Video: Guardian Climategate Debate

Regarding cleaning up the science, I’ve argued previously that I don’t think environmental sciences (I think the problem spreads across the wider subject) can be salvaged in this generation, and I think it will need hand-holding and some stern academic “parenting” in the new generation too. And that’s only IF the subject itself can survive the rigour of appropriate academic and scientific standards.
My suspicion is that the field is only really attractive, as an academic career specifically, to a very narrow band of individuals having a particular ideological mindset (one might describe them glibly and as “tree huggers”) and their interest in entering the field is specifically for the purpose of shaping science so that it specifically serves ideologically oriented policy decisions.
What is needed, though, is an end to academic science being led by advocacy motivation. If that door leading to the perversion of science is closed, by applying regulatory control to assert much-needed rigour and scientific integrity, the field will no longer be attractive to the activists and may collapse.

Am I the only one that noticed that The 6-and-change minute Guardian video does not actually show McIntyre saying anything. In fact I think that, other than appearing in shots showing others speaking, there is no mention of Steve at all, in the video…

Amino Acids writes:
“Maybe I am not understanding you correctly, but isn’t that Lindzen’s Infrared Iris? Isn’t Spencer’s work with clouds in the tropics proof of it? Or should the Infrared Iris still be considered hypothesis?”
Good questions. The immediate answer is that they have no confirmed hypotheses. But I will check again. I am sure you will do the same. Thanks.

The end to climate hysteria won’t come with a bang. Too many careers, too much money and too many egos have been invested in it for it to go away in a hurry.
Some may have been disappointed by the Guardian debate but it’s a good stepping stone in the war to uncover the truth, whatever that is. We need journalists to stop seeing AGW as cut and dried. We need them to stop seeing sceptics as a bunch of raving right wing oil shills. What we need is better climate science and they’re in a far better position to demand it. Steve McIntyre is an excellent argument for all that, precisely because he is annoyingly even handed and precise 😉 He typifies what the journalists imagine scientists to be, staggeringly clever and honest to the point of pain.
Demanding better science is the key to resolving global warming and it’s the one area that believers can’t argue with sceptics (though they do). If everyone is to be persuaded to act on CO2 then the science HAS to be better, because clearly it’s not doing the job right now.
Let’s face it, if the CRU represent some of climate science’s finest, are we sure that they wouldn’t miss genuine evidence of climate trouble, even if that proof presented itself with a badge saying ‘hi, I’m categorical proof of CAGW’? I’m not and it’s a continual source of doubt of my scepticism. I suppose that makes me a climate change agnostic.
What is encouraging is that the AGW positive press are beginning to doubt the quality of the scientists, not least because they can’t even investigate something as simple as Climategate without incompetence and bias. Often we judge others on their ability to perform tasks that we think we could handle and while the likes of Fred Pierce and George Monbiot might feel out of their depth examining the minutiae of climate science, I think we all know that they could have made a better job of investigating the CRU emails… and did.
Thanks to all the sceptics who attended the debate. Keep up the pressure!

Reed Coray says:
July 16, 2010 at 9:19 am
I agree with Luboš Motl’s assessment (July 15, 2010 at 9:54 PM)
“…..But the important fact is that the current climate community is overwhelmingly corrupt and it can’t be fixed unless something like 80% of the people who are working in it today are fired together with the bad policies that got us into the current state.
Their work may have a place. The various investigative committees have a qualifier:
[… the Investigatory Committee determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities.]
The above is true for the UEA/CRU investigations also.
I accept that.
I also recognize that their work can never leave academia. It is not ready for prime time.
NASA GISS, NOAA, UEA/CRU, UK Met Office, BoM, CISRO, etc… or the IPCC itself, until work can stand scrutiny, be reproduced and be recognized as actual science all products regarding ‘climate science’ must remain within academia and not brought into the real world and considered in policy decisions.

Don’t Monbiot’s eyes sayit all…?
REPLY: Since Christopher Monckton also has eye issues (Graves disease) and I admonish posters that taunt him for that reason, I’ll voice the same concern here. -Anthony

RiHo08 says:
July 16, 2010 at 2:49 pm
if you listen closely to the question “Where are all the joules that have caused climate warming come from?” Steve McIntyre said “I don’t know!”

Well,
I was certainly out of Monbiot’s “line” and I was not by any means the only one making audience rumblings against Monbiot’s frequent use of the pejorative term “Climate Change denier” (and some who had been muttering in fact left early but I was still there to be blamed) .
Monbiot I think maybe sees he goes to far on this (I had a perfectly reasonable discussion with him afterwards) but his main distress was because I interjected when Bob Watson made some remarks of seriously strained credibility on Mars, Earth, Venus and CO2 (I think in response to my question). I make no apology for interjecting to defend the integrity of science.
It is true that the meeting was not primarily about science but then the panel raised or alluded to science claims in many places.
To see more on the missing science issues please visit Climate Realists reports:
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6006&linkbox=true&position=1

Clearly, in the UK, lessons about what constitutes sound science are being learned. Even the CGW alarmist George Monbiot makes concessions to skeptical critics. This is progress.
But in the US, with the utter lack of airing climategate’s critical issues, little is being learned by elites and the chattering classes. But climate scientists do not necessarily share the same boat. A perfect case in point comes from a discussion on climategate between the New York Times environmental science reporter Andrew Revkin and NPRs Ira Flato on “Talk of the Nation,” versus climate scientist Richard Muller.

“…Climategate will never be over. They’re [skeptics] going to keep – that reverberating echo chamber of the blogosphere will keep asserting that this episode fundamentally eroded understanding, you know, the idea that we have a clear picture of a human warming climate. And that’s all -that’s not going to change, just because there are people who are immune to evidence.”

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128568245
Let me introduce these journalists to the old saw that the ‘shoe is on the other foot’ – if only they notice.
On the one hand there are Warming Believers immune to the evidence too – some who have state-funded microphones and national audiences to promulgate their ignorance of the evidence and bigotry against substantive scientific criticism. On the other hand, there are notable climate research scientists formerly convinced of man-made global warming who find climategate disturbing, posing a real challenge to doing sound science. Some appear to be agnostics now. Some deeply disagree with Revkin.
For example, UC-Berkeley physicist and climate scientist Richard Muller, who served to untangle another unsound-science controversy, the famous NAS Hockey Stick panel in 2006. Muller, a MacArthur ‘genius’ Fellow now with Lawrence Livermore Labs, had this to say about climategate scandal to me in a recent email:

“I found the climategate emails to be extremely disturbing.  They do throw doubt on all the work published by the Hadley CRU team, and those who worked with them.  I am equally disturbed by their blatant manipulations of the peer-review system.
“Also disturbing are the revelations of the various investigations into the procedures of the IPCC.  I had not previously been aware of their extensive use of grey literature, or the apparent fact that authors of sections had the right to overrule referee demands.
“I am now engaged in a scientific re-evaluation of the thermometer data.  This is a major project, and we plan to derive a new estimate for temperature change in the past 100 years.  I have no idea what the answer will be, because so much of the past work is now tainted.  But our work will be transparent and public and we will encourage others to check and duplicate our work.” (Personal communication, June 18, 2010.)

Clearly, the last paragraph indicates that climate scientists have seen their credibility impugned, and their data and results scientifically damaged. Climategate has taught them lessons about their conduct and standards of sound evidence they would not have learned without the scandal. Thus, scientists must change in order to convince others about the science.
Interestingly, neither Flato nor Revkin have learned how practicing climate scientists are reacting to climategate with reforms aimed to meet their critics challenges.
Instead they persist in the True Belief that there’s nothing wrong with climate science as practiced before the scandal.
But, if so, why would Prof. Muller be “extremely alarmed?” So eager to set new standards of transparency, methodological sharing, and invite independent replication? Obviously, the problems skeptics have long claimed have left their mark upon climate scientists after climategate. How could Revkin and Flato miss this?
But even worse, Revkin gets his climate science facts wrong.

“Jim: My question is, has the hockey, the so-called hockey stick graph, has that been discredited?
“Mr. REVKIN: Well, let me tell you what it is, for those listeners who don’t know. In the late ’90s, Michael Mann at Penn – who now is at Penn State and some other researchers, pulled together some of these threads from tree rings and other things and came up with an estimate, over the last thousand years, of temperature, and found that the last 50 years was really outstanding. It stood out as the – a period of warming unparalleled in a thousand years.
“The original paper was riddled with caveats, all these could, would, might, to be sure, kind of phrases. And it – but then it quickly got spun, including by the IPCC in 2001. In the illustration they derived from it, they removed the gray bands that showed you the error, the possible up and down error. And as you go farther back in time, the range of possible error in these estimates is much, much higher. So that was where the problem was. The National Academy of Sciences did a study that assessed this. And largely, there were some problems that they raised with the way it had been done. But since then also, the main thrust of that work has been repeatedly replicated by other groups of scientists.
“So the idea that we’re in a period of unusual warming in the last 50 years has not been erased.”

Revkin concedes that the Hockey Stick’s temperature reconstruction problems were in the absence of error bars – that’s all. (It wasn’t about ‘error bars’ but the inherent uncertainty within the data sets used.) The 2006 NAS panel raised issues with its methods, which were resolved by other independent temperature reconstructions.
Except that these successive independent “replications” of the Hockey Stick temperature graph simply recycled the same cherry picked data by a scientist named Briffa using data from Siberia, as Steve McIntyre demonstrated last fall. (A story summarized by Andrew Montford here (http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/9/29/the-yamal-implosion.html) and in his book “The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science,” which Matt Ridley proclaims “one of the best science books in years.”
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/03/the-case-against-the-hockey-stick/) But apparently science news not “fit to print” travels slowly to the New York Times.
Next, Revkin claims that the most important Hockey Stick thesis that later twentieth century warmth is unprecedented withstood the NAS panel’s scrutiny. But not according to Professor Muller, one of the panel’s referees.
“In the end, there was nothing new left in Mann’s papers that the National Academy supported….” (295, “Physics for Future Presidents,” by Richard A. Muller, 2008) The “unprecedented warming” claim was overturned by the panel, restoring the Medieval Optimum to its prior place as warmer than our time, as he explained last July at UC-Berkely economic historian Brad DeLong’s blog.
To Muller, the “Hockey Stick” controversy is a lesson in the lure of confirmation bias – believing what one wants to find, despite the evidence – one that Revkin still has not learned.
Finally, Revkin’s notion that merely a frustrated wish among scientists for action led to “oversimplification” of certain science is not a lesson one gleans from the London debate on climategate, hosted by the Guardian on Wednesday.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/jul/15/climategate-public-debate
On the contrary, there was a good-deal of agreement about the changes climate science needs to make, despite three Parliamentary investigations that never once interviewed the critics smeared or sabotaged in climategate’s emails.
From Professor Muller’s perspective, who is the unlearned, marginalized crank now? And they still dare to call themselves “journalists?” Obviously, neither Revkin nor Flato have learned the same lessons scientists on the research frontier of global warming like Muller have.

Orson,
Thanks so much for your wonderfully informative and helpful post. I will look around for Muller’s work. If you want to provide more guidance in that direction, I would appreciate it.