Shub Niggurath Climate

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Let us get this:

1) A certain number of climate scientists in Australia receive emails. These are characterized as ‘death threats.’ The alleged threats are publicized worldwide in Nature and the Guardian

2) Much after the news is disseminated and public sympathy garnered, the threatening emails are released under FOI to the blog owner of Australian Climate Madness

3) The emails contain no threats. Understandably enough, those at the centre of the event, still, do not want to be seen condoning any form of abuse. Discussion is stultified by reaffirmations of the virtues of civility.

… but …,

4) There do not seem to be any death threats.

Right now, cries of “A-Ha!” by climate skeptics derive mainly from the impact of revelation of facts previously  hidden from public view.  But there is one group who knew these facts all along  -  the climate scientists who originally received these emails.

Even as the spectre of death threats was raised and cynically exploited – perhaps by the university, and by Nature and Guardian, the scientists kept mum. As skeptics said: “the debate may be heated up, but whatever the case, death threats are not acceptable”, the scientists knew there were no threats of the sort, but yet kept their silence. They simply let faceless and anonymous members of the public – i.e., skeptics, be tarred.

What does one trust such scientists to tell us, as the media informs us about ‘threats’ to the climate?

I want to see episodes where climate scientists renounce immediate worldly benefits of media prominence and moral one-upmanship, and shut down habitual alarmists who slyly recruit scientists’ names for their pet political causes and buy their silence with a hoary pretense that what’s good for alarmism is good for science.

Believe me, the skeptics are waiting.

Imagine you are new to town. As you drive to the gas station, you are told that gas prices are 20 dollars a gallon.

When you hear this first, you raise your eyebrows. But you are new to the place, and you want to fit in, so you just cough it up. You don’t want to be the out-of-town jerk arguing with the counter lady.

You get used to the new price. “Hmmm, maybe that’s how they do it here.’ You immerse in your new life. The gas prices pinch your wallet though. Soon enough you are not taking the car frequently. You wake up early to take the bus to work thrice a week. You try to carpool and give up. You take the train back and walk two miles home. You even think it is healthy – all the walking.

Four months pass. You take a business trip. On the way to the motel, it catches your eye. The gas price is S4 a gallon. The cab ride gives you time to think. “Wait a minute! What is going on here”?

You head to the gas station when you get back. You’ve lived there enough to ask people questions.

“Hey Joe, what’s up with the gas prices?”

“What about them?”- Joe’s looking at you plainly.

Why are they so high? Everyone else’s at S4 a gallon. How did it get to be 20 here?” A small pause.

Suddenly ‘Joe the gas station guy’ is explaining:” You see, it was me. I raised the gas prices to twenty dollars. I am studying to be an economist. I figured I’d control people behavior by raising gas prices. They would drive less and it would save the climate. So I told my uncle who is a councilor here.”

They put a $15 carbon tax.”

“What!?”

“Yeah, what else? If you drive around too much, you’ll damage the climate and your kids will pay the price. This way we’re splitting the costs between you and them. It is a total and complete solution. You’ll feel the pain caused by your actions. I saw you huffing and puffing up the hill on your way home the other day. We want the maximum number of people to be happy.”

“Plus when your wife has pre-eclampsia, you can use the car. We want people to be able to use the best technology for their emergencies.Gives them maximum value for money.”

“What are you guys doing with all the money!?

“I don’t know. I was for giving it to a windmill charity. My uncle wants to buy a supercomputer for climate modeling. Joe is miffed: “”What’re you looking at me like that for? If you don’t understand stuff this simple, you can go boil your head.”

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There are several levels to this. What did Heartland do? Was it a nice thing, or the right thing to do?

The second level is: Should Heartland judge and weigh their own actions by the moral standards of members of a limited circle who participate in online debate about climate change?

The first question, I feel, is meaningless.

Let me explain. When the 10:10 No Pressure video was made, were you shocked? When I watched it, I felt the momentary twinge but it passed away. I was then left with no particular outrage towards those who made the video, because, I didn’t care for the people who made it, and a certain immunity to being shocked by gratuitous violence has been acquired. The greens can make the most outrageous video possible – they are not going to reach me. I know their game.

Moral conundrums are more subtle in the modern world. Everyone attempts to find simplicity but knows it doesn’t exist. Simplistic stuff, consequently, doesn’t move us. If an act of violence triggers a mass eruption of emotion, it is only when unresolved contradictions have built up under the surface for a long period.

The second question is easier.

Look at the list of people, by no means complete, who criticized the Heartland Institute for its behaviour:

1. Andy Revkin
2. Keith Kloor
3. Leo Hickman
4. Andrew Sullivan
5. Jim Newell
6. Trey Pollard (Sierra Club)
7. Joe Romm
8. Charles Pierce
9. Michael Mann
10. Ken Caldeira
11. Lucia Graves (Huffington Post)
12. Kate Sheppard (Mother Jones)
13. Brendan DeMelle
14. Richard Littlemore

Have any one of these ever engaged with the Heartland Institute ever in the past? For them, the Heartland Institute did not exist – just in the vein that organizations who have a contrary opinion on global warming do not exist.

Why should their standards become the scale against which Heartland is held?

This is not to encourage the balkanization of public propriety. Heartland should weigh itself against standards of its own. Behaving properly so as to not give others a ‘stick to beat you with‘, especially when the ‘others’, consist of unprincipled opportunists however, ought not to be reason good enough.

It pays to remember, that, Heartland is a small organization with a big burden. When Peter Gleick perpetrated his fraud on its members and hired some very powerful lawyers money can buy, it must have been an enervating moment. When the force of being right, in full public glare, cannot fetch you a modicum of justice what else can? Heartland did everything they can, but they cannot do the one thing that needs to be done: hire some lawyers of their own and go after Gleick. They cannot obtain personal justice. There is no closure. They are not big enough.

The climate story seems to run the same way for McIntyre. For years a big player “by the rules” McIntyre found one day that at the end of so many blog posts, papers, articles, books, inquiries, investigations, Congressional hearings and court rulings, Mann, to be touring the world signing book copies. With no active benefaction to science Mann now wears all criticism that ever came his way, and the troubles his actions brought him, as feathers in his cap.

In America, it pays to be on the side of the climate consensus.

Heartland therefore, is out of ordinary, everyday options. Its profile is higher. The path left is to realize, that the burden it carries on its shoulders – of failure, call it that if you will – is a gift it possesses. There is no need for Heartland to open the eyes of the public through its billboards. The climate issue is dead in the water for them. Even when it came before them, about ten years ago now, virginal and untarnished, climate change had the faintest whiff of a scam.

On the other hand, it is the consensus that needs billboards, snuff videos and Arctic animal pictures. It is they who need to spread their message to school children and television viewers. It is they who forget, that “… men are wiser than they know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits without after-thought, if said in conversation, would probably be questioned in silence.” Heartland simply ought to know. Everywhere it goes, the doctrine of global warming is questioned in silence. Talk about criminals believing in global warming breaks that fatal silence. Ironically, Heartland’s moral capital has catapulted it to an orbit its political opponents imagine that they inhabit. That is why they suddenly see it fit, to impose their unsolicited demands on Heartland.

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A lot of people like climate change, mainly because it presents them with a platform for doing things they like to do. Of course, they will tell you they have come to do it because it needs to be done. So you see often – experts seriously discussing ins-and-outs of a ‘policy’ even as you blink about the need for the whole thing. Tim Worstall, provides us with an example. Tim likes the idea of a carbon tax thinks a ‘carbon’ tax  just needs to be done. Apparently he’s been yammering away about it for years.

We can ask him the ‘blink’ question. Why, do we need this ‘tax’? The answers pour forth – for those who seek:

1)

Now, as you all know, I’m generally on board with the idea that climate change is a) happening and b) something we ought to do something about.

2)

As you all know, I’m generally on side over this climate change thing. It’s happening, we’re causing it and something must be done.

3)

Start from where the Government is: yes, climate change is a problem, something we should do something about.

4)

Let us assume a number of things: that climate change is happening, that it’s a problem, that it’s human activity causing it and that we really do need to do something about it.

Ok, Tim’s really convinced ‘something needs to be done’. But why? These are not really an answer to our question, are they? One digs deeper.

1)

I take the IPCC projections to be pretty much what they say they are, the current state of the scientific art

2)

When you start reading some of the scientists actually involved, William Connelly(sic), James Annan for example, you actually get told that while this is a problem, …

3)

I will still defer to the collected expertise of climatologists, which, for the moment, still supports the AGW hypothesis. (via quote)

4)

As is usual around here, we’ll start with the assumption that the IPCC is correct.

That’s it, really. I’ve looked quite hard – though I haven’t read Worstall’s book – there is absolutely nowhere that he examines why we need to put a tax on ‘carbon’. It is just layers of assumptions and belief in experts.

Please mind – Worstall actually gives very clever reasons to why a carbon tax would be a good thing, even if the climate thing were not true. But that would mean he’s using the climate as an excuse to push things he happens to like, wont it? There is the odd mumbling about solar power, and titanium dioxide, and fuel cells, and “billions “of people dying from climate change.  But why would you operate a battery-powered car when you have a tankful of gas? And why would one listen to Worstall when he is busy deferring to experts other than himself ?

Worstall even says:

I’m perfetly(sic) happy with the basic science of climate change.

What is this ‘basic science of climate change’ and why is Worstall ‘happy’ with it? And about that “we really need need to do something about it?” What the heck is that? And, because William Connolley said so?

How about this? Let us not do something just because we feel like ‘doing something.’ I wonder about economists and policymakers whose life’s work would go swirling down the drain – just like the tax money they advocate collecting. When the IPCC which forms the basis for what they do, crashes under the weight of such hopes and expectations, that is.

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So it begins

I was glancing at Skepticalscience a few days back , and the usual stuff was still there – the sentimentality, the droning, the navel-gazing, and of course, the bald-faced propaganda. I thought this bit in particular was striking:

However, the Climategate emails had very little to do with the IPCC reports.

There was just one commenter who questioned this claim. He received no response. That is how it is now –  they say whatever they want, whenever they want to, and in any way or form they choose to. No feedback mechanism seemingly operates.

Among consensus websites,  Realclimate is too weird (and growing irrelevant), Joe Romm is too goofy (and a failure to boot), DotEarth is dreamy and … there are hardly any other central venues of aggregation worthy of mention. Inadvertently, Skepticalscience has become the proxy voice of the climate consensus on the intertubes. Their brand of robotic straight-faced simplistic ‘myth’ narratives and officialese has to hold the fort for the global warming narrative.

Unfortunately though, this will kill any human interest in climate change, and climate science. Surely it speaks volumes about the climate movement that these guys are left holding the torch, so to speak

The censorship, snippery and comment butchery is still there as well, just as it was before. Witness:

Now apparently, Skepticalscience has a special feature – a secret forum. News comes via Tom Nelson and Australian Climate Madness of a leak exposing contents of the forum. Apparently a cabal of  secretive website members hang out, coordinating, planning, complaining and strategizing in the forums which is the beating heart of operations. What a bunch of whackjobs, one would think—as though the censorsing and shutting down of debate were not enough they have to go huddle in the back and bitch about you as well.

It is dispiriting to think all that secret activity goes only to produce the kind of stuff they do.

Update 1: John Cook has posted that a ”breach of privacy”  in the form of an “”external hack rather than from within Skeptical Science itself”  has affected his website.

Update 2: A SkepticalScience author/insider makes the statement: [...] “There’s a variety of information which is being collected. We are to the point where we have a short list of suspects based on the evidence that is collected.” [...]

In June last year a 45 minute film ‘Der Pakt mit dem Panda’ (‘The Pact with the Panda’) was broadcast on German TV to a reported audience of 900,000. Made by by journalist and documentary film-maker Wilfried Huismann, it examines the two-faced nature of the World Wildlife Fund (examined briefly in an earlier post here). The WWF in Germany initially prevented the film from being broadcast in its original form from the advertisements for the film. 

The producers subsequently removed three claims that were brought under dispute and the documentary was broadcast. A version with English narration called ‘The Silence of the Pandas’ was released and is available on Youtube.

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

At the peak of the claim and counter-claim thrown around over Amazongate Simon Lewis a forest researcher at the University of Leeds emerged briefly at its centre. Lewis’ defense of the actions of the IPCC helped the organization avoid confronting its use of advocacy and environmental pressure group material from the WWF. A little-examined fact at the time was that Lewis’ parent department was involved along with contributions from the University of East Anglia (UEA), the Royal Society, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation and other non-governmental organizations in a UN REDD+ pilot project in Tanzania. Called ‘Valuing the Arc’, it was designed to work out putting a ‘price on carbon’ to provide ”input to the policy process, … including PES mechanisms”. ‘PES’, is payment for ecosystem services, i.e., REDD. The most prominent NGO at the the centre of the project? WWF-Tanzania.

News has now emerged of a major embezzlement scandal involving the WWF in Tanzania. The sponsoring Norwegian government has stopped payment on both projects the NGO was involved. From the Tanzania office, six WWF employees have been sacked and a seventh has resigned. Reportedly two senior WWF figures have resigned as well. The UK DFID – a funder for the projects – has suspended payments it makes through WWF-UK, pending results of an audit of WWF books by private firm Ernst and Young. The DailyNews informs us that the DFID “eagerly awaits” the results of the audit.

Trouble erupted on the longer-running project of the two – called RUMAKI – that began in 2008. With funding coming in from WWF-Switzerland, the Norwegian goverment aid arm Norad, Barclays Bank, and the DFID via WWF-UK, the project was to  ”[help] civil society organisations build capacity”. Apparently money had been diverted in the guise of attending educational seminars, a seeming euphemism for activity that involves award of  travel allowances, hotel expenses, and other forms of personal expenses. A preliminary audit report suggests amounts of upto $1.3 million, already higher than the initially quoted $85,000 by the WWF. In its latest release, the WWF admits that four projects have been engulfed, with total allotted amounts of ‘ $US15.4 million’.

In December last year Norad’s own trade magazine Bistandsaktuelt reported on the form of greasing that runs Tanzanian aid-driven bureaucratic functioning. Hints of Norwegian embassay officials being informed of similar activities in WWF-Tanzania accompanied. Called ‘per diem’, the system takes on a form of daily allowances for sundry activities to be paid out, in cash or in kind, to people participating or conducting projects. It is reported that upto 70% of the budgets in Norwegian aid went to per diem payments in some of the programmes. Ironically such methods fell into place in poverty-stricken Tanzania in the 1970s driven by aid agencies themsevles, who used it to lure officials in engaging in charity-driven  activities.

The allegations come against the backdrop of a larger simmering controversy. In the chess game of Tanzanian conservation, counter-conservation and industrial growth, the Rufiji delta mangroves have been a hotspot. The WWF says it wants to preserve mangroves by persuading local farmers from cutting them down for rice cultivation; measurment of coastal ‘forest carbon stocks’ for REDD by photographic methods were planned in this location as well. Ironically, the government’s Forestry and Beekeeping Division (FBD) is engaged in the same area implementing a fortress-conservation approach, a method the WWF advocated years prior but now no longer allegedly supports. In October last year the FBD evicted thousands of locals from the forests, burning down crops and huts. The state points to ‘illegal rice cultivation’ as justifiction. The numbers are indeed astounding –  18,000 evicted. WWF projects suffered a setback as locals scarcely distinguish NGO from state — both appear only to prevent use of forest resources.

Into this mix, a timely paper published in the journal Global Environmental Change by Betsey Baymer-Farris and Thomas Bassett provided further substantiation. The authors discussed how conservation approaches, especially those billing themselves as ‘participatory’ and ‘community-based’ paradoxically enabled ‘fortress conservation’ under a REDD regime. The WWF, for its part blew a fuse. Stung by what it characterized as incorrect criticism, Neil Burgess, WWF activist and professor at Copenhagen University, and Stephen Makiri, head of WWF-Tanzania lashed out in an angry letter to the journal in early February. Burgess, in particular, appeared to be fuming: (emphasis mine)

In addition, as this paper and its numerous factual errors has personally damaged my reputation as a professional scientist and that of a number of colleagues working in Tanzania, several of us would welcome a face to face meeting for a discussion of this paper and the process that was used during its publication. This meeting should, amongst other things, address how the Journal plans to remedy the reputational damage that this article has caused WWF, its office in Tanzania, and several of its staff who have been working on projects in the Rufiji delta for many years and on the WWF REDD project for the past year.

As is standard in climate change, the WWF questioned the peer review and the publication-worthiness of the paper. In a move reminiscent of the Simon Lewis complaint to the PCC in UK, the WWF bundled a note filled with quoted passages from the paper disputing every claim it felt was wrong, and included alternate ‘reviews’ of its own of the already published paper.

Under pressure from the seminar per diem scandal, the same Stephen Makiri has now resigned. For reasons unknown, the head of WWF-Norway was replaced in March this year. The presence of intra-WWF political intrigue is inescapable —in just November last year, Prince Charles of the United Kingdom gave away awards to five ‘community members’ who lived in the ‘operational area of WWF-Tanzania’s award-winning RUMAKI Seascape programme’ (i.e., the Rufiji delta). At the same time on the other side, auditors in Norway were uncovering irregularities to the tune of $53 million in Tanzanian projects over the years. By the 15th, Norwegian scientists Tor A Benjaminsen, Ian Bryseson and Hanne Svarstad had penned a searing op-ed in Norway’s leading newspaper the Aftenposten. They laid the exacerbation of fortress conservation squarely at the feet of three players – the state, big NGOs and the aid donors themselves:

Several of the most productive fishing reefs [in the Rufiji delta] have been illegal to exploit the local population, and unreasonable restrictions are introduced for fishing in other areas. Tourist industry is thereby given an exclusive access to exploit the areas where wealthy tourists can spend their “tropical vacations” on the beaches and snorkeling on the coral reefs. Protests from fishermen have been turned down by armed force. Military has been set to withdraw and destroy nets and boats from the fishing families who have lived in a sustainable manner.

How has this serious situation happened, and why we find everywhere a glossy picture of nature conservation in Africa which is in stark contrast to the reality we observe? The trend is driven by an alliance of three teams in the lead.

In response, just as it did with the Himayalan glacier error and the Amazon error with the IPCC, the WWF simply sought to disown responsibility. It distanced itself from the actions of the Tanzanian FBD and denied connections with REDD, blaming the researchers for making ‘provocative’, ‘loaded’, and ‘unscientific’ statements. The approach to the Global Environmental Change journal was just as with the case of the Sunday Times article by Jonathan Leake – retraction and censorship (emphasis mine):

Of course this will not correct the reputational damage, nor the significant potential financial damage, that this factually inaccurate article has already caused, and continues to cause. In the meantime, while a suitable response is being prepared, we request that the article is removed from the online web site where it is currently located and the authors of the paper are A) informed of the problems in the science and facts of their paper; B) given an opportunity to correct their work based on the various comments provided here.

The original authors Beymer-Farris and Bassett responded in the Aftenposten:

WWF cooperates actively with the Tanzanian Ministry of Forestry (FBD) for projects in the Rufiji. … FBD staff, one day wearing a WWF had, get involved in conservation initiatives, and then another day to forcibly move people wearing a FBD had*. [...]

The problem is not our method, recently met the academic requirements for publication in one of the world’s most recognized environmental journals. The problem is that Hansson [WWF-Norway head] not like the questions we travel*.

(* sic, machine translation)

The menace of per diem payments was well recognized by government wings from both Norway and the UK running charity projects. For some reason however the latest eviction with its direct connection to the institution of REDD projects with Norwegian funding seems to have prompted a soul-searching exercise in Norway. One long-term Norad employee wrote in an Aftenposten editorial:

We are easily amateurs in the game of corruption compared with participants in the receiving country

For their part it appears that a subset of researchers siezed a rare opportunity to go public on how activist organisations such as the WWF work against their proclaimed objectives, and against scientific norms. How vastly influential the WWF has become is evident from a slide from Dr Svarstad’s presentation:

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With the latest saga, it can be said that a watershed event in conservation and the climate change debate has occurred. For the first time an organisation as the WWF finds itself at the wrong end of all things – locals and government officials, scientists, and aid agencies. The vision it tries to impose seem alien to all comers, the problems it faces as earthly as everyone else’s.

More importantly the episode defines the lack of a scientific temper at the WWF. The utter bewilderment that environmental scientists might be against some of its activities and speak about it openly is evident in the unprofessional response – bullying journal editors and scientists, demanding censorship of scientific papers, and a charactertistic denial of responsibility toward its contribution to the larger evolving mess.

Environmentalists have invested significantly in building their political movements. It is primarily their campaigning investments that has opened up newer areas of politicking.  As Donna Laframboise notes, just before Gleick’s ‘confession’, a peculiarly virulent pushback was directed at the Heartland Institute. ‘Conservative think tank tries to participate in environmental debate.’ – book the criminals!!

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The above, is from a professor in Minnesota.

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First, a climate activist appears to have written a document and tried to pass it off as a Heartland memo.

Now, Aaron Huertas – press secretary at the non-governmental organisation – Union of Concerned Scientists appears to have written the letter being passed off as written by world famous climate scientists.

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More in the vein of the Realclimate zinger a couple of days back.

Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum thinks that climate science is being used to promote agendas of global political control. The wise Chris Mooney disagreed with him:

Appropriately, the scientists who study the climate are trained—and often, temperamentally disposed—to see the world in gray, rather than black and white.

This was yesterday. Almost the same time, a bunch of ‘top’ climate scientists were saying this (via Tom Nelson):

We can say categorically that this [Keystone] pipeline is not in the nation’s, or the planet’s best interest.

PS: How can something be ‘the best’ for a planet?

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I ran across this in Realclimate today. Realclimate has a history of doing this kind of thing (see here, and here).

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Peter Gleick, I felt sometimes, was a guileless warmie. He exemplifies the multifaceted, contradictory things that human beings are – he is both father of Ursus bogus, and scourge of bottled water. Quite unlike Michael Mann, who seems to only exist unidimensionally in the pages of Congressional hearings and local newspapers.

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Following all the questions raised about his blog John Cook has managed to respond. Or not.

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I learned from the Guardian newspaper website in the UK that James Hansen is angry at Lord Lawson and the Global Warming Policy Foundation. As per the Guardian, this is because the foundation “…routinely casts doubt on the work of climate scientists”.  This is quite puzzling. Shouldn’t James Hansen be thankful to Lord Lawson for this?

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I read with amusement Skepticalscience’s latest in their lineup of posts on climate scientists whose views diverge from the consensus. First it was the ‘Michaels Mischiefs’ series. Now he’s been turned into a ‘serial deleter’. Michaels’ probably getting off easy – John Christy is stuck with ‘Christy’s Crocks’. I guess if you run a website, you can call people whatever names you want.

The present story though goes to Pat Michaels’ ‘More Ice than ever‘, an article that appeared in American Spectator way back in February 2008. Michaels was then responding to a alarmist Washington Post news item on Antarctic ice loss reported by Rignot and co-authors. The article draws attention to increasing Antarctic sea ice, and how little information there was on whether the Antarctic land ice was really going down, or its significance.

Now direct your attention to this article at Skepticalscience.com. This is them trying to ‘debunk’  a supposed Antarctic myth.

It begins with a quote attributed to Pat Michaels, linked to the American Spectator article:

“The amount of ice surrounding Antarctica is now at the highest level since satellites began to monitor it almost 30 years ago. It’s simply too cold for rain in Antarctica and it’ll stay that way for a very long time. The bottom line is there is more ice than ever surrounding Antarctica.”

You can examine the Spectatorarticle—the above passage does not appear at all. It has been created by pulling together sentences from two different places. Skepticalscience.com then provides the rebuttal, beginning as follows (emphasis in original):

“Skeptic arguments that Antarctica is gaining ice frequently hinge on an error of omission, namely ignoring the difference between land ice and sea ice.”

In his article, Michaels wrote:

 [...]

So it’s not warming up, and the snowfall data are equivocal, yet the continent is experiencing a net loss of ice. How can this be, and is it even important? The current hypothesis is that warmer waters beneath the surface are somehow loosening the ice. That’s plausible, but again, there’s precious little proof of it.

And further, the bottom line is that there is more ice than ever surrounding Antarctica.

Whereas John Cook says Michaels wrote:

 ”The amount of ice surrounding Antarctica is now at the highest level since satellites began to monitor it almost 30 years ago. It’s simply too cold for rain in Antarctica and it’ll stay that way for a very long time. The bottom line is there is more ice than ever surrounding Antarctica.”

Cook makes Michaels look like an ignorant stereotypical ‘denier’ who says that ice cannot melt because it is too cold to rain and craftily ignores the distinction between land ice and sea ice. Only he did nothing of the sort. Indeed in the conclusion he says:

 One of the tired tropes that reverberate throughout global warming reporting is that inconvenient facts get left out. In this case, it’s blatant. Midway through the Post’s page-long article comes a statement that “these new findings come as the Arctic is losing ice at a dramatic rate.” Wouldn’t that have been an appropriate place to note that, despite a small recent loss of ice from the Antarctic landmass, the ice field surrounding Antarctica is now larger than ever measured?

Which is what Cook puts down as well. Only Michaels said it before Cook/Skepticalscience did.

In other words, Skepticalscience.com creates an impression that ‘skeptic arguments’ are grossly wrong and simplistic, uses a manipulated quote from Michaels’ article to exemplify such a position, and then proceeds to provide a rebuttal which consists exactly of the same facts laid by him in the first place.

John Cook, who seems to have a need to create ‘skeptical myths’ out of whole cloth (in order to debunk them), has consistently had a problem representing what people say (see here, here and here). An earlier version of his Antarctic ice post carried a slightly different passage. Even then, Cook lopped off a crucial sentence about IPCC predictions on Antarctic sea ice from Michaels’ original.

Skepticalscience.com are free to nurture their delusions about skeptics, but it should not be at the cost of false representation.

Update: A Skepticalscience.com author dana ‘corrected’ the quoted passage by inserting ellipsis marks between the sentences. Quickly following the move, the whole Pat Michaels quote has now been taken down silently and replaced by an article summary from journalist Greg Roberts’ piece in The Australian. Unfortunately the Australian’s article too makes the clear distinction between land ice and sea ice. At this point, it is unclear which skeptic actually said anything resembling what John Cook and his cohort claim they do.

Further update: The Skepticalscience article now carries this at the end:

On 20 Jan 2012, we revised this article upon learning it referenced an incorrect quote. We apologize to Dr. Michaels and to our readers for the error.

Readers point out this is an useful graphic to show what was done:

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It is not some investigative journalist, or journalists who have free time on their hands and demand money to follow their hobbies.

It is Tom Nelson.

Donna Laframboise alerts readers to Canadian Environment Minister Joe Oliver’s insightful remarks. Oliver notes how environmental and other pressure groups “ hijack [our] regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda”. Oliver, of course, is laying his finger at the crux of the matter. Western regulatory systems, with their high compliance rates, lack of safety valves, and paucity of democratically elected oversight are perfect vehicles for subversion and capture of power.

Which brings us to the question: Radicals hijacking a regulatory system is obviously bad. Is it Ok then for regulatory systems to be hijacked to achieve a moderate political agenda?

That is exactly what the Hartwell group and Roger Pielke Jr advocate. They both want to play ‘policy jujitsu’ – i.e., do something no one likes, but in a way no one can see it being done, and use their own energies for doing it.

I dig my hole you build a wall
I dig my hole you build a wall
One day that wall is gonna fall

Gon’ build that city on a hill
Gon’ build that city on a hill
Some day those tears are gonna spill

So build that wall and build it strong cause
We’ll be there before too long

Gon’ build that wall up to the sky
Gon’ build that wall up to the sky
Some day your bird is gonna fly

Gon’ build that wall until it’s done
Gon’ build that wall until it’s done
But now you’ve got nowhere to run

So build that wall and build it strong cause
We’ll be there before too long

Mike Hulme the British Professor, has written a new paper that appeared in the 2011 issue of Osiris magazine. Hulme discusses what he has ferreted out, as a new revelation in climate science and climate studies practice. He then claims this method he sees scientists resorting to – which he calls ‘climate reductionism – has ‘deficiencies’.

In seeking to predict a climate-shaped future, the complexity of interactions between climates, environments and societies is reduced and a new variant of climate determinism emerges. I call this ‘climate reductionism’, a form of analysis and prediction in which climate is first extracted from the matrix of interdependencies which shape human life within the physical world. Once isolated, climate is then elevated to the role of dominant predictor variable. I argue in this paper that climate reductionism is a methodology that has become dominant in analyses of present and future environmental change – and that as a methodology it has deficiencies.

So Hulme has found in their analyses, climate scientists  first extract climate “from the matrix of interdependencies”  and  then elevate “climate to the role of dominant predictor variable”.

Helpfully enough, Hulme provides examples of the final outcome of this method. These are claims in the media he finds, e.g., ‘every year climate change leaves over 300,000 people dead and ‘We predict, on the basis of mid-range climate-warming scenarios for 2050, that 15–37% of species … will be ‘committed to extinction’, and so forth.

How does the method itself look? Hulme again provides an example of an economics paper as a perfect illustration of “[seeking] out simple chains of climatic cause-and-effect” between climate change and economic growth:

The authors recognise that whether or not climate change has a direct effect on economic development is contentious, but they claim nevertheless that their global analysis using data from over 180 nations reveals a “substantial contemporary causal effect of temperature on aggregate [economic] output … on average, a 1⁰C increase in average temperature predicts a fall in per-capita income by about 8 per cent”

By doing this Hulme says, the “complex relationships that exist between climate and economic performance are first reduced to a dependent relationship between temperature and GDP per capita” and then, using projections of future climate warming, future economic performance is predicted for the twenty-first century”.

But this is not a new observation at all. Climate sceptics are well familiar with the numerous instances of fear-mongering which Hulme acknowledges exist, have traced backward to the original source of such alarmism, and found the same methodology being adopted over and over again. ‘Take something good and connect it to climate, run a climate model and make it worse’ – this is virtually the touchstone of the alarmist call. The method has myriad variants and has been successfully used in environmental regulation and public health policy formulation. It is the root source of several claims to emerge from the IPCC. Fortunately enough the IPCC sourced such claims from environmental pressure group literature, so that aspect could be pointed out to the world to draw attention to the inherent implausibility and fear-mongering present in such claims. But what otherwise?

In instances where critics can bring enormously inconvenient ‘gotchas’ to bear, the consensus establishment reluctantly concedes some inches of territory; otherwise the use of this methodolgy is defended to death (because it yields such precious results).

Consider the case of Amazongate, where a computer-modelling effort on forest fires by Nepstad and colleagues transmogrified into a statement on dramatic Amazonian vulnerability.  The technique adopted in the originating papers by Daniel Nepstad is straightforward. A threshold of soil moisture is said to cause ‘fire risk’ and climate change produces/contributes to a reduction in precipitation over the Amazon. Vast tracts of the forest then burn away in the models. In Nepstad et al 2004, 40% of the forest is at risk of catching fire. In Nepstad et al 2008, the computer model loses 55% of the entire Amazon in the next 20 years. Or take the more recent Le Page et al 2010 whose models  reduction in rainfall whose models leave only 24% of the Amazon protected from fire due to reduction in rainfall. As we know, such extrapolation methodology has been comprehensively defended by scientists studying the Amazon.

How can this method be explicitly characterized for Amazonian literature?

From my comment on this thread:

The approach is similar: a certain diffusely present environmental metric is selected (in this case precipitation), and by a series of assumptions, linked to the risk for a local factor developing (in this case, fire). Models are then used, to obtain projections of the environmental metric (precipitation) into the future. Proportionally, the local event is projected to increase (usually), hand in hand, with the global environmental metric. Impressive area estimate figures are arrived at, for the purported ‘risk’, involving the entire Amazon.

From my comment

The way quantitative claims in the Amazon and the way their link to global warming is derived, pretty much follows the same pattern, as has occurred in this thread.

Initially, an area estimate is derived – either from modeling or from expert opinion. – indicating some damage to affect the entire Amazon. Properly considered, this estimate is meaningful, *only given the complete suite of assumptions*, which go into deriving the estimate.

Then, climate change is shown to be capable of potentially causing, usually by computer modeling, the worst/highest/most severe of causal factor/s. Thirdly, the above two things are clubbed together to derive high area estimates of forest ‘vulnerability’.

The above method – derivation of results by daisy-chaining and stacking of assumptions – implies naturally, that conclusions so arrived are heavily tied down by qualifiers, and therefore weak.

However, successive transmissions of such results happen in press releases, interviews or blog posts. At each step, the crucial context, the qualifying assumptions and conditions which constrain and make such conclusions meaningful are stripped away successively. This effectively de-contextualizes the scientific claim. The causal link between ‘climate change’ and the proposed ‘vulnerability’ becomes super-strong, at this stage.

What is left is a percent figure, the words ‘climate change’ and Amazon.

I would say these formulations above are very similar to what Hulme claims to have divined. The bulk of Working Group II high-impact high-profile modelling publications would squarely fall into this category and Hulme identifies this himself. The insight provided by Hulme in his paper is not new, and climate skeptics recognize it in its various forms.

link[i-link]

Why does it happen though? Hulme blames the “hegemony exerted by the predictive natural sciences” which allows such ‘climate reductionism’ to emerge. I quote:

I suggest that the hegemony exerted by the predictive natural sciences over human attempts to understand the unfolding future, opens up the spaces for climate reductionism to emerge. It is a hegemony manifest in the pivotal role held by climate (and related) modelling in shaping climate change discourses.

This is backward in several important respects. There are strong systemic forces that strengthen predictive activity of this kind, once it takes its hold. Specifically in the case of climate change, a persistent and expansile international technocrat-activist class fuels the political and funding process. Predictive activity (i.e., modelling) capable of producing useful results (as opposed to no-catastrophe and world-will-end-tomorrow type results) are selected for survival in this milieu. Modeling that predicts undefined disaster safely well into the near future, whose putative outcomes are potentially modifiable by legislative regulation of substances is encouraged. In other words, the ‘hegemony exerted by predictive natural sciences’ coincides perfectly with spikes of political activity that finds such predictive science an attractive handmaiden. Once these driving forces are in place, the mere presence of an enormous number of variable in large, complex systems as the climate, makes the emergence of such climate reductionism almost inevitable.

Climate scientists  first extract climate “from the matrix of interdependencies”  and  then elevate “climate to the role of dominant predictor variable”, not just because they are scientists who “hegemony” made them do it, but because people and entities with power would benefit from them doing so.

Lot of people think the climate game is fun: caring for the planet, reading climate science papers, arguing about statistics, ‘sensitivitiy’, radiative physics and the like. Well, … let’s just leave that be for now. Behind the scenes, the climate game is played by ratfucking and retractions. People are not angling for ‘genuine debate’ or trying to ‘solve problems’, they are trying to shut the other guy down and have things their way.

In January last year (i.e., 2010), when the climate faithful were smarting from the twin hits of Climategate and Copenhagen, two people got together and wrote a humorous piece for the website Alternet. Now humour takes on many forms. The Alternet authors in their version of  leftie gallows humour  fancifully imagined letting Richard Lindzen roast in a sauna with a running automobile, leaving Steve McIntyre stranded on a Maldivian beach with cement shoes on, and letting Monckton’s castle be overrun by ‘climate refugees’. No doubt they were giving full expression to their frustration at not being allowed to rearrange the world’s economies in order to save it.

Interestingly enough policy scholar Roger Pielke Jr made the list of the ’15 most heinous climate villians’ (that was what the article was about), at position 14. Pretty soon though, Pielke Jr was taken off the list.  The only reason Alternet’s editors offered was that someone from an ‘affiliated organization’ had complained to them.

Fast-forward to May 2010. Author Ian Murphy after researching the Pielke Jr-described ‘post-normal science’ was literally overcome by pangs of conscience that Pielke Jr had walked free earlier and spilled the beans.  As he explains, it was Michael Shellenberger – boss at the Breakthrough Institute where Pielke Jr was fellow who got in touch by email with Alternet. Shellenberger explained how ‘Pielke had received death threats previously and Alternet shouldn’t encourage more of that’. In the original the heinous climate villian Pielke Jr was to be ‘ripped to shreds’ by invasive species hyenas as his comeuppance. This presumably in Shellenberger’s eyes counted as  ‘encouraging’ readers to literally making it happen. Pielke Jr took Murphy’s moral proclamations somewhat literally  - he called it: ‘A Call for violence against me‘.

Things become a bit simple from that point. One of the chief financial backers of Alternet, we learn , is the Nathan Cummings Foundation.  Shellenberger’s Breakthrough Institute is almost exclusively funded by the Nathan Cummings Foundation. “Virtually all of our funding comes from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, trustees of the dreaded Sara Lee pound cake fortune, and the Lotus Foundation, funded by members of the Pritzker family” , and not just some ‘dirty libertarian oil company’  as the Alternet article slanted it, boasted Ted Nordhaus Breakthrough Institute’s co-founder. One see in its full glory how the retraction game played out in January at the Breakthrough blog: as Eli Rabett informs Ted Nordhaus that he’d become Pielke Jr’s cats paws, Nordhaus informs him that Alternet had retracted the segment. Nordhaus of course forgot to mention at that point that the Nathan Cummings Foundation of the ‘dreaded Sara Lee pound cake fortune’ funded Alternet. Shellenberger forgot to mention that the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Ford Foundation were clients of his private company American Environics.

Those who would wish to verify the facts about the Breakthrough Institute’s funding via Sourcewatch.org would come in for a jolt. The page is taken down as well, and there is a short message which reads: “This article is under review”. The omnipresent Anna Haynes had carried out the last rites edits. This is the same Haynes whose Sourcewatch article on Keith Kloor was taken down as well.

When Anthony Watts deleted my article on Roger Pielke Jr’s ‘The Climate Debate is Over’ at WUWT, he wrote:

 I have removed this guest post [by Shub Niggurath] because it has been brought to my attention that it is unfair and has caused inflamed reactions [especially in comments] that were unintended.

Sounds just like something that’s happened earlier before, doesn’t it?

As a few of you might know, this blog carried an article that was critical of Roger Pielke Jr, a science and technology policy scholar who runs a popular eponymously titled blog, for his claim that ‘the climate debate is over’. Pielke Jr made the claim in this form:

The debate over climate science is over and has been won by those who assert a human influence on the climate system. This then is what victory looks like. (For supporting evidence on the science and opinion, see chapters 1 and 2 of TCF).

With the first sentence, it is clear that a number of different things are entangled in a yarnball of a statement and is quite open to interpretation. But that is Pielke Jr’s style. As he notes, evidence to support the claim (that the debate is over) apparently presented in two chapters of his book, The Climate Fix.

The next day, commenter PaulM wryly reminded Pielke Jr about his statement. Pielke Jr responded:

Actually I am providing a forum for a genuine debate over whether that debate is over … so far, my original assertions seem to stand ;-)

But if you (or anyone) wants to tell me what is wrong with the arguments laid out in Ch 1 and 2 of TCF (where this argument has its full presentation), I’m all ears. Thanks!

There it was – stuff about how he had explained the debate was over in his book chapters. So, I took the second statement above as an assignment. I had read the book a while ago and still remembered bits of it. So I read the first two chapters again, and wrote up a piece. ‘Is the climate debate over?’

All kinds of funny things happened at once. Pielke Jr’s blog is on a Blogger platform, and he implements a moderation-sequenced comment stream. Seeking a wider debate on what appeared to be an overgeneralized statement thrown up to draw attention to a more specific and innocuous point (so I thought), I submitted the piece as a guest post to Anthony Watts. The article went up at WUWT.

Pielke Jr responded on his blog. I was ‘reviewing’ his book, he said. He then launched into what he called a sporting interpretation of my ‘review’, presented excerpts, and went on to say I did not ‘know what [I] was writing about’ ( about parts  that didn’t make sense as a review). He finally thanked me for writing the piece. Several of Roger’s readers essentially took him at his word. What kind of a review is this, they wondered. Meanwhile, Anthony Watts deleted my article from his blog. I won’t go into the circumstances surrounding that here.

For Pielke Jr, the mere fact that Fred Singer and James Hansen agree on the effect of atmospheric CO2 may be enough to shut shop on science and enter the policy kitchen. A World Bank poll may be enough to settle the question of public support for climate action. Others may not agree and even if one did, there is a whole chain of assumptions to be allowed for. It is clear that my article is not a review of his book. Given the link to his original post, the larger context is clear as well. Pielke Jr’s response therefore amounts to deliberate misrepresentation. This is reinforced by his making as though the GWPF’s carrying the article was an act of  Internet preservation of material the original publisher decided not to carry. After declaring that he is ‘all ears’ for any discussion of arguments in his book, Pielke Jr used his own labelling  to avoid discussion. That is fine – he is free to engage or not, but his reluctance to engage ought not to be disguised by misrepresentation.

I request Pielke Jr to set the record straight in this regard.

tallbloke[i-tallbloke]

I wonder how Michael Mann claims he feels harassed by the instrument of the law, and yet is pleased at the prospect of others in the same plight.

I heard the news that Christopher Hitchens has died.

I was reminded of the so-many intellectual midgets who crawl parasitically in the climate debate. They survive because their very lebensraum is defined by the considered opinions of others, in the middle of which they position their own.

Hitchens had said in this regard:

The truth cannot lie, but if it could, it would lie somewhere in between

Settling down in the middle is easy because you don’t have to have an idea or thought. You only need to know how to mark out territory. This brings endless advantages, chiefly, the ability to constantly indulge in territorial wrangling and pass that off as new thinking.

In this regard, Hitchens:

If you care about agreement and civility, then, you had better be equipped with points of argument and combativity, because if you are not then the “center” will be occupied and defined without your having helped to decide it, or determine what and where it is

I hope his words are not lost on those who sacrifice principle at the altar of expedience.

One characteristic of academics is that they never waste a good argument. They would give it as project to a graduate student, carve out a review article with favored colleagues as co-authors, or write a whole book on it. This brings multiple benefits: you can forever hang around making half-baked public statements to draw attention, and simply wave away questions with “The answers are in my book”. Your h-index keeps going up while your opponents waste their time figuring out your cryptic statements.

Roger Pielke Jr has been doing that for a while. There is a new post in his blog in the same vein: about those skeptics. Pielke reacts favourably to a football sports columnist Simon Kuper writing about ‘climate change’, quoting Pielke. Not the first time that’s happened either: here’s Kuper quoting Pielke Jr and saying ‘ignore the skeptics’. The reverse’s happened too: Pielke quoting occasional climate writer Kuper writing about football. You might think, ‘what’s the deal with football here?’ It’ll become obvious shortly.

I ploughed through the sportswriter’s piece: sceptics are ‘irrelevant’, there are not that ‘many of them’, and they are not blocking ‘action’ on climate change. What is blocking it? “Lack of government will”

Apparently Pielke Jr who agrees that the debate is over and the sceptics are irrelevant makes his full argument for the case. Only, as noted before, it is made in his book.

Again, I ploughed through the book. While the first two chapters are rambling one can hack away at the fluffy text and extract points for review, some which Pielke himself fortitiously identifies and some he doesn’t. These are: a) Climate change from CO2 can be ‘undesirable’ b) I cannot tell you exactly why that is, but just…just believe me c) Everyone in the world is worried about climate change and wants to do something about it d) There is an iron law

The central playground for scepticism in climate change has been in (a) and (b). Is CO2 really bad? is warming bad? how much so? is it really heating up so fast and so much like never ever before? Really? Apparently Pielke never experienced any of these questions

Perhaps it is one of the unavoidable side effects of being the son of a world-famous atmospheric scientist, but I have never questioned the climatic importance of human emissions of carbon dioxide; its importance has always been something that was accepted by my father and presented in his work.

So the young Pielke learnt everything about CO2 from his dad, you might think. However Pielke the Junior informs the reader that when his dad was writing basic encyclopedia articles on climate he was not interested in the science and was instead running behind girls and playing soccer

For instance, in the mid-1980s, when my own interests lay far from science and policy, focused instead on soccer and girls my father wrote an annual article on the atmospheric sciences for the Encyclopedia Brittanica

Thus when Pielke writes:

“So the “controversy” over whether carbon di-oxide emissions affect climate is not a subject that holds much interest for me, …”

the situation is rather easy to understand. Here’s one more person wishing to impose that the ‘real debate’ lies away from an area he is not good at, or is interested in.

 ’The debate is over’?

One of Pielke’s favorite claims is that the public of the nations of the world support climate action. As before, the effect is one of stepping into a hall of mirrors of non-sequiturs. Pielke’s contention is based on opinion polls conducted by the World Bank. The “debate is over” conclusions by Pielke spring from the same source.

Did ‘the debate’ ever take place around the world?

Consider the recent University of Oxford study of newspaper articles, examining reporting of climate scepticism in six countries: Brazil, China, India, France, the US and UK in 2007 and 2009. The report concludes that close to 80% of all ‘climate sceptic content’ appeared in the UK and US print media, and that Brazil, China, India and France had considerably reduced coverage of ‘climate-sceptical’ content. Climate scepticism is particularly ‘an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon’, we learn.

No doubt, the Reuters Institute study wants the focus to be on the inordinate amounts of scepticism flowing through UK and US media arteries, but data that is of interest to us is available  – climate scepticism finds little to no expression in countries like India and China.

Media expression of climate scepticism is studied in the peer-reviewed literature. Consider the example of India, for which good data happens to be available. In a 2009 study published in the journal Climatic Change, Simon Billett of the Oxford University Centre for the Environment found many interesting things. Firstly, Billett asserts rightly that the print media is the predominant source of information about climate issues in India:

The media are instrumental in shaping public understanding of environmental issues in India (Chapman et al. 1997). Recent public polling suggests that the print media remain the major source of information for the literate public on climate change issues; the 2007 Global Nielsen Survey suggested that 74% of the surveyed population used newspapers as the primary source of information on climate change.

Well, what information does the Indian print media carry on climate change (for a 2002-2007 period)?

On whether global warming is real:

In comparison to the scepticism in the North American and European press, the coding results suggest that the Indian press entirely endorses climate change as a scientific reality. Based on the codes in Table 1, 100% of the 247 articles discussing the existence of global warming argued that rapid, unusual climate change does exist today.

On what was causing it:

 In addition, 98% of these articles directly attributed climate change to anthropogenic causes.

Anything about ‘climate scepticism’?

 Just five articles remained unconvinced that the phenomenon  was the result of human activity, four of which suggested the causes were unknown rather than simply ‘natural’.

…many were also highly critical of so-called ‘climate sceptics’, often highlighting the US media in particular as responsible for giving voice to known contrarians.

So most of those who get their climate fix get it from newspapers and all studied newspapers toe the consensus line completely. Moreover Pielke himself points out in his book: close to 35% percent of the Indian population hasn’t even heard of ‘climate change’.

‘The debate is over’ indeed! Looks more like it never got underway.

The same phenomenon is repeated in almost every UNFCCC non-annex I developing country. Either privately owned media (as in the case of India) or state-controlled media outlets fully suport and promulgate the consensus line. Data to support this are available in Billett 2010 as well (see graph). The reasons for this are not hard to discern.

Imagine a situation where a country’s media uniformly promotes a certain line, and the media forms the major source of information in that area. What opinions would a majority of its citizens  hold, other than what is sold to them? However it is such unanimity that Pielke Jr presents as evidence for his claim that  ‘the debate is over’. Calling it disingenuous would be going easy. Pielke Jr is not alone in this either. As he reports in his book Bill McKibben, a Pielke favourite, managed to convince ‘mostly poor’ 92 island nations about the risk of global warming. One wonders whether these poor nations had the scientific expertise to evaluate McKibben’s claims before lending him their support.

The absurd consequences of such stage-managed opinions and the resulting neuroticism is clearly evident in a paper by Max Boykoff, one of Pielke’s colleagues at his Colorado institute. Singing praises of the study above, Boykoff writes of an Indian farmer so worried about climate change that he looks for text messages on his phone:

“I can’t afford to suffer due to such frantic climate changes. I can’t predict yields any more as my forefathers could. I have to depend on the SMS (short message service)”

It is in tow of such abysmal understanding of climate change (no fault of theirs though) that Pielke claims that the debate is over.

The non-sequiturs only multiply from there in Pielke’s chapters. Public support for action on climate change is ‘strong’ as shown by polls such as those conducted by the World Bank, but apparently it is not ‘intense’. Climate change and global warming consistently at the very bottom in surveys of global concerns. What this properly tells us is that people worry about global warming but in the larger scheme of things they really don’t. In the real world this would simply mean that climate action carries little political weight, but in the hair-splitting logic of climate policymakers, ‘strong support’ has a different meaning.

Another of Pielke’s favorites is his iron law. Simply put, the ‘law’ is another reminder of the painful reality that nothing can be done in the name of climate (which Pielke gleefully points out at every turn), and its intimate link to climate scepticsm (which Pielke doesn’t want anyone to know about). To the  climate sceptic, the link between carbon di-oxide and catastrophe is tenuous or non-existent. He/she therefore may argue from principle that drastic action ought not to be taken. To the climate-neutral layperson, the link between CO2 and catastrophe is immaterial: he/she is simply willing to go along with the climate game, to a certain limit. What this means in practical terms is that the same public which Pielke Jr is counting on his side, are actually more akin to skeptics. One takes the climate issue seriously and the other doesn’t even do that. You will get nothing from them both. In other words, the so-called ‘iron law’ is an enormous non-sequitur, and just a small outcome of a more general ‘iron law of scams’.

The Iron Law of Scams dictates how much money people are willing to throw away to a cause they only marginally care for, and feel in their heart of hearts is probably a scam but will not say it out loud from politeness. If such donation-seekers showed up at my doorstep, I might feel like parting with 50 bucks a year just to keep them happy and away. This says nothing about what I feel about my economy (i.e., my income) or my concerns for the climate.  You could take the ‘iron law of scams’ and replace ‘scam’ with any cause celebré of the moment, it would work just the same.  Pielke’s iron law of climate policy is however an attempt to link economic priorities and climate ‘action’.

Climate sceptics are those who looked at the case for climate change causing ‘undesirable’ things and therefore require remedial action, and came away unconvinced. Pielke and Kuper believe that something should be done about the climate even if there is not much concern or support, and even if it costs us handsomely. I hope they don’t think something needs to be done, even if  there isn’t any need to do it. Pielke’s mistake lies in his misdiagnosis of the foundation for any possible climate action.

In the end, the numerous step-wise safety valves that have been built into the Durban climate agreement by these very countries, Brazil, China and India make one thing clear. They are a greater testimony to ‘government will’ and undercurrents of public expectation, than any monolithic wall of climate-supportive ‘political will’  that is hypothesized to exist.

References:

[1] Billett S Dividing climate change: global warming in the Indian mass media DOI: 10.1007/s10584-009-9605-3
[2] Boykoff M. Indian media representations of climate change in a threatened journalistic ecosystem Climatic Change (2010) 99:17–25

The sequence of events is sometimes forgotten; it is wilfully obscured at other times. You might stumble across IPCC damage-control maneuvers saying  “the IPCC Himalayan glacier error was the only mistake, it was just a typo, buried somewhere deep in a 3000 page report”.

When such excuses made its appearance, Richard North showed in characteristic fashion that exaggerations such as Africagate were present in the summary for policymakers (SPM) and the synthesis reports (SYR). Ben Pile broke the story first. But North showed that IPCC chairman RK Pachauri was tugging at heartstrings about ‘Africa’ and its plight, repeatedly, in drumming up climate policy action.

The various ‘Gate-exposed IPCC errors were not just stray occurrences. Ill-founded exaggerations were found to make their way to the highest pedestals – the IPCC SPM and synthesis reports.

As we have seen before, there is an interesting backstory that developed after North broke the story in full detail. German journalist Irene Meichsner picked up on ‘Africagate’, publishing a full-length story in the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau. At the time RealClimateer Stefan Rahmstorf was getting increasingly ticked off at the drubbing the consensus was enduring from the IPCC exposés. His point of IPCC defense? ‘The IPCC based its claim on sound science, and described it specifically: only some African countries were to be affected. Its critics make it as though it claimed otherwise.’

Rahmstorf wrote to the editorial board of the newspaper with his grievances, advocating the same kind of thing he does on his Realclimate website (deleting stuff):

I would therefore ask you to publish a correction to the [Meichsner article] or withdraw it completely.

The Frankfurter Rundschau, as though seeking comfort in conformity with the Sunday Times’ action on Amazongate, withdrew the article completely. It published an explanation that must be read to understand the utter simple-mindedness of some who are writing on climate issues in Germany. Rahmstorf no doubt, was overjoyed. He steadily catalogued headlines by news outlets who bought his version of the story on his blog. They ‘quoted me’ – he wrote in one of his updates. How could a single blogger have so much influence over the climate debate? – he had ranted about North on his blog earlier. But now Rahmstorf had gotten back – newspaper editors listened to him. Even the New York Times ran a story. They had listened to Simon Lewis, another scientist, over the Amazongate affair. The climate ‘street fight’ was in full swing and the scientists it seemed were winning.

That Moroccan author Agoumi Ali had penned a review and not conducted an actual study, that her article was based on computer model projections for just three African countries, that two of these models actually projected crop yield increases, that the work was funded through the UNFCCC which is the parent organization of the very IPCC assessing her evidence, that it was not published in the peer-reviewed literature (which was a big thing those days remember), that the crop yield decreases were for droughts, and that vast uncertainties remained on scientists’ ability to predict droughts in Africa -  did not bother Rahmstorf much.

Now here is where the miracle occurs. Rahmstorf in his zeal to protect the IPCC wrote two inflammatory blog posts. The journalist Irene Meichsner did not take it lying down. She sued (yes, you heard that right). That is the first miracle.  A Cologne court heard arguments and ruled in her favour and reprimanded the newspaper for withdrawing the article. That is the second miracle. Rahmstorf has been ordered to pay Meichsner 511.58 euros ‘plus interest and two-thirds of the cost of the legal dispute’.

In the aftermath a quite-extraordinary article has appeared in the WPK Quarterly website. Titled: Ideology and Climate Change: How to silence journalists, it takes a long hard look at the whole Rahmstorf-Meichsner story. The author’s conclusions are worth taking in:

This particular case deserves special attention first of all because a freelance journalist has successfully defended herself against the malice a renowned scientist poured on her. It may motivate other journalists not to put up with absolutely everything in disputes over the quality of their work but to defend themselves, even if this involves an enormous effort.

…

The notion that one can deal with media coverage of science in the role of the scientific expert merely by invoking a true-false category would be widely agreed upon. However, this particular case illustrates that scientists have to negotiate difficult terrain, which may hold risks for their own credibility.

The article ventures into territory your correspondent is quite familiar with the Amazongate story. Why did the Frankfurter Rundschau abruptly withdraw the story, just as the Sunday Times did with Jonathan Leake’s Amazon article? (emphasis mine)

Nonetheless, it is astonishing that the FR should so demonstratively and publicly distance itself from its own article. In this case, a brief correction would certainly have sufficed. As it is, one cannot fail to get the impression that a daily newspaper is employing a grand gesture to disassociate itself from its own critical article at the behest of a renowned scientist without having verified the objections raised by the scientist first. The readers get the impression that the editors consider the article to be false because the facts are not correct. Thus in addition to the mistake in the heading, the editors make a second, and from my point of view, much more serious error: it is not the facts themselves that are the problem, but how they are interpreted. It is strange that the FR seems to have made no effort to defend the core information in its own article against a poorly substantiated criticism.

Der Speigel was equally mystified as well. They got no answer from the newspaper:

Why the “FR” acted thus, remains open. Upon request by SPIEGEL ONLINE, the main editorial office did not respond.

Rahmstorf has long known to be involved in similar actions. He seems to specialize in writing to department heads complaining of their subordinates’ skeptical actions. This 2007 article (titled: The ruthless methods of climatologist Rahmstorf) contains a fairly long list of his moves.

With the Climategate emails I and II, one can see how a small coterie of activist-scientists concerned themselves with climate issues  in the media, using every available opportunity and venue to directly influence it. Journalists, not trained in the science appear to get a sense of empowerment being on talking terms with these scientists, emailing them for feedback, direction and a sense of approval. Interacting closely with such members, the scientists seem to develop a sense of entitlement, that they and only they can dictate the contours and course of the climate debate in its broadest terms. It seems they forget, that journalists are independent actors too, who may actually dig into their claims and peer behind the curtain. When it does happen all hell breaks loose.

‘RealClimate author found guilty in court’. I like the sound of that.

This is the vision the Climategaters have for society:

This is the vision they have for themselves:

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As it became obvious that Climategate II was the release of more emails from the same 2009 leak many prominent news outlets have tried adopting an ‘ostrich position’. But just as with Climategate 1.0 the contours of the climate debate change right in front of our eyes. The change  is leaving some of the expert pissants stranded in their own wake.

The slow drip-drip release of emails has had quite an unfortunate effect on the knights of the consensus— every leak gives them just enough rope to hang from, at the time of the next leak.

When the dust settled from Climategate part I, there was still a hastily hacked-out path back to the old (pre-2005) comforting fetal position. Many  activists, journalists and scientists resorted to taking this path. Clues to this type of thinking are evident in RealClimate’s latest post where it still imagines of going back to the good old days:

We anticipate normal service will be resumed shortly

But, ‘normal service’ never resumed at Realclimate even the last time around.  A few thoughtful ones of course, broke ranks. One fine day Judith Curry suddenly found herself cut off and facing the rabid wrath of the consensus. Top Amazon researcher and modeller Richard Betts though firmly in the consensus speaks his own mind. So does Jonathan Jones. So do Hans von Storch and Eduardo Zorita. von Storch in particular must be blinking at the trick pulled on on him when he was briefly editor-in-chief  at the journal Climate Research.

In any event one of the key messages that news and opinion outlets tried promulgating was this: ‘Yes, there have been some leaks. But the leaks do nothing to damage the consensus in climate science.  Scientists are unanimous in their belief of anthropogenic global warming’. But Climategate II emails paint a completely different picture unrolling behind the scenes.

So the message changes as well. Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia in a rapid response item to Climategate II says (emphasis mine):

Reading down these selective quotes, what comes across to me is that climate scientists are a diverse, complex and argumentative bunch, much like any other group of people. They argue about the data and trash the models. They bitch about their colleagues. Some see global warming as a “cause” and all are passionate about the importance of their work, but they worry and complain that the science is becoming distorted by the politics. Some feel that their religious belief requires them to promote the stewardship of the Earth; others feel that their critics are driven by religious zealotry.

So what to make of all that? That they are diverse, sometimes contradictory, and have multiple motives. Well, so what? Welcome to the human race!

New York blogger Keith Kloor goes one step further:

But before we move on, there is one notable observation shared by all sides, which deserves greater attention. And that is the healthy display of outright skepticism in many of the highlighted [Climategate II email] exchanges.

Seriously gentlemen, when you talk about a diverse, contradictory bunch who argue about data and trash the models and display outright skepticism, are you sure you are not referring to climate deniers who akin to Holocaust deniers ought to be tried for crimes against humanity?

I particularly loved Watson’s ‘Welcome to the human race’ comment. Climate scientists belong to the rarefied elite who alone are capable of reading the tea leaves of IPCC models, and yet belong to the entire human race when they make mistakes.

Watson however left out one inconvenient bit from his description though – that some climate scientists were just as political and motivated as the rest of the human race is. But such an admission would be the deathknell to science’s credibility, as Christopher Caldwell at the Financial Times points out (via Junkscience.com):

But that is everything. Voters in a democracy do not argue about science. They argue about the authority of scientists. And scientists’ claim to authority comes from the perception that, in fact, they do not let their vanities and rivalries influence their work. Where others pursue their grubby little self-interest, scientists pursue only the truth. The emails of 2009, however, showed that some prominent members of the climate-change establishment were not operating in a spirit of openness. Defending a scientist’s furtiveness on the grounds that “his science is good” is like defending a politician’s blunder on the grounds that he “did nothing illegal”. The emails were damaging because they undermined the scientists’ claim to be speaking as scientists rather than as interested parties.

If scientists are shown to be colluding to arrive at a given result, then the halo around science dissipates. Any voter who does not want to be duped must suspend his scepticism. He must listen to scientists with no more deference than he does any other interest group.

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To those outside the climate establishment part of the problem have long seemed obvious.

This brings us to the central problem – current deficiencies and uncertainties in climate science are not allowed to become part of everyday discussion. This is obviously because they are seen as damaging to the strength of the dominant paradigm. ‘Dominant paradigm’ is of course something we are all familiar with – “the earth is warming, humans are the cause and while there are some minor questions, most of the science is settled”.

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“Let us make our case strong first”, the climate establishment thinks, “and then we can discuss our questions and doubts”. This is both wrong and foolish. You make your case strong by openly discussing doubts. But then of course, in order to do that, a measure of confidence in your own science and data is needed first.

In the statements by journalists and scientists above one can see the slow, painful by inexorable move to the same position. Keep your problems, your data and your methods out in the open. Your case may take a while to take root (and there is a chance it might not have any takers at all), but the support you get will be much stronger and long-lasting. Climategate II should be an eye-opener for establishment scientists still chasing illusions of UN-conference-mediated global policy change, wrought by their own science.