Well, the DeSmog Blog “coup” is going down, oh the humanity.
There’s a scathing second writeup at The Atlantic by Megan McArdle (as if the first wasn’t enough) that takes the DeSmoggers to task. Note to Hoggan and crew – when you can’t even get a left leaning news outlet to back you up, even in the slightest, you’ve lost the battle.
This is a must read: Heartland Memo Looking Faker By the Minute
I appreciate this quote from her article:
The high probability that the memo is fake makes this response from Desmogblog, one of the first places to post the memos, all the more disappointing:
The DeSmogBlog has no evidence supporting Heartland’s claim that the Strategic document is fake. A close review of the content shows that it is overwhelmingly accurate (“almost too accurate” for one analyst), and while critics have said that it is “too short” or is distinguished by “an overuse of commas,” even the skeptics at weatherguy Anthony Watts’s WUWT say that a technical analysis of the metadata on the documents in question does not offer sufficient information to come to a firm conclusion either way.But in the tradition of the famous, and famously controversial “hockey stick graph,” the challenge to the single document has afforded the DeSmogBlog’s critics – and Heartland’s supporters – something comfortable to obsess about while they avoid answering questions raised by the other documents.
The first two links are to my post, and they are an egregious misrepresentation of what I said.
She adds:
Dismissing the possibility of fakery–and the obvious questions about who might have perpetrated it–does not help us focus on the “real issues”. I’m afraid “Fake but accurate” just won’t do. Nor will trying to shift the burden of proof to the people who are pointing out solid reasons for concern. Instead, the stubborn willingness to ignore obvious problems becomes the story–something that Dan Rather learned to his dismay in 2004.
Moreover, the fact is that this document does not merely confirm facts found in other sources. It substantially recasts those facts, in the case of the Koch donation. And in the selection of facts it presents, and the spin it puts on them, it alters the reporting.
…
The climate blogs presumably relied so heavily on the memo because the quotes were punchier, and suggested far darker motivations than the blandly professional language of the authenticated documents–and because it edited the facts into a neat, almost narrative story.
In the first 24 hours, I saw a lot of comments along the line of “See! They’re really just as amoral and dangerous as we thought they were!” based on a memo which I now believe to have been written by someone who, well, thinks that AGW skeptics are amoral and dangerous. (And judging from his update to the original document dump, Littlemore’s fellow blogger, Brandon Demelle, is also unsure of the memo’s “facts”.)
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Crash and burn for DeSmog.
Meanwhile, over at The American Spectator, Ross Kaminsky has this:
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Theft and Apparent Forgery of Heartland Institute Documents
The Heartland Institute is in contact with law enforcement officials, which may have the perpetrator feeling a little nervous.
One obvious suspect in the Heartland document theft — and this is just my speculation — is Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security and a true enemy of the Heartland Institute. Gleick is a committed alarmist rent-seeker who seems quite bitter that he shares Forbes magazine’s pages with Heartland’s James Taylor.
The document which the alarmists have been trying to make the most of is called “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy.” It appears to be of a similar nature to the forged “Rathergate” documents which ended Dan Rather’s long career promoting leftist views disguised as news.
First, the Heartland document is written in a way which makes it appear unlikely to be genuine. As a commenter on a Forbes.com article about this mini-scandal notes, “It uses the term ‘anti-climate’ to refer to Heartland’s own position — a derogatory term which climate skeptic outfits never use to describe their positions (and…) it is written in the first person, yet there’s no indication of who wrote it. (Have you ever seen a memo like that?)”
…
Interestingly, Gleick, who would normally be preening and prancing in glee at this sort of attention to the Heartland Institute has so far been utterly silent at his Forbes blog and on his Twitter feed.
Full story here.
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(Added)There are two other discussions of interest in the “whodunnit” category. Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has a spirited discussion going on (love his movie graphic), as does Lucia’s Blackboard. Pielke Jr. has flat out asked Dr. Gleick in an email if he was involved, and so have I. I have received no response since my email this morning, and to my knowledge neither has Pielke Jr. For once, not a sound out of WaterWorld by the bay.
In Australia, The Age has this political cartoon about Dr. Bob Carter, also named in the emails along with me:
We live in interesting times. Popcorn futures are off the charts.
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oh…. my….. God!! BREAKING NEWS
February 20, 2012, 8:06 pm
Peter Gleick Admits to Deception in Obtaining Heartland Climate Files
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Peter H. Gleick, a water and climate analyst who has been studying aspects of global warming for more than two decades, in recent years became an aggressive critic of organizations and individuals casting doubt on the seriousness of greenhouse-driven climate change. He used blogs, congressional testimony, group letters and other means to make his case.
Now, Gleick has admitted to an act that leaves his reputation in ruins and threatens to undercut the cause he spent so much time pursuing. His summary, just published on his blog at Huffington Post, speaks for itself. You can read his short statement below with a couple of thoughts from me:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/peter-gleick-admits-to-deception-in-obtaining-heartland-climate-files/?smid=tw-nytimesscience&seid=auto
johanna says:
February 20, 2012 at 5:47 pm
“Oh, and Gleick has just confessed – see Climate Audit for details.”
Ausgegleickt.
That was quicker than I thought.
yawn says:
February 20, 2012 at 12:08 pm
“Digging? You are not making any sense. The documents have been verified as containing correct and accurate information. For example, the anti-science school curriculum project. Are you going to argue that the facts are correct, but the documents fake? Or what?”
yawn, “digging” as in the Rule Of Holes.
With each comment you are trying to obfuscate the distinction between the boring real information in the docs and the added forged document; the standard PR tactic.
As I said, see what it will get you.
DirkH;
your variant German spelling threw me and Google for a bit.
Ausgegleicht works tho’.
Michael Tobis, waiting for your defense of proxy thermometry. But I see you farmed it out. No sweat. Stay tuned.
You asked: ““What paleoclimatologists do is grounded in ecology.” How is that more informative than your “what engineers do is grounded in physics”?
Physics is grounded in falsifable theory, Mike. Ecology, as such, is not. Evolutionary Theory is falsifiable. Geophysics is falsifiable. Climate futurology is not.
So, you went through a degree in engineering without realizing it’s based in Physics. That’s your loss. A physics base doesn’t mean engineering can have no empirical equations. Chemistry has them too. But no one would think they are not rooted in physical theory. Likewise your engineering empiricism. As Theodosius Dobzhansky said of Biology, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution,” so likewise engineering, Mike: Nothing in Engineering makes sense except in light of Physics.
Without physics, engineers haven’t a profession. They only have a trade.
My first reply to Michael Tobis concerning proxy paleothermometry, which concerns the neglected measurement error in the temperature d-O18 proxy.
The second reply concerns the complete non-science of the standard proxy paleo-temperature reconstruction.
As I write this (8:55 pm PST) both posts are still awaiting moderation. We’ll see.
I feel a great disturbance in the Farce. It’s felt like a million lies, dying, all at once.
Well, the experience was lovely. The take-home message? Whoever disagrees with Michael Tobis is either stupid or dishonest, or both.
I posted a series of replies this evening at the Singer thread at Planet3.org, concerning measurement error in dO-18 proxies. It appears that Michael Tobis has deleted the lot of them. There’s the courage of his conviction.
That’s become a trend for him. In our debate at his old blog, now here, he apparently got frustrated, posted a pathetic insult, and then closed the thread.
I’ll probably repost the Singer thread replies here.
Michael Tobis has after all, allowed a sanitized version of one post, allowed two verbatim, and didn’t allow a fourth.
This post was truncated because of, “… insulting ad hominem commentary removed – AS …”. Below is the post in its original entirety with the “insulting ad hominem” bolded, as an object example of the ethical refinement of the Planet3 moderator, apparently “AS” in this case.
Here’s the post: “Kaustubh, we can agree that dO-18 in shell calcite is a function of marine temperature and salinity.
“We can also agree that when constructing paleo-temperatures from fossil calcite, direct knowledge of paleo-marine temperature and salinity is not in hand.
“Therefore, one does not know whether any detected change in fossil dO-18 is due to a change in paleo-temperature, or in paleo-salinity, or both.
“But it gets more complicated. Bemis, 1997 discuss the non-equilibrium values of dO-18 in foraminifera, and relate that to impacts of variable symbiont photosynthesis and over-all marine [CO3(2-)]. Photosynthetic activity can vary with both cloudiness and turbidity, as well as nutrient flux.
“Temperature, salinity, photosynthesis, and [CO3(2-)] now represent four variables that enter into foraminiferal calcite dO-18. How does one then isolate a physically clean temperature signal from fossil foram calcite?
“Apart from that, however, the accuracy of a dO-18 measurement depends on more than mass spectrometry. It also depends on the chemical methods used to liberate CO2 from fossil calcite. For example: how much of the O-18 in the CO2 exchanges with O-16 in the water used to process the calcite.
“These variables can impact a dO-18 paleo-temperature reconstruction in unknown ways, and are responsible for the point scatter one sees in the experimental data. Therefore, any paleo-temperature reconstructed from fossil calcite must acknowledge the uncertainty due to the real possibility of confounding environmental variables that are currently invisible to analysis.
“Figure 2 in Bemis, 1997 displays the lines for 10 independent empirical dO-18 paleo-temperature prediction equations. The variation between the lines is far greater than the uncertainty due to measurement scatter about the mean line.
“Bemis Figure 2 shows that a single marine temperature can produce a spread in dO-18 of about 0.8%o. Conversely a predictive spread of about 3.5 C can follow from a single dO-18 value. And this is with known temperatures.
“The empirical spread displayed in Bemis, et al., Figure 2 implies an uncertainty of about (+/-)1.75 C in any reconstructed dO-18 temperature, just based on the spread of the standard empirical equations. This inter-equational uncertainty is in addition to the uncertainty within each equation itself due to the systematic point scatter I described above.
“As the internal measurement errors and the external inter-equational uncertainties stem from independent sets of systematic errors, they combine as the rms: (+/-)sqrt[measurement error)^2+(inter-equational spread)^2] = sqrt[(1.25)^2+(1.75)^2]=(+/-)2.2 C.
“All these variations are real and clearly reflect systematic errors due to unaccounted confounding variables. And those systematic errors have entered into empirical equations derived from studies where the water temperatures and salinities are known.
“I wondered whether paleo-salinity might be independently recoverable from Mg/Ca or Sr/Ca ratios. That might help resolve the confounding of temperature and salinity in fossil calcite. But apparently, that is not a current possibility. See Dodd and Crisp, Nürnberg, et al., and Takesue, et al.
“Kaustubh, as a Ph.D. student, by the time you graduate you will have risen to being a world expert in your field. Attaining that state will require you to learn the field down to the bed-rock, or as close to that as you can get.
“You had plenty of time to write a long essay replying to my initial WUWT comment, but now have no time to write a response to my discussion of the methodological uncertainties that enter into dO-18 temperature reconstructions.
“You should have been already familiar with those uncertainties, because you should have worked thoroughly through the foundational papers. If you were familiar with the methodological problems and their solutions, and knew that the problems I raised had already been solved, and how, you’d have immediately described those solutions, with citations.
“But you didn’t.
“That’s evidence that you don’t know. It’s clear, therefore, that the empirical uncertainties I raised are new to you. You haven’t worked through the papers that underlie your field. And as a consequence, you posted the list of papers as rhetorical iconography rather than as science.
“You must decide what you’re really doing, Kaustubh. Are you doing science or are you playing games?
“Doing science means knowing the data and surrendering to the data. The data evidently don’t support precise dO-18 temperature reconstructions, even though the physics of equilibrium thermal fractionation of stable isotopes is well-understood. The reasons include methodological error and unaccounted environmental variables.
“There’s no dishonor in uncertainty, because that’s just how things are. It’s no one’s fault. Methodological uncertainties just show where people must focus their attention. The mistake is trying to force the data into pre-set conclusions. At that point, it’s games and not science.
“So which is it going to be for you, Kaustubh? The meaning of your Ph.D. will depend on the choice you make.”
So there it is. An outrage, isn’t it? 🙂
I wrote to Kaustubh as someone thoroughly familiar with experimental science and as someone who has worked with generations of graduate students (~5 yrs/generation). The difference between games and science is obvious to any scientist. A grad student who cites papers as icons of foundational certitude, while clearly not having worked through the contents, is in danger of descent into game playing. I gathered that Kaustubh is about a 2nd year grad student. It’s time for him to begin mastering his discipline, and it seemed constructive to his development into a scientist to impart that as advice.
The post below, in response to this never appeared at all. I can’t imagine why, except maybe the moderator got upset because of the reference to Michael Mann or, perhaps more likely, because of the mention of he who must not be named, followed by a link to his blog.
Whatever the reason, the absent post follows. The “Arthur,” addressee by the way, is apparently a Ph.D. trained physicist who seems to know nothing of Chemistry, or spectroscopy, or the history of either, or even of systematic error analysis.
Anyway … “#11, Arthur, spectroscopic data were approached from theory, not phenomenology, ever since atomic emission lines were explained using the new quantum mechanics in the early 1920’s.
“After that, came its improvements in Chemistry and Physics from valence bond theory, through molecular orbital theory, and in Inorganic Chemistry, crystal field theory, ligand field theory, self-consistent field and X-alpha methods, right through to DFT all of which employed quantum mechanics, and all of which did a good to excellent job explaining absorption and emission spectra.
“Chemistry itself, apart from QM, is thoroughly grounded in atomic theory and Thermodynamics. Those constitute “most of what what chemists do.” Not phenomenology, not statistics, and not “[parametrized] simple models.” You were wrong the first time you claimed Chemistry is based in phenomenology, and you’re still wrong.
Your comments about DFT merely show that you have no appreciation of approximation methods.
“I know physicists and work with them. You don’t write like one, you don’t evidence thinking like one, and you don’t respect science — their professional passion — like one. No matter your training in science, your description of it is impoverished.
No one knows how Michael Mann calculated his 1998/1999 error bars, because he has never released his entire code and has never fully clarified his methods. If you have information to the contrary, then I suggest you contact Steve McIntyre. I’m sure you’d have a fine conversation, i.e., about this, for example.
Monte Carlo methods are useful only for analyzing systems under an assumption of random distribution. That’s hardly useful for assessing systematic error.
“Finally, I have not “[dismissed] paleoclimatology.” I’ve merely pointed out a neglected methodological uncertainty in dO-18 temperature reconstructions.
“That uncertainty obviates any reconstruction of paleo SST at better accuracy than about (+/-)2 C.
“”Idiosyncratic” is your insistent elaboration of misperceptions about science that border on the bizarre.”