NOTE: In this essay, commenters have noted that Dr. Tim Ball used a rhetorical device in this sentence:
“The following is a possible email from John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, to bureaucrat Karl, or at least to his boss, at NOAA.”
Had I seen the word “possible”, I would not have allowed the subsequent paragraph where Dr. Ball outlined a “possible” email. While I understand what he was trying to do, this is just wrong, and I apologize to readers that this rhetorical device even exists in this essay, because it opens the possibility that somebody may interpret this as a real email.
UPDATE: This article has been revised and updated, and Dr. Tim Ball writes: Here is an extensive revision of my article to replace the one that caused so much grief.
The current article as of 7PM PDT 6/16/15 has been fully updated.- Anthony Watts
UPDATE2: 6/17/15 9:20AM PDT Dr. Ball adds via email with request it be posted here:
I wish to thank Anthony for the opportunity to rewrite the original article. It is no excuse, but I let my views color my judgment. It was triggered by the claim on the White House web site that “The weather is getting more extreme.” Evidence does not support this claim, as I believe the President’s Science Advisor should know. The [rhetorical] device used to draw attention to this was inappropriate.I have always said that if I am wrong about the global warming/ climate change issue as presented by the IPCC then I must be the first to publicly say so. It is important that I maintain a credible voice to continue to confront misuse of climatology and climate science.
Guest Opinion by Dr. Tim Ball
One dictionary defines Modus Operandi (MO) as
…a particular way or method of doing something, especially one that is characteristic or well-established: the volunteers were instructed to buy specific systems using our usual modus operandi—anonymously and with cash.
Use of a nefarious example illustrates the predominant use of the term by criminal investigators. The recent publication of an article by Karl et al. (2015) Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus (paywalled) appears to fit the modus operandi of official climate science, at least since the 1995 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Several analyses and comments outline the serious problems and contrived nature of the article. Bob Tisdale addressed his comments to the lead author, Thomas Karl, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center. Tisdale concluded,
“The results of the statistical methods used on the earlier version of the NOAA sea surface temperature data (ERSST.v3b) did not provide the results NOAA was looking for now, so NOAA/NCEI, under your direction, mixed and matched methods until they found the results you wanted (ERSST.v4).”
He cited Judith Curry’s conclusion.
“This new paper is especially interesting in context of the Karl et al paper that ‘disappears’ the hiatus. I suspect that the main take home message for the public (those paying attention, anyways) is that the data is really uncertain and there is plenty of opportunity for scientists to ‘cherry pick’ methods to get desired results.”
I disagree with Curry’s conclusion, even for “those paying attention”. Very few know about the problems with leather bucket, metal bucket, and ship water intake temperature measures. Most don’t know how cherry picking the start and end of a graph is central to official climate science. The point Tisdale and Curry miss is that Karl et al., don’t care. All they want is a headline that removes the hiatus from the debate. They know the media and public don’t understand. They also know it’s easy to counter by calling challengers deniers. The article and its timing are in the sequence or modus operandi of the IPCC and the proponents of anthropogenic warming (AGW), at least since 1995.
The first example of the MO of finding the science or scientists to provide support for the global political agenda started with selection of James Hansen to appear before a 1988 Senate Hearing. As former US Senator Timothy Wirth said in PBS Frontline interview.
We knew there was this scientist at NASA, you know, 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 as this and you’re part of the federal bureaucracy. Jim Hansen has always been a very brave and outspoken individual.
The transition from the 1990 Report to the 1995 Report marked a shift from reasonable science to directed science. Both Reports worked from the UNFCCC definition of climate change that restricted them to only human causes. However, the decision to restrict the definition caught up with the scientific method. Because they chose to prove the hypothesis rather than disprove it, they ran into contradictory data and evidence. The situation caused Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist and former Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to comment that the consensus was reached before the research had even begun. It also eliminated the possibility of the null hypothesis that something other than human activity was the cause of global warming.
The AGW hypothesis developed around the idea that the highest temperatures in the record occurred in the latter part of the 20th century. The deception is in the focus on the modern instrumental record. A few scientists pointed to warmer temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) a thousand years before the instrumental record and approximately 800 years before the Industrial Revolution. They also identified the lack of a discernible human signal in the record. Both problems appeared in the 1990 Report, the MWP as part of Figure 7c (Figure 1), and the latter in commentary.
Figure 1
The IPCC essentially had two options, acknowledge the evidence and adjust their science or refute it. They chose the latter and took the first steps in the modus operandi that led to the Karl et al., article.
No technique existed to eliminate the MWP when the 1995 Report appeared. They focused on the lack of a discernable human influence issue. They achieved this through the amendments made to Chapter 8. The IPCC committee under Chapter 8 Lead Author Benjamin Santer, a graduate of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), wrote,
· “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.”
· “While some of the pattern-base discussed here have claimed detection of a significant climate change, no study to date has positively attributed all or part of climate change observed to man-made causes.”
· “Any claims of positive detection and attribution of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.”
· “While none of these studies has specifically considered the attribution issue, they often draw some attribution conclusions, for which there is little justification.”
The sentences Santer placed in the Report said,
· “There is evidence of an emerging pattern of climate response to forcing by greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols … from the geographical, seasonal and vertical patterns of temperature change … These results point toward a human influence on global climate.”
· “The body of statistical evidence in chapter 8, when examined in the context of our physical understanding of the climate system, now points to a discernible human influence on the global climate.”
In 2006 Avery and Singer wrote,
“Santer single-handedly reversed the ‘climate science’ of the whole IPCC report and with it the global warming political process! The ‘discernible human influence’ supposedly revealed by the IPCC has been cited thousands of times since in media around the world, and has been the ‘stopper’ in millions of debates among nonscientists.”
The situation required a peer-reviewed article to establish Santer’s credibility. It appeared rapidly (July, 1996) in the journal Nature with the title “A Search for Human Influences On the Thermal Structure of the Atmosphere” authored by Santer, Wigley, Jones, Mitchell, Oort and Stouffer.
Research designed to confront the MWP did not appear until the 2001 IPCC Report. David Deming revealed they were working on the problem. In a letter to Science he 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.”
Most of the story about creation of the “hockey stick” that eliminated the MWP is extensively documented. The hockey stick actually promoted three misperceptions for the public. It eliminated the MWP and the Little Ice Age (LIA) in the handle of the stick, which accentuated the upturn in temperature of the 20th century temperature record. All three were false, but necessary to the objective of showing that current climate conditions were exceptional.
Ironically, the hockey stick eliminated a bump in the temperature graph but the next problem was no bump. Temperatures leveled starting after 1998, but CO2 levels continued to rise. The response by AGW people followed the MO by changing names from global warming to climate change instead of correcting the science.
The President is promoting climate change as the greatest threat to the world. A major challenge to his agenda is the hiatus or pause in temperature increase for the last 18 years. It is as big a hindrance to this agenda as the MWP was to the IPCC agenda. Attacks on the MWP included production of the hockey stick but also personal attacks on Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. They produced an article “Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1,000 years” with extensive proof of the existence of the MWP. John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, helped in the attack.
In an email on October 16, 2003 to Michael Mann and Tom Wigley he wrote:
“I’m forwarding for your entertainment an exchange that followed from my being quoted in the Harvard Crimson to the effect that you and your colleagues are right and my “Harvard” colleagues Soon and Baliunas are wrong about what the evidence shows concerning surface temperatures over the past millennium. The cover note to faculty and postdocs in a regular Wednesday breakfast discussion group on environmental science and public policy in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences is more or less self-explanatory.”
Here is what he, Holdren wrote to the Harvard Wednesday Breakfast group:
“I append here an e-mail correspondence I have engaged in over the past few days trying to educate a Soon/Baliunas supporter who originally wrote to me asking how I could think that Soon and Baliunas are wrong and Mann et al. are right (a view attributed to me, correctly, in the Harvard Crimson). This individual apparently runs a web site on which he had been touting the Soon/Baliunas position.”
Holdren would understand the need for peer-reviewed research to show there is no hiatus and temperatures continue to rise. As he wrote to the person questioning his views on the Soon and Baliunas article,
“But, in practice, burden of proof is an evolving thing—it evolves as the amount of evidence relevant to a particular proposition grows.”
The evidence is evolving but it is showing the hypothesis is wrong. The solution all along was to counter with inaccurate information. The President exemplified the problems on the White House web page with the false statement that, “The weather is getting more extreme.”
Thomas Karl’s article is another example of the MO of the IPCC and its adherent’s willingness to produce science to fit the political need. Curry’s claim that the public takeaway is that the data is uncertain with a high cherry picking potential misses the point. The real point is that the data chosen and how it was handled are so inappropriate they would fail a first-year climate class paper. How it ever got through peer review is a disturbing mystery, except it is climate science and peer review was never a roadblock. It is so wrong that there is only one conclusion based on the MO it was created to eliminate problematic evidence, namely the hiatus. Ironically, the hiatus is giving AGW proponents a hernia.
I was writing a post about my reaction to this one, but I had to stop for a minute. You see, I received a possible email from Tim Ball which said:
————–
Email from Tim Ball to Brandon Shollenberger:
It’s crazy, I know!
Poor little troll.
I possibly feel your pain.
Good Heavens! Tim Ball had better get on the online editor and clean this mess up.
Rip out the fake quotes, give reliable links to quotes that are allegedly real, and ….. never mind.
Better to withdraw the whole piece with an apology.
I agree, given that he has dug in and blames the readers for the confusion.
Agreed, Tim Ball is probably the most unreliable ( and uninteresting ) author to get articles on WUWT. I have no idea why our host carries this stuff. There certainly does not seem to be a shortage of material here.
I disagree with you Mike. Tim Ball sheds light on the corruption known as the IPCC and the global warming / climate change nonsense that ‘political scientists’ peddle. If they were real “scientists” they would not peddle this garbage.
Why you said what you said makes me wonder if you are okay with all this corruption and are a closet warmunist.
Mike, Tim Ball is the only credible source of long term observations about the CAGW agenda. He was there from the beginning, way back in the eighties, and saw the agenda evolve. I do not know of another source of first hand observations who stands up for science. I find it helpful to see the big picture.
Mike, get off your high horse. Study the political motivations of the entire CAGW scam. Books have been written. Tim made a mistake in formatting what is very accurate information. You called Bob Tisdale’s accurate but poorly worded interpretation of what Judith Curry wrote a felony.
That, unlike Bobs accurate portrayal of what Judith clearly implied, was nonsense. Your general slam of Tim Ball, without articulating other examples is also without value.
Based on what I read in this thread, Mike is a typical “concern troll”. At least his MO is a typical concern troll MO 😉
Tim,
Your fumbling around to “illustrate the MO” by using fake emails is probably not a good idea.
You really should rethink this entire article, and rewrite or remove.
However, this is a great example of the fundamental need for a whistleblower from within the scam. Analysis and deduction reveals the scam MO–connive, conspire, obfuscate, admit nothing, deny everything make counter-accusations.
Until we have an actual insider who provides REAL emails that document the MO, or, better yet, an insider who wears a wire while discussing the scam with his colleagues, it is difficult to convince.
My son relentlessly repeats himself to get attention too. His excuse is that he’s 5, what’s yours?
Gosh, D.J., devastating wit.
If you want to see “repeating yourself,” follow the “scientific debate/discussion” of the realists–best demonstrated by our good host.
Well-meaning, apparently, but a complete waste of time, energy and focus. Pointing out their bad science, explaining their mendacity, proving that their math is wrong, or that they’ve fudged a number in a formula, or abused data–how many years now have realists been pointing out the scamming techniques? 15? 20?
My kids, when they were 5, learned pretty quickly to stop doing something that not produce results. They learned to focus on creative approaches to solutions.
As have I.
The only possible solution to revealing the heart of this scam is to recruit a whistleblower from the inside.
It’s the technique that prosecutors and investigators have used for a long, long time. In closely held criminal conspiracies, in which the co-conspirators have tight bonds of affinity, as in the AGW scam, there is no hope of revealing the conspiracy without an insider.
The Bernie Madoff scam is a perfect example. Without an insider providing details, the prosecution never would have been able to crack it. And yet, it took an outsider, over and over, for years, pointing the feds in the direction of the insiders with knowledge of the scam, to break the case.
I’ll keep on searching for a whistleblower who’s ready to do the right thing. Their consciences are eating away at them, even as they read this.
Do you know anyone with inside knowledge who’s ready to achieve fame, fortune and a conscience cleansing? Spread the word.
We are going to see a rain of these types of papers before Paris , in a all out effort .
The good news is it is becasue this is they feel that if they do not pull it off this time they never will and yet there is little reason to think Paris will in reality be much different to any other ‘wasteful jamboree’
—————
‘”Karl’s article is another example of the MO of the IPCC and its adherent’s willingness to produce science to fit the political need.”
You are right on , Tim.
It seems that every time there is Climate conference , a G7 meeting , a presidential major speech like the state of the union or an address of a political group,, new cherry picked science modifications to support global warming are released via hastily called press releases without little if any prior dialogue in the climate science community . These are clear political events and not about science at all.
Those who are considered as pioneers and ground breakers in science are not those who experimented and researched to promote an agenda. They simply wanted to discover how things worked and hopefully find a practical application of what they have learned. Personal motives may have been curiosity, altruism, financial gain etc. But it had to work. Edison and Bell wouldn’t have gotten get rich if the light bulb and the telephone didn’t work. But, for the most part, they sold directly to the public.
Today’s “climate science” sells to those who have an agenda to promote and the public foots the bill.
I like to think the ‘removal of the hiatus’ will ultimately be the ‘jumping the shark tank’ for the climate warmists… Because many people in the public ARE aware there has been a bit of a pause – heck even the IPCC acknowledges it. So to suddenly make it disappear will have many (not all, but many), going, ‘hang on a minute here… how can it ‘disappear?’ You said the pause was real, and now suddenly it isn’t? Just how reliable is this warming temperature data???’ And even if they don’t think that, then at the very least, there will be a seed of doubt planted as it rests uneasily that for 17-18 years there was a hiatus in the so called ‘recorded data’ and then suddenly there wasn’t…
This is the second time in a week that a regular contributor to WUWT has responded to civil, constructive criticism, from people sympathetic to his cause, by calling the critics “trolls,” and sarcastically dismissing the criticism. So far at least, Ball hasn’t gone embarrassingly over the top, as Monckton did when he flamed several commenters under his post about Karl et al, and thermodynamics.
Even though the topic of this post is more philosophical than scientific, assuming that criticism can only come from opponents, and that one’s position is perfect as presented, is the opposite of how scholarly discourse should take place. If a writer thinks that a substantive criticism is off the mark, he should either ignore it, or respond to it in kind. Flaming a thoughtful, non-confrontational commenter is wrong when CAGW writers do it. It is also wrong and counter-productive when skeptical writers do it. We shouldn’t be hypocrites.
There have been some intelligent comments here regarding the writer/reader relationship. Since these comments appear to be from like-minded people, they should be viewed as notes from a colleague after an author has given the colleague a piece to read before publication. They are a chance to consider a fresh perspective and possibly improve one’s rhetoric.
Or not. I’m new enough to this site that I could be wrong about its intentions. First impressions, even optimistic ones, have to be re-evaluated in the light of new evidence. If the habit here is not to encourage civil discussion, and discourage ad hominem attacks, even from regular contributors, then please consider this a well-intentioned, but uninformed opinion.
Having said all that: I also found the handling of the fake quote to be awkward. There are methods of formatting imagined dialogue which make clear what is being done. A couple have been mentioned. If nothing else, Ball should find it helpful, as a writer, to be made aware that the current format bounces the reader out of the essay, a distraction that could and should be avoided. As soon as I read the phrase “hypothetical email” (an unfamiliar rhetorical device) I stopped thinking about the essay’s subject and started asking questions about the essay’s construction. Fairly fundamental concept in non-fiction.
takebackthegreen, even if he didn’t use any special formatting to distinguish the fake quote from a real one, it would have been easy to clearly identify it as a hypothetical quote. It’s not hard to write a sentence saying a quote isn’t real but is something you could imagine being said. Tim Ball didn’t. He basically relied on people understanding the single phrase “possible email” to mean it wasn’t a real one, even though he then immediately described it as just an “Email.” Even if they did notice that one word, “possible,” in the ~1,700 words in the post, there’s no assurance they’d understand the quote was made up.
I really don’t think the formatting was the problem. I think the problem was just that he didn’t bother to clearly state the quote was a product of his imagination. That’s a shame because it’s easy to do.
I’ve been out today, but have now added this to the head of the post:
NOTE: In this essay, commenters have noted that Dr. Tim Ball used a rhetorical device in this sentence:
“The following is a possible email from John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, to bureaucrat Karl, or at least to his boss, at NOAA.”
Had I seen the word “possible”, I would not have allowed the subsequent paragraph where Dr. Ball outlined a “possible” email. While I understand what he was trying to do, this is just wrong, and I apologize to readers that this rhetorical device even exists in this essay, because it opens the possibility that somebody may interpret this as a real email. As a result, I have done a strike through on that section and I have asked Dr. Ball to comment on the issue.
Thank you Anthony. This article has shown your readers to be observant and critical if someone on our side misuses rhetoric. This article should be stashed in a prominent location as an example of rhetoric unsuitable to our purpose, and potentially harmful to our position as legitimate questioners of the science.
Integrity. Nothing wrong with that. One of the reasons this site isn’t just popular but trusted.
Per5haps Dr. Ball will be afforded the opportunity to amend the sentence to make it clearer that the email “quoted” is a hypothetical email?
OOPS!
I see you already clarified. (Integrity, again.8-)
Perhaps Dr. Ball would be permitted to add an “I concur” or clarification to what you redacted.
Some advice, Anthony, and an open warning to all of you. It would best to withdraw his post in its entirety and offer a general apology to those mentioned or have commented in this post. Dr. Ball’s use of the rhetorical device, while legitimate in form, failed in style, and the subsequent comment chain has exacerbated the situation significantly. There are several actionable comments in this post from more than one individual, about more than one individual, and given the scale of WUWT’s reach, the resultant mess could be very costly. The First Amendment offers no protection against explicit or implicit defamation, and the cosmopolitan nature of WUWT increases risk.
Clear the post, have Dr. Ball rewrite the article again if desired, based on, and including only factual information in the appropriate context, and tread carefully with both the real and implied accusations. There are limits to content in “public” conversations, the breach of which might find you at the wrong end of a very real legal dscussion.
If Dr. Ball could find a working link to the open letter reply by Gordon McBean and other EC scientists…
Message to Tim Ball ==> Please get in here and fix up this mess — or pull the entire piece.
It is entirely unclear which parts are fictitious and which parts might actually be quoting real emails — and even when one seems to recognize a quote as some email maybe from ClimateGate, etc, it is unclear who is speaking or writing.
Anthony has been forced to try and clean some of it up, but ity is still a mess of confusion.
It is an unwise strategy to try to say others are faking things up by faking things up yourself.
[snip]
Dr. Ball
Explaining the trend in Karl 2015
If the number of high ship readings is greater than the number of low buoy readings and over time that situation reverses you will always get an upwards trend. The size of the adjust made to one or the other does not effect that there will be an upward trend.
If you want a downward trend you start with the number of low buoy readings being greater than the number of high ship readings. As they reverse and the high ship readings come to outnumber the low buoy readings the downward trend appears. The size of the adjustment you make does not effect the appearance of a downward trend.
The trend is create by the changing number of high ship readings and low buoy readings.
So decreasing the greater number of high ship readings while increasing the fewer number of low buoy readings, no matter what adjustment is used between them, always produces an upward trend.
Doing it the opposite always produces a downward trend.
So the authors of Karl 2015 are either laughably incompetent or deliberate deceivers.
Eugene WR Gallun
We need to appear to play a straight game. And the only way to pull that one off convincingly is to be real sneaky and actually play a straight game.
A perfect 10. And you and I don’t agree on much.
Kudos to Tim Ball for the re-write of this column.
[Re-writes are not easy — authors like their work and don’t like scrapping something and re-doing it — I know I don’t. I admit that I scrap about 50% of what I write — it never sees the light of day.]
And Kudos2 for a real, well-worded sincere apology.
I disagree. The fake quote was clearly a spoof, a send-up. Amazing that so many got sent up!
On the other hand, it so closely mimics the real processes and priorities of the official Big Liars that it was highly plausible.