Coyote Blog

I have written a lot about problems with over-emphasis on peer review and problems in scientific publishing.  This is from a press release by the CRU quoting the highly flawed Muir-Russel review / whitewash of the Climategate emails.

We note that much of the challenge to CRU’s work has not always followed the conventional scientific method of checking and seeking to falsify conclusions or offering alternative hypotheses for peer review and publication. We believe this is necessary if science is to move on, and we hope that all those involved on all sides of the climate science debate will adopt this approach.

Because methodological challenges to scientists work that don't appear in Climate Journals controlled by the scientists in question are not part of the scientific method.

By the way, the statement that "The raw tree-ring data used in our published work are available; anyone is free to use them in any way they wish" is absolutely hilarious for anyone who has followed this saga over the years.  To the extent they are available "freely," it is only because Steve McIntyre and other challengers of CRU's work engaged in a decade long legal campaign to get this publicly-funded data (necessary to verify and/or replicate the CRU's published work) released.  Here is the McIntyre post to which CRU was responding, though they bend over backwards not to actually mention him.

This has already made the rounds but I can't resist mocking an HBS professors whose classes I assiduously avoided when I was there.  Her house was hit by lightning.  Apparently, this was not the fault of poor lightning protection for her house, but was due to your SUV:

I am not a climate change scientist, but I have come to understand that I am a climate change victim. Our daughter took the lead investigating destructive lightning in Maine. She found that the NASA Goddard Institute estimates a 5-6% change in global lightning frequencies for every 1 degree Celsius global warming. The Earth has already warmed .8 degrees Celsius since 1802 and isexpected to warm another 1.1-6.4 degrees by the end of the century. Maine's temperatures rose 1.9 degrees Celsius in the last century and another 2.24 degree rise is projected by 2104. I learned from our insurance company that while the typical thunderstorm produces around 100 lightning strikes, there were 217 strikes around our house that night. I was shocked to discover that when it comes to increased lightning frequency and destructiveness, a NASA study concluded that eastern areas of North America like Maine are especially vulnerable. Scientists confirm a 10% increase in the incidence of extreme weather events in our region since 1949.

This is one of those paragraphs that is so bad, I put off writing about it because I could write a book about all the errors.

• The 5-6% lightning strike estimate comes from one single study that I have never seen replicated, but more importantly comes from running a computer model.  Though it may exist, I have found no empirical evidence that lightning activity has net increased with increases in temperature
• The world has warmed about 0.8C over the last century or two. Congrats.  Infinite monkeys and Shakespeare and all that.
• We could argue the forecasts, but they are irrelevant to this discussion as we are talking about current weather which cannot be influenced by future warming.
• Her claim that Maine's temperature rose 1.9C in the last Century is simply absurd.  Apparently she got the data from some authoritative place called nextgenerationearth.com, but its impossible to know since in the few days since she published this article that site has taken down the page.  So we will just have to rely on a lesser source like the NOAA for Maine temperatures.  Here story is from 2009 so I used data through 2009

Annual Averages in Maine:

Oops, not a lot of warming here, and certainly not 1.9C.  In fact, there has not even been a single year that has been 1.9C above the average for the century since the early 1900s.  And 2009 was a below average year.
Well, she said it was in summer.  That's when we get the majority of thunderstorms.  Maybe it is just summer warming?  The NOAA does not have a way to get just summer, but I can run average temperatures for July-September of each year, which matches summer within about 8 days.

Whoa!  What's this?  A 0.3-0.4C drop in the last 100 years.   And summer of 2009 (the last data point) was well below average. Wow, I guess cooling causes lightning.  We better do something about that cooling, and fast!  Or else buy this professor some lightning rods.
And you have to love evidence like this

I learned from our insurance company that while the typical thunderstorm produces around 100 lightning strikes, there were 217 strikes around our house that night

What is this, the climate version of the Lake Wobegone Effect?  If all our storms are not below average, then that is proof of climate change.  Is this really how a Harvard professor does statistical analysis?  She can just look at a sample and the mean and determine from that one sample that the mean is shifting?

Finally, she goes on to say that extreme weather in her area is up 10% from some source called the Gulf of Maine Council on Marine Environment.  Well, of course, you can't find that fact anywhere on the source she links.  And besides, even if Maine extreme weather is up, it can't be because of warming because Maine seems to be cooling.

This is just a classic example of the observer bias that is driving the whole "extreme weather" meme.  I will show you what is going on by analogy.  This is from the Wikipedia page on "Summer of the Shark":

The media's fixation with shark attacks began on July 6, when 8-year-old Mississippi boy Jessie Arbogast was bitten by a bull shark while standing in shallow water at Santa Rosa Island's Langdon Beach. ...

Immediately after the near-fatal attack on Arbogast, another attack severed the leg of a New Yorker vacationing in The Bahamas, while a third attack on a surfer occurred about a week later on July 15, six miles from the spot where Arbogast was bitten.^[6] In the following weeks, Abrogast's spectacular rescue and survival received extensive coverage in the 24-hour news cycle, which was renewed (and then redoubled) with each subsequent report of a shark incident. The media fixation continued story with a cover story in the July 30th issue of Time magazine.

In mid-August, many networks were showing footage captured by helicopters of hundreds of sharks coalescing off the southwest coast of Florida. Beach-goers were warned of the dangers of swimming,^[7] despite the fact that the swarm was likely part of an annual shark migration.^[8] The repeated broadcasts of the shark group has been criticized as blatant fear mongering, leading to the unwarranted belief of a so-called shark "epidemic".^[8]...

In terms of absolute minutes of television coverage on the three major broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—shark attacks were 2001's third "most important" news story prior toSeptember 11, behind the western United States forest fires, and the political scandal resulting from the Chandra Levy missing persons case.^[11] However, the comparatively higher shock value of shark attacks left a lasting impression on the public. According to the International Shark Attack File, there were 76 shark attacks that occurred in 2001, lower than the 85 attacks documented in 2000; furthermore, although 5 people were killed in attacks in 2001, this was less than the 12 deaths caused by shark attacks the previous year.^[12]

A trend in news coverage <> a trend in the underlying frequency. If these were correlated, gas prices would only go up and would never come down.

From the Gaurdian via Bishop Hill

The Guardian is reporting that UK climate change aid money has been used to fund forced sterilisation programmes in India.

Tens of millions of pounds of UK aid money have been spent on a programme that has forcibly sterilised Indian women and men, the Observer has learned...

Court documents filed in India earlier this month claim that many victims have been left in pain, with little or no aftercare. Across the country, there have been numerous reports of deaths and of pregnant women suffering miscarriages after being selected for sterilisation without being warned that they would lose their unborn babies.

Yet a working paper published by the UK's Department for International Development in 2010 cited the need to fight climate change as one of the key reasons for pressing ahead with such programmes. The document argued that reducing population numbers would cut greenhouse gases, although it warned that there were "complex human rights and ethical issues" involved in forced population control.

A reader sent this abstract of a Henrik Svensmark study with a one word caption:  Wow!  I agree.  The notion that "local" (and by local, we mean unimaginably far away) supernova affecting the Earth's climate is certainly creative.  Haven't even read the thing so certainly not buying it yet, but it certainly is an amazing hypothesis.

Observations of open star clusters in the solar neighbourhood are used to calculate local supernova (SN) rates for the past 510 Myr. Peaks in the SN rates match passages of the Sun through periods of locally increased cluster formation which could be caused by spiral arms of the Galaxy. A statistical analysis indicates that the Solar system has experienced many large short-term increases in the flux of Galactic cosmic rays (GCR) from nearby SNe. The hypothesis that a high GCR flux should coincide with cold conditions on the Earth is borne out by comparing the general geological record of climate over the past 510 Myr with the fluctuating local SN rates. Surprisingly, a simple combination of tectonics (long-term changes in sea level) and astrophysical activity (SN rates) largely accounts for the observed variations in marine biodiversity over the past 510 Myr. An inverse correspondence between SN rates and carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels is discussed in terms of a possible drawdown of CO₂ by enhanced bio-productivity in oceans that are better fertilized in cold conditions – a hypothesis that is not contradicted by data on the relative abundance of the heavy isotope of carbon, ¹³C.

I was initially very skeptical of Svensmark's work attempting to link cosmic rays to cloud formation, with that affect acting as an amplifier (in terms of warming and cooling effects) of changes in solar output.  I must say that over time, that work has survived replication effects pretty well.

I am the worst headline-writer ever.  Most of my posts have titles like "update on climate debate."  However, I finally wrote one at Forbes I kind of liked.  I wrote last week about Steve Zwick's article hoping to assign the catastrophic costs of climate change to those ill-intentioned skeptics.   He has walked that back a bit, at least the invective about letting people's house burn down, and I have some additional comments in response.

My Forbes column is up this week.  I really did not want to write about climate, but when Forbes conctributor Steve Zwick wrote this, I had to respond

We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies.  Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay.  Let’s let their houses burn.  Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands.  Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices.

They broke the climate.  Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?

The bizarre threats and ad hominem attacks have to stop.  Real debate is necessary based on an assumption that our opponents may be wrong, but are still people of good will.  And we need to debate what really freaking matters:

Instead of screwing around in the media trying to assign blame for the recent US heat wave to CO2 and threatening to burn down the houses of those who disagree with us, we should be arguing about what matters.  And the main scientific issue that really matters is understanding climate feedback.  I won't repeat all of the previous posts (see here and here), but this is worth repeating:

Direct warming from the greenhouse gas effect of CO2 does not create a catastrophe, and at most, according to the IPCC, might warm the Earth another degree over the next century.  The catastrophe comes from the assumption that there are large net positive feedbacks in the climate system that multiply a small initial warming from CO2 many times.  It is this assumption that positive feedbacks dominate over negative feedbacks that creates the catastrophe.  It is telling that when prominent supporters of the catastrophic theory argue the science is settled, they always want to talk about the greenhouse gas effect (which most of us skeptics accept), NOT the positive feedback assumption.  The assumption of net positive climate feedback is not at all settled -- in fact there is as much evidence the feedback is net negative as net positive -- which may be why catastrophic theory supporters seldom if ever mention this aspect of the science in the media.

I said I would offer a counter-proposal to Mr. Zwick's that skeptics bear the costs of climate change.  I am ready to step up to the cost of any future man-made climate change if Mr. Zwick is ready to write a check for the lost economic activity and increased poverty caused by his proposals.  We are at an exciting point in history where a billion people, or more, in Asia and Africa and Latin America are at the cusp of emerging from millenia of poverty.  To do so, they need to burn every fossil fuel they can get their hands on, not be forced to use rich people's toys like wind and solar.  I am happy to trade my home for an imaginary one that Zwick thinks will be under water.  Not only is this a great way to upgrade to some oceanfront property, but I am fully confident the crazy Al Gore sea level rise predictions are a chimera, since sea levels have been rising at a fairly constant rate since the end of the little ice age..  In return, perhaps Mr. Zwick can trade his job for one in Asia that disappears when he closes the tap on fossil fuels?

I encourage you to read it all, including an appearance by the summer of the shark.

According not to some random weird dude found on a campus in California, but to the head of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I am guilty of crimes against humanity for questioning whether the world's climate system is really dominated by strong positive feedback

One of the world’s most widely respected climatologists, James Hansen, director of NASA-GISS, which focuses on the study of earth’s climate for the space agency, testified to Congress in 2008 that the CEOs of fossil fuel companies (who, according to various professional reporting have been promoting this and other misleading messages about global warming in conjunction with ideological groups trying to prevent government regulation) “knew what they were doing” and, as stated in his written testimony to Congress in 2008, were guilty of “high crimes against humanity and nature.”

Hansen tells ABC News — in a phone call from the U.K. where he’s been traveling — that he used that highly charged phrase, crime against humanity, “not only for dramatic effect, but also because it is accurate, given the enormous scale of the consequences to humanity” if manmade global warming is not somehow stopped and reversed.

“It wasn’t only aimed at the fossil fuel CEOs,” Hansen added on the phone. “This also applies to politicians who pretend the global warming is not manmade.”....

“Crimes Against Humanity” is a category of culpability that found currency in the last century as a label for such atrocities as genocide, including the Nazi Holocaust.

This is a grave accusation, laden with great emotion, but it has not been made lightly — rather with extensive study and forethought.

You have been warned.

Presented without comment, via WUWT:

Lots more updates but I have to get home from Buffalo first.  Here is a funny quote

When the Earth Hour ambassadors include a child, a magician, a couple of actors, a singer, a model, a chef, a radio presenter, a celebrity gardener, a priest, a hotelier, a former rock star, a green politician, an SBS landscape architect and not a single economist or scientist, I think we’ve long stopped listening to “the science” and are checking out the designer label.

Cross posted from Climate Skeptic

This quote from Michael Mann [of Hockey Stick fame] is a great example of two common rhetorical tactics of climate alarmists:

And so I think we have to get away from this idea that in matters of science, it's, you know, that we should treat discussions of climate change as if there are two equal sides, like we often do in the political discourse. In matters of science, there is an equal merit to those who are denying the reality of climate change who area few marginal individuals largely affiliated with special interests versus the, you know, thousands of scientists around the world. U.S. National Academy of Sciences founded by Abraham Lincoln back in the 19th century, all the national academies of all of the major industrial nations around the world have all gone on record as stating clearly that humans are warming the planet and changing the climate through our continued burning of fossil fuels.

Here are the two tactics at play here:

1. He is attempting to marginalize skeptics so that debating their criticisms is not necessary.  He argues that skeptics are not people of goodwill; or that they say what they say because they are paid by nefarious interests to do so; or that they are vastly outnumbered by real scientists ("real" being defined as those who agree with Dr. Mann).  This is an oddly self-defeating argument, though the media never calls folks like Mann on it.  If skeptics' arguments are indeed so threadbare, then one would imagine that throwing as much sunlight on them as possible would reveal their bankruptcy to everyone, but instead most alarmists are begging the media, as in this quote, to bury and hide skeptics' arguments.  I LOVE to debate people when I know I am right, and have pre-debate trepidation only when I know my position to be weak.
2. There is an enormous bait and switch going on in the last sentence.  Note the proposition is stated as "humans are warming the planet and changing the climate through our continued burning of fossil fuels."  I, and many other skeptics, don't doubt the first part and would quibble with the second only because so much poor science occurs in attributing specific instances of climate change to human action.  What most skeptics disagree with is an entirely different proposition, that humans are warming the planet to catastrophic levels that justify immensely expensive and coercive government actions to correct.  Skeptics generally accept a degree or so of warming from each doubling of CO2 concentrations but reject the separate theory that the climate is dominated by positive feedback effects that multiple this warming 3x or more.   Mann would never be caught dead in public trying to debate this second theory of positive feedback, despite the fact that most of the warming in IPCC forecasts is from this second theory, because it is FAR from settled.  Again, the media is either uninterested or intellectually unable to call him on this.

Would Copernicus and Galileo have been right to lie about the nature of the solar system if that lie prevented the undermining of the Catholic Church, which most everyone at the time felt to have substantial positive benefits?

I think the answer for most of us is "no."  Science is about finding the truth, and the effects of those truths on social and political institutions are what they are.

But we have now entered the era of post-modern science, where writers on scientific ethics now conclude that its OK for scientists to lie as long as they are on the right team

James Garvey, a philosopher and the author of The Ethics of Climate Change has written a defence of Peter Gleick at the Guardian:

What Heartland is doing is harmful, because it gets in the way of public consensus and action. Was Gleick right to lie to expose Heartland and maybe stop it from causing further delay to action on climate change? If his lie has good effects overall – if those who take Heartland's money to push scepticism are dismissed as shills, if donors pull funding after being exposed in the press – then perhaps on balance he did the right thing. It could go the other way too – maybe he's undermined confidence in climate scientists. It depends on how this plays out.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that opposition to the Keystone was never about the Ogallala Aquifer.  Polluting the water was a simply a convenient talking point that might play better with the American public than the true goal, which is to shut down the development of new sources of North American oil.  I got a lot of comments and email that I was making this up, but in fact its pretty clear that opposition to the pipeline pre-dated knowledge even of its route.  Here is a environmental group's presentation from 2008 which advocates opposition to all pipelines (without any reference to their routes) out of the Canadian tar sands as a strategy to halt their development.

Postscript:  I really have little use for discussions about funding amounts and sources of various causes.  I find it largely irrelevent.  So I post this only because this week we are talking about the Heartland Institute's funding of climate skeptics as revealed by hero (if you are an environmentalist blog) or thief Peter Gleick.  Heartland sends a portion of its $6 million budget to support various climate skeptics, and somehow this "revelation" has environmentalists running in circles screaming rape.  But Heartland's pitiful few millions seem a joke in comparison to the environmental funding torrent.  Take this example from the Canadian tar sands issue, just a single one of a myriad of climate-related issues getting millions, even billions of dollars of funding.

Northrop’s presentation promised funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation in the amount of $7 million per year. Named in the presentation were 12 participating environmental pressure groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and the Sierra Club.

According to Canadian writer and researcher Vivian Krause, U.S. foundations have poured more than $300 million into Canadian environmental groups since 2000. One foundation, endowed by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, has been single-handedly responsible for $92 million of that total, Krause wrote Jan. 17 in Canada’s Financial Post. Foundations flush with the wealth of computer pioneers William Hewlett and David Packard, she added, sent another $90 million to wage green-politics wars in the Great White North....

Tax records from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund indicate that it sent $1.25 million to Michael Marx’s organization, Corporate Ethics International, between December 2007 and November 2010. The money was earmarked “to coordinate the initial steps of a markets campaign to stem demand for tar sands derived fuels in the United States.” The Fund has not yet filed its tax return for 2011.

Among other initiatives, Corporate Ethics International launched a campaign in July 2010 to persuade American and British travelers to avoid visiting Alberta while tar sands exploration was underway. Tourism brings $5 billion to Alberta, making it one of the Canadian province’s biggest industries.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the second philanthropy Northrop mentioned in 2008 as a partner in the concerted effort to stop tar sands oil development, contributed far more.

Its tax returns indicate expenditures of more than $17.5 million targeted at tar sands oil development, including more than $15.4 million to the left-wing Tides Foundation and the affiliated Tides Canada Foundation. At the time, Tides was led by progressive millionaire Drummond Pike, and by ACORN co-founder and AFL-CIO organizer Wade Rathke.

A newer philanthropy, the Sea Change Foundation, also sent Tides $2 million in 2009, all of it to “promote awareness of an opposition to tar sands.” Another $3.75 million to Tides followed in 2010.

Funded by Renaissance Technologies hedge fund founder James Simons and his son, Nathaniel, Sea Change gave away $120 million between 2008 and 2010 in connection with energy-related issue activism. More than $18 million more of the Simons’ philanthropic funding in 2009 and 2010 went to organizations named in Northrop’s 2008 presentations, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund and Ceres, Inc., although Sea Change did not disclose the specific purpose of those grants.

Smaller tar sands-related contributions to Tides came from the Oak Foundation, endowed by Duty Free Shoppers tycoon Alan Parker; the New York Community Trust; and the Schmidt Family Foundation, whose millions come from Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy.

Tides, in turn, made at least $8.6 million in grants to 44 different organizations, each time specifically mentioning its “tar sands campaign.” Funds went to Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, Forest Ethics, the Rainforest Action Network and dozens of others. Fully $2.2 million of that total went to Michael Marx’s Corporate Ethics International.

I have no problem with private people spending money however they want, but after throwing around sums of this magnitude, it seems amazing they feel the need to stop Heartland from spending a couple of million dollars in opposition.  It's like a rich guy telling you that your Chevy Nova is in the way of his Ferrari and could you please get it off the road.

This seems to represent the general MSM reaction to Peter Gleick's fraud in obtaining Heartland documents:

Peter Gleick violated a principle rule of the global-warming debate: Climate scientists must be better than their opponents....

It’s very tempting for scientists and their allies to employ to tactics of their over-aggressive critics. Yet the global warming camp must make an affirmative case for ambitious action on carbon emissions. Critics need only poke holes in the scientists’ arguments, or, as is so often the case in global warming debates, merely insist they’ve done so. Manipulation and perfidy work much better for the deniers.

Whatever the misdeeds of those who attack climate research, however braindead the opposition to climate scientists appears to be, advocates degrade themselves when they allow their frustrations to get the better of their ethical responsibilities. They lend credence to the (wrong) impression that both sides of the debate are equally worthy of criticism, that global warming is another ideological war that both sides fight deceitfully. In that context, those who want to spend lots of money to green the economy lose, and those who want to do nothing win. As Rick Santorum tours the country accusing climate activists of treachery and conspiracy, this should be only more obvious.

In other words, shame on Gleick for stooping to the level of those corrupt and evil skeptics.  A sentence or two of denunciation of Gleick for an actual crime, accompanied by 500 words of unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks on skeptics.  Nice.  I try to have a "let's play nice" response and this is what comes back in return?  Very frustrating.

I have an updated article at Forbes.  A small excerpt

In a written statement, Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, and vocal advocate of catastrophic man-made global warming theory, has admitted to obtaining certain Heartland Institute internal documents under false premises, and then forwarding these documents to bloggers who were eager to publish them.

Gleick (also a writer on these pages at Forbes) frequently styles himself a defender of scientific integrity (for example), generally equating any criticism of his work or scientific positions with lack of integrity (the logic being that since certain scientists like himself have declared the science to be settled beyond question, laymen or even other scientists who dispute them must be ethically-challenged).

In equating disagreement with lack of integrity, he offers a prime example of what is broken in the climate debate, with folks on both sides working from an assumption that their opponents have deeply flawed, even evil motives.  Gleick frequently led the charge to shift the debate away from science, which he claimed was settled and unassailable, to the funding and motives of his critics.  Note that with this action, Gleick has essentially said that the way to get a more rational debate on climate, which he often says is his number one goal, was not to simplify or better present the scientific arguments but to steal and publish details on a think tank’s donors....

Hit the link to read it all.

I could not resist commenting on the brouhaha around the stolen Heartland Institute documents in my column at Forbes.  The key one that is the "smoking gun" now appears to be fake.  I wrote in part:

One reason I am fairly certain the document is fake is this line from the supposed skeptic strategy document:

His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.

For those of us at least somewhat inside the tent of the skeptic community, particularly the science-based ones Heartland has supported in the past, the goal of "dissuading teachers from teaching science" is a total disconnect.  I have never had any skeptic in even the most private of conversations even hint at such a goal.  The skeptic view is that science education vis a vis climate and other environmental matters tends to be shallow, or one-sided, or politicized -- in other words broken in some way and needing repair.  In this way, most every prominent skeptic that works even a bit in the science/data end of things believes him or herself to be supporting, helping, and fixing science.  In fact, many skeptics believe that the continued positive reception of catastrophic global warming theory is a function of the general scientific illiteracy of Americans and points to a need for more and better science education (see here for an overview of the climate debate that does not once use the ad hominem words "myth", "scam" or "lie").

The only people who believe skeptics are anti-science per se, and therefore might believe skeptics would scheme to dissuade teachers from teaching science, are the more political alarmists (a good example was posted today right here at Forbes, which you might want to contrast withthis).  For years, I presume partially in an effort to avoid debate, certain alarmists have taken the ad hominem position that skeptics are anti-science.  And many probably well-meaning alarmists believe this about skeptics (since they may have not actually met any skeptics to know differently).  The person who wrote this fake memo almost had to be an alarmist, and probably was of the middling, more junior sort, the type of person who does not craft the talking points but is a recipient of them and true believer.

At the end I make a sort of bet

 If the strategy memo turns out to be fake as I believe it to be, I am starting the countdown now for the Dan-Rather-esque "fake but accurate" defense of the memo -- ie, "Well, sure, the actual document was faked but we all know it represents what these deniers are really thinking."  This has become a mainstay of post-modern debate, where facts matter less than having the politically correct position.

But in the first update I note the winner may already be delcared

Is Revkin himself seeking to win my fake-but-accurate race?   When presented with the fact that he may have published a fake memo, Revkin wrote:

looking back, it could well be something that was created as a way to assemble the core points in the batch of related docs.

It sounds like he is saying that while the memo is faked, it may have been someones attempt to summarize real Heartland documents.  Fake but accurate!  By the way, I don't think he has any basis for this supposition, as no other documents have come to light with stuff like "we need to stop teachers from teaching science."

My new column at Forbes is a post I have been thinking about and working on for quite a while, trying to refine over time a simple explanation of what is and is not understood in climate science.  This is how it begins, but I hope you will read it all

Likely you have heard the sound bite that “97% of climate scientists” accept the global warming “consensus”.  Which is what gives global warming advocates the confidence to call climate skeptics “deniers,” hoping to evoke a parallel with “Holocaust Deniers,” a case where most of us would agree that a small group are denying a well-accepted reality.  So why do these “deniers” stand athwart of the 97%?  Is it just politics?  Oil money? Perversity? Ignorance?

We are going to cover a lot of ground, but let me start with a hint.

In the early 1980′s I saw Ayn Rand speak at Northeastern University.  In the Q&A period afterwards, a woman asked Ms. Rand, “Why don’t you believe in housewives?”  And Ms. Rand responded, “I did not know housewives were a matter of belief.”  In this snarky way, Ms. Rand was telling the questioner that she had not been given a valid proposition to which she could agree or disagree.  What the questioner likely should have asked was, “Do you believe that being a housewife is a morally valid pursuit for a woman.”  That would have been an interesting question (and one that Rand wrote about a number of times).

In a similar way, we need to ask ourselves what actual proposition do the 97% of climate scientists agree with.  And, we need to understand what it is, exactly,  that the deniers are denying.   (I personally have fun echoing Ms. Rand’s answer every time someone calls me a climate denier — is the climate really a matter of belief?)

It turns out that the propositions that are “settled” and the propositions to which some like me are skeptical are NOT the same propositions.  Understanding that mismatch will help explain a lot of the climate debate.

I propose a similar law for all climate scientists when they are presenting their computer model forecasts.  Actual legislation once proposed in New Mexico:

When a psychologist or psychiatrist testifies during a defendant’s competency hearing, the psychologist or psychiatrist shall wear a cone-shaped hat that is not less than two feet tall. The surface of the hat shall be imprinted with stars and lightning bolts. Additionally, a psychologist or psychiatrist shall be required to don a white beard that is not less than 18 inches in length, and shall punctuate crucial elements of his testimony by stabbing the air with a wand. Whenever a psychologist or psychiatrist provides expert testimony regarding a defendant’s competency, the bailiff shall contemporaneously dim the courtroom lights and administer two strikes to a Chinese gong…

In the case of New Mexico, this was meant as satire and eventually was removed from the final bill, but I think it would be a great adjunct for climate forecasts, better than a surgeon general's warning.

It is December, 2005.  The Gulf Coast had just been pounded, in succession, by Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.  Everyone was talking about how global warming seemed to be intensifying hurricanes.  In a speech just after Katrina, Al Gore said

 When the corpses of American citizens are floating in toxic floodwaters five days after a hurricane strikes, it is time not only to respond directly to the victims of the catastrophe but to hold the processes of our nation accountable, and the leaders of our nation accountable, for the failures that have taken place....

There are scientific warnings now of another onrushing catastrophe. We were warned of an imminent attack by Al Qaeda; we didn't respond. We were warned the levees would break in New Orleans; we didn't respond. Now, the scientific community is warning us that the average hurricane will continue to get stronger because of global warming. A scientist at MIT has published a study well before this tragedy showing that since the 1970s, hurricanes in both the Atlantic and the Pacific have increased in duration, and in intensity, by about 50 percent....

Two thousand scientists, in 100 countries, engaged in the most elaborate, well-organized scientific collaboration in the history of humankind, have produced long-since a consensus that we will face a string of terrible catastrophes unless we act to prepare ourselves and deal with the underlying causes of global warming....

At about the same time, the IPCC was in the process of preparing its fourth report, later released in 2007.  It said, in part:

Several peer-reviewed studies show a clear global trend toward increased intensity of the strongest hurricanes over the past two or three decades. The strongest trends are in the North Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean. According to the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR4), it is “more likely than not” (better than even odds) that there is a human contribution to the observed trend of hurricane intensification since the 1970s. In the future, “it is likely [better than 2 to 1 odds] that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of tropical [sea surface temperatures].”

So what happened?  Since Wilma in 2005, we have gone 6 full years without a category 3+ hurricane making landfall in the US, the longest span since 1900 without such an event.  And the clock is still counting.  When alarmists of all stripes were breathlessly predicting hurricane after hurricane in late 2005, the reality is that we wouldn't see another in the US for  over six years.

Of course, US landfall is in fact a terrible indicator of hurricane activity.  Its relevant to us, but it is a pretty random metric.  I said this when there were a lot of landfalls and I say it again since there have been so few.

A better metric is accumulated cyclonic energy, a sort of time integral of all large cyclonic storms worldwide.  Here is the most recent ACE figures:

As it turns out, the total strength of hurricane and hurricane-like storms has been falling almost since the exact day of Al Gore's speech in 2005 (another Gore effect!)  In fact, of late, it has hit numbers close to all-time lows.

Of course this chart will go back up some day, and then back down, and then up ... because hurricane activity has always been cyclical over decadal time scales.

The media loves to trumpet end-of-the-world predictions from folks like Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich, but they never go back five years later and back-check their predictions.  And despite their horrendous record for accuracy, the media eagerly publishes the next one.  Here is a proposed editorial rule for the MSM -- no breathless publication of anyone's next prediction without first revisiting the last one.

It is possible for the theory that the climate has a high sensitivity to CO2 (ie that a doubling of CO2 concentrations will lead to global temperature increases of 2.5C or higher) to be correct while still having ten years of flat to declining surface temperatures.  That is because Earth's great surface heat reservoir is the oceans, not the atmosphere, and so the extra heat from the greenhouse effect could be going into the oceans rather than into near-surface air.

However, it is NOT possible, as least as we (and by "we" I mean everyone, skeptics and alarmists alike) understand the climate, for CO2 to be holding a lot of extra heat and it not show up either in surface temperatures or ocean heat content.  The greenhouse effect does not turn off -- its effects may be masked in the chaotic weather systems, perhaps for years, but if the climate sensitivity to CO2 is really as high as the IPCC says, there has to be new heat going somewhere.

That is why a number of folks, including Roger Pielke, have argued for years that the best way to monitor whether we are truly seeing an additional forcing or heat input to the climate is to look at ocean heat content.  Understand, changes in ocean heat content would not tell us where the heat is coming from (e.g. anthropogenic CO2 vs. solar activity).  But it is pretty much impossible for us to imagine a new heat input to the Earth's surface, like greenhouse gas forcing from anthropogenic CO2, without observing its effect in ocean heat content.

I will turn over the story to Jo Nova, who has a good post on the new tools we have to measure ocean heat content since 2003.  In short, though, we have seen no rise in measured ocean heat content since we started measuring with technology dedicated to the task.  This means, if those who believe the climate has a high sensitivity to CO2 are right, something like 50,000 quintillion joules of energy have gone missing since 2003.  This is the "missing heat", and though climate scientists sometimes discuss it in private, they almost never do so in public.  Ocean heat is the dinosaur bone fossil that the creationists simply don't want to acknowledge.

Read the whole thing.  It is very simple and well-written and written.

PS- note in the chart above, the y-axis is mis-labelled a bit, it is not absolute heat content but changes in heat content from some base period.  Scientists call this the "anomaly."  This is typical of many climate charts.

I feel the need to reproduce this email in its entirety.  Here is Phil Jones actively hoping the world will warm (an outcome he has publicly stated would be catastrophic).  The tribalism has gotten so intense that it is more important for his alarmist tribe to count coup on the skeptics than to hope for a good outcome for the Earth.

>From: Phil Jones [mailto:p.jones@uea.ac.uk]
>Sent: 05 January 2009 16:18
>To: Johns, Tim; Folland, Chris
>Cc: Smith, Doug; Johns, Tim
>Subject: Re: FW: Temperatures in 2009
>
>
>   Tim, Chris,
>     I hope you're not right about the lack of warming lasting
>   till about 2020. I'd rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office
>   press release with Doug's paper that said something like -
>   half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on
> record, 1998!
>     Still a way to go before 2014.
>
>     I seem to be getting an email a week from skeptics saying
>   where's the warming gone. I know the warming is on the decadal
>   scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away.
>
>     Chris - I presume the Met Office
> continually monitor the weather forecasts.
>    Maybe because I'm in my 50s, but the language used in the forecasts seems
>    a bit over the top re the cold. Where I've been for the last 20
> days (in Norfolk)
>    it doesn't seem to have been as cold as the forecasts.
>
>     I've just submitted a paper on the UHI for London - it is 1.6 deg
> C for the LWC.
>   It comes out to 2.6 deg C for night-time minimums. The BBC forecasts has
>   the countryside 5-6 deg C cooler than city centres on recent nights.
> The paper
>   shows the UHI hasn't got any worse since 1901 (based on St James Park
>   and Rothamsted).
>
>   Cheers
>   Phil

Is this better or worse than rooting for a bad economy to get your favorite politicians elected?  Anthony Watt has more in this same tone, showing how climate scientists were working to shift messages and invent new science to protect the warming hypothesis.

The last part about the UHI (urban heat island) study is interesting.  I don't remember this study.  But it is interesting that he accepts a UHI of as high as 1.6C (my son and I found evening UHI in Phoenix around 4-6C, about in line with his London results).    It looks like he is trying to say that UHI should not matter to temperature measurement, since it has not changed in London since 1900  (a bias in temperature measurement that does not change does not affect the temperature anomaly, which is what tends to be important).  But the point is that many other temperature stations in the Hadley CRUT data base are in cities that are now large today but were much smaller than London in 1900 (Tucson is a great example).  In these cases, there is a changing measurement bias that can affect the anomaly, so I am not sure what Jones was trying to get at.

I normally object to the ways in which global warming alarmists portray skeptics.  But I will accept this from Phil Jones

They [skeptics] mostly look at observation papers and ignore modelling ones, as they believe by default models are wrong!

Models are nothing more than scientific hypotheses programmed into computer code.  As such, I must admit to finding papers that merely model various hypotheses (generally in a very nontransparent and non-replicable sort of way) to be the least interesting of all possible papers.   It is far more interesting to see someone lay out their hypotheses and attempt to justify them with observational data.  In climate, the prevalence of modelling tends actually obscure this discussion, as we don't always see all the relevant hypotheses that form the foundation of a model, and even when we do, we usually don't see the details of its implementation  (which can be as important to the results as, say, the exact wording of a poll question).

So, yes, if Dr. Jones wishes to defines the sides in this debate as skeptics whose science is driven by observational data and alarmists whose science is driven by computer models no one has seen or replicated, I will accept those definitions.

In the Climategate 2.0 emails, Michael Mann confirms what we already knew - there is absolutely no tolerance for dissent, even the scientifically thoughtful sort, among climate alarmists.  Writing about their mother-site, RealClimate, Mann says

 I suspect you've both seen the latest attack against [Keith Briffa's] Yamal work by McIntyre.    Gavin and I (having consulted also w/ Malcolm) are wondering what to make of this, and what sort of response---if any---is necessary and appropriate. So far, we've simply deleted  all of the attempts by McIntyre and his minions to draw attention to this at RealClimate.

Note that the knee-jerk, default action is to purge, hide, and delete criticism, even before it is understood.  They make absolutely no attempt to understand the argument, reading it just enough to know that it is critical and therefore must be deleted.  The second action is to find someone to refute it, again even before the critique is understood.  It is critical of us so it must be wrong.  QED.

Here is one of the original McIntyre posts where he outlines the problem he found in Briff's work.  He argues that the findings in Briffa are not very robust, as substitution of a larger sample of trees (this is a tree-ring temperature reconstruction study, like the hockey stick) from the same area for Briffa's apparently small, hand-picked sample have an astoundingly large effect on the study's findings (the red study line below, McIntyre's reconstruction in black).

Perhaps McIntyre was missing something (though over the 2 years since no one involved has suggested what that might be).  But the tone of the article is certainly scientific and thoughtful.   It has no resemblance to the unscientific polemic that alarmists often use as an excuse to excise skeptical comments from their web sites.

I am working on a summary post of the new batch of climategate emails, but this is perhaps my favorite.  It is written to Andy Revkin, nominally a reporter for the NY Times but revealed by the new emails to be pretty much the unpaid PR agent of Michael Mann and company.  Over and over, emails from Mann and his cohorts get Revkin to write the articles they want, drop quotes from skeptics from articles, and in general coordinate communications policy.

Anyway, one climate scientist writes Revkin this note

I think the notion of telling the public to prepare for both global warming and an ice age at the same [time] creates a real public relations problem for us.

Amazing that this actually had to be said.

Update:  Revkin is currently an opinion blogger but at the time of the emails he was supposed to be a news reporter at the NYT.

We lost track of a caribou herd, so since we can't find it, we will just tell the press it was destroyed by climate change.   (Happily the herd has been found, right where it always was, so we won't have to see caribou heads on our diet coke bottles).

I joke about this but it is really a serious statement about the quality of science and science journalism that there was really a big climate-related panic over the disappearing caribou a couple of years ago.   This is climate science in a nutshell - make a measurement error, assume the faulty data is real, and then without evidence blame the changing data on climate change.

(Update:  Yes, I actually spelled caribou herd "heard" in the original.  I am a big believer there is no such thing as a single metric for intelligence, but that there are multiple intelligences of various sorts.    We can argue about the other kinds, but I clearly did not get much of the spelling and proof-reading sort.

I often raise the issue of "What is Normal" when discussing climate.  The media frequently declares certain weather events as so "abnormal" that they must be due to man-made factors.  A great example is the current Texas drought, which is somehow unprecedented and thus caused by CO2 despite the fact that the great dust bowl drought of the 1930's was many times larger in area and years in duration.

The EPA has a new slideshow purporting to aggregate these "abnormalities."  While I could spend all year going through each slide, I want to focus on just one.

Now we all know that the EPA is just full of sciency goodness and so everything they say is based on science and not, say, some political agenda.  And the statement and the pictures above are absolutely correct, as far as they go.  But they are missing a teeny tiny bit of context.  Here is a longer history of that same glacier (thanks to the Real Science blog for the pointer, this is a much better map than the one I have used in the past).

The 1948 position is way up at the top.  You can see that the melting since 1966, which according to the EPA is an "acceleration," is trivial compared to the melting since 1760.  Basically, this glacier has been retreating since at least the end of the little ice age.

Those who want to attribute the recent retreat to CO2 have to explain what drove the glacier to retreat all that way from 1760 to 1960, and why that factor stopped in 1960 at exactly the time Co2 supposedly took over.

By the way, this same exact story can be seen in glaciers around the world.  Glaciers began retreating at the end of the little ice age, and if anything that pace of retreat has slowed somewhat over the last few decades.