By Andrew C. Revkin
Hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.
The e-mail messages, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments - in some cases derisive - about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.
In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”
Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information. “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents. Some of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under siege by the skeptics’ camp and worried that any stray comment or data glitch could be turned against them.
The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument. However, the documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists.
In several e-mail exchanges, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and other scientists discuss gaps in understanding of recent variations in temperature. Skeptic Web sites pointed out one line in particular: “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,” Dr. Trenberth wrote.
The cache of e-mail messages also includes references to journalists, including this reporter, and queries from journalists related to articles they were reporting. Officials at the University of East Anglia confirmed in a statement on Friday that files had been stolen from a university server and that the police had been brought in to investigate the breach. They added, however, that they could not confirm that all the material circulating on the Internet was authentic.
But several scientists and others contacted by The New York Times confirmed that they were the authors or recipients of specific e-mail messages included in the file. The revelations are bound to inflame the public debate as hundreds of negotiators prepare to negotiate an international climate accord at meetings in Copenhagen next month, and at least one scientist speculated that the timing was not coincidental.
Dr. Trenberth said Friday that he was appalled at the release of the e-mail messages. But he added that he thought the revelations might backfire against climate skeptics. He said that he thought that the messages showed “the integrity of scientists.” Still, some of the comments might lend themselves to being interpreted as sinister.
In a 1999 e-mail exchange about charts showing climate patterns over the last two millenniums, Phil Jones, a longtime climate researcher at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, said he had used a “trick” employed by another scientist, Michael Mann, to “hide the decline” in temperatures.
Dr. Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, confirmed in an interview that the e-mail message was real. He said the choice of words by his colleague was poor but noted that scientists often used the word “trick” to refer to a good way to solve a problem, “and not something secret.”
At issue were sets of data, both employed in two studies. One data set showed long-term temperature effects on tree rings; the other, thermometer readings for the past 100 years.
Through the last century, tree rings and thermometers show a consistent rise in temperature until 1960, when some tree rings, for unknown reasons, no longer show that rise, while the thermometers continue to do so until the present.
Dr. Mann explained that the reliability of the tree-ring data was called into question, so they were no longer used to track temperature fluctuations. But he said dropping the use of the tree rings was never something that was hidden, and had been in the scientific literature for more than a decade. “It sounds incriminating, but when you look at what you’re talking about, there’s nothing there” Dr. Mann said. In addition, other independent but indirect measurements of temperature fluctuations in the studies broadly agreed with the thermometer data showing rising temperatures.
Dr. Jones, writing in an e-mail message, declined to be interviewed.
Stephen McIntyre, a blogger who on his Web site, climateaudit.org, has for years been challenging data used to chart climate patterns, and who came in for heated criticism in some e-mail messages, called the revelations “quite breathtaking.”
But several scientists whose names appear in the e-mail messages said they merely revealed that scientists were human, and did nothing to undercut the body of research on global warming. “Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA whose e-mail exchanges with colleagues over a variety of climate studies were in the cache. “Newton may have been an ass, but the theory of gravity still works.”
He said the breach at the University of East Anglia was discovered after hackers who had gained access to the correspondence sought Tuesday to hack into a different server supporting realclimate.org, a blog unrelated to NASA that he runs with several other scientists pressing the case that global warming is true. The intruders sought to create a mock blog post there and to upload the full batch of files from Britain. That effort was thwarted, Dr. Schmidt said, and scientists immediately notified colleagues at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. The first posts that revealed details from the files appeared Thursday at The Air Vent, a Web site devoted to skeptics’ arguments.
At first, said Dr. Michaels, the climatologist who has faulted some of the science of the global warming consensus, his instinct was to ignore the correspondence as “just the way scientists talk.” But on Friday, he said that after reading more deeply, he felt that some exchanges reflected an effort to block the release of data for independent review.
He said some messages mused about discrediting him by challenging the veracity of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin by claiming he knew his research was wrong. “This shows these are people willing to bend rules and go after other people’s reputations in very serious ways,” he said.
Spencer R. Weart, a physicist and historian who is charting the course of research on global warming, said the hacked material would serve as “great material for historians.” See post here. See search engine on the hacked files here.
See also this critique of this story here.
Bt Paul Chesser, The American Spectator
Willie Soon and David Legates, both respected members of the American Geophysical Union, tell the story of how their planned session to discuss scientific papers that consider the many contributing factors to climate variability was a “go,” until suddenly it wasn’t:
We developed this session to honor the great tradition of science and scientific inquiry, as exemplified by Galileo when, 400 years ago this year, he first pointed his telescope at the Earth’s moon and at the moons of Jupiter, analyzed his findings, and subsequently challenged the orthodoxy of a geocentric universe. Our proposed session was accepted by the AGU.
In response to its acceptance, we were joined by a highly distinguished list of scientists - which included members of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, France and China, as well as recipients of the AGU’s William Bowie, Charles Whitten and James MacElwane medals. Our participants faithfully submitted abstracts for the session.
But by late September, several puzzling events left us wondering whether the AGU truly serves science and environmental scientists - or simply reflects, protects and advances the political agendas of those who espouse belief in manmade CO2-induced catastrophic global warming.
Could this AGU position have anything to do with it?
The scientific consensus on climate change was expressed in an open letter sent to the US Senate on last Wednesday, 21 October.
While the signatories represent a wide variety of scientific disciplines, they all came together to express their concern over anthropogenic climate change. The letter states: “Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver. These conclusions are based on multiple independent lines of evidence, and contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of the vast body of peer-reviewed science.”
What about the independent lines of evidence of no global warming the last ten years, which the vast body could not see below their extended gut?
See post here.
Physics World
The American Physical Society (APS) has “overwhelmingly rejected” a proposal from a group of 160 physicists to alter its official position on climate change. The physicists, who include the Nobel laureate Ivar Giaver, wanted the APS to modify its stance to reflect their own doubts about the human contribution to global warming. The APS turned down the request on the recommendations of a six-person committee chaired by atomic physicist Daniel Kleppner from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (report here).
The committee was set up by APS president Cherry Murray in July, when the society received the proposal for changing its statement, which had originally been drawn up in November 2007. It has spent the last four months carrying out what the APS calls “a serious review of existing compilations of scientific research” and took soundings from its members. “We recommended not accepting the proposal,” Kleppner told physicsworld.com. “The [APS] council almost unanimously decided to go with that.”
Different positions
The official APS position on climate change says that “emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate” and adds that there is “incontrovertible” evidence that global warming is occurring. The APS also wants reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions to start immediately. “If no mitigating actions are taken,” it says, “significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur.”
However, the petition’s signatories claim that “measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20–21st century changes [in climate] are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today”. They say that various natural processes, such as ocean cycles and solar variability, could account for variations in the Earth’s climate on the time scale of decades and centuries.
“Current climate models appear insufficiently reliable to properly account for natural and anthropogenic contributions to past climate change, much less project future climate,” the petition concludes. It also points to “extensive scientific literature that examines beneficial effects of increased levels of carbon dioxide for both plants and animals”.
Next steps
Although the APS council turned down the request, it has, however, agreed to one proposal from Kleppner’s committee: that the society’s Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) should “examine the statement for improvements in clarity and tone”. Princeton University atomic physicist Will Happer, who was one of those leading the proposal for change, sees that fact as a form of vindication. “They basically sent both statements back to their committee on public affairs and asked them to reconsider,” says Happer. “I think it’s a big victory for us. Many of [the people who signed the petition] took quite a bit of risk in signing this statement.”
However, the APS firmly refutes Happer’s reading. “The council has, in effect, said we reject outright the replacement of our statement,” points out APS spokesperson Tawanda Johnson. “We are certainly not rejecting the 2007 statement. It’s still on our website. POPA reviews statements every five years; it would have come up for review anyway.”
Kleppner also points out that the call for change came from a small minority of the APS’s 47,000 members. “This is certainly not a majority opinion,” he says. “Most other physicists have come to a different conclusion looking at the same evidence.”
Icecap note: For your information, the following is part of a communication sent today to the 213 signatories of the Open Letter to the American Physical Society after the committee response:
To APS Open Letter Signatories,
This message outlines the key problems we see with the APS process to date and lays out the next stage of this initiative. It also provides opportunities for you to re emphasize your position to the APS.
As laid out at the APS website and in president Cherry Murray’s note to members (attached), two key claims are made with respect to the APS process that considered the proposal contained in our Open Letter.
1. The APS claims that the “[Kleppner Ad Hoc] committee reached its conclusion based upon a serious review of existing compilations of scientific research.”
2. The APS claims that “APS members were also given an opportunity to advise the Council on the matter.”
The first claim is misleading, and its consequence is extremely important. It seeks to create the impression that the APS conducted an original and independent investigation of the science, taking into account inputs from all sides of the issue. In fact, the APS undertook no independent critical investigation of its own. As can be gleaned from a reading of the Ad Hoc Committee report (attached), the committee merely consulted existing material contained in IPCC reports (and an accomodating NRC report) and accepted those claims as authoritative. The IPCC claims were in fact the ones countered by the claims in the Open Letter. It makes no mention of consulting the substantial published literature standing in opposition to IPCC positions. Therefore the APS merely parroted the IPCC.
The second claim is also misleading. It implies that the APS actively solicited inputs or comments on the Open Letter. This is not the case. In fact, even the names of the internally-appointed committee members were held confidential during its deliberations and until after its report to the Council. Furthermore, members were given no opportunity to comment on the report before its adoption by the Council. Rather it was the petitioners themselves who directly contacted more than 10,000 members, and hundreds of them commented to the APS Council before the meeting, with more than 1/3 supporting our Open Letter or a substantial moderation or withdrawal of the existing statement. This process also produced an additional 50 signatories. The Ad Hoc Committee members never saw these hundreds of comments. We have asked that this part of the aps.org release be corrected.
There are other problems with the aps.org release and with president Murray’s letter, including (1) the statement that the alternative statement “raised doubts about global warming,” which is false; and (2) the underplaying of the problems associated with the 2007 Statement, which are cloaked by the persistent use of the phrase “clarity and tone.” Roger Cohen
By Joanne Nova
The world is considering a new financial market larger than any commodity, it’s “based on science” but if you ask for evidence, you’re called names - “Denier”, and by our Prime Minister, no less. This is supposed to pass for reasoned debate?
In 6000 words Rudd uses ad hominem attacks, baseless allegations, argument from authority, mindless inflammatory rhetoric and quotes not a single piece of evidence that carbon drives our climate. He repeats quote after quote of sensible, ordinary points from his opponents as if it shows they are confused. Yet he can’t point out how any of them are wrong. It shows the depth of his own delusions - that he thinks merely questioning “the UN committee” is a flaw in itself.
It’s as if being a sceptic is a bad thing, yet the opposite of sceptical is gullible. Rudd throws baseless innuendo when he claims vested interests are at work. The truth is the exact opposite. Exxon spent $23 million on sceptics, but the US government spent $79 billion on the climate industry. Big Government outspent big-oil 3000 to 1. Worse, carbon trading last year was $126 billion dollars. That’s for just one year. The real vested interests stand in the open like signposted black holes hidden in plain view by a legal disclaimer. The singularities at the centre of the climate change galaxy have names like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, ABN Amro, Deutsche Bank, and HSBC.
The banks want us to trade carbon.
And the career scientists like their “rock-star” status. “Call us heroes”. “Thanks for the institute. Ta.”
The UN bureaucrats soak in their fame and their junkets. Why wouldn’t they? Two weeks and ten thousand people in an exotic locale every year. Nobel prizes for just doing their jobs, and the promise that they might be at the centre of new world financial market: dinner with Obama and tea with Gordon Brown. Status knocks, and everyone is home.
This global gravy train got rolling in 1988 and when the evidence turned “180”, the train ran off the tracks. Now it levitates above the real world on a cushion of snarling spite and intimidation. It’s as if calling someone a “denier” replaces 100,000 radiosonde readings, 6,000 boreholes, 30 years of satellite results and ice cores that go back to a time before homo sapiens was sapien. These things are evidence, but a manufactured “consensus” from a self serving committee is not. “Denier” is an insult, a cheap attempt to bully dissent into submission.
Rudd offers up our nation to global bullies and giant bankers because he’s swallowed a UN committee report. The IPCC were set up and funded to find a link, any link between carbon and the climate: they are not audited, elected or accountable to the Australian people. Team IPCC-how-big-is-my-junket would never issue a press release that said, essentially: greenhouse gases are minor forces. “Thanks for the funding. We’ll all get new jobs”. They are not an unbiased source. Yet the Australian government seems to think they help Australian citizens by slavishly repeating UN committee decrees.
Rudd claims sceptics “play with our children’s future”, but if a nations leader just obediently accepts a foreign decree without checking it, isn’t he the one who lets our children down? He’s the one who isn’t arranging an independent audit of the claims made by a committee in Geneva before we sign away the hard work of Australian adults and children for decades to come.
Ratings agencies repacked junk securities into “AAA rated” investments and triggered the credit crunch. The IPCC has repackaged “junk science” and created an “expert triple A rated”, full gloss quasi prospectus called a “Synthesis Report”. The Australian government is buying their unaudited package hook, line and stinker.
It’s sobering to think this man is in our highest office. Rudd will come to regret his Lowy Institute speech. It’s a sad indictment of what intelligent discourse in Australia has been reduced to. The nation that invented the bionic ear considers trashing its economy because someone thinks “denier” is a scientific term? There is no human subclass called “denier”, there are only concerned citizens, retired scientists, unpaid bloggers, and “working families”. All of whom will ship truckloads of money to foreign financial houses in the event we are forced to buy meaningless permits at the point of a gun.
Kevin Rudd gambles with our economy. He wants sweeping changes based on the science, but he hasn’t spent ten minutes checking the evidence. He claims sceptics can’t name any evidence but that’s only because he never reads a word sceptics write. He can’t name a single peer reviewed paper yet we can name hundreds. But we only need one, and Lindzen 2009 will do. (Thank you, since you asked.)
Rudd could start with The Non Governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) - an enormous non-profit production of around 800 pages of dense scientific text and references. That it exists at all is remarkable. Why do so many eminent scientists around the world feel compelled to donate time to write long detailed reports?
But talking “papers” is a waste of time, Rudd thinks evidence comes from government, and he’s waiting for the IPCC to debunk itself. He actually says: “Sceptics offer no alternative official body of evidence from any credible government in the world.”
That misunderstanding about the nature of evidence automatically rules out all independent research until such time as some bureaucratic committee agrees. Einstein pointed out that it only takes one experiment to prove him wrong. Obviously, in Rudd’s world, if a government department hadn’t legislated the sun to rise tomorrow, it wouldn’t come up. In the real world, evidence doesn’t come from governments it comes from thermometers.
The IPCC even admits carbon will only warm us by 1 degree. Did you know? Don’t wait for the IPCC press release in plain English. The rest of the projected catastrophe is due to feedback from clouds, rain and humidity. But it isn’t there. Outgoing radiation does the opposite of what the models project. Humidity levels aren’t rising in the upper troposphere, the greenhouse hot-spot is totally missing, high cirrus clouds shrink as the world warms, which cools us. Low clouds correlate with high energy cosmic rays. Weather balloons showed the models were wrong years ago, beyond all reasonable doubt. For the last few years, sea levels have plateaued, and temperatures have cooled. Nothing bar anything is going the right way for the carbonistas. The ice cores show that temperature controls carbon and not the other way around. One hockey stick graph was based on one freak tree in northern Russia, the other used statistical tricks that create hockey sticks from random noise. The East Anglia CRU has lost the entire raw data set of global temperatures. The whole set?! The carbon crisis charade has become a farce. Read much more of this masterful Rudd debunking here. From Dr. Bob Carter, ”Quadrant Online has excelled itself this week. Don’t miss (i) Ian Plimer’s letter exchange with George Monbiot, (ii) Dennis Jensen’s throwing down the gauntlet to Rudd (and, indirectly, to his own party leader - Malcolm Turnbull), and (iii) Joanne Nova’s excoriation of Kevin Rudd’s appalling speech (above).
By Miranda Devine, Sydney Morning Herald
Kevin Rudd went over the top last week in a speech to the Lowy institute, declaring it was “time to remove any polite veneer” from the climate change debate, which he claims is the “moral challenge of our generation”. Then he launched an extraordinary tirade against “the climate change sceptics, the climate change deniers” who he claims are “powerful”, “too dangerous to be ignored”, “driven by vested interests...quite literally holding the world to ransom...Our children’s fate - and our grandchildren’s fate - will lie entirely with them.”
If he had any shame, the Prime Minister would be mortified to be associated with such a hysterical, undergraduate piece of ad hominem hyperbole. History will record his embarrassment and the debasing of his office. But the speech shows Rudd’s desperation in the week before his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (Emissions Trading Scheme) is debated in Parliament and less than a month before the Copenhagen climate summit at which he wants to parade a signed-off scheme. As the public cools towards this new energy tax, politicians, green groups and other alarmists with the real “vested interest” in this debate are stooping ever lower in their attempts to shun dissenters.
One of the few public figures with the courage not to conform, the Liberal senator Nick Minchin, was smeared by anonymous sources in his own party this week as “crazy” for expressing scepticism about the extent of man-made climate change. As the impacts of the global warming scare already are being felt at home in rising food and energy costs, taxpayers will be demanding credible evidence of the necessity of an ETS. It is unlikely the one-party state Rudd is attempting to fashion will be popular. Rudd claimed in his speech there would be only “modest cost rises” associated with his scheme. The facts tell a different story.
The “most significant” price rise in the CPI index for the September quarter was for electricity, up 11.4 per cent. The Business Council of Australia’s infrastructure report last month predicted prices will double by 2015, with the “first and most significant” driver being the ETS. I have looked at my Energy Australia bills for the past two years and found large and unheralded price increases already. From October 2007 to October 2009 the price per kwH of my electricity soared from 10.84 cents to 15.60 cents for the first 1750 KWh, and from 14.76 cents to 23.10 cents for the rest, which usually accounts for one-third to half of electricity used in the average three- or four-bedroom house. This is an increase of 44 per cent and 57 per cent respectively.
That’s hardly modest.
Against the apocalyptic rhetoric pushed by Rudd comes a cool-minded new book which unpicks the science underpinning the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports. Global Warming, False Alarm by Ralph Alexander, an Australian-born US scientist with a PhD in physics from Oxford, is subtitled ‘’The bad science behind the United Nations’ assertion that man-made CO2 causes global warming”. Alexander wrote the book, “because I’m a scientist. Because I’m offended that science has been perverted in the name of global warming.”
He became a sceptic when he taught a course on physical science and found the textbook presented the “alarmist line on man-made global warming without question”. “To me that made a mockery of the history of science presented in the course, which featured several examples of how mainstream scientific thinking has been wrong in the past.”
The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change says the earth has effectively developed an allergy to CO2. The effect of a tiny amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is amplified by water vapour and clouds - in a positive feedback loop which enhances the climate’s sensitivity to extra CO2 and causes “runaway global warming”. That is the big Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change hypothesis.
Alexander explains the three problems with the hypothesis.
First, recent satellite observations show cloud feedback to be a negative loop, that is, clouds reduce global warming, rather than amplify it in a positive feedback loop, as the panel’s models predict. Second, the panel has used flawed data. It “stooped to trickery and rewrote history” to make the temperature and CO2 records correlate over the past 2000 years, creating the notorious “hockey stick” graph that wiped out the well-documented Medieval Warm Period (a warm spell about the year 1000) and Little Ice Age (cool period in about 1650). The graph relied on data from a few tree rings to estimate historic temperatures, which have since been shown to be inaccurate. The third problem for the panel hypothesis is that CO2 lags behind temperature in the Ice Age era, which has been explained by the delayed release of stored CO2 from oceans, but the panel model has CO2 and temperature rising together since 1850. “Either temperature and CO2 go up and down at the same time or they don’t. You can’t have it one way during the ice ages and another way today.”
Alexander says data manipulation has been the panel’s main tool of deception. For instance, it has ignored the bias in the modern temperature record caused by the “urban heat island effect” that inflates warming near cities.
The panel has also ignored the bias in its temperature data caused by the shutting down of weather stations in cold parts of the world in the 1990s - from about 5000 to 2000 or so - most notably in the former Soviet Union. Again, this artificially increases the recent warming rate. Alexander says the panel has “cherry-picked” 19th century CO2 data to exaggerate the rise in CO2 levels since pre-industrial times, and has trivialised the sun’s contribution to the present warming trend.
Don’t get him started on computer climate models which he says are “full of unfounded assumptions”. He points to the drop in the earth’s temperature since 2001 which wasn’t predicted by the models.
Ultimately, “trillions of dollars could be wasted to fix a problem that doesn’t exist’’. Alexander’s book is a useful tool to make sense of climate change. As they did in the republic debate, regardless of elite consensus, Australians make up their own minds, and are probably turned off by official attempts to stifle dissent. Read story and comments here.
By Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, the Breakthrough Institute, 11 November 2009
What gave rise to Joe Romm and Climate McCarthyism? In a word: hyper-partisanship. America is more polarized politically today than it has been in 130 years. The fracturing of traditional media has political partisans looking for people who will filter news, analysis, and opinions for them. Democrats who care about the environment have been turning to Joe Romm. They wished for somebody tough to stand up to the bad guys on climate change. They wished for somebody to simplify complicated questions. In “The Hyper-Partisan Mind,” we see why they should be careful what they wish for.
In Parts 1 and Part 2 we documented how Joe Romm uses McCarthyite tactics, including character assassination, misrepresentation, and guilt-by-association, to intimidate the press corps and discredit non-skeptical climate experts as “global warming deniers.” In this post we will explore one of the main forces that gave rise to Climate McCarthyism: hyper-partisan polarization.
America is more polarized today than at any time since Reconstruction. A major quantitative analysis by social scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal found today to be the most polarized period in 130 years.
Little wonder then that Romm’s strength lies in his appeals to Democratic partisan identity. He writes for a Democratic audience and mobilizes liberal and environmentalist readers to attack reporters, activists, and policymakers who diverge, literally, from the Party line.
Today’s fractured and polarized media environment has allowed Joe Romm to become the most influential liberal climate activist in the country, largely because he has convinced liberals and Democrats that he is an energy and climate science expert. This explains why Nobel Prize Winner and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says ”I trust Joe Romm ,” Thomas Friedman calls ClimateProgress.org “the indispensable blog,” Al Gore relies on him for technical analysis, and the Center for American Progress makes him the organization’s chief spokesperson on climate and energy issues. Icecap Note: explains why Krugman, Friedman and Gore are so clueless
In this post we will see how Romm helps Democrats make mental short-cuts about who to trust and distrust, which technologies are promising and which are chimeras, and which policies to advocate and which to oppose. We will document how Romm does this by inventing associations between people he disagrees with and various Republicans, particularly George W. Bush.
And we will argue - against those who pooh-pooh his influence - that Joe Romm is, in fact, far more influential today than Joe McCarthy was in the 1950s, a fact that, unfortunately, has proven poisonous to creating the consensus needed for serious action on climate.
Partisan Identity as a Mental Short-Cut
It’s no coincidence that America’s Climate McCarthyite-in-chief is a blogger at the largest liberal think tank and not a U.S. Senator. Busy fundraising and campaigning, members of Congress have largely outsourced the deliberative process of legislating to partisan interest groups and think tanks.
Meanwhile, the explosion of new media and the resulting flood of information means that educated partisans - including beat reporters and national columnists—are looking for partisan specialists to filter their news, analysis, and media commentary. “We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions,” Times columnists Nicholas Kristof noted, “but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.”
Much has been written about the ideological echo chamber conservatives like Sen. James Inhofe, Rush Limbaugh, and Glen Beck have created to enforce anti-environmental orthodoxy on the Right. Less remarked upon has been the creation of its analog on the Left - an accomplishment in which Romm has taken a leading role. Romm has mastered the echo chamber in its liberal expression and creates a reassuring green womb for his growing cadre of loyal readers. Every day of the week he dutifully filters the news, telling readers the good news of yet another McKinsey report on how energy efficiency more than pays for itself!, and the bad news of yet another outrageous declaration by the dastardly Sen. Inhofe. In one post Romm serves up news stories of natural disasters as evidence of the imminent apocalypse, while in the next he touts new studies showing how cheap, solar power is and how expensive nuclear is.
Most importantly Romm functions to inform his readers of the partisan identity of any given thing, whether it be a new technology, policy, or analysis. Thus, when it came time for Romm to criticize a rather technical piece on the rising carbon intensity of the global economy that appeared in the journal Nature he attacked it, not as inaccurate or incorrect, but rather as Republican.
It will be no surprise to learn the central point of their essay, ironically titled “Dangerous Assumptions” (available here or here with a subscription) is “Enormous advances in energy technology will be needed to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at acceptable levels,” which is otherwise known as the technology trap or the standard “Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah” delayer message developed by Frank Luntz and perfected by Bush/Lomborg/Gingrich.
In other words, the Nature article was not what it claimed to be. It wasn’t an analysis suggesting that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should revisit its assumptions about decarbonization. It wasn’t an argument for stronger technology policies. No, it was a devious Republican message - one designed by Republican pollster Frank Luntz during the Bush years—to delay action.
How then did Romm become convinced that, rather than being genuine, the “Dangerous Assumptions” analysis was, in fact, Republican propaganda? Because Romm’s Climate McCarthyism is, in large measure, the product of his Hyper-Partisan mind, one which sees everything through the gaze of Republican or Democratic, “climate denier” or “climate science advocate,” and “climate destroyer” or climate savior.
Earlier this year Romm attacked two of the world’s leading environmental economists, Richard Tol and William Nordhaus (the co-author’s uncle). Their crime? They were thanked in the acknowledgements of a study by economists from MIT, Northwestern and the National Bureau of Economic Research, which was subsequently touted by the conservative Heritage Foundation. See more here. H/T Dr. Benny Peiser, CCNet.
By Dennis Byrne, Chicago Tribune
In the next few weeks we’ll be relentlessly scrubbed with eyewash, brainwash and hogwash, all designed to cleanse us of any doubts that global warming is a proven menace to mother Earth.
First, there’s the Democratic global warming legislation rushing through Congress with a denouement expected soon. Second, the rush to pass the legislation is fueled by the upcoming United Nations meeting on global warming next month in Copenhagen.President Barack Obama and Democrats want to be able to go there with a goody basket of economy-busting measures that will show the world that America is with it.
Too bad, because the alleged “scientific” evidence of a coming man-made apocalypse is incomplete at best and, more likely, manipulated for political reasons.
That’s obviously not the conventional wisdom. According to climate alarmists, only “skeptics” or “deniers” would ignore the “scientific consensus” that the planet is doomed without draconian acts of economic self-immolation. We know this because Al Gore, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and European smarties have told us so.
That’s also the view of the United Nations-sponsored Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group-1—the climate alarmist’s bible. It contains, they allege, all the evidence you need to justify their frenzy.
Is that so?
Inconveniently, that study itself has been studied by an independent group of scientists who concluded that the IPCC bible is wrong. They said the IPCC document “is marred by errors and misstatements, ignores scientific data that were available but were inconsistent with the authors’ pre-conceived conclusions, and has already been contradicted in important parts by research published since May 2006, the IPCC’s cutoff date.”
To back up the conclusion, the independent group, called the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), published its own analysis in a tome called “Climate Change Reconsidered.” The 856-page, nearly two-inch-thick volume did what all good science requires: check the work of fellow scientists to see if it stands up to a rigorous review of the available research, data and conclusions.
What they found is stunning. For example, the IPCC claimed that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely (at least 90 percent certain) due to the increase in anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas concentrations” (Emphasis in the original.) Wrong; the opposite is true. Blame it on natural causes, the NIPCC said.
The IPCC claims that global warming will wreck humanity and the Earth. Wrong. The NIPCC concludes—using the data and science available to the IPCC—that a “warmer world would be a safer and healthier world for humans and wildlife alike.”
The IPCC relies on complicated computer climate models to reach its dour conclusions; the NIPCC rips the methodology, challenging the reliability of models to make such cosmic predictions. The NIPCC reveals that the IPCC failed to consider naturally occurring “feedback” factors that reduce the impact of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Reviewing the empirical data, the NIPCC finds no evidence that climate change in the last century is unprecedented. Nor do the data demonstrate an anthropogenic effect on climate change. Nor is there evidence that anthropogenic factors are melting glaciers, raising sea levels or precipitating other catastrophic weather or climate changes. The IPCC ignored research probing solar activity as a cause of climate change. It ignored research showing that rising carbon dioxide levels actually increase plant growth to the benefit of all mankind and the planet. It ignored research that global warming will improve, not harm, human health and increase, not decrease, biodiversity.
Climate change alarmists will condemn these findings as unspeakable and unthinkable. They will point to who is doing the research or who is paying for it, while ignoring the substance of the research. They won’t bother contacting Chicago-based Heartland Institute, the report’s publisher, to get their own copy.
An honest examination of the science will reveal perhaps the only indisputable fact in this entire argument: The science is not settled and claims of a scientific consensus are an exaggeration, if not a deception. A scientific consensus—if such a thing even exists—would be surprising for any issue that is as complicated as this, involving so many different branches of science. As a layman struggling to comprehend this avalanche of science, I was struck by one truth: Beware of any “science” that claims to fully describe in single theory any phenomenon as complex as global climate change. Trying to tie it all up in such a neat package, as climate alarmists do, is a trap for the simple-minded. See the story here.
By Dr. Vincent Gray
"Forecasting is difficult: particularly about the future” This piece of wisdom is attributed to Yogi Berra. But it does not apply to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, since they do not make “forecasts” at all, only “projections”. As they make clear, “projections” are dependent on the correctness of the assumptions made by the computer models and the futures scenarios from which they are made.
This has not always been so. In the first IPCC Report (1990). on the first page of the “Executive Summary” there was nearly a whole page headed “ Based on current model results, we predict” with no less than ten actual “predictions”.They used the phrase “models predict” several times throughout, but they did, at least admit that there were “uncertainties”.
Chapter 4 was entitled “Validation of Climate Models”. Paragraph 4,12 “Methods and Problems of Model Validation” showed that such validation is quite a problem, and it seemed to show that, so far, no model has been truly validated. Chapter 8 “Detection of the Greenhouse Effect in the Observations” had the answer when it said (paragraph 8.4) “the fact that we have not yet detected the enhanced greenhouse effect leads to the question: when is this likely to occur”
The next Report (1995) had, in its first draft, another Chapter 4 “Validation of Climate Models”. I commented (with, perhaps, others), that since no model had ever been validated, according to their own opinions, the title was inappropriate. So in the next draft they changed the word “validation” to “evaluation” no less that fifty times, and that report and all subsequent ones have not used the terms “predict”, “forecast”, or “validate”. Also there has been no further discussion on how validation might be made. This is true of all of the four parts of the Fourth Report.
I frequently quote this example from their “Frequently Asked Question 1.2”: “A common confusion between weather and climate arises when scientists are asked how they can predict climate 50 years from now when they cannot predict the weather a few weeks from now. The chaotic nature of weather makes it unpredictable beyond a few days. Projecting changes in climate (i.e., long-term average weather) due to changes in atmospheric composition or other factors is a very different and much more manageable issue”.
Note that they insist that all they do is “project”. They are admitting that “scientists cannot “predict climate 50 years from now”. No wonder there is “A common confusion”, The claim that their “projections” are “very different” and “much more manageable” does not include a claim that they can provide successful predictions.
And yet, the politicians, activists and many ordinary people seem to be under the delusion that the IPCC “projections” actually can be regarded as “forecasts” to the extent of promoting all manner of economically damaging measures in the belief of countering them. The above statement seems also to agree that the only scientists capable of actually predicting are the weather forecasters and it might be worth while to examine how this has been achieved, however imperfect it may seem.
Despite all this, the public, the media and the politicians seem to think that the IPCC “projections” are “forecasts” even when the IPCC denies it. It is therefore useful to see whether these projections show any success as forecasts.
The following (enlarged here) table shows a comparison between the “projections” of the IPCC and the observed figures, extrapolated to 2010 from the latest available information. It shows that the IPCC are within range of prediction for population, coal production, CO2 emissions and CO2 concentrations, but they are completely wrong on methane concentrations, global temperature change and sea level change. It might be mentioned that the “projections” for global GDP are also all wrong, but I have been unable to find figures that make adequate allowance for the changes in the US dollar.
See full newsletter PDF here.
See also the post “Global Warming Predictions Invalidated” by Doug L. Hoffman on The Resilient Earth reporting on the new study in the journal Science has just shown that all of the climate modeling results of the past are erroneous here.
And in this UK Times Online story, experts say that climate change forecasts and scenarios are overblown and too much time is being spent at the expense of changes in human use of land which has a greater impact on the survival of species.