Climategate: Cleaning out the in-box

Following are links to articles about global warming / climate change.

First, Merv at Prarie Pundit looks at a piece that appeared on Real Clear Politics:

More seriously, in one e-mail, a prominent global warming alarmist admits to using a statistical "trick" to "hide the decline" in temperatures. Anthony Watts provides an explanation of this case in technical detail; the "trick" consists of selectively mixing two different kinds of data-temperature "proxies" from tree rings and actual thermometer measurements-in a way designed to produce a graph of global temperatures that ends the way the global warming establishment wants it to: with an upward "hockey stick" slope.

Confirming the earlier scandal about cherry-picked data, the e-mails show CRU scientists conspiring to evade legal requests, under the Freedom of Information Act, for their underlying data. It's a basic rule of science that you don't just get to report your results and ask other people to take you on faith. You also have to report your data and your specific method of analysis, so that others can check it and, yes, even criticize it. Yet that is precisely what the CRU scientists have refused.

The fraud at the core of the Globo warming crowd is what caused them to try to reframe their issue as "Climate Change." This was a more amorphous term that would make it easier for them to explain anomalies, but that was still not enough. They had to cook the books.

Tracinski is right about the expenditures at stake in this debate, but it overlooks the loss of freedom that is also at stake. The globo warmers are control freaks who want to use this manufactured "crisis" to control every aspect of our lives. The totalitarian polices they want to impose would make the communist blush.

From Samizdata:

Why the fuss is because of the vast, globe-spanning policy conclusions that have been plucked from these in themselves rather minor deceptions. The fraud revealed isn't just in the fiddling of some numbers. There is also the faking of that precious scientific consensus that has so dominated public and official thinking about climate and climate policy during the last decade. The world is being sold a gigantic economic and political upheaval, backed by the claim that all this scientific rough-and-tumble, this slightly dodgy infighting, was in fact a blandly uniform scientific consensus. And the "scientists" (who more and more now look like politicos who have barged their way into science) are the engineers of this political fraud, not just the contrivers of the scientific opinions around which they have assembled their bogus consensus.

One of the more feeble responses that have so far been put forward by The Green Mob is that these emails were stolen, so it's wrong to talk about them. But this is not a private matter in any meaningful sense. This is not people being filmed doing weird things to one another in their own bed, in their own property. This is public policy of the most public sort. The vast wealth that The Green Global Government is trying to transfer from those creating it to those wanting to gobble it up (many of the gobblers being themselves), is taxed wealth. The money paying for this corrupted climate "research" is tax money. The issues at stake are matters of earth-shaping public policy. Millions upon millions will be tipped into impoverishment by these grand plans. If that isn't a "public interest" defence for the leaker or hacker or whatever, then I don't know what is.
....
Getting back to the matter of why this is all so important, these revelations will echo around the world not only because they are part of an absolutely gigantic global story, but also because of the peculiar nature of the Global Warming debate.

Basically, the Global Warming debate has been a gigantic exercise in argument from authority. In debates like this one the great mass of onlookers are being told that they must take some particular judgement on trust, because the experts are all agreed about it. The science is settled. All the scientists agree. Who are you to criticise? What do you know about climate science? Who indeed? What indeed?
....
...Last night on Channel 4 news, a long-gray-haired scientist type was interviewed by the young chap in a suit fronting the show. All that Professor Long-Gray-Hair could think of to say was that if his good friend Phil Jones had done what his good friend Phil Jones is now being accused all over the planet of having done, well, er, that would be very silly - scientist, tampering with evidence, reputation, most precious resource, blah blah - therefore Phil Jones, er, can't have done it. In other words, Professor Long-Gray-Hair was himself resorting to the Argument From Authority. Scientists just don't do that sort of thing! Not one shred of an argument was heard from Professor Long-Gray-Hair to the effect that, if you study the actual evidence, you will find that Phil Jones did not in fact do what he is accused of. I know about his observations and experiments, I've looked at the data, I know this guy, he does not lie, he does not cheat, it all adds up. Nothing like that. Not one shred of expertise was presented, in a form that might have exonerated Phil Jones. Had Professor Long-Gray-Hair simply broken down in tears and cried: "I don't know I don't know I don't know it's all too horrible to think about ... waaaaaargh!!!", he could not have made a worse impression....

Jonah Goldberg has his take at The Corner:

This should be considered not merely a scientific scandal but an enormous journalistic scandal. The elite press treats skepticism about global warming as a mental defect. It uses a form of the No True Scotsman fallacy to delegitimize people who dissent from the (manufactured) "consensus." Dissent is scientifically unserious, therefore dissenting scientist A is unserious. There's no way to break in. The moment someone disagrees with the "consensus" they disqualify themselves from criticizing the consensus. That's not how science is supposed to work. Skeptics who've received a tote bag from some oil company are branded as shills, but scientists who live off of climate-change-obsessed foundations or congressional fiefdoms are objective, call-it-like-they-see-it truth seekers. Question these folks and you get a Bill Murrayesque, "Back off, man. We're scientists."

An even larger reason this is a journalistic scandal is that governments want to spend — literally — trillions of dollars on climate change. Industries want to make billions off it. The poor will be hurt. Economies wrenched apart. And journalistic skepticism is almost nowhere to be found. If you know people in the "skeptic community" (for want of a better term) or even just normal, honest scientists, the observation that federal and foundation funding and groupthink is driving, or at least distorting, the climate debate is commonplace. But it's given almost no oxygen in the elite press, because they are in on it.

Jonathan Adler at The Volokh Conspiracy quotes George Monbiot as saying:

The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging(1). I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released(2,3), and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request(4).

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics(5,6), or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(7). I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.

Adler then notes:

The hack or unauthorized disclosure of these documents may have been illegal (unless protected by the UK’s whistleblower law). Yet the documents themselves also provide evidence of illegal activity by several climate researchers.

Monbiot is quick to note that the leaked documents do not disprove global warming nor discredit the wealth of evidence that human activity contributes to cliamte change. They do, however, suggest that some specific claims and data sets will need to be reanalyzed.

Der Spiegel has a piece on the accuracy of climate modeling.

"Give me ten parameters, and I'll simulate an elephant for you. Give me one more, and he'll wag his tail." The saying sums up the problem with many models. Models allow you demonstrate anything and everything, as long as there are enough knobs to turn. The real test of how good a model really is comes when you compare it to reality.

But when it comes to climate change, researchers are faced with a practically insoluble problem: We won't know for sure until the end of the century whether climate predictions for the year 2100 are correct or not. But with climate scientists around the world warning of the dangerous consequences of climate change, it becomes apparent that we can hardly afford to wait that long.