The Wall Street Journal gets it right:
I don’t think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn’t only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called “the scientific community” had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).
Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science.
That it did. I don’t think many of my friends who work in science have fully understood just how bad this blow is to their field, no matter which particular field of science they’re in. Those who derided the skeptics on the Global Warming “consensus” have placed themselves in the role of the Inquisitors who damned Galileo. Never mind that Galileo was wrong about some things, never mind even that his Inquisitors got something of a bad rap themselves. By actively working to destroy reputations and careers, by hiding–and even destroying!–code and data, by hiding behind the mantle of authority and gatekeepers of truth, they’ve caused countless people with a love and respect for the sciences to cease trusting scientists, the scientific method, and the peer review process itself.
This is no small thing. The shakeout may bring positive things (much-needed reform of the peer-review funding system is one we may hope for), but may bring very negative things as well, including a general disrepute for science that could have negative consequences for generations to come.
I suppose the average person doesn’t quite see all this; they look at science with some vague interest as something beyond their daily lives. But trust in scientists, trust in the sciences? It’s no longer something people who care passionately about the subject can rest confidently on.
And I might add, there are a number of science bloggers out there who aren’t even in the climate change field who now have egg on their faces. Let’s hope most of them are adult enough to admit it.
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Take care what y0u place on a pedastal.
The pedastal itself corrputs.
True enough.
It’s hard for me, as someone with a love and respect for science since I was a small child, to watch this happening. Sure, I’ve been watching it happen and been one of the skeptics for some time, but that’s made it all the harder as it became more and more obvious how my idols had feet of clay.
A little semantic word play:
When I was a little boy, when my Dad called Einstein a genius, I learned that Einstein was, in fact, a genius.
But, when my Uncle Ike called Einstein a Commie moron, I merely learned that Uncle Ike wasn’t too bright.
It’s the same thing with Scientists (not just in Global warming, but in any field), when they call people “Deniers” or “Denialists”.
You don’t learn about the “Deniers” or “Denialists,” but you do learn that the scientists using that phrase, have so much money at stake, so much prestige at stake, and so much emotion tied up in their personal viewpoint, that they are not acting like scientists.
Worse, they are corrupting science for the rest of us.
That is exactly what Phil Jones and Michael Mann have done.
Henceforth, anyone who calls an scientific opponent a Denialist or Denier, really should be viewed with great suspicion. If they had the data and the correct interpretation of the data, supporting their opinion, they wouldn’t have to resort to name-calling.
Jones and Mann are toast.
–HB
It is clear that the unauthorized release of all these emails and data is a public relations disaster for CRU and global warming research in general.
I have, of course, not read all the emails, but I have read the short snippets that people point. It is clear that those snippets are being blown all out of proportion by people who don’t believe in global warming. The facts are being very mis-represented.
For example, CRU did destroy the original raw data in the 1980s, apparently because of lack of space. The 1980s was before anyone had ever heard of global warming. The idea that CRU destroyed this data to hide it from their critics is just silly, since the critics didn’t appear until many years later. The raw data is also still available from the original sources that CRU got it from, so all CRU did was destroy its copy of the raw data.
The controversy over the Soon and Baliunas 2003 paper was a very public controversy. Many climate scientists were very upset about the publication of that review paper because they argued the conclusions drawn in the paper were not supported by the data reviewed in the paper. In many fields a publication of a study like this would not be a big deal. Other people would write papers pointing out the errors, and that would be the end of it. Other authors did in fact write papers pointing out the errors in Soon and Baliuunas 2003 paper, but Senator Inofhe called a committee hearing to debate the Soon and Baliuunas paper in July 2003.
That is the root of the politicization of this issue. A single paper skeptical of global warming published in a refereed journal, that many other climate scientist find to be seriously flawed, merits a congressional hearing to discuss it. Given that is the political reality of climate science, is it any wonder that many climate scientist were very upset about the publication of this paper they viewed as seriously flawed?
Global warming skeptics have been mounting a significant PR effort to discredit climate science. These leaked emails and files are a PR bonanza that will help discredit the public perception of global warming, but they contain almost nothing that discredits that actual underlying science. The earth has still warmed significantly in the last hundred years. The climate models still predict that rising CO2 levels will accelerate that warming in the next hundred years.
I personally think global climate is probably too complex to be modeled with what we currently understand. I think it is likely there are factors that are not properly accounted for in those models. That is all beside the point.
The point of releasing these emails is to convince people to ignore the science of global warming.
The point of releasing these emails is to convince people to ignore the science of global warming.
No, the point is to break up the false, jerry-rigged consensus that global warming is an established fact, and allow a less obstructed path for critics to express their views and the data supporting their views.
–HB
That is the root of the politicization of this issue.
Not Hansen’s testimony? Not Al Gore? or Kyoto?
This has been political for a long time.
No, the point is to break up the false, jerry-rigged consensus that global warming is an established fact, and allow a less obstructed path for critics to express their views and the data supporting their views.
The whole point of the issue is to change the public perception of the state of global warming science. Today 26% of Americans do not believe that global temperatures have gone up in the last hundred years, although no serious person familiar with the data disputes that temperatures have gone up. (There are disputes about other issues, like whether the rise is unusual, different than previous warming periods in history and what part of it, if any, can be attributed to rising CO2 levels or other human influences.)
I think the whole point is to allow global warming skeptics and amateur skeptics access to journals and the media so they can publish poorly researched papers that will be widely publicized by friendly media outlets and members of congress to convince the public that climate science is so unsettled that we don’t even know whether the earth has gotten warmer in the last 100 years.
If amateur skeptics had easy access to the CRU data, there would be hundreds of amateur papers based on manipulations of the CRU data to show that global warming did not even exist. The science would simply get buried in a flood of amateur pseudo science.
Since you haven’t really done anything more than a cursory examinations, Mike, your conclusions really aren’t worth anything. Sorry, but they aren’t.
Having read a good bit myself, it isn’t at all clear that much is being blown out of proportion here, even though I was somewhat inclined to agree for a while there. But it’s not just me, a growing number of scientists, in this field and other fields, are saying the same exact thing. You really, seriously, need to do more homework before making your sweeping pronouncements, most particularly about the supposed motivations of others.
There really is no good context for some of those remarks. And a look at the source code and comments is simply devastating. This is a horrendous, horrendous mess, aggravated by years of truly shockingly arrogant behavior that at minimum adds up to an abuse of power.
By the way, I would again note that Dr. Curry’s position on this is pretty much unimpeachable, so far as I can see.
There have always been plenty of Global Warming skeptics. There are also alternate theories that make more sense such as water pollution > CO2 emissions.
The problem is the politicization of the issue has buried these people. Governments, people who aren’t scientists, have been deciding which scientific issues to prioritize and that makes any sort of skepticism harder to reach public ears. After all, if the government spent a great deal of money on nothing, the last thing they want the public to know is that it was a waste of money.
The problem with the global warming issue is that environmental scientists were overwhelmed by environmentalists. There is a difference. The effects of pollution on our health is negative and there is data to support why we should reduce smog and stop dumping crap into the water. However, it wasn’t scary enough. Panic needed to be generated to “get the word out” so certain people bake up a scheme where the world is threatened because gases are being stored up and boiling the Earth! Then it became politicized and that’s when things became absurd.
From what I have read of the files ( I admit I just didn’t have time to read every single scrap of data), it is completely obvious that there was data manipulation and attempt to derail the peer review process and curtail valid arguments. Who knows how many effective experiments had been ignored this whole time on the effects of pollution and means to reduce it in a beneficial way. It’s truly sad.
Since you haven’t really done anything more than a cursory examinations, Mike, your conclusions really aren’t worth anything. Sorry, but they aren’t.
Dean, You are a well know global warming skeptic. I would not expect anything different from you.
I have read a number of posts, some on the front page here, by people who quote some passage from an email, and then say see, this shows xyz. I read the passage, and I don’t think it shows it shows xyz at all.
I think you have to be a true believer that global warming does not exist in order to draw that conclusion. You have used the word conspiracy to describe what you these emails show. I think that reflects a very naive understanding of how science is done.
You understand that the purpose of stealing these documents and releasing them was to further politicize the global warming debate. It is hard to win a scientific argument. You have to actually collect data and analyze it to support you conclusions. Political arguments however can be and often are won simply be screaming louder and more hysterically.
These documents have given global warming skeptics great material to scream loudly and hysterical about. The problem is that investigating these emails will do nothing to advance our understanding of the issue.
The important question is not whether the warming in the last hundred years was similar to other warnings in the past. That is a side issue at most. The important question is whether the theory and predictions of climate models that increasing CO2 will cause accelerated future global warming. That question has little to do with historical temperature reconstructions or CRU data.
I know you are also a HIV skeptic. You can make an argument that HIV is simply an opportunistic infection that occurs in people with weak immune systems. I remember in the 1980′s when AIDs was first discovered, it was essentially 100% fatal. Thousand of people died of AIDs in SF alone. The death rate in the US because of AIDs is now very low. To me this would seem to be because of the treatments. Those treatments were designed to attack HIV. I have never heard an explanation of why treatments developed to destroy HIV would be effective against AIDS, if HIV was not the cause of AIDS.
I think some of your critic of how big time science is funded has some truth in it. It is much like saying that democracy is a very bad form of government, it is just that all the others are worse. What is your alternative theory for how to fund science? The world is full of crackpots with all kinds of crazy ideas. Clearly someone needs to decide who should get funding and who should not. What do you base those decisions on? Who should make them? How is it different from the current system?
There are also alternate theories that make more sense such as water pollution > CO2 emissions.
A theory I have heard suggested is that part of the rather rapid increase in global temperatures in the last 50 years is because of reduction in particulate air pollution. While CO2 levels have been increasing for hundreds of years, they were accompanied by increased particulate air pollution, which cause sunlight to be reflected. This tended to balance the effect of CO2, until we started reducing air pollution.
You can see publicizing that theory might not be popular with some global warming supporters. By the way, I’m not advocating increased particulate air pollution, because that killed thousands of people too.
Thinking about it…
I think measuring productivity by “papers published” is problematic. It makes about as much sense as measuring programmer productivity by “lines of code”. We learned a quarter century ago that that really doesn’t work.
For knowledge workers, what matters is quality, not quantity. It’s relatively easy to spew out a pile of junk. It doesn’t add much, though.
The only thing that quantity metrics have to offer is ease of evaluation by administrators who know nothing of the subject matter.
Dear Mikeca, what the H. does:
“The important question is whether the theory and predictions of climate models that increasing CO2 will cause accelerated future global warming. That question has little to do with historical temperature reconstructions or CRU data”
mean?
Do you understand that (according to the emails) the historical data did not match the models, so the data was “adjusted”? Do you understand that (according to the emails) the last decade’s data did not match the models so the last decades data was “adjusted”? Did you know that when data does not match a model it usually means the model is wrong (as opposed to the data being wrong)?
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” –R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
http://ai.stanford.edu/~nilsson/hawtk/4chapter4.pdf
Bertrand Russell, “On the Value of Scepticism,” from The Will to Doubt, New York: Philosophical Library, 1958:
. . . the opinion of experts, when it is unanimous, must be accepted by non-experts as more likely to be right than the opposite opinion. The scepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.
It should be clear to everyone that the global temperature has been varying for millions of years and not all those variations are caused by CO2. There are many factors that effect global temperature. CO2 is just one of them.
Say you have a swimming pool with a gas heater. You have a theory that the energy consumed by the gas heater is related to the pool water temperature. If you keep careful records, you will probably find some correlation, but it will not be a perfect correlation. There will be times when the water temperature goes up, even though the heater is not being used at all. There are other factors besides the pool heater that effect the water temperature.
My point is that just because CO2 did not cause all temperature variations in the last few hundred years, does not mean that increasing levels of CO2 will not cause the earth to be warmer than what it otherwise would have been. That is the important question.
Now these scientist may well have been trying to find a close relationship between recent temperatures and CO2 based models of global temperature. It certainly is something worth trying.
When a scientist pots up his raw data and says “I don’t see the effect I thought I would. I’ll apply some adjustments to the data and see if I can see the effect then.” That may or may not mean that he is manipulating the data to get the effect he wants to see. It depends on whether the adjustments he is applying to the raw data are fair adjustments. Now, scientist are human, and there may be a tendency to favor the adjustments that show the effect he wants. Whether the adjustments are manipulations to show the effect you want or whether they are valid adjustments is a very complex question. These emails are really not evidence of manipulation.
mike…
The adjustments are straight additions to the “temperature” product applied directly at the output. They’re not even cherry-picking to use series with the best results.
It’s not changing the data to see if it works differently, it’s effectively straight replacement of the low frequency portion of the data.
I’m a simpleton. I can’t wrap my brain around climate “science”.
As a chemist, I have a hard time thinking of CO2 as a big bad boogeyman. I have a hard time getting into a tizzy over an average global temp change of no more than a degree when I can’t keep my lab thermometers calibrated to the accuracy that would be needed to measure such a change with certainty. As a healthcare practitioner I have a hard time buying into estimates that require as series of guesses and extrapolations. As a citizen, my BS detector goes off in direct proportion to the shrillness of alarmist politiking.
That’s why I tend to lean toward the AGW skeptic side in this debate.
I tried to follow the debate on this new climategate scandal around the web, but there is very little real debate going on. The AGW beleivers (and they act very much like religious zealots from what I have seen) stick their fingers in their ears and slur insults and the “skeptics” scream gotcha and slur them back. There’s so little substance to be found.
Meanwhile, it was 60 degrees in Maine today and I had my windows wide open thinking “if this is global warming then I’m liking it!”
Cheers!
“A theory I have heard suggested is that part of the rather rapid increase in global temperatures in the last 50 years is because of reduction in particulate air pollution. While CO2 levels have been increasing for hundreds of years, they were accompanied by increased particulate air pollution, which cause sunlight to be reflected. This tended to balance the effect of CO2, until we started reducing air pollution.
You can see publicizing that theory might not be popular with some global warming supporters. By the way, I’m not advocating increased particulate air pollution, because that killed thousands of people too.”
That would be very interesting. In that case it would be the effects of a previous reaction to the pollution, which would be followed by another rebound reaction after the pollution was cleared. Resulting in a temporary warming of temperature until the Earth “reset” itself so-to-speak.
Lots of interesting theories out there that definitely deserved some attention. Too bad one guy stole the whole show.
Whoa:
“It should be clear to everyone that the global temperature has been varying for millions of years and not all those variations are caused by CO2. There are many factors that effect global temperature. CO2 is just one of them. ”
If the pre-historical processed temp and inferred CO2 concentration data is correct, there appears to be a correlation between CO2 and temp. If you start from the assumption that CO2 changes temp you’ve already drawn the conclusion.
The AGW mantra WAS that CO2 was reaching a tipping point from which we could not recover. I don’t know if or how that has morphed given that “something” has managed to completely overcome increasing CO2 levels to provide decreasing global temps for the past decade.
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