We’ve now had two posts on the East Anglia University email hacking affair and the material continues to flow. This update is a sample of what I’ve seen of the more sensible material.
Michael Le Page has a plain language article in the New Scientist entitled Why there’s no sign of a climate conspiracy in hacked emails, starting with a re-statement of the basic phenomenon of global warming, that the rising levels of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere are causing it and then dealing with the main issues raised by the affair.
I was not aware of the degree to which FOI was apparently being used as an attack weapon to disrupt the work of scientists:
There is also no doubt that climate change deniers have been using freedom of information requests to harass researchers and waste their time, with the CRU receiving more than 50 such requests in one week alone this year.
An editorial in Nature also finds no conspiracy, finds the science intact, but thinks that the stolen emails “highlight ways in which climate researchers could be better supported in the face of public scrutiny.”
Nature worries that the affair will be used by denialists to “undermine trust in scientists and science” in an effort to undermine the US climate change legislation next year.
An editorial in the New Scientist also raises the spectre of scientists under attack.
CRU researchers have compiled “the most authoritative record of recent temperatures on the planet.”
Yet its researchers have been inundated over the past few years with what feel like unreasonable and malicious demands for their raw data. They fear the hacking of their emails is the culmination of a concerted attack by data terrorists.
The editorial chides scientists who ask each other to delete emails apparently in the face of an FOI request (no-one defends that behaviour) and urges them to engage with the terrorists:
Researchers being paid from the public purse should not treat their detractors as enemies but make reasonable attempts to engage with them honestly, no matter how unpalatable their views.
That’s actually a big ask, when you know that your interlocutors are not acting in good faith and will lie, deceive and distort in an attempt to destroy your work.
The editorial says the Hadley/CRU temperature record is the best. Joe Romm at Climate Progress disagrees because it simply leaves a blank for the Arctic Ocean, thought to be the warmingest place on earth. Romm prefers the NASA GISS version, which “assumes its surface temperature is the same as that of the nearest land-based stations.”
The inclusion of the Arctic makes 2005 the warmest year on record, with 2007 just pipping 1998 for second place. Unsurprisingly, sceptics usually prefer the HadCRUT version.
The first RealClimate post produced a thread with 1092 comments. This is followed by The CRU hack: Context which attracted a further 1074 comments.
In the second post a link is provided to Trenberth’s paper exploring the need for tracking “changes in reservoirs and flows of energy within the climate system” on a year to year basis. You will recall Trenberth was the one who made this statement:
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t… Our observing system is inadequate.”
When you see the remark in context the absurdity of denialist claims about it become self-evident.
In the interests of transparency, RealClimate set up a Data Sources page and an appeal for suggestions.
RealClimate has now done a third post giving more context. It includes a link to an Open Letter to Scientists by Kevin Trenberth with an attachment detailing IPPC procedures. There is also link to an excellent opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal by Mike Hume, a climate scientist who worked in the CRU at East Anglia:
Science never writes closed textbooks. It does not offer us a holy scripture, infallible and complete.
Science has clearly revealed that humans are influencing global climate and will continue to do so, but we don’t know the full scale of the risks involved, nor how rapidly they will evolve, nor indeed—with clear insight—the relative roles of all the forcing agents involved at different scales.
The central battlegrounds on which we need to fight out the policy implications of climate change concern matters of risk management, of valuation, and political ideology. We must move the locus of public argumentation here not because the science has somehow been “done” or “is settled”; science will never be either of these things, although it can offer powerful forms of knowledge not available in other ways.
This theme is taken up in yet another post.
The reason why no scientist has said [that the science is settled] is because they know full well that knowledge about science is not binary – science isn’t either settled or not settled. This is a false and misleading dichotomy. Instead, we know things with varying degrees of confidence – for instance, conservation of energy is pretty well accepted, as is the theory of gravity (despite continuing interest in what happens at very small scales or very high energies) , while the exact nature of dark matter is still unclear. The forced binary distinction implicit in the phrase is designed to misleadingly relegate anything about which there is still uncertainty to the category of completely unknown. i.e. that since we don’t know everything, we know nothing.
In the climate field, there are a number of issues which are no longer subject to fundamental debate in the community. The existence of the greenhouse effect, the increase in CO2 (and other GHGs) over the last hundred years and its human cause, and the fact the planet warmed significantly over the 20th Century are not much in doubt. IPCC described these factors as ‘virtually certain’ or ‘unequivocal’. The attribution of the warming over the last 50 years to human activity is also pretty well established – that is ‘highly likely’ and the anticipation that further warming will continue as CO2 levels continue to rise is a well supported conclusion. To the extent that anyone has said that the scientific debate is over, this is what they are referring to. In answer to colloquial questions like “Is anthropogenic warming real?”, the answer is yes with high confidence.
But no scientists would be scientists if they thought there was nothing left to find out.
As an example of reasonably settled science, RealClimate has set out The CO2 problem in 6 easy steps.
You’ve probably heard that the UN as well as East Anglia have set up a panel to formally investigate claims that scientists manipulated data about global warming. The head of the CRU, Prof. Phil Jones, has stood aside.
The joint chairman of the IPCC has now strongly defended the scientists.
the science is unequivocal in its evidence of global warming and supported by researchers around the world.
Update: At Climate Progress Joe Romm’s latest post is about a conference call with Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann and Michael Oppenheimer. Romm’s main message is that scientists and science institutions are not going on the front foot enough.
At the end of his post he has links to no less than 8 earlier posts he has done on the topic, including an interview with James Hansen. His view on Hansen is that he is great on the science but has no more expertise than the next bloke on solutions to the mitigation problem.
Thank you for pulling these together. An interesting article in a similar vein to those above was published by The Economist.
I think the CRU affair will aid the denialists in the short term, though. I had a discussion with friend at the weekend who is shaken by the emails, and he’s got a significant financial stake in the success of an Australian CPRS & carbon trading.
Here’s a very good video summary of just exactly what wasn’t being hidden at all by the scientists who wrote those emails:
Here’s why this is a massive win for the ‘Denialists.’
Lots of TL:DR articles about outliers and samples and data massaging verses ‘they teh lied LOL’
Without trying to be conspiratoralist, it feels like a managed event for the benefit of denialists in the public arena. If so, its been massively successful. But ultimately, its self-defeating. Like the tobacco astroturfing, its clearly only going to delay things, and the public anger when the worm turns again will be gigantic. And what kind of failure is this, that instead of dealing with the problem, we prefer to explain it away? It’s not the scientific process we should be questioning, its the political and economic, as they already very aware.
Thanks Andrew and tigtog for the links.
Before posting I should have checked Climate Progress. Joe Romm’s latest post is about a conference call with Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann and Michael Oppenheimer. Romm’s main message is that scientists and science institutions are not going on the front foot enough.
At the end of his post he has links to no less than 8 earlier posts he has done on the topic, including an interview with James Hansen. His view on Hansen is that he is great on the science but has no more expertise than the next bloke on solutions to the mitigation problem.
Thanks for pulling the facts togther on this. Unfortunately, even the belated strong reaction of the scientists is feeding the conspiracy theorists. They use it as furtehr “proof” that all climate scientists associated with the IPCC are part of the swindle. And the UN itself? – well that’s the ultimate conspiracy, isn’t it?.
“It’s not the scientific process we should be questioning, its the political and economic, as they already very aware.”
While this is true where scientists and policy makers are concerned, it is imperative that the science is presented to the general public in a way that can be understood.
The reason that progress to this point has been limited in reducing greenhouse gas pollution is that only a small percentage of people understand the greenhouse effect.
The current controversy around the emails should provide a valuable opportunity for scientists and governments and even interested media organisations to communicate the mechanism of global warming. Unless people understand the science they will be easy prey for the polluting industries’ lobbyists.
Fortunately, the greenhouse effect is relatively easy to grasp. It is only very recently that most governments have accepted the facts of climate change. Now they need to begin a public education process. Jumping straight to discussion of an ETS etc is to miss this vital first step.
An interesting experiment for nay who doubt that cliamte change is at alll well understood is to ask those around you to give their understanding of the greenhouse effect.
That’s true, wbb. The RealClimate The CO2 problem in 6 easy steps is an attempt, but doesn’t quite do it for me.
Apart from a depressing post on Copenhagen which is about to appear and a few bits and pieces, my remaining effort for the year is going to be to have a crack at presenting the basic science
I think that would really be worthwhile, Brian. The problem with the RealClimate 6 easy steps is that it is not easy at all.
I know a doctor (whose identity shall remain unknown!) She votes Green. I asked her this morning for an explanation of the greenhouse effect. She didn’t come close to pulling it off. She would have been able to (I hope) shortly after leaving the cinema after Gore’s film, but that’s a while ago now isn’t it.
You have presented the hard science here at great length and for a long time with a competence I really admire, Brian. Trouble is I doubt enough of it has been understood by many of us reading.
I reckon we now need to be shown rather than told. The greenhouse effect is so simple that scientists forget that it is not yet generally understood.
It does need to be understood. Otherwise people are left with no resistance to false argument. The Denial Industry is seriously getting their act together.
The debate on the science is long over. But the education of that science has now to begin.
For the broader community, this is going to be a difficult task to achieve. The disconnect between the rhetoric and policy responses of both major parties suggests that it is in the best interests of neither to adequately educate the voters. In light of the most recent scientific evidence I would argue that only the Greens’ policies seem to be in the ballpark, but as they have been labelled extremists by both the Labs and Libs its most likely that they’ll be excluded from any meaningful involvement.
It’s really interesting to see the results of this leak. The alarmist side has been downplaying the significance of these emails, fearing that the sceptics will sensationalise them. But the real significance has been in the way the alarmist side has been forced to change its language.
How many times in recent years have we heard that there “is consensus”, and “the science is settled”. Now we have Mike Hulme saying that science is never settled, and Tim Flannery admitting there are gaps in our knowledge of the climate. This is a great contrast to the facade of certainty that the alarmist side has presented in the past. “Climategate” has changed the whole tone of this debate, and that’s a very good thing.
“Now we have Mike Hulme saying that science is never settled, and Tim Flannery admitting there are gaps in our knowledge of the climate. This is a great contrast to the facade of certainty that the alarmist side has presented in the past.”
With all due respect Lachlan, that is utter bullshit.
Scientists should not get sucked into this discussion about how settled the science is. Not unless they are prepared to use colloquial meaning of the word. It is completely counter-productive to talk about science never being settled. A non-scientist heas this and gets the wrong message.
The science is settled. End of story.
wbb“The science is settled. End of story.”
Not quite: oversimplistic, sorry, and if we keep the debate at that level of binarism, we’ll all go in circles forever.
I’d agree that it is settled that warming is happening fast enough to be a major concern, and that serious action needs to be taken to mitigate this. Anyone denying this is part of the problem.
I’d also agree that it is pretty well settled that human activities have accelerated it beyond the pace at which it would normally occur, but this is not actually pertinent to the former point. Dwelling on anthropogenicity is a pointless blame game.
Timescales, strengths of forcing factors and feedback mechanisms, efficacy of remedies, risks/benefits of doing nothing/taking various actions: these are not settled, and need research, education and discussion.
We have to get the public, media, policy-makers and politicians engaged in more nuanced, contentful debate that goes beyond 9-second sound bites, yes/no questions and ‘lied!’/'didn’t’ dichotomies.
What’s settled is settled. We obviously have to hammer that home, because the message still isn’t 100% embedded. But there is a lot more detail that is still up for serious discussion rather than the time-wasting that we have largely had so far.
The science is settled, no it’s not, yes it is, no it’s not . . .
Keep up the good work.
Brian, a basic explanation of the science would be very much appreciated. Many people really are trying to wrap their heads around Atmosphere 101, and aren’t getting much help.
Really, anyone who’s an actual skeptic and not just a contrary “don’t let the hippies take away my SUV” denier should be looking for proof that the absorption spectrum of CO2 behaves differently than is currently known. It’s like the Intelligent Design people though – they think that picking tiny holes in the existing theory is enough, when what they need to do is put forward an alternate theory that better fits the facts.
stringy said:
Actually they haven’t even done that. They’ve run sopme spurious and specisous claims and had their cyberworld zombies repeat them over and over again like re-runs of M.A.S.H. but without the amusement value.
Well that’s what is called scientific research, and they aren’t interested in that, because, well that’s tough to do and what they want is a way of keeping up the value of fossil fuel assets. Why waste time doing science when you can throw rocks.
The whole thing really is very simple.
1.Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas (Tyndall 1859).
2.Carbon dioxide is rising (Keeling 1958, 1960, etc.).
3.Therefore (1, 2) the Earth’s temperature should be rising.
4.The Earth’s temperature is rising (NASA GISS, Hadley Centre CRU,
RSS, UAH, etc., etc.).
5.Therefore (1, 2, 3) the increased temperatures should relate closely
to the carbon dioxide level. And as you note, the sections of the absorption spectra that measure outgoing longwave are marked by gaps in the parts you’d expect to be associated with elevated CO2, in quanta that fal;l within the warming trend
6.The correlation between NASA GISS temperature anomalies and ln CO2
is r = 0.87 for 1880-2007 BPL.
7.The new carbon dioxide is primarily from fossil fuel burning (Suess
1955, Revelle and Suess 1957).
8.Therefore the global warming taking place is anthropogenic.
In short, all of what may be called the basic science of the current climate anomaly is absolutely beyond reasonable demur.
Other important questions — feedbacks, the dynamic interplay in elements in the climate system, the speed of warming, the likely pattern of fluxes between sinks, the rate and pattern of ice sheet and glacier decomposition, effects on regional weather and severe events, the precise cost and harm of the changes associated with cvarious response scenarios and their timelines, impacts on biodiversity, where exactly the much discussed tipping point is etc. is still a matter for earnest discussion amongst those who have the skill and the integrity on this matter that springs from a genuine desire to underpin good policy.
Razor,
“Tony himself has, in just four or five months, publicly advocated the blocking of the ETS, the passing of the ETS, the amending of the ETS and, if the amendments were satisfactory, passing it, and now the blocking of it.”
Yep, the Liberal position is settled.
Keep up the good work.
It is interesting to see the bias on this site.
A more balanced statement reads:
Pielke: “Both those who denounce “global warming” as a hoax and RealClimate’s claim that this is a “tempest in a teapot” are incorrect. With respect to the role of humans in the climate system, there is incontrovertible evidence that we exert both warming and cooling effects. The warming occurs through the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and certain aerosols, and cooling [occurs due to] other types of aerosols. Land use change due to human land management also effects warming and cooling forcings.
With respect to the RealClimate dismissal of the emails, however, there are serious issues exposed by the emails — including the goal of these scientists to prevent proper scientific disclosure of their data, as well as to control what papers appear in the peer reviewed literature and climate assessments. The IPCC assessment, with which major policy decisions are being made, involves the individuals in the emails who have senior leadership positions.”
Fran @ 17
“8.Therefore the global warming taking place is anthropogenic.”
The failure of this statement is EXACTLY how much global warming is attributable to carbon dioxide, and therefore what impact will occur, if and when we control carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere?
What is the correlation between the temperature used and global warming?
FDB said:
Al Gore and demagogues like him have been saying “the debate is over” for many years now. It’s a good thing that Climategate is forcing that to be challenged in the mainstream media. The debate is going to go on and on (and on).
“This is a great contrast to the facade of certainty that the alarmist side has presented in the past.”
I took this to mean a unified and consistent facade, hiding (as facades are designed to do) a secret maelstrom of heated disagreement, uncertainty etc etc.
Whereas the science on whose basis Gore and others pronounce (I agree, sometimes hyperbolically and without making clear the uncertainties) is freely available, and has always shown error bars, and confidence intervals, and been quite upfront about the amount and type of uncertainties.
Not actually a very effective facade, right? More of a case of a couple of very prominent people over-egging the case, while the IPCC and scientific community continue the work of honestly applying science to quantify and propose solutions for the problem of global warming.
via Collins
Comparing political decisions versus scientific evidence – do you see that as an apples and apples comparison?
Razor,
Your note referred (I assume) to the commenters discussion immediately above it. Therefore, it had no relation to science whatever.
Either way, your comment did make me smile, but I happened over Malcom’s comment moments afterwards, and enjoyed the similarities.
From the post:
Anti-AGW types write out 500 times and learn by heart, please.
I’d go a bit further, but I can’t prove it. For the IPPC “highly likely” means 90% plus probability. “Virtually certain” means 95% plus probability. The IPPC is a conservative body and if you want to get a statement in the Summary for Policy Makers there has to be complete consensus including at the political level.
I reckon if you polled IPPC contributing authors, or climate scientists published in peer-reviewed journals, in a secret poll you’d get 95% plus support for AGW.
can any one explain the correlation between the climate when the dinasaurs roamed the planet and the present climate on earth now, was the climate in a greenhouse state then? if so has not the earth cooled since then? some one please explain!
John M @ 19, I don’t see that Pielke is bringing anything new to the table. So he is not biassed?
You include the point you raised on another thread that “land use change due to human land management also effects warming and cooling forcings”. It’s as though no-one has thought of this before.
If you look at the final Garnaut Review Figure 2.3, you’ll see that land use changes are slightly negative and pretty much balance the slightly positive forcing of the sun as such.
Much ado about nothing.
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Bondy @ 25, here is the temperature for for the last 542 million years. As you can see it is cooler now than when the dinosaurs karked it 65 million years ago.
BTW the sun is hotter now than it was 65 million years ago. The main driver of the cooling from about 55mya was the CO2 content in the atmosphere, but from about 3 mya when the Panama Isthmus closed orbital changes (the Milankovitch cycles) took over as the main driver until the industrial era when we started putting CO2 into the atmosphere in great quantities.
Craig Mc
I see your snark and raise you one planet.
Zoot: and back at ya.
Brian @ 26,
“Much ado about nothing”
Another quotation from a scientist for you, Roy Spencer, Ph.D.
“Supporters have claimed that there is nothing to see there…that the Climategate e-mails released to the world by a whistleblower just show how scientists normally work. This is a particularly bad strategy, and the public knows it. Scientists do NOT behave this way…at least not in my world.
Others have claimed that a few bad apples do not spoil the whole IPCC barrel. Well, if it wasn’t for the fact that these are the core people who gave us the primary thermometer evidence of 20th Century warming (Phil Jones), and the Hockey Stick temperature reconstruction which conveniently did away with the previous 10 or more centuries of natural climate change (Michael Mann), I might be inclined to agree with them.
I will admit that it seems unlikely (but not impossible) that a reanalysis of the thermometer data will lead to a much reduced rate of warming in recent decades. But my bigger concern is that the “it’s-OK-to-fudge” attitude pervades the entire IPCC apparatus.
These e-mails are from the observational side of the IPCC, that is, the research into temperature observations of the past. What I am more concerned about, though, is the manipulation of climate models, which are used to predict the future state of the climate system. Computer models are much easier to manipulate than real data, and one can get just about any answer one wants out of them.
Now that we have seen that the temperature observation guys ‘wanted’ to get a certain result, it is reasonable to wonder whether the modelers are also incentivized to produce particular results. I’m sure the hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into global warming research – money that would dry up if the threat evaporated — has not influenced their objectivity.
Now, trillions of dollars in global warming legislation are riding upon these model ‘black boxes’ that relatively few people understand the inner workings of. The models are so complex, with many adjustable parameters which have no known true values, that it is unlikely that they can ever be replicated by other researchers. In case you hadn’t heard, reproducibility is a basic requirement of scientific research.”
John M, it’s a pity Roy Spencer, Ph.D. didn’t have something new to say. I think Gavin Schmidt’s line that what we see is “normal” for scientists at work in terms of the way they communicate, interact and compete etc is not a profitable line to take. It doesn’t mean that they have corrupted the science, the data bases, the models, the IPCC process or anything else, however. Spencer’s stuff is the same old stuff and I’m not going to respond in detail.
It does seem that the ‘scientists manipulating data’ (in an evil way) meme has stuck, which is a shame, because there’s no case for it.
Courtesy of Fran on another thread, Swifthack.com has more.