Note: this is NOT Professor Scott Mandia in another costume
From the overhyped and virtually overheated UK Met Office meeting yesterday where they tried to explain “The Pause” Telegraph blogger Sean Thomas was there and was able to get first hand reports on what was said. Bishop Hill says: “I think we should be worried.”
First, I asked Stephen Belcher, the head of the Met Office Hadley Centre, whether the recent extended winter was related to global warming.
Shaking his famous “ghost stick”, and fingering his trademark necklace of sharks’ teeth and mammoth bones, the loin-clothed Belcher blew smoke into a conch, and replied,
“Here come de heap big warmy. Bigtime warmy warmy. Is big big hot. Plenty big warm burny hot. Hot! Hot hot! But now not hot. Not hot now. De hot come go, come go. Now Is Coldy Coldy. Is ice. Hot den cold. Frreeeezy ice til hot again. Den de rain. It faaaalllll. Make pasty.”....
Huddersfield, 2017
For a final word, I turned to the greatest climate change scientist of all, Dr David Viner, one-time senior research scientist at the climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia, who predicted in 2000 that, within a few years, winter snowfall would become “a very rare and exciting event”.
However, he was trapped under a glacier in Stockport, so was unable to comment at the time the Telegraph went to press.
More hilarity here.
Meanwhile back in the real world: yawn
By Steve Goreham Originally published in Master Resource.
Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate, is on the wane. Once riding high, the ideology of man-made climate change is losing its influence in governments across the world. Climategate, the release of e-mails from the University of East Anglia, called the science of dangerous warming into question and turned the tide of global opinion.
Background
On November 19, 2009, and unidentified hacker or internal whistle-blower downloaded more than 1,000 documents and e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in the United Kingdom and posted them on a server in Russia. Within hours, these documents were accessed by websites around the world.
These e-mails were a subset of confidential communications between top climate scientists in the United Kingdom, the United States, and other nations over the last fifteen years. These were the very same scientists that developed the surface temperature data sets, promoted the Mann Hockey Stick Curve, and wrote and edited the core of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports.
The incident was branded “Climategate” by British columnist James Delingpole, a label soon adopted by the world. These e-mails provide an insight into practices by researchers that are poor science at best and fraudulent at worst. Bias, manipulation of data, avoidance of freedom of information requests, and efforts to subvert the peer-review process are apparent, all to further the “cause” of man-made global warming. The e-mails were released on the eve of the 2009 United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen.
Climatism’s Apex
Just two years earlier, Climatism had swept almost all in its path. The IPCC 2007 Fourth Assessment Report declared that mankind was very likely the cause of global temperature increase. That same year, former Vice President Al Gore and the IPCC shared the Nobel Peace Prize.
In December of 2007, The RENIXX index of the world’s largest renewable energy companies soared to over 1,900. Barack Obama was elected President of the United States in 2008, heralding the rebirth of a more environmentally conscious nation. After securing the majority of primary delegates in June, 2008, candidate Obama declared, “...this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal!...”
The year 2009 was set to be a year of triumph for Climatism. The US House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in June and sent it to the US Senate. The Copenhagen Climate Conference in December 2009 was to be the major next step to control global emissions. But the release of the Climategate e-mails just one week prior to the start of the conference shook the science of man-made warming.
Climatism’s Downward Spiral
Today, the man-made global warming movement is headed for a crash. United Nations climate conferences at Cancun (2010), Durban (2011), and Doha (2012) failed to produce an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Kyoto Protocol climate treaty expired at the end of 2012 without a successor agreement. The Waxman-Markey bill was ignored by the US Senate and climate legislation is now a non-starter in the US Congress.
Contrary to climate model predictions, global temperatures have failed to increase for the last fifteen years, confounding the sirens for dangerous climate change. In January of this year, the UK Met Office revised their global temperature forecast downward for the next decade. The early release of a chart from the upcoming Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC showed that temperatures are running far below IPCC projections. Scientists and leading publications, such as The Economist, now question whether the climate models are too sensitive to greenhouse gas levels.
Renewable energy subsidies have been cut in Germany, Greece, Netherlands, Spain, the UK, and the US. Governments across the world are rethinking their commitment to green energy. The RENIXX index has fallen to 250, down almost 90 percent from the 2007 peak. In April, the European Parliament rejected an effort to prop up the Emissions Trading System. The price of a carbon allowances dropped to under 3 Euros per tonne, down from 20 per tonne in 2011. Climatism has become shaky business.
The Climategate e-mail release has played an important role in shifting global opinions about the theory of man-made warming. Below are some of the most important quotes from Climategate emails. More quotes on climate change, energy, and the environment can be found here.
Emails: On the Theory of Man-Made Warming
“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is no quite so simple.” Dr. Keith Briffa, Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Sep. 22, 1999
“Keith’s [Briffa] series...differs in large part in exactly the opposite direction that Phil’s [Jones] does from ours. This is the problem we all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably consensus viewpoint we’d like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al series).” Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Sep. 22, 1999
“...it would be nice to try to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP’ [Medieval Warm Period]...” Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, June 4, 2003
“By the way, when is Tom C [Crowley] going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc. Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Aug. 3, 2004
“I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.” Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 30, 2008
“Well, I have my own article on where the heck is global warming...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. Kevin Trenberth, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Oct. 12, 2009
Emails: Manipulating Temperature Data
“I’ve just completed Mike’s [Mann] Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s [Briffa] to hide the decline.” Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Nov. 16, 1999
“Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were...” Dr. Tim Osborn, Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Dec. 20, 2006
“...If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s warming blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say 0.15 deg C, then this would be significant for the global mean but we’d still have to explain the land blip...” Dr. Tom Wigley, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, on adjusting global temperature data, disclosed Climategate e-mail to Phil Jones, Sep. 28, 2008
“We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data.” Climatic Research Unit web site, the world’s leading provider of global temperature data, admitting that it can’t produce the original thermometer data, 2011
Emails: Data Suppression and Freedom of Information (FOI) Avoidance
“...We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try to find something wrong with it...” Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, e-mail to Warwick Hughes, 2004
“I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act.”
Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Feb. 21, 2005
“Mike [Mann], can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith [Trenberth] re AR4? Keith will do likewise...Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his e-mail address...We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 29, 2008
“You might want to check with the IPCC Bureau. I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 [the upcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report] would be to delete all e-mails at the end of the process. Hard to do, as not everybody will remember it.” Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, on avoiding Freedom of Information requirements, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 12, 2009
Emails: Subverting the Peer-Review Literature Process
“...I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, July 8, 2004
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
Posted by Anthony Watts
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
That is from Charles Mackay in his book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds first published in 1841.
I think it is an apt description of the process that led to Cook et al. (2013) Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature because that paper is in fact, a product of a crowd evaluating a crowd. As an example, Dr. Richard Tol has just discovered that using Cook’s own data, the consensus number Cook should have published is 98%, rather than 97%.
Dr. Tol writes in a critique of the Cook et al. paper:
In fact, the paper by Cook et al. may strengthen the belief that all is not well in climate research. For starters, their headline conclusion is wrong. According to their data and their definition, 98%, rather than 97%, of papers endorse anthropogenic climate change. While the difference between 97% and 98% may be dismissed as insubstantial, it is indicative of the quality of manuscript preparation and review.
He shows the Cook data as he compiles it:
You’d think such simple elementary errors in data would have been caught in peer review, after all, that is what peer review is for.
I think that there was a goal by Cook and his crowd, and that goal was to match the 97% number that has become a popular meme in the literature and the media. This intent seems confirmed by a recent statement by one of the co-authors, Dana Nuccitilli in a media argument that 97% global warming consensus meets resistance from scientific denialism
However, we have used two independent methods and confirmed the same 97% consensus as in previous studies.
It is that branding of “denialism” by Nuccitelli to Dr. Tol, who is hardly a “denier” on climate change even by the loosest definition, that has given Tol incentive to now start systemically deconstructing the paper. It also lends a window into the mind of the coauthor Nucitelli, who can’t seem to assimilate useful criticisms, no matter how valid, but instead publicly attributes discovery of real errors in the Cook et al. paper to “denialism” rather than the self-correcting process of science. Nuccitelli’s actions suggest to me, a mindset of zealotry, rather than one of discovery. His actions of branding Dr. Tol’s and others valid criticisms, seem to fit the textbook definition of the word.
As an aside, it seems truly laughable that the Guardian has created an entire regular opinion column based and named on this 97% number, and it supports that idea that this was the “target number” rather than the number that the actual data would report. Richard Tol has just proven their own data doesn’t even match the title of their paper. Will the Guardian now correct the title?
Tol goes on to say this about the crowd-sourcing:
The results thus depend on the quality of the volunteers. Are they neutral observers, or are they predisposed to endorsing or rejecting anthropogenic climate change? Did they suffer from fatigue after rating a certain number of abstracts? 12 volunteers rated on average 50 abstracts each, and another 12 volunteers rated an average of 1922 abstracts each. Fatigue may well have a problem. This level of effort by a volunteer could indicate a strong interest in the issue at hand.
Indeed, and he backs this up by saying it is evident in the data:
WoS generates homoskedastic data. Rating made the data heteroskedastic. Sign of tiredness or manipulation.
So which is it? Tiredness or manipulation, or perhaps both? Based on what has been observed so far, I’d say there is a combination, but given the obvious 97% target, more likely it is an unconscious manipulation by the chosen crowd of volunteer reviewers, which included no climate skeptics and consisted of mostly insiders for Cook’s antithetically named website, “Skeptical Science”. Tol goes on to comment:
No neutral person would volunteer to do 1922 tasks. Cook’s data duly show bias: 35% of abstract were misclassified, 99% towards endorsement.
To support the idea that bias played a role in reaching the conclusions of the Cook et al. paper, there seems to be a systemic sloppiness in the sampling process, as Tol points out in his critique:
In fact, 34.6% of papers that should have been rated as neutral were in fact rated as non-neutral. Of those misrated papers, 99.4% were rated as endorsements. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the volunteers were not neutral, but tended to find endorsements where there were none. Because rater IDs were not reported, it is not possible to say whether all volunteers are somewhat biased or a few were very biased.
Tol also says this about the 97% scientific consensus claim:
It is a strange claim to make. Consensus or near-consensus is not a scientific argument. Indeed, the heroes in the history of science are those who challenged the prevailing consensus and convincingly demonstrated that everyone thought wrong. Such heroes are even better appreciated if they take on not only the scientific establishment but the worldly and godly authorities as well.
Well known examples of this include the challenges to the theory that Earth was the center of the universe, that infection was spread by surgeons who didn’t wash their hands, that the Earth’s crust had plates that moved, and that gastric ulcers were caused by a bacterial infection, and not stress as physicians once widely believed. As William Briggs writes:
There was once a consensus among astronomers that the heavens were static, that the boundaries of the universe constant. But in 1929, Hubble observed his red shift among the stars, overturning that consensus. In 1904, there was a consensus among physicists that Newtonian mechanics was, at last, the final word in explaining the workings of the [universe]. All that was left to do was to mop up the details. But in 1905, Einstein and a few others soon convinced them that this view was false.
Consensus can also cause disaster, as NASA proved with a consensus of management that solid rocket booster O-rings affected by unusual cold weren’t worth worrying about or that a foam strike during launch wouldn’t damage the wing of the space shuttle and were “not even worth mentioning”.
Clearly, the power of thousands in agreement on scientific consensus can’t stand up to stubborn facts and that is the self-correcting process of science which sometimes works slowly, other times dramatically quickly. Given that consensus by itself means nothing in the face of such facts, it seems to me that consensus is just another manifestation of herd-like thinking as illustrated by Mackay.
From the Amazon summary of Mackay’s insightful book on crowds:
First published in 1841, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is often cited as the best book ever written about market psychology. Author Charles Mackay chronicles many celebrated financial manias, or ‘bubbles’, which demonstrate his assertion that “every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or fantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation.” This still holds fast today! Among the alleged ‘bubbles’ described by Mackay is the infamous Dutch tulip mania, the South Sea Company bubble and the Mississippi Company bubble. And what do bubbles do? Why they burst of course.
The Cook et al. paper bubble is about to burst.
UPDATE: Read the draft paper Tol is working on here, comments welcome.
See how the extremists Cook and Nucitelli planned their Oreskes like hoax in Cook’s 97% Consensus Study Game Plan Revealed. As we have shown in at least 25 ways, the theory has been falsified and should be discarded no matter how many papers the $100B invested in the hoax have been published in pal review.