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.
Dr Curry,
You write that Climate Science is not settled. I couldn’t agree more.
Could you please tell us what you think is settled and NOT settled in Climate Science ?
And would you call the MSM and let them know ?
Thank you Dr. Curry for your essay. It is illuminating.
“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.”
“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.”
Those two small paragraphs say a lot. I’m not sure I can articulate it better than what’s already here, but ….. The first paragraph I’ve referenced assumes the scientists(climatologists) have developed an expertise. I disagree. For years they’ve attempted to draw a linear relationship with heat and CO2 when one obviously doesn’t exist. And speaking of heat, the temp stations that are mysteriously disappearing from the data set seems to infer that we are declaring temps in an area because of the proximity to another temp recording station irrespective of elevation Well, at least they’ve conquered the 2 dimensional aspect. So, if we are to believe these are well intentioned scientists, then one has to conclude multi-dimensional relationships are beyond them. The “relatively uneducated public” would expect more from an expert that states with “95% confidence…..” There is many more examples of the lack of ability to apply complex thoughts to their area of science. They own some form of expertise other than how to dodge FOI requests? That’s news to me.
The second paragraph “No one really believes…..” Then why, pray tell, the absolute silence when a colleague(Gavin), psuedo-scientist(Bill Nye), or a politician(take your pick), assert that it is settled either explicitly or through inference? I don’t recall any press releases from any science organization correcting the assertions stated.
Our friends at the IPCC apparently think they need to asses the manner in which they conduct business also.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/24/exclusive-climate-panel-announce-significant-changes/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%253A+foxnews%252Fscitech+%2528Text+-+SciTech%2529
Dr Curry,
This from the current post on RC:
Over the last few weeks or so the UK Guardian (who occasionally reprint our posts) has published a 12-part series about the stolen CRU emails by Fred Pearce that are well below the normal Guardian standards of reporting. We delineate some of the errors and misrepresentations below. While this has to be seen on a backdrop of an almost complete collapse in reporting standards across the UK media on the issue of climate change, it can’t be excused on the basis that the Mail or the Times is just as bad. As a long-time Guardian reader and avid Guardian crossword puzzle solver, I’m extremely unhappy writing this post, but the pathologies of media reporting on this issue have become too big to ignore.
We highlight issues with three of the articles below, which revisit a number of zombie arguments that have been doing the rounds of the sceptic blogs for years
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So you want sceptics and warmists to negotiate and understand? We should “negotiate” to “restore trust” with someone who calls negative press “a complete collapse in reporting standards”, calls it a “pathology” and refers to sceptics legitimate concerns as “zombie arguments”. This is someone who was just well intentioned but misunderstood?
Sorry, but I see nothing there to restore trust with and I would be a fool if I did.
One of the most brutally honest Progressive Democrats, Dennis Kucinich, has publicly come forward to publicly admit that Cap and Trade was written by the Coal and Oil industries.
Kucinich: “There’s nothing liberal about letting coal and oil write climate change legislation,” he added. “Are you kidding me?”
http://rawstory.com/2010/01/exclusive-kucinich-shreds-democrats/
Overall, a thoughtful view from a climate research insider. Here is one of the important nuggets of the essay:
“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.”
It is my belief that the BIGGEST mistake the climate science community has made with regard to gaining public trust is their FAILURE to denounce crass political statements made by their “leaders”. For example:
“James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.”
Where WAS the climate science community when this kind of insane rhetoric was being delivered by one their leading lights? The same goes for Al Gore and “An Inconvenient Truth”. I do note that Dr. Curry did speak out…against Bjorn Lomborg.
And as for Al Gore…
“You cannot blame any single storm or even a single season on global warming. … Gore’s statement in the movie is that we can expect more storms like Katrina in a greenhouse-warmed world. I would agree with this,” said Judith Curry. She is chairwoman of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and is co-author, with Mr. Webster, Mr. Holland and H.R. Chang, of a paper titled “Changes in Tropical Cyclones,” in the Sept. 16 issue of Science, a weekly publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dr. Curry,
Please don’t take this criticism personally, but your timing is absolutely horrible. The fact that the radical and wholly unfounded claims of a twenty foot rise in seas, killer hurricanes, devastating droughts, catastrophic floods, imminent death, etc.. would eventually be found false and destroy the credibility of scientists was entirely predictable. Surely you saw it coming. How could you not?
The time to worry about the toothpaste is before it is out of the tube. It is too late to worry about it after it is all over the bottom of the bathroom sink.
A small group (20-30?) of scientists and a few politicians successfully hijacked climate science. They shouted down dissent. They intimidated their fellow scientists into silence. And you and thousands of other scientists allowed them to do it.
And noooooooooooooooow you worry about how to rebuild the reputation of science/scientists and once again gain the trust of the public???? The time to have worried about the obvious outcome of this fraud has passed. You and your fellow scientists should not have allowed yourselves to be intimidated into silence. You should have spoken up loud and often starting back in the early 1990’s.
Your best chance at limiting the damage (I say limiting because I seriously doubt it can be repaired in my lifetime) is to demand a full accounting of all the inaccuracies. Demand a full and open audit of ALL of the science. Demand that ALL scientific papers used in climate change make their raw data and source code freely available on public servers. Demand that any paper which fails to meet that standard is discarded and not permitted to be used/referenced in any form for the science of climate change. Demand that teachers immediately stop brainwashing/scaring children with tales of imminent doom.
I hope you can convince your colleagues to adopt those measures and I sincerely wish you the best of luck in limiting the damage done to the good name and reputation of science.
Sincerely,
C. Quesenberry
I am glad you decided to post this open letter, its a step in the right direction.
I believe Dr Curry may have taken note of your concern regarding the use of the word ‘Deniers’.
My reading of her use of the term, in this letter, is one of disapproval.
More like this, please.
@ur momisugly Eric (07:58:52):
“Reading the comments here I think people are missing the fact the Dr. Curry is trying to play a bridging/mitigating role…”
Eric, I agree the bridging role is important, but, Dr. Curry is then beginning in the middle. In order to properly bridge, the terms of the debate must be agreed upon; terms like credibility, science, alarmist, denier, skeptic, policy, expertise, etc. Dr. Curry states that “scientists persist in thinking that they should be trusted because of their expertise.” I would argue, that based on my understanding of science, trust should never even enter the equation. If a scientist truly believed it did, is that person really a scientist? Perhaps we can trust results, but not some vague posturing of “expertise.” In fact, the whole point of science is to NOT trust someone else’s results, but to see if those results can be repeated. Dr. Curry needs to start by defining the terms of the debate especially since she believes it’s not settled. What is science? What is a scientist?
“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.”
Sorry, but the scientists should BE the skeptics, first and last.
Leave the messages to “the public” from the “climate research establishment” out. The researchers “lost this” not “somehow” but by massive political TAXPAYER funding. That data, these “facts” belong to US!
B.S. alarm wailing: Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus
“HotRod (07:20:13) :
“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.”
That’s pretty unequivocal. I was talking yesterday to an old friend, Conservative MP and Chair of the cross-party environment group in the UK Houses of Parliament. He said The Science is IN.”
If that was Tim Yeo, then I’m sorry he is an old friend of yours! This is the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee which has recently reported on the EUs emissions trading scheme. The committee reckon that the trading scheme isn’t working because emissions allowances are too cheap (but surely that is bacause of the recession which has caused a down-turn in emissions (along with everything else) produced and therefore a downturn in demand in trading. This numpty then wants to see the price of emissions pushed up from 15Euros/tonne to 100 or even 200Euros/tonne to make people/businesses/public bodies work more effectively in reducing emissions.
I am a local councillor. According to our officers our council will have to fork out £600,000 for the 50,000 tonnes of CO2 produced. If the price is increased that would be about £4m per annum. Granted that councils receive most of that back if they are good boys and take steps to reduce their carbon footprint but it is going to cost us £400k to set up a team of officers to do this. But the penalties get bigger and bigger each sucessive year if the tonnes of CO2 aren’t reduced.
This is one council. Multiply that by however many councils there are..
And Tim Yeo is also Chairman of AFC Energy, receiving £45,000 for the privilege and a director of Waste”Tricity and ITI Energy. He was advocating in his parliamentary capacity that the price of emissions should go up to encourage polluters to earn offset allowances by investing in clean technology – clean technology such as the alkaline fuel cells for use in clean energy production and as produced by AFC Energy. So, no conflict of interest there, then.
So, to revert back to the matter in hand, I appreciate Judith Curry’s concern that the trust in scientists must be restored and that this must be dealt with by allowing all scientific reports to be properly reviewed by anyone who wants to, sceptics included, the data and methodology must be freely available. But how are the far-reaching effects of the past attempts to block that free discussion to be resolved especially now that the knock-on effects have assumed a runaway motion of their own? How are the brakes to be applied to the silliness of our politicians and every opportunist free-marketeer who has jumped on the bandwagon, or in the case of Mr Yeo who straddles both camps (as does Mr Gore).
I am not sure the science can be rectified as easily as I first thought reading the article as most of the research monies come from governments and the EU (see EUReferendum for the sort of funding which would make your hair curl) and they are driving the AGW agenda now. It has been said many times before that unless you come up with the “right” answers to the questions asked by those that are funding the research, then you don’t get the funding. So, a massive shake up of the way research is funded is also required but how that is done I do not know. It is no longer independent nor are funds granted to test that research. And how will those pro-AGW scientists, who for a very long time have taken the moral high ground, going to react to having to share their research with potential denigrators of that research?
I could go on, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder how on earth things can change and the more depressed I get about it. As it’s 5.30pm in the UK I think I shall hit the gin bottle early, i.e. now!
PJB (08:40:19)
Coming from another professional chemist, this NAILS the situation on the head. And, I don’t think it can every be tested to 90% confidence limits, so AGW will always remain a faith.
The concept of having to “dumb down” the math for policy makers is wrong. Politicians have an absolutely feral sense of statistics. It is their livelyhood.
You may need to strip out the jargon and obscure academic references, but they will grasp it quickly.
“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.”
So despite all the weasel words which surround it, that is the problem as she sees it. Not ‘what are the facts?’ but ‘we haven’t got *our* beliefs across yet’
Well Judith as our greatly beloved Michael Mann said to Steve McIntyre just before he stomped out of the room, “I hardly know where to begin”.
Neverthless, thank you for the outreach and the somewhat revisionist history of climate science in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
I paid little attention to climatologist’s (does anyone call themselves that anymore?) claims of AGW, simply assuming that it was true, until about 1995. I was satisfied with this prospect since, after all, I’m from Manitoba where any moderation of the continental air mass in late January is always welcome. Then in a hotel room in New Jersey of all places I had an epiphany.
I flipped to Public Television on a day that ended earlier than usual and there was someone from the Natural Resources Defense Fund screaming insults at Eric Lindzen, saying that he didn’t know what he was talking about and that the NRDF ran cutting edge models and Lindzen didn’t. Lindzen calmly replied that he didn’t run models at all. He was just stating what the temperature data was saying. The NRDF guy wouldn’t address the data. It was all yelling and name calling. I was stunned. How could anyone argue that the models trumped the data?
I wasn’t aware of who Lindzen was at the time, but it was pretty clear to me he was a talented MIT scientist. It didn’t take long for me to hear the smear and inuendo though, about “shill for big oil” and the namecalling that is the narcotic of choice for intervenor groups like NRDF who gain power and advocacy by shouting down and bullying. I knew right there and then that the science wasn’t settled. I knew from my experience with intervenors in the nuclear industry that if there’s namecalling going on there is something to hide, and that they are making things up.
So I ask you Judith, if it was so obvious to me then that advocacy was biasing the science, why wasn’t it obvious to you?
Surely it would have been obvious once carbon trading was proposed that there was a conflict of interest between the advancement of the science and the advocacy groups that could only bend the science in a damaging way. Look at the list of donors to advocacy groups like the WWF, the NWF, Greenpeace etc. Big bank charitable trust funds, clean energy companies, yes even “big oil”. I don’t think the latter is such a recent addition to the donor list either. Even Enron, who traded mainly in fossil fuels was eager to participate. Banks and securities companies, deperate to trade in carbon are the biggest cheerleaders and supporters of the so-called green charites who are equally desperate for political power.
So now I ask you Judith, If it was so easy for you to “follow the money” for sceptics back then, why was it so hard to follow the money for the supporters of AGW?
As for the pubic policy debate, everyone in the scientific climate community should have realized that peer review wouldn’t cut it once it was clear that radical economic and societal change cards were on the table. It isn’t enough for the FDA, it isn’t enough for the FAA or Health Canada or Transport Canada or the EU or any other jurisdiction tasked with protecting the public good. So now we have a spectacle of Phil Jones admitting that one of the reasons he didn’t want to give up his data was because it wasn’t very well organized. The documentation wasn’t good. In fact, it’s pretty clear it is a mess.
Unfortunately it appears like it’s going to be good enough for Lisa Jackson and the EPA.
Why weren’t you pulling out your ISO standards and certifying your labs when it became obvious that the science would be so important to public poilicy decisions and every piece of data would be seriously scrutinized? With all those millions in climate science funding was it just cheaper and easier to let McIntyre do it?
If I’m seeming harsh here Judith, I’m sorry, but I’m not quite ready to let it go.
Snip me if you must Anthony but keep up the good work.
Regards
John
1DandyTroll (07:52:38) : “However, the one sided stance on the big-oil conspiracy is disheartening.”
Of course it is. This is the lie used by “greenspin” to discredit proper scientific scepticism by trying to attribute it to paid lobbying. In my experience on both sides of the fence, there was far far more money available from the oil lobby to “greenspin” than there is this side of the fence.
Come on, I’ve often thought of doing this for a profession, but where’s the money? Even if I could stomach their politics the Heartland institute can’t dole out money to every would-be sceptic. Trump is another potential source – but that is really scraping the barrell.
Compare that to the hugely well financed renewable lobby in the UK. The BWEA are rolling in money from oil companies trying to look green – sorry, that’s wrong, the oil companies who have seen the billions of pounds available from renewables: a highly lucrative income stream.
As for higher taxation of fossil fuels – it just shows the lack of any economic nouse by those who suggest it. The oil companies LOVE higher taxation, because it allows them to substantially raise prices, and so long as they all get taxed the same, there is no competitive advantage, and there is a huge benefit as prices are raised allowing greater profits per unit sold.
So, basically, the oil companies just fein their opposition to this global warming hysteria, because at the end of the day it just lines their pockets!
That may be slightly at odds with my comments above regarding the global warming message: “there’s so much oil and gas that having too much is a problem … we can keep consuming till it runs dry and it can’t be a problem” – that I see as a way to ensure there isn’t a move to legislative action to control the oil market as a limited reserve.
But all in all, I’ve seen orders of magnitude more people making money from oil who are on the global warming bandwagon than I know people making money from oil who are sceptics.
[snip OTT]
Dr. Curry has taken the role of mediator with carefully crafted, diplomatic statements that end up saying very little other than let’s play nice together. Sometimes I just want to say, “Let ‘er rip! What do you really think?”
IMHO, Curry is a bit player who’s trying to fashion herself a larger role.
She’s echoing the current AGW meme that this is a crisis of trust, not the science. On principle, we should never trust scientists (or politicians, statisticians, physicians, et al). They can earn our respect, though, through competency and professionalism. Of all the things that are worrisome is the sheer sloppiness of the climatology work. Details count.
Is it me, or does it seem that Curry positions herself neutrally in blogs but is always careful to come down on the side of the AGW crowd when talking with the media?
Well, Dr. Curry, in order to understand the political aspects of AGW, one can read the quotation list at
http://www.green-agenda.com
which is now up. It is often down due to the zero funding of the skeptic side.
If you scroll down about 40% into the list, you can learn that AGW did not become an important movement for abstract reasons. It is a modern version of Lysenkoism — the use of distorted science in support of the extreme left. In the real world, AGW is part of the “long march through the institutions” that has captured the academic and media cultures.
I’m sure there were many good points in this essay but to be honest it took way too many words to identify a basic problem. The IPCC and related scientists acted with arrogance, hubris, condescension and in a climate of secrecy. None of these traits are admirable but they are down right toxic for those who are basically public employees advocating taking more of our money and freedom.
The attitude taken by most when they were questioned about their methods or results is that “you are too stupid to understand, just trust me and do as I say” and if that doesn’t work the insults and accussations fly. Yea, I can’t see why that wouldn’t work. The vast majority of the public which now doubts the “settled science” are not climate scientists but they are not stupid either. Somehow, they seem to make good livings in other fields, enough to fund not only their own needs but to fund climate scientists as well. I’m pretty sure most climate scientists couldn’t describe every aspect of my chosen field but they would have a pretty good idea when I wasn’t telling the truth and would be pretty skeptical of taking my word when the consequences of my actions, which had already been questioned, had huge impilcations for them.
Suppose Michael Mann took his car into the shop. The mechanic told him it was dangerously broken and he needed to fork over a significant sum of money and drive in a completely different way or the car would have a catastrophic breakdown but the mechanic wouldn’t tell Mann how he came to that conclusion, wouldn’t show any evidence and told him that even if he did he wasn’t smart enough to understand the problem. Anyone think Mann would throw his wallet at him?
Me neither.
I like the essay, but unfortunately this view is not predominant among government funded scientists, let alone left-wing advocates or politicians. Many countries are already waist-deep in climate policy and are screaming at us to join them. Our House of Reps already has a cap & trade bill passed. Our neck is sticking out for climate science already.
What the public sees in climate science is:
-a complete lack of humility
-lack of honesty regarding uncertainty & assumptions
-poor archiving techniques reducing ability to review/replicate
-purposeful concealing of methods, full datasets, methodology & programming
-inability to concede/repair elementary problems and inability to understand that many errors that are insignificant alone can be significant as a whole
-condenscending attitude to outright obstruction to those who attempt to independently review who have another point of view
I think I could go on writing all day but you get the point.
I hate when people claim that science in general is now being questioned. That is a back-handed and baseless way of claiming that climate skeptics are anti-science flat earthers. When in fact most skeptics are generally claiming that the scientific process has not been properly applied, and have an open mind on future results.
sartec (08:32:45) :
Here’s Curry on a public affairs program, May 6, 2007:
http://www.gpb.org/georgiaweekly/2007/05/06
Thanks for the link.
Very interesting.
I see two issues in terms of the credibility of climate science. I’ll put them in separate messages so this doesn’t get too long.
First, just reading between the lines, it looks to me as though when the Global Warming debate got going, the various governments asked scientists in the field if they could confirm or deny the AGW hypothesis. The really high-quality ones shook their heads and said, “Maybe in 30 years with a lot of basic research and a lot of cash.” Unfortunately, there were plenty of hungry and politically savvy scientists of lesser quality who were willing to claim, and maybe even believe that they could nail down proof of AGW quickly and relatively easily. Guess who got the funding, and with it political power within the scientific community?
The wrong people were getting the funding, and they were asking the wrong question. They were asking, “How can we prove AGW?” when they should have been asking, “How does the world’s climate work, and how is it likely to change in the foreseeable future?
If sea levels go up to the level they were in the last interglacial, or if we get a “year without a summer” like the one in 1816, we have serious problems whether or not the temperature change is man-made.
When politically powerful but not particularly high quality science got challenged, the scientists involved tried to win the debate by attacking the people who challenged them, rather answering the challenges. Website “supporting” those scientists made matter worse. I can’t imagine any reasonably intelligent person visiting Climate Progress and to a lesser extent RealClimate and NOT coming away more skeptical than they started. At the very least most people are going to come away hoping AGW gets disproved just to take the arrogant expletives down a peg, if for no other reason.
Fortunately, Climategate has cut the political power of the Manns and Jones, and I’ve seen more high-quality science in climatology in the months since that story broke than I’ve seen in the last five year before that.
Bottom line: Do science. Be skeptical. Go where the data leads. Stay out of politics. Understand that whether AGW turns out to be true or not, scientists will at some point need to tell the public vital and unpleasant things. Science needs the credibility that Mann, Jones, and company were so careless with. The only way it can get it back is to do good, high-quality science in a transparent manner, whether that proves you right or wrong.
An interesting read…
A lil analogy, if a man comes to your house, and says it will burn down if you dont give him the contents of your wallet… you will be suspicious, if the man is fingering a pack o matches.. most o us joe six packs will be reaching for the shot gun, not the wallet. Now if the man has a gang of known arsonists with him to boot(extreme environmentalists) It will not take much for us to start shooting.
This area of science is effecting our lives, it has become a political tool. It needs to be totally transparent.. We will not forgive a politician for a fault we will forgive a friend for. And the same goes for climate scientists. This whole climate gate thing has exposed, at least to our perceptions that this area of science is being corrupted by politics. And a conformation bias seems evident to what we see in our own weather(this its much worse than we thought… and we look around, and think, yah know, if no one had told me about this, i wouldnt have noticed climate change… and this is unprecedented?
I personally dont doubt that adding co2 to the atmosphere will lead to warming.. the catastrophic predictions however? And watching what seems to be carpet baggers setting up carbon trading etc… all it takes is for us to see a pack o matches.
I keep shaking my head about the connection of “deniers” with big oil.
I am a skeptic because I have a scientific background. However, I work in the oil industry, though hardly for “big oil” which is merely a conspiracy-laden epithet. This made me reluctant to enter the debate until the pre-Copenhagen hype about AGW made it seem imperative to do so before a great policy mistake was made. The CRU leak was a fortunate coincidence(?) allowing the wedge of other opinion to slip further into the shell of “THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED” dogma.
CO2 driven AGW theory has not any more proof than the correlation of rising atmospheric CO2 concentration (still less than during much of the geologic past) and apparent global temperature increase through the last 150 years or so (which appears to have been inflated by biased data collection and analysis).
The proponents of the AGW theory seem to have behaved as advocates or aides to advocates, and not considered that any other position had any merit.
The difference in acceptance of two recent significant scientific controversies; the theory of evolution and the theory of plate tectonics, both of which are generally accepted by most educated people, show how beliefs can overwhelm evidence. In 2010, there is not much opposition to the concept of plate tectonics, but there is still serious opposition to evolution because of religious fundamentalism (notably Muslim as well as Christian), with a well-funded lobby that maintains websites and tries to influence education. The AGW theory has aspects of belief (generally political or eco-activist) that make it difficult for proponents and deniers to give credence to arguments from the other side (here I allow there are people who will use all kinds of argument and rhetoric – mostly in political or commentary positions). On the other hand, skeptics, who mostly are scientists or technical people, (including the bloggers Curry mentions and most of the comment posters on those blogs) can consider and weigh the validity of more of the evidence from either side. Dialog in scientific journals and transparency of process are necessary for resolution of the question “Is higher concentration of atmospheric CO2 resulting from fossil-fuel use significant in changing global temperatures and climate?”. After that, what to do about it may be pertinent (though debate and planning should probably continue, with the understanding that AGW is not necessarily a fact).
Science has to be skeptical, and skeptics should not be called deniers.
(Apologies for all the parentheses, it’s hard to include all the ideas and caveats that come to mind without writing an essay)
I was a regular commenter at Steve McIntyre’s climateaudit in the pre-climate days, including more than a few back-and-forth exchanges with Judith on hurricanes. So, I’ve “butted heads” with Judith in the blogosphere and I have no qualms about (politely) butting heads again.
But, I also have no qualms about noting where she and I agree. So, I’ll note here that I find her article to be a pretty good description of things. I think she has hits the main points well. That doesn’t mean that I totally agree with the details but the gist of the article is about right. It’s a good piece of work.
One important point which I did not notice in the article (maybe I missed it) is that too many people in climate science have been making extraordinary claims for years. Those who make extraordinary claims are obliged, if they are to be believed, to provide extraordinary evidence. That is one of life’s rules which is widely held by we hoi polloi.
Climate science has failed, in my opinion, to provide the required extraordinary evidence to match the extraordinary claims. To move forward, climate science must tone down the claims (including press releases) until they align with the evidence. Otherwise, the profession’s ox cart will remain in the ditch.