By Richard, EU Referendum
Following the release of over 1,000 e-mails and other material from the University of East Anglia’s (UEA) Climatic Research Unit (CRU, the so-called Independent Climate Change Email Review, headed by Muir Russell, has concluded of the unit’s scientists that “their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt”. Furthermore, the review found nothing in the e-mails to undermine IPCC reports.
So says Richard Black of the BBC and we are shocked, utterly shocked - that anyone could have thought that the review might have found otherwise. Its full 160-page report can be downloaded here, and you will immediately see what I mean.
Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said that the report was a “damning indictment of the university’s handling of freedom of information requests”. He added: “I don’t think the university can just claim that this is a vindication.”
Nor indeed can it. As Russell is quick to point out, “It is important to note that we offer no opinion on the validity of their scientific work. Such an outcome could only come through the normal processes of scientific debate and not from the examination of e-mails or from a series of interviews about conduct.”
Thus, as Peiser also observes, the “Climategate” issue would “not go away with this report”. He is right there. See post here.
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Global Warming ‘ClimateGate’ Investigation Yields Whitewash Report
Statement by CEI Myron Ebell on “Muir Russell” Report
Washington, D.C., July 7, 2010 - In the wake of the recent, notorious “ClimateGate” scandal, the university at the epicenter of the scandal has exonerated its staff. Myron Ebell, CEI Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy, issued a statement condemning the report.
The Muir Russell report on the ClimateGate scandal does a highly professional job of concealment. It gives every appearance of addressing all the allegations that have been made since the ClimateGate e-mails and computer files from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Institute were released last November. However, the committee relied almost entirely on the testimony of those implicated in the scandal or those who have a vested interest in defending the establishment view of global warming. The critics of the CRU with the most expertise were not interviewed. It is easy to find for the accused if no prosecution witnesses are allowed to take the stand.
The Muir Russell report is thus a classic example of the establishment circling its wagons to defend itself. As was pointed out when the committee was appointed, the members are part of the old boys’ network and have several obvious conflicts of interest.
The professional whitewash attempted by the Muir Russell report will not succeed, however. That is because the evidence that data was manipulated by some of the scientists involved, for example to make the 1930s appear cooler in twentieth century temperature records, is simply too obvious and too strong to cover up.
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Introductory paper on paradigm shift Should we change emphasis in greenhouse-effect research?
By Arthur Rorsch, Ph.D.
A paradigm is a set of scientific and metaphysical beliefs that provide a theoretical framework within which scientific theories can be tested. Replacement of an existing paradigm by another is called a paradigm shift. Most of the following papers in this issue argue that an alternative paradigm is needed for the functioning of the so-called greenhouse effect of the Earth and hence for the explanation of observed climatic change. Some others contest it.
The observed coincidence between global warming and rise of CO2 in the atmosphere over the last century - more accurately measured over the last 30 years of it - need not indicate a causal relationship, and it certainly need not give rise to global catastrophe. An assumed correlation is based on the expectation that the infrared radiation from CO2 contributes significantly to the greenhouse effect of the Earth. However, irregularities in the trends raise doubts of such a simple causal relationship and, at least, considerable doubt about the magnitude of such an expected effect. See more here.
By Russell Cook
Meteorologist blogger Anthony Watts normally talks about the crumbling science of man-caused global warming, but recently described an uninvited office guest demanding to know about his alleged “big oil funding.” The charge that only the lure of big money causes people to question warmist gospel is old, but, turns out, of highly questionable origin.
Al Gore typifies the central accusation in An Inconvenient Truth, pg 263:
The misconception that there is a serious disagreement among scientists about global warming is actually an illusion that has been deliberately fostered by a relatively small but extremely well-funded cadre of special interests, including Exxon Mobil and a few other oil, coal, and utilities companies. These companies want to prevent any new policies that would interfere with their current business plans...
One of the internal memos prepared by this group to guide the employees they hired to run their disinformation campaign was discovered by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ross Gelbspan. Here was the group’s stated objective: to “reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact.”
Internet searches of the “reposition global warming” phrase show how viral it is. However, more searching reveals former Boston Globe reporter Gelbspan not only has never won a Pulitzer, despite uncountable times he’s described as such, he is also not the discoverer of the ‘campaign’. Intensive investigation only reveals myriad ties to the phrase, but the actual 1991 internal PR campaign memo containing the phrase is never seen.
Gore’s 2004 NY Times review of Gelbspan’s then-current 2nd book offered this praise:
Gelbspan’s first book, “The Heat Is On” (1997), remains the best, and virtually only, study of how the coal and oil industry has provided financing to a small group of contrarian scientists...In this new book, Gelbspan focuses his toughest language by far on the coal and oil industries. After documenting the largely successful efforts of companies like ExxonMobil to paralyze the policy process, confuse the American people and cynically ‘reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.’....
Greenpeace director Phil Radford offers more praise, in an article describing two people he worked with who most impressed him:
John Passacantando, the former director of Greenpeace, whose strategic instinct and track record of changing the political landscape on global warming has made it possible to imagine that solving the problem could be a reality. And Ross Gelbspan...who...uncover[ed] the scandalous cover up of global warming by polluting companies. Ross has been the lone voice...that has inspired countless people, me included, to demand our country and our future back from the coal and oil interests behind global warming.
The article also says Radford worked for Ozone Action. Prior to 1996, their focus was ozone depletion. Ozone Action had just over/under $1 million worth of contributions per year in 1998, 1999 and 2000, under John Passacantando’s leadership, who then merged his group into Greenpeace in 2000. Greenpeace archive records of a 1996 Ozone Action report (page 5, paragraphs 3 & 4) reveal:
...the Information Council for the Environment (ICE) stated their goal was to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact)”
According to documents obtained by Ozone Action and by Ross Gelbspan, several ICE strategies were laid out: the repositioning of global warming as theory, not fact....
The word “obtained” prompts questions about assertions that Gelbspan was the discoverer. Worse, Greenpeace/WWF activist Andrew Rowell cites the “reposition” phrase in his 1996 Green Backlash (2nd paragraph), while not saying where the “ICE internal packet” came from. NY Times reporter Matthew Wald’s July 8, 1991 article reported:
The goal of the campaign, according to one planning document, is to “reposition global warming as theory” and not fact.
A packet of internal correspondence and other information relating to the campaign was provided to The New York Times by the Sierra Club, the San Francisco-based environmental group that favors taking steps to reduce the risk of global warming.
Curtis Moore, who cites Wald’s article about the “reposition” phrase in his 1994 Green Gold, also refers to an interview of Simmons Advertising’s Tom Helland. That appears to be the same Simmons contact “T. Helland” seen in page 13 of another set of Greenpeace scans, a fair indication that Moore saw the documents. And, on pg 14, there is a Simmons letter describing “what you’ll find in this packet”, the same descriptive word in Rowell’s book note and Wald’s article. Gelbspan refers to other 1991 articles breaking this story near the bottom of the page at his web site. An obvious question is: who discovered these documents?
That second set of Greenpeace scans contains something vastly more important on page 10—the document with the “reposition” phrase in its complete context. Of all the internet searches for the phrase, I found no others showing it in its entirety, or any linking to this Greenpeace scan. In Gelbspan’s own hugely acclaimed 1997 book, no scan is shown, he simply says, “ICE documents in author’s possession”. Why is that? And what is the significance of yet another Greenpeace scan of an October 1996 Kalee Kreider email to “D Becker” at the Sierra Club? That’s probably Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club’s Global Warming Program from ‘89 to 2006. Kreider worked at Ozone Action just three months earlier, repeating the “reposition” phrase in a media release. Many now know Kreider as Al Gore’s spokesperson.
It turns out that the attempted slander of global warming skeptics as tools of big oil is as poorly grounded as the theory itself. Read more here.
See also developing “Healthy scepticism over climate change” here.
By Fred Pearce, The Guardian
Science has been changed forever by the so-called “climategate” saga, leading researchers have said ahead of publication of an inquiry into the affair - and mostly it has been changed for the better.
This Wednesday sees the publication of the Muir Russell report into the conduct of scientists from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), whose emails caused a furore in November after they were hacked into and published online.
Critics say the emails reveal evasion of freedom of information law, secret deals done during the writing of reports for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a cover-up of uncertainties in key research findings and the misuse of scientific peer review to silence critics.
But whatever Sir Muir Russell, the chairman of the Judicial Appointments Board for Scotland, concludes on these charges, senior climate scientists say their world has been dramatically changed by the affair.
“The release of the emails was a turning point, a game-changer,” said Mike Hulme, professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia. “The community has been brought up short by the row over their science. Already there is a new tone. Researchers are more upfront, open and explicit about their uncertainties, for instance.”
And there will be other changes, said Hulme. The emails made him reflect how “astonishing” it was that it had been left to individual researchers to police access to the archive of global temperature data collected over the past 160 years. “The primary data should have been properly curated as an archive open to all.” He believes that will now happen.
Bob Watson, a former chair of the IPCC and now chief environment scientist for the British government, agreed. “It is clear that the scientific community will have to respond by being more open and transparent in allowing access to raw data in order that their scientific findings can be checked.”
In addition, Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, said: “Researchers have to accept that it won’t just be their science that is judged but also their motives, professionalism, integrity and all those other qualities that are considered important in public life.”
Researchers outside Britain say a row that began in Norwich now has important implications for the wider scientific community round the world.
“Trust has been damaged,” said Hans von Storch of the KGSS Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany. “People now find it conceivable that scientists cheat and manipulate, and understand that scientists need societal supervision as any other societal institution.”
The climate scientist most associated with efforts to reconciling warring factions, Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, said the idea of IPCC scientists as “self-appointed oracles, enhanced by the Nobel Prize, is now in tatters”. The outside world now sees that “the science of climate is more complex and uncertain than they have been led to believe”.
Some IPCC scientists are in denial on this issue, she said, arguing that they would like to see the CRU incident as “an irrelevant blip” and to blame their problems on “a monolithic denial machine”, but that won’t wash.
Roger Pielke Jr of the University of Colorado agreed that “the climate science community, or at least its most visible and activist wing, appeared to want to go back to waging an all-out war on its perceived political opponents”.
He added: “Such a strategy will simply exacerbate the pathological politicisation of the climate science community.” In reality, he said, “There is no going back to the pre-November 2009 era.”
Curry exempted from this criticism Phil Jones, CRU director and the man at the centre of the furore. Put through the fire, “Jones seems genuinely repentant, and has been completely open and honest about what has been done and why… speaking with humility about the uncertainty in the data sets,” she said.
The affair “has pointed out the seamy side of peer review and consensus building in the IPCC assessment reports,” she said. “A host of issues need to be addressed.”
The veteran Oxford science philosopher Jerome Ravetz says the role of the blogosphere in revealing the important issues buried in the emails means it will assume an increasing role in scientific discourse. “The radical implications of the blogosphere need to be better understood.” Curry too applauds the rise of the “citizen scientist” triggered by climategate, and urges scientists to embrace them.
But greater openness and engagement with their critics will not ensure that climate scientists have an easier time in future, warns Hulme. Back in the lab, a new generation of more sophisticated computer models is failing to reduce the uncertainties in predicting future climate, he says- rather, the reverse. “This is not what the public and politicians expect, so handling and explaining this will be difficult.”
Read post here.