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.
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Inspector Thompson’s Gazelle (17:10:48) :
This question is the heart of the IPCC fraud
what concerns radiative physics is the heat absorbtion of c02 in the atmosphere. It absorbs radiation at 13.7-16.3 microns with a peak of 15 microns – yet radiation on average leaves earth at 10 microns, which equates with 15C, or 288K. 15 microns equates with subzero temperatures that can be found at the poles – so heat capture of c02 in the atmosphere is a rather rare event, and is fixed at around 4-6% of atmospheric thermal energy, achieved by the 1st 100ppm where its absorbtion window closes – well outside of normal temperatures. Its true that a c02 molecule’s stretching mode would allow it to transfer energy to other atmospheric molecules, such as the ghg water vapour, but this requires so much energy that it doesn’t occur even at 300K, with the c02 absorbtion bands, and there’s some 3,000 other mlecules apart from c02 in a given volume of air, making collisions between thermally excited c02 molecules very unlikely. Molecules of like kind are more efficient at transferring energy to one another. In the absence of such, thermal degradation takes place very quickly. (a billionth of a second), so vibrationally excited c02 thermalises very quickly with oxygen and nitrogen
the only way that global warming via the atmosphere could be justified would be by Boyle’s law, or the ideal gas law. However, temperature change through air pressure depends on a closed system – if the atmosphere gains more density it expands, than increasing partial pressure – the so called Iris effect. Given the limited spectroscopic bands of c02 on the other hand, an argument can’t be developed for c02 increasing the temperature or retaining heat. In the mid to upper troposphere where it goes to from -20-45C, or 228K, that does coincide with heat absorbtion from c02. However, there is no physical mechanism by which such mid tropospheric subzero temperatures can send heat back to earth, as temperature falls with altitude. (The notion violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics)
Since climatologists know that oceans and the sun heat the atmosphere, why did they put the focus on c02, not all c02 but the anthropogenic fraction? Because c02 goes after people, and guilt can generate a lot of profit for some. When the UN decided to go after people for the sake of carbon trading and taxes, it a form of totalitarian overwhelm, which is indeed very hard, and demodé to resist or question.
ITG ((17:10:48), suppose you show how suppressing the convective turbulence that is responsible for ~50% of the thermal translocation from the lower atmosphere still allows GCMs to make reliable predictions about CO2 induced climate warming. Not to mention the inability of GCMs to model clouds. Or to properly model (curve fit, actually) both temperature and precipitation at the same time.
Antonis Christofides and Nikos Mamassis at National Technical University of Athens, colleagues of Demetris Koutsoyiannis, have written a nice walk-through of climate models and the whole AGW credibility issue here: http://www.hk-climate.org/
Take a look, Mr. Gazelle, and then let us all know where they go wrong, scientifically.
Interesting view Mosh. You might be interested to note that of the $4M in EU taxpayer funds granted to TERI, a portion went to the Met Office – also to study impacts of glacier loss in India. I would imagine the Euros might want their money back. As will many others.
The pattern appears to be science fronts accept huge government grants (taxpayer dollars) and then wash it down through additional fronts. Pachauri is in bed with so many organizations investigating his deeds could take years.
OK, we’re agreed. We need to get rid of this guy. Anyone know the place in the rulebook that tells us how to do this?
I’ve been searching te UN charter for “corruption”. There’s plenty there, but it’s other people’s corruption, not theirs.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7003622.ece
“There is fundamental uncertainty in climate change, science tsar says”
and
“The impact of global warming has been exaggerated by some scientists and there is an urgent need for more honest disclosure of the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change, according to the Government’s chief scientific adviser.”
Dodgy Geezer (15:50:40) : “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….”
And Huff’s “How to Lie with Statistics.”
And a book on logical thinking and fallacies.
Any others?
I keep wondering whether Hulme was the one who leaked the emails.
He was very pro post normal science. His objectives were: To trade truth for influence. To make climate science post-normal (source: small dead animals website, article: post normal science) 2007.
Then he seemed to change his mind and maybe could see something coming:
“Hulme believes that this dependence of politics on science expects too much of science’s ability to explain and to predict, and that this is a burden that science cannot carry. Science is exposing its vulnerabilities, he says. And in overselling itself, the risks are very substantial.”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/06/mike_hulme_interview/
and “To hide behind the dubious precision of scientific numbers, and not actually expose one’s own ideologies or beliefs or values and judgments is undermining both politics and science” “time to ditch climate consensus” Hulme May 2009.
Then came climategate: Headline: the IPCC is over says UEA climate scientist (Hulme)
He was quick to bury the IPCC.
OK:
delete the comma
delete the comma.
delete the apostrophe.
delete the comma.
And by activists inside the grant-giving agencies.
P Wilson, you said:
..is the heat absorbtion of c02 in the atmosphere. It absorbs radiation at 13.7-16.3 microns with a peak of 15 microns – yet radiation on average leaves earth at 10 microns, which equates with 15C, or 288K. 15 microns equates with subzero temperatures that can be found at the poles – so heat capture of c02 in the atmosphere is a rather rare event..
It would be amazing if science had missed this point, but actually the 2nd half of your statement is not correct.
The radiation from a black body at a given temperature is a spectrum of wavelengths.
So when a 288K (15’C) body radiates heat, the peak wavelength is around 10um.
Radiation emitted between 14-16um is actually 72% of the radiation between 9-11um. As one example.
Blackbody radiation is described by Planck’s formula which you can see at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_law
You can see the effect of CO2 and other “greenhouse” gases in the earth’s radiation spectrum at:
http://scienceofdoom.com/2009/11/28/co2-an-insignificant-trace-gas-part-one/
Mr Gazelle sir,
Its not even the errors in the science that burn me up, its the misleading manner in which even the good science is presented:
1. At the current rate of CO2 increase – sorry, that’s as silly as suggesting that the temperature went up 1 degree yesterday, and 2 today, so at the current rate of increase it will go up 4 tomorrow and 8 the day after. There isn’t enough oil production capacity to support that, and we’d run out of oil in a few years if there was.
2. There could be a tipping point – The amount of energy it takes to increase temperature rises exponentially as temperature rises. Tipping points etc are nonsense as a consequence unless you have an incredible amount of energy at your disposal, enought to boil the oceans.
3. CO2 doubling could add another 3.7 w/m2 to earth’s energy input – EVEN if this were true, it leaves the impression that energy input rises linearly with CO2 concentration. If that were true, you could add enough CO2 to put more energy in than what was coming out and invent perpetual motion. Additional CO2 effects diminish as concentration rises. Keep that in mind as you read 1 and 2 over again.
4. Water vapour rises exponentially with temperature and is also a greenhouse gas – yes it does and it is. Forgot to mention that law of diminishing returns thing again, or are we still fixated on perpetual motion?
5. The temperature has gone up about 0.6 degrees since the start of the industrial age 90 years ago – Also suspect, but even if true, its about the same as the temperature change in the 90 years before the industrial age. Funny how they lop that part of the graph off in all the presentations.
…I am sure you get the drift by now. If the science were solid, there would be no need to present facts in such a misleading fashion.
I certainly think Georg Kaser has justification for saying he will no longer serve as a Lead Author, after Lal denied receiving the letter Kaser sent him. (I hope a journalist asks Kaser for a fax of that letter And then posts it online.) And I think Kaser’s friends should make similar statements.
I hope this Lal-letter issue isn’t allowed to die but pursued, because Lal’s denial, if proven false, is potentially fatal to the IPCC.
Inspector Thompson’s Gazelle (17:10:48) :
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.
Well Boss, assumin’ us here cowpokes wanted or needed to be obligin’ you somehows, Then, Inspector Sir, do you have a real greenhouse in which we could presumeably find these so called “greenhouse gases”, so as to narrow down the search to their natural habitat?
Micky C (16:18:18): I think everyone is agreed that CO2 alone is not up to the job. That’s why the positive water vapor feedback loop is invoked.
@ur momisugly jaypan – Buffett knows insurance inside-out, so his punt on Munich Re is worth following. At their level they’re a stable bluechip outift, slightly undervalued at present.
@ur momisugly Inspector Thompon’s Gazelle – I’m afraid there’s nothing I could say that could possibly arouse you from your stupor. Instead, perhaps I could throw you a compliment for the sake of our poor planet: May your bicycle never puncture, may your cabbages never be rotten, and may your vegan lifestyle bear no polluting offspring.
[Anthony/Mods: I apologize if this is a duplicate … usually my posts make it to – and quickly past – moderation. But this time, for some reason, it disappeared into the ether and I didn’t Ctrl+A Ctrl+C before hitting submit …. arrrrgh …. herewith my reconstruction, using Firefox since obviously MSIE cannot be trusted! hro]
kwik (14:48:58) [responding to Dave Andrews (14:11:10)] wrote:
“Dave, it might be that Hulme is a nice guy, I dont know him.
“But look at 6:44 minutes out in this video here […]”
I’m still a relative newbie to the “climate wars”, having arrived on the scene a mere two weeks BC [Before Climategate], and this excellent series of Lindzen videos was among the first that I had looked at during my voyage of discovery.
In particular the frames to which kwik draws our attention: My mind was completely boggled, so that while they’ve been very much a part of my consciousness, because I did not know the key actors at that time, the connection to Hulme had escaped me … until now!
It was my thoughts on the E-mail from Hulme and Alcamo soliciting “consensus” in their co-authored “ATTENTION: Invitation to influence Kyoto” – along with Hulme’s Dec. 2 OpEd in the WSJ – that led to the birth of my quiet little corner of the blogosphere [http://hro001.wordpress.com/2009/12/06/the-fog-of-uncertainty-and-the-precautionary-principle/]
As an aside, Canada’s National Post even published a (somewhat abbreviated and slightly mangled version of my) letter to the editor in which I had corrected Terence Corcoran’s benevolent depiction of Hulme in his otherwise excellent two-part series on Climategate (Dec. 19/21). But I digress …
A few days ago, after reading the same Hulme text Steve Mosher cited in this post, I started mousing around on Hulme’s own site. Interestingly, in light of Mosher’s unearthing of the Pachauri connection, a search on “Pachauri” yields zilch.
A search on “IPCC” however, is considerably 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. I was a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society from 1982 to 2002.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t the “scenarios chapter” in TAR have been based on the SRES in which Castles & Henderson had found so many flaws (and whose critique, in true IPCC fashion, was dismissed)?
Two other tidbits I fouund on this page:
“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 – under the heading of Personal Interests – “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.”
Just as a search of Hulme’s site on “Pachauri” leads to zilch, the site to which “Fulcrum” is linked also yields zilch on a search for Hulme. However, searching on Fulcrum for “climate change” is – not unlike searching for “IPCC” on Hulme’s – considerably more fruitful (one might even surmise that Hulme’s fruitful thoughts had gone forth and multiplied!).
At Fulcrum one finds: [ http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/news/2007/20070713atkinson.cfm?doc=220 ]
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 header & paragraph:]
“Global warming is changing more than the climate
“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, my response to Dave Andrews concern that Steve Mosher “might be being a bit too hard on Mike Hulme” is: No, I don’t think so.
My response to Steve Mosher: Mazeltov! And thanks for yet another brilliant exposition 🙂
Thanks. It’s important to keep the focus on the key question, “What did the IPCC know and when did it know it?” (I hope any Woodward and Bernsteins in the media who are following this will take the hint.) Therefore think it’s worth including a key excerpt from the link above:
Very good essay and analysis of the situation Mr Mosher.
I usually supress a chuckle when I hear the word ‘radiative’.
…I am sure you get the drift by now. If the science were solid, there would be no need to present facts in such a misleading fashion
I just realized my own statement may be incorrect as there could be an alternative explanation. It is also possible that the science was presented in a misleading fashion because the presenters didn’t understand it and so made mistakes.
Shall we go with misleading or incompetant?
rbatemen: Not much I can say there. You’ve swallowed the kool-aid.
P. Wilson: You have no idea what you’re talking about. Zero.
Pat Frank: Where they go wrong is they aren’t trained as scientists. A certain John McEnroe quote comes to mind I’m afraid.
J. Peden: Earth would do nicely. Or so thought Fourier, Tyndall, Arrhenius, Calendar, Plasse, Hansen and others.
davidmhoffer: You are aware that both emissions, and atmospheric [CO2], are both accelerating, right? There is more than enough C in fossil fuels and vegetation, never mind the oceans, to send the [CO2] well over 1000 ppm. And boiling the oceans would not be an example of a tipping point david, but rather of blunt force annihilation. Tipping points involve a degree of surprise, or at least unexpectedly quick change.
But at least you all gave it a shot and +/- addressed the science, which is more than I can say for a couple of others.
Well said!
Also see Eric Hoffer’s True Believer:
http://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-Thoughts-Movements-Perennial/dp/0060505915/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264563476&sr=1-3
JohnWho (18:24:22) :
From timesonline
‘Professor Beddington said that uncertainty about some aspects of climate science should not be used as an excuse for inaction: “Some people ask why we should act when scientists say they are only 90 per cent certain about the problem. But would you get on a plane that had a 10 per cent chance of crashing?” ‘
What is it about climate science that makes an idiot of so many people? Everything he says about uncertainty is sensible but then he goes on to indicate that he believes that the IPCC estimate of P=0.9 is meaningful. What does he think the evidence for this could be? 9 observations supporting CAGW and 1 refuting it? (Of course, there’s no evidence, they just made it up.)
How about misleading the public about how many scientists were actually involved in the IPCC report? Coldplay over at James Delingpole’s blog posted this CRU letter today:
From: Joseph Alcamo
To: m.hulme Rob.Swart
Subject: Timing, Distribution of the Statement
Date: Thu, 9 Oct 1997 18:52:33 0100
Reply-to: alcamo
Mike, Rob,
Sounds like you guys have been busy doing good things for the cause.
I would like to weigh in on two important questions –
Distribution for Endorsements —
I am very strongly in favor of as wide and rapid a distribution as
possible for endorsements. I think the only thing that counts is
numbers. The media is going to say “1000 scientists signed” or “1500
signed”. No one is going to check if it is 600 with PhDs versus 2000
without. They will mention the prominent ones, but that is a
different story.
Conclusion — Forget the screening, forget asking
them about their last publication (most will ignore you.) Get those
names!
Timing — I feel strongly that the week of 24 November is too late.
1. We wanted to announce the Statement in the period when there was
a sag in related news, but in the week before Kyoto we should expect
that we will have to crowd out many other articles about climate.
2. If the Statement comes out just a few days before Kyoto I am
afraid that the delegates who we want to influence will not have any
time to pay attention to it. We should give them a few weeks to hear
about it.
3. If Greenpeace is having an event the week before, we should have
it a week before them so that they and other NGOs can further spread
the word about the Statement. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be so
bad to release the Statement in the same week, but on a
diffeent day. The media might enjoy hearing the message from two
very different directions.
Conclusion — I suggest the week of 10 November, or the week of 17
November at the latest.
Mike — I have no organized email list that could begin to compete
with the list you can get from the Dutch. But I am still
willing to send you what I have, if you wish.
Best wishes,
Joe Alcamo
” By davidmhoffer on January 26, 2010 at 6:43 p: …I am sure you get the drift by now. If the science were solid, there would be no need to present facts in such a misleading fashion.”
David, yes indeed. Why would they act the way they did if their position was strongly supported by the whole spectrum of significant science studies? There would be no need for their questionable behavior.
So was it because the wanted the whole research fund market to themselves? Was it really the money? I don’t think it was money primarily. Something deeper. Hmmmm.
John