By Viv Forbes, Carbon-Sense Coalition
The Carbon Sense Coalition today claimed that the Emissions Trading Scheme proposed for Australia and now before the Australian Parliament was far more than “A Great Big New Tax”. The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that PM Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme combined a Big New Tax with a War-Time Rationing scheme and an Income redistributing compensation scheme, all to be run by a regulatory army probably bigger than our real army.
He continued: “Let’s try to understand this Ruddy ETS. To simplify things, let’s look at just the electricity industry. If Rudd’s ETS ever rules Australia, companies producing electricity from carbon fuels must beg, buy or borrow a permit to burn coal, gas or diesel. They can beg a free permit from some mate in Canberra; they can buy a permit from some lucky sod who managed to get more permits than he needs; they can borrow a permit by entering into some tricky derivative trade with a speculator in Chicago; or they can pay carbon credit penance to a shifty land owner in some foreign land who promises solemnly not to clear his trees.
No matter which option is chosen, power costs will go up and companies must pass the extra cost (plus GST) onto their customers or go broke.
There will be no effect on climate.
Now look at consumers. The ETS must push up the cost of all goods and services using carbon fuel. It will boost the cost of electricity, food, transport and travel. When this happens, consumers will suddenly understand the ETS Tax and politicians who voted for it will feel their anger.
“But there is a plan: “Let’s compensate all those likely to vote for us”. If these subsidies work properly, the lucky consumers will be in the same position as they were before ETS, except for the extra bureaucracy. For these consumers, there is no signal to reduce their consumption of carbon fuels. The ETS will do nothing except create a tangle of red tape which consumes and redistributes wealth.
“But for the un-subsidised consumers, the ETS is an extra tax on everything. And for the power companies, the ETS will produce nothing except a heap of angry customers, and lots of red tape.”
Mr Forbes claimed that Tony Abbott was wrong about the ETS. It is not just a Great Big Tax. It’s a Great Big Tax PLUS a mountain of Red Tape. And it will have absolutely no effect on world climate.
Monckton Tour
There has been a tremendous public response to the tour by Christopher Monckton and Ian Plimer. Every function packed out, people turned away, and sustained standing ovations in many places. Because of the number of disappointed people, two more functions have been organised hurriedly (see).
Public Opinion
This response of the public shows that politicians of all parties are, as usual, lagging public opinion. The public have had a gutful of green propaganda and vested interests masquerading as science. A recent Australian poll shows that only 33% of Australians now support the Rudd Ration-N-Tax Scheme. And in Britain, only 26% now believe in man-made global warming (see). Even the BBC and now the ABC have discovered that “The Science is not settled”. And the BBC’s huge vested interest in promoting climate alarmism is revealed. Their eight billion pound pension fund is heavily invested in the Climate Change Industry (see).
It is more important than ever to prevent Australia being left like a shag on a rock with the only lonely Ration-N-Tax Scheme in the Pacific Rim.
Keep the heat on the politicians, and watch how they vote. We need to work actively for the removal of EVERY politician from EVERY party who votes for the destruction of Australian industry on a bunch of manufactured scare stories.
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Droughtgate: Study Finds IPCC had Temperature - Drought Connection Backwards
By Marc Sheppard, American Thinker
Add another to the growing list of IPCC outrages. As I mentioned in last week’s IPCC: International Pack of Climate Crooks, in Chapter 9 of Assessment Report 4’s (AR4) Working Group One (WG1) Report, the IPCC claimed that manmade CO2-driven higher temperatures drive higher evaporation, and thereby cause droughts. As readers are all too aware, droughts are favorite ingredients in most alarmists’ recipes for manmade climate disaster. But a paper published last month in Geophysical Research Letters lays out a compelling argument that the IPCC has it completely backwards - that droughts are actually causing warming, not the other way around.
In Section 9.1.2, the IPCC states that: [P]recipitation and temperature are ordinarily inversely correlated in some regions, with increases in temperature corresponding to drying conditions. Thus, a warming trend in such a region that is not associated with rainfall change may indicate an external influence on the climate of that region (Nicholls et al., 2005; Section 9.4.2.3).
That statement is attributed to the same Neville Nicholls who wrote in his 2004 paper, The Changing Nature of Australian Droughts, that:
The relatively warm temperatures in 2002 were partly the result of a continued warming evident in Australia since the middle of the 20th century. The possibility that the enhanced greenhouse effect is increasing the severity of Australian droughts, by raising temperatures and hence increasing evaporation, even if the rainfall does not decrease, needs to be considered.
Later in the paper, Nicholls concluded that “the warming has meant that the severity and impacts of the most recent drought have been exacerbated by enhanced evaporation and evapotranspiration.”
Not surprisingly, as with many other AR4 irregularities that have recently surfaced, this too has a non-peer-reviewed World Wildlife Fund link to it. Nicholls’ was an extension of the work of fellow Aussie alarmist, David Karoly, whose 2003 WWF report, Global warming contributes to Australia’s worst drought [PDF], studied the 2002 drought in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin and found that: “This drought has had a more severe impact than any other drought since at least 1950, because the temperatures in 2002 have also been significantly higher than in other drought years (see Table 1 and 2). The higher temperatures caused a marked increase in evaporation rates, which sped up the loss of soil moisture and the drying of vegetation and watercourses. This is the first drought in Australia where the impact of human-induced global warming can be clearly observed.”
So then, the basis for the claim that anthropogenic warming causes droughts put forth in the IPCC’s AR4 was a WWF report and its follow-up written the next year.
But that basis, conclude Natalie Lockart, Dmitri Kavetski and Stewart W. Franks, authors of On the recent warming in the Murray-Darling Basin: Land surface interactions misunderstood, is bogus. As stated in its opening, their study “demonstrates that significant misunderstanding of known processes of land surface - atmosphere interactions has led to the incorrect attribution of the causes of the anomalous temperatures, as well as significant misunderstanding of their impact on evaporation within the Murray-Darling Basin.” And after deconstructing the claims of both Nicholls and Karoly, concludes that:
All presented results demonstrate that potential evaporation under dry conditions is elevated not as a result of the air temperature, but as a result of the lack of actual evaporation. This is accompanied by increased sensible heat fluxes which increases air temperatures. This is an entirely natural consequence of the dynamics of drought. Importantly, it is shown that antecedent temperature increases do not lead to insignificant increases in actual or potential evapotranspiration.
As coauthor Stewart Franks explained to me in an email, “this is a confusion of the well known physics of evaporation - as higher air temperatures are driven by the lack of evaporation (as occurs during drought).” He explained further in a subsequent correspondence:
Of course, when there is a deficit of rainfall, this tends to be accompanied by less cloud-cover, hence more sunshine, which does increase the energy available for evaporation, but as soil moisture is low, the bulk of the energy goes into heating the near-surface atmosphere and hence higher air temperatures. But amazingly, the story doesn’t end with how wrong the chapter was.
Professor Franks also pointed out that Neville Nicholls was one of the chapter’s Lead Authors, and David Karoly, whose work was also heavily cited in WG1 Chapter 9, was its Review Editor. Quipped Franks: “Hence they cite and review their own papers as part of the clearly flawed IPCC process.”
Unbelievable. Read moe here.
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Barrasso Calls for U.N. Climate Chief’s Resignation
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, Senator John Barrasso, R-Wyo., called on Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to resign after revelations of ongoing scientific fraud under Dr. Pachauri’s watch. Senator Barrasso delivered the following statement on the Senate Floor:
“Every day, new scandals emerge about the so called ‘facts’ in the UN reports. The integrity of the data and the integrity of the science have been compromised.
“Concrete action by world leaders is needed. Government delegations of the UN’s general assembly and UN Secretary Moon must pressure Dr. Rajendra Pachauri to step down as head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“It is time to conduct an independent investigation into the conduct of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The scientific data behind these policies must be independently verified.
“Administration policies relating to climate change will cost millions of Americans their jobs. We need to get this right. To continue to rely on these corrupted U.N. Reports is an endorsement of fraudulent behavior. It is a signal to the American people that ideology is more important than their jobs.”
Background:
Recent news reports have highlighted Dr. Rajendra Pachauri’s and the United Nation’s involvement in covering up flawed science:
February 2, 2010, Investor’s Business Daily article, Walter Russell Read, Project Director for Religion and Foreign Policy at the Pew Forum, said “After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all.”
On January 30, 2010, the Times of London reported, “Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it.”
On January 24, 2010, the Times of London reported the UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters. Reporter Jonathan Leake wrote, “The United Nations climate panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods,” and the report “had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny.”
Senator Barrasso, a member of both the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Environment and Public Works Committee, has continued to call on the international community and the Obama Administration to ensure that our energy policy is based on sound scientific data.
Recently, Barrasso sent letters to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to express his concerns regarding a report concluding the organizations eliminated two-thirds of their temperature monitoring stations around the globe in places that are colder, rural or at higher altitudes beginning in 1990 in order to drive up temperature trend averages.
See the Barasso story here. See the growing list of IPCC’s wuestionable, non-peer reviewed citations here.
See here how Greenpeace has called for Pachauri to resign.
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The end is not near
By Dr Fred Singer, Hindustan Times
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has acknowledged they made a mistake in their projection of 2035 as the year when Himalayan glaciers were said to melt. But the blunder is not a one-off mistake, and is the latest in the litany of errors that have dogged the panel over the past ten years.
In their 2001 report, they claimed that the 20th century was “unusual” and blamed it on human-released greenhouse gases. Their infamous temperature graph shown there, shaped like a hockey stick, did away with the well-established Medieval Warm Period (around 1000A.D.) and the following Little Ice Age (around 1400 to 1800A.D.). Two Canadians exposed the bad data used by the panel and the statistical errors in their analysis. In mid-August, after repeated requests for such data under the Freedom of Information Act, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (CRU), one of the three international agencies that calculate global temperatures, announced that it discarded the raw data used to calculate global surface temperatures. This action renders independent review and verification of the temperature trends published by it impossible - a clear violation of principles of science and the Act.
At the 2009 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, Don Easterbrook presented graphs demonstrating how tree ring data from Russia showing a cooling after 1961 were truncated and disguised in IPCC publications. The deceit, so exposed, indicates that the IPCC Assessment Report 4 (AR4) contains deceptions rendering the document scientifically questionable.
In November, emails from the CRU were leaked and they reveal efforts to suppress independent studies that are contrary to IPCC conclusions that humans caused global warming. Thus, the IPCC’s scientific review process has a systematic bias of an unknowable magnitude in favour of human-induced warming.
In mid-December, the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis reported that the Hadley Center for Climate Change of the British Meteorological Office (Met Office) had probably tampered with Russian climate data and that the Russian meteorological station data do not support human-caused global warming. The Met Office collaborates with the CRU in reporting global temperatures. The reported global surface temperature trends are unreliable and probably have a strong warming bias of an unknown magnitude.
In January, Joe D’Aleo, Anthony Watts and E. Michael Smith reported that the National Climatic Data Center and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies dropped many meteorological stations from their data bases in recent years. The dropped stations are generally in colder climates. It seems the three major reporting international organisations probably have a warming bias of an unknown magnitude rendering their announced temperatures and temperature trends scientifically unreliable.
On January 23, 2010, the Sunday Times (London) reported that the AR4 wrongly linked natural disasters to global warming. Yet it reported the actual published report upon which this claim was based stated: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophic losses.”
In January, Murari Lal, the coordinating lead author of the AR4’s chapter on Asia, stated that the report deliberately exaggerated the possible melt of the Himalayan glaciers. “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.” This admission demonstrates that the AR4 is a political document and not a scientific one.
This past week, additional reports reveal that IPCC’s claims that warming will cause extensive adverse effects in the Amazon rainforests and on coral reefs came not from peer-reviewed science but from publications by environmental groups such as the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace. Thus, the IPCC pretence that it represents peer-reviewed science is false.
More scandalous even, the IPCC-based its predictions on anecdotal, non-peer-reviewed sources - not at all in accord with its solemnly announced principles and scientific standards. These events showed not only a general sloppiness of IPCC procedures but also an extreme ideological bias - quite inappropriate to a supposedly impartial scientific survey. By themselves, they do not invalidate the basic IPCC conclusion - that a warming in the latter half of the 20th century was human-caused, presumably by the rise of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Yet all of these missteps pale in comparison to ClimateGate, which calls into question the very temperature data used by the IPCC’s main policy result.
In my opinion, ClimateGate is a much more serious issue than simply sloppiness and ideological distortion; ClimateGate suggests conspiracy to commit fraud.
In this enterprise, the group was aided not only by environmental zealots, anti-technology Luddites, Utopian one-worlders, and population-control fanatics, but also by bureaucrats, businesses, brokers and bankers, who had learned how to game the system and profit from government grants and subsidies for exotic schemes to produce ‘carbon-free’ energy and from the trading of carbon permits. Hundreds of billions have already been wasted - most of this in transfers of tax revenues to a favoured few.
These sums pale, however, in comparison to the trillions that would have been spent in future if some of the mitigation schemes had come into effect. Fortunately for the world economy, these schemes collapsed at the Copenhagen conference. Clearly, developing nations did not want to take on the sacrifices and restrictions on growth. There was little concern expressed about climate; Copenhagen was mostly about transfer of money from rich to poor countries - or more precisely, from the poor in rich countries to the rich in poor ones.
By Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit
The Mann Report is here. I’ll comment later. See RA-47 here.
A couple of quick points. Readers should understand that I have limited expectations from this sort of inquiry. What I do expect is that the authors not make untrue statements that can be easily disproven. (At least make them hard to disprove.)
Point 1. Penn State President Spanier is quoted as saying:
“I know they’ve taken the time and spent hundreds of hours studying documents and interviewing people and looking at issues from all sides,” Spanier said.
The only interviews mentioned in the report (aside from Mann) are with Gerry North and Donald Kennedy, editor of Science. [Since they are required to provide a transcript or summary of all interviews, I presume that the Inquiry did not carry out any other interviews.] What does Donald Kennedy know about the matter? These two hardly constitute “looking at issues from all sides”. [A CA reader observed below that “North [at a Rice University event] admitted that he had not read any of the EAU e-mails and did not even know that software files were included in the release."] They didn’t even talk to Wegman. Contrary to Spanier’s claim, they did not make the slightest effort to talk to any critic or even neutral observer.
Point 2. The Penn State Committee stated:
The so-called “trick” was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field. This is untrue on a variety of levels. The “trick” is not a “legitimate” statistical method; its essence is the failure to show adverse data. See Climate Audit here or the Daily Express here. Did they do any investigation of the “trick”? They don’t even seem to have read the relevant Climate Audit post - only realclimate.
Point 3. The Report states:
The allegation inquires about whether Dr. Mann seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research or other scholarly activities. In 2006, similar questions were asked about Dr. Mann and these questions motivated the National Academy of Sciences to undertake an in depth investigation of his research.
Similar questions may have been asked in 2006 but the National Academy of Sciences panel did not carry out an “in depth” investigation into whether Mann had “deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research or other scholarly activities.” Ralph Cicerone of NAS, together with Gerry North, drew up terms of reference that specifically excluded such an investigation. This is discussed in CA post Sir Humphrey and the Boehlert Questions.
While the Science Committee had asked questions about MBH, Cicerone did not submit these questions to the NAS Panel. Cicerone framed the terms of reference as follows (See the Sir Humphrey post for context):
the committee will summarize current scientific information on the temperature record for the past 1,000-2,000 years, describe the main areas of uncertainty and how significant they are, describe the principal methodologies used and any problems with these approaches, and explain how central the debate over the paleoclimate temperature record is to the state of scientific knowledge on global climate change. The committee will address tasks such as identifying the variables for which proxy records have been employed, describing the proxy records that have been used to reconstruct surface temperature records for the pre-instrumental period, assessing the methods employed to combine multiple proxy data to develop surface temperature reconstructions, discussing the geographical regions over which proxy data can be reliably extrapolated, and evaluating the overall accuracy and precision of such reconstructions.
When Hans von Storch showed the Boehlert questions in a PPT slide, it caused great consternation for the panel - many of whom had never seen the Boehlert questions - and they had a hard time deciding whether they would entertain von Storch’s presentation on these matters.
Panelist Christy asked Mann whether he had calculated a verification r2 for the AD1400 step and what it was. Notwithstanding overwhelming evidence that the verification r2 statistic for this step had been calculated along with the RE statistic, Mann famously said that he had not calculated a verification r2 statistic as that would be a “foolish and incorrect reasoning”. No one on the panel asked Mann why he had shown verification r2 results for the AD1820 step or why it was calculated in the same step as the RE statistic - though they had been briefed on both points. Instead, North and the panelists sat there like bumps on a log. My contemporary post on Mann’s presentation is here and noted:
Christy did ask Mann: “Did you calculate R2?” ‘? Mann’s answer was: “We didn’t calculate it. That would be silly and incorrect reasoning”?. Whenever I hear this statement in my mind, the following phrase runs through my mind: “I did not have r2 with that statistic, Miss Lewinsky”.
We had discussed the verification r2 issue in considerable depth on the previous day, even showing a graphic in which Mann had shown verification r2 for the AD1820 step. However, no one on the panel challenged Mann either about his claim that they did not calculate the r2 statistic or why it would be “silly and incorrect reasoning“‘? to calculate the r2 statistic - a point which is not only not self-evident, but incorrect. Perhaps the non-statistical panelists were reluctant to step into an area where they were not experts, given Mann’s aggressive and dismissive response to Christy. However, Nychka and Bloomfield, as statisticians, should have stepped here. I’ve pointed out Nychka’s association with Ammann (he is acknowledged in Wahl and Ammann [2006]); Nychka is a decent guy, but he should have made way for an independent statistician.
Mann arrived at the NAS presentation shortly before his presentation and left immediately after answering the panel questions (before any public questions.) I criticized the panel at the time for not resolving the verification r2 issue that had been specifically mentioned in the very first letter from NAS to the Barton Committee. North and the others sat there like bumps on a log. After the session, Nychka came up to me and said that just because they didn’t say anything about Mann’s verification r2 answer didn’t mean that they didn’t notice what had happened. But then they didn’t deal with it.
Update: 11 pm: The Inquiry Report stated that Mann “consented to the public release” of the report. RA-10 says:
A written report shall be prepared that states what evidence was reviewed, a copy of all interview transcripts and/or summaries, and includes the conclusions of the inquiry.
The Inquiry Report says that their interview with Mann was recorded and transcribed. Despite the RA-10 requirement that the written report include a “copy of all interview transcripts”, the Inquiry Report did not contain a transcript of the interview with Mann. The Inquiry Report stated that Mann provided a ten page supplemental written response to the matters discussed during his interview. Contary to RA-10, this was not included in the written report.
The Inquiry Report said that Gerald North and Donald Kennedy were interviewed. Once again, despite RA-10 requirements, the Inquiry Report did not contain a transcript and/or summary of the interviews with North or Kennedy.
RA-10 said that the Inquiry Report should state “what evidence was reviewed”. It also states:
Documentation in sufficient detail to permit a later assessment, if necessary, of the reasons for determining that an investigation was not warranted shall be maintained for a period of at least three years by the Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School, and shall be made available upon request to any involved Federal agencies.
Here is how the Inquiry Report describes what evidence was reviewed:
It was agreed that these individuals would meet again in early January and that they would use the time until that meeting to review the relevant information, including the above mentioned e-mails, journal articles, OP-ED columns, newspaper and magazine articles, the National Academy of Sciences report entitled “Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years,” ISBN: 0-309-66144-7 and various blogs on the internet.
Does the statement that they looked at “journal articles, OP-ED columns, newspaper and magazine articles, the NAS report and various blogs on the internet” constitute acceptable “documentation” at Penn State for a freshman essay, much less for an Inquiry Report required to provide “sufficient detail to permit a later assessment, if necessary, of the reasons for determining that an investigation was not warranted”.
Speaking of which - the only evidence said to have been considered by the Inquiry was what was already in the public record. They did not examine any of Mann’s correspondence that was not already on the public record. RA-10 states that “Relevant research records, documents, and/or materials shall be immediately sequestered.” This does not appear to have been done. See more and comments here.
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Cicerone, Then and Now
By Steve McIntyre
Ralph Cicerone, President of the US National Academy of Sciences, has weighed in on the CRU and data sharing controversies - he’s now in favor of data sharing. While it’s nice that he’s seen the light, he has previously (in best Sir Humphrey style) manipulated the NAS panel terms of reference to avoid having to report on data problems in paleoclimate, failed as President of NAS in ensuring that PNAS set an example of excellence in data archiving for paleoclimate articles and to use his personal prestige as President of NAS to request co-operation from paleoclimatologists who had refused to archive data used in the NAS panel report.
Cicerone writes today:
Contention over paleoclimatic data was at the heart of the UEA/CRU e-mail exchanges and that “Clarity and transparency must be reinforced to build and maintain trust”.
So it’s interesting to look back at how Cicerone himself has previously acted when he had opportunities to help build and maintain such trust, especially in respect to paleoclimate data.In 2005, the House Science Committee sent a list of questions to Cicerone, which they wished to see resolved - including issues pertaining to MBH that were then the topic of controversy, including the mundane question of whether the “information required to replicate their work has always been available”.
Instead of establishing terms of reference that actually answered the questions asked by the House Science Committee, in best Susan Hassool-style, Cicerone re-framed the terms of reference, taking the House questions off the table. As previously noted, both at the time and recently, this created consternation at the NAS Panel presentations, when von Storch tried to answer the House questions - questions that many in the panel had apparently never seen and some didn’t want to address. See CA contemporary report here, where I reported:
Von Storch’s introduction of the Boehlert questions prompted a discussion about whether these questions were within the scope of the panel’s mandate. Von Storch criticized MBH replicability giving a very categorical answer to one of the Boehlert questions that was identical to ours. So the panel has testimony on the matter. We also pointed out that presenters D’Arrigo and Hegerl had not archived their data and had refused to make it available as part of the IPCC review process. This sparked responses from both D’Arrigo and Hegerl purporting to justify this and concerns by the chairman [Gerald North] about whether replication and data archiving was going off topic and distracting from the questions that they were charged with answering, even though these were obviously questions specifically asked by Boehlert.
My contemporary post included the following account of a statement by a staffer from the House Science Committee in the public discussion at the end of the first day’s proceedings:
Goldston, representing the House Science Committee, closed off the first day’s proceedings by observing as a public comment that the Science Committee realized that there were many large questions associated with climate change and recognized that there were many big and contentious issues still to come in the future. However, the Science Committee had intentionally asked some finite questions associated with current controversies [e.g. data availability], since they wanted to take at least a few small issues off the table.
I urge readers to re-read the Sir Humphrey post. As a result of this controversy, there was a slight change in the terms of reference of the NAS panel (see CA post here), which resulted in the North panel making a few references to data archiving, but they did not investigate such issues and their comments did not amount to more than pieties.
The NAS report of 2006 relied on many studies with unarchived data. I wrote to Cicerone (See CA here) , excerpt as follows:
In many cases, I have corresponded both with the authors and the journals in an effort to obtain such data without success. In some cases, the correspondence has gone on for nearly three years without resolution. In several cases, the NAS Panel relied on such studies, even hearing personal presentations, but did not take the opportunity to request the authors to archive their data. However, now that the NAS has relied on these studies, it is of paramount importance that these studies are closely examined to determine if their conclusions are robust, or have limitations such as the NAS panel described for Mann’s work.
I believe that a letter to authors who have refused to archive data and methods in a complete manner, coming from you in your capacity as President of the National Academies, which has just published a study relying on their reports, might be effective in achieving the mutually desired goal of inspiring the authors to archive their data and methods. In Lonnie Thompson’s case, since some of the results have recently been published in the Proceedings of the NAS, the request could also be made via the journal.
In an Appendix to this letter, I have set out missing and pertinent data for six authors. Considering all of the above, I request that you promptly write to each of the authors asking that they promptly archive the data at the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology or other archive acceptable to the NAS. Thank you for your consideration.
Cicerone refused to take any action on the grounds that he could not “command’ the authors to do so, which I already had expressly acknowledged - I merely asked him to request that they do so. The post goes on to say:
I then wrote to Gerry North who, to his credit, agreed to write to the various authors. This praise seems to have been undeserved, as North’s purported agreement seems to have been a “trick” - in fact, he seems to have done nothing.
In 2007, I tried to obtain Lonnie Thompson’s data following his publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences see CA here. Despite clear policies that on their face require the archiving of large data sets, PNAS refused to require Thompson to provide a comprehensive archive of his sample data. The complicity of PNAS in Thompson’s evasion is reported at CA here.
But today’s a new day. In my original post, I quoted Sir Humphrey as follows:
“It is axiomatic in government that hornets’ nests should be left unstirred, cans of worms should remain unopened, and cats should be left firmly in bags and not set among the pigeons. Ministers should also leave boats unrocked, nettles ungrasped, refrain from taking bulls by the horns, and resolutely turn their backs to the music.”
Cicerone wisely realizes that this will no longer work: In the wake of the UEA controversy, I have been contacted by many U.S. and world leaders in science, business, and government. Their assessments and those from various editorials, added to results from scattered public opinion polls, suggest that public opinion has moved toward the view that scientists often try to suppress alternative hypotheses and ideas and that scientists will withhold data and try to manipulate some aspects of peer review to prevent dissent. This view reflects the fragile nature of trust between science and society, demonstrating that the perceived misbehavior of even a few scientists can diminish the credibility of science as a whole.
Cicerone in best bureaucratic tradition has called for yet another meeting, this time calling for an outcome with “explicit actions”:
Later this month, at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego, NAS and AAAS will lead a discussion of these important issues, examine points raised by the UEA/CRU situation, review best practices, and encourage scientists to develop standards for data access that work in their fields. The outcome of this special session must be explicit actions, as scientists must do much more now, and with urgency, to demonstrate that science is indeed self-correcting and worthy of the public’s trust.
I noticed two other Sir Humphrey quotes from my original post which seem timely in relation to climate science.
Sir Humphrey anticipating climate scientist obstruction of information on methodology and data:
“If people don’t know what you’re doing, they don’t know what you’re doing wrong.” Sir Humphrey summarizing exchanges between realclimate and climateaudit - something here for both sides:
“Almost anything can be attacked as a failure, but almost anything can be defended as not a significant failure.”
University Park, Pa. - An internal inquiry by Penn State into the research and scholarly activities of a well-known climate scientist will move into the investigatory stage, which is the next step in the University’s process for reviewing research conduct.
A University committee has concluded its inquiry into allegations of research impropriety that were leveled in November against Professor Michael Mann, after information contained in a collection of stolen e-mails was revealed. More than a thousand e-mails are reported to have been “hacked” from computer servers at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England, one of the main repositories of information about climate change.
During the inquiry, all relevant e-mails pertaining to Mann or his work were reviewed, as well as related journal articles, reports and additional information. The committee followed a well-established University policy during the inquiry.
In looking at four possible allegations of research misconduct, the committee determined that further investigation is warranted for one of those allegations. The recommended investigation will focus on determining if Mann “engaged in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities.” A full report concerning the allegations and the findings of the inquiry committee has been submitted.
In the investigatory phase, as in the inquiry phase, the committee will not address the science of global climate change, a matter more appropriately left to the profession. The committee is charged with looking at the ethical behavior of the scientist and determining whether he violated professional standards in the course of his work.
The investigatory committee will consist of five tenured full professor faculty members who will assess the evidence in the case and make a determination on Mann’s conduct. Read the Inquiry Findings here.
See Senator Inhofe’s response and letter here.
See also Pittsburgh Tribune story on Mann here. Morano said “Mann represents everything that is corrupt and unethical in climate science today. He is one of the prime reasons that the global warming movement lay in tatters. Mann will go down in scientific history as a statistical charlatan.”
Meanwhile a short distance away.
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Former IPCC Scientist: Transparency ‘An Obligation’
By Paul Chesser
University of Arizona climate scientist William Sprigg, who led the technical review of the first global warming report issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1990, dissected Climategate in a presentation he delivered at this week’s Energy and Environment Conference in Phoenix. My Heartland Institute colleagues James Taylor and Jim Lakely caught Sprigg’s remarks:
Sprigg called for a new climate research agency supported not entirely by the government, but in conjunction with the private sector.
“We need to stick to our scientific principles,” Sprigg said, referring at least in part to the critical importance of sharing data with other scientists so that hypotheses and methodologies can be checked and double-checked. “We need to improve our peer preview process, and expand the stakeholders’ role to keep us all honest.”
Taylor and Lakely put together a video report based on Sprigg’s presentation, emphasizing some of his key points about the need for transparency in scientific research. By the way, Sprigg is no global warming skeptic.
See the full interview in 3 parts courtesy of the Heartland here, here, and here.
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Climategate: How Researchers Tried to Hide Flaws in Key Study
By Fred Pearce
It is difficult to imagine a more bizarre academic dispute. Where exactly are 42 weather monitoring stations in remote parts of rural China? But the argument over the weather stations, and how it affects an important set of data on global warming, has led to accusations of scientific fraud and may yet result in a significant revision of a scientific paper that is still cited by the UN’s top climate science body.
It also further calls into question the integrity of the scientist at the centre of the scandal over hacked climate emails, the director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Dr Phil Jones. The emails suggest that he helped to cover up flaws in temperature data from China that underpinned his research on the strength of recent global warming. The Guardian has learned that crucial data obtained by American scientists from Chinese collaborators cannot be verified because documents containing them no longer exist. And what data is available suggests that the findings are fundamentally flawed.
Jones and his Chinese-American colleague Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University at Albany in New York, are being accused of scientific fraud by an independent British researcher over the contents of a research paper back in 1990. That paper, which was published in the prestigious journal Nature, claimed to answer an important question in climate change science: how much of the warming seen in recent decades is due to the local effects of spreading cities, rather than global warming?
It is well-known that the concrete, bricks and asphalt of urban areas absorb more heat than the countryside. They result in cities being warmer than the countryside, especially at night. So the question is whether rising mercury is simply a result of thermometers once in the countryside gradually finding themselves in expanding urban areas.
The pair, with four fellow researchers, concluded that the urban influence was negligible. Some of their most compelling evidence came from a study of temperature data from eastern China, a region urbanising fast even then. The paper became a key reference source for the conclusions of succeeding reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - including a chapter in the 2007 one co-authored by Jones. It said that globally “the urbanisation influence is, at most, an order of magnitude less than the warming seen on a century timescale”. In other words, it is tiny.
But many climate sceptics did not believe the claim. They were convinced that the urban effect was much bigger, even though it might not change the overall story of global warming too much. After all, two-thirds of the planet is covered by ocean, and the oceans are warming, too.
But when Jones turned down requests from them to reveal details about the location of the 84 Chinese weather stations used in the study, arguing that it would be “unduly burdensome”, they concluded that he was covering up the error. And when, in 2007, Jones finally released what location data he had, British amateur climate analyst and former City banker Doug Keenan accused Jones and Wang of fraud. He pointed out that the data showed that 49 of the Chinese meteorological stations had no histories of their location or other details. These mysterious stations included 40 of the 42 rural stations. Of the rest, 18 had certainly been moved during the story period, perhaps invalidating their data.
Keenan told the Guardian: “The worst case was a station that moved five times over a distance of 41 kilometres”; hence, for those stations, the claim made in the paper that “there were ‘few if any changes’ to locations is a fabrication”. He demanded that Jones retract his claims about the Chinese data.
The emails, which first emerged online in November last year following a hack of the university’s computer systems that is being investigated by police, reveal that Jones was hurt, angry and uncertain about the allegations. “It is all malicious. I seem to be a marked man now,” he wrote in April 2007.
Another email from him said: “My problem is I don’t know the best course of action. I know I’m on the right side and honest, but I seem to be telling myself this more often recently!” An American colleague, and frequent contributor to the leaked emails, Dr Mike Mann at Pennsylvania State University, advised him: “This crowd of charlatans look for one little thing they can say is wrong, and thus generalise that the science is entirely compromised. The last thing you want to do is help them by feeding the fire. Best thing is to ignore them completely.”
Another colleague, Kevin Trenberth at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, urged a fightback. “The response should try to somehow label these guys and [sic] lazy and incompetent and unable to do the huge amount of work it takes to construct such a database.” In August 2007, Keenan submitted a formal complaint about Wang to Wang’s employers. The university launched an inquiry. Reporting in May 2008, it found “no evidence of the alleged fabrication of results” and exonerated him. But it did not publish its detailed findings, and refused to give a copy to Keenan.
By then, Keenan had published his charges in Energy & Environment, a peer-reviewed journal edited by a Hull University geographer, Dr Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen. The paper was largely ignored at the time, but Guardian investigations of the hacked emails now reveal that there was concern among Jones’s colleagues about Wang’s missing data - and the apparent efforts by Jones and Wang over several years to cover this up.
Those concerns were most cogently expressed to Jones by his ex-boss, and former head of the CRU, Dr Tom Wigley. In August 2007, Wigley warned Jones by email: “It seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (W-C W at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect.” Wigley was concerned partly because he had been director of the CRU when the original paper was published in 1990. As he told Jones later, in 2009: “The buck should eventually stop with me.”
Wigley put to Jones the allegations made by the sceptics. “Wang had been claiming the existence of such exonerating documents for nearly a year, but he has not been able to produce them. Additionally, there was a report published in 1991 (with a second version in 1997) explicitly stating that no such documents exist.” This is believed to be a report from the US department of energy, which obtained the original Chinese temperature data.
Wang’s defence to the university inquiry says that he had got the Chinese temperature data from a Chinese colleague, although she is not an author on the 1990 Nature paper. Wang’s defence explains that the colleague had lost her notes on many station locations during a series of office moves. Nonetheless, “based on her recollections”, she could provide information on 41 of the 49 stations.
In all, that meant that no fewer than 51 of the 84 stations had been moved during the 30-year study period, 25 had not moved, and eight she could not recollect. Wang, however, maintained to the university that the 1990 paper’s claim that “few, if any” stations had moved was true. The inquiry apparently agreed. Wigley, in his May 2009 email to Jones, said of Wang: “I have always thought W-C W was a rather sloppy scientist. I would not be surprised if he screwed up here. Were you taking W-C W on trust? Why, why, why did you and W-C W not simply say this right at the start? Perhaps it’s not too late.” There is no evidence of any doubts being raised over Wang’s previous work.
Jones told the Guardian he was not able to comment on the allegations. Wang said: “I have been exonerated by my university on all the charges. When we started on the paper we had all the station location details in order to identify our network, but we cannot find them any more. Some of the location changes were probably only a few metres, and where they were more we corrected for them.” The story has a startling postscript. In 2008, Jones prepared a paper for the Journal of Geophysical Research re-examining temperatures in eastern China. It found that, far from being negligible, the urban heat phenomenon was responsible for 40% of the warming seen in eastern China between 1951 and 2004.
This does not flatly contradict Jones’s 1990 paper. The timeframe for the new analysis is different. But it raises serious new questions about one of the most widely referenced papers on global warming, and about the IPCC’s reliance on its conclusions. It is important to keep this in perspective, however. This dramatic revision of the estimated impact of urbanisation on temperatures in China does not change the global picture of temperature trends. There is plenty of evidence of global warming, not least from oceans far from urban influences. A review of recent studies published online in December by David Parker of the Met Office concludes that, even allowing for Jones’s new data, “global near-surface temperature trends have not been greatly affected by urban warming trends.”
Keenan accepts that his allegations do not on their own change the global picture. But he told the Guardian: “My interest in all this arises from concern about research integrity, rather than about global warming per se. Jones knew there were serious problems with the Chinese research, yet continued to rely upon the research in his work, including allowing it to be cited in the IPCC report.”
DR. BENNY PEISER’S NOTE: If Fred Pearces investigations turn out to be correct, the final verdict on the fraud allegations by Doug Keenan against Wei-Chyung Wang is likely to be that Wang’s research “cannot be verified because documents containing them no longer exist. And what data is available suggests that the findings are fundamentally flawed.” What Pearce does not report, however, are the concerted attempts by Phil Jones, Michael Mann and others to prevent the publication of Keenan’s research by trying to coerce the guest-editor of the E&E issue in question, no other than yours truly. Since a number of those ominous e-mails are not included in the published CRU e-mails, I cannot comment on the details of these attempts to pressure me into rejecting Keenan’s paper. But in my submission to the Parliamentary CRU Inquiry, I will call for full disclosure of all correspondence regarding this alleged fraud case which include attempts to stifle publication of undesirable research findings. Read more here.
See the post follow-up today by Fred Pearce in the Guardian.