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
=================================
Related articles from the Guardian:
Doubts about “hockey stick” graph revealed
No apology from IPCC chief Pachauri for glacier fallacy
BBC newsnight did a piece with Roger Pielke junior, worth watching on BBC iplayer.
Whoops! Regarding biased-bbc blog
should read
http://www.biased-bbc.blogspot.com/2010/02/fingers-in-pies.html
In a strong field we have a leading contender for most absurd CiF post of the century:
It begins:
“After watching last night’s Newsnight, I can only come to one conclusion: the BBC has become this country’s most pernicious climate-change-denying media outlet in the UK.”
….and gets worse!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/03/bbc-climate-change-denier
At last some investigative articles from the Guardian, formerly a leading warmist media outlet.
What happened to Fred Pearce? Maybe he thought that speaking out could be the best way to preserve his own and the newspaper’s credibility.
I’m not sure if that Guardian link was a portal to another universe, but did I read Monbiot criticising the CRU and IPCC? And then backing up those statements in the comments? Or did I just read it wrong?
‘The guardian has discovered’ . Please – this information has been out for months. That is a very cheap trick to plagiarise and then claim credit.
Is not this link :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/01/climate-emails-sceptics
by the very same Fred Pearce 2 days ago and asserts that (and I quote)
“Almost all the media and political discussion about the hacked climate emails has been based on brief soundbites publicised by professional sceptics and their blogs. In many cases, these have been taken out of context and twisted to mean something they were never intended to.”
So, are we to assume that the linked Guardian article is ‘based on brief soundbites’ and ‘taken out of context’. Do the emails show attempts to subvert FOI request, manipulate data, or do they not?
My head is spinning.
Lucy Skywalker and Andrew P
There may be a way to go yet, but I remember when the Soviet Union and its satellites started to collapse, and this feels awfully similar.
The “Pearce” Review Process
We may owe a great debt of gratitude to Fred Pearce, the co writer of this Guardian headline story and the writer of a two page spread on the inside pages. It was an unintended but extremely valuable consequence of his New Scientist article back in 1999 entitled “Flooded Out” in which the 2035 claim was made that ultimately led to the exposure of the IPCC deceit. Without his lazy journalistic approach in not checking his source, or perhaps because he was only interested in promoting the cause, we would never have had this brilliant piece of AGW propaganda to set in train the process which ultimately lead to the spurious IPCC claims on this and supposed other disastrous consequences. He says that he made clear that the report he was citing was not peer reviewed. The article does not say this, but does give the claim an air of authority as if it had been peer reviewed, or was it perhaps just “Pearce” reviewed.
It may however be another travesty to Trenberth that this ultra disciple of the warming cause has lead to one of their greatest set backs and that he is now appearing as Mr Innocent and capitalising on his insider knowledge to be able to earn himself a nice little number writing front page stories and in depth articles on this and other emerging stories. There is an excellent article at Climate Resistance where Fred Pearce’s involvement is exposed.
http://www.climate-resistance.org/2010/01/the-ipcc-and-the-melting-glaciers-story.html
Pearce actually responds to the article in the blog with this comment.
Fred Pearce says:
January 21, 2010 at 4:06 am
“You accuse me of having a hidden agenda on this in my writing. This is nonsense. In 1999 I found Hasnain’s claims about the eastern and central Himalayas melting away by 2035 sufficiently interesting, coming from a leading Indian glacioplogist after a four year study, to be newsworthy. I wrote the story. Some years later, I spoke to other glaciologists who seriously contested the claim and i did not repeat it after that, regarding it as at best unreliable. Then it turned up in the IPCC report. I presumed it must have been substantiated, and used it (attributed to IPCC) in a brief pre-Copenhagen roundup of climate science in the online Daily Telegraph. At that point glaciologists contacted me to point out both that it STILL wasn’t true and that my article may have been the starting point for the IPCC paragraph. As a conscientious journalist, I followed up the story and published in New Scientist. The Sunday Times picked up that story and everyone else picked up from them.
I have no hidden agenda for or against the IPCC. Indeed, I exposed the scandal.”
Note that he recognizes the status of the whole process by referring to it as a scandal. This blog is immediately followed with a response from the editor which says far more than I can about the professional qualities of Mr Pearce.
1. Editors says:
January 21, 2010 at 5:22 am
“Fred,
at no point do we accuse you having a ‘hidden’ agenda. On the contrary, we say that your agenda is all too obvious, as is the New Scientist’s.
Some years later, I spoke to other glaciologists who seriously contested the claim and i did not repeat it after that, regarding it as at best unreliable.
Wasn’t that a story in itself: On the one hand, a scientist apparently claims that Himalayan glaciers will melt in decades, another says not? A scientific controversy worthy of reporting on, no?
Since your article, however, you wrote two books on water shortages, and the social catastrophe that they will cause.
The product description on the Amazon site for your book, When the Rivers Run Dry: What Happens When Our Water Runs Out? says that
That we face a world-wide crisis is no idle threat. Pearce’s 15-year research into water issues has taken him all over the world. His vivid reportage reveals the personal stories behind failing rivers, barren fields, desertification, floods and water wars. His book gives a clear and terrifying picture of the consequences if no remedial action is taken, but also a brilliantly challenging explanation of the steps we must take to ensure the ‘blue revolution’ the world desperately needs.
How can someone spend 15 years researching and writing about water, and not be aware of the status of the scientific claims relating to the water supply of possibly more than a billion Asians?
Then it turned up in the IPCC report. I presumed it must have been substantiated, and used it (attributed to IPCC) in a brief pre-Copenhagen roundup of climate science in the online Daily Telegraph.
So you did see the claim in the IPCC report, and yet you, a science journalist, and someone who had spent 15 years researching water security, didn’t think to investigate where the claim – that you had previously regarded as dubious, and controversial – had been substantiated, but decided to take at face value?
That is what we are criticising, Fred. If the science fits the political narrative, obviously there’s not point in scrutinising it. That doesn’t speak about a hidden political agenda; it speaks about the way in which politics is prior to the science, in the arguments made throughout the debate, leading to the array of apocalyptic fantasies that it consists of now.”
It seems to me that the Climate Resistance article makes some very good points on the antics and motivations of Mr Pearce. When you read the 1999 article in the New Scientist, you have to come to the conclusion that with Pearce’s knowledge on the subject, the giant Gangotri Glacier could not possibly disappear in 40 years at an attrition rate of 30m per year and yet he chose to publish the article anyway. And even after he had been told by glaciologists that the report was nonsense he chose to produce this and other pieces of propaganda in the Telegraph in the run up to Copenhagen.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6730317/Copenhagen-climate-summit-issues-ice-caps.html
Anthony, is it not worth investigating the activity of Pearce and perhaps other environmental correspondents in the whole shoddy business of AWG propaganda peddling. The Climate Resistance article would make a very good starting point.
To anyone who has been in a graduate level science program, this is old news. Even when I got my masters 20+ years ago, the same behaviors were prevalent. It is good that the outside world is being educated on what goes on behind the scenes & that scientists *gasp* are just like anyone else, complete with the same flaws.
It is really pretty intuitively obvious – when you depend on grant money for your liveleyhood, you have a much stronger profit motive to do what ever you need to do (including twisting results to keep your grantees happy) to keepthe grant money coming. A process to make grants double blind would help the scientific process greatly.
Anyone who suggests research has no profit motive but “big evil corporations”so, doesnt understand the process
Got bit by that one myself. We sent my paper (a re-write of my master’s thesis research on the auditory brainstem) to one journal who’s editor at the time was doing the same research we were doing, but we submitted first. He refused to allow the paper to be reviewed, saying it was not new information. We had to go journal shopping just to get in the door of peer review, let alone not get it returned unopened. We also added a cross town colleague to the re-writing process, one that brought a great deal more prestige and may I say interpretative genius to the team. The research, data, and results never changed but the technical interpretation was much improved. It finally got published. But by then I was so unimpressed by peer review politics, the pressure to smudge the data and bend/break rules, and territorial idiocy that I quit after my paper was accepted. These types of shenanigans were finely penned by Candace Pert in her book “Molecules of Emotion”. The fact that she stayed the course shames me. An excellent read by any measure.
By the way, an interesting side note about the early victorian era of scientific research. It was often the gentleman with time on his hands and a yen for an engaging hobby who made amazing discoveries. It was even because of a bit of snobbery that these gentleman had little to say about those who needed to go to school to learn how to be a scientist.
Andy Scrase (00:25:50) :
“Earth to Guardian readers: ( and George Monbiot )”
We are not talking about Science here, we are talking “Post Normal Science”
There is a Wikipedia page on this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-normal_science
We can save the planet and have real science too,
—————————————————————–
No Andy…. We can only have the “Scientific Method”…. There is nothing else…. It really is that simple.
….. The rest is Politics. There is really no protection against Scientists engaging in Partisan politics or allowing Government or Private funding to buy Scientific justification of Policy or ideology….
It all comes back to the empirical evidence and the interpretation of that evidence as it pertains to the theory it supports….
There is only one solution. Open transparency in which all data and methodology is available for anyone to test and interpret. The contention is then open to all.
Whilst these more honest (and somewhat belated) articles in The Guardian blogs are welcome, the hypocracy is glaring. When Sceptics made essentially these very same statements just a few months ago, they were either censored or patronisingly put down as Denialists and Flat Earthers. Still, I suggest we do not rub their faces in it (too much) and instead welcome and encourage more of this openness. Let them pretend they ‘broke’ the stories – it’s a small price to pay for the satisfaction of their change of heart.
artwest (04:32:59) :
“After watching last night’s Newsnight, I can only come to one conclusion: the BBC has become this country’s most pernicious climate-change-denying media outlet in the UK.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/03/bbc-climate-change-denier
…Don’t bother reading through that article. It’s just a nasty columnist shouting and screaming names at anyone not convinced man-made global warming is a proven scientific fact. Pathetic, really.
Jeef (00:45:45)
“Reads like all he ever looks at is RealClimate.”
It seems that ‘we’ have an advantage over the likes of G Monbiot et al in that sceptics are more open to reading the AGW alarmist articles and literature than vice versa.
I regularly visit realclimate, grist etc to see what they are saying. I even check on the egregiously daft Jo Abbess’s babblings from time to time. She refuses to read ANY sceptical offerings. (If you check her out, please don’t be tempted to leave a comment, you will spoil an almost unbroken record! Poor Jo no mates.)
I think this gives us a distinctly more wholesome and educated outlook.
And thanks for reminding me of Spiked’s article on GM – I read it some time ago, but it’s even more relevant today.
For those interested in British national news coverage of global warming, here are two items from yesterday’s TV news:
Channel 4 News
UEA email item
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1529573111
BBC Newsnight
Global warming item
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qnxhz/Newsnight_02_02_2010/
igi (01:03:23) :
Breaking! news:
Climate skeptic Ron Armstrong of Hoquiam, Washington has today learned from Penn State University that they are exempt from the Freedom Of Information Act and Pennsylvania’ s Right To Know Law
http://www.climategate.com/breaking-penn-state-says-they-are-exempt-from-freedom-of-information-act
Hillsdale College takes NO Federal money at all, student scholarships or grants, therefore they are exempt from many federal laws. However if Penn takes Federal scholarships or grants, they may have a real hard time defending the position – exempt from the Freedom Of Information Act.
I wonder if it will go all the way to the Supreme Court?
Re
artwest (04:32:59) :
In a strong field we have a leading contender for most absurd CiF post of the century:
I agree what a disgusting RANT, how can the Guardian have such a split personality?
Fraud, in its various forms, seems to have become a national disease in Great Britain. From the revelations of climategate, to “Though Monbiot needs a bit of education on who “broke” these stories. It certainly wasn’t the Guardian” , this persistent arrogance and hubris, always a defining characteristic of those from the Isles (ask any denizen of “the colonies”), has reached a level almost beyond comprehension. In so many ways, GB is a nation on the brink. With luck, Climategate might refocus the national psyche back to some semblance of rational normalcy.
Haha, didn’t the AP have 5 people thoroughly investigate the CRU e-mails only to conclude “[nothing to see here, move along]”
“Big Oil” must have bought off the Guardian 😛
Have a look at this article for the evolution of Monbiot.
It doesn’t elucidate why he goes rabid. It’s an unpleasant sight when he does.
I doubt stem cell research is the only one to suffer from bias. String theory bias in Physics appears to be another.
I think the next major scandal is the bias in research funding. NAS in particular. It’s just prime for someone to dig in and find activists controlling the funding. Would probably require someone with access to the internal workings. NASgate anyone?
For example, I read the summary on wolverines. Purely an example of well known science known better as survival of the fittest. One could probably find just as many examples of species doing better on changes in snow depth. However, would they have been funded? Very doubtful. I did note in the parts that I read that the author only referred to climate change and left out the MM part. That way the AGW supporters would automatically think this article supported there position, while it was really only discussing regional climate effects that have been occurring forever.
“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
– Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh,
patron of the World Wildlife Fund
http://www.green-agenda.com/index.html
People are human
Scientists are people
Scientists are human.
Professional organizations no longer do well, as a group, of policing their own houses. Scientists, Lawyers, Indian Chiefs, or whatever, are no different than people anywhere. Today the rule is “Let somebody else do it, I’m too busy.” While everyone else is off doing their own thing, a caretaker is appointed –excuse me, elected– to answer the phones and the mail and sweep up the Old Guildhall; oh, and put out the Grand Old Journal.
OR
They don’t even bother doing that. They decided long ago to put their submissions in a for profit, for politics, “commercial” journal like “Science” or Nature” or “Indian Chief Memos” or “Nuc Medicine International Monthly” or “How to Sue Anybody Quarterly” — and they (the “professionals”) really have no control over anything anymore.
Ha, Fred Pearce wrote this article yet for years he has been an alarmist, attacked skeptics as deniers, and his behaviour allowed this scandal to manifest because those scientists thought the media would always cover their arses.
The day when we will all receive our NEW CARBON PLASTIC credit card, or worse a brand new implanted carbon chip, is near, watch your local greenies!