By Daniel Henninger

Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.

I don’t think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn’t only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called “the scientific community” had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).

Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because “science” said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.

What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences - physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously “unprovable” theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.

This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and “messy” as, say, gender studies. The New England Journal of Medicine has turned into a weird weekly amalgam of straight medical-research and propaganda for the Obama redesign of U.S. medicine.

The East Anglians’ mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming’s claims - plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish -evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. The exchanges between Penn State’s Michael Mann and East Anglia CRU director Phil Jones sound like Father Firenzuola, the Commissary-General of the Inquisition.

For three centuries Galileo has symbolized dissent in science. In our time, most scientists outside this circle have kept silent as their climatologist fellows, helped by the cardinals of the press, mocked and ostracized scientists who questioned this grand theory of global doom. Even a doubter as eminent as Princeton’s Freeman Dyson was dismissed as an aging crank.

Beneath this dispute is a relatively new, very postmodern environmental idea known as “the precautionary principle.” As defined by one official version: “When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.” The global-warming establishment says we know “enough” to impose new rules on the world’s use of carbon fuels. The dissenters say this demotes science’s traditional standards of evidence.

What would Galileo do?

The Environmental Protection Agency’s dramatic Endangerment Finding in April that greenhouse gas emissions qualify as an air pollutant - with implications for a vast new regulatory regime - used what the agency called a precautionary approach. The EPA admitted “varying degrees of uncertainty across many of these scientific issues.” Again, this puts hard science in the new position of saying, close enough is good enough. One hopes civil engineers never build bridges under this theory.

The Obama administration’s new head of policy at EPA, Lisa Heinzerling, is an advocate of turning precaution into standard policy. In a law-review article titled “Law and Economics for a Warming World,” Ms. Heinzerling wrote, “Policy formation based on prediction and calculation of expected harm is no longer relevant; the only coherent response to a situation of chaotically worsening outcomes is a precautionary policy. . . .”

If the new ethos is that “close-enough” science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas. Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it.

--------------------------

Climategate: Phil Jones accused of making error of judgment by Mann
By Chris Irvine, UK Telegraph

Phil Jones, the professor at the centre of a row over climate change data, has been accused of making an error of judgment by his US colleague. Prof Jones, director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) has been accused of manipulating climate change data following thousands of leaked documents that suggested academics delete sensitive emails to evade Freedom of Information requests from climate change sceptics. Prof Jones, who has denied altering figures, has since said he would stand down from his post while an independent review is carried out.

Who’s to blame for Climategate? One of the scientists to whom the emails were addressed, Professor Michael Mann, the Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University has moved to distance himself from some of the comments in the emails that suggest scientists did not want the IPCC, the UN body charged with monitoring climate change, to consider studies that challenged the view global warming was genuine and man-made.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight, Prof Mann said: “I can’t put myself in the mind of the person who wrote that email and sent it. I in no way endorse what was in that email.”

Prof Mann also said he could not “justify” a request from Prof Jones that he should delete some of his own emails to prevent them from being seen by outsiders. “I can’t justify the action, I can only speculate that he was feeling so under attack that he made some poor decisions frankly and I think that’s clear.” Prof Mann then argued however that there was “absolutely no evidence” that he too had manipulated data, while he also said “I don’t believe that any of my colleagues have done that”.

While climate change sceptics argue the emails are proof scientists have been hiding evidence of temperature decline, Prof Mann said he believed the incident “false controversy” manufactured by sceptics “to distract the public and to distract policy-makers to try to thwart efforts next week in Copenhagen”.

“The emails are genuine and have been misrepresented, cherry-picked, mined for single words and phrases that can be completely twisted to imply the opposite of what was actually being said, manufactured controversy and the timing of it is not coincidental as far as I’m concerned,” he added. Read more here.

-------------------------

CSIRO climate researcher resigns rather than be censored

From news.com.au it seems bullying those who have an unpopular opinion about climate issues isn’t limited to the Climategate actors. Clive Spash resigns from CSIRO after climate report ‘censorship’. SCIENTIST Clive Spash has resigned from the CSIRO and called for a Senate inquiry into the science body following the censorship of his controversial report into emissions trading.

Dr Spash has lashed out at the organisation which he said promoted self-censorship among its scientists with its unfair publication guidelines. He said he was stunned at the treatment he received at the hands of CSIRO management, including boss Megan Clark, and believed he was not alone.

“I’ve been treated extremely poorly,” he said. “There needs to be a Senate inquiry. “The way the publication policy and the charter are being interpreted will encourage self-censorship.” “It’s obviously happened before at the CSIRO - and there’s issues currently.”

Last month, Dr Spash accused the organisation of gagging him and his report - The Brave New World of Carbon Trading - and restricting its publication. The report is critical of cap and trade schemes, like the one the federal government is seeking to introduce, as well as big compensation to polluters.

Dr Spash advocates a direct tax on carbon. The CSIRO said the report was in breach of its publication guidelines, which restrict scientists from speaking out on public policy. But it provoked accusations the CSIRO was censoring research harmful to the Government.

Under intense pressure, Dr Clark publicly released the report on November 26 but warned Dr Spash would be punished for his behaviour and his refusal to amend it. “I believe that internationally peer-reviewed science should be published or, if Dr Clark wishes to have her own opinion, then she should publish her own opinion,” Dr Spash said, who has been on sick leave. “I’ve been to the doctor under extreme stress.” He had been ordered not to speak to the media while working for the CSIRO, which originally headhunted him for the job. See post here.

See both stories and comments on Watts Up With That.

--------------------------

Americans Skeptical of Science Behind Global Warming

Most Americans (52%) believe that there continues to be significant disagreement within the scientific community over global warming. While many advocates of aggressive policy responses to global warming say a consensus exists, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 25% of adults think most scientists agree on the topic. Twenty-three percent (23%) are not sure.

But just in the last few days, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs seemed to reject any such disagreement in a response to a question about global warming, “I don’t think [global warming] is quite, frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore.”

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Americans say it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming. Thirty-five percent (35%) say it’s Very Likely. Just 26% say it’s not very or not at all likely that some scientists falsified data.
This skepticism does not appear to be the result of the recent disclosure of e-mails confirming such data falsification as part of the so-called “Climategate” scandal. Just 20% of Americans say they’ve followed news reports about those e-mails Very Closely, while another 29% have followed them Somewhat Closely. Read more here.

---------------------------

McKitrick vs Watson on TV 4 in UK
By Bishop Hill

Ross McKitrick was just on Channel 4 News here in the UK, up against Bob Watson of UEA. It came over to me as a substantial victory for McKitrick.

Back when I was an auditor, I used to come across bureaucrats whose books didn’t balance. They had many of the same mannerisms that Watson displayed.

By Harold Ambler

Among the points of interest in the unfolding climate scandal is the fact that the term “climategate” rapidly eclipsed global warming in the number of links produced by a simple Google search. As is standard, Google’s auto-suggest function facilitated this, several days into the story’s evolution. Anyone typing in the letters c-l-i would see the suggested time-saving choice of climategate. Within a day or two of the auto-suggest function being added for
“climategate” it had become the top item in the list.

Suddenly, though, on Monday December 1, Google stopped offering “climategate” as a choice to those who typed c-l-i and even to those who typed c-l-i-m-a-t-e-g-a-t. Strange.

Intrigued, I sent a few questions to Google’s Global Communications Department and a polite gentleman by the name of Jake Hubert responded right away.
This is what he wrote back in an e-mail:

Hi Harold,

Jake

In my response, I pointed out that the number of links produced by a “climategate” query was growing by leaps and bounds, drawing attention to the fact
that “climategate” had eclipsed global warming (by that point) by more than half. (The doubling would be completed in the next 24 hours.)

Could he double-check with his product team? His response was not surprising:

Hi Harold,

Jake

At this point, although I suspected I was getting the run-around, I thought I’d give Jake once last shot at solving this problem:

Hi Jake,

Harold

Unlike the previous efforts at communication, this one was met with silence. At that point, I thought it might save time to work my way up the chain of command. I e-mailed a letter to Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, to whom I forwarded my correspondence with Jake. Toward the end of my letter I wrote the following: Unfortunately, what this situation appears like is one in which someone with an interest in suppressing Climategate prevailed upon someone within the Google structure to remove Climategate from the list of auto-suggests. (Other phrases starting with climate are still Google-suggested even though they have many fewer links than Climategate.) I asked him if it would it be possible to have someone from his staff look into this. I also asked if it would be possible to interview him by phone. Failing that, I said, perhaps I could send him a list of questions?

After sending the message, I went out to pick up my daughter from nursery school. When I returned, there was a message from Jake on my answering machine. Without boring readers with the entirety of the message, the takeaway was the statement “No need to contact the CEO.”

I returned Jake’s call and we spent a pleasant ten minutes on the phone, during which he explained that there was “no conspiracy,” that the algorithm governing Google Suggest simply had its own idiosyncracies, things of that nature. Nothing remotely credible, I am afraid, although I have no doubt that Jake was sincere. I decided then to try another e-mail to Eric Schmidt (Sorry about that, Jake!). In the meantime, I’d seen that Google searching “climategate” (if one was willing to type in the whole phrase) now produced 22 million links.

Dear Mr. Schmidt,

Harold Ambler

I pushed send, got my daughter into her gymnastics gear, and rushed out the door. When I returned a little less than two hours later, I put my sleeping daughter on the couch and rushed upstairs to check my e-mail. Nada. Then I did a Google search, typing c-l-i-m ... and there it was - offered by the gloriously user-friendly Google Suggest function - “climategate.”

Coincidence?

You never know.

Was Google briefly complicit in the largest scientific scandal in at least a generation, attempting to minimize it behind the scenes? Like I said, you never, ever, ever, ever know. Ever.

P.S. Four hours after the function returned, Google Suggest on “climategate” was brought down again. Read post here.

ICECAP Note: See also about Barbara Boxer hypocrisy here. Boxer, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said that the recently released e-mails, showing scientists allegedly overstating the case for climate change, should be treated as a crime. “You call it ‘Climategate’; I call it ‘E-mail-theft-gate,’” she said during a committee meeting.”

Roger Pielke Jr. described the editorial as seething with anger (here).

Wall Street Journal

Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called - without irony - the climate change “consensus.”

To read some of the press accounts of these gifts - amounting to about 0.0027% of Exxon’s 2008 profits of $45 billion - you might think you’d hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.

Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world’s leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data - facts that were laid bare by last week’s disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, or CRU.

But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists’ follow-the-money methods right back at them.

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents leaked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he’d been awarded in the 1990s.

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries? Thus, the European Commission’s most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that’s not counting funds from the EU’s member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA’s climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA’s, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. American states also have a piece of the action, with California - apparently not feeling bankrupt enough - devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls “green stimulus” - largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes - of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.

Today these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own. They include not just old standbys like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, but also Ozone Action, Clean Air Cool Planet, Americans for Equitable Climate Change Solutions, the Alternative Energy Resources Association, the California Climate Action Registry and so on and on. All of them have been on the receiving end of climate-change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.

None of these outfits are per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent - including the thousands of jobs they provide - vanishes. This is what’s known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.

Which brings us back to the climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU’s temperature database: “I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!”

This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble. See post here.