPCC was easiest hack to uncover. As the hackers left a paper trial of their activities that exists outside of the climategate mails. The mails, merely confirm what Steve McIntyre had already figured out. The mails of course add some background that strengthens the case, including the hacker’s knowledge that McIntyre was on to their game as well as Jones suggestion to cover up the hack by changing the “received date” on the paper.
By hacking the deadlines of the process, and shoe horning in a paper that would not be fully reviewed and published for over a year, a paper that contains references to another paper published after the fact, the hackers could ensure that lead author Briffa had the ammunition he needed to write the chapter the way Overpeck, his overlord, wanted it written: with a punch line more compelling than the ‘Hockey Stick’, that iconic figure of the global warming religion which “shows” that the current warming is “unprecedented in human history.” This hack is akin to check kiting or akin to planting older fossils with younger fossils as occurred in the Piltdown Man hoax.
To further the promotion of the ‘Hockey Stick’ message the Chapter 6 team also manipulated graphics, “hiding the decline,” even when one reviewer explicitly demanded that they show the graphic as it appeared in the original science. And finally, after keeping one skeptical paper out of the first two drafts of the report, as they had threatened to, the scientists finally resorted to making up facts on the fly.
Those are the user level hacks, but the hacks go deeper. At the IPPC level, the hacks are open to scrutiny and as we see journalists now following the references in the IPCC document they are finding these user level exploits. The deeper hacks, like a rootkit hack, involve the operating system of science, the science journals themselves. Manipulation of the science at the IPCC level is easy to document, but corrupting the journal process, the process that is supposed to feed the IPCC process with “trusted” information, is tougher to document.
Without the mails which detail how these hacks work, one could imagine that the IPCC could be made “hack proof” merely by adopting more controls and a more open process. The mails, however, indicate that the science publishing process has also been hacked. Editors have been compromised, and the system of peer review has been corrupted. Very simply, one can make the IPCC process as open and transparent as one likes, but as long as it is fed by a corrupt journal process, you will still get garbage science out of the IPCC process. And further, you could reform the journals all you like and the process can still be corrupted by the individual influential researcher who hides his data and his code.
Eleven Mails
The 11 mails mentioning Pachauri by name, only give hints at how the system was worked to his advantage. Reading them now in hindsight is instructive. The first from Rob Stewart to Pachauri in 1998, before Pachuari’s tenure begins, details the process of communicating about IPCC matters. As it notes, all communication should happen within the structures set up so that a traceable chain of evidence can be created. As the Climategate files show, this policy was violated, violated precisely so that the 4th assessment could be shaped in a way not reflected in the underlying science.
In the second mail Pachauri invites Hulme to a conference, initiating a relationship with Hulme that will culminate in Pachauri and Hulme working together to on UEA’s effort to win a government bid on the creation of a climate change center in England, as detailed in the third mail in the stack. That effort results in the founding of the Tyndall Center, a center named no less than 11 times in the mails.
The interests of Hulme and Pachauri are clear. Use the science arm at CRU to drive conclusions in the IPCC that will drive funding into Tyndall and drive money into TERI, Pachauri’s organization, and CRU. The important of funding should not be underestimated. Money works to corrupt science, not by changing the answer, but by changing the questions that get asked.
The fourth mail shows some of the TERI organization’s interests and one can see from the articles promoted in their newsletter that the agenda is clearly one of using the threat of climate change to drive a particular developing nation agenda.
The fifth Pachauri mail is interesting for a variety of reasons. The mail contains other mails, notably mails from Tom Wigley and Phil Jones who question the appointment of Pachauri, as they apparently believed that Pachauri was put in place by political forces, namely Bush, to serve corporate interests. This typical kneejerk reaction of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who alerted Wigley to the issue, on reflection, is somewhat laughable now. Hulme, as the mail show, defends Pachauri, his Indian partner, in the bid to get the Tyndall center, on rather odd grounds. Simply: Wigley points out that the “bushies” are behind this and Hulme defends Pachauri by arguing that perhaps Watson ,a Brit and the previous IPCC secretariat, has gone too far; and Hulme wonders why an Indian and an engineer should not be considered. Hulme strangely turns a political attack on Pachauri into an attack on his back ground. The defense seems entirely misplaced, unless of course there has been some other communications where these concerns were raised.
So why does Hulme go “racial?” Whatever the reason its apparent that discussions about Pachauri’s appointment don’t continue. Hulme played the race card and issue ends there. Perhaps Hulme played the race card so he would not have to explain how having Pachauri “on board” would be beneficial. Hulme’s partner is now in charge of the IPCC; and as Hulme writes, recalling the language of the conference Pachauri invited him to back in 1998, it will be a good thing to have someone in charge who understands that climate change is a North/South issue. It will also be good to have some one in charge who can funnel benefits your way.
The sixth Pachauri mail is from Tom Wigley in 2003. The topic of the mail is the strategy for responding to a single paper by Soon and Baliunas. It’s hard to fathom why a scientist would include the head of the IPCC as well as many other scientists on a mail that lays out the strategy for responding to lone contrarian paper. The Soon and Balinunas paper, did have the notoriety of being a skeptical paper accepted by the peer review science, but it was hardly a crushing blow to “the science.” Still, Wigley lays out for Pachauri, what the goal is. Rebut the paper to make the job of writing the next IPCC report, due years down the road, easier. So, the practices of just letting bad science die, or of letting individual scientists rebut the bad paper as they see fit are brushed aside. Wigley believes that there must be some sort of orchestrated effort to provide the future writers of the IPCC reports with specifically targeted ammunition. Science gets turned to producing papers to make the job of the science summarizers easier.
In the seventh mail in the stack Michael Mann appears to weigh in with his opinion. Included in the mail, is Stephan Schneider. Schneider, whose name appears at least 71 times in the mails, will later prove instrumental in getting the Jesus Paper into Chapter 6 of the 4th Assessment. He is a Trojan horse inside the journal system. But for Schneider, who “knows the drill” , the Jesus paper would never make it into the report. What Schneider and Pachauri see, of course, is that Mann is making the contrarian paper a political issue and David Halpern of the OSFT has been contacted. In the eighth mail, Jim Salinger will add his voice to the choir of those suggesting that the “bad” science be refuted rather than merely ignored. Again, one has to ask what is the head of the IPCC doing on these mails? Why does Mann and Salinger think that he will be remotely interested in the fate of a single paper?
In the ninth Parchuari mail, we see Hulme and Pachauri starting to take advantage of their connection through the Tyndall Center, and Hulme suggests a joint publishing project. So we have Hulme, who brushed off Wigley’s and Jones’ political concerns about his partner Pachauri, actively engaging with the head of the IPCC to work on projects that both of their organizations will benefit from.
The 10th mail is interesting for one reason. It provides some rich irony and it shows what men of character do when a publishing process is subverted. The file contains a mail from Mann and from Salinger, and both reference the turmoil cause by the Soon paper. Notably Hans Von Storch is reckoned a hero for resigning his editorship at Climate Research over the incident. The journal that he worked for had published the suspect paper, and his response and the response of other editors was resignation. Simply put, those who worked on the IPCC reports took the same stance as Von Storch, they would take their names off the IPCC report. Just as Climate Research erred in publishing the flawed Soon paper, the IPCC process has also published bogus science, even invented science where there was none.
In 2003 that one simple error was enough to get a men of character to resign. Author’s of the IPCC report would do well to follow their example. The incident bears some striking similarities to what we see today. The Wall Street Journal editorial by Antonio Regalado, is included in the mail from Mann.
“This week, three editors of Climate Research resigned in protest over
the journal’s handling of the review process that approved the study;
among them is Hans von Storch, the journal’s recently appointed
editor in chief. “It was flawed and it shouldn’t have been
published,” he said”
And most importantly, the flawed science found its way into an EPA document much as flawed science has made its way into the IPCC report:
“A reference to Dr. Soon’s paper previously found its way into
revisions suggested by the White House to an EPA report on
environmental quality. According to an internal EPA memorandum
disclosed in June, agency scientists were concerned the version
containing the White House edits “no longer accurately represents
scientific consensus on climate change.” Dr. Mann’s data showing the
hockey-stick temperature curve was deleted. In its place,
administration officials added a reference to Dr. Soon’s paper, which
the EPA memo called “a limited analysis that supports the
administration’s favored message.”
In 2003 the journal Climate Research let through a bad piece of science that challenged the “hockey stick.” That bad science made it’s way into an EPA document because it favored the administrations view. Clearly this was wrong. And Von Storch took the right action. And now, with the evidence that bad science has made its way into the IPCC report, its time for the responsible parties to follow the fine example of Von Storch.
The 11th mail which mentions Pachauri is important for understanding the events leading up to Phil Jones’ refusal to give data to Warwick Hughes, but it’s relation to Pachauri is tangential, except for the hint it contains about the kind of rhetoric Pachauri would use to further his cause, an early clue into his character. Buried in a series of editorials about Michael Mann forward by Briffa to Jones, we find the following 2005 gem from Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute:
“Not long ago the IPCC’s chairman, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, compared
eco-skeptic Bjorn Lomborg to Hitler. “What is the difference between Lomborg’s view of humanity and Hitler’s?” Pachauri asked in a Danish newspaper. “If you were to accept Lomborg’s way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing” Lomborg’s sin was merely to follow the consensus practice of economists in applying a discount to present costs for future benefits, and comparing the range of outcomes with other world problems alongside climate change. It is hard to judge what is worse: Pachauri’s appalling judgment in resorting to reductio ad Hitlerum, or his abysmal ignorance of basic economics. In either case, it is hard to have much confidence in the policy advice the IPCC might have.”
Looking at the Pachauri mails in the Climategate files doesn’t provide any new examples of wrong doing. We don’t need any. What it does do is give a sense of how the men who hacked the climate science operated. How they reasoned, how they strategized and what they viewed as threats and opportunities. If we want to improve the science in climate science and build a trusted system, we need to understand the “black hats.”
Building a trusted system for climate science
With the IPCC’s reputation in tatters, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion of Pachauri’s man at CRU, Hulme. Perhaps the IPCC has run its course. If trust is to be rebuilt in climate science it must start from the bottom up, with the fundamental data and code of climate science. The IPCC process will always be hackable, and so to will the climate science journals. Cleaning up the mess must start at the foundation of science with open access to the data and the code used in climate science.
The notion that science can move forward while individual climate scientists hide data from their critics is antithetical to the dictates of reason. CRU and others have no more excuses. All and any data used in climate science should be published under a Creative Commons like license, free for anyone to view and use. Confidential data should not be used; it is not necessary to the science. Phil Jones should be removed as an advisor to NOAA on data archiving and access. That’s having a black hat hacker in charge of the hardware. The code of climate science should likewise be freely available. In particular, we should press climate science to adopt a GPL license, one that enforces sharing of code. In part GPL is required because on more than one occasion some climate scientists have used the public code of others without re–sharing it. For example, they have used public code, modified it in undocumented ways, and refused to share the derivative work.
At the level of the journals trust can only be rebuilt by changes in people and principles. The list of people who need to go is easy to draw up. More importantly the Journals need to adopt principles of reproducible research. If a reviewer or official “replication” expert cannot recompile the science from source, both data and code, the science needs to be rejected.
Above the journal level at the IPCC level of course Pachauri needs to go. But the risk of him being replaced with a less crude hacker is high. The issue is that trust cannot be blindly placed in people. The entire IPCC process must be opened. We want to watch that process first hand and be eyewitness to every word.
@Herman Dobrowolski L (12:57:33) :
Non-peer reviewed publications are permissible reference…
But any time I read alarmist blogs they shout down anyone who mentions a non peer reviewed report. And every time I read a newspaper they say the science is settled “from the scientists at the IPCC”. But the reporters have been conned as well, they were told the IPCC report was by thousands of scientists, not activists for WWF and Greenpeace.
Everytime I hear the news I hear “Scientists at the IPCC say….” and then some scare story. That is why this is a bigger story than alarmists would like to admit.
My government makes bedtime stories to scare my children. When I complain about it I am told : “The IPCC says…”. So now my kids think the dog is going to drown in a few years. And the CO2 monster is going to come and get them while they sleep.
Did anyone at the IPCC find their errors? Did they announce them? Did they get a headline as big as the scare stories? No they did not. They hoped no one would question them.
I am no scientist. I am a member of the public and I deserve to be told about these issues. I trusted the IPCC like millions of other people. I read stories which worry me, and make me worried for my children, and the planet. I was prepared to pay my taxes to save the planet. And then I find out I have been lied to. Not once but many times. How many more lies need to be uncovered before the settled science becomes unsettled?
How about I put a report together and tell everyone that glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate and COULD be gone by 2025 IF CO2 levels continue to rise at the current levels. And I have a confidence of 90%. Should my report be considered? Maybe if I add that millions MAY die of thirst. Or POSSIBLY get drowned in the tidal wave of water down the mountain? Is it good enough yet?
DirkH (12:58:05)
I find it difficult to describe people on personal terms but I agree, this Pauchari is just dirty
Half way through your book-love it. I really liked and smiled alot over page 31. “Jones has no such option. He is his science. The same goes for Mann. He is his hockey stick”. He is a hockey puck too!
The team as you explained is made up of a lot of disgusting folks .The recent events as described above continue to point this out. Keep up the good work.
I hope you sell millions of copies.
Steve Schneider, referenced in the 7th email, can be seen here responding to a question about the emails here. (Coopenhage, Phelim McAleer question)
Mr. Mosher: This ismy first comment submission anywhere. To date I have been a reader only. I concur with most of what you have said. However, I take strong objection to your characterization of the Soon and Baliunas paper. Refer to rasmusen1.blogspot.com/2009/12/climate-research-dispute-over.html for text of CRU/climategate email by Mr. de Freitas wherein he compellingly defends the review process for that paper. Refer to climateaudit.org/2006/04/27/treydte-moberg-soon-and-baliunas/ for Mr. Mc Intyre analysis of Hockey Team double standards. Mr.Von Storch is no hero. He should have stood up to the orchestrated campaign by CRU/GISS/Mann et al to micromanage so-called peer review so only “correct” papers were published. Soon and Baliunas, whatever its technical flaws may be, is not remotely close to “bad science”. That terminology is most appropriately applied to the “hockey stick” and methodologies employed and attitudes displayed by the group Mr. McIntyre has called the Hockey Team.
Despite all of this stuff there is still a central thesis which may yet turn out to be correct, even if there has been meddling, distortion, invention and manipulationon the part of some of the so called scientists. Those who’ve resorted to chicanery in order to create facts to fit to the thesis are guilty of a common human tendency. We invest a great deal of emotion/commitment in our beliefs – though there may be little in the way of supporting grounds – and we don’t like letting go of them even when counter evidence starts to come in, and those amongst us who are less scrupulous can be tempted to attempt to make reality fit the theory instead of the reverse. There’s also the crowd/herd instinct at work. The majority of humans like to stay with the bigger pack. It takes courage and ruthlessness to stand alone against a tide of differing opinion/theory and those qualities don’t come together in more than a small percentage of humans. Hence the number of scientists adhering to a theory that seems to me to be lacking substantial support in terms of evidence and logic. And yet the theory might still be right. The sheer physical scale, the complexity and the lengthy time factors involved in planetary climate mean, in my view, that this thing still has to work itself out.
There has been a temperature stand-still for 8 years but that is far from proving the AGWists wrong. Just as evidence of malpractice so far isn’t yet enough to blow them out of the water. It would take something like raw data for the last 150 years showing no change or change in the wrong direction from temp stations around the world that haven’t been moved and whose environmental characteristics haven’t changed by UHI encroachment effects for example. Until that kind of evidence comes in or, for example, the current stand-still continues beyond the duration of factors that might be explainable within the terms of the warmists position there remains the possibility that they might be right. It might come to that, but this sceptic prefers to wait and see. The evidence and trends are not clear either way I believe and the hacking, misinformation, and manipulation don’t kill the case for the AGW position on their own. There’s more work to be done by good people like Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre and others, and maybe a lot more time needs to pass, but at least for the moment the bandwagon has been slowed.
In the coming months, Pachauri will resign.
He will cite the “storm in a tea cup” created by the deniers/contrarians.
He will defend to the end the “robust” science used by the IPCC
He will defend to the end the IPCC itself and it’s processes.
He will state that the IPCC is more important than an individual.
He will state that the upcoming 5th assessment report is the most important of all and that it deserves to be formulated without the distractions created by the deniers/contrarians.
He will be accompanied by Yve De Boer.
The timing will depend on how quickly errors like glaciergate accumulate over the coming weeks. If nothing new is exposed, his resignation will be announced quietly in a few months.
If however more errors are exposed, his resignation will be sooner.
By the way, the real culprit is Yve de Boer, the head of the UNFCCC
All roads lead to him. Nothing happens without is direction.
Mike Hulme is a politician in a lab coat. Two or three years ago he wrote a piece in the Guardian announcing the arrival of Post-normal Science. It is probably still there in the Guardian’s archives.
Tells you all you need to know about the fellow. Slippery as a bar of wet soap.
@John Whitman
“…Regarding the fundamental motivation of CAGW leaders & followers, I do not think it is money. ..The causitive motivation at root is some kind of hatred of . . . . something.”
Mosher’s article is not really quite on the ball – the IPCC hackers were never really hackers of an independent scientific organisation. They were, and remain, green activists. The way the IPCC was set up made it an obvious place for activists to work. If you weren’t a true believer, I guess you didn’t apply to work there.
Towards the end, I am sure that the atmosphere there will be similar to that in the Branch Davidian ranch at Mount Carmel, or Jonestown just before the KoolAid. These people do not hate humanity as such – they just believe with all their heart and soul that their view of the world is right, and that because of this whatever they do to further that view cannot be wrong.
In a way, we are lucky we are catching them this early. Quasi-religious believer groups of this kind (the scientologists are one obvious example) have been known to kill people, convinced that they were doing right. Certainly they would ignore any major disruption and death caused as a consequence of their policies.
What this shows is that humanity in general is a sucker for this kind of mass movement. Charles Mackay’s book on Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds should be a set text in all classrooms….
NYT can’t help itself. This was originally headlined “Scientists Say Ozone Hole’s Repair May Worsen Global Warming” which still comes up at the top of the browser when u link here. And it’s already being touted on Fox News?
NYT: The Ozone Hole Is Mending. Now for the ‘But.’
By SINDYA N. BHANOO
But in a new report, scientists say there is a downside: its repair may contribute to global warming.
It turns out that the hole led to the formation of moist, brighter-than-usual clouds that shielded the Antarctic region from the warming induced by greenhouse gas emissions over the last two decades, scientists write in Wednesday’s issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
“The recovery of the hole will reverse that,” said Ken Carslaw, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Leeds and a co-author of the paper. “Essentially, it will accelerate warming in certain parts of the Southern Hemisphere.”..
For their research, the authors of the new study relied on meteorological data recorded between 1980 and 2000, including global wind speeds recorded by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts…
But Judith Perlwitz, a University of Colorado professor and a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said that although the paper’s data were sound, she questioned the conclusions..
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/science/earth/26ozone.html
the game is over, NYT.
O/T and deliciously politically incorrect:
[snip – We don’t post the Hitler videos here, no matter how funny. We don’t like being called “deniers” so I’m not going to post holocaust references -A]
You people are kinda funny with your endless innuendo and paranoia. Sad and utterly pathetic, but funny nonetheless. Denial Depot has nothing on you all.
[I’m letting this blatant troll through for entertainment value… -themods]
Okay, I was distracted earlier (see previous comment) but now that I’ve finally finished reading Mosher’s article in it’s entirety I have to say that I’m left feeling underwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate all the work that Mosher has done and I’m very sympathetic to his goal of exposing IPCC duplicity. However, this article fails to accomplish that. It’s attempting to weave together too many disparate instances of IPCC corruption into a coherent and compelling hacker narrative and ends up accomplishing none of the above. Instead, the narrative comes across as awkward, forced, confusing, and fragmented.
Now if anyone wants me to provide specific examples of what I’m talking about then please say so. Otherwise I’ll just assume that no one is interested and get back to calculating my carbon footprint with my trusty abacus.
Funding corrupts.
Absolute government funding corrupts absolutely.
Jim Hogg
The point you make about the theory may at its basic level be correct is right. The solution is simple. You test it in a lab. Co2 forcing is a testable phenomenon. As is the supposed saturation of the wings idea when the temperature, humidity and pressure reduce. I’m a physicist. For me the whole circus, and it is a circus, has people running off in all directions assuming Co2 re-emission heats a surface the way it has been modelled. They have been assuming this for over a 100 years. It doesn’t make it true.
I’ve seen theories where this is no accounting for convection or the minimum energy principle and thermodynamics. No accounting for example interesting experiments such as Japanese food scientists tested FIR forcing on heating strawberries and found it does not produce a surface heating rate greater than the standard convection method they use (air at 150 degrees blown over the strawberries).
So never mind the noise. The only thing that you should have in your mind is this: If someone asks just say, Show me in an experiment how more Co2 heats a surface by re-emission of IR in the presence of realistic atmospheric components? That’s it. They show that, or at least try to and the rest can be understood in context. They don’t and they are living in dreamland. I come across assumptions like this all the time in my work. I also make them myself and have to catch myself on. But the job of a scientist and to a lesser extent, any logical thinking person, is always to disregard, check and test/find out someway.
That is the biggest HACK of all. This assumption told often enough becomes fact.
“Editors have been compromised, and the system of peer review has been corrupted. ”
More than that, they’ve managed to get “peer review” elevated to the status of a stamp of inviolable truth. This is something it clearly can’t be.
Thank you for this very interesting and cogent piece, Mr Mosher. The use of “hack” to describe abuse of the process from the inside is particularly insightful.
The point taken up by our friend Mr Lief (at 13:43:34) interests me. “All and any data used in climate science should be published under a Creative Commons like license, free for anyone to view and use.” Why just climate science? And why all of climate science?
It is not the subject that dictates the need for free access to the fullest information, it is the use to which it is put. If people wish to do research and put it to private uses, there is no reason for anyone else to know all the details of what they have discovered. It is when the conclusions are put forward as a reason for steps to be taken to affect peoples lives that the game changes.
A boffin in a lab can experiment for years inventing a medicine to cure some widespread major ailment, be it the common cold, rheumatism or the inability of some spouses to stop nagging. His work is of no consequence to anyone until he tries to sell the resulting potion. At that point he must disclose every crossed T and dotted I of his research. He must do so because his product will affect ordinary people.
So it is with all scientific research that results in a product, service or political policy that will affect the little people. It is not just climate science but all science that must be subject to this rule. And it is not all climate science but only that which leads to proposals to take steps that affect the little people.
” nigel jones (16:33:02) : More than that, they’ve managed to get “peer review” elevated to the status of a stamp of inviolable truth. This is something it clearly can’t be. ”
Your point is the first time I have heard of this idea on “peer review”. I think the idea is correct. Science is (should be) an ongoing process that self-corrects, peer review is part of the self correction but not the end product.
John
This may have been already mentioned, but von Storch resigned from Climate Research because of a dispute with the publisher, not because the 2003 Soon & Baliunas paper was poor science or because the review process was tainted.
[I’m letting this blatant troll through for entertainment value… -themods]
Not necessary, you have Mr. Mosher here fof that. I encourage you to keep up the self-talk amongst yourselves; those of us who actually care about the issue will spend our time with the science.
Moshpit,
This is so totally off topic I’m not sure where to post it. However, since deep science is an interest of yours and it does deal with emission/absorption lines and their frequency and probability of emission (topics in climate science) I thought you might want to have a look. The video was first published yesterday.
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-theory-of-electrodynamics.html
I have looked it over and it fits with everything I know. It greatly simplifies quantum electrodynamics and puts it on a classical mechanics basis.
p.s. maybe Mosher, or Watts, or any of you cowboys here for that matter, would care to tell us how the labyrinthine conspiracy you so meticulously “document” affects the radiative forcing properties of greenhouse gases. Fire at will.
The term ‘hacked’ as it applies to the IPCC internals workings seems odd to me. I am familiar with ‘fixed’ and ‘rigged’. It was a great way for pockets to be lined, but in the end, it all comes undone.
The AGW baby gets tossed with the money laundry water.
kwik (14:48:58) :
“Dave, it might be that Hulme is a nice guy, I dont know him.
“But look at 6:44 minutes out in this video”
I’m a relative newbie to the “climate wars”, having arrived on the scene about 2 weeks “BC” [Before Climategate] … and am still catching up on the history!
That series of Lindzen videos was among the first that I had watched, during my explorations. And the frames to which you pointed were very high on the list of items that really grabbed my attention.
Although at that time, not knowing who the major actors were, Hulme’s name didn’t register on my brain; so, even though I have subsequently written about some of Hulme’s activities, I hadn’t made that particular connection.
As an aside, I even had a (somewhat abbreviated!) letter to the editor published in Canada’s National Post – correcting Terence Corcoran’s depiction of Hulme (in his otherwise excellent 2 part Dec. 19/21 series).
Hulme and Alcamo were the ones who had circulated the “consensus” building “ATTENTION: Invitation to Influence Kyoto” email. And it was that discovery – in conjunction with Hulme’s Dec. 2 WSJ OpEd that led to the birth of my blog. [ http://hro001.wordpress.com/2009/12/06/the-fog-of-uncertainty-and-the-precautionary-principle/ ]
When I came across the Hulme quote that Steve Mosher cited above, a few days ago, I started mousing around on Hulme’s own site.
Interestingly – in light of the Pachauri connections Steve Mosher has unearthed – a search on “Pachauri” on Hulme’s site, turns up zilch. But a search on “IPCC” is somewhat more fruitful:
From: http://mikehulme.org/index.php?s=IPCC
“I was a Convening Lead Author for the scenarios chapter for the IPCC Third Assessment Report, as well as a Lead Author and Review Editor for other chapters. I was also the Manager of the IPCC Data Distribution Centre between 1997 and 2002.”
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t the “scenarios chapter” of TAR which had been based on the SRES that were disputed by Castles & Henderson (whose critique, of course, was dismissed)?
Another 2 enlightening tidbits from Hulme’s own site (particularly considering the “spiritual” aspect of his thinking that was highlighted by Lindzen in the video):
“I am a signatory to the Oxford Declaration ‘Science and faith unite on biodiversity’ under the auspicies of the James Martin Institute, issued 7 December 2007”
And – listed amongst his Personal Influences – “I am an evangelical Christian and member of the Church of England, and my theology is broadly aligned with that espoused by Fulcrum, a movement seeking to act as a point of balance within the Anglican Church.”
And a search at the Fulcrum link from the above yields zilch on Hulme, but (predictably?!) a “climate” search is, again, more fruitful (which suggests that Hulme’s thoughts might have … uh … multiplied)
http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/news/2007/20070713atkinson.cfm?doc=220
A page on which one finds:
Climate and Covenant
by David Atkinson, Bishop of Thetford
A shorter version of this article was published as “How to make God’s promise good”, in The Church Times, 13 July 2007 and is republished with permission.
Opening para (not unexpectedly) reads as follows:
“The climate is changing, and there is now a very high confidence by an overwhelming majority of scientists that human activity is a significant part of that change. The global atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased markedly since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values. Much of this is due to fossil fuel use, changes in land use, and agriculture.”
So, in conclusion, my response to Dave Andrews (14:11:10) concern that Steve Mosher “might be being a bit too hard on Mike Hulme”, is no, I don’t think so.
And my response to Steve Mosher is: Mazeltov! Another brilliant exposé 🙂
Inspector Thompson’s Gazelle (17:10:48) :
They did anything, said anything, published anything, doctored anything, erased anything, blackballed anyone and denied anything the could to keep the gravy train rolling into thier slush funds.
You want to sort through all that sticky mess to try and salvage it?
That would be like trying to repair the WTC Towers after they pancacked.
Start over, it’s so bad you’d lose your shirt trying to repair the damage.