Below are two articles, one from the UK, the other Australia, taking a wider perspective on Climategate. The science-media-political complex is now starting to come under the spotlight. This is a very necessary and salutary development. It is the much required, "how did it come to this?" phase. If we do not learn from this, and make changes, we will be condemned to repeat it.
Firstly, a piece from Andrew Orlowski
Why the Climategate controversy matters…
The leaked emails suggest that Projection and Anecdote are the key planks of the science of global warming.
Andrew Orlowski
Turn on the radio or TV at any point in the past two weeks, or eavesdrop on our professional commentariat, and you’ll certainly have heard the mantra that despite Climategate, the ‘science behind global warming’ remains as strong as ever, and unquestionable.
For Guardian columnist George Monbiot, the behaviour of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, revealed in the files, was disgraceful, yet as he called for director Phil Jones to resign he also assured us that the scientific basis was ‘unimpeachable’. Even Benny Peiser, director of the new Global Warming Policy Foundation, hastened to tell BBC’s Newsnight that ‘we are not questioning the basic science of global warning’, instead preferring that the Foundation express concern about ‘transparency and openness’.
But why is a scientific hypothesis beyond question? If the phrase ‘an informed citizenry’ is to be more than a pious and empty sentiment, we need to make rational decisions with all the evidence available. If we are to give our consent to dramatic changes in public policy, we need to know all the weaknesses of a hypothesis. Reason is not the privilege of an elite.
‘Climategate’ has pulled back the curtain of authority, and let the public in to have a look at the state of the ‘science’ for themselves. The picture we can see isn’t pretty, and the lasting damage will not be to science. It may be the opening of a gulf between the public and their media and political elites that is so wide, it may never be bridged.
The problem for advocates of the manmade global warming hypothesis – and by extension, for the political and media elites – is that demonstrating it reasonably was always going to be extremely difficult. Contrary to expectations, there’s no smoking gun, no fingerprint that tells us, beyond reasonable doubt, that it was mankind with fossil fuels wot dun it. The carbon isotope carbon-14 and the Tropospheric Hotspot have briefly starred in the role – but the former proved ambiguous (biomatter produces the ‘telltale’ isotope, too) and the latter has been elusive; heat isn’t being trapped where the greenhouse models predicted it would be.
Of the dozen or so factors influencing climate, for one candidate to emerge as dominant we would need to discount the effects of others. Factors governing inputs and outputs into the elegant ‘energy budget model’ are still largely guesswork; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits knowledge of most of the feedbacks is low, but this flatters the science. We’re not sure if more energy is radiated back to space than we thought, and if more carbon is being absorbed than predicted: both seem to be happening. Yet both are enough to wound the hypothesis fatally. Since CO2 by itself causes little effect, less than a degree’s worth of warming, this is a theory that needs a lot more science.
And the ‘mountain of evidence’ so often cited is descriptive of the effects of climate change – such as the population dynamics of a species – and gives no clue as to the causes of the change.
Faced with all this, fence-sitting agnosticism seems a safe option. This was the default position of the media and political classes less than a decade ago. Why did they abandon it?
There is almost a tragic quality to the CRU correspondence. Academics in this infant field had been burdened with a duty to deliver on their hypothesis, but couldn’t do so other than through conjecture or modelling. In private, we see them unable to explain the energy budget, floundering as much as a newcomer might. 1997 finds the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research’s (UCAR) Tom Wigley admonishing scientists who want to express mitigation policies in a letter to The Times. The evidence doesn’t support the claim, he advises. A dozen years later, Wigley is unable to administer a hint of caution in public, lest the entire edifice collapse.
‘The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment’ – this ‘moment’ is in its second decade – ‘and it is a travesty that we can’t’, says colleague Kevin Trenberth in one of the leaked CRU emails, and Wigley agrees. Climate has refused to play along as predicted, and the experts are confounded. The elegant energy budget model is useless. ‘What surprised me was to discover how weak and uncertain the science was’, Lord Lawson told the makers of Channel 4’s The Great Global Warming Swindle. Now we can see why.
From Climategate, we can now see why the most apparently authoritative rhetoric crawls with weasel words: coulds, maybes, balances of probabilities, and think-it-likelys abound. The Royal Society’s much-quoted position on climate change is a good example.
We can also begin to explain the increasing reliance on anecdote, and on computer modelling. The former suggests recent changes are anomalous, and substitutes for causation; the latter makes claims to predict the future, but only at the exclusion of other forcings. Critics of the theory were obliged to discard observations, and defer to the models.
Listen to the careful formulation of Susan Watts of the BBC’s Newsnight, or Bob Watson of the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, or the University of East Anglia itself: the same words are used in response to Climategate again and again – that earth is warming and this warming can only be explained by human activity. This emphasises the correlation, yet evidence of causation remains unspoken. None of the anecdotal evidence points to a single explanatory forcing. Projection and Anecdote are the two shaky planks of the theory.
Yet the media chose not to present these ambiguities in recent years. Why? The established news institutions have watched a proliferation of rival media in recent years and attempted to reassert their authority by reducing and overdramatising stories. In the simplified world they present to viewers, readers and listeners, dangers become ‘urgent’ and the morality clearly delineated for us. The Good Guys wear White Coats. The dispassionate approach, so useful in presenting matters of scientific contestation, has been abandoned.
The absence of technical and scientific grounding amongst the chattering classes has created a vacuum, filled with an unquestioning faith in the Good Guys. Scientists are untainted by human foibles, such as intellectual corruption. Their workings are as mysterious as the telepathy they (doubtless) use to communicate their concepts, and their processes, such as peer-review, remove all room for doubt, leaving only a residue of gleaming truth. Such is science viewed from Islington. David Aaronovitch typified this amazement that anyone could doubt the ‘consensus’. It seems inconceivable, to the commentariat, that scientists have prejudices, too, and that the publication process (peer review) is not some Kitemark of quality but is vulnerable to being hijacked. All of which is demonstrated in the Climategate files.
Politicians have also outsourced their authority, finding in climate a risk-free way of restoring their moral superiority. Unable to articulate a political vision of their own, they ceded judgement and then policymaking to the scientists. Yet the politics is prior to the science – apocalyptic environmentalism posits a prior relationship with nature in which man is at best, a nuisance. The phony ‘urgency’ which gives rise to the precautionary principle arises not from science, but from the view of man as an unwelcome intrusion on the ‘natural’.
Imagine an approach to scientific enquiry which demanded that we know how much mankind effects the climate – through greenhouse gases and particulates – in sufficient detail that it could be handed to an engineer. The ability to manipulate our climate for the benefit of humanity will almost certainly come in useful. But the approach requires a positive view of humanity; the Climategate years show how little faith in our inventiveness and ability to organise our media and political elites have had in us.
Andrew Orlowski is executive editor of The Register.
Bob Carter, Australian geologist, writing in the mainstream ABC, reflects on the suborning of the once-prestigious CSIRO.
Kill the IPCC
I am standing on the helicopter deck of the famous science-drilling ship JOIDES Resolution, the snow-capped mountains of South Island, New Zealand, glistening gently along the far western horizon.
It is a privilege and a pleasure to be here. The group of 50 scientists and technicians on board are drawn from the best in the world, and from the many country members of the International Drilling Program (IODP). For a research proposal to be allocated a drilling leg on JR - which lasts 2 months and costs about US $15 million to conduct - the science involved has to survive the most rigorous international peer-review.
The drilling leg in which I am participating has been fostered by a group of scientists who are vitally interested in the topic of ancient sea-level and climate changes. Faintly, for it is far away, I remember that these issues are supposed to be the focus of international discussions in Copenhagen this week.
I grimace at the thought, because the study of climate change, under the aegis of "dangerous global warming caused by human carbon dioxide emissions," has long since been captured by the small group of well connected, well networked and well funded atmospheric scientists and computer modellers who advise the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and whose nearly every utterance confirms their ignorance of the true course of climate history and change on our planet - a topic that is the domain of geologists, not meteorologists and computer jockeys.
However, the stately progress that the IPCC was making towards achieving international action at the COP15 climate conference against carbon dioxide, an environmentally beneficial trace gas, has been shattered by the Climategate affair.
"Climategate" refers to the recent leaking of a copious file of emails, technical papers and computer codes from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which is the research group that provides the IPCC with its iconic global temperature curve since 1860.
The Climategate files have demonstrated the scientific malfeasance of an influential and internationally well networked segment of the climate research community. A small group of scientists and computer modellers - with the aid of an enormous supporting cast of environmental activists and organisations, self-interested business groups, and crusading journalists - have managed to turn the global warming issue (which in 1990 was an entirely sensible matter to have raised) into the scientific scam of the century, if not the biggest ever.
Since the original leak in mid-November, which was not covered by the mainstream press, Climategate has surpassed 30 million hits on a Google search
The IPCC is the official UN body that has presided over this fiasco. It is an organisation that was specifically set up to provide advice to national governments (including Australia's) for their use in setting climate policy. The IPCC's incompetence is manifest in its failure to detect the corrupt science that has for so long permeated the activities of the international jetsetters of the climate science power group. The organisation should be closed down (without tears), and the Copenhagen COP-15 meeting would be a good place to start this process happening.
That the global warming scare should turn out to be precisely the scam that climate rationalists have been banging on about for years is shocking enough; many future PhD theses and books will undoubtedly be written about it. Yet it is but the tip of the iceberg so far as the public prostitution of science is concerned. Climategate being currently in full swing, the obvious question is when (not if) the parallel Reefgate, Murraygate and Fishgate scandals will erupt in Australia?
All Australians should contemplate deeply the questions that are raised by the global warming scandal, including the systemic corruption of science and the dereliction of duty by media news organisations that it reveals. Key questions include the following.
Why has our formerly excellent national science agency, the CSIRO, been allowed to become a consultancy arm for the government?
Why, amongst other shameless activities, has CSIRO been allowed to go around selling region-customized reports that are implied to provide climate predictions, but which in fact contain projections that are statistically no better than flipping a coin?
(CSIRO's back is protected, of course, by the doubtless expensive lawyers who have insisted that the following disclaimer be inserted in all such reports: "This report relates to climate change scenarios based on computer modelling. Models involve simplifications of the real processes that are not fully understood. Accordingly, no responsibility will be accepted by CSIRO or the QLD government for the accuracy of forecasts or predictions inferred from this report or for any person's interpretations, deductions, conclusions or actions in reliance on this report". Would you buy a used car from these people?).
Why has the Australian Research Council been required to apply "national science priorities" as if any scientist, however distinguished, let alone a bureaucrat or politician, has the wisdom to discriminate between useful and "useless" research?
Behind the corrupted science of Climategate and the fall of the IPCC, then, lie two things. The first is the degradation, mainly by political interference, of research conditions and practices within modern government-funded research groups. The second is the power and financial clout of the modern, ecoevangelistic Green movement, egged on by crusading media reporters and editors. The world has probably never before seen a propaganda and political machine that is as well oiled, well funded and well organized as this modern army of apocalyptics and their media flag-wavers.
But voters who respond to the siren song of the Greens imperil both our standard of living and, ironically, the state of our natural environment. For every dollar that is spent on a false environmental issue such as dangerous human-caused global warming is a dollar that is not available to be spent on a real environmental or social problem.
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