Times of India, Reprinted from the Financial Times

Two British committees, one Dutch committee and a US Senate committee have investigated Climategate - the disclosure from emails that scientists at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University sought to withhold data from and sabotage research publications of other scientists questioning the conventional wisdom on global warming.

The first three committees gave CRU scientists and collaborators - including Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Keith Briffa and Kevin Trenberth - a slap on the wrist without calling them outright frauds. The Minority Staff Report of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, however, has accused the scientists of (a) obstructing release of damaging data and information, (b) manipulating data to reach preconceived conclusions, (c) colluding to pressure journal editors who published work questioning the climate science ‘consensus’, and (d) assuming activist roles to influence the political process.

Critics have lambasted the supposedly-independent inquiry by Sir Muir Russell because he himself is a climate change crusader. He interviewed the CRU scientists but not the climate sceptics whom the scientists were targeting. This has been called “a trial with judge, jury, reporters, spectators and defendant , but no plaintiff. The plaintiff is locked outside the courtroom sitting in the hall hollering and hoping the jury hears some of what he has to say.” At the end of it all, two things are clear. First, it is fantasy for crusaders to claim that catastrophic global warming is established science: the emails reveal doubts and caveats even among true believers in CRU. Second, the International Panel on Climate Change must disavow its claim made first in 2001 - based on the ‘hockey stick’ graph of Michael Mann using historical tree-ring data - that the world is warmer today than ever before.

Tree-ring data after 1961 indicate cooling, but actual temperatures show warming. So, Jones resorted to the ‘trick’ of splicing tree-ring data up to 1961 with actual temperatures after 1961, thus manufacturing a steadily-rising temperature trend in the 20th century. The splicing was dishonest and an insult to science. Yet, the independent inquiry did not condemn it, showing how easily crusader-inquirers forgive transgressions that promote their private agenda.

The IPCC needs to revert to the earlier scientific consensus - maintained from its first report in 1990 to 2001 - that the medieval warm period of 800-1 ,300 AD - well before fossil fuels were extracted - was warmer than it is today.

This is inconvenient for climate crusaders who blame fossil fuels for all warming. But it will provide citizens with basic information they need before deciding whether to spend trillions on combating a problem that may or may not be real.

To throw light on these two issues, it is worth citing some of the emails.

Phil Jones (regarding queries from climate sceptic S McIntyre). “I had some emails with him a few years ago when he wanted to get all the station temperature data we use here in CRU. I hid behind the fact that some of the data had been received from individuals and not directly from Met Services through the Global Telecommunications Service (GTS) or through GCOS.”

Phil Jones to Michael Mann. “And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp [file transfer protocol] sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send it to anyone”

KEITH Briffa. “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 not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies) show some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming...”

Phil Jones. “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK, it has, but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”

On February 13 this year, Phil Jones told BBC that “there has been no statistically significant warming over the last 15 years.”

Kevin Trenberth, UCAR, October 12, 2009, “We can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t .”

Professor Mojib Latif, an IPCC member , recently said, “For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.” Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, he said North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) cycles were probably responsible for some of the strong global warming seen in the past three decades. The NAO was now moving into a colder phase (New Scientist, September 2009).

The National Research Council appointed by US Congress concluded that “the substantial uncertainties in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about AD 1600 lower our confidence in this (hockey stick) conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming. Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al(1999) that the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium.”

Climategate fortifies my own convictions as a critical agnostic on global warming. We know so little about the weather that we cannot predict it five days ahead, let alone one century ahead. This also means we know too little to rule out guesstimates - like the six IPCC scenarios - about a possible catastrophe.

The case for combating global warming rests not on established proof of warming but on insuring against a catastrophe that may not happen. If the public decides to spend a trillion dollars on such speculative insurance, so be it. I doubt if this will happen once people learn that catastrophic global warming is a guesstimate, not proven science. (PDF)

By David Lungren

Peterson Institute’s Prediction of 203,000 Net Jobs Gained is Just More Spin

“The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. ‘I am no such thing,’ it would say; ‘I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.’” -William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

We always eagerly await the next iteration of cap-and-trade legislation, for with it comes the inevitable refrain that “this time, it’s different.” Claims that cap-and-trade means fewer jobs, higher energy prices for consumers, a weaker economy-well, maybe for those other bills, advocates say, but not this one.  The American Power Act, aka the Kerry-Lieberman bill, is deemed a special case, because, according to one prominent Senate supporter, this time “we got the balance right.”

That same supporter claims that, unlike those other unbalanced cap-and-trade bills, the Kerry-Lieberman bill will actually create jobs-203,000 jobs, in fact, according to a recent analysis by the Peterson Institute. Yet sadly for the bill’s authors, the bill is not sui generis; it’s fairly typical: close scrutiny of the Peterson Institute study shows Kerry-Lieberman is no different than Waxman-Markey and every other failed version of cap-and-trade-jobs will be lost and consumers will suffer. 

According to the study, between 2011 and 2020, Kerry-Lieberman would actually kill 479,000 jobs.  After tallying the jobs created from, among other things, “clean energy investment,” “adaptation,” and “energy efficiency,” the Institute subtracts those lost in key sectors of the economy because of Kerry-Lieberman.  Consider the fossil fuel industry, which would lose 72,000 jobs because of “lower demand for fossil fuels and foregone construction of new fossil fuel power generating capacity. This includes direct, indirect, and induced jobs as well.” The study goes on: “We further subtract the jobs lost when households have less money to spend on other goods because energy has become more expensive.” The number subtracted?  305,000. 

Then there’s Kerry-Lieberman’s “macroeconomic effects” caused by “changes in consumer demand.” “This includes,” the authors found, “changes in consumer demand for non-energy goods that are more expensive because of higher energy costs, reduction in investment in non-energy sectors because additional investment in power generation has pushed up interest rates, and changes in the US current account position resulting from a net increase in US investment demand.” Jobs lost: 102,000. 

As for those 203,000 net jobs created, the Peterson Institute has some interesting things to say.  After the bill’s free allocation of emissions allowances phases out, “resulting in higher energy prices,” the “net effect” is that “after 2025, some of the employment gains in the first decade are clawed back, bringing the 2011-30 average back in line with business as usual.” The authors go on to note that, “While outside the window of this analysis, energy prices will likely continue to increase beyond 2030 as GHG abatement costs get higher.”

As supporters seek to advance yet another version of cap-and-trade-this time one confined to the utility sector-the Peterson Institute study seems to confirm the proverb, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Read more here.

By Andrew Orlowski, The Register

Parliament was misled and needs to re-examine the Climategate affair thoroughly after the failure of the Russell report, a leading backbench MP told us today.

“It’s not a whitewash, but it is inadequate,” is Labour MP Graham Stringer’s summary of the Russell inquiry report. Stringer is the only member of the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology with scientific qualifications - he holds a PhD in Chemistry.

Not only did Russell fail to deal with the issues of malpractice raised in the emails, Stringer told us, but he confirmed the feeling that MPs had been misled by the University of East Anglia when conducting their own inquiry. Parliament only had time for a brief examination of the CRU files before the election, but made recommendations. This is a serious charge.

After the Select Committee heard oral evidence on March 1, MPs believed that Anglia had entrusted an examination of the science to a separate inquiry. Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia Edward Acton had told the committee that “I am hoping, later this week, to announce the chair of a panel to reassess the science and make sure there is nothing wrong."[Hansard - Q129]]

Ron Oxburgh’s inquiry eventually produced a short report clearing the participants. He did not reassess the science, and now says it was never in his remit. “The science was not the subject of our study,” he confirmed in an email to Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit.

Earlier this week the former chair of the Science and Technology Committee, Phil Willis, now Lord Willis, said MPs had been amazed at the “sleight of hand”.

“Oxburgh didn’t go as far as I expected. The Oxburgh Report looks much more like a whitewash,” Graham Stringer told us.

Stringer says Anglia appointee Muir Russell (a civil servant and former Vice Chancellor of Glasgow University), failed in three significant areas.

“Why did they delete emails? The key question was what reason they had for doing this, but this was never addressed; not getting to the central motivation was a major failing both of our report and Muir Russell.”

Graham Stringer

Stringer also says that it was unacceptable for Russell (who is not a scientist) to conclude that CRU’s work was reproducible, when the data needed was not available. He goes further:

“The fact that you can make up your own experiments and get similar results doesn’t mean that you’re doing what’s scientifically expected of you. You need to follow the same methodology of the process.”

“I was surprised at Phil Jones’ answers to the questions I asked him [in Parliament]. The work was never replicable,” says Stringer.

In 2004 Jones had declined to give out data that would have permitted independent scrutiny of their work, explaining that “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 and find something wrong with it.”

This policy is confirmed several times in the emails, with Jones also advising colleagues to destroy evidence helpful to people wishing to reproduce the team’s results.

“I think that’s quite shocking,” says Stringer.

Thirdly, the University of East Anglia failed to follow the Commons Select Committee’s recommendations in handling the inquiry and producing the report.

Stringer said, “We asked them to be independent, and not allow the University to have first sight of the report. The way it’s come out is as an UEA inquiry, not an independent inquiry.”

Stringer also says they reminded the inquiry to be open - Russell had promised as much - but witness testimony took place behind closed doors, and not all the depositions have been published.

How independent was the panel?
Muir Russell’s team heard only one side of the story, failing to call witnesses who were the subjects of the emails - Stephen McIntyre of Climate Audit is mentioned over one hundred times in the archive - who may have given a different perspective. Nor was any active climate scientist supportive of climate change policy but critical of the CRU team’s behaviour - Hans Storch or Judith Curry, let alone the prominent sceptics, for example - summoned. Stringer feels their presence would have provided vital context.

The panel included Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet and a vocal advocate of mitigation against climate change (in 2007 he described global warming “the biggest threat to our future health") and Geoffrey Boulton a climate change advisor to the UK government and the EU, who spent 16-years at the University of East Anglia - the institution under apparently ‘independent’ scrutiny.

In several areas the CRU academics were given the benefit of the doubt because a precedent had been set - often by the academics themselves.

The British establishment has a poor record of examining its own conduct. The 1983 Franks Report into events leading up to the Falklands Invasion exonerated the leading institutions and decision-makers, so too did the Hutton Report into the Invasion of Iraq.

For Stringer, policy needs to be justified by the evidence.

“Vast amounts of money are going to be spent on climate change policy, it’s billions and eventually could be trillions. Knowing what is accurate and what is inaccurate is important.”

“I view this as a Parliamentarian for one of the poorest constituencies in the country. Putting up the price of fuel for poor people on such a low level of evidence, hoping it will have the desired effect, is not acceptable. I need to know what’s going on.”

Climategate may finally be living up to its name. If you recall, it wasn’t the burglary or use of funding that led to the impeachment of Nixon, but the cover-up. Now, ominously, three inquiries into affair have raised more questions than there were before. Read post here.