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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Leif Svalgaard (13:43:34) :
ya I got issues with the pay wall as well.
“You bet I would Anand. It’s happened many times in the past, as the ice core record shows pretty well.” [co2 lagging behind temperature]
If I’ve understood correctly, this lag could be in the range of 800-1000 years. Is that correct?
Could it be that the current co2 surge have a component of this lagging rise due to the putative medieval warm period?
Thanks
Anand
Richard Drake (14:22:33) :
Steve, this is an enormously helpful narrative, a seedbed as some of us try to get our heads around what we should submit to the UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into CRU and Climategate.
Richard, truth be told I am struggling to get my head wrapped around what I will submit to the house of commons. I believe I am just going to focus on one issue. The issue where I have standing WRT a pair of FOIA I have pending ( havent told anybody what they are about yet) Anyway, last night I needed to distract myself from that brain buster. So I did this. It really is a tough story to tell. The good Bishop has mad skills when it comes to narrative so I can’t wait to read how he expands his Jesus paper story with the facts from the mails. That is a whole book in itself.
Why use the computer term ‘hack’ instead of corrupt[ion]?
1. I’m a computer guy.
2. For me a “hack” describes many things. A ugly kludge to make a system
work, or an trick devised to make the system operate against its own principles. You set up rules, I’ll look for a way to hack those rules.
3. In the climategate debate the term hacker is “owned” by the other side.
i want to pwn that word. So everytime you see them use the word “hacker”
pwn it and tell them who the REAL HACKERS ARE. link them to this article and jack the thread.
Dave Andrews (14:11:10) :
I’m not sure if I was too hard on Hulme. he does redeem himself, as I noted, in his moment of clarity. We will see. Perhaps he can explain himself. In my mind there is always room for redemption. After time in the penalty box.
Methinks Senator Inhofe is going to have a lot more help on his side of the fence come election time this fall. It has dawned on the electorate that we have been had by the warmers, the U.N., and it’s I.P.C.C. spawn. Enough precious time and money has been wasted on this AGW hoax, and we don’t have any more to waste, unless we want to watch millions starve in the near future.
Fantastic article, Stephen.
jack morrow (15:39:53) :
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”.
Thanks, I really have to thank some people on the other side for this. A while back, both at Lucia’s blog and at a blog by a persona named Susanna, I started down the path of just trying ( for devils advocate sake) to argue why
A proud man is more dangerous than a shill. And how a man will work harder to protect his personal identity than a corporation will work to protect its corporate identity. As no one could mount a counter argument worth spit, I went with it. Now Pachauri illustrates this PERFECTLY.
here you have a man whom the AGWers woried about because of his political backing. Once he gets inside, the shill for Bush becomes a shill for TERI. people who work for money can be flipped. A corporation, like Shell, can also be flipped. profit from OIL, or profit from renewables, in the end, they will switch identity. But a man who’s whole reputation, who’s whole professional identity rests on his science being right.. he cannot change.
That’s why, Jones says in his mail to Christy that he hopes that nothing will be done about climate change.. that way his science can be proved right.
John Cepican (15:41:56) :
“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.”
Granted. That was a tough call for me. I might substitute the word “tenuous” to describe the paper. But then, I find most paleo work tenuous. In the larger scheme of things I dont think it matters. The issue is that you have an example of Von Storch who took what I think was the right action based on his belief. The chapter authors of galciergate and amazongate
would do well to follow his lead. The same goes for the guys who did chapter 6.
David Ball, do you have some type of learning disability? Who said anything about ” the equivalence of C and CO2″, or whether people had the right to think for themselves? As for Stefan-Boltzmann, a barrage?, yeah probably, but credible, no. Anyway, take it up with J Peden–he’s the one who claimed the earth is not a greenhouse, 150 years of research to the direct contrary notwithstanding.
davidmhoffer: Yes, someone did in fact claim the earth’s not a greenhouse, thus the response. The climate sensitivity, without long term feedbacks, is pretty confidently established at about 3C, from at least 1979.
Anand: yes up to 800 years in at least one case, maybe more. But no, on the MWP as a CO2 source. The stable isotope signature of the atmosphere, points directly to fossil fuel burning as the main cause of the CO2 rise since 1800. Plus the MWP was not a global phenomenon.
Dodgy Geezer (15:50:40) :
@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.”
That’s a fair assessment. Tom Fuller has looking at how the activists have hijacked the science. So in one sense you are right. My feeble defense would be this. The system is set up to look like it is a fair process, but once the activist operators are in place it’s really not.
Davidmhoffer – thanx! this has been bugging me for a while! to me the whole shebang depends on this CO2 ability to heat the atmosphere.
your nice tie in to the amazon story from the ipcc regarding the forest turning into savanahh by using the lion/gazalle metaphor was just spot on! if you don’t mind, i am going to use that to help explain the CO2 forcing to my kids (18 and 16 LOL!). So nice when difficult science can be explained so succintly!
“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.”
As many here can tell you I am a LukeWarmer. That means I don’t deny radiative physics. heck I worked with Modtran and Hitran ages ago ( source code even, very cool) . So adding GHGs to the atmosphere will increase the temperature, all other things being equal. How much? I dunno. lets start by looking at the BEST evidence we have.
hmmm. Thermometers. They are the best proxy for temperature ( the kinetic energy of molecules) Lets look at the record. Hmm. what’s the index of record for the IPCC. Why that would be Hadcru. hadcru is a nice graph.
I like it. I used to make charts like that. let me write to Phil Jones and see if he will give me the raw data, his code for processing that, and the geostats he uses to come up with that nice graph.
Opps. 404. file not found.
I don’t engage In debates about GHGs and radiative physics. That bugs some people who want to convince me that Global warming is false.
But my position also bugs people who do believe in radiative physics. they think that just because I believe in the physics I am somehow commited to believing in data I am not allowed to see and code I am not allowed to see.
I’m sorry I wont move off this point until it is settled. Warmer? sure.
How much? cant say.
So asking me to even debate the “why” is a silliness I choose not to engage in.
M. Simon (17:06:24) :
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.
Cool. Thanks for reminding me about that site. it’s been a while
Leif Svalgaard (13:43:34) :
All and any data used in climate science should be published under a Creative Commons like license, free for anyone to view and use.
This should be the case not only for data but also for the published papers. Often it takes the papers to make sense of the data or to see how the data is used. Therefore the papers should also be accessible to everyone without a ‘pay-wall’. Finally, the reviews [or at least, the reviewers’ identity] should be part of the electronic version of the paper. One could argue that some fields and/or obscure journals might be exempt [for various reasons, e.g. economic], but Journals with high impact factor should be open.”
Thx dr. S.
A while back I suggested to Dr. Curry that journals require that papers have reproducible results. basically you have to submit your paper ( the advertisement of the science) your data and your code. If the junk wont produce the charts and tables used in the paper– trash bin. She wasnt too keen on that idea, but thought it a good suggestion for the IPCC.
Also ditto on the reviewers identity. In my background I always knew who was busting my chops. its part of the job. Crap, you WANT harsh critics.
theduke (13:21:28) :
Hulme, in a moment of temporary lucidness, had it right.
I wonder if he’s the whistleblower.
I very much doubt it. Anyway, that question is a sideshow. Best let sleeping dogs lie IMO.
I especially like the arguments about the allowances for non peer reviewed literature. These arguments show an utter lack of understanding of the mind set of those writing CH 6. But first let’s start with an analysis of the actual annex 2. why is the exception created? let’s see what they say..
“Because it is increasingly apparent that materials relevant to IPCC Reports, in particular, information about the
experience and practice of the private sector in mitigation and adaptation activities, are found in sources that
have not been published or peer-reviewed (e.g., industry journals, internal organisational publications, non-peer
reviewed reports or working papers of research institutions, proceedings of workshops etc) the following
additional procedures are provided.”
the first thing to note about the exception is that it is targeted or motivated by issues that come up in WGII and WGIII. I’m refering to WGI, which is the SCIENCE working group. Second, the exception indicates that the publications in this area are not peer reviewed. It’s a different case in WGI where the norm, where the gold standard is peer review.
So, besides the fact that the exception was carved out for a different WG, you only have to look at the mails to see what the mindset of the the WGI AR4 Ch06 writers and reviewers were.
Which mail would you like to see? The mails were they talk about rejecting papers because they contain references to personal communication?
the mails were they are scrambling to get stuff into journals?
The mails were they argue that they should refute papers in peer reviewed journals so that they can be used? Seems to me, if you read the mails, that they took the guidelines pretty damn seriously. heck it looks like they broke the law to cover up what they did. Why not just say ” hey briffa, that paper by ammann, dont worry about the IPCC deadlines, dont worry annex 2 is our friend.” nope you wont find them saying that. Why? Cause they are WGI
and peer review rules supreme. At Least in their minds.
Still you have an interesting hack there.
1. promote the IPCC report on the basis that it only uses peer review.
2. trash people who publish in non peer reviewed literature.
3. Stuff a little exception clause away, just in case.
When you get busted, whip out #3 and hope to god people dont remember that you sold them the product on #1.
If you sold medicine and used this tactic, you’d go to jail.
Do not pass go, do not collect 200.
next.
If the “Science is settled” why is the IPCC having to withdraw various reports that constitute (albeit small) parts of that settled science? By admitting to these individual oversights are they not admitting, by extension, that the science is not settled, notwithstanding their massive expertise in climate science. Or are we to understand the “Science is settled” as special climate scientist use of English, like ‘trick’, or ‘hide the decline’ which means one thing to poorly informed citizens but quite another to the priesthood of climate science?
Inspector Thompson’s Gazelle (20:50:26) :
I don’t know if it’s courage or stupid ignorance when someone comes on to this forum obviously lacking knowledge. I hope the good mods bear with me.
Gazelle, go to the IPCC web site and download the paper IPCC Expert Meeting on the Science of Alternative Metrics
The Grand Hotel, Oslo, Norway
18-20 March 2009
In that paper you will see that the MAIN OBJECTIVE of the AGW movement is for the UN to control not just CO2 but ALL human emissions.
The paper discusses changing the current metric from Global Warming Potential (GWP) {which uses radiative forcing} to Global Temperature change Potential (GTP){which uses T targets within any given timeframes}
This may possibly explain why Copenhagen ended with Obama announcing a target of 1.5-2degC
(are you happy with the UN taking control of all emissions on this planet?)
Read the report. You may decide to change your comment about “rationale” people and the “science” of CC
Good article Mosh. And I only spotted one minor typo, 4th para from the end:
…and so to(o) will the climate science…
bill (00:43:44) :
There was nothing “small” about the Himalayan Glacier fraud. It purported to adversely affect 16% of the worlds population within a relatively short period of time (2035). This was in effect the poster child of the IPCC alarmism. Just like it’s predecessor poster child, the Mann Hockey Stick, it’s been shown to be a fraud.
NOT (albeit small)
Mosh,
Thanks.
steven mosher (23:27:28) :
So adding GHGs to the atmosphere will increase the temperature, all other things being equal.
Few of us are able to understand Miscolczi’s math, but no-one has yet refuted him as far as I know. He says the greenhouse is saturated, and increases in co2 will be offset by changes in humidity. Since water vapour is so much more powerful as a GHG than co2, humidity wouldn’t have to change much, and so the change wouldn’t be easily detectable.
I suspect the reason Miscolczi’s NASA boss logged on to Miscolczi’s computer and withdrew his paper from JGR, forcing Miscolczi’s resignation, is that NASA knows he is right, and doesn’t want the paper cited or debated.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/why-the-sun-is-so-important-to-climate/
Gazelle,
“The climate sensitivity, without long term feedbacks, is pretty confidently established at about 3C, from at least 1979.”
Reference please!
“Plus the MWP was not a global phenomenon.”
Oh yes, the old “the MWP was not a global phenomenon” argument. Funny then, that there are hundreds of papers published over several decades that identify a warm period in every Continent of the Earth. That really is the scientific consensus.
Or do you actually imagine that somehow there was this warm anomoly sitting over Europe that lasted hundreds of years? How is that supposed to happen? There is no physical mechanism that could prevent equilibrium from occuring. The only reason there are those peddling this nonsense is because it fits their man made warming theories, otherwise it would have been smothered at birth.
Steve Mosher, Sir: I read the article with complete absorption, once I ‘clicked’ with your use of the word ‘hacker’. All of us who seek enlightenment in this scandal owe you a huge debt and a big thanks! The guys wearing the black hats will get theirs as You, Anthony and a host of others have started gaing momentum in making the fraud totally cleare to all who can read and listen!
Prof Hulme is in very odd company judging by the Bishop of Thetford’s little article about climate. I was indoctrinated in Christianity as a young chorister and the Bish reminds me of why I gave up on it after I found that loving the music wasn’t enough. However, I still love Mozart’s religious works and regard them as some of the loveliest music ever written.