For the Guardian, it has been a week of finally coming to terms with what we’ve known here at WUWT for months now. The issues of Climategate are finally getting full sunlight in the UK, and it’s white hot light. Even Monbiot is calling for resignations beyond that of Phil Jones. Though Monbiot needs a bit of education on who “broke” these stories. It certainly wasn’t the Guardian.
By Fred Pearce
Scientists sometimes like to portray what they do as divorced from the everyday jealousies, rivalries and tribalism of human relationships. What makes science special is that data and results that can be replicated are what matters and the scientific truth will out in the end.
But a close reading of the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia in November exposes the real process of everyday science in lurid detail.
Many of the emails reveal strenuous efforts by the mainstream climate scientists to do what outside observers would regard as censoring their critics. And the correspondence raises awkward questions about the effectiveness of peer review – the supposed gold standard of scientific merit – and the operation of the UN’s top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The scientists involved disagree. They say they were engaged not in suppressing dissent but in upholding scientific standards by keeping bad science out of peer-reviewed journals. Either way, when passing judgment on papers that directly attack their own work, they were mired in conflicts of interest that would not be allowed in most professions.
The cornerstone of maintaining the quality of scientific papers is the peer review system. Under this, papers submitted to scientific journals are reviewed anonymously by experts in the field. Conducting reviews is seen as part of the job for academics, who are generally not paid for the work.
The papers are normally sent back to the authors for improvement and only published when the reviewers give their approval. But the system relies on trust, especially if editors send papers to reviewers whose own work is being criticised in the paper. It also relies on anonymity, so reviewers can give candid opinions.
Cracks in the system have been obvious for years. Yesterday it emerged that 14 leading researchers in a different field – stem cell research – have written an open letter to journal editors to highlight their dissatisfaction with the process. They allege that a small scientific clique is using peer review to block papers from other researchers.
Many will see a similar pattern in the emails from UEA’s Climatic Research Unit, which brutally expose what happens behind the scenes of peer review and how a chance meeting at a barbecue years earlier had led to one journal editor being suspected of being in the “greenhouse sceptics camp”.
The head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, as a top expert in his field, was regularly asked to review papers and he sometimes wrote critical reviews that may have had the effect of blackballing papers criticising his work.
Here is how it worked in one case.
Read the rest of this article at the Guardian here
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Related articles from the Guardian:
Doubts about “hockey stick” graph revealed
No apology from IPCC chief Pachauri for glacier fallacy
Isn’t this just a calculated distraction from the real issue of the AGW fraud?
There have been a few articles from The Guardian in the last 2 weeks that are a world away from their previous and continual “AGW is true and nothing else, all who doubt are deniers”
The Guardian were also one of the many newspapers who all signed off the identical editorial late last year, pleading with the world to “save the planet” at Copenhagen.
Interesting times.
By insulting anyone with questions, and stifling debate, the “consensus climate community” and the media have been very effective at turning floating voters into skeptics/”deniers”.
Maybe The Guardian has realized that.
We’ll know the world has really changed when realclimate.org starts saying “it’s ok to have doubts, even we aren’t sure how good GCMs really are!“.. (hell will have frozen over)
Science of Doom – for serious climate science where it’s ok to ask questions
It certainly wasn’t Monbiot who broke the story. It was Pallava Bagla an Indian from Delhi.
It appeared first in an article in Science and then on the BBC at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8387737.stm on 5 December
In a very odd way, this may possibly support the rabid ravings of David King about foreign spies doing the ‘climategate job’
Here is a totally made-up scenario.
The Indian Government doesn’t want Copenhagen to succeed because it would severely affect Indian economic development. They arrange for various leaks to occur just before Copenhagen. First they get a compliant journalist to publish glaciergate. Then they get an employee of CRU (almost certainly an Indian National) to release the FOI material for publication.
As I said, a totally made-up and fake scenario.
This climategate/ carbon tax type discussion in the comments is just hilarious at Huffington Post, if you’re into reading other discussion boards comments on similar subjects we talk about.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/02/global-warming-makes-tree_n_445857.html
I think it is just ‘normal’ science, and there are large literatures on both the problems of peer review, and also the referencing errors. That is why critical examination of assumptions and replication is vital. It is a problem in every science that believes in an objective truth.
But the AGW crowd upped the ante by shouting down normal scientific enquiry, and making completely bogus claims such as all the IPCC work being peer reviewed. Contra that, it is abundantly clear that parts of the IPCC report have been subject to massive confirmation bias.
As a skeptic, I looked into this in detail and then became convinced about AGW. I think the evidence (not least arctic ice melt) shows warming, and most plausibly AGW. But the arrogant attitude of Pachauri and others like him have put so many peoples backs up, and lost so much credibility, that they have to go.
It is an act of crass stupidity to persist with a losing tactic, and to stand behind strategy of spin and exaggeration when you have been found out.
The IPCC should hire PR Crisis experts. The kinds of people who advise on massive product recalls. They need to change their approach if they are to protect their brand. However, they are so arrogant, I doubt they would lower themselves to take advice from anybody outside the clique. Unfortunately.
Something to make everyone smile 😀
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/environment/trees-will-not-become-unstoppable-killing-machines%2c-admit-climate-scientists-201002022433/
People here say “the tide has turned”. But I think it’s still got a long way to go. Guardianistas are still not recognizing that the whole science is a can of worms. There’s still bad climate science at every turn, in every discipline, supported by the scientific “leaders” ie NAS, Royal Society, Nature magazine, New Scientist, and heck, you should hear the stand-in for Phil Jones saying Jones is going to be completely vindicated, etc. And he looks and sounds such a nice, believable, trustworthy person. Just like Pachauri does when he’s combed his hair and is really well-dressed and in a relaxed interview.
I wonder if it would be a good idea to run a series here on “primers” and one-page “disproofs” of AGW. I’ve done a primer that many like, but I don’t like to tout it around very much and since Climategate it’s gone slightly out of date. But there are many, many others. Warren Meyer has done a firstrate vimeo very recently. WUWT can be a peer-to-peer-review forum for all these. This would help raise awareness that Climategate is not just an isolated incident or a matter of “normal” behaviour among scientists.
A quote from Huffington post, I couldn’t help my self, I’m sorry.
“Don’t you Globull Warming evangelists ever tire of hawking these bogus, idiotic studies??
Don’t you get it? The jig is up. Your cult is based on phony manufactured data and people aren’t willing to pay $1,000 a month for electricity so you can pat yourselves on the back for “saving the planet”!!”
Thanks for understanding.
I think Leonard Young & Lucy Skywalker have hit the nail on the head. Also along with the Guardian must sit the BBC who have mercilessly hyped up AGW and lectured us on it.
I think we need a new body to assess the state of climate science , before we spend billions of dollars/ pounds. The body should include qualified sceptics, engineers and lawyers. The body should be set up on the understanding there is no contact with people who have vested interests in AGW either way.
I think some of the patient comment & work by this site and its regular contributors and readers is starting to get to the truth.
Well done everyone
Look
Thirteen years ago we came to the conclusion as postdoctoral researchers that our fate was determined by who we managed to work under.
Where I worked almost all folks worked hard and worthily. There was no real difference in the quality of scientific work being done, but there was a real difference in the influence of who would be the senior author on our papers.
If that person was a Prof, an editor of a journal, particularly a top one, then their papers had a far, far higher percentage chance of being published in those key, ‘high impact’ publications. Networks and influence.
Result: scientific ‘success’ for most is due to networking skills to get a job in a top lab, allied to a reasonably good scientific ability. Not brilliance per se. Reasonably good.
We all saw comments designed to delay publication. For the sake of it. Spurious little details mostly. It was the way it was.
We all knew, then, what a Nature or Science paper could do for our career. And we all saw how certain colleagues’ attitudes to us changed with a new publication coming out. It told us more about them than it did about us.
Science is like anything else: you got a good idea, there are 20 folks without a good idea looking to take it from you and run with it. So you either need to learn silence or you need to be allied to political power. To put the frighteners on the spongers. Science isn’t a place for collegial practice in my experience……..
Science is about egos, prestige and self-interest. One bad piece of publicity on Gene Therapy in the late 1990s and the scientific politicians in the UK ran for the hills. As if a field like that would come to fruition without hiccups along the way, eh?
It’s about relationships with key editors to ‘shape the market’ for your field, making it sexy to justify ‘high impact’ publications. Stem cells were ‘sexy’ in science in the 1980s, although the public didn’t know they existed then. Editors had been primed.
It’s about credit. Some folks I know are still named on papers 10 years after finishing work in a field. Others published one and then got no further credit. They both did the same work. One got on, the other didn’t. Name in lights means more than hard work at the end of the day…..just like show business.
Science is about power games. Medics treating scientists as technicians. Medics playing hard ball about access to clinical samples. Scientists wanting a side kick to run their labs, so damning the reluctant side-kick with faint praise when they try to become independent. Nothing to do with science that. To do with base human selfishness. No different in science and medicine to anywhere else.
Science is about spinning. Spinning hype with newspapers and not addressing the excesses of the journalist. I once fielded a call in the UK from New Orleans when my boss was on holiday due to a typical piece of hype in an English tabloid which some Americans had picked up on through the wires. I explained clearly to them what the hype was, what was genuine and what wasn’t, directed them to a Prof in Boston and suggested they called back when my boss was back. I was regarded as dangerously honest. Nothing I said was other than 100% truth. But journalists were ‘the enemy’. They weren’t actually. They didn’t understand the story but understood the hype. Like good journalists they bit until they got what they wanted. I simply opened the Pedigree Chum and fed them, making it clear I was speaking off the record. And they were happy as a result.
But scientists must let the ‘leaders’ deal with the Press. 10 years of reading hyped rubbish told me that the leaders weren’t doing a good job at all…….
I’m glad all this is coming out. It’ll do scientists good to get rid of the hypocritical airs and graces, the sanctimonious superiority and the petty little power games. The spinning to get grant income and budgets from the State. And the ‘my new baby will be an Oxford Professor one day’ translation of an initial interesting result into imminent ‘change the world’ technology.
Go earn your Nobel Prizes. Others did.
leave ol phil jones alone he thought he was right and he wasn’t let’s forget it and move on. He probably has kids and a family just like you and me. The eareth ain’t warming due to AGW so whaT?
“Phil Jones, scientist in climate data row, promises to be more open”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7013060.ece
“The scientist at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails has admitted that he (Dr Jones) and his colleagues need to be more open with their data. ”
“He said: “We are facing more and more public scrutiny and any future work we do is going to have much greater scrutiny by our peers and by the public. We do need to make more of the data available, I fully accept that. ”
Read it all in The Times, but note Dr Jones is only promising to make more information available, not ALL information. At least it is progress of a kind and an admission that he has been “economical” with release of information in the past.
I think the “So what” is, Stephan, that his mistake could bring down the economies of the Western World.
not only the guardian and a bit stronger:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10623715&pnum=2
LeonardYoung (01:07:55) :
“…middle class professionals who are intelligent though gullible, has been so brainwashed that it is now regarded as a socially outcast thing to question ANY conventional wisdom regarding climate. They still believe Polar Bears are all but extinct and still confuse pollution and carbon dioxide. They are among the most mis-informed of the UK electorate exactly because they are subscribed to a closed-loop of disinformation which they genuinely believe is true, and never bother to look outside that loop.”
You are correct, and this situation is changing. The BBC is being dragged kicking and screaming into the real world in the face of an imminent change of government, the first port of call of which will be to start hacking away at the bloated corporate structure the BBC has become. The BBC is part of the Guardian/Independent/BBC axis of lying propaganda that climate science has become in this country, and which is being attacked from all sides for its bloody-minded refusal to allow any other views than its own to be aired on this subject for nearly 40 years.
The BBC science output’s chickens are also coming home to roost, as it has become painfully apparent that the public are not convinced by either the government, the newspapers, civil servants, politicians, or government scientists that man-made global warming even exists as described by these entities. The BBC is now under attack for its blatantly biased science output as never before by scientists themselves, and by informed members of the public…
For example:
BBC criticised for scientific ‘cheap sensationalism’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7128624/BBC-criticised-for-scientific-cheap-sensationalism.html
[Extract]
The BBC has been accused of “exaggerating” the threat of global warming to the oceans in a documentary.
The programme Britain’s really disgusting food: Fish has been accused of pushing scientific “cheap sensationalism” by fisherman and the seafood industry. The documentary, the third in the ‘disgusting food’ series, featured BBC presenter Alex Riley investigating the seafood industry. Shown on BBC One last week, the programme contained “willful factual errors” including the assertion that there will be no fish left in the sea in fifty years time, according to campaigners.
James Wood, from Seafish, the industry body which is sponsored by four UK government fisheries departments to promote good quality and sustainable seafood, said: “World fish supply has been boringly stable for the last 35 years”. The organization claims that despite countless phone calls to producers who were made aware that cod stocks in the North Sea have increased by 40% since 2000, BBC producers chose to “ignore the facts”….
…The BBC was also criticized for its reporting of science stories in recent months. It has been accused of failing to cover the climate change debate objectively. The corporation came under fire in November, after a broadcaster admitted he knew about controversial emails in which scientists discussed “spinning” climate data long before it reported on them.
It comes amid anger over the way predictions about climate change are published by experts. Bob Watson, the chief scientist at the Department for the Environment, said the scientific community needed to be more honest about the “uncertainties” surrounding climate change. The former chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that climate change skeptics needed to be included in future reports on global warming from international bodies.
The IPCC has been criticized for using anecdotal evidence and non-peer reviewed science in its reports. Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the current chairman of the IPCC, was criticized at the weekend after it was reported that he drove to work in a Toyota and he has admitted the IPCC was wrong to include a claim that the glaciers would melt by 2035 in a recent report.
The BBC’s governing body announced last month that it will carry out a review in the spring to assess the “accuracy and impartiality” of the corporation’s coverage of science.”
Stephan (02:11:36)
“The eareth ain’t warming due to AGW so whaT?”
I want back my money(TAX)
My only problem with AGW was the “virtual certainty” claimed by its proponents. Arguments became ridiculous blocking tactics. If you question “the science” for lacking enough evidence, then you’re claiming the sun won’t rise tomorrow. They pigeonhole any objection into unreasonable positions—that you’re either demanding 100% certainty or claiming that any knowledge is impossible and there’s zero knowledge about anything. You either accept “the science” or the IPCC chairman himself will call you a Flat Earther. Utterly utterly idiotic.
Too damned right they have a PR problem. They claimed virtual certainty, when we all knew that was not possible with the knowledge available, and now they’ve been caught out as the weakness of their evidence has been exposed.
It didn’t need to be this way. They could just have been honest about the quality of the evidence. The evidence suggests there may be links between CO2 and climate change, but this is merely observational and could be a fluke correlation. We need find ways to study it experimentally.
They ridiculed skeptics because that’s all they could do, as they couldn’t defend their thesis.
The real worry is that they managed to do this for so long. Their basic claim, that the science was settled on their 100 year predictions about a giant complex old system of systems of systems hundreds of millions of years old with multiple overlapping cycles, should have elicited a loud belly laugh from any average person.
Think for yourselves—hundreds of years later we’re still trying to learn that one.
For this positive attribution to McIntyre to appear on a Guardian blog by Fred Pearce this afternoon is significant. And this change of tack will have a flow on. For example, in Australia one of the gatekeepers of information on this topic is Robyn Williams who relies on the likes of Pearce for assistance at the gate.
Why the change of heart? Surely in some way or another the hit-rates, reader behaviour, comments, competition from WUWT etc…would give a hint that they are not going to maintain credibility or readership if they did not respond to the wind change.
Just now posted on Monbiot’s Guardian blog :
The University of East Anglia is repressing information and is misleading in its statement about Jones.
Warwick Hughes presented a report to the Tasman Institute in Melbourne (a private think tank to which I provided suggestions for projects and funding) late 1991. The report alleged, with illustrations, cherry picking by Jones in his 1988 paper about Southern Hemisphere temperature patterns.
This UEA statement is wrong. “The FOI request from Douglas Keenan was responded to by the university in full in 2007. The data used in the 1990 paper were indeed sent to Mr Keenan, including both the locations of the stations and the station temperature data for China, Australia and western parts of the former Soviet Union. For China, the data covered the period 1954 to 1983. The data were also uploaded onto the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) website.”
I know it is wrong because the Australian raw data have not as yet been released because Jones maintains that he lost them. (Personal email to me).
Here is some of the report by Hughes to Tasman: “Jones et al 1986 looked at 86 Australian stations and rejected 46 (25 Short term ? 21 long term). Of the 40 they used 27 were short term and 13 long term. Of the long term there were 5 large cities.”
Last year I replotted some of the earlier data and can attest that the sites selected by Jones show warming on avarage and the rejected sites, averaged, show essentially none.
A chronology is at
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=363
I agree with Lucy, there’s still a long way to go, and until the BBC has a complete clearout of Harribin, Black, and Shuckman and the Policy Unit issues new advice to remaining journalists, I won’t hold my breath waiting for balanced coverage and the dam bursting.
Here’s some satire from Scotland on the latest aspect of climategate:
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/environment/trees-will-not-become-unstoppable-killing-machines%2c-admit-climate-scientists-201002022433/
(mild warning – this story is work safe but other’s on the Daily Mash may not be).
“But a close reading of the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia in November exposes the real process of everyday science in lurid detail.”
Rubbish. It exposes the reality of government funded politics and nothing more. Real science has nothing to do with what Mann, Jones, et al are doing.
Now the Telegraph is turning back the other way, GW is killing the soil.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/agriculture/farming/6828878/Britain-facing-food-crisis-as-worlds-soil-vanishes-in-60-years.html
To see why the BBC is kicking and screaming so much: follow the money.
This a a biggy!
http://www.biased-bbc.blogspot.com/2010/finger-in-pies.html
The Met Office is the next institution that is going to be even more embarrassed than it already is. Already forced to publish data it previously refused, and having several times predicted long-term weather that was way off the mark, its new challenge is to bring an end to its current defense against sceptics, which is to patronise the public with condescending articles, a good example of which is:
Dr Richard Betts, Met Office “Head of Climate Impacts”, who implies in his piece “Clarifying climate change messages”, that it is not the science that is wrong, its just that somehow its not coming across in the right way.
This is the precise argument used by politcal parties who lose elections – “it’s not that our policies were wrong….we just didn’t get our point across in the right way”.
Don’t be taken in by this lame attempt at deflecting criticism. It is always the refuge of those who have been found out!
@ur momisugly Andy Scrase (00:25:50) :
Good link, but following on from there I think the current state of play is actually closer to Cargo Cult science. See Feynman’s completely brilliant speech at http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm. Thirty-five years on, it should be compulsory reading for all the scientists involved in the GW business — indeed, for all scientists everywhere — in that it describes how science OUGHT to be done, and why. It seems Feynman’s words had been forgotten.