Guest essay by Dr. Tim Ball
Cherry-picking data in climate science gained notoriety during the joint Committee Hearing chaired by Representative Barton on the “hockey stick.” Steve McIntyre reported, “D’Arrigo put up a slide about “cherry picking” and then she explained to the panel that that’s what you have to do if you want to make cherry pie.” There’s another form of cherry-picking central in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) science that involves finding people to produce the science you want. They bring the cherry-picked data with them.
Anthropogenic global warming (AGW), first appeared on the world stage after the 1988 hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Chair Senator Timothy Wirth described arranging for the appearance of James Hansen whose testimony became central justification for the global warming fiasco that still continues. It was the first major example of picking people from obscurity to advance the political agenda of global warming.
Wirth explains how he organized Hansen’s appearance in an interview with Frontline. In response to the question “How did you know about Jim Hansen?” He replied;
“I don’t remember exactly where the data came from, but we knew there was this scientist at NASA who had really identified the human impact before anybody else had done so and was very certain about it. So we called him up and asked him if he would testify. Now, this is a tough thing for a scientist to do when you’re going to make such an outspoken statement is this your part of the federal bureaucracy. Jim Hansen has always been a very brave and outspoken individual.”
Wirth set the stage by holding the hearing on the historically hottest day of the year in Washington and the night before opening the windows and shutting off the air conditioning in the room. Wirth later said, “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing…” Wirth led the US negotiating team at the Kyoto Summit. Hansen became head of NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) where he was a very politically active bureaucrat. His blatant flaunting of the Hatch Act suggests political protection.
Benjamin Santer, an American, took a B.SC in Environmental Science and a Ph.D., in Climatology at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in England, graduating in 1987. His thesis supervisor Tom Wigley Director of CRU, later moved to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), where Stephen Schneider worked. Santer’s thesis, ‘Regional Validation of General Circulation Models” used the three top models and data from around the North Atlantic. They did not recreate actual condition and produced large non-existent pressure systems. They failed a standard validation test.
Just three years after graduation he appears as B.D.Santer from the Max Planck Institute as a Contributor to Section 8 of the 1990 IPCC Report. Tom Wigley was lead author of Section 8. By the 1995 Report Santer was convening lead author for Chapter 8. In that Report he was caught changing the story agreed to by his fellow authors from no evidence of a human signal, to “a discernible human signal”. Santer claims he was ready to quit science because of the attacks for his deception but received encouragement from the promoter of climate exaggeration and participant in four IPCC Reports, Stephen Schneider. Santer said, “Steve was a huge source of support to me,” “He told me, ‘Ben, some things are worth fighting for, and this is worth fighting for.’” Likely the fight is for “the cause” identified in the leaked CRU emails.
David Demings’ congressional testimony gives insight into how the CRU/IPCC dealt with problems. It involved the challenge the Medieval Warm Period posed for the IPCC. Deming wrote,
With the publication of the article in Science [in 1995], I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. So one of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”
[Emphasis added]
The IPCC needed somebody to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). This was part of the challenge posed by Figure 7c in the 1990 Report. Existence of the MWP contradicted the IPCC claim that the late 20th century was the warmest ever. Two arguments were tried. One was a personal attack on Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas and their article Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1,000 years, Soon, W., and S. Baliunas, 2003 Climate Research, 23, 89–110 which established existence of the MWP from a multitude of sources. The leaked CRU emails exposed John Holdren, Obama’s Science Tsar, as an active and virulent part of the personal attacks. On 16th October 2003 Michael Mann sent an email;
“Dear All,
Thought you would be interested in this exchange, which John Holdren of Harvard has been kind enough to pass along…”
The second was the claim that the MWP was not global. Attacks on Soon and Baliunas and the “not global” claim had little traction, especially for the mainstream media and the public. The IPCC were aware prior to the 1995 Report they had to get rid of the MWP and it required supposedly scientific evidence. It led to the next cherry picking.
Barry Saltzman, climate professor at Yale from 1968 to his death in 2001 had his work “Theory of Climate” published posthumously in 2002. He was labeled, “the father of modern climate theory” by the American Meteorological Society (AMS). In their accolades the AMS said, “Barry Saltzman led the revival of the theory that variations of atmospheric CO2 are a significant driver of long-term climate change.” Saltzman identified his challenge as one that confronts all specialists who study climate, a generalist discipline. The need was, as he put it, to bridge the “cultural gap”. This challenge is where most corruption of climate science occurs. People using unfamiliar specialist procedures and methodologies to achieve a result to support their climate beliefs. Saltzman identified a major bridging area when he identified the skills of those who “have brilliantly and painstakingly been reconstructing the paleoclimatic record.” “It is again my hope that this book will help bridge this gap.”
Salzman supervised Michael Mann’s thesis, a person he thought would bridge the gap between his theory and temperature. The shifts in focus and speed with which Michael Mann took center stage at the IPCC are revealing.
His doctoral thesis “A study of ocean-atmosphere interaction and low-frequency variability of the climate system” and other work did not involve dendroclimatology until he connected with Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes. The collaboration created the now discredited “hockey stick” graph that eliminated the MWP. He provided the mathematical and computer model techniques to bridge the gap for Bradley and Hughes as Saltzman had hoped.
Mann’s acceleration from obscurity paralleled Hansen and Santer. In 1998, the same year he received his PhD and there are reports it was rushed through, he became contributing author for Chapters 7, 8, and 12 as well as Lead Author for Chapter 2 of the IPCC Third report scheduled for release in 2001. He later became central to the production of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) that re-emphasized the hockey stick claims. These activities triggered the first recommendation of the Wegman Report
Recommendation 1. Especially when massive amounts of public monies and human lives are at stake, academic work should have a more intense level of scrutiny and review. It is especially the case that authors of policy-related documents like the IPCC report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, should not be the same people as those that constructed the academic papers.
The IPCC had no choice but to give Mann such prominence because his work was deliberately unique.
Another form of cherry picking involved the selection of members of the IPCC. Maurice Strong set it up through the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) so that all participants were bureaucrats or selected by bureaucrats. As Richard Lindzen explained,
“IPCC’s emphasis, however, isn’t on getting qualified scientists, but on getting representatives from over 100 countries, said Lindzen. The truth is only a handful of countries do quality climate research. Most of the so-called experts served merely to pad the numbers.”
“It is no small matter that routine weather service functionaries from New Zealand to Tanzania are referred to as ‘the world’s leading climate scientists.’ It should come as no surprise that they will be determinedly supportive of the process.”
The Canadian example typifies activities because Environment Canada was involved from the start. Assistant deputy Minister Gordon McBean chaired the IPCC founding meeting in Villach Austria in 1985. Former Minister of Environment, David Anderson (He has a dog named Kyoto) announced they consulted all Canadian climate experts on the Kyoto Protocol. Eight scientists held a press conference in Ottawa to say they were not consulted. Anderson, who had not announced Kyoto plans, suddenly scheduled their announcement at exactly the same time as the scientist’s press conference thus drawing media attention.
Environment Canada (EC) diverted so much funding to climate change they failed to provide proper service. This triggered political questions so they were ordered set up an independent investigation. They reported the truth as Kenneth Green confirmed when he wrote,
The Impact Group, a contractor working for Environment Canada”s Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC), has released materials that support the contention that policy is driving climate science in Canada, not the other way around.
EC did not release the results, but as Green notes,
Elements of an “Action Plan for Climate Science Research at MSC” (obtained through an Access to Information request) indicate that Canada’s climate change science program is being driven by a predetermined political agenda with a clear disregard of scientific needs.
This comment applies to all national weather agencies and thereby to the IPCC process. It doesn’t get much more corrupt in science than cherry-picking data and people.
The process is corrupt because there is grant money involved. Grant money pays salaries and brings speaker invites, and offers road to tenure. Grant money pays post-grad fellowships and trips to Scandinavia (Swedish bikini team, et al), which brings more publications. More pubs brings more more grants.
Repeat cycle, ad nauseum.
Amazing! Reminds me of an old Broadway song, “We’re in the Money”!
Something I remember from my Army years that I said to myself early in my career, “those who can get to the Money will take all they can. Those that can’t, just too bad”.
They will burn an Army contractor or controller for kick backs and bribes but at Congress level, it’s just campaign contributions in exchange for services.
“His blatant flaunting of the Hatch Act suggests political protection.”
Forgive me a moment of pedantry, but I think the word you want there is “flouting” not “flaunting”.
It is patently obvious this entire AGW movement has, from the beginning, been a political program masquerading as science,
Shame to all the trough dwellers involved, and contempt for those blind fools in the general population who still buy it.
“Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) science that involves finding people to produce the science you want.”
And when someone questions the science, they say ‘there is a consensus’, pointing at the IPCC.
A self selecting (political) consensus is not a genuine consensus. The argument from (IPCC) authority therefore fails.
And those in control of the grant money have ideological goals. They’re essentially paying for propaganda.
Dr. Ball, many thanks for joining the dots. Great research, and a great article which snapshots the perversion of science over the past 3 decades.
@ Pachygrapsus. April 20th 2014 at 12:33
I’ll second that…but it’s not pedantry to point it out. While I’ve got the chance, I’ll flag up the substitutions of momentarily for presently, presently for currently, inference for intimation and alternate for alternative. In all cases a word gets hijacked and given a new meaning, leaving no ready alternative word to use for the old meaning. It means we are slowly losing our tools for conveying ideas and goodness knows, we need to define our ideas as succinctly and accurately as possible when dealing with the spin in climate science.
“The leaked CRU emails exposed John Holdren, Obama’s Science Tsar, as an active and virulent part of the personal attacks.”
Quotes from Holdren:
“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States…De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation.”
http://www.c3headlines.com/global-warming-quotes-climate-change-quotes.html
While practical politics limits how much he can carry out his desires, those are code words for desiring to force reduced consumption (production), towards the lesser carrying capacity which land would have if humanity was de-developed, de-industrialized. (Primitives had very low survivable populations per unit area, whereas the opposite is, for instance, when Israel unnaturally develops and irrigates desert land to turn its natural carrying capacity of near zero into something much higher, builds nuclear-powered desalination plants providing a substantial percentage now of its total water usage, etc).
The likes of him are not scientists in the old sense of a combo of pure academic interest with desire to increase the material & energy production and capabilities of mankind, rather the opposite. The CAGW movement is a surface cause, and arguments about climate itself fail to “convince” its core, because nothing to do with climate is the root motivation.
And, of course, with enough people involved, eventually someone slipped up by outright mentioning how little they really care about the truth of climate itself, as this article quoted:
“Wirth later said, “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing…””
Regarding:
“We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”
And indeed they do have to, for, in temperature data not rewritten, both the past millennium and the past century have multiple peak appearances which fit patterns in solar-CRF forcing meanwhile as illustrated in my usual http://tinyurl.com/nbnh7hq, whereas data rewritten towards hockey sticks allows them to claim mismatch. Part of why they don’t mind such dishonesty is, as earlier implied, this isn’t really about the truth of climate to them.
Someone can support the CAGW movement and be honest if really ignorant and new to the topic, but about anyone much experienced is a different matter, having passed through a test of whether or not they split off to become a skeptic upon learning enough or instead don’t really care about honesty.
Joel, “ad nauseum” should be “ad nauseam”.
The Latin word is nausea, whose accusative form is nauseam.
Margaret Thatcher started pushing it in 1988 as well, for her political purposes. Officially changed her mind later, but the damage had been done.
And thus for the selected and self selected players for the cause life is a bowl of cherries 🙁
it only works because the cult of the priest who must be believed because they say they have a hotline to god is replaced by the cult of the expert who must be believed because they say they have a hotline to the truth.
My memory may be fading, but Dr.Ball seems to be doing some cherry picking of his own as regards the origins of climate hysteria. At the climate summits of 1990 and 1992, the Bush (HW) Administration was endlessly castigated by European media and politicians for its reluctance to jump on the evolving bandwagon. Even then the BBC was suitably outraged (as ever!). Of course the Democrats in the US are always on the lookout for some political advantage, but western Europe was already well advanced in climate-mongering by 1990 (eg Thatcher at the UN 1989) and this could hardly have been spur of the moment?
One of the questions posed by (often innocent) believers in CAGW is ‘how could such a giant conspiracy ever have taken off…how could so many scientists and scientific bodies around the world have got it so profoundly wrong?”
Well the article above provides a very good and clear timeline as to when and how and by what channels a handful of activists managed to infiltrate the establishment and pervert the course of Climate Science for the last 3 decades.
Well done Tim Ball.
“RoHa says:
April 20, 2014 at 2:18 am”
Be careful now as you might find someone claiming he had nothing to do with the Policy Unit or keeping “science advisers” to Thatcher “in control” just a few years before that fateful 1988 speach.
Whether the Iron Mountain Report was a hoax, satire or real, the idea of a manufactured environmantal crisis certainly seems to have appealed to some people as a blueprint:
http://www.thelightgate.com/IRON%20MOUNTAIN%20BRIEFING%20PAPER.pdf
Orwell’s 1984 was fiction too …. when it was written.
RoHa on April 20, 2014 at 2:18 am
“Margaret Thatcher started pushing it in 1988 as well, for her political purposes. Officially changed her mind later, but the damage had been done.”
Mrs Thatcher left Number 10 in November 1990 so, at best, she had little more than two years to influence the situation. She saw that nuclear power, managed properly, offered an energy supply with less political hassle than Middle Eastern oil, which is what the French have done! They sell their nuclear power sourced electricity to the UK, and Germany etc! The idea was to give Britain a cheap, reliable, long term energy source, unlike the windmills that blight our countryside and shores! And the damage is continuing!
Apparently, Shale Gas is back in fashion, except with the UK’s only Green MP, and so is nuclear, except that the UK has run out of people with enough experience!
Mrs Thatcher “officially changed her mind” when more evidence was gathered, again, unlike the windmill worshipers!
” She saw that nuclear power, managed properly, offered an energy supply with less political hassle than Middle Eastern oil… The idea was to give Britain a cheap, reliable, long term energy source”
Crap , it was an essential part of her plans to destroy the british coal mining industry, which at that time was an integral part of the infrastructure.
Thatcher was planning that before she took office , not in 1998.
Nuclear never has been and never will be “cheap”.
Witness the the recent deal by Cameron which DOUBLES the wholesale price of generated power agreed with EDF at the same time as giving illegal subsidies by dispensing EDF of the responsibility of any costs (and hence hefty insurance costs) in case of a nuclear accident.
Read this and know the real puppet masters behind the scam: http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2014-04-18/bankers-are-behind-wars
Greg April 20, 2014 at 3:39 am
“it was an essential part of her plans to destroy the british coal mining industry, which at that time was an integral part of the infrastructure”
Yes: and the purpose of that was to secure “energy supply with less political hassle than Middle Eastern oil” or British coal. The leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers had already brought down one democratically-elected British Government in the 1970s, and Arthur Scargill and Mick McGahey (both far-far-Leftists) hoped for a repeat performance in the 1980s. They failed only because of the remarkable woman who opposed them.
If the leadership of the NUM had not been so very willing to abuse their industrial power, based entirely on the use of coal for power generation, the whole history of the British coal industry from the 70s onwards would have been different. The spectacle of apologists for Scargill and McGahey weeping crocodile tears over job losses in the industry is nauseating – and constantly on display, even now.
Pachygrapsus says:
Forgive me a moment of pedantry, but I think the word you want there is “flouting” not “flaunting”.
I know what you mean, but I have a feeling that Tim has used EXACTLY the word he wanted to… 😉
There are many ways of lying, cherry-picking being but one, and the CAGW cultists use them all, perhaps even inventing new ones. My first exposure to the lies was my first climate skeptic book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming” by Chris Horner. Then came “Unstoppable Global Warming” by Avery and Singer, and another by Chris Horner, “Red Hot Lies”. Among the biggies is the lie that skeptics/climate realists are “funded by big oil”. The viciousness with which they attacked anyone who dared to speak out against “the consensus”, which itself was a double-lie was and still is astounding. Big Climate is a vast, multi-billion dollar anti-human pseudo-scientific quasi-religious coalescence of varied interests, described recently as a meme-plex, which I believe is an apt description of it. Money, power, and self-interest are what drive it. In recent years, particularly after the failure of Copenhagen, but also due to temperatures refusing to do what they needed them to do, the whole thing has begun to crumble and collapse in on itself, despite their best efforts to prop it up, which of course involves lashing out even more against their opponents. At intervals, we skeptics are either a tiny, dwindling band with big money backing us and inordinate influence via the MSM and the internet, or a vast army working against a frail group of “scientists”, whose only interests lie in science, and who see a danger to the planet which they are trying to warn us of. As psychopathic compulsive liars, they just can’t understand the power of truth to eventually win. It baffles and frustrates them to no end.
Greg says:
April 20, 2014 at 3:39 am
Nuclear never has been and never will be “cheap”.
=============
Nuclear phobia requires gross over design of nuclear power stations. Nuclear could be cheap if government didn’t help.
A minor correction: Kyoto the dog belonged to Stephane Dion, not David Anderson. Briefly leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, before Stephen Harper and the rest of the political parties put the run to the Liberals. Dion is still an MP, I believe, and one of the highest ranking (useful) idiots Canada has ever produced. Dion was a central facilitator in Montreal for COP11 and was the architect for one of Canada’s most ambitious climate policies The Green Shift.
Dr. Ball, I’ve just read and learned many things from your “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science”. Thanks a lot. The sole concern about your book is a slight redundancy in description.
Thanks Dr. Ball. Reach as many people as you can and one day we will all realize we’ve been done.
I feel certain, that just like me, you can remember the “transition time” back in the 1970s when the agenda/polemic changed from catastrophic cooling to catastrophic warming. – I remember it well; even thou the “debate” seemed to be calmer back then. Probably, it was – I suppose, because it was much less money and no Nobel Prize involved back then.
Please keep going Tim.
A real scientist will spend a career trying to disprove his own theory, a climatologist spends his life and our money trying to prove his theory. One believes what they can prove, the other tries to prove what they believe.
It is the story of corruption that will be the sorry history of the AGW movement.
We deserve better science and better integrity that what Wirth, Hansen, Santer, etc. etc. etc. have given us. They have violated our trust and profited greatly.
Bruce Cobb says:
April 20, 2014 at 4:44 am
The warmists speak out of both sides of their mouths about the beliefs of Big Energy. Here’s an appeal for indoctrinating school children in Wyoming:
Editorial board: Join energy industries and admit climate change exists
http://trib.com/opinion/editorial/editorial-board-join-energy-industries-and-admit-climate-change-exists/article_ca4a1bd6-e7d4-5dde-acad-140c21c8067e.html
“we have to get rid of the medieval warm period” It appears Dr. Saltzman thought “I have just the Mann for the job…….”
Greg, You are wrong. Nuclear energy is already the cheapest source of electrical energy in the world see this OECD report http://www.oecd-nea.org/pub/egc/docs/exec-summary-ENG.pdf
With the new generation Thorium and mixed uranium & Thorium reactors being developed in China, India and other countries it will be even cheaper by a considerable margin. The Greens and socialists who want to ban nuclear energy are holding back progress in the Western world but they can not stop the Chinese and the Indians.
But one chapter in a potential book, anatomy of a scam. Perhaps the chapter titled perps.
Other chapters will feature Himalayan glaciers (grey literature and reliance on nonscience), polar bears and mass extinctions (wrong science/bad science), inherent model limitations (grid scales and resolution of convection cells and clouds), naked agendas tacked onto the bandwagon (Tuvalu, Green Climate Fund), and at least one chapter on how the whole scam was brought down by a few Internet blogs and bloggers despite no organization and meager resources compared to billions spent by governments, because they exposed the fundamental flaws in the foundations of the CAGW edifice.
Hansen was sure in 1988. Below are a few things Hansen discovered after 1988. Science is a journey of discovery indeed. After 1988 and the setting up of the IPCC we discovered the PDO in 1996.
Hansen even got it right about Venus.
Dr. James Hansen should hang up his boots and stay at home for the sake of his and our grandchildren. It’s all for the grandchildren.
Later retracted by Hansen himself. Why oh why should any sane person listen to whatever Dr. James Hansen has to say? He has been wrong on so many levels that I despair.
(He has a dog named Kyoto)
Having a dog in the fight?
(My money is on UCC member, Kenchi.)
Why oh why should any sane person listen to whatever Dr. James Hansen has to say? He has been wrong on so many levels that I despair.
Yet I’ll say one thing for him: His “solution” was the among most realistic of the entire lot.
When I was just out of college, I was working on a construction crew and one day one of the guys I was working with said, “One of these days I’m gonna quit working for a living and go and make some money.”
Some one quoted the song title, “We’re in the Money,” above. There’s another song that also applies here: “Nice Work If You Can Get It.”
But to be fair, it’s more than the money. It’s the pleasure they get from imposing the religious laws of environmental radicalism. The money is just a means to achieve power. The real greed is for power to curtail human excess so they can revel in the glory of having saved the earth.
Speaking of Hansen, I actually have a book called “Censoring Science”, on “Dr. James Hansen and The TRUTH of Global Warming”, given to me by my mother perhaps 4 or 5 years ago (it was published in 2008), in hopes, I guess, that I would “see the light”. I have never read it, but, out of curiosity I did just poke my nose into it. The first paragraph reads as follows:
“One sweltering June afternoon in 1988, an understated Iowan named James Hansen turned global warming into an international issue with one sentence. He told a group of reporters in a hearing room, just after testifying to a Senate committee, “It’s time to stop waffling…and say that the greenhouse effect is here and is affecting our climate now”.
Yes, the famous stagecrafted Senate hearing. How could we forget. Notice what he says though, basically that the greenhouse effect is real, and does effect our climate. He conveniently left out the fact that this has always been the case, and no more so now than before. It was lying by omission, and it had the desired effect, because he knew the clueless MSM and politicians would catch the alarmist intent and run with it.
Two months later, Michael Oppenheimer boasted to the NY Times “I’ve never seen an environmental issue mature so quickly, shifting from science to the policy realm almost overnight”.
I’m not sure how far I’ll get with the book, but it is somewhat fascinating, in a morbid type way.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Deliberate-Corruption-Climate-Science/dp/0988877740/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1398007245&sr=8-1
Does anyone know who emailed Demings and said “We have to get rid of the medeival warm period”?
It’s all policy based and at an another totally bases play field than science.
Thank you Dr. Tim Ball for filling in some holes in the sequence of happenings for me.
I am still trying to get a better handle on specifically what ‘THE CAUSE’ is.
Is it (primarily) NATO driven redistribution of world wealth, using climate change as a vehicle?
Is it a kind of eugenicist thinking control of the human species with only the special few in control?
Is it simply Mega ego’s, personal power and money?
If I remember correctly, Dr. Ball, you voted ‘no’ on the question of an organization of skeptics.
Cfact is sort of that type of organization. I voted ‘yes’ but not with the idea of an in your face notoriety. Rather, as a group that could gradually meet, inform and support each other, exchange information, determine how to support students and/or instructors at colleges who are simply trying to be objective in their science. Perhaps it could become an avenue on how to get financial support of those doing climate or other science research.
I am gradually gathering information for a book regarding some facets of human nature, of which the AGW/ CAGW meme will be a large part. Dr. Ball, I expect I will be giving you credit for many things.—–
—-There is one story which I am very anxious to present, but I cannot until the involved person gives me permission. I cannot state at this point the sex of the person, only that the person is relatively young, has a family and, is involved in science directly related to modelling global ocean/atmospheric climate changes, and is an employee of a(n) college/university.
Our first communication was by email, then (much) later by phone- and that communication evolved slowly and carefully, gradually tip toeing into tepid trusting waters.
Finally tears and stories of being careful as to not disclose actual scientific understanding so as not to be ostracized by colleagues or lose financial support. Amazing! Sad!
Democracy is based on that the elected representatives base their policy on science.
With climate and environmental policy based science we no longer have a functionally democracy. I think I see why Obama turned the IRS on the Tea Party and the Republicans?
USA should rid itself of the democrats?
James McCown—–There has been speculation (only speculation) that it was Jonathan Overpeck.
or ‘Peck’ as he likes to be called.
The reason for the confusion is that flouters often flaunt their flout.
=======================
darrylb – Thanks. I have also heard Kevin Trenberth. But I don’t have any idea. I don’t understand why its being kept a secret.
Mann’s PhD was not rushed through. He defended his thesis in 1996! As the degree was not awarded until ’98, apparently he agreed to take the huge professional risk of publishing the “MBH’98” Hockey Stick paper in exchange for not flunking.
darrylb says:
April 20, 2014 at 8:45 am
That was me, Darryl. I am uncertain as to how my father would have voted.
Hearing chaired by Representative Barton on the “hockey stick.” Steve McIntyre reported, “D’Arrigo put up a slide about “cherry picking” and then she explained to the panel that that’s what you have to do if you want to make cherry pie.”
Interestingly ‘Cherry Pie’ is cockney rhyming slang for “Lie”
So D’Arrigo chose a rather apt analogy with which I would completely agree.
Climate ‘science’ is as much has anything else an ‘industry . and the first task of any industry is to ensure its own ‘profitability’ from which all other things flow .
Hansen and Mann were ‘plucked from obscurity’?
Ball will be lucky if he’s remembered at all. Maybe as a footnote as the loser of some defamation lawsuits in Canada.
What matters more is being right and not being remembered for being wrong. Imagine if Hansen is shown to be wrong as the decades move forward? His grandchildren will hang their heads in shame, just like yourself.
Magma nastily uses misdirection and sleight of hand, going from the concept of “plucked from obscurity” to the completely different idea of being remembered, throwing in an ad hominem for good measure. Typical troll tactics.
darrylb says:
April 20, 2014 at 8:45 am
Thank you Dr. Tim Ball for filling in some holes in the sequence of happenings for me.
I am still trying to get a better handle on specifically what ‘THE CAUSE’ is.
Is it (primarily) NATO driven redistribution of world wealth, using climate change as a vehicle?
Is it a kind of eugenicist thinking control of the human species with only the special few in control?
Is it simply Mega ego’s, personal power and money?
===================================
I would say any of these things, depending on the person.
Gadzooks, climate change is politically driven. Didn’t anyone read about the genesis of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, convened in 1992 and base on “By the mid-1980s, scientists warned that global warming beyond natural variability was occurring and that this was in large part due to human activity and the increase of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs).”
The mid 1980’s were just 10 years away from the end of global cooling in 1975. They took 5-8 year trends and turned them into an industry!
Santer claims he was ready to quit science because of the attacks for his deception but received encouragement from the promoter of climate exaggeration and participant in four IPCC Reports, Stephen Schneider ….
——————————————————————————————————————————-
Stephen Schneider is the same Stephen Schneider who, in the 1970’s when the world climate was going through a minor cooling, hung his hat on a little ice age. He refuted a suggestion that increasing CO2 may mitigate this prophesised cooling and I refer to an article by Schneider published by ‘Science’ magazine in 1971 claiming that the warming capability of CO2 was greatly exaggerated. He said that even an eightfold increase of CO2 over existing levels would warm the earths surface by less than 2 degrees (John L Daly “The Greenhouse Trap”) Amazing how a man can maintain creditability while his ‘science’ appears to be based solely on decadal small world temperature variations.
Not only that, but Dr. Ball’s continuous misuse of, or lack of, commas is really astounding. He really should let someone, anyone, proofread this stuff before posting.
cementafriend. Those of you tempted by Nuclear Power. Look under the rocks, check it out. It is a massive loser from every angle.
Cost? What would we think folks from Pripyat and Fukushima think about cost? How much for their lost towns, neighborhoods, homes, land, farmland, businesses, jobs? Think about your home.
Now Leave, right now, leave everything behind, and never return.
Is this an acceptable risk?
Without even these tragic, avoidable events, nuclear power has been the most expensive energy, by multiple orders of magnitude.
They were uninsurable from the start by private companies, who laughed them out of the office.
Only gov’t action via Price Anderson made them possible. They are now seriously under-insured at $500 mil each. But they are not worried, as they know they will be bailed out, when things go awry. It is another cost they need not pay.
Costs. From uranium mines and mills, to cleaning up those existing messes, to enrichment facilities, to cleaning up those messes, 100s of billions yet to be spent decommissioning sites, still more cleaning up after current messes, and some fictional wild guesstimate of the cost of 20,000 years of waste storage? Cheap? That is not even funny.
The good news is, nobody is interested, because it is currently a bad business
10 Billion US up front now to even start thinking about a new one, and nobody is jumping, because the economics do not work. So bad, they are shutting down running plants. Vermont Yankee, shut down because it doesn’t work financially. San Onofre. Crystal River. Well, they broke the latter, Oops.
Now too expensive to fix.
Gorbachev says it was Chernobyl that broke the USSR. Fukushima is busy breaking Japan.
The Govt already bailed them to the tune of 50 billion. Last year. 40 years before the cleanup can begin. Pesky water, radioactivity flowing into the Pacific, as we speak. as it will continue to do, for decades.
Too Cheap To Measure!
Thorium. The US spent billions on this. Billions. It was not a secret. There was no conspiracy. The smartest guys in the room Noticed it, tried it.
In the 1960’s and early 1970’s the DOE’s predecessor, the AEC assumed that some 1000 reactors would be on line in the United States with a commensurate nuclear growth world -wide. As a result, the AEC predicted that world uranium supplies would be rapidly exhausted.
These assumptions drove research.
Japan, Britain, France, Germany, all tried. All failed. The effort and money was there. It did not work. It is still of course, a huge temptation. On paper, beautiful. So India manages to continue to fail at it.
Safe? Not safe. Not safer. Thorium itself is more radioactive than still cheap uranium. A worker in a little over 6 working days could reach the maximum annual U.S. occupational exposure limit.
Two more? Liquid sodium’s fondness for spontaneous combustion upon contact with water or air, and the unfortunate by product, uranium-232.
Ugly even in this ugly crowd, it is 60 million times more radioactive than uranium-238.
The end result is nastier than the spices that come out of our rusty old GE boilers.
Of course all of that used stuff sits in the spent fuel pools, under no containment.
Another cost to consider, for past performance. That bill, still due.
The industry has sat on the stuff, hoping for a centralized Gov’t storage facility. How much?
24,000 Hiroshima’s worth of radioactivity in the SFP at that little place 30 miles from NYC.
It has collected and sat because there was no place to put it. The industry waited for a storage solution so they could hand it off, along with liability, costs and responsibility for the waste.
Now the WIPP has come down. There will be No place to put it.
These companies now must face the fact that they are stuck with the waste. The sites become waste storage sites, casks in the parking lot.
Expect them to fold, as separate LLCs they can safely do that.
The states will be stuck holding the baby.
It is over.
/Rant
I wrote a short note on this a few years ago-
Climate scientists often chastise ‘climate deniers’ (whatever that means) for selecting subsets of a particular dataset and using it to argue that catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is not yet observed.
Setting aside the fact that climate science is flooded with cherry-picked studies, there is a more serious issue with climate science. The person that becomes a climate scientist is a cherry-picked sampling of the world’s scientists and engineers. Very often, a student will become interested in climate science because of a strong desire to protect the world from destructive human activities. This foundational belief impacts every aspect of the climate scientist’s life, especially their work product. It often results in a data diode, ignoring, discounting, ad-hominemizing or trivializing observations or conclusions that run counter to their tightly-held beliefs of man-made eco-destruction.
The cherry picking becomes acute and consequential to society when scientists are selected to author or edit major reports, such as the UN IPCC’s quinquennial climate change assessments, the last of which (AR5) was just completed in fall 2013. Without exception, scientists selected to shepherd these reports have strong convictions that humans have only unipolar, negative impacts on the environment. The resulting reports, given overt influence over public policy, consist of cherry-picked data provided by cherry-picked scientists with an axe to grind.
There are thousands of examples of advocacy statements made by climate scientists over the decades. It is simply impossible to believe that these statements: a) do not represent the personal opinions of the scientists; and b) reflect an unbiased evaluation of the scientific evidence available. This fundamental problem with climate science contributes profoundly to the accelerating erosion of the field’s credibility in the eyes of not only other scientists and engineers, but of the public in general- you know, the people who fund the majority of climate science.
Eliminating this problem should be the number one priority of all scientific organizations.
Pachygrapsus says:
April 20, 2014 at 12:33 am
Pachygrapsus:
He has been flaunting his flouting.
Regards,
Jack
Rud,
RE: how the whole scam was brought down by a few Internet blogs and bloggers despite no organization and meager resources compared to billions spent by governments
That is one of the amazing parts of the story for me. It doesn’t take a lot of digging to find out which side of the debate the money is on, yet people stick to the big oil storyline with a persistence that is hard to understand. Along with the consensus and the science is settled meme’s (the latter being the one that set off my alarm bell). Appears the latest is loss of academic freedom.
We’ve seen a lot on how climate scientists just need to communicate better. Based on what I’ve observed, their competence at communicating can be predicted from their compentence at doing climate science.
id8,
Anyone citing Chernobyl in a discussion on nuclear power in western democracies either is poorly informed or has an agenda to push. Nowhere in the west is that design in use. Furthermore, the multiple short circuiting of safety measures would never be allowed. Finally, lets take a look at the impacts. The tens of thousands dying prematurely? Hasn’t happened. The exclusion zone around the plant? 25 miles, with over 200 families living within it (the Russian government couldn’t stop them from returning home).
As for Fukashima, it should be telling how people choose to ignore or advoid comparisons between the death toll and cost incurred from the earthquake and tsunami to that of Fukashima. The plant survived the earthquake and would have survived the damage caused by the tsunami (both events being outside original design parameters) had it not been for the devestation to the electrical grid caused by the tsunami.
As for the [“threat”] from leaking radioactive water, it compares with the “threats” climate change purportedly presents us with. Most people’s views on radiation seem to come from 1950’s horror movies. In the real world people’s ability to handle radiation is far better than what we get told.
Maybe the author is going to rewrite the part about that link leading to the right post but just hasnt gotten around to it yet.
I’m currently reading the third book in the Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, named “That Hideous Strength”. I can’t avoid pointing out the similarities between the actions and methods of the IPCC and those of the NICE institute from that book. It’s clear that the IPCC is one of the tentacles of quite a “Hideous Strength”.