Schmitt on AGW

Harrison Schmitt is a geologist and a former Senator from New Mexico. He's also the last man to have stepped on to the surface of the moon¹ (until the next one). And he has a great article this morning about the earth's climate and the AGW movement.

Global surface and near surface temperatures have risen about half a degree Centigrade (about 0.9 degree Fahrenheit) each 100 years since the minimum temperatures of the Little Ice Age in 1660. Multi-decade intervals of more rapid warming and cooling have occurred during this current, centuries-long general warming trend as they have for over 10,000 years since the last major ice age.

Indeed, by the end of the 17th century, glaciers had advanced over valley farmlands cultivated as those same glaciers receded during the preceding Medieval Warm Period (about 800-1300). Since the last major ice age, decades long periods of warming and cooling have been superposed on longer cycles, the longest repeating about every 1500 years.

All of this has occurred without any significant human activity. Cooling between 1935 and 1975 and since 2000, and warming between 1975 and 1995 have been the most recent such variations and correlate strongly with variations in solar activity.

In contrast to these facts, climate change assumptions and computer modeling, rather than real-world observations, underpin the government’s efforts to restrict American liberties and confiscate trillions of dollars of American income in the name of “doing something” about climate change. The scientific rationale behind this proposed massive intrusion into American life requires more than a “consensus” of like-minded climate analysts and bureaucrats. It needs to be right.

Recent disclosures and admissions of scientific misconduct by the United Nations and advocates of the human-caused global warming hypothesis shows the fraudulent foundation of this much-ballyhooed but non-existent scientific consensus about climate.

Go ahead and read the whole thing...



¹ - None of that, of course, should cause anyone to listen to what he has to say on this topic. People should listen to what he has to say because he's right...

An interview with Professor Jones

Professor Phil Jones is the currently-on-leave director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, source of the massive "leak" in November of e-mails, data, computer code and other files related to climate change research ("Climategate"). Professor Jones is the author of the controversial e-mail in which he talked of using "Mike's nature trick" to "hide the decline."

He is a man who is supported with taxpayer dollars because of concern about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, and has, therefore, a vested interest in producing materials which perpetuate or exacerbate concerns about that possibility. To quote Al Gore quoting Sinclair Lewis, "it's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon his not understanding it." (The climate alarmists have for years been warning us that we couldn't trust any "science" funded by the oil companies - why we should trust science funded by zealous, power-hungry bureaucrats and performed by leftist academicians?)

Professor Jones has been a significant figure in the propagation of the kind of scientific information which leads to widespread panic and enables "well-meaning public servants" to argue for greater central control of world-wide economies and private behaviors. He's fought to suppress any kind of research which doesn't support the AGW position out of peer-reviewed literature, to "hide the decline," and, in short, to paint the picture of "settled science" which suggests a imminent catastrophe.

And the BBC got a chance to ask him some questions last week. Before we look at some of the excerpts, here are a couple of key points to remember. There are some who have questioned various aspects of the official story, as represented by the UN's IPCC, and been criticized or ostracized as "deniers." In the case of the AGW story, "skepticism" has been a dirty word. The following articles of the AGW case are considered to be "settled science," which no one of any intelligence would challenge, indisputable facts.

1. There has been an unprecedented rise in global temperature over the past 30 years.
2. The earth has never before been this hot.
3. The rise in temperature has proven to be caused by human behavior.
4. There is no legitimate "debate" about the causes of the current unprecedented warming.
5. Warming has continued rapidly over the past 15 years.

So, let's hear from Professor Jones:

Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I've assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.

Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).

I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

C - Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?

No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.

G - There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a global phenomenon, would you accept that this would undermine the premise that mean surface atmospheric temperatures during the latter part of the 20th Century were unprecedented?

There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented.

N - When scientists say "the debate on climate change is over", what exactly do they mean - and what don't they mean?

It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.

Let's see. The debate's not over, the MWP may have been warmer, the recent warming is similar to other warming periods in the last 150 years, there's been no statistically significant warming in the last 15 years, there's been cooling in the last 8 (albeit also not statistically significant). It sounds to me as if Professor Jones is one of those "skeptics" or "deniers" that draw so much opprobrium from the likes of Al Gore.

I know this - I need a LOT more convincing before I'll peacefully acquiesce to the planned destruction of the US economy...

Ironing...

A reader to Instapundit:

“Today, Michael Mann was scheduled to give a colloquium on climate change at the University of Pennsylvania, where I am a graduate student. As you may know, Philadelphia has been hit by multiple snowstorms in the past week. Today, for what I am told is the first time since the mid-1990s, the university suspended normal operations due to snow, and his colloquium on climate change has been postponed.”

To quote Bart Simpson, "the ironing is delicious..."

(For those who don't know, Mann is the climatology professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose work and behavior are under fire following the release of the data from the CRU last November. He's one of the "sky is falling" climatologists, convinced that the earth is burning up because people are still driving cars and heating their houses. He's one of the oracles on whom the Goreacle depends for his info.)

All the news that fits...

Walter Russell Mead offers a public service for those still getting their news from the New York Times.

Readers of The New York Times learned something this morning that millions of people in the UK have known for some time, not to mention of the millions of Americans following the story on the web. But they didn’t learn much about it, or learn enough to begin to think through the consequences for American politics and global policy.

A page one story by Elisabeth Rosenthal under the headline “U.N. Climate Panel and Its Chief Face a Siege on Their Credibility” gently informed the sensitive readers of The New York Times that all is not well in the world of the climate change movement.

...

The dwindling band who depend on The New York Times for their news don’t know that their world has changed in some important ways. They deserve to know and they need to know; I hope that the paper will find a way to tell them.

He provides an excellent short summary of Climate-gate and the recently acknowledged issues that render the IPCC utterly untrustworthy as a source of information. Unfortunately, those who still get their information from the Times are probably never going to see this piece...

Climate skeptics still out there, still not insane

Former director of the National Hurricane Center, Neil Frank, on AGW skeptics:

What do the skeptics believe? First, they concur with the believers that the Earth has been warming since the end of a Little Ice Age around 1850. The cause of this warming is the question. Believers think the warming is man-made, while the skeptics believe the warming is natural and contributions from man are minimal and certainly not potentially catastrophic a la Al Gore.

Second, skeptics argue that CO2 is not a pollutant but vital for plant life. Numerous field experiments have confirmed that higher levels of CO2 are positive for agricultural productivity. Furthermore, carbon dioxide is a very minor greenhouse gas. More than 90 percent of the warming from greenhouse gases is caused by water vapor. If you are going to change the temperature of the globe, it must involve water vapor.

Third, and most important, skeptics believe that climate models are grossly overpredicting future warming from rising concentrations of carbon dioxide. We are being told that numerical models that cannot make accurate 5- to 10-day forecasts can be simplified and run forward for 100 years with results so reliable you can impose an economic disaster on the U.S. and the world.

The revelation of Climate­gate occurs at a time when the accuracy of the climate models is being seriously questioned. Over the last decade Earth's temperature has not warmed, yet every model (there are many) predicted a significant increase in global temperatures for that time period. If the climate models cannot get it right for the past 10 years, why should we trust them for the next century?

Climategate reveals how predetermined political agendas shaped science rather than the other way around. It is high time to question the true agenda of the scientists now on the hot seat and to bring skeptics back into the public debate.

Excellent piece - check it out, read it all...

Do we have ANY good temperature measurements?

Yet another piece of information comes out indicating that the "scientists" who have been measuring the planet's temperature have been doing so with a foot on the scale:

On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.

On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.

IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.

Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.

I've long believed that there was plenty of evidence that the planet was warming. What I've been far less willing to buy, without substantial proof, is that mankind is the cause. And what I've been absolutely unwilling to accept is that we need to trash the world's economy to "save the planet." But the more information that comes out about the data measurements, the less willing I am to even believe that there's been any significant warming. The available public evidence - not the super-homogenized "consensus" data pictures presented, but the actual public evidence available for people to look at - now suggests that we don't have any idea whether there's been significant warming or not, because the data is being manipulated and presented to us by ideologues rather than scientists.

More on the "scientific consensus"

141 scientists have signed thefollowing letter, explaining (and, in the process, demonstrating) that the science of global climate change is not "settled."

His Excellency Ban Ki Moon
Secretary-General, United Nations
New York, NY
United States of America

8 December 2009

Dear Secretary-General,

Climate change science is in a period of ‘negative discovery’ - the more we learn about this exceptionally complex and rapidly evolving field the more we realize how little we know. Truly, the science is NOT settled.

Therefore, there is no sound reason to impose expensive and restrictive public policy decisions on the peoples of the Earth without first providing convincing evidence that human activities are causing dangerous climate change beyond that resulting from natural causes. Before any precipitate action is taken, we must have solid observational data demonstrating that recent changes in climate differ substantially from changes observed in the past and are well in excess of normal variations caused by solar cycles, ocean currents, changes in the Earth's orbital parameters and other natural phenomena.

We the undersigned, being qualified in climate-related scientific disciplines, challenge the UNFCCC and supporters of the United Nations Climate Change Conference to produce convincing OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE for their claims of dangerous human-caused global warming and other changes in climate. Projections of possible future scenarios from unproven computer models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation.

Specifically, we challenge supporters of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused climate change to demonstrate that:

1. Variations in global climate in the last hundred years are significantly outside the natural range experienced in previous centuries;
2. Humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG) are having a dangerous impact on global climate;
3. Computer-based models can meaningfully replicate the impact of all of the natural factors that may significantly influence climate;
4. Sea levels are rising dangerously at a rate that has accelerated with increasing human GHG emissions, thereby threatening small islands and coastal communities;
5. The incidence of malaria is increasing due to recent climate changes;
6. Human society and natural ecosystems cannot adapt to foreseeable climate change as they have done in the past;
7. Worldwide glacier retreat, and sea ice melting in Polar Regions , is unusual and related to increases in human GHG emissions;
8. Polar bears and other Arctic and Antarctic wildlife are unable to adapt to anticipated local climate change effects, independent of the causes of those changes;
9. Hurricanes, other tropical cyclones and associated extreme weather events are increasing in severity and frequency;
10. Data recorded by ground-based stations are a reliable indicator of surface temperature trends.

It is not the responsibility of ‘climate realist’ scientists to prove that dangerous human-caused climate change is not happening. Rather, it is those who propose that it is, and promote the allocation of massive investments to solve the supposed ‘problem’, who have the obligation to convincingly demonstrate that recent climate change is not of mostly natural origin and, if we do nothing, catastrophic change will ensue. To date, this they have utterly failed to do so.

(Additional emphasis is mine.)

What happened at Darwin zero?

Part of response to the CRU scandal is "the scientists may have behaved badly, but the data still shows that the earth is warming." Believe that?

Think again. Check this out.

Intrigued by the curious shape of the average of the homogenized Darwin records, I then went to see how they had homogenized each of the individual station records. What made up that strange average shown in Fig. 7? I started at zero with the earliest record. Here is Station Zero at Darwin, showing the raw and the homogenized versions.



Yikes again, double yikes! What on earth justifies that adjustment? How can they do that? We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? They’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data! Now it looks like the IPCC diagram in Figure 1, all right … but a six degree per century trend? And in the shape of a regular stepped pyramid climbing to heaven? What’s up with that?

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

Really, it is a must-read. It is not unique, but representative of far too many of the pieces of data. The anti-American left is currently meeting in Copenhagen in an attempt to destroy the American economy (what's left of it) based on rigged data. It must be stopped. This administration, which is, unfortunately, part of the anti-American left, needs to be stopped.

Quote of the day

Noted by Derb:

Exercising the right of occasional suppression and slight modification, it is truly absurd to see how plastic a limited number of observations become, in the hands of men with preconceived ideas.

— Francis Galton, Meteorographica, or Methods of Mapping the Weather (1863), p.5 [quoted in Stigler's History of Statistics, p.267]

Carlin on CRU

Remember Alan Carlin? He was the EPA scientist that suggested to the agency that "the extensive portions of the EPA's Endangerment TSD which are based upon the old science are no longer appropriate and need to be revised" and was told that

the time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has [sic] decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision...

Well, he's back, and he's got a good piece at Pajamas Media.

the EPA — perhaps at the urging of others in the Obama administration — has proposed to regulate GHG emissions on the basis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports … and reports primarily based on the IPCC reports.

This is highly unusual for the EPA. I cannot think of any instance where the EPA depended so heavily on non-EPA synthesis reports to justify proposed regulatory action in their almost 39 years of existence.

...

It seems clear to me that if a group (such as the EPA) wanted to get an objective scientific judgment on climate change science, CRU et al — and therefore the IPCC — might be the last place that they would want to rely on.

...

Despite the uproar concerning CRU et al’s data and research, the basic problem remains — the UN hypothesis that increases in GHGs/CO2 will result in significant increases in global temperatures has not been confirmed by comparisons with real world data. Unless it is, attempts to decrease GHG/CO2 emissions in order to significantly change global temperatures are very likely to fail. This is the primary question that the EPA and climate scientists need to address before any control efforts are undertaken.

There are some good links in there, too. Read it all...

Aliens cause global warming

This is old, but I hadn't seen it until today. From the late Michael Crichton, a 2003 speech titled Aliens Cause Global Warming:

Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horses**t? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?

But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport. And in 2000, France was getting 80% its power from an energy source that was unknown in 1900. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan were getting more than 30% from this source, unknown in 1900. Remember, people in 1900 didn't know what an atom was. They didn't know its structure. They also didn't know what a radio was, or an airport, or a movie, or a television, or a computer, or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI, ICU, IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet. interferon, instant replay, remote sensing, remote control, speed dialing, gene therapy, gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking, bipolar, prozac, leotards, lap dancing, email, tape recorder, CDs, airbags, plastic explosive, plastic, robots, cars, liposuction, transduction, superconduction, dish antennas, step aerobics, smoothies, twelve-step, ultrasound, nylon, rayon, teflon, fiber optics, carpal tunnel, laser surgery, laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney transplant, AIDS... None of this would have meant anything to a person in the year 1900. They wouldn't know what you are talking about.

Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it's even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They're bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment's thought knows it.

It's long, but brilliant, hitting science, consensus, SETI, nuclear winter, second-hand smoke and global warming (and more) and well worth the time...

And one more quote, particularly relevant to the current "climate:" "When did "skeptic" become a dirty word in science? When did a skeptic require quotation marks around it? "

A question for the Associated Press

AP:

Britain's University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.

Is it still prestigious?

Or, more to the point, if the AP still considers it prestigious, is there anything that could come out which would actually damage its prestige to the point where the AP would not consider it prestigious?

Great CRU piece

This - CRUdGate - Why this can't be swept under the carpet - is excellent. With a couple of outstanding graphics explaing the AGW process from science to politics.

Lastly and as a slight aside, why so little from the MSM? That one is easy. You need to have a decent analytical brain just to deal with the chain of events. You need to have a decent analytical brain, a mathematical/scientific mind and a good grasp of some very hard statistics to understand what is being done to massage the numbers and to see how significant it is to the chain of events.

Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you're going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown—in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand—that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact "at it" and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.

I would find that hard to report too.

I liked that last bit, but go read it - the decision tree diagrams are fantastic...

Global Warming - What I Believe

What I Believe - Global Warming Edition:

1. I am not a climate scientist, and am dependent on others who are to explain the "nuts and bolts" of the Anthropogenic Global Warming model.



2. On the AGW front, I have seen and heard a lot of loud demagoguery.



3. In my opinion, this demagoguery tends to weaken the case rather than strengthen it.



4. Some aspects of the AGW theory are not in dispute.



5. Mankind has, through various activities, increased the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere over what it would contain if mankind did not exist.



6. Mankind continues to engage in activities that increase the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere.



7. No one disputes that.



8. One of these activities is breathing.



9. Many of the others contribute in substantial ways to the health and well being of mankind.



10. I am willing to stipulate that human activity has raised the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ from 280 PPM (Parts per Million, .000000280) to 380 PPM of CO₂.
    
    
11. The difference between 280 PPM and 380 PPM of CO₂ in the atmosphere does not seem like a particularly huge change in the chemical composition of the atmosphere.



12. It is not, to a layman, prima facie evidence of impending catastrophe that requires enormous and world-wide economic sacrifice to address.



13. Despite that, it is conceivable, and a reasonable hypothesis, that the accumulated CO₂ in the atmosphere could have some effect on the planetary climate.



14. As Al Gore showed in his move, An Inconvenient Truth, there does appear to be a relationship between temperature and atmospheric CO₂ concentration, given possible reconstructions of both values over the last several million years.



15. Unfortunately for Al, his chart shows temperature changing before CO₂.



16. That's right - Al Gore's big temperature vs. CO₂ graph shows temperature leading and CO₂ following.



17. Look for yourself - temperature goes up and then CO₂ goes up, temperature goes down and then CO₂ goes down.



18. That is to say, if there is a causal, and not just correlative, relationship between temperature and atmospheric CO₂, it is the opposite of what Gore is claiming.



19. I once believed that there was fairly compelling evidence that the planet has warmed over the past 150 years.



20. I now believe that there is some evidence that the planet has warmed over the past 150 years.



21. The evidence is nowhere near as compelling as it once was.



22. The evidence of data manipulation and outright fraud in the published records is compelling.



23. If the data were as compelling as the people at the CRU and other places claim that it is, there would be no need to hide it.



24. If the "contrarian" position were so weak that it couldn't pass peer review, there would be no need to rig the peer review process.



25. If the "contrarian" position were so weak that it was indefensible, getting the papers published, criticized and mocked could only help the AGW position.



26. It is a reasonable hypothesis to suppose that there is a relationship between increased CO₂ levels and increased temperature on a global level.



27. This hypothesis has not been proven to my satisfaction.



28. I do not believe that the scientific "consensus" is as strong as the warming alarmists would have us believe.



29. If this hypothesis were proven to my satisfaction, I would then expect realistic scenarios presented for the costs vs. benefits of mitigation and the costs vs. benefits of living on a planet with the increased CO₂ levels.



30. The pro-Kyoto, pro-Copenhagen, AGW alarmists have never, to the best of my knowledge, presented a reasonable, rational cost-benefit analysis.



31. Many of the people favoring what may objectively be looked at as anti-Western civilization, "spread the wealth to the poor" policies with regards to carbon have a history of favoring anti-Western civilization, "spread the wealth to the poor" policies at other times in history, for other reasons.



32. Many of the people who are pushing the AGW story the hardest have profited, are profiting, and can be expected to continue profiting from policies and government outlays that are based on their assumptions of short-term climate catastrophe.



33. Many of the people who are profiting from the climate change storyline are living their lives as if it weren't a problem.



34. The AGW scientists admit, among themselves, that they cannot account for the past decade-plus of cooling.



35. I've built complex multi-variable models, based on past data, and used them to predict future data.



36. If the model doesn't correctly predict the future data, something's wrong with the model.



37. It could be an algorithmic problem.



38. It could be a data entry or assumption problem.



39. It could be a problem of failing to understand and include a vital input, or multiple vital inputs.



40. If you kludge a model with fixed data-specific adjustments to say what you want it to say every time you get new data, as they did at CRU, you can always make it match.



41. A model which matches new data based on kludging it after that data is known, has no useful predictive power for future events.



42. An old computer acronym is GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out.



43. The CRU model was garbage, and it was fed garbage.



44. I would not gamble a nickel based on the output of the CRU model.



45. Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama want us to sacrifice our economy and our lifestyle based on it.

It is difficult to believe that engaging in economically destructive activities based on the output of a fudged model using an uncertain and non-reproducible data set is a rational course of action.

Climategate/Climaquiddick

I haven't written about the CRU scandal yet, for a couple of reasons. I've been busy with actual work, for one thing, so that's limited my time, and there's a lot of information to go through. Another is that there's a tendency for initial reports to be wrong, and for people to get up in arms about something that turns out to be innocent or at least explicable. But as the story has developed, it has become clear that there is, in fact, a "there" there, and I've got a couple of things to say.

First, for those that haven't followed the story, some anonymous source, a couple of weeks ago now, posted a massive bundle of data from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia on a (I think) Russian web server, from which the data has been uploaded and examined by people around the world. First reports attributed it to a "hacker," but the content of the file seems to indicate an insider, a whistle-blower, as the content is all relevant to the "climate change" research taking place at CRU. There is source code for the various models, some data, and a lot of emails between various "alarmists," proponents of massive and radical government action to curb global warming.

The emails got the first attention, and they paint a damning picture. The impression created is not that of a group of scientists committed to the truth. Instead, we see what seems to be a small cabal of high priests, committed to their religion, devoted to its truth regardless of the facts, willing to hide and potential defects in their story, fudge data to support it, and punish heresy wherever it appears. They don't come across well.

After a few days, people have also had a chance to look at the model code. It also doesn't reflect well on anyone. The code is poorly structured, poorly commented, and what commenting exists is fairly damning, talking about "fudge factors," and data manipulation tricks to get desired results.


Anyway, this has been the major story in the blogosphere for the past week. I was hesitant to post at first for a couple of reasons. One is that we all have a tendency to jump at information that confirms our pre-conceptions ("confirmation bias"), so I'm aware that I'll tend to credit information which disputes and/or disparages AGW. So I try not to go there, especially with something this big, until I've seen enough to be convinced that there's a real story. There's definitely a real story.

Another reason is that a lot of the early coverage focused on one e-mail, in which Dr. Phil Jones claimed to have "used Mike's Nature trick" to "hide the decline." Too much of the first wave of coverage was focused on the word "trick," which is not actually damning at all. We've all got "tricks." "What's the trick to getting that lawnmower started?" "My trick for getting those cookies that color is to bake them faster and take them out before they're done." So the focus on the word "trick" bothered me. That passed quickly, however, and "hide the decline" is a lot tougher to explain away.

So that's the background for those who haven't been following the story. (I'll have more links and more comments going forward.) The absolute best-case interpretation that you can put on what's been released, as near as I can tell, is this - the scientists pushing the "carbon is killing the world" message are sloppy, short-sighted, fanatical, petty, and willing to manipulate the data in order to present the most effective case to the world on a real danger. The worst-case is that they've lied for grant money, to the detriment of pretty much everyone else on the face of the earth.

Is it "the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'" as James Delingpole says? Or would "a far wider conspiracy ... have to be revealed," as George Monbiot claims?

I don't know. I do know this - in order to justify ANY kind of government action to reduce carbon emissions, there needs to be some compelling and convincing science done, science that we can all trust. I'm not aware of the existence of any thus far.