You’ve been had!

As you may know, stalwart reader, I’ve been a climate change sceptic for a little while now. I spoke about bogus weather station placement here more than a year ago, the despicable side-lining of an eminently useful Japanese paper on climate change here back in February, and the lack of transparency of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) here in August.

And now it appears that the general public have time to catch up in a controversy everyone is calling (and I’m cringing as I type this, believe me) Climategate.

Can I get a timeline over here, please?

20-Nov: Bishop Hill breaks the news that the CRU at the University of East Anglia (UEA) has been hacked and there is a “massive file of emails and code up on a server in Russia”. But, with a sceptic’s view that warms my heart, he wonders if all of this is too good to be true.

20-Nov (later): Someone from UEA confirms that the CRU was hacked. Oh-oh.

21-Nov: People start dissecting and posting analyses of the emails. It doesn’t look good.

23-Nov: People start dissecting and posting analyses of the data and code. It looks even worse.

I’ll skip ahead to the conclusion before I backtrack a bit. I’m sorry to have to tell you, but the current “global warming” scare looks to be pretty well bogus.

But, before I get into the meat of things, you may like to read a post by Willis Eschenbach that makes the same point I made in August; i.e. the entire attitude of the CRU is anti-science. Eschenbach has a nice diagram of The Scientific Method, as well as an account of how researchers tried, and were hampered in, obtaining public data on climate change as was used by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in their many reports.

The post marries the dates from the hacked emails with independent FOI (Freedom of Information) requests, to get such gems from purported scientists:

“I wouldn’t tell anybody about the FOI Act in Britain”, “Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them”, and “We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it – thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that.”

So, whether I believe in climate change or not, one thing that is reprehensible to me is the attitude of CRU towards other researchers. It doesn’t matter whether someone wants to hang your hypothesis by the genitalia. If you are a scientist, you are duty bound to make your data and methods available so that other scientists can — or not — replicate your model and either applaud you loudly or make minced meat out of your sacred cow. That. Is. What. Science. Is. About. That is what separates science from religion. And, first and foremost, what you have here, with attitudes that are obstructionist and malicious, is an heinous subversion of science.

In trawling through the Climategate analyses, I came across someone else who was treated as shabbily as the Japanese; namely, Dr Demetris Koutsoyiannis, professor at the National Technical University of Athens. His guest post at the Climate Science blog is readable, succinct and illuminating. If you can’t be bothered diving into statistical method, his is an excellent summary that you might want to ponder for an hour or two.

Having had several negative experiences in my (rather indirect) interaction with mainstream “scientists” involved in “climate change” and “climate change impacts” (I put all these quotation marks because I believe that the latter terms are not scientific), I must say that what I’ve been reading in the recently hacked and released confidential files from the CRU (aka “Climategate” documents) is not a surprise to me. Rather, and sadly, it verifies what I had suspected about some in the climate establishment. I wonder if they take pride in seeing their own words—now in a public forum:

“I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC , which were not always the same.” (http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=794).

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !” (http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=419).

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”  (http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=154).

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.” (http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=1048).

“If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences.” (http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=544)

“The skeptics appear to have staged a ‘coup’ at ‘Climate Research’ … Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate
research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.” (http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=295).

“It’s one thing to lose ‘Climate Research’. We can’t afford to lose GRL [Geophysical Research Letters]” http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=484).

Go read the entire thing. To say it’s damning is a gross understatement.

If you’re a programming statistician, and the above has done nothing more than whet your appetite, you might be interested in the initial analysis of the hacked data and algorithms, all documented at The Devil’s Kitchen.

And now that the cat’s out of the bag in one place, it appears that the seams are rupturing even as far away as New Zealand, where it has been discovered that Kiwiland’s average temperature has not risen as much as the National Institute for Water and Atmosphere (NIWA) has claimed. In fact, if you have a look at the two graphs in the article (the NIWA graph above, and the actual temperature graph below), I do believe you’ll be struck by the difference.

In summary, it appears that the IPCC has been using New Zealand as a bit of a climate change bellwether. However ….

According to NIWA the temperature trend over the last 100 years has been 0.92°C/century, which is higher than the 0.6°C/century that the IPCC claims as the global average during the 20th century. In contrast to NIWA’s figures, the NZCSC reported a statistically insignificant warming trend of 0.06°C/century since 1850.

So, a concocted increase of almost one degree per century, versus an actual increase of less than one tenth of a degree per century. Two paragraphs from the Quadrant report are beautiful:

NIWA responded in a press statement released late the next day claiming its “analysis of measured temperatures uses internationally accepted techniques, including making adjustments for changes such as movement of measurement sites.” It then cited one example of such adjustments before also claiming that it had previously explained these adjustments to members of NZCSC.

The final NIWA point surprised the [New Zealand Science] Coalition, which has documented numerous instances of NIWA’s failure to respond to requests for this information. The Coalition pointed out that the first of NIWA’s points is a “fob off” that says nothing more than “trust us”, but Climategate has shown us that “trust us” is not a credible response in climate science at the moment and maybe never will be in the future.

Back in February, I wrote the following:

Global warming, as it’s being portrayed now, plays straight to the unthinking consumer, of which there are too many to contemplate without wanting to slit your wrists. It pats on the head all those little, lazy, PC do-gooders like “Mark” who, according to Anna Shapiro said:

“What a relief …. Finally, I can stop arguing in my head with all these conservatives, trying to sway faith with reason, you know? …. Obama’s much smarter than I am. I’ve handed it off to him. [my emphasis]“

What a lovely attitude to have. Democracy? Nah, we don’t have to fight for it, watch it, know that its price is eternal vigilance and constant criticism. No, if someone who even looks a quarter-decent comes along, I’ll just hand the entire responsibility over to him. Likewise, global warming? Nah, we don’t have to think about it, try to understand it, read up on it more. So what if the effects will last multiple generations? What this mob say (the IPCC) sound okay, and those pictures of penguins are heart-breaking, so I’ll go with them.

…

We’re — well, you’re — being scared into taking for granted something that has not been fully vindicated. It’s a big responsibility (and takes a lot of time) to go wading through the facts and come up with your own independent opinion. What a pity most people aren’t going to bother. After all, it’s only the future economic and political landscape of our planet that’s at stake. We can leave it to the big guys, right? I mean, they did such a good job on finance, what the hell’s there to worry about?

At the end of last week, the major newspapers were doing hatchet jobs on the sceptics. However, as the veracity of the hacked information has continued to stand up, the tone has slowly, glacially, been changing. And, as of 30 November, the CRU appears to be changing its own stance. But, if you know what to look for, it’s more mealy-mouthed side-stepping. According to The Age:

Professor Trevor Davies, the university’s pro-vice-chancellor, research enterprise and engagement, said: “CRU’s full data will be published in the interests of research transparency when we have the necessary agreements.”

My question is this: what agreements?

The climate data were collected at publicly-funded weather stations and sent to publicly-funded scientists who used publicly-funded equipment at publicly-funded institutions to do their work. Under such circumstances, any member of the public can reasonably demand the data and have it given to them. That’s the whole idea behind public research. It’s like software. If you read the legislation (as I have done in Australia), you’ll find that one government department is duty-bound to give (yes, give, as in free) any software, or product they develop, to another government department upon request. That’s how I managed to negotiate $200,000 worth of GIS modelling from one department to another. For free. That’s what it means to be funded by the public. So I’m dying to find out what these “agreements” are that Prof. Trevor Davies is whittling on about. Anti-science strikes again!

Stay tuned.

ADDITIONAL: El Reg has a nice summary, including the history of the CRU, if you’ve only just joined us.