Foreword – Below is a guest post (by request) from Dr. Judith Curry on the issues we deal with every day here. While I and other like minded bloggers were given the opportunity to have some early input into this, little of it was accepted. This I think puts it off to a bad start in light of the title. One of my issues was that it wasn’t necessary to use the word “deniers”, which I think removal of is central to any discourse that includes a goal of “rebuilding trust”. There’s also other more technical issues related to current investigations that are not addressed here.
I had made my concerns known to Dr. Curry before in this post: The Curry letter: a word about “deniers”… which is worth re-reading again.
To be frank, given that she’s still using the term even when pointed out, and had deferred other valid suggestions from other skeptics, I’d given serious consideration to not carrying this at all. But I had carried Dr. Curry’s original post (at my request) on 11/27/09, just seven days after the Climategate story broke here at WUWT on 11/20/09:
An open letter from Dr. Judith Curry on climate science
Since I had carried that one at my request to Dr. Curry, I decided it only fair that I’d carry this one she offered, but with the above caveat. Further, as Andrew Revkin pointed out yesterday, WUWT is now by far the most trafficked climate blog in the world. With that comes a level of responsibility to broadly report the issues. Readers should give their opinion here, pulling no punches, but with one caveat: make the discourse respectful and without labels or inflammatory comments. – Anthony
Guest post by Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology
I am trying something new, a blogospheric experiment, if you will. I have been a fairly active participant in the blogosphere since 2006, and recently posted two essays on climategate, one at climateaudit.org and the other at climateprogress.org. Both essays were subsequently picked up by other blogs, and the diversity of opinions expressed at the different blogs was quite interesting. Hence I am distributing this essay to a number of different blogs simultaneously with the hope of demonstrating the collective power of the blogosphere to generate ideas and debate them. I look forward to a stimulating discussion on this important topic.
Losing the Public’s Trust
Climategate has now become broadened in scope to extend beyond the CRU emails to include glaciergate and a host of other issues associated with the IPCC. In responding to climategate, the climate research establishment has appealed to its own authority and failed to understand that climategate is primarily a crisis of trust. Finally, we have an editorial published in Science on February 10 from Ralph Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Science, that begins to articulate the trust issue: “This view reflects the fragile nature of trust between science and society, demonstrating that the perceived misbehavior of even a few scientists can diminish the credibility of science as a whole. What needs to be done? Two aspects need urgent attention: the general practice of science and the personal behaviors of scientists.” While I applaud loudly Dr. Cicerone’s statement, I wish it had been made earlier and had not been isolated from the public by publishing the statement behind paywall at Science. Unfortunately, the void of substantive statements from our institutions has been filled in ways that have made the situation much worse.
Credibility is a combination of expertise and trust. While scientists persist in thinking that they should be trusted because of their expertise, climategate has made it clear that expertise itself is not a sufficient basis for public trust. The fallout from climategate is much broader than the allegations of misconduct by scientists at two universities. Of greatest importance is the reduced credibility of the IPCC assessment reports, which are providing the scientific basis for international policies on climate change. Recent disclosures about the IPCC have brought up a host of concerns about the IPCC that had been festering in the background: involvement of IPCC scientists in explicit climate policy advocacy; tribalism that excluded skeptics; hubris of scientists with regards to a noble (Nobel) cause; alarmism; and inadequate attention to the statistics of uncertainty and the complexity of alternative interpretations.
The scientists involved in the CRU emails and the IPCC have been defended as scientists with the best of intentions trying to do their work in a very difficult environment. They blame the alleged hacking incident on the “climate denial machine.” They are described as fighting a valiant war to keep misinformation from the public that is being pushed by skeptics with links to the oil industry. They are focused on moving the science forward, rather than the janitorial work of record keeping, data archival, etc. They have had to adopt unconventional strategies to fight off what they thought was malicious interference. They defend their science based upon their years of experience and their expertise.
Scientists are claiming that the scientific content of the IPCC reports is not compromised by climategate. The jury is still out on the specific fallout from climategate in terms of the historical and paleo temperature records. There are larger concerns (raised by glaciergate, etc.) particularly with regards to the IPCC Assessment Report on Impacts (Working Group II): has a combination of groupthink, political advocacy and a noble cause syndrome stifled scientific debate, slowed down scientific progress and corrupted the assessment process? If institutions are doing their jobs, then misconduct by a few individual scientists should be quickly identified, and the impacts of the misconduct should be confined and quickly rectified. Institutions need to look in the mirror and ask the question as to how they enabled this situation and what opportunities they missed to forestall such substantial loss of public trust in climate research and the major assessment reports.
In their misguided war against the skeptics, the CRU emails reveal that core research values became compromised. Much has been said about the role of the highly politicized environment in providing an extremely difficult environment in which to conduct science that produces a lot of stress for the scientists. There is no question that this environment is not conducive to science and scientists need more support from their institutions in dealing with it. However, there is nothing in this crazy environment that is worth sacrificing your personal or professional integrity. And when your science receives this kind of attention, it means that the science is really important to the public. Therefore scientists need to do everything possible to make sure that they effectively communicate uncertainty, risk, probability and complexity, and provide a context that includes alternative and competing scientific viewpoints. This is an important responsibility that individual scientists and particularly the institutions need to take very seriously.
Both individual scientists and the institutions need to look in the mirror and really understand how this happened. Climategate isn’t going to go away until these issues are resolved. Science is ultimately a self-correcting process, but with a major international treaty and far-reaching domestic legislation on the table, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
The Changing Nature of Skepticism about Global Warming
Over the last few months, I have been trying to understand how this insane environment for climate research developed. In my informal investigations, I have been listening to the perspectives of a broad range of people that have been labeled as “skeptics” or even “deniers”. I have come to understand that global warming skepticism is very different now than it was five years ago. Here is my take on how global warming skepticism has evolved over the past several decades.
In the 1980’s, James Hansen and Steven Schneider led the charge in informing the public of the risks of potential anthropogenic climate change. Sir John Houghton and Bert Bolin played similar roles in Europe. This charge was embraced by the environmental advocacy groups, and global warming alarmism was born. During this period I would say that many if not most researchers, including myself, were skeptical that global warming was detectable in the temperature record and that it would have dire consequences. The traditional foes of the environmental movement worked to counter the alarmism of the environmental movement, but this was mostly a war between advocacy groups and not an issue that had taken hold in the mainstream media and the public consciousness. In the first few years of the 21st century, the stakes became higher and we saw the birth of what some have called a “monolithic climate denial machine”. Skeptical research published by academics provided fodder for the think tanks and advocacy groups, which were fed by money provided by the oil industry. This was all amplified by talk radio and cable news.
In 2006 and 2007, things changed as a result of Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” plus the IPCC 4th Assessment Report, and global warming became a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut. The reason that the IPCC 4th Assessment Report was so influential is that people trusted the process the IPCC described: participation of a thousand scientists from 100 different countries, who worked for several years to produce 3000 pages with thousands of peer reviewed scientific references, with extensive peer review. Further, the process was undertaken with the participation of policy makers under the watchful eyes of advocacy groups with a broad range of conflicting interests. As a result of the IPCC influence, scientific skepticism by academic researchers became vastly diminished and it became easier to embellish the IPCC findings rather than to buck the juggernaut. Big oil funding for contrary views mostly dried up and the mainstream media supported the IPCC consensus. But there was a new movement in the blogosphere, which I refer to as the “climate auditors”, started by Steve McIntyre. The climate change establishment failed to understand this changing dynamic, and continued to blame skepticism on the denial machine funded by big oil.
Climate Auditors and the Blogosphere
Steve McIntyre started the blog climateaudit.org so that he could defend himself against claims being made at the blog realclimate.org with regards to his critique of the “hockey stick” since he was unable to post his comments there. Climateaudit has focused on auditing topics related to the paleoclimate reconstructions over the past millennia (in particular the so called “hockey stick”) and also the software being used by climate researchers to fix data problems due to poor quality surface weather stations in the historical climate data record. McIntyre’s “auditing” became very popular not only with the skeptics, but also with the progressive “open source” community, and there are now a number of such blogs. The blog with the largest public audience is wattsupwiththat.com, led by weatherman Anthony Watts, with over 2 million unique visitors each month.
So who are the climate auditors? They are technically educated people, mostly outside of academia. Several individuals have developed substantial expertise in aspects of climate science, although they mainly audit rather than produce original scientific research. They tend to be watchdogs rather than deniers; many of them classify themselves as “lukewarmers”. They are independent of oil industry influence. They have found a collective voice in the blogosphere and their posts are often picked up by the mainstream media. They are demanding greater accountability and transparency of climate research and assessment reports.
So what motivated their FOIA requests of the CRU at the University of East Anglia? Last weekend, I was part of a discussion on this issue at the Blackboard. Among the participants in this discussion was Steven Mosher, who broke the climategate story and has already written a book on it here. They are concerned about inadvertent introduction of bias into the CRU temperature data by having the same people who create the dataset use the dataset in research and in verifying climate models; this concern applies to both NASA GISS and the connection between CRU and the Hadley Centre. This concern is exacerbated by the choice of James Hansen at NASA GISS to become a policy advocate, and his forecasts of forthcoming “warmest years.” Medical research has long been concerned with the introduction of such bias, which is why they conduct double blind studies when testing the efficacy of a medical treatment. Any such bias could be checked by independent analyses of the data; however, people outside the inner circle were unable to obtain access to the information required to link the raw data to the final analyzed product. Further, creation of the surface data sets was treated like a research project, with no emphasis on data quality analysis, and there was no independent oversight. Given the importance of these data sets both to scientific research and public policy, they feel that greater public accountability is required.
So why do the mainstream climate researchers have such a problem with the climate auditors? The scientists involved in the CRU emails seem to regard Steve McIntyre as their arch-nemesis (Roger Pielke Jr’s term). Steve McIntyre’s early critiques of the hockey stick were dismissed and he was characterized as a shill for the oil industry. Academic/blogospheric guerilla warfare ensued, as the academic researchers tried to prevent access of the climate auditors to publishing in scientific journals and presenting their work at professional conferences, and tried to deny them access to published research data and computer programs. The bloggers countered with highly critical posts in the blogosphere and FOIA requests. And climategate was the result.
So how did this group of bloggers succeed in bringing the climate establishment to its knees (whether or not the climate establishment realizes yet that this has happened)? Again, trust plays a big role; it was pretty easy to follow the money trail associated with the “denial machine”. On the other hand, the climate auditors have no apparent political agenda,
are doing this work for free, and have been playing a watchdog role, which has engendered the trust of a large segment of the population.
Towards Rebuilding Trust
Rebuilding trust with the public on the subject of climate research starts with Ralph Cicerone’s statement “Two aspects need urgent attention: the general practice of science and the personal behaviors of scientists.” Much has been written about the need for greater transparency, reforms to peer review, etc. and I am hopeful that the relevant institutions will respond appropriately. Investigations of misconduct are being conducted at the University of East Anglia and at Penn State. Here I would like to bring up some broader issues that will require substantial reflection by the institutions and also by individual scientists.
Climate research and its institutions have not yet adapted to its high policy relevance. How scientists can most effectively and appropriately engage with the policy process is a topic that has not been adequately discussed (e.g. the “honest broker” challenge discussed by Roger Pielke Jr), and climate researchers are poorly informed in this regard. The result has been reflexive support for the UNFCCC policy agenda (e.g. carbon cap and trade) by many climate researchers that are involved in the public debate (particularly those involved in the IPCC), which they believe follows logically from the findings of the (allegedly policy neutral) IPCC. The often misinformed policy advocacy by this group of climate scientists has played a role in the political polarization of this issue.. The interface between science and policy is a muddy issue, but it is very important that scientists have guidance in navigating the potential pitfalls. Improving this situation could help defuse the hostile environment that scientists involved in the public debate have to deal with, and would also help restore the public trust of climate scientists.
The failure of the public and policy makers to understand the truth as presented by the IPCC is often blamed on difficulties of communicating such a complex topic to a relatively uneducated public that is referred to as “unscientific America” by Chris Mooney. Efforts are made to “dumb down” the message and to frame the message to respond to issues that are salient to the audience. People have heard the alarm, but they remain unconvinced because of a perceived political agenda and lack of trust of the message and the messengers. At the same time, there is a large group of educated and evidence driven people (e.g. the libertarians, people that read the technical skeptic blogs, not to mention policy makers) who want to understand the risk and uncertainties associated with climate change, without being told what kinds of policies they should be supporting. More effective communication strategies can be devised by recognizing that there are two groups with different levels of base knowledge about the topic. But building trust through public communication on this topic requires that uncertainty be acknowledged. My own experience in making public presentations about climate change has found that discussing the uncertainties increases the public trust in what scientists are trying to convey and doesn’t detract from the receptivity to understanding climate change risks (they distrust alarmism). Trust can also be rebuilt by discussing broad choices rather than focusing on specific policies.
And finally, the blogosphere can be a very powerful tool for increasing the credibility of climate research. “Dueling blogs” (e.g. climateprogress.org versus wattsupwiththat.com and realclimate.org versus climateaudit.org) can actually enhance public trust in the science as they see both sides of the arguments being discussed. Debating science with skeptics should be the spice of academic life, but many climate researchers lost this somehow by mistakenly thinking that skeptical arguments would diminish the public trust in the message coming from the climate research establishment. Such debate is alive and well in the blogosphere, but few mainstream climate researchers participate in the blogospheric debate. The climate researchers at realclimate.org were the pioneers in this, and other academic climate researchers hosting blogs include Roy Spencer, Roger Pielke Sr and Jr, Richard Rood, and Andrew Dessler. The blogs that are most effective are those that allow comments from both sides of the debate (many blogs are heavily moderated). While the blogosphere has a “wild west” aspect to it, I have certainly learned a lot by participating in the blogospheric debate including how to sharpen my thinking and improve the rhetoric of my arguments. Additional scientific voices entering the public debate particularly in the blogosphere would help in the broader communication efforts and in rebuilding trust. And we need to acknowledge the emerging auditing and open source movements in the in the internet-enabled world, and put them to productive use. The openness and democratization of knowledge enabled by the internet can be a tremendous tool for building public understanding of climate science and also trust in climate research.
No one really believes that the “science is settled” or that “the debate is over.” Scientists and others that say this seem to want to advance a particular agenda. There is nothing more detrimental to public trust than such statements.
And finally, I hope that this blogospheric experiment will demonstrate how the diversity of the different blogs can be used collectively to generate ideas and debate them, towards bringing some sanity to this whole situation surrounding the politicization of climate science and rebuilding trust with the public.
The failure of the public and policy makers to understand the truth as presented by the IPCC
TRUTH?!? I can think of several more appropriate words: story, case, hypothesis, theory.
Reading the comments here I think people are missing the fact the Dr. Curry is trying to play a bridging/mitigating role. She cannot be too hard on either side or it will just be more business as usual us vs them-ism.
I see this entry from Dr. Curry and Revkin’s most recent efforts at Dot Earth to find common ground as very positive steps toward more productive future debate.
Everyone knows that sociopaths exist and that they sometimes rise to the top. The folks that caused this scandal appear to act like sociopaths (i.e. they have no concern for others, outcomes, or the truth) as well as their weak-minded dupes. There’s no trusting these people. Rebuilding trust among the sheep and the wolves is a bad idea. I’m not normally one for ad hominem attacks, but, sometimes they are necessary.
“This isn’t “deniers” vs. “warmers,” this is about destroying our planet (if AGW is correct,) or destroying our civilization’s economy unnecessarily (if AGW isn’t correct.)”
And it’s not even about that. Or, at least, it’s not a binary situation. I laughed yesterday when I read someone saying that the split regarding AGW among scientists was 90%/10%. In other words, 90% of scientists were full-on AGW believers and 10% were full-on AGW deniers. In the commenter’s mind, that proved there was a consensus and proved AGW was true.
First, I have no idea where he got the 90% number. I think AGW proponents want it to be true and throw that number around like it is true. But more importantly, this radical division into two diametrically opposed camps is meaningless and counterproductive. I’ve read enough comments from enough scientists to know that there is a whole range of opinion out there on this topic, as is to be expected on something so complex and ephemeral. Some are less convinced of one aspect or another than they are of others, while, even if two scientists agree on one aspect, they might differ as to the explanation of its cause. So there are probably as many opinions about this as there are scientists. Even within the CRU emailer group, there were differences of opinion and ranges of extremism.
So, in regards to public trust, Judith Curry is right. Trying to shove everyone into one of two groups is ridiculous and engenders distrust. I know it causes distrust in me when I hear Al Gore trying to shut down debate by doing that. If the people pushing the idea that AGW is a serious issue don’t acknowledge the wide range of legitimately held opinions out there about the meaning of all this, then they have only themselves to blame when millions of people don’t take them seriously.
Dr. Curry repeatedly refers to the part that big oil has played, but never once mentions the role that big government has played. Big government has funded the pro-AGW camp far more than big oil has ever funded the skeptics, probably to the tune of a thousand times more. Enough money has been spent in the name of saving the planet from AGW that we could have fed the entire world for generations.
Scientists should never enter into politics due to the inherent conflict of interest associated with government funding of research. Additionally, there is a misrepresentation by the press and supporters of the IPCC concerning the number of educated people who while actually believe in recent global warming don’t necessarily believe in a mostly human cause (e.g. they question correlation vs. causality). The bottom line is simply that climate change is being used as the poster child for changing the world’s attitude towards the consumption of fossil fuel in an every increasing population. It is easier for governments to invoke changes in behavior for materialism than sexual reproduction.
Andrew,
I would not go on too much about the “Denier” badge – just wear it with pride!
She seems to want to bring people like you in from the cold (so to speak!) and I think any attempt to engage ‘deniers’ in debate will create further doubts in the believers. Some of those guys have been steeped in one way of thinking for so many years, it may take time for them to come around.
Judith — A great essay over all. A couple of points:
I am less concerned with the continued use of the term “deniers” than I am with the failure to acknowledge the huge disparity of funding between “alarmists” and “denialists”, with “big government” funding the “alarmists” at a level several orders of magnitude greater than “oil industry” has provided for the “denialists”. (http://www.transworldnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?id=104031&cat=12) It is most naive to believe that 79 billion in US government funding since 1989 has not produced at least some confirmation bias in studies funded to examine the problem of global warming. No problem? No funding!
The statement “They have had to adopt unconventional strategies to fight off what they thought was malicious interference.” would seem defend the bunker mentality revealed in the climategate emails. No “had to” about it. A neutral, objective statement would be that “They adopted unconventional strategies…”
Your essay forthrightly acknowledges a number of problems that the community of climate scientists needs to work on, and I really appreciate the effort to initiate open dialogue.
John B.
May our “crowd” be called “Climate Realists”. We’re not “deniers” since the opposition have surreptitiously taken the mantra “Climate Change” and everybody knows that’s what has happened/is happening/will happen, so they’re hijacked the status quo to their own benefit. And everybody that ever though of calling themselves a scientist or even just a thinking man/woman should be “skeptical”, so that term is simply redundant.
Climate Realists demand the real (raw) data; climate realists demand to see what fudges… er…. adjustments are made to this data. Climate realists demand to have an accounting, both legal and scientific, on the $65 billion that’s been spent so far. And climate realists demand to have sober, logical, honest, open, and non-political scientists investigating the climate and weather.
(This climate realist personally believes the coming Ice Age is a much bigger threat than anything their “global warming” hysteria predicts.)
I submit it is the majority of the citizenry of the UK, Europe, Canada, the US, and other interested and industrialized nations that would consider themselves “Climate Realists”. AGWers and their ilk are now in the minority and shrinking fast.
It is the taxpayer’s money that’s being spent; it is their money that’s projected to pay for whatever policies are put in place, and it is their money that will be missing if this current chicanery continues. Payment connotes ownership. (Got that?)
We’re not mere spectators; we’re concerned citizens that have witnessed a science wreck. So please, by all means drop the “denier” and call us “realists”.
This really isn’t all that complicated.
If you’re going to “make science” and zealously push policy positions based on that science (which strikes me as something scientists shouldn’t be doing, but maybe I’m naive), you need to make all of your evidence available to anybody who wants it. The raw data; not the “tricked-out” data run through your mystery rubrics.
Going back to my naivete, I thought scientists were simply supposed to follow the science wherever it led, and not work to suppress anything that doesn’t jibe with a desired conclusion. Why do you have “desired conclusions” in the first place?
When we see the amount of money that could change hands over these issues, the way the policies could transform society, and then the scandals of Climategate and in the IPCC AR4, our B.S. detectors go off.
Bottom line: It’s all hot air from “the other side” until I see them cooperating with the likes of McIntyre, sharing data and methods and HOPING he can pick their work apart.
MattN (07:24:57) :
‘No one really believes that the “science is settled” or that “the debate is over.” ‘
Then you need to make a call to Al Gore, please, and tell him to shut the hell up…
Our naive, inexperienced and credulous president believes this fairy tale, as do all of his ridiculous czars and most of congress. Not to mention all of the 20-something Starbucks crowd fresh from liberal academia.
Do something about that, Ms. Curry, before pontificating any further.
‘No one really believes that the “science is settled” or that “the debate is over.” ‘
That is a flat out LIE!
Judith, you need to have this discussion with the President, his advisers and the EPA. Until that time you won’t get much support from skeptics. While I agree with much of your analysis, the next step is all that counts.
In addition, I’ll be looking for many peer reviewed papers to be pulled because they do NOT:
… do everything possible to make sure that they effectively communicate uncertainty, risk, probability and complexity, and provide a context that includes alternative and competing scientific viewpoints. This is an important responsibility that individual scientists and particularly the institutions need to take very seriously.
This will be a basic requirement if you want to regain trust.
Good luck in your efforts because I’d really, really like to see this happen.
Something very basic: If Co2 caused global warming life on earth would have disappeared a long long time ago
“They are focused on moving the science forward, rather than the janitorial work of record keeping, data archival, etc.”
I work in Big Pharma…..If we want our products approved for the market we have to follow strict GMP rules: we have to pay very close attention to the “janitorial work” as described above, to the satisfaction of any auditor or agency that wants to look at ANYTHING. They can ask to see specific notebook pages, and those pages better have all the proper entries and signatures, and proper protocols are followed or there can be big trouble. And this is a good thing and is designed to protect the patients. We don’t see it as a problem…it’s an important part of our job that helps ensure quality and safety for patients.
But lets get real for a second: the IPCC is trying to change the world’s economy in a major way by reducing CO2….why should they be forced to do “janitorial work” when there’s so much frontier science that needs to be done?????? Give me a break. The more I read from the AGW lunatics the less credibility they have in my eyes. Actually, they have zero credibility now. I’m curious to see if it’s possible to have negative credibility.
This article tried to walk a tightrope of observation, fairly neutral in perspective. But stating that the issue is a matter of trust belies the notion that this pseudoscience is factually accurate and scientists merely need to restore that trust. The article states:
“Debating science with skeptics should be the spice of academic life, but many climate researchers lost this somehow by mistakenly thinking that skeptical arguments would diminish the public trust in the message coming from the climate research establishment.”
A more frank observation of the above would be that warming scientists lost sight of science itself. On the forefront of discovery, there is no road map to keep anyone on track. If a scientist loses impartiality, that which appears to be mere adjustments or “corrections” of theory may in fact be the delusions of self projection.
AGW theory went off the rails long ago, near the time of its inception. As scientific observation failed to confirm it, AGW marched on, sinking from speculation into fantasy, and then deception to cover its failings. There is little truth in which to restore trust.
A few folks mentioned Michael Chrichton. I read this recently regarding him and a speech in 2003:
“Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. En-vironmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a re-ligion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a re-sult of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment.”
AGW theory has become part and parcel of this growing Pantheist ideology.
Dear Dr Curry,
I am afraid I disagree with most of the key conclusions and recommendations of your text.
Trust is not something that can be repainted, damaged or cleaned, whenever necessary. For rational people, their trust in others is a result of the evaluation of their experience with these others – with their honesty, passion for the truth, ability to resist corruption, will to sacrifice themselves for others, and so on.
The ClimateGate material contains objective information showing that it is unreasonable if not foolish to trust the people from the CRU and several other institutions. Because of pre-existing similarities between the CRU folks and other groups pushing the climate panic, including GISS, Met Office, Hadley etc., it is also reasonable to make a preliminary guess that the key people in most or all these institutions and others lack the scientific integrity – and sometimes basic human decency, too.
You may claim that it hasn’t been proven that other climate scientists have done similar things. And I would agree. In fact, it is likely that many of them have not. But it is pretty unlikely that it is just CRU that is a bad exception. The dishonest behavior is clearly a part of the system. It would be completely foolish to deny the evidence for this proposition that the “Gates” have given us. So as long as people – including yourself – are forming their expectations rationally, they should conclude that it is likely that this kind of behavior has been universal in the field of “climate change”.
I am totally puzzled by your assertions about a “monolithic climate denial machine”. Clearly, this term is meant to invoke negative emotions by 3/4 of its words (monolithic, denial, machine), and the remaining 1/4 (climate) arguably brings negative emotions, too. 😉 However, if you try to think what this term actually means, it means the same thing that there is a pretty much “consensus” among the sane people – I mean climate skeptics – about most of the key questions. It’s not perfect, but it’s analogous to the consensus among the “panic oriented” climate scientists.
If your alarmed colleagues were talking about the alarmists themselves, they would surely talk about the “consensus”. When they talk about the same characteristic of the skeptics, they talk about the “monoliths” and “machines”. This is clearly an irrational propaganda meant to distort the opinions of listeners who are not able or willing to think about these things independently and neutrally. It has worked for years. But don’t expect it will work too well after November 2009.
I find your statement that the people “trusted the 4th IPCC report” very bizarre, too. I have never trusted it and 99% of the people whose methods and knowledge about the topic I respect didn’t trust the IPCC process, either. The IPCC process has always been corrupt, unscientific, ideological, and most of us on WUWT – or at least those who have studied it for many years – have known it for years if not decades. The ClimateGate and other revelations just confirmed what was generally known to everyone who was not hiding his or her head in the sand. It’s great that many other people realized this fact, too. But they surely didn’t discover something that was completely new to everyone.
You overestimate the role of someone’s being unpaid or outside of the Academia etc. It really doesn’t matter. These are technical details. What matters is the method, scientific ethics, and the agreement of the statements with the empirical data. Ross McKitrick is arguably a part of the Academia, after all. And so are many others. And there are a few others who are doing a similar work and who are being paid by various pro-market organizations. They are often not as skillful as the “spontaneously” chosen auditors that do the technical (e.g. statistical) work, but they usually have compatible opinions about the broader picture, and their work is being followed by many people.
If you think that e.g. Marc Morano is still generally dismissed as an oil puppet or whatever by nearly everyone, you’re completely wrong. He actually has lots of visitors – ClimateDepot is a kind of DrudgeReport of the climate. The climate alarm industry has become a big animal and it does require a lot of work – and even some funding – to peacefully liberate the world from this monster. So far, this funding is an extremely good investment. Marc Morano does much more work in making the people aware about the climate issues than hundreds of people paid on the side of the “alarm”, so he surely deserves some salary.
You wrote: “The failure of the public and policy makers to understand the truth as presented by the IPCC is often blamed on…”
Well, there is a simple fact that can be blamed for the “failure of public (and less so, policy makers – they usually jumped on the bandwagon) to understand the truth as presented by the IPCC”. Who should be blamed for the failure? Simply the fact that the IPCC reports are not the truth. More precisely, there are lots of “small truths” and “approximate truths” that no one would care about and that wouldn’t make the climate science relevant for the policymaking (and most people didn’t bother to read them because they don’t matter). And then there are the “big and catchy” statements that bring all the funding to the IPCC and climate science.
But these big ones are not the truth. It’s that simple. Whatever example you choose, you will see that I am right. Melting glaciers for India China, sinking Netherlands, dying African agriculture, rainforests destroyed by the warmth, and so on, and so on – the regions mentioned in these scandals cover the whole world. Virtually all of the IPCC “big statements” are actually lies, and I am almost convinced that you must know that.
You may put a more human face, such as yours, instead of Michael Mann’s unhuman face as the face of the climate science. But you won’t rebuild the trust in the IPCC if your predetermined plan is to keep all these lies as parts of the IPCC conclusions. One simply can’t trust in the people who end up with conclusions such as “Himalayan glaciers are going to melt soon” because these things are not true. Whoever has followed these “Gates” more properly has not only learned that big mistakes (and misinformation) have been done, but he also learned the right answers which can be obtained from the accessible evidence and that are vastly different than the IPCC report says. Many people have been fooled by this organized misinformation process but I don’t think that there will be too many people who will be fooled twice.
Your plans for “dueling blogs” and “restoration of the trust” are apparently designed to keep the climate science important, and so on. But in that you case, you want to mask the main lesson of all these “Gates”, and the lesson is that if the data are evaluated and communicated honestly, it turns out that there is nothing too interesting happening about the climate, and the science is simply not that interesting. It is one of hundreds of scientific disciplines that are only important to an isolated ring of specialists. It should peacefully scale back from those $2 billion a year to those $200 million a year (in the U.S., to pick a major example) that we knew a decade ago. Anything else is just wrong – or unethical.
In some sense, I find your attitude similar to the 1989 fall-of-communism opinions of the Czechoslovak reformed communists from 1968. Your proposals really don’t solve the “essence” of the problems with the IPCC and the dominant form of the climate science as we’ve known it in the most recent decade. The lack of integrity and the things that destroyed the trust after November 2009 are the same thing that you want people to trust again. It simply can’t work. Climate science has to return where it belongs, among legitimate scientific disciplines without distortions and irrational hype, and when it does so, it will inevitably look similar to what it used to be 20 or more years ago. It will be much more modest, too. It *is* modest and all the propositions that the climate science is more than modest were based on fraud and its political motivation. You can’t preserve these things while solving the “confidence crisis”.
Best wishes
Lubos
I feel bad that I have become quite polarized as well. Whenever someone is whole-heartedly sold on AGW and the like, I automatically assume that they have not looked at the data, are emotional, or part of the neo-religious I-want-to-save-the-world movement. I am a scientist and understand most of the points, but I am no longer as open as I used to be (I used to be a believer 2 decades ago when the movement started). Now, after decades of analysis and introspection and general BS detecting, etc., I, now, automatically think “what is wrong with them?” when someone is a believer.
I’m not dumb, I’m not extremely conservative, I have no money to make off of the situation. I’m just saying, both sides getting more polarized takes us know where.
John wrote: one must discuss the money from government to fund AGW research.,/em>
The root of the problem. It seems that governments are all trying to prove what will allow them to tax, and give their support to those that provide the best path to levying more taxes.
Agenda research — Naked bias … hypothesis is not truth, it’s only conjecture.
I can’t think of a more disgusting way to make me turn away than to call me a denier. Not only does it offend in its origins but it also offends in its inference that a scientist would deny anything. That is to say that as a scientist I am a total failure. THAT DISGUSTS ME.
All we need now is Gavin Schmidt making a YouTube video crying, admitting that he’s a fraud too.
It’s even easier to follow the big money trail to climate “believers” and also to the very top of the IPCC.
“Big Oil Funding” ??????
Its been shown that funding for the pro-AGW research is several orders of magnitude larger than that of all other funding sources worldwide for skeptical research. I suspect it was also true 5 years ago also. As Mosher said in the CRUTape Letters (I am paraphrasing here…btw) Big Oil can change course and follow the lead horse no matter what that horse represents. So throwing around “Big Oil” as some sort of boogie man to justify pro-AGW misdeeds is misleading imo. Especially, when one accounts for the ultimate funding source behind RC.
This is a typical Curry “overture” with an embedded red herring…just another TITPB, imo. Maybe she thinks she is being objective.
I’m at work so I merely skimmed through it during some downtime, but I’m amazed; what I see is a calm, rational argument, made by someone who knows a lot more on the subject than I do, that echoes my own (admittedly uneducated) skepticism.
I think she should be praised for this. It is a good start. Not perfect – the analysis of the situation prior to 2005 is, I think, incorrect, and the AGW crew (or CRU) are hardly as innocent and well-intentioned as suggested. But it is a good start.
Of course, her article and stance could be a judo move. Praise but verify.
I find this post disturbing, for reasons exemplefied by the following statementss:
“Credibility is a combination of expertise and trust.”
“Therefore scientists need to do everything possible to make sure that they effectively communicate uncertainty, risk, probability and complexity, and provide a context that includes alternative and competing scientific viewpoints.”
“On the other hand, the climate auditors have no apparent political agenda,
are doing this work for free, and have been playing a watchdog role, which has engendered the trust of a large segment of the population.”
” Such debate is alive and well in the blogosphere, but few mainstream climate researchers participate in the blogospheric debate. The climate researchers at realclimate.org were the pioneers in this, …”
“And we need to acknowledge the emerging auditing and open source movements in the in the internet-enabled world, and put them to productive use. The openness and democratization of knowledge enabled by the internet can be a tremendous tool for building public understanding of climate science and also trust in climate research.”
“No one really believes that the “science is settled” or that “the debate is over.” Scientists and others that say this seem to want to advance a particular agenda. There is nothing more detrimental to public trust than such statements.”
They serve to frame the problem as being one of presentation, not substance. Of faulty communication, not faulty science. It reads more like a primer on getting your way, rather than on evaluating the correctness of that way.
Credibility is not merely a matter of expertise and trust. It is a matter of having demonstrated that your assertions are well supported and reliable in both their retrospective analysis and their predictions.
Scientists cannot effectively communicate uncertainty, risk, probability and complexity until they have addressed, quantified, and incorporated same in their work – by some method far more rigorous than the IPCC’s completely subjective five step “we’re pretty sure” to “we’re completely sure” drill.
Noting that ‘climate auditors have no apparent political agenda’ and thus engender trust is true enough as a statement of ‘what is’, but becomes an exercise in cynicism when coupled with statements like ‘no one believes the science is settled’ and ‘for gods sake dont say that or the public wont believe you.’
Some scientists do believe the science is settled and that the debate is over. The problem is not that they say that, but that they believe it without adequate substantiation, and that they act on that belief in ways that corrupt the process to hide that lack of substantiation from themselves and others. Treating this as a commincation problem is suborning propaganda, not improving science.
Finally, ‘putting the open source audit movement to productive use’ is again defined strictly in terms of ‘improving communication and trust’. Missing is the fundamental productive use of any auditing movement – as an audit. Not as another media outlet for your predetermined message, but as an independant check of the truth content of that message. What is described is not the usefulness of a ‘Climate Audit’ for finding error and exposing bias, but rather a ‘RealClimate’ for communicating the ‘propriety’ of hiding the decline.
The fundamental issue here is not that certain scientists dont have the public’s trust, it is that they do not deserve it. And though they might regain that trust through improved ‘communication’, it should be acknowledged that using communication to achieve undeserved trust is illegitimate …
JJ