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ISSUES: CHRISTIANS AND THE WORLD

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29/11/2009 17:53
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Rigging a climate 'consensus':
About those emails and 'peer review'

Editorial

November 27, 2009


The climatologists at the center of the leaked email and document scandal have taken the line that it is all much ado about nothing.

Yes, the wording of their messages was unfortunate, but they insist this in no way undermines the underlying science. They're ignoring the damage they've done to public confidence in the arbiters of climate science.

"What they've done is search through stolen personal emails—confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world," Penn State's Michael Mann told Reuters Wednesday. Mr. Mann added that this has made "something innocent into something nefarious."

Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, from which the emails were lifted, is singing from the same climate hymnal. "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues," he said this week.

We don't doubt that Mr. Jones would have phrased his emails differently if he expected them to end up in the newspaper.

He's right that it doesn't look good that his May 2008 email to Mr. Mann regarding the U.N.'s Fourth Assessment Report said "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?" Mr. Mann says he didn't delete any such emails, but the point is that Mr. Jones wanted them hidden.

The furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or whether climatologists are nice people. The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at, and how a single view of warming and its causes is being enforced.

The impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start.

According to this privileged group, only those whose work has been published in select scientific journals, after having gone through the "peer-review" process, can be relied on to critique the science. And sure enough, any challenges from critics outside this clique are dismissed and disparaged.

This September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: "Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted."

Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who checks the findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more famous papers.

As anonymous reviewers of choice for certain journals, Mr. Mann & Co. had considerable power to enforce the consensus, but it was not absolute, as they discovered in 2003.

Mr. Mann noted in a March 2003 email, after the journal Climate Research published a paper not to Mr. Mann's liking, that "This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the 'peer-reviewed literature'. Obviously, they found a solution to that — take over a journal!"

Mr. Mann went on to suggest that the journal itself be blackballed: "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."

In other words, keep dissent out of the respected journals. When that fails, redefine what constitutes a respected journal to exclude any that publish inconvenient views.

A more thoughtful response to the emails comes from Mike Hulme, another climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, as reported by a New York Times blogger:

"This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science."

The response from the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still the best climate science.

Their proof for this is circular. It's the best, we're told, because it's the most-published and most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature.

The public has every reason to ask why they felt the need to rig the game if their science is as indisputable as they claim.


The wholesale dishonesty among the climate-change alarmists is reprehensible not just because it is morally and intellectually wrong, but because their false conclusions are driving gullible national leaders and international institutions to institute draconian measures that will cause more harm than good to all of mankind than if they did nothing for now.

Note that those who are preparing for the much-ballyhooed Copenhagen conference on climate next week are all behaving as though the Climategate revelations never happened!

It is political correctness taken to unacceptable extremes to ignore inconvenient scientific facts for the sake of pursuing a wrong-headed crusade - into which too much ideology and great expense has already been invested, and upon which people like Al Gore and Michael Mann have built not just their career but their very identity! That's selfishness to the max, in the name of altruism!

Yes, personal, social, national and international responsibility must be assumed and exercised actively by everyone who cares about the planet and mankind - through reasonable, reasoned and responsible measures, not by rabidly ideological fiat.

But measures such as Barack Obama's so-called 'cap-and-trade' bill, which would impose drastic measures overnight to reduce carbon dioxide gas emissions to levels that many studies show will not affect global climate an iota [it's like creating a fly to swat an elephant - pitting ineffective human means against a cosmologic phenomenon], with Obama's own admission that doing so would cause household energy bills to 'skyrocket' - and all this in a time of global economic crisis and double-digit unemployment in the USA - constitute gross irresponsiblity and hubris.




And the scandal just gets bigger! No serious scientist would ever dump the raw data on which he bases his conclusions and reports.

But the guys who admit in e-mails how and why they have doctored data and reports to 'substantiate' their global climate alarmism have just admitted they did - so we will never know what the actual data were, unless someone tries to go back and reconstruct anything they may recover from the hard drives of those who gathered the data originally.

Read and weep. Is there no end to dishonesty in the name of ideology?




Climate change data dumped
by Jonathan Leake
Environment Editor

November 29, 2009

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building. [That is never an excuse: Store them offsite in an archive and/or send them to be scanned into archive disks. That's what any one with common sense would do.]

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.

He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 01/12/2009 20:25]
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