And so the party’s over, the tables in the ballroom at the Magnificent Mile Marriot Hotel in Chicago have been tidied up and the carpet vacuumed. The Monckton fan club have drifted away from their vigil in the shade of the trees on the sidewalk outside the lobby, and the speakers assembled from around the world have gone home — except for the ones still waiting in line outside Hot Doug’s for the duck fat fries and andouille special (Fridays & Saturdays only, well worth waiting for, I can assure you).

Luckily for us, however, Heartland are promising to make all the talks available on video, so we won’t have to miss any of the highlights. At the moment they only have the keynotes available, but there are quite a few Powerpoints available for download. I’ve been poking around in some of those…

Bob Carter left the “it’s ENSO wot dunnit” duties to McLean et al co-author Chris de Freitas, and gave a talk on Ancient sea-level & climate change: how do we reconstruct it? Looks pretty interesting and non-controversial, until you get to the last few slides where Carter lets rip:

Following Nils-Axel “no sea level rise since 1970″ Mörner, and with Fred Singer in the room, I suppose it was inevitable that Bob would downplay the real risks, and give Singer’s Not The IPCC report equivalent billing to real science. Note the green dot for Hansen’s speculation, no doubt there so Bob could get a few laughs at his expense. Meanwhile, out in the real world, Bob Bindschadler’s been in NZ, and told TV NZ “the best evidence we have and the best insight into the behaviour of the ice sheet lead us to expect that by the end of the century we are going to see sea levels at least one metre higher than today“. (Pity TV NZ couldn’t spell Bob’s name properly…)

Chris de Freitas devoted his talk to The influence of the Southern Oscillation on mean global temperature, as one might expect from the corresponding author of a controversial recent paper on the subject. Strangely, Chris seems to have ignored the heavyweight rebuttal his paper attracted, and continued to make assertions that are — how shall I put this — tenuous in the extreme. Here’s the text of his last three slides, with annotations:

Summary
Change in atmospheric circulation (ENSO) is a dominant influence on MGT (with 7-month lag).
Mechanism that accounts for this is change in Hadley and Walker circulation
A: During La Niña conditions, zonal circulation of the Walker Circulation is enhanced, whereas the meridional circulation of the Hadley cell weakens; 
B: During El Niño conditions, Hadley, circulation increases, which leads to an increase in heat transfer from tropical to higher latitudes.

So far so good. I might quibble with “a dominant influence”, because his discussion ignores any other potential influences, and McLean et al was criticised for using statistical techniques that overstated the the correlation. But then he says this:

Trends towards high frequencies of B show up as “global warming”.

Pardon? Is de Freitas really asserting that more El Niños mean more global warming? We’ll have to wait for the video to hear what he actually said, but if he’s true to his slide then he’s wandering a long way off the beaten track. Two big problems with this claim: we have evidence that the ENSO cycle has been operating for a very long time, and there were El Nino events during the cold spells (Little Ice Age) as well as during warmer periods. The second is that when you make a thorough effort to account for all the effects of natural variability in the climate system (see Swanson et al, Long-term natural variability and 20th century climate change, PNAS 2009) you find a strong underlying upward trend. If de Freitas were right, then removing all natural variability would remove all or most of the trend. It doesn’t.

He continues:

Mechanism involves more than simply moving heat around within the global climate system.

Changes in ENSO affect convection, and thus atmospheric moisture content and cloud cover, which may in turn affect net solar heating as well as the transfer of heat from Earth to space.

This is channelling Roy Spencer, as an earlier slide acknowledged. We”l have to wait for the video to see what he means, and how Spencer’s postulated negative (cooling) feedback fits into the more El Niño, more warming framework.

If there was a sustained and significant influence on MGT caused by some other forcing, we would expect to see the temperature line in Figure 7 rising relative to the SOI line. The absence of this divergence implies that increases in atmospheric CO₂ have had at most only a small impact on MGT.

This is just risible. de Freitas makes no attempt to quantify this — we’re expected to rely on the Mk 1 eyeball. Perhaps this might be because the temperature data shows a rising trend, and actually showing that would weaken his case? By way of contrast, here’s what Swanson et al found:

The dotted line is the “cleaned” global mean temperature, and as Swanson et al point out, it warms steadily through the century. Back to CdF:

Natural climate forcing of global circulation is major contributor to MGT tendency, a relationship that is not included in current global climate models.

The punch line, and not much of one. As as has been pointed out many times in discussion of the original McLean et al paper, the finding that ENSO has an influence on global temperature is trivial — it’s been well understood for decades. But ENSO events, whatever their frequency, can’t explain the heat accumulating in the system. We may see that demonstrated this year, when the relatively weak El Niño that’s been around for the last six months could drive the global temperature above the levels seen during the strong El Niño of 1998. de Freitas is also wrong about climate models. The better ones certainly do show ENSO cycles — not perfectly, but they’re there. Knocking climate models is a core feature of the crank catechism, and when on a pilgrimage to crank central I suppose you have to observe the ritual responses.

I’ve also has a look at Bryan Leyland’s presentation on renewable energy, A $720 billion boondoggle? Bryan’s answer is straightforward enough (yes, of course), but his talk is chiefly notable for his optimistic take on fossil fuel availability:

The words “cloud cuckoo land” spring to mind. Bryan believes that global warming is “a problem that doesn’t exist”, and so he is therefore free to burn as much carbon as he wants. Not what I’d call strategically sound advice…

Finally, one presentation at the Heartland conference I can heartily recommend was made by Scott Denning, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Colorado. Scott was one of only two non-sceptic climate scientists to accept an invitation to talk, and his Debunking common myths about global warming is a very straightforward explanation of why we have a problem. He was applauded for his bravery, as you can see over at In It For The Gold. It’s also worth having a look at Richard Lindzen’s extraordinary speech in which he accuses climate scientists of “overt cheating”. I’d give Monckon’s conference closer a miss though. Having sat through more than one of his speeches in the interests of research, I can confirm that’s he’s running low on jokes. You’ve used ‘em all before, Chris.

[Jefferson Airplane]

The peer-reviewed rebuttal to last year’s infamous McLean, de Freitas and Carter paper which claimed that the El Niño Southern Oscillation could explain most recent warming (see Mother Nature’s Sons and Big Guns Brought To Bear), has been accepted for publication by the Journal of Geophysical Research (Comment on “Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature” Foster et al, 2010). Co-author James Annan has the details (and full text of the rebuttal), but what is perhaps most remarkable is that despite being given the opportunity to reply to Foster et al’s comment — normal practice in these circumstances — McLean et al’s offering has failed to pass review and will not be published by JGR. Tim Lambert at Deltoid has more feedback, and draws attention to the comments by Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg at Climate Shifts who demands:

The five things we want to know are:

1. Will McLean et al. retract the paper (and will Bob Carter admit fault or even discuss the errors publicly)?
2. Will the denial0sphere and the MSM give this story (a climate change scandal!) the same coverage it has recently showered on various IPCC hiccups?
3. Will there be an investigation as Bob Carter himself and so many other skeptics have insisted on over and over again, usually in response to bogus and unsubstantiated allegations.
4. Will Bob now reverse his policy positions and urge (vocally) politicians that may have been swayed by his bogus science to do the same? After all Bob, shouldn’t the science drive the policy?
5. Will The Australian cover this pending scandal! A scientist behaving badly!

Those look like damned good questions to me. New Zealand’s science community has been reluctant to publicly criticise Carter — he was once a respected and influential scientist who encouraged many talented students to forge their careers in the earth sciences — but surely this display of academic turpitude puts him beyond the pale. What it says about de Freitas is probably unprintable. I encourage readers to remember the extravagant claims being made for this paper by Carter and de Freitas, and the uncritical acceptance of those claims by a pliable media. High time the boot was on the other foot.

[This song's for Bob: h/t caerbannog in comments at Deltoid]

[Update 23/3: Skeptical Science explains the rebuttal here. Worth a read.]

Quite a fuss about stolen emails over the weekend. Let’s review the story so far. Person or persons unknown hack into servers at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia and steal lots of emails and other documents [BBC 1, 2, Times, Bob Ward at The Guardian]. This is a criminal offence in the UK, the USA, New Zealand and many other jurisdictions. The criminals then release edited highlights of these documents and emails by putting them up on a Russian web server, and let the news out via what Nature calls “a relatively obscure climate-sceptic blog” (The Air Vent which may have been Andrew Bolt’s blog in Australia). Within a matter of hours, the usual suspects are out in force, screaming data manipulation, conspiracy to exclude climate sceptics from publishing, and fraudulent behaviour. Criminals are portrayed as whistleblowers, quotes are pulled out of private emails and taken out of context, and the end of climate science is proclaimed.

I’ve been reluctant to weigh in on this issue, because commenting on stolen and possibly edited documents strikes me as unethical. In a courtroom, improperly obtained evidence is not allowed to influence proceedings, and I would prefer to apply the same standard here. That hasn’t stopped the likes of Wishart (peer review is broken, climate science is dead), propagandist in chief Marc Morano (continuously updated “Climategate” coverage at his Climate Depot), or even now well out of the closet denialist, the NZ blogger sometimes known as Poneke (warming stopped in 1998 (yet again)). However…

I’ve been asked to comment on the issue a few times today, so I’ve been doing a little research. First, the content of the emails. I’m not going to link to them (see above) — but they’re easy enough to find if you want to. What I’ve read (and I’ve read some, but nowhere near all), look to me like the normal sort of email traffic you might expect from a bunch of working scientists, in a field where critics have been throwing mud at them for years. Are they pissed off? Yes. Are they rude? Yes, sometimes — and enjoyably so, from my perspective. Are they careful? Most of the time. Is peer review broken? No. Is there evidence of some vast, over-arching conspiracy? If that’s the best they can muster, then I’d have to say they’re bloody useless conspirators.

Nor is it a complete record. It seems to be widely acknowledged that this is only part of the hackers haul, so what is there in the rest? Certainly, there will be personal emails — private stuff, family stuff, stuff that any reasonable person would admit should remain out of the public domain.

But are there emails that portray a different picture, a more anodyne, boring portrait of science in action? Who knows? The editorial decisions have been made by a bunch of crooks, and all the noise is being made by people with an overt agenda.

All of which leads me to the crux of the matter. Cui bono, or as Jerry Maguire might say, show me the money. Are we supposed to believe that in the run up to a major international conference on climate change, when there’s a big climate bill being considered by the US legislature, and when we know that for the last 20 years there has been a concerted campaign and PR effort to derail action on reducing carbon emissions, that a “whistleblower” has been so moved by the behaviour of the CRU that they have broken the law to uncover this compelling story? Frankly, that’s unbelievable. But then so is much of the denial campaign. Believability and credibility is much less important than noise and column inches.

This whole affair looks like nothing more than another beat-up by the cranks, denialists and ideologues, a crude and unpersuasive attempt to add PR pressure in the run up to Copenhagen and Waxman Markey. With that in mind, let me ask another pertinent question. Who did it? Do they have links with the US think tanks who seem to be running the denial campaign? Perhaps a real investigative journalist might do some digging…

For excellent coverage on the story so far, I recommend Greenfyre’s: Mike’s been documenting events as they happen. RealClimate provides context for the most egregious quote mines here and here (and Gavin Schmidt has been heroically dealing with a flood of comments — over 1,000 at the time of writing). For something you’ll never read at Climate Depot or Wishart’s crank central, try this exposé of ethical behaviour by climate scientists confronted by rubbish, and for a candid opinion on the quality of Chris de Freitas and Patrick Michaels PhD theses — you’ll have to search the texts…

[Richard Thompson]

Two of New Zealand’s most prominent climate cranks, “inexpert witness” Chris de Freitas and Bob “great communicator” Carter are no strangers to the art of misrepresenting facts in support of their peculiar political visions, but recent articles by the pair set new standards for economy with the truth. Here’s De Freitas, writing in Energy NZ:

…no one has yet found even a shred of objective scientific evidence that humans are causing damaging global climate change.

No to be outdone, in Aussie “journal of ideas” Quadrant Carter revives the oldest zombie fact of them all:

As the temperature trend for ten years now has been one of cooling, since the unusually warm El Nino year of 1998, this requires a precautionary response to cooling rather than warming.

De Freitas’ piece is — even to my jaundiced eyes — remarkable for how liberally he misleads his readers…

Fit the first:

In preparation, the Government has committed New Zealand to cut up to a third of current emissions by 2020.

The economic, social and moral implications are immense, since carbon taxes and tradable emissions alone cannot make such a massive reduction. Sweeping legislation restricting the use of oil, coal and natural gas would be required, along with far-reaching reforms in pastoral farming to cut methane release.

De Freitas is ignoring the fact that any 2020 target will be for net emissions, that is, emissions after taking into account the carbon stored away in New Zealand’s growing forests. The government is aiming to weaken the emissions trading scheme, but still apparently expects forestry to play a major role in helping NZ to meet the target. But de Freitas prefers to spin a scary fairy tale…

Second fit:

…no one has yet found even a shred of objective scientific evidence that humans are causing damaging global climate change.

Breathtaking in its ignorance. But he continues:

There are no published scientific papers that show irrefutable proof of human-caused global warming.

Oh really? Depends what you mean by irrefutable, I suppose. There’s a very large attribution literature, handily summarised in Chapter 9 (PDF) of the WG1 report in IPPC’s Fourth Report (AR4). It starts: Human-induced warming of the climate system is widespread, and references approximately 550 papers. Either de Freitas has read them all and prepared detailed rebuttals, or his refutation technique is to deny the evidence exists, or if it can’t be denied, to stick his fingers in his ears and say “la la la, can’t hear you”. Effective at playgroup level perhaps, but odd behaviour by an associate professor at the University of Auckland.

After a ritual swipe at the IPCC, he then makes the following astonishing assertion (fit the third):

It is a conveniently forgotten fact that most of the industrialised world went into hysterics during the 40 years of global cooling beginning in the late 1930s.

This is — not to put too fine a point on it — complete invention. There were a few magazine and newspaper articles about possible cooling, and at least one book, but no-one was having hysterics. Undaunted, de Freitas continues with his fictionalisation of climate history:

Fifty years ago it became clear that global carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were increasing at a rate of about 1.8 ppmv per year. It was assumed that this was the prime contributor to an observed increase in global temperatures. On this basis, the carbon dioxide data were used in climate model projections for future global warming.

Assumed? What about the fact — understood for 150 years — that CO₂ has an impact on radiation passing through the atmosphere? No assumptions required. There was sound theory supported by measurement, and to have left that out of the models would have been academic suicide.

de Freitas then trots through a few crank tropes, including the mandatory assertion of global cooling:

By 2006, despite the ongoing rise in global carbon dioxide emissions, data showed that mean global temperature rise had slowed, and currently shows signs of falling.

Now that’s he’s working up a bit of steam, he delivers this final fit:

Government decision-makers should have heard by now that the basis for the longstanding claim that carbon dioxide is a major driver of global climate is being questioned; along with it the hitherto assumed need for costly measures to restrict carbon dioxide emissions. If they have not heard, it is because of the din of global warming hysteria that relies on the logical fallacy of ‘argument from ignorance’ and predictions of computer models.

Risible. The only person arguing from ignorance is de Freitas. The “din of global warming hysteria” comes not from the real science that underpins our understanding of the problem, but from sceptics like de Freitas who have to make ever more shrill and ridiculous pronouncements to be heard.

On the other side of the Tasman, Bob Carter is the better writer, but equally ridiculous in his arguments:

…the real climatic risks faced by our societies, not least because it assumes that global warming is more dangerous, or more to be feared, than is global cooling. In reality, the converse is true.

That’s the version of reality that Bob and his crank mates occupy. It’s a strange planet, but not ours. They have odd models too…

Some computer models (General Circulation Models; deterministic) project that the global temperature in ten years time will be warmer than today’s. Other computer models (statistical; based upon projection of past climate patterns) project that global temperature will be cooler ten years hence. The reality is, therefore, that no scientist can tell you with confidence whether the temperature in 2020, let alone 2100, will be warmer or cooler than today’s.

Told you Bob’s planet was a strange place. On the one I inhabit there are plenty of people, scientists even, who would happily accept a wager that the next ten years will be warmer on average than the last ten. And I know of no credible “statistical models” that project cooling — but I do know of at least one that projects continued warming.

Bob then delivers a broadside against Australia’s planned emissions legislation, and finishes with this dramatic flourish:

If such a monstrously socially damaging and environmentally ineffectual measure as the government’s carbon dioxide taxation bill becomes law, it will stand for decades as an indictment of all the parliamentarians who voted for it.

In which event, be sure to remember their names, for nothing is more certain than that you are going to want to exercise retribution thereafter.

The names that will be remembered as the world burns will be those of the vocal minority who were willing to prostitute their academic reputations in service of delaying action. One wonders what “retribution” Carter and de Freitas will face. Opprobrium and ridicule will be the least of their worries when harsh reality intrudes on their ideology.