The Hadley CRU emails

The major topic of a lot of blogs is obviously the release of the hacked/leaked emails from the Hadley CRU.

This summation seems accurate to me:

• I have seen the files—not all of them, there are too many—and my early take doesn’t change the view I have already formed: climate models have no skill beyond about one year. The models predict warming, but the warming isn’t there, therefore the models are wrong. Why they are wrong is an interesting question, and worth investigating. Many of the emails responsibly take this tack. And they should.

• I have not seen open acknowledgment that the premise that forms the models is false. That is, that it is possible, even with the observed small increase in atmospheric CO₂, that that gas has at best a marginal effect. As far as I can tell by my early reading, all the folks in those emails truly believe their models (it’s the observations they don’t love).

• There is no conspiracy, as far as I can tell. A conspiracy would obtain if the participants knew their stated beliefs were false, yet the still espoused them with the goal of winning either money, or power, or control, or whatever. My early, and admittedly incomplete, judgment is that all of these people really are convinced that catastrophic warming is on the way and that it will be caused by mankind. Further, they believe it fervently.

Until the basic premise is questioned, alarmist climate change will persist as an ecomyth.

What these emails do is add credence to the claims that belief in global warming is just that: a belief. Moreover, it is a widely held belief amongst many committed scientists. But belief, even that of qualified scientists, is not science: it is ideology. The models of climate are not real, they are virtual. The real climate is the observations and empirical data, and those do not seemingly want to play nice with the warmist beliefs despite their many and varied attempts to have the data conform to their wishes. These emails reveal the extent to which the Team sought to enforce conformity of belief, a consensus on science that by its very definitions is predicated on skepticism and not conformity.

Perhaps this revelation will be enough for the questioning of AGW as an axiomatic construct to commence, which is about all climate realists and skeptics have been seeking.

biggest scandal of the day

So here is a difficult one: which of the following represents the biggest scandal?

• the complete lack of profile and media attention paid to the UN summit on food security?
  
• the revelation that an extensive and highly embarrassing set of files and emails from the Hadley climate center has been hacked, leaked and publicly disclosed? or
• that cheating in sport is acceptable if the "right" team ends up winning and qualifying for the planet's biggest sports event, the world cup of soccer?

Wow! Tough call.

Political indifference. Corruption. Arrogance. Absence of integrity.

Everywhere you go -- politics, science, sports -- the same ethics appear to be manifest.

Still, where's the harm? Its only the poor, the free thinkers and the Irish that have suffered. And what's the point of principles anyways?

Consensus on climate change

The problem with politicizing science is the inevitability that the science will always be subservient to the politics.

The nail in the coffin of climate alarmists are polls such as this one from the UK.

The one trait all successful politicians share is the ability to accurately interpret polling data. In every jurisdiction, public opinion polls have turned and AGW has officially lost political traction.

The conference in Copenhagen will be more of a wake than a celebration and the only real question that remains is what issue will emerge as the newly framed disaster for widespread alarm, dogma and boondoggling to replace the politically defunct AGW.

Environmentalism suffers from the malaise of moral certitude. Consequently, political framing of environmental issues tends to be partisan and, in the case of AGW, has given rise to climate McCarthyism.

Here is good discussion on the continuing way environmental issues will be framed for political discussion:

• The green movement isn’t really a movement at all. At best, it is a phenomenon of individuals whose only thing in common is their sense of disconnect and disorientation. At worst, it is a self-serving elitist club.

Even more alarming for environmentalists and scientists alike is the realization that the politicization of climate may completely backfire:

• Indeed, science often has the quality of a quasi-religious dogma these days, especially in the arena of climate-change alarmism.
• (which)...actually serves to undermine the pre-eminent authority of science today.
• (reflecting)...the erosion of the line between science and moralising

Politics involves the manipulation of emotions for control and the expression of power over people. When science gets into bed with politics, it too becomes infused with manipulation and emotion, bias and moral certitude. At this point, science becomes just another ideological construct, subject to the same prevarications and predilections as other ideologies. In short, it becomes more used than useful.

The Double Standard About Bias in Journalism

One of my favourite TV correspondents is John Stossel. I find his reporting is consistently forthright, provocative, challenging to axiomatic ideas and both well presented and well researched. In short, what good journalism ought to be.

Stossel has recently changed networks, switching from the politically accepted ABC to the unfashionable (read right of center) Fox. Here is his take on the situation. (Also see here).

Interesting. A journalist is upfront and candid about his politics and is vilified (of course, his are the wrong politics). On the contrary, an explicit declaration of ideology removes bias and clearly identifies the author's advocacy of that ideological perspective: bias is the manipulation of data or facts to align with an ideological perspective that remains implicit and surreptitious.

Keep these constructs in mind, especially when reading blogs and especially in the mainstream media's reporting of environmental issues. Ask yourself:

• what is explicitly ideological and therefore advocacy?
• and what is assumptive in its perspective, implicit in its tacit acceptance of axiomatic ideas and biased in its presentation of politically correct dogma?

Now, no ideology is immune to corruption or abuse. But Stossel is right when he says that only one perspective is labeled as biased and objectionable. Just ask the guys over at Superfreakonomics.

Besides, the UK is only one step away from making environmentalism the official state religion and everywhere else, it is the de facto alternative to the evils of capitalism: things like freedom, prosperity, wealth, a free press....thank goodness for George Orwell. Without him, we'd have to conjure up a new term for doublespeak (spin?) to assist people in differentiating advocacy from bias. Of course, Penn and Teller have a more succinct phrase.

Climatism

 

Terrance Corcoran has another excellent article today discussing the emergence of "climatism" and the imposition of a stasist green state.  He notes that:

• Formal state corporatism is unmarketable as a political model, but green industrial statism looks like a winner.

The hype leading up to the Copenhagen debacle is beginning to ramp up.  The trouble for warmists is that not only have they lost the general public's attention, they now have lost most politician's.  Climatism signals the end of AGW as a real concern: it has done its job and fixed climate into the political lexicon as a dominant motive for government intervention, regulation and sibsidy.  The Copenhagen conference will say very little new nor incisive about actual climate mitigation or adaptation.  Rather, it will lay the justification for social engineering in economic policy, energy and resource management, all on the axiomatic imperative of a change in climate that is neither unprecedented nor alarming. 

 

AGW is best thought of as a great global swindle based on inconvienient truths wherein real climate data have failed their climate audit.  This leads to climate resistance by climate realists, who demand debate about junk science that is not evil, just wrong and fails to address the question, watts up with that?

 

green power is not sustainable

One of the basic requirements of sustainability is that economics be integrated with environmental and social concerns.  Ignoring basic economics of reality in the name of those concerns, both perceived and real, is not sustainable.

 

But in socialist imposition of government policy, all governing rules of common sense are ignored:

 

• Under the new Ontario electric power and green energy plans, personally directed by the minister, everybody is protected and subsidized except consumers.
• Billed as a North American first, the new Ontario green energy plan involves imposing hidden taxes on electricity consumers to fund an industrial strategy based on government directives, subsidies and trade protectionism — all for the benefit of a select collection of rent-seeking corporate interests.

no longer just broken, the hockey stick is finally dead

I ended my last post by saying that data do not change your perspective, your perspective changes your data: a by-line for this blog. Some see the wisdom of this contention, others query it, or just think it odd, disagree and reject it.

The latest support for the insight of the contention is provided by the ongoing sadness of the hockey stick fraud that was further evidenced with the revelations of this week. They are outlined by Anthony here, with many accompanying links and enough comments and explanations that those with and without any background can fully appreciate the import of the latest audit findings. (Direct links to Steve's work are here and here).

In short, not only was the infamous hockey stick for global warming produced with faulty methods and suspect data, it is now clear that the data utilized then and subsequently were selectively employed to bias (falsify?) the results. This was done by a small coterie of experts consistent with the prevailing ideology and justification that AGW had to be sold as the public policy crisis of the present era.

These revelations follow hard on the embarrassing admission that data critical to the AGW myth are just not being withheld from scrutiny, they are in fact simply missing: maybe the dog ate them?

Will anyone from the scientific climate community actually step up and sanction the climate alarmists who sought to distort and deceive? It is not the character of academics to do their laundry in public but one has to hope that some strong repercussions at least in the court of public opinion are finally forthcoming to the "Team" for their shameless self-promotion at the expense of scientific integrity.

Follow up:

here is an excellent summation of the whole mess by Ross McKitrick, which concludes

• The IPCC review process, of which I was a member last time, is nothing at all like what the public has been told: Conflicts of interest are endemic, critical evidence is systematically ignored and there are no effective checks and balances against bias or distortion.

• I get exasperated with fellow academics, and others who ought to know better, who pile on to the supposed global warming consensus without bothering to investigate any of the glaring scientific discrepancies and procedural flaws.

And here is another good summation from Jennifer's blog.

latest climate data

Many people want to disregard the politics surrounding climate change and AGW. Despite comments about ideology and politicization of science, there are those who still want the whole mess to be just reduced to the facts: what do the data indicate?

Here is a site that presents the data, in historical context, in as neutral, objective a fashion as I have seen.

A recent example is this pdf which contains graphs of temperature, temperature change and CO2 from each of the four sources of temperature data, such as this one:

The author offers these comments:

• Most climate models assume the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide CO2 to influence significantly upon global temperature. Thus, it is relevant to compare the different global temperature records with measurements of atmospheric CO2, as shown in the diagrams above. Any comparison, however, should not be made on a monthly or annual basis, but for a longer time period, as other effects (oceanographic, clouds, etc.) may well override the potential influence of CO2 on short time scales such as just a few years.
• It is of cause equally inappropriate to present new meteorological record values, whether daily, monthly or annual, as support for the hypothesis ascribing high importance of atmospheric CO2 for global temperatures. Any such short-period meteorological record value may well be the result of other phenomena than atmospheric CO2.
• What exactly defines the critical length of a relevant time period to consider for evaluating the alleged high importance of CO2 remains elusive, and is still a topic for debate. The critical period length must, however, be inversely proportional to the importance of CO2 on the global temperature, including feedback effects, such as assumed by most climate models.
• After about 10 years of global temperature increase following global cooling 1940-1978, IPCC was established in 1988. Presumably, several scientists interested in climate then felt intuitively that their empirical and theoretical understanding of climate dynamics was sufficient to conclude about the importance of CO2 for global temperature. However, for obtaining public and political support for the CO2-hypothesis the 10 year warming period leading up to 1988 in all likelihood was important. Had the global temperature instead been decreasing, public support for the hypothesis would have been difficult to obtain. Adopting this approach as to critical time length, the varying relation (positive or negative) between global temperature and atmospheric CO2 has been indicated in the lower panels of the three diagrams above.

So the data show 40 years of cooling, followed by a 20 year period of temperature increase, followed by the present period of another 10 years of cooling.

In the midst of the warming phase the dogma for AGW was established and has been developed as the central platform for ideological environmentalism since then.

Science gives us measurement. Meaning is provided by us.

And what meaning is applied to those measurements varies with ideology, politics, values and agendas of those framing the public policy issues that arise from the meaning they apply to those data. The data may be neutral: the meaning they are given is never neutral nor free of ideology.

Data do not change your perspective. Your perspective changes your data.

Growth first, climate later

So the major topic of the day is Obama's speech to the UN on climate (well, other than the dust storm that shut down Sydney -- no fear, someone somewhere will manage to link the two, causally: meanwhile see this).

Here is a particularly pithy but accurate take on events:

• U.S. President Barack Obama more or less shuffled climate control policy off into the great dreamscape of unattainable plans and long range objectives.
• Like equality for all and peace in our time, the world will have to wait for sweeping and binding climate policy.
• On the urgency of climate policy, Mr. Obama used language with enough drag coefficient to stop an ocean liner, even one with the momentum and power of climate change.

Other comments of interest include this and this.

So how soon before the careerist advocates of ecomyths abandon the AGW meme and re-surface with another vehicle for their dogma, abandoning climate science to the scientific obscurity it had prior to its Warhol moment of fame?

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Tomorrow marks first showing at my local Fine Arts cinema of the re-release of the classic Monty Python film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.   Python humour is deeply ingrained within the cohort that grew up watching all of the original episodes on English TV and re-enacting them all the following morning.  To this day, members of that generation can recall with great accuracy their favourite skits: the cheese shop, the dead parrot, the upper-class twit race, the Bishop and nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!  We may falter at Shakespeare, our Latin and Greek is passed recall, but Python sketches, we have them!

 

What prompted this reminiscence, was the exchange over at the Roger Pielke Jr. site concerning the pathologies in climate science, the subsequent illustration of tribalism in climate politics and the continued confirmation that nobody expects the Spanish inquisition when they posit reasonable propositions only to be scorned.

 

Sadly, as Climate Audit continues to document, all climate science is not equal, nor do people practice what they preach.

 

Over at Climate Resistance, they discuss the status of climate porn and make this observation:

 

• ....climate change isn't something difficult for governments to cope with. It is actually convenient.
• The political establishment's absorption of environmentalism allows it to substantially lower the standard by which it is measured, and gives authoritarianism a legitimising basis.
• The looming, inevitable environmental crisis instructs the public to lower their expectations accordingly. It means that rather than finding a way through problems such as energy supply, water and travel infrastructure, and of course, raising expectations, politicians can turn the normal business of politics around, and redefine the problem as one of individual morality.
• The statement that the public must use less electricity, must travel less, and must consume fewer resources is a statement that the public must expect less of politicians and politics, and behave themselves.
• The failure of the establishment's collective imagination is what drives 'climate change ethics'.
• The search for international agreements and legal frameworks to 'combat climate change' is a way of externalising what cannot legitimately be done domestically. Once in place, politicians can reasonably argue that punitive climate laws are a matter of international obligation; we are all bound by them, and cannot do anything about them. It defers politics and political accountibility to the strange, undemocratic, inaccessible space that exists between states.

It was Harold Wilson's England that gave rise to Monty Python's particular brand of satire.  Hopefully the current state of political ineptness will serve as similar fodder for new comedy.  Until then, there is this and, of course, the renewed quest for the Holy Grail.