This is the final report, which has been embargoed until 5:01 PM PDT / 00:01 GMT March 31st.
Below is the emailed notice to MP’s sent with the PDF of the report.
Date: 30 March 2010 10:30
Subject: EMBARGOED REPORT: CLIMATE SCIENCE MUST BECOME MORE TRANSPARENT SAY MPs
To: [undisclosed recipients]
Phil Willis MP, Committee Chair, is available for embargoed interviews today. Please let me know if you wish to bid (I will be at the embargoed briefing until approx 1pm but will respond once I return).
Embargoed press briefing for science, environment and news corrs at Science Media Centre (21 Albemarle Street London, W1S 4BS), 11.30 am today.
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY COMMITTEE
Select Committee Announcement
[X]
31 March 2010
***EMBARGOED UNTIL 00.01 WEDNESDAY 31 MARCH 2010***
CLIMATE SCIENCE MUST BECOME MORE TRANSPARENT, SAY MPs
The Science and Technology Committee today publishes its report on the disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. The Committee calls for the climate science
community to become more transparent by publishing raw data and detailed methodologies.
Phil Willis MP, Committee Chair, said:
“Climate science is a matter of global importance. On the basis of the science, governments across the world will be spending trillions of pounds on climate change mitigation. The quality of the science therefore has to be irreproachable. What this inquiry revealed was that climate scientists need to take steps to make available all the data that support their work and full methodological workings, including their computer codes. Had both been available, many of the problems at CRU could have been avoided.”
The focus on Professor Jones and CRU has been largely misplaced. On the accusations relating to Professor Jones’s refusal to share raw data and computer codes, the Committee considers that his actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community but that those practices need to change.
On the much cited phrases in the leaked e-mails-“trick” and “hiding the decline”-the Committee considers that they were colloquial terms used in private e-mails and the balance of evidence is that they were not part of a
systematic attempt to mislead.
Insofar as the Committee was able to consider accusations of dishonesty against CRU, the Committee considers that there is no case to answer.
The Committee found no reason in this inquiry to challenge the scientific consensus as expressed by Professor Beddington, the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, that “global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity”. But this was not an inquiry into the science produced by CRU and it will be for the Scientific Appraisal Panel, announced by the University on 22 March, to determine whether the work of CRU has been soundly built.
On the mishandling of Freedom of Information (FoI) requests, the Committee considers that much of the responsibility should lie with the University, not CRU. The leaked e-mails appear to show a culture of non-disclosure at CRU and instances where information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure, particularly to climate change sceptics. The failure of the University to grasp fully the potential damage this could do and did was regrettable. The University needs to re-assess how it can
support academics whose expertise in FoI requests is limited.
Ends.
NOTES TO EDITORS:
Further details about this inquiry can be found at:
http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/science_technology/s_t_cru_inquiry.cfm
Media Enquiries: Becky Jones: 020 7219 5693 Committee Website:
http://www.parliament.uk/science Publications / Reports / Reference
Material: Copies of all select committee reports are available from the
Parliamentary Bookshop (12 Bridge St, Westminster, 020 7219 3890) or the
Stationery Office (0845 7023474). Committee reports, press releases,
evidence transcripts, Bills; research papers, a directory of MPs, plus
Hansard (from 8am daily) and much more, can be found on
www.parliament.uk<http://www.parliament.uk/>.
Rebecca Jones
House of Commons Select Committee Media Officer Children, Schools &
Families; Health; Science & Technology; Northern Ireland; Scotland; Wales
===================================================
UPDATE:
Steve McIntyre has a few points to make, which I encourage reading here at Climate Audit
You knew they would never give up the quest for trillions in taxes, didn’t you?
Whitewash … it looks bad in government, almost as bad as giving grants for the science we want does.
ac patriot (00:18:08) :
I’m not ignoring you, yet, but it’s going to be a jungle of a day (literary reference) and I haven’t decided just how much of my life I care to share with someone who hasn’t the courage to use his own real name. Let it suffice for now that I am not the foam chap at Trinity.
As for your other blithe assumptions about who would want to suppress AGW… keep in mind that ENRON was a leading promoter of cap-and-trade. I’m reminded of the time I sat one booth over in my local diner from the pastors of the various churches in the area having their Sunday afternoon strategy session. The Episcopal priest made a remark to the effect that St. Paul’s Episcopcal was “where God worships…” The others were suitably irritated, but they nonetheless continued planning their coordinated outreach efforts.
As a sort of extra-credit exercise, take a look at the names of the submitters of statements on the parliamentary report and compare them to the names of commenters on this blog and then tell us again how the committee is so much more reliable than mere blog readers. And if you come across a a know-it-all troll that calls himself Leif Svalgaard (as if that is a real name), tell him he has no right to be so opinated since he is just another blog reader.
I don’t know about what y’alls think about this whole fiasco; or how you plan to proceed from here; but I believe I am simply going to ignore the whole thing (but NOT forget it).
Just think about it; this whole donnybrook has had the net effect of elevating the CRU output (izzat HADCRUt) to the status of the pinnacle of climate science; ahead of even the IPCC.
Having stirred the governmental conscience of one of the once Great world Nations, to give its blessings to Phil Jones and his merry band of tinkerers, and their now “not quite” Peer reviewed climate proclamations; they have elevated this whole global temperature anomaly gathering ritual to the status of real science. Well I prefer the Japanese view of it; as somewhat akin to ancient astrology. And my apologies to ancient astrologers.
The idea that some 150-60 years of somewhat erratically gathered recordings of some temperatures in some places on this planet; offset; by some assumed average behavior of each thermometer (location); and then arbitrarily applied to some vastly larger area of the planet, than is even mildly rational; and used to compute by some physically unsupportable model, a supposed mean global temperature (or anomaly); and then assert that this is a harbinger of the climate of planet earth, and somehow relates to the flow of energies about the environment; is totally ludicrous.
Apart from grossly violating all the laws of sampled data systems; there simply is no physical relationship between any mean temperature calculation; whether valid or not; and the way different areas of the planet manipulate energy flow, into and out of the planet.
Ocean environments at 288 K do not behave the same as arboreal forests at 288 K not of alpine meaodws at 288K, or even a tropical arid desert at 288 K.
So the fudged output of Dr Phil Jones and his team; is NOT the Rosetta Stone of world Climate; it offers no explanation as to why the earth remains always within a comfortable temperature range, that is clearly regulated by some powerful feedback loop that simply will not allow any catastrophic thermal runaway to occur, and hasn’t allowed that for over 600 million years.
So let’s quit wasting our time on Jones and his caper. Regardless of how they arrived at what they publish for public and governmental consumption; that output itself is on no value whatsoever in determining how earth’s climate system works.
It’s like watching the Dow Jones (another Jones trap) Industrial average, go up and down, and then believing that somehow, that is how people get rich in the stock market.
HADCRUt and GISSTemp, are quite irrelevent, in answering the question of how earth’s climate works.
Hey! IT’S THE WATER; STUPID !
So get over it; Climategate is a storm in a teacup; well it does show us that crooks with an agenda, unrelated to the health of world climate, are loose, and working against freedom; but it has little to do with climate science.
Phil Willis MP, Committee Chair, said:
“Climate science is a matter of global importance. On the basis of the science, governments across the world will be spending trillions of pounds on climate change mitigation. The quality of the science therefore has to be irreproachable.”
Er…actually…what you mean to say Mr Willis is “governments across the world will be spending trillions of OTHER PEOPLE’S pounds..blah…blah…blah”. Governments of the day continue to treat the electorate as ill-informed push-overs. We must trust in the commonsense instincts of the crowd.
The UK government accrue £billions through this carbon fraud. Of course an inquiry is going to be a whitwash
just imagine a statement from the committee explaining that the CRU was devious and fraudulent at every stage of climate science, for the sake of putting the desired result before the scientific procedure. They would have to admit that the billions they receive in Tax revenue were a fraud and that the scare propaganda campaigns were all a bluff. The Royal Society would have to recant and say that they were in the wrong, and by implication – as we live in a globally interconnected world – the rest of the proponents of this supersition would go into abeyance.
@barry (23:33:53) :”What funding source for climate science would skeptics consider reasonable? Answer – none. Any source would be grist in the skeptical mill.”
Governmental and foundation support for “climate science” (which you apparently equate to the study of AGW) is wide spread and well-accepted. So you got that completely backwards. What funding source for disproving AGW would warmists consider reasonable? Answer – none, despite that being a critical factor in the exercise of scientific investigation.
Who are these 10,000 scientists? Name them please.
There’s no database for it. I’ve read similar or much higher figures in various places (a million even, somewhere, including all related fields, but I think a small fraction of that number would have actually published), and I did some simple math, extrapolating from the paper lists at the bottom of the latest IPCC report chapters, which I examined for repeats and such and rounded down. The figure was around 6000 (about 40 authors per page IIRC, if you want to check). That is by no means a full list of published climate and climate-related scientists worldwide, and it includes some deceased authors. AR4 was reviewed by 2500 scientists, of which just over 600 were lead authors. Considering I’m including climate-related scientists in my challenge upthread (they have to have published at least one climate-related paper in their field), I’m very confident 10 000 is a low-ball figure.
I’ve got a cite for you.
An invitation to participate in the survey was sent to 10,257 Earth scientists.
I’m not saying that report is definitive re numbers. The survey pool was wider than the one I’m thinking of (must have published at least one climate-related paper). This is not the total number of Earth scientists, obviously. 4% of respondents came from 21 countries aside from the US and Canada. IPCC was attended by climate and climate-related scientists from 130 countries. I feel pretty confident with the 10 000 figure.
So, if anyone can come up with 101 Earth scientists, who have published at least one climate-related paper, who disagree with the mainstream view (as the HoC review quotes Beddington), then there’s maybe an argument for a lack of consensus.
(But I’m playing along with a meme, here. In truth, consensus isn’t arrived at by taking a vote. Understanding spreads. If it gathers weight, it sticks. It took about as long for consensus on AGW to arrive as it did for evolution theory: ~90 years)
Oops – link format didn’t work for the cite.
George E. Smith (08:39:10) :
Climategate is a storm in a teacup
I would like to share your optimism, I suspect they consider the whole planet their teacup, and will stir it as they please. Hope in the mean time it dies of boredom but if not it doesn’t it could end in anything we could imagine.
Bishop Hill..
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p006x9l4
This is pure PR: every newspaper titles “CRU scientists exonerated”.
The radicalisation is coming up orchestrated by politicians. Only one MP was courageous (see climateaudit analysis), the rest were lemmings. The time bomb is ticking… Eco-totalitarism is alive and well.
barry (09:42:03),
“An invitation to participate in the survey was sent to 10,257 Earth scientists.”
Yes, and how many of those actually responded? Typical responses to mailed surveys are in the neighborhood of 6%. Anyway, besides being bogus propaganda, your link is well over a year old. It claims that 58% of the public believes that AGW is a problem. But times have changed, and the large majority in all current polls put concern for global warming at or near the bottom of the list.
It’s fun watching you try to back and fill over your invented statement about 10,000 “Earth scientists.” The number of IPCC scientists you cite – 2,500 – are political appointees with their AGW marching orders, so they can be discounted as worthless opinions.
And your 10,000 are taken from over twenty countries, while the OISM Petition, for example, which had to be printed out, signed, and mailed in, and which was limited to U.S. residents only, now has over thirty thousand scientists endorsing the statement that…
That is a clear, definitive statement.
Finally, you don’t get to set the parameters of the debate. The already falsified CAGW hypothesis that you’re trying so desperately to defend is so weak that you feel compelled to make silly constructs like:
“So, if anyone can come up with 101 Earth scientists, who have published at least one climate-related paper… & blah, blah, etc.”
101, eh? What orifice did you pull that number out of?
I hate to say this, but the comments from the Planet Zarg contingent on Real Climate are generally more interesting than the ones here, as they demonstrate just how twisted and distorted the views of the purveyors of bad science have become.
You witness something akin to the bigoted zeal of the newly converted – the flag bearers of the ‘only truth’ – in the comments.
If you have a strong stomach, spend a few minutes reviewing the Real Climate posts on the subject of the British whitewash.
As a great person once said: Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up.”
Fed up (02:45:34) :
“Is it really a surprise that a bunch of crooks found another bunch of crooks not guilty.
If you are unlucky enough to live in the UK under this government then these enquiries, and their results are a joke , what a scandalous waste of money!”
Agreed! Just like Public Enquiries and Public Consultations – a joke, a foregone conclusion in every case.
stephen richards (05:11:10) :
I have been in contact with the office of the opposition leader M. Cameron and I’m afraid that the “Doing something is better than doing nothing” brigade are everywhere.
There will be no movement away from AGW anytime soon and no movement toward ‘real science’ either.
————————————
Exactly! This is the whole problem: almost the whole political establishment is supportive of the scam.
That fact alone tells us a lot.
In means that if we vote for one of the ‘major parties’ NOTHING WILL CHANGE once they get in, because they all sing from the same hymn sheet.
But of course, some people on this thread would tell us there is no conspiracy of any kind, The politicians are all just well meaning people doing the best they can to help the rest us, they care about our future, our children’s future. That’s why they’re doing all this green stuff. It’s the greatest threat humanity has ever faced, don’t you know?
Smokey: “Who is “most of us?”
I guess I mean people who would be disturbed to find that a person in a position of trust had abused that trust through dishonesty.
We rely on “experts” of all sorts to do the right thing, since through their expertise they are in a position of influence, and can make a major difference to our lives.
“…the number of skeptics is steadily rising.”
But that’s been happening since the early 1990s, and all the while the numbers supporting AGW have also risen.
Stefan (08:22:41) : “Doesn’t it make you curious why most everyone here sees the climate science as pretty unreliable?
How do you explain it?”
You’re asking me to impute motive. I think AGW scepticism involves some genuine doubts about the science against a background of ideological and political worldviews. How the mix pans out depends on the individual sceptic.
But these motivations say nothing for or against the science.
“Professor Jones told us that the published e-mails represented only “one tenth of 1%” of his output, which amounts to one million e-mails, and that we were only seeing the end of a protracted series of e-mail exchanges.”
If Professor Jones has been sending emails 365 days a year including an extra day for leap years for twenty years (before which Tim Berners Lee had not invented the worldwide web) he would have dispatched more than 135 emails a day. Assuming that each email, on average, takes two minutes to compose and send, we are talking about four and a half hours a day sending emails. When did he get time to do any serious research?
Were none of the HOC sufficiently numerate to question or at least comment on such an obvious false statement?
Brendan H (11:18:07) :
Stefan (08:22:41) : “Doesn’t it make you curious why most everyone here sees the climate science as pretty unreliable?
How do you explain it?”
You’re asking me to impute motive. I think AGW scepticism involves some genuine doubts about the science against a background of ideological and political worldviews. How the mix pans out depends on the individual sceptic.
But these motivations say nothing for or against the science.
—————————
Brendan, when you say “I think AGW scepticism involves some genuine doubts about the science against a background of ideological and political worldviews”, which ideological and political world views do you mean?
Please name them.
What are you trying to say? If you can just put it in plain words that would be great.
“British Parliament: Climategate scientists’ actions ‘in line with common practice'”
This is outrageous. Since when does any real science have “common practices” that are completely outside those of any other real science, much less have the audacity to defy the Freedom of Information laws?
The key email in all this mess was the reason given to one researcher for not sending him the original data: “You’ll just try to find something wrong with it!” Duh. That’s the smoking gun that proves these people are not real scientists. There’s very little chance that forcing them to make their data, methodology and programs public can correct that basic flaw. Jones has trained himself in disorganized efforts for years.
BBC Parliament
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/playlive/bbc_parliament/
Phil Jones live until 21:00 BST
The terminology of the report by the committee is suggestive.
1) No use of the word ‘denier(s)’ in the report.
2) Of the ~15 times that the word ‘sceptic(s)’ was used in the report, the committee used it themselves 6 times. The other ~8 uses were by newspapers or people testifying or from submittals to the committee.
3) I find that none of the 6 uses of the word ‘sceptic(s)’ by the committee were in anyway derogatory. It seemed respectful to me.
4) Respect was shown towards the anthropogenic case and people by the committe report.
My take on this is that the committee was purposefully cautious toward sceptics. I surmise it is because they did not want the report to appear outwardly biased toward an anthropogenic case and against any sceptic case.
The report, however, was completely sympathetic toward the antropogenic case.
Some fear by the committee of sceptic reaction to the report was a factor in the terminology used in the report. I consider that a positive sign. We did not see that kind of behavior a year ago.
John
Barry,
” It took about as long for consensus on AGW to arrive as it did for evolution theory: ~90 years.”
Well let’s compare the too timelines shall we? It was around 1845 that Darwin began writing out what became the Origin of Species. It was Darwin’s observations of related species that led him to conclude that they evolved traits due to selection pressures of the environment. But at that time there was no know physical/biological mechanism to account for this interesting deduction.
In 1865 Gregor Mendel discovered by experiment that traits were inherited in a predictable manner, although his work was unknown to Darwin at that time. Whem it became widely known in the early 1900’s it led to a major disagreement over the rate of evolution predicted by early geneticists.
The apparent contradiction between Mendel’s work and the early Darwinists was reconcilled in the 1920’s and 1930’s by Haldane, Wright and Fisher who set the foundations of “population genetics.” Even then, no biological mechanism was known that could account for the theory.
In the 1940’s the discovery of DNA by Avery, and the double helix by Watson and Crick in 1953 finally demonstrated the physical basis for inheritance. Since then, genetics and molecular biology have become core parts of evolutionary biology and have revolutionised the field of phylogenetics.
Thus we see the inception of a hypothesis based on observation, through 150 years of rigorous debate and challenges, of more and more evidence from fields as diverse as taxonomy and molecular biology until, brick by brick, an edifice is built of one of the most enduring and solid theories of science.
Now Global warming. Where to start? Tyndall and Fourier in the early 19th century? I think we have to start with Ahrrenius with his paper in the 1890’s in which he calculated a temperature sensitivity of the climate to doubling CO2 of about 5C. In 1906 he then recants and changes the sensitivity to about 1.5C.
From 1906 until the 1930’s nothing much happens. Then in 1938 Callendar publishes “The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature,” He concluded that the trend toward higher temperatures was significant, especially north of the forty-fifth parallel; that increased use of fossil fuels had caused a rise of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere of about ten percent from nineteenth century levels; and that increased sky radiation from the extra CO2 was linked to the rising temperature trend.
Unfortunately for Callendar, he made his measurements during a naturally warming period in the early 20th century and missed the cooling decades through to the seventies.
Since then we have had seen a ton of papers written documenting circumstantial evidence but no solid evidence that CO2 is a major driver. Indeed, the theory has several flaws, not least in that it cannot account for previous warm periods or even ignores the evidence.
So AGW and evolution are not comparable. AGW does not have an unbroken lineage back to Ahrennius but is patchy, with large gaps. AGW is not a theory built from observation as evolution is, but is an ideology looking for evidence. The only evidence based thread was added by Callendar, but he had the misfortune to be measuring during the warming decades only.
A more appropriate comparison for AGW is with Lamarckism – and we all know how that turned out.
I bet those commons don’t have enough “common sense”☺