After I published this story:
NCDC’s Dr. Thomas Peterson: “It’s a knife fight”
I wrote to Dr. Peterson to advise him that he had WUWT available to him for rebuttal should he wish. Here is his response verbatim. – Anthony
============================================================
In response to your kind offer, I have typed up the three relevant pages
of the notes I spoke from at that meeting, which I would appreciate you
adding to your forum. I had three lessons that I personally took from
Climategate. Here are my notes verbatim for lessons 2 and 3, which are
the relevant ones to this discussion. You can agree or disagree with the
points I made, but let’s at least start with exactly what I said.
Regards,
Tom Peterson
Lesson 2: If the fight isn’t fair, then don’t fight – and maybe don’t
fight even if it is fair
Only a small percentage of Phil Jones’ emails on that server were released
-The subset that was released was not random
–So it didn’t give a fair representation
-Releasing additional selected emails would make the fight fairer
–But not civil
There is a lot of incivility and ad hominem attacks out there
-We can’t control that
But we can control how we respond . . . or not respond
-Perhaps don’t even fight if the fight is fair
-Fights are never fun
–Even if you win them
The unfortunate downside is that some pseudoscientific nonsense can go
unchallenged.
Lesson 3: Collaborate with communicators
An aside from a Congressman after a hearing:
-You’re in a knife fight and need to fight back.
A science communicator:
-All scientists need to have their own blogs.
A good summary of similar issue though on a different topic by Michael
D. Gershon, M.D. (1999)
-“The experiments I conducted to this point gave me a feeling of
confidence that my work could withstand anyone’s scrutiny, which I
assumed (foolishly, it turned out) would be both logical and reasonable.”
Collaborate with communicators, 2
A scientist’s response to both knives and illogic tends to be more science
-Sound, rigorous, peer-reviewed science
-What we do best
-And in the end it will win the day
–Just ask Galileo
But unlike heliocentrism, we cannot afford to wait a century for views
on climate change to catch up to climate science
So partnering with communicators can help bridge the gap
-From nerdy scientists like myself to regular people.
matt v.
So what is the sensible course of action? Do we start building nuclear power stations and phasing out coal burning planets, or do we burn ever more fossils fuels, pumping up atmospheric CO2 to levels the earth hasn’t seen for millions of years in the hope that the science is wrong?
RichieP says:
January 17, 2011 at 2:32 pm
Frosty says:
January 17, 2011 at 12:46 pm
‘Is he’s saying “only talk through a communicator” because only spin doctors communicators can the spin communicate their science correctly? ‘
Maybe he thinks he’s on Star Trek?
It’s SCIENCE Jim…. but not as we know it.
“–Just ask Galileo” (re heliocentrism, no doubt!)
If only. He would turn in his grave at the thought that his lonely courageous stand against a corrupt or pig ignorant establishment would be twisted so perversely in defence of to-day’s corrupt or pig ignorant establishment.
@ur momisugly ScientistForTruth January 17, 2011 at 10:03 am:
“Heliocentrism would have caught on a lot quicker if he hadn’t tried to paint those who were sceptical of his views – including the Pope, who was originally his friend – as ignorant fools.” They were just that.
Mr. Peterson, there are some great posts above, I hope you read through them with an open mind. I have found weather fascinating since my first job emptying the trash at the weather office 35 years ago (I took home the discarded maps to study them). I have also studied man-made warming since before the 1998 “acceleration”. I already knew some of the warming was natural, but in 1998/99 there was a shift from some kind of balance to alarmism in my view (although now I realize it had happened prior to that). Well after 1998 it turned out it was only El Nino and there was a deceleration in warming, but despite that fact, there was a ratcheting up of the alarmism.
But here’s the honest truth: climate change, global warming, what-you-call-it, is the one of the most boring topics I can imagine. Weather has it beat 100 to 1, literally and figuratively. The small amount of man-made warming is mildly interesting, but only in a good way, warmer arctic, warmer winters, in short warmer where and when it needs to be warmer. Weather blasts past that warming into heat waves or freezes Florida to its coldest December ever. Lots of current weather is as interesting as the 70’s We are getting floods and droughts like the 30’s.
So your crowd has now latched onto weather in your dying gasps of alarmism. But you are digging your hole even deeper because increased extreme weather (if part of AGW) is a negative feedback. It is far from proven that there is any increase in extreme weather beyond natural variations (e.g. 70’s, 30’s, and earlier). It is even more far from proven that AGW has anything to do with it (e.g. AGW does not cause negative AO). The ignorance of climate scientists about weather in general is quite astounding (I could give many examples, but the recent blaming of cold Europe on missing ice was a good one). The climate scientists are also drawn like drowning rats to the recent flooding and trying desperately to claim that it is unnatural. It will wash away their last bit of credibility while swaying a few gullible folks. Is it really worth spending what remains of your credibility to get a point or two in an opinion poll?
To follow on to my previous comment, here is the CAGW mindset writ large.
The Price of Change by James Hansen
I found this cited at Lubos Motl’s blog, The Reference Frame. It was originally published in the South China Morning Post, and therefore is meant for a Chinese audience.
The money quotes:
“Burning all fossil fuels would increase carbon dioxide to more than 550 ppm and create a different planet – a desolate, ice-free planet with sea levels 75 meters higher than today.”
and…
“Climate change will soon emerge as the great moral issue of the 21st century, a matter of intergenerational justice.”
Read it all. It is quite chilling to me, especially since he seems to have developed a seething and irrational hatred for all fossil fuel companies – the same fossil fuel companies that right now are helping deliver power, heat, food, and water to the NASA GISS headquarters in New York City (and to Jim Hansen’s home, no doubt).
Humorously, the paper cites Jim Hansen as writing “as a private citizen” – errr a private citizen pushing a new book and whose day job just happens to reap huge sums of money by scaring the public about climate change.
What say you, Dr. Peterson?
Dear Anthony,
In August 2009, I did a critique of a paper by Dr. Tom Peterson (published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Atmospheres) on alleged changes in climate extremes in the Caribbean. It was rejected by the journal editor, a colleague of Dr. Peterson at NOAA. Fortunately, Professor Emeritus Roger Pielke Sr. posted my critique on his blog at climatesci.org and invited Dr. Peterson to provide a rebuttal to my critique. To date, Dr. Peterson has declined the offer. Perhaps, you may have better luck in getting Dr. Peterson to respond.
My critique is available at the following link:
http://climatesci.org/2009/08/05/comment-on-%e2%80%9crecent-changes-in-climate-extremes-in-the-caribbean-region-by-peterson-et-al-2002%e2%80%9d-by-rj-stone/
Best wishes,
Reynold Stone
REPLY: I’ll have a look, thanks -A
Let’s see, then – if a non-team person wants to replicate work and asks for the data and methodology and metadata, and he is stonewalled to the point of needing to use FOIA, is that FOIA request the knife fighting?
Or is the knife fighting when emails are circulated to increase the stonewalling?
Is being astounded that the data isn’t made public the knife fight?
Or is it when the hopeful replicators are called “deniers”?
Is it a knife fight because team members circle the wagons when they could more easily have simply told everyone, “The dog ate my homework” (Phil Jones, on his slovenly record keeping)?
Or is the knife fight when an disillusioned insider who knew where all the skeletons were buried decided to out the cover-up?
If this was Watergate, was the knife fight when the cops arrested the burglars?
Or was it when Nixon, Haldeman and Ehrlichman covered it all up?
It was a knife fight in all of those (and more) because the ones who jealously guarded the power they thought the possessed paranoically thought they had enemies all around them, and they went into battle mode to protect that perceived power. That kind of mentality happens all the time with institutions: Those who find themselves at the center of things believe they are infallible as long as they are “defending the faith.” And when that happens, all rules of gentlemanly behavior (such as the scientific method and objective peer review) are repealed – and the gloves come off. That is Climategate in a nutshell. Everyone “out of the loop” who read any of the damning emails and files could see it plain as day. The insiders are still deluding themselves that they are the good guys in this.
Roger Otip says:
January 17, 2011 at 5:01 pm
“It is in this way that science approaches the truth, but it is essential that this process remains scientific, that we have a peer-review system to weed out the non-science and the nonsense, or else the whole thing becomes muddied and confused.”
How do you propose to address the assault on the peer review process that was launched by Phil Jones and his fellows?
Bob Barker
Here’s the page you’re referring to. Note the error bars, indicating the levels of uncertainty. The two radiative forcing components where the level of scientific understanding is judged to be high are also the two components with the greatest (positive) radiative forcing. They are carbon dioxide and methane, both major products of human activity. Thus they can conclude that the total net anthropogenic forcing is positive and almost certainly lies between +0.6 and +2.4 Watts per square meter, though is probably close to +1.6 Watts per square meter.
Steve McIntyre
That was a private email though, wasn’t it? It was not intended to be published.
REPLY: Sorry, you are wrong on that point. Emails done by government employees are not private and subject to FOIA queries. This is the law. In the UK and the USA. It has been suggested this batch of emails was in response to FOIA requests that the University of East Anglia deferred, illegally, and somebody decided to make them public when it was known they were skirting the law. The British office responsible for FOIA said they had broken the law, but only escaped punishment due to statute of limitations. See
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/25/loophole-in-uk-foia-laws-will-allow-cru-to-avoid-prosecution/
and
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/25/uea-the-new-crimestoppers/
The relevant quote:
– Anthony
Roger Otip,
The CLIMATEGATE emails were written on “company time,” regarding a taxpayer-funded work product. That has never been disputed. The correct term is “misappropriation of public funds.” The work product is the property of those who fund it, not the individual employees who wrote it. Tough luck that one of their own spilled the beans, huh?☺
Anthony
Not in Wisconsin apparently.
REPLY: Heh, lame, can’t win your argument so you throw up an aberration. As we both know, the UK is not Wisconsin, and the ICO would have prosecuted them if he could.
-Anthony
“But unlike heliocentrism, we cannot afford to wait a century for views
on climate change to catch up to climate science”
Well…uhm…I hate to break it to your buddy…but, climate science HAS become just LIKE “heliocentrism”, EVERYTHING revolves around AGW…..Okay…”egocentrism”.
No debate simply means you can’t defend your position…whatever the excuse to avoid debate.
Wanna play Clue?
Only a small percentage of Phil Jones’ emails on that server were released
-The subset that was released was not random
–So it didn’t give a fair representation
-Releasing additional selected emails would make the fight fairer
–But not civil
sort of piques my interest. It is my guess that this “subset” of emails was actually selected by Phil Jones himself, as those most damning to him and his cause, and nominated as those that most definitely had to be deleted (along with all the collateral comments of his consortium and the ghastly “code” by which they actually made their calculations). My further guess is that the “murder” was done in the computer room, by the FOIA officer, with a password.
Anthony
Sorry, I didn’t realize this was an argument. I’m not a lawyer. I’m more interested in the science than this legal stuff. If you say the emails of government employees are not private then I take your word for it. It’s not something I’d investigated, until just now I tried googling it and came up with that Wisconsin teachers case, which it seems to me suggests there may be cases when the law decides that certain instances of electronic communication by government employees may be deemed private.
I’m aware that Wisconsin is not in the UK, but I’m assuming Dr Peterson also wasn’t in the UK when he sent the email, and I’m not sure where the server the emails were taken from was located, or whether that even matters. The law is whatever it is, and that’s only really ever known for sure when it’s tested in court my legal friends tell me, but I’d say taking without permission correspondance that was intended to be private and publishing it is a tad unethical, unless one can clearly demonstrate that disclosure is in the public interest (not simply that the public are interested in it) and that that overrides any personal harm that could result from publication (I guess that applies as much to Wikileaks as to this).
Anyway, I suppose the next time I email a government employee I’d better be careful what I say, or perhaps I’ll use the phone instead.
Roger Otip,
Peterson hasn’t denied the validity of the email. His intention to make the email public or not has nothing to do with the slanderous and defamatory content of the email. Surely you agree that it is hypocritical for Peterson to complain about uncivil language from others while he himself makes defamatory slurs – a hypocrisy that is all too common among climate scientists, as we’ve recently seen in the preprint of Trenberth’s speech.
Dr. Peterson,
A great many scientists from not just a few disciplines have watched this non-debate for many years, some for several decades. Beginning about the same time as the UN’s Food for Oil scandal. Not just a few have had papers rejected out of hand in ways never experienced before, and watched the same done to others. We have watched sites like RealClimate spring up, offered scholarly opinions and watched them either disappear or never appear, when they were quite well-focused and carefully considered scientific opinions. And then we watched the Climategate scenario unfold.
The entire situation indeed reminded us of Galileo except church and science seemed to have switched sides. And now we see that it isn’t so much the science as how the science is packaged.
Personally, I rather doubt it is possible for this long practicing scientist to effectively communicate the contempt that we hold the rather young science of climatology, and the even lower esteem that we have for climatologists. Many of us who have written complex models for things like geophysics and hydrogeology know that the only way to be taken seriously is to both publish your code and your data. To not do so, and to engage in the byzantine chicanery and skullduggery that has thankfully now been daylighted, goes beyond destroying credibility. It conveys the probable permanence of it. To engage in psychological repackaging of such discredited messages takes this into a domain for which I still await a proper name.
In the world of environmental litigation support we know which “experts” have “cred” and which ones do not. That in no way means that we are not sometimes put into the position of recommending the engagement of those that do not. It is done specifically with the goal of bamboozling judges and juries. Once so branded that is all such “experts” ever do again. And they are well known.
Climategate was a “come to Jesus moment” for climate scientists. Off the top of my head of the many such “scientists” involved only Judith Curry rates listening to, but with a properly jaundiced ear. But that does not mean those of us anticipating the next many years of climate litigation support are not keeping very assiduous notes. It happens to be part of our business not to forget. You would be wise to take a note.
Remember, WE choose the dark paths down which we walk. In this electronic world, those dark paths can become quite well lighted by such things as Climategate, FOIA shenanigans etc., so it isn’t just the path anymore, it’s each little step along it. And some of the attorneys I work with are ever so good at just needing a single one…..
Steve McIntyre
I think there is a huge difference between something said publicly and something said privately – and in that I include something that was meant to remain private and that the author believed would remain private. The difference lies with the intention of the author. If you really wanted to bring someone down then you’d be shouting out your defamation from the rooftops, getting it out there on whatever media you can lay your hands on, blogging it, tweeting it, broadcasting it in whatever way, not just narrowcasting it to one sole individual. And there are people out there, many people, blogging and twittering and broadcasting uncivil and in some cases libellous words about other people with the express intention of undermining their reputations.
Roger Otip says:
January 17, 2011 at 5:11 pm
ScientistForTruth
what if climate science is wrong on attribution, or models, or understanding, or physics? Do we really want to advance “views” and policies towards what is wrong, then?
If the science turns out to be wrong and yet we’re already some way down the road of transitioning our economies to a post-fossil fuels world, building nuclear power stations, investing in and developing renewables, well, this is something we’d have had to have done sooner or later as these fossil fuels are running out, plus our dependance on them binds us to some pretty unsavoury regimes. But if the science turns out to be right but we have not taken action to reduce our emissions, then the consequences could be grave.
========================================================
Hi Roger, hope you’re still here………a response to your response…..
Errr, no, we’re not building new nuclear plants. At least not anywhere near what is necessary. What we are doing is building wind and solar plants. We’re a few centuries or so away from running out of fossil fuels. And no, you nor anyone else knows what we would have done 10/20/50/100 years from now. As to wind and solar, REE are necessary materials for these to work. The U.S. mines none. China does. Nice, we’re spending billions so we can be more dependent on a leftist regime as opposed to being more dependent on a leftist regime. (China or Venz.) Somehow, I don’t feel good about this. Strange. But here! This is your money quote!…….
“But if the science turns out to be right but we have not taken action to reduce our emissions, then the consequences could be grave.”
There is a large body of science that says it isn’t correct. So much so, it would be ludicrous to act before more information is available. But, as you’ve stated we’ve already taken steps towards these goals. Indeed, we have. We’ve come up with a wonderful scheme to turn a food source into a fuel source for motorized vehicles. Brilliant! The fuel is less efficient and costs more to produce. That on it face really isn’t what the problem is, though. But, I’m sure you know all of this already. What the problem is, a very foreseeable consequence was that food prices have dramatically risen. We’re now using wind and solar generation for electricity, backed up by natural gas. This in turn has raised the price of both electricity and natural gas(used for cooking and heat). For everybody! So, in sum, in our Quixotic quest, we’ve managed to raise the cost of food, fuel, and electricity, for nearly every person on this planet! I’ll repeat what you said, “then the consequences could be grave.”
Sir, have you check the alarmist body count lately? People have starved. We’ve doubled the price of corn! This in turn has raised the prices of all other commodities! How many died in the U.K. because they had to choose between food or warmth? And that is just one very affluent nation! What of the less fortunate nations? Why? Because we’re afraid of 1 or 2 degrees more warmth? History tells us this is good for the world. Because someone thinks an essential molecule is evil? Even if all of the dark fantasies of the warmists were true, this would only present a slight challenge for mankind to overcome just as all of our predecessors had done ins the past. The cowardice displayed by a significant portion of this planet disgusts me to the point of revulsion. Scared, others have to die because you and people like you are scared of the unknown.
The consequences could be grave and indeed they were. Many souls took your consequences to the grave. And you and I helped pay for it.
Thanks for responding.
The comment that “we cannot afford to wait a century for views
on climate change to catch up to climate science” is a political judgment not a scientific one, that is one major problem I have with your side of the argument, while claiming to be the side upholding science your side quite often makes the political arguments, often in response to the scientific arguments made on the other side.
I am not sure I understand the point of the rebuttal.
1. If I have thousands of emails in my account but only two of them describe my shoplifting, am I any less of a shoplifter because there are thousands of other emails that don’t describe shoplifting?
2. The idea that one is “in a fight” assumes they have set their sights on a goal. They aren’t allowing they data to lead them where they will, this shows an almost limbic protection of their hypothesis in the face of criticism. It is a matter of protecting the conclusion and not a matter of close analysis of the data. A scientist or (worse) a group of scientists striving to be victorious seems somehow anti-science. The truth doesn’t “fight”, it just is.
Nobody is “fighting” the AGW scientists but many are looking closely at the data and saying, “wait a minute, 2+2 does not equal 5”. The adjustments; the removal of rural, high latitude, and high altitude stations; the continuing changing of the adjustments over time that walk older data colder and newer data warmer; all of this is giving people pause. Added to this the appearance of hiding data and methods, and finally the climategate emails on top of all of that like a nice neat ribbon with a bow to wrap it all up … it looks bad. It looks very bad.
In other words, it doesn’t appear that the scientists are so much “fighting” for the conclusion of AGW so much as they are “fighting” for the policies that the conclusion would tend to warrant. When the conclusion is questioned, then naturally follows a questioning of the policies based on that conclusion and that seems to be what the “fight” is about.
Roger Otip says:
January 17, 2011 at 7:17 pm
“ICO would have prosecuted them if he could.”
_______________________________________________________
I admire your implicit faith that there is no corruption in AGW science circles.
Excellent! Then all Dr. P has to do is release all of his emails and convince Dr. Jones to do the same! I can hardly wait!
But when, oh when, are these academics going to finally stop pretending that they are doing science?
Dr Peterson invokes the spirit of Galileo and adds “.. but unlike heliocentrism, we cannot afford to wait a century for views on climate change to catch up to climate science …”.
Above all, Galileo was an empiricist.
In astronomy, he would not submit to the prevailing model and, by patient observation, proved it was wrong.
Is Dr Peterson seriously suggesting that after just 60 years of observing alleged AGW (as defined by IPCC AR4) during which time there has been only one period of sustained net warming (1980-2000), that now he has sufficient evidence of the warming effect of a constant, monotonically rising CO2 concentration — sufficient evidence to warrant the immediate and complete dismantling of world economy with unimaginable civil consequences?