Posts Tagged Climate science

Carterist “science”: Bob’s self-plagiarism, misrepresentation and misquotations Gareth Renowden Mar 11

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homer.jpgThe crank web is all atwitter with the news that Bob Carter’s been censored by Australia’s public broadcaster, the ABC. But an exclusive Hot Topic investigation reveals that the supposed “censorship” looks a lot more like prudent quality control. Carter’s submission plagiarises his own writings, misquotes and misrepresents James Hansen, and joins the recent baseless attacks on the NZ temperature record.

When the ABC’s Unleashed site turned down Carter’s offering — supposedly a reply or counterbalance to their recent five part series on climate denial by Clive Hamilton — it was quickly picked up by his frequent publisher, Aussie website QuadrantOnline. Titled Lysenkoism and James Hansen – Is Hansenism more dangerous than Lysenkoism?, it’s a crude attack on Hansen, currently visiting Australia. But it’s not only crude, it’s unoriginal.

Carter opens his ABC/Quadrant piece with an account of Hansen’s 1988 testimony to Congress:

On June 23, 1988, a young and previously unknown NASA computer modeller, James Hansen, appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr. Hansen used a graph to convince his listeners that late 20th century warming was taking place at an accelerated rate, which, it being a scorching summer’s day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm.

But back in 2005, in a talk to the Melbourne Rotary Club titled Global Warming Hysteria and the Deadly Disease of Hansenism (and in a paper available on his web site since), he had this to say about Hansen’s testimony:

Why Hansenism? Because James Hansen was the NASA-employed scientist who started the climate alarmism hare running on June 23, 1988, when he appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr Hansen used a misleading graph to convince his listeners that [words cut here] warming was taking place at an accelerated rate (which, it being a scorching summer’s day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm). [My emboldening of identical words.]

Strikingly similar, I think you’ll agree. The next two paragraphs share strong similarities with his 2005 paper, although he attributes a quote from Hansen somewhat differently: Here’s the Quadrant/ABC piece:

Fifteen years later, in the Scientific American in March, 2004, Hansen came to write that “Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic”.

This conversion to honesty came too late, however, for in the intervening years thousands of other climate scientists had meanwhile climbed onto the Hansenist funding gravy-train.

Once again, here’s Carter’s original version:

Much later (20032), Hansen came to write “Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate …. scenarios consistent with what is realistic”. But this astonishing conversion to honesty came too late, for in the intervening years thousands of other climate scientists had meanwhile climbed onto the Hansenist funding gravy-train.

Carter’s use of this quote is intended to show that Hansen had been dishonest. What else can a “conversion to honesty” be taken to mean? But the dishonesty is entirely Carter’s, and the many other climate deniers (Patrick Michaels prominent among them) who have ripped Hansen’s words from their context. Firstly, the quote is not accurate, the relevant sentences as published are:

Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue, and energy sources such as “synfuels,” shale oil and tar sands were receiving strong consideration. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic under current conditions. Scenarios that accurately fit recent and near-future observations have the best chance of bringing all of the important players into the discussion, and they also are what is needed for the purpose of providing policy-makers the most effective and efficient options to stop global warming. [Missing words emboldened]

Secondly, as in so many things, context is all important. Hansen is discussing the details of the forcing scenarios put together by the IPCC for use in climate model runs. The standard scenarios assume no actions to reduce emissions. Hansen is arguing that to be useful for policy makers, scenarios that include emissions reductions need to be developed, to provide an idea of what might happen if action were taken. No change of mind, no admission of dishonesty — just a call for policy-relevant emissions trajectories and forcing scenarios. Misquotation and misrepresentation in the same breath — nice one, Bob. [Interesting too to note that the AR5 modelling will be based on new, more realistic scenarios that will include emissions reductions]

Let’s move on to the next par in the Bob’s samizdat article:

Currently, global warming alarmism is fuelled by an estimated worldwide expenditure on related research and greenhouse bureaucracy of more than US$10 billion annually. Scientists and bureaucrats being only too human, the power of such sums of money to corrupt not only the politics of greenhouse, but even the scientific process itself, should not be underestimated.

That’s a lot of money. What did he tell the Rotarians five years ago?

Currently, global warming alarmism is fuelled by an estimated worldwide expenditure on related research and greenhouse bureaucracy of US$3-4 billion annually. Scientists and bureaucrats being only too human, the power of such sums of money to corrupt not only the politics of greenhouse, but even the scientific process itself, must not be underestimated.

Crikey Moses, that’s some climate inflation! Not a Hansenist gravy train, but a Carterist scary ghost train.

The sections on “Lysenkoism” in the two pieces are also more or less identical, but in the more recent article, Bob moves on to deliver his wisdom on the state of climate science and policy advice in Australia, and can’t resist a dig at the NZ temperature record:

And, across the Tasman, NIWAgate is developing apace, as the N.Z. National Institute of Water & Atmosphere battles to provide a parliamentary accounting for its historic temperature archive, which may yet prove to include the “dog ate my homework” excuse for the apparent absence of some records.

Bob’s clearly channelling Treadgold and Wishart, and just as clearly out of touch (or perhaps that should be unwilling to be in touch) with reality.
So what are the basic tenets of Carterist science, as revealed by the writings of the great communicator himself? Bob describes them perfectly in his Rotary Club talk:

HansenistCarterist climate hysteria is driven by relentless, ideological, pseudo-scientific drivel, most of which issues from greenright wing political activists and their supporters, and is then promulgated by compliant media commentators who are innocent of knowledge of true scientific method. Opportunistically, and sadly, some scientists, too, contribute to the HansenistCarterist alarmism.

Quite right Bob. I share your sorrow, if not your shame.

Fight back, scientists urged Bryan Walker Mar 11

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“The response to the [email] vandals is to bury them with the data and experience of a century of scholarly research and analysis. The information that is important in making the decisions as to how to manage our world is unequivocal and must be advanced, not as questions at the edge of scientific knowledge where scientist like to dwell, but as the facts that they are, facts as immutable as the law of gravity. The climatic disruption is not a theory open to a belief system any more than the solar system is a theory, or gravity, or the oceanic tides, or evolution.”

Strong words from a scientist, but I felt an involuntary cheer as I read them on Joe Romm’s Climate Progress. They are from Dr. George Woodwell in an email to Romm. Woodwell is the founder, Director Emeritus, and Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Research Centre. 

Romm had invited comment from him in response to a Washington Times report of an email exchange between several scientists from the National Academy of Sciences discussing the need to fight back against the attempts by sceptics to portray the UEA emails and the IPCC error as ground for doubting the science of climate change.

“This is not the time to wring our hands over the challenges to hyper-scientific objectivity, the purity of scholars, and to tie ourselves in knots with apologies for alleged errors of trifling import.”

Here is the reality, which Woodwell expresses with a freshness of perception:

“The fact is that we, humans, have changed the composition of the atmosphere with respect to heat-trapping gases enough to start the progression of global climate, not into a new steady state, but into an open-ended warming that is pulling the environment out from under this civilization. If one wonders where that process leads, one need not look far around the world to find dysfunctional landscapes. Have a quick look at New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, or Haiti before the earthquake.  All have fallen far below any point where internal resources can be used to restore a nation with a functional political system, a vital economy, and a functional environment.”

Scientists need to come out fighting:

“The scientific community has done brilliantly with the IPCC, by nature a conservative apparatus. It is time now, thirty years after the problem was recognized as threatening this civilization, for the scientific community to come forth with clear instructions, relentlessly repeated and amplified, as to how to restore a functional habitat for humanity. It can be done, but the scientific community has a big responsibility not now widely recognized or accepted.”

Woodwell has had plenty of time to consider these matters.  Over twenty years ago, in 1988, he testified to a Senate committee under the title Rapid Global Warming: Worse With Neglect. The matters he raised then have continued to be prominent in the science in the intervening years, and the early warning he sounded has stood the test of time.  (The full text of his testimony is included on the Climate Progress post.)

James Hansen also gave his famous Congressional testimony that year, and continues today to bring his scientific concern about climate change to the attention of political leaders.  He is a splendid exemplar of Woodwell’s urging that the scientific community “come forth with clear instructions, relentlessly repeated and amplified”. 

There is much advice circulating these days about how to get the message across successfully to the public.  Some of it suggests that the scientists should retreat to their domain of research and leave it to others to work on public opinion. That won’t work.  If the scientists are not constantly and publicly reiterating the seriousness of their findings it’s likely that the issue will continue to be treated with far less urgency than it requires.  It’s not always easy for scientists to take public roles, but they need to do it  more than ever as the campaigns of disinformation reach the peaks of activity we have seen in recent months. Bravo Woodwell and others like him.

The Lomborg Deception Bryan Walker Mar 10

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Is it worth spending a whole book dissecting the writing of Bjørn Lomborg, the “skeptical environmentalist”?  Certainly not in terms of the quality of Lomborg’s argument, which simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.  But Lomborg’s writing has been permitted to exercise a widespread and harmful influence. For that reason Howard Friel’s painstaking book The Lomborg Deception: Setting the Record Straight About Global Warming represents time well and usefully spent.

Friel identifies two strains in Lomborg’s work: his “theorem”, that though global warming is happening and is human-induced it is far from a catastrophe; his “corollary” that there is therefore little need to incur the costs of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to the extent urged by concerned experts. Friel concentrates on Lomborg’s two books The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (2001) and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (2007). The first book covered a range of environmental concerns presented as an exaggerated “litany” of bad news generated by environmentalists. The second focused exclusively on climate change. 

Friel spends most of his space on a detailed examination of Cool It. Lomborg has no hesitation in claiming that scientists exaggerate the effects of global warming, and has a large number of end notes supposedly backing his claims with reference to the sources of his evidence. By examining those supporting notes and citations in considerable detail Friel exposes the flimsiness of Lomborg’s claims. They are grounded, to say the least, in bad data. Indeed if Friel’s tracking of the referencing is accurate they are hardly grounded at all.

Take Lomborg’s claim that there will be only 12 inches of sea level rise this century. Of this he attributes 9 inches to thermal expansion.  He references the 9 inches to Figure 10.6.1 in Working Group 1 (WG1) of the 2007 IPCC assessment report (AR4).  No such figure can be found, says Friel.  But assume Lomborg meant Section 10.6.1.  It contains three projections (using three SRES scenarios) of thermal expansion. They range between 4 and 15 inches. Lomborg apparently chooses a rough median and presents it as an unwarrantably precise estimate.

The remaining 3 inches of Lomborg’s 12 inch rise come from melting glaciers and ice caps. Here he references Figure 10.6.3 in WG1 of AR4. Again there is no such figure, and he probably meant Section 10.6.3 titled Glaciers and Ice Caps; nowhere in it or its subsections can Friel find any substantiation of the 3 inches claim. Lomborg then referenced a claim that Greenland is expected to contribute 1.4 inches by itself to, we assume, Section 10.6.4. With its subsections it spans five pages, which do not report any 1.4 inch expectation from Greenland. Lomborg’s further claim that Antarctica will be accumulating ice as a result of increased precipitation and consequently contribute a 2-inch reduction in sea level rise is also referenced to Section 10.6.4 which offers no such report.

“Thus,” writes Friel, “Lomborg referenced only these IPCC figures to itemize his assertion of a one-foot sea-level rise, even though none of these sources can be found in the IPCC assessment report.”

Friel finds similar loose sourcing to most of Lomborg’s claims. Polar bears are not threatened. Climate change will reduce human mortality due to an offsetting reduction in cold-related deaths. Extreme weather events will be much fewer than predicted by environmentalists. The WHO exaggerates excess fatalities due to global warming. Food concerns related to global warming are vastly overplayed – “we will be able to feed the world ever better”.  $4 billion annually will be enough to bring water and sanitation to those in the world who lack these essential services.

Friel offers frequent useful statements of the scientific consensus on many of these issues against which Lomborg sets himself as an authority empowered in some extraordinary way to see the exaggeration of which he asserts a large scientific community is guilty. 

The role of the IPCC, as set out in 1988 by the UN Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organisation, emphasises scientific objectivity, policy neutrality, balanced geographic representation, and consensus. By the time its reports are issued, Friel comments, one might conclude that its product would embody a scientifically sound consensus middle ground among its 2,500 contributors and reviewers. He marvels that Cool It, which reflects none of these characteristics and which throughout asserts unsubstantiated claims that are completely at odds with the IPCC consensus can yet be described as representing “the practical middle” (Wall Street Journal) or “the pragmatic center” (New York Times). Lomborg has successfully competed with the IPCC in the US. Friel provides a telling analogy: “…the favourable coverage of Lomborg and his books are to global warming what the triple-A ratings for mortgage-backed securities were to the US financial system – misguided seals of approval with catastrophic consequences.” More catastrophic, he notes, in the case of climate change than in the case of financial systems which can presumably be repaired. His verdict on the part played by publishers and journalists: “Lomborg’s success largely reflects an ability of elite publishing houses and news organizations to contruct an alternative but counterfeit network of knowledge about an issue of the highest public importance.”

In the light of his thorough scrutiny of Lomborg’s claimed sources Friel considers it legitimate to maintain that Lomborg’s books are an assault on science, as Scientific American did when it convened a forum of distinguished scientists to write a rebuttal to The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001. Friel reports this and other authoritative responses to Lomborg’s earlier book in some detail. He also asks whether the success of Lomborg’s books in a cultural sense is a manifestation of a broader “assault on reason”, described by Al Gore in his book of that title as a systematic breakdown of rational consideration of the major challenges facing the US and the world. 

There’s probably little reason to expect that a book like Friel’s will put a dent in the popularity Lomborg commands. Denial is rampant at present. And the book is not a light read. However it has elicited a lengthy response from Lomborg himself, to which Friel has replied on his publisher’s website.  He comments there that his previous experience in the hermeneutics of deception mostly dealt with books and texts that sought to justify war. “Lomborg’s books are no worse then those, but they are no better. Perhaps twenty or fifty years from now, if and when the fuller impacts of man-made global warming are more apparent, people might argue that they were worse. This is because at least wars usually end whereas global warming past a certain point probably won’t.” Which is all the more reason to persist with trying to focus public attention on the real science and expose the falsity of confident deniers and delayers. And good reason to welcome what Howard Friel’s book has contributed to that exposure.

Merchants of doubt: Oreskes on the history of climate denial Gareth Renowden Mar 09

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Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global WarmingScience historian Naomi Oreskes, well known for her work on consensus in science (and climate science in particular) has a new book, Merchants of Doubt, due out in a couple of months. Helpfully sub-titled How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, it digs deep into the historical roots of the campaign to create doubt abut the need for action on a host of environmental issues. The video above is of a talk she gave at Brown University recently, outlining the material in the book. If you’re interested in the roots of the campaign against action on climate, this is an excellent overview. We’ll have a review of the book soon after it’s available.

[Hat tip to Deltoid and Resilience Science]

Siberian seabed methane: first numbers Gareth Renowden Mar 05

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The latest estimate of methane release from the shallow seas off the north coast of Russia — the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) — suggests that around 8 teragrams per year (1Tg = 1 million tonnes) of the gas are reaching the atmosphere. This is equivalent to previous estimates of total methane release from all oceans. The study, led by Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov and published in this week’s Science (Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, Science 5 March 2010, Vol. 327. no. 5970, pp. 1246 – 1250 DOI: 10.1126/science.1182221), is based on fieldwork over 2003 – 2008. Over 80% of the bottom water over the ESAS was found to be supersaturated with dissolved methane, and 50% of the surface water. More than 100 “hotspots’ were discovered, where large quantities of methane are escaping from the sea-floor. Here’s Shakhova discussing the paper’s findings in a University of Alaska Fairbanks video (press release):

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ESASShakova310.gif

Map of the study region showing fluxes of methane to the atmosphere

The CH4 emitted is about 2 per cent of global annual emissions, so it is certainly significant. Ed Dlugokencky of NOAA, who confirmed a couple of weeks ago that recent increases in atmospheric methane were continuing, tells me that the emissions estimates are reasonable, but that the global data is not yet consistent with a large and growing source of Arctic methane:

We saw an increase in atmospheric CH4 growth rate in the Arctic in 2007, but not in 2008. There were also large increases in the tropics in 2007 and 2008. I can not determine the relative amounts of the increase from the tropics vs. Arctic without a chemical transport model, but much of the increase was because of increased tropical emissions. The 2007 increase in the Arctic likely resulted from terrestrial wetland sources (i.e., not the processes Shakhova discuss), because of warmer than average conditions affecting microbial CH4 production of CH4. This is supported by measurements of CH4 isotopic composition. So the bottom line is that the atmospheric data are not consistent with a long term increase in Arctic sources.

This week’s Science podcast features Shakhova discussing the team’s findings [transcript]:

…subsea permafrost acts as a lid – the seal to prevent this methane escape. And being prevented for a period of time, being sealed for a period of time, means that this gas accumulates, and it accumulates under higher pressure –- this is what we have to give an example, this is what we have, for example, this bottle of champagne. So, you have a lot of gas inside, but it’s sealed for a period of time, and when you uncork this bottle, what you can see – it’s different from a bottle of mineral water left open for period of time, it’s just little bit of different. And I think that release of methane from this kind of seabed deposits disturbed by destabilization of subsea permafrost, provides a pathway for this methane – ready to go methane – because its release does not depend on production. It’s not time-dependent, it’s not temperature-dependent, it only needs the pathway to be released.

The release pathway could be melting of the permafrost on the sea floor, or through faults, reefs and other sea-floor features. This graphic from UAF gives an idea of what’s going on:

methaneESAS.jpg

In the podcast, Shakhova emphasises that this study establishes a baseline against which future methane fluxes can be judged. But she is in no doubt about the stakes. As she says in the press release (and video):

“The release to the atmosphere of only one percent of the methane assumed to be stored in shallow hydrate deposits might alter the current atmospheric burden of methane up to 3 to 4 times. The climatic consequences of this are hard to predict.”

Sounds like understatement to me… Shakhova and Semiletov are currently working to produce figures based on the summer 2009 fieldwork. More coverage of the paper at New Scientist, Times Online, and for Hot Topic’s coverage of methane news over the last three years follow the methane tag.

[Update: Forgot to add that Shakhova and Semiletov's chapter in last year's WWF Arctic report provides an excellent overview of the ESAS methane issue.]

A blast from the past Gareth Renowden Mar 03

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Two years ago I took part in the World Peace Summit: Climate Change – What To Do? in Wellington, at the Westpac St James Theatre. I blogged about it at the time (before and after), and promised to link to the video of my talk when it was available. Of course, I then completely forgot to check, and so when I stumbled upon myself on Youtube earlier today, I thought I’d finally keep my promise. Given that I was talking in 2008, I think my comments stand up quite well (I’m rather pleased with my remarks about warmer winters being snowier winters), though my technological optimism is now tempered by pessimism both about the state of the climate system and our ability to come up with policies to reduce emissions. If you follow the “more from” links on the Youtube page, you can also watch David Wratt, Pene Lefale, Rod Oram, Andrew West, and Rachel Brown’s presentations.

CRU’s Jones on the stand: Pearce offers opinion as news Bryan Walker Mar 02

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Fred Pearce is obviously unrepentant over the unjust treatment he meted out to Phil Jones in his unfortunate series of artices on the UEA emails, one of which I commented on here. He has just produced an extraordinarily slanted account of Jones’ questioning from the Parliamentary committee set up to look into the affair. How’s this for openers?

“Jones did his best to persuade the Commons science and technology committee that all was well in the house of climate science. If they didn’t quite believe him, they didn’t have the heart to press the point. The man has had three months of hell, after all.”

Then Pearce offers two highly prejudicial descriptions of Jones’ actions, each linked to one of his own articles:

“Jones’s general defence was that anything people didn’t like – the strong-arm tactics to silence critics, the cold-shouldering of freedom of information requests, the economy with data sharing – were all “standard practice” among climate scientists.”

Pearce expresses disappointment that one of his own pet projects was not pursued by the committee:

“Nobody asked if, as claimed by British climate sceptic Doug Keenan, he had for two decades suppressed evidence of the unreliability of key temperature data from China.”

Gavin Schmidt has comprehensively dealt with this claim on Real Climate (see his comments on part 5). If Pearce is aware of what Schmidt wrote he is undeterred by it and again links to his own article as demonstrating the topic worthy of the attention of a parliamentary committee.

Then Pearce apparently leaves the scene of the parliamentary committee and offers his own account of what he claims Jones has conceded publicly about the 1990 China study, translating Jones’ ‘slightly different conclusion’ into his own ‘radically different findings’.  

There are other important Pearce conclusions which the committee failed to investigate, again expressed in prejudicial terms:

“Nor did the MPs probe how conflicts of interest have become routine in Jones’s world of analysing and reconstructing past temperatures. How, as the emails reveal, Jones found himself intemperately reviewing papers that sought to criticise his own work. And then, should the papers somehow get into print, judging what place they should have in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where he and his fellow emails held senior positions.”

Pearce takes comfort from his feeling that the committee will have to pay closer attention to the issue in the light of the written submission from the Institute of Physics which is highly critical of the emailers.  He doesn’t mention that John Beddington, the government’s chief scientific adviser, told the committee the institute’s view was “premature” and that they should wait until the Russell inquiry publishes its findings in the spring.

Pearce’s Guardian report is clearly an opinion piece but not presented as such. It is an extraordinary example of the authority some journalists have taken upon themselves to declare judgment on matters of which they have shown very little knowledge. Pearce is not a climate change sceptic, but he is hounding a group of climate scientists and seems fired up by the thrill of the chase. It’s a sad spectacle in a leading newspaper.

[GR adds: The Guardian's David Adam provides a more balanced overview here, and the paper's live blog of the session is worth a look.]
[GR update: Simon Hoggart's take: "Whatever your view on man-made global warming, you had to feel sorry for Professor Phil Jones.."]

Sorry seems to be the hardest word Gareth Renowden Mar 02

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homer.jpgLate last week Richard Treadgold, author and principal promoter of the recent attempt to cast doubt on the long term temperature record for New Zealand, popped up on Hot Topic to leave one of his typically rambling and pompous comments. Regular readers may recall that following the publication of his Climate Conversation Group/Climate “Science” Coalition “paper” last year, I told Treadgold (after a similar long comment) that he was no longer welcome at Hot Topic:

Until you are prepared to withdraw and apologise for the incompetent analysis you released, and specifically apologise to the scientists whose good name you have felt free to smear, I will be forced to conclude that you remain a liar and a charlatan.

Until such an apology and withdrawal is made you are not welcome here.

His report has not been withdrawn, and no apology has been forthcoming. He therefore remains unwelcome here. I reminded him of this in an edit to his comment last week (the first he’s made since December), and deleted two subsequent attempted comments.

If you’re going to join the conversation at Hot Topic, you have to play by the house rules. Some of them are reasonably flexible — I like people to be polite, but I’m not too fussed if the language or argument are robust — but there is one thing that I don’t tolerate, and that is the casual smearing of working scientists, most of whom are in no position to defend themselves. Reputations are hard won things, and can be lost in a flash. Playing vicious politics with people’s careers is the worst aspect of the current campaign to delay action on climate change, and it’s a tactic Treadgold seems to have adopted with relish. Let’s look again at the CSC/CCG report Are we feeling warmer yet? and review some of his recent blog posts.

In a post titled Apologise? Why? back in February, Treadgold appeared to have forgotten my earlier remarks, and asserted that “there’s no reason for us to apologise”. Following my deletion of his comments last week, he posted this:

From the response, you’d think we’d committed a crime. The only crime I can identify is a certain bunch of public so-called “servants” in charge of NIWA engaging in pervasive obstruction and citing references to us and the New Zealand public which proved to be entirely empty. They said the material we sought was there and it was not there.

One day soon they must account for that. They must also account for misleading their minister in guiding him to false replies to the Parliament.

Note the language and the allegations, which border on the defamatory. A couple of days later, he attempted a tactical revision of history in this post, claiming that his paper had been misinterpreted:

The sceptics shouldn’t look to our paper to refute local warming, because it doesn’t. It presents no evidence on the quality of the national temperature graph — it merely questions the data, expresses strong doubts about their accuracy and wonders what adjustments were made to them.

What does the paper actually say?

  • …the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming…
  • We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2 — it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace.
  • Using NIWA’s public data, we have shown that global warming has not yet reached New Zealand (and what does that say for global warming?).

[My emphasis]

No misinterpretation at all. The paper was designed to make the public and the world believe that there were “problems” with the NZ temperature record, that there was no real warming. The press release that accompanied the paper was quite clear about it. Here’s the headline and opening sentence:

NZ climate scandal: NIWA “adjusts” records to show warming

New Zealand may have its own “Climategate”, including manipulation of temperature readings [...] researchers claim that temperature readings from seven weather stations throughout New Zealand have been adjusted to show a higher degree of warming than is justified by a study of the original raw data.

And what was that about not supporting “no warming”? Here’s the press release again:

Spokesman for the group, Richard Treadgold, said that recent claims that New Zealand is warming have been proved wrong. “Official information clearly shows that temperatures in New Zealand have actually been remarkably stable since 1850.”

And here’s the attempt to smear Jim Salinger…

“NIWA’s official graph (done originally by Dr Jim Salinger, who features also in the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia) shows considerable warming, which they give as 0.92°C per century, saying this is consistent with global warming over the 20th century. But the actual temperature readings taken from the thermometers show an almost flat trend for 150 years.

Back to Treadgold’s attempt to rewrite history. Later in that post he dismisses calls for an apology:

Those apologists for NIWA who complain about our paper smearing the reputations of their scientists should reflect on this: that these changes were made in secret, are still, today, undisclosed (Hokitika has apparently been fully described, but we have not finished checking it) and, by NIWA’s own admission, these changes introduce warming to raw data that show no warming and NIWA have refused requests for them from bona fide scientists for decades.

That really is a disgrace.

The disgrace is Treadgold’s. Adjustments were never made in secret, the raw data is available, and the techniques used to combine station records are well-established in the literature and in the public domain. NIWA last communicated with the Climate Science Coalition on the subject of the adjustments made when homogenising station records in 2006, when Jim Salinger exchanged emails with Vincent Gray. Gray reviewed the CSC/CCG paper before release, according to Open Parachute blogger Ken Perrott, who has been diligently attempting to hold Treadgold to account in comments at his site. Here’s Treadgold, prompted by Perrott, talking about Gray’s review:

Please don’t use Dr Gray’s comment allegedly admitting a mistake. He was being his normal conservative self and I disagree with him. He, being a scientist, found it hard at first to grasp the essentially political objectives of our paper and looked at it from the normal scientific point of view. So he was of the view that we should be describing error limits, doing statistical analyses and quoting learned papers.

Those techniques were no help to us – they weren’t even necessary. We set out simply to motivate scientists to talk to us for the first time in 30 years.

Revealing, eh? The paper is admitted to be “essentially political”, so normal rules don’t apply. Let’s ignore the science, let’s not do the hard yards to understand the subject, let’s just fling mud. And then expect the scientists to cooperate…

This whole affair has never been anything other than a thinly disguised propaganda exercise, designed to capitalise on the noise about stolen CRU emails toplay politics in New Zealand. That it has been jumped on by parliamentary sceptics like Rodney Hide and John Boscawen is perhaps not surprising, given the fawning treatment of ACT and its luminaries by Treadgold. Here’s an exchange in comments at Treadgold’s blog this morning, apparently between Hide and Treadgold:

Hide: And on the basis of these numbers, and this advice, the government has committed to an ETS that will cost NZ conservatively a billion dollars a year.

We need to hold NIWA to account. Good work!

Treadgold: Yes, one’s tempted to call it shonky, but it isn’t. The ghastly thing is that AGW was created and the ETS introduced in the full light of consciousness to achieve ideological objectives.

We’re fortunate to have in high places men like you with the courage to speak the truth and to question error.

Thanks, Rodney.

Hide’s comment (if it really was Hide) is remarkable. Neither this government or the last committed to an ETS solely on the basis of NIWA’s New Zealand temperature record. The NZ numbers are just one tiny part of an immense jigsaw of evidence handily summarised by the IPCC, and accepted by every government involved in the IPCC process. Even if New Zealand were cooling, it would have no discernible impact on the global picture, either on the need for emissions reductions or for policy to encourage those reductions. The NZ temperature record is interesting — fascinating, even — but it is not crucial to anything, let alone national or international climate science or policy. And that fact, perhaps more than anything else, is what shows Treadgold to be little more than a tawdry propagandist for inaction.

Meanwhile, the taxpayers of New Zealand might want to know how much of NIWA’s time has been wasted dealing with frivolous freedom of information requests and ACT questions in Parliament. NIWA time is public money, and Treadgold and his courageous friend Rodney are wasting buckets of it. Perhaps there might be scope for a question in Parliament…?

Finally, unless and until Treadgold withdraws his paper, apologises for the attempt to mislead the public, and for the direct smears on Salinger and the scientists working at NIWA, he will take no further part in the climate conversation at Hot Topic.

[Elton John, before hair transplant]

Al Gore going strong Bryan Walker Mar 01

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That travesty of a news outlet, Fox News, carried an article last Thursday (in its science and technology section, believe it or not) which opened as follows:

“Al Gore won a Nobel Prize and an Oscar for his film, An Inconvenient Truth. But in the last three months, as global warming has gone from a scientific near-certitude to the subject of satire, Gore –- the public face of global warming –- has been mum on the topic.”

The writer elaborates in the rest of the article, with such choice pickings as this quote from the Investors’ Business Daily:

“The godfather of climate hysteria is in hiding as another of his wild claims unravels – this one about global warming causing seas to swallow us up. We’ve not seen or heard much of the former vice president, Oscar winner and Nobel Prize recipient recently as the case for disastrous man-made climate change collapses.”

No doubt this kind of taunting is rife in the fevered madness of some of the right-wing media in America. It’s not a world I willingly dip into.

But they’re as wrong about Gore’s reticence as they are about the science he communicates.  He contributed a lengthy opinion piece to last weekend’s New York Times.  In it he recognises the recent attacks on the science of global warming, even says it would be an enormous relief they were true. But they’re not.

Two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change don’t change the climate crisis, he says. Nor do e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showing that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law. In a nutshell:

“Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.”

He goes on to acknowledge that, in spite of the efforts of many, “our civilization is still failing miserably to slow the rate at which emissions are increasing – much less reduce them.” Because the world still relies on leadership from the US, the failure of the Senate to pass legislation to cap American emissions before Copenhagen guaranteed that the outcome would fall short of what is required. He laments the political paralysis on this issue and others which has gripped Washington. 

There is no readily apparent alternative path at the present time to the cap-and-trade approach. It is proving difficult, but  the flexibility of a global market-based policy — supplemented by regulation and revenue-neutral tax policies — is the option that has by far the best chance of success. 

Time is not on our side:

“The lags in the global climate system, including the buildup of heat in the oceans from which it is slowly reintroduced into the atmosphere, means that we can create conditions that make large and destructive consequences inevitable long before their awful manifestations become apparent: the displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.”

He refers to the market fundamentalism which has held sway at just the time that the seriousness of climate change became apparent. Market fundamentalists fought to weaken existing constraints and scoffed at the possibility that global constraints would be needed to halt the dangerous dumping of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere.

“[At the same time] changes in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as ‘socialist’ any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.”

Can the rule of law be used “as an instrument of human redemption”?  He hopes that the Senate will take up the legislation likely to be presented this week and follow the House of Representatives in taking the first halting steps for pricing greenhouse gas emissions and stimulating the development of low-carbon sources of energy.

Gore is well known for his film and book  An Inconvenient Truth. People are less aware of a subsequent book The Assault on Reason. “Greed and wealth now allocate power in our society”, he wrote in that book, and supported his statement with many examples.  He discusses how he thinks television and advertising have been appropriated and used to make for a passive citizenry which expects no engagement in the political process.  The rule of reason in democratic discourse was a founding principle of the new republic but America has lost the participation of its people in the conversation of citizens essential to functioning democracy. The intelligence and passion of the book impressed me.

His latest publication Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, is reviewed here. The three books together add up to a substantial body of writing of considerable intellectual breadth and a thoroughly decent concern for the human future.  He is vilified and demonized by a sector of society, but those of us who value rationality and care about the future of civilisation have ample reason to be grateful for the advocacy role he has adopted.

Weekend reading: dealing with noise Gareth Renowden Feb 27

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There’s no doubt that in the last few months the PR war against action on climate change has been fierce — and effective. Three articles I’ve read in the last couple of days throw some light on what’s been going on, and are well worth a few moments of anyone’s time. The first, and by far the most eloquent, is Bill McKibben’s The attack on climate science is the O.J. moment of the 21st century. McKibben likens the tactics of OJ Simpson’s lawyers, confronted with a huge pile of evidence that their client was guilty to the campaign against climate science:

If anything, [OJ's lawyers] were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: In closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared [LA detective Mark] Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instil considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.

McKibben suggests that CRU head Phil Jones has been cast in the Fuhrman role, taking the full force of the attack. This personalisation of the process is exemplified by the McCarthy-like tactics of US senator James Inhofe, who has just released a report calling for investigations and prosecutions of leading climate scientists. Because they can’t change the evidence, however hard they try, they are reduced to shooting the messenger…

The robustness of the case for action is underlined in the new statement on climate science from NZ PM John Key’s science adviser Sir Peter Gluckman, Climate change and the scientific process, but Gluckman is also realistic about the difficulty of making policy in this area.

Although the risk to our future of not acting now is real, the scientific community has had and is having difficulty communicating both its uncertainty and the absolute need for action simultaneously. [...] The ensuing political and economic debate on how best to respond to climate change should not be used as an excuse to gamble the planet’s future against the overwhelming evidence that humans are contributing to the world warming at an unsafe rate. The basic principle is no different to risk management in any other sphere of life.

The “debate”, such as it is, is not about the science. McKibben again:

…it’s a mistake to concentrate solely on the science for another reason. Science may be what we know about the world, but politics is how we feel about the world. And feelings count at least as much as knowledge. Especially when those feelings are valid. People are getting ripped off. They are powerless against large forces that are, at the moment, beyond their control. Anger is justified.

Feelings can do more: they condition the way the think about things. This recent National Public Radio story, headlined Belief in climate change hinges on worldview explains the work of The Cultural Cognition Project:

To social scientist and lawyer Don Braman, it’s not surprising that two people can disagree so strongly over science. Braman is on the faculty at George Washington University and part of The Cultural Cognition Project, a group of scholars who study how cultural values shape public perceptions and policy beliefs. “People tend to conform their factual beliefs to ones that are consistent with their cultural outlook, their world view,” Braman says.

“Basically the reason that people react in a close-minded way to information is that the implications of it threaten their values,” says Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale University and a member of The Cultural Cognition Project.

Kahan says people test new information against their preexisting view of how the world should work.

“If the implication, the outcome, can affirm your values, you think about it in a much more open-minded way,” he says.

And if the information doesn’t, you tend to reject it.

This is what is happening with climate change. The polarisation is all too obvious in the blogosphere and the wider media. The CCP has also identified what it calls the “messenger effect” — where people tend to believe information if it comes from people like themselves. In the climate “debate” this becomes a vicious, inward-looking circle, with sceptic and crank arguments endlessly recirculating around blogs, boards and mailing lists.

All of these articles illuminate one central truth: all the noise about emails, IPCC “errors” and crooked scientists has absolutely nothing to do with the underlying science. Those who want to delay action on climate change have no hope of dismantling what McKibben calls the haystack of evidence, they can only pretend that finding a needle means the thing is not made of hay. But they can change the politics — the willingness of politicians the world over to take firm action now.

The answer, if it can be found, will not come from climate scientists. They need to do what they do best — study the planet in all its complexity, define and delineate the implications of what we’re doing to it. But we should not expect them to win hearts and minds, to build a global public consensus on the need for urgent action. That’s a matter for politics, not science. The lead has to come from elsewhere. My own suspicion is that nothing much will get done until the damage from change becomes too great to ignore — and I found an eery echo of that fear in my morning paper, in a story lifted from the Times about a new British report on likely land use changes in the UK over the coming century. One scenario considered is described thus:

Mass migration northwards to new towns in Scotland, Wales and northeast England may be needed to cope with climate change and water shortages in the South East, according to an apocalyptic vision set out by the Government Office for Science. [...] In the most extreme scenario, world leaders hold an emergency summit in 2014 when it becomes clear that the impacts of climate change are going to be far worse and happen much sooner than previously envisaged.

The sad fact is that if we wait until the damage is too obvious to ignore, it will be too late to stop much worse impacts in future decades. McKibben says we need courage and hope. But we also need leaders who are prepared to take the evidence and act on it — and who will not be swayed by the denialist noise campaign. They need to recognise empty vessels when they see them.

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