This is very wrong. The emails are worth studying in full, because they raise very serious questions about the credibility of the IPCC, the journals publishing papers on climatology, the government scientific bodies commissioning research into climate and the news organizations covering them.

Moreover, the emails call into disrepute the assertion, frequently made, that the warming of the climate over the past century is known to be “unprecedented”. While it is possible that it is unprecedented, we do not know this for certain, since the proofs advanced are provably flawed.

So what do we know? What do the emails in question tell us?

1. The emails are from a repository from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, an organization which maintains a database of temperatures used by researchers analyzing the Earth’s climate. The database is one of several which are nominally claimed to be independently produced.
2. The emails are not comprehensive, only about 2.5% of the emails sent to and from the professors in question have been released into the wild. The encrypted emails are well enough encrypted that unless the hacker/whistle-blower publishes the encryption key’s pass-phrase, they will not be decrypted in our life-times.
3. The emails that are readable appear to be selected based on the subjects of discussion, primarily around controversies surrounding paleo-climate research, a branch of climatology where ice-cores, tree-cores, sedimentary-cores and other similar geological records are used to attempt to reconstruct climate from periods prior to modern temperature instrumentation. Paleo-climatologists have been instrumental in creating the narrative that the Earth is warming at an unprecedented, dangerous rate.
4. The first controversy, “hiding the decline” is related to an attempt to create a global temperature record by Dr Michael Mann of Penn State, who used records of tree-cores collected at a handful of sites across the world to create a historical temperature record. By measuring the density and thickness of the rings, one can create a record going back about a thousand years of tree growth. Dr Mann used a statistical process that is a variant of Principal Component Analysis to generate identify which sets of tree-cores had growth patterns that most closely tracked temperature in the past hundred years. He presumed that these sets of cores would maintain a similar relationship with temperature throughout the entire record. By mathematically applying this transformation to the tree-core data, he produced the thousand year reconstruction known colloquially as the Mann Hockey Stick, which played a central role in both IPCC reports and in Al Gore’s movie, and Inconvenient Truth. At this point, I should digress to explain several critical flaws in Michael Mann’s work that doom this effort.
• The relationship between tree growth and temperature is not linear, and is not even proportional. Here are all the things that affect tree core growth, according to the late Dr Daly:
1. cloudiness – more clouds, less sun, less ring.
2. pests/disease – a caterpillar or locust plague will reduce photosynthesis
3. access to sunlight – competition within a forest can disadvantage or advantage some trees.
4. moisture/rainfall – a key variable. Trees do not prosper in a droughteven if there’s a heat wave.
5. snow packing in spring around the base of the trees retards growth temperature
• Without a physical correlation, one is left with cherrypicked accidental correlation. I will give an example of this phenomenon by describing a stock-scam. A person wanting to get at gullible people’s money will email 500,000 people telling them that stock A is going to rise in the next month, and 500,000 people that stock A is going to fall. He has a 50/50 shot of being right, so 500,000 people receive the correct prediction. A month later, he selects the group that received the correct prediction and divides them in half and sends each half another set of predictions. Now 250,000 people have received two correct predictions in a row. Another two passes, and now he has 62,000 people that have received 4 correct tips from him in a row. He then contacts these people offering to invest their money for them. This is precisely the sort of cherry picking that mindlessly applying PCA to a series of unrelated parameters will produce.
• The type of PCA Dr Mann used is infamous for creating a spurious rise at the end of a time series when applied to time series of data.
• After 1960, the trees that had been most correlated with temperature ceased to correlate with temperatures and instead showed reduced growth rates that when converted to the apparent temperature showed a dramatic decline of 4 – 5 degrees. This is the “decline” that needed to be hidden, not the decline of actual temperatures, but a divergence of the proxy temperatures from the historical record.
• Dr Mann “hid” this decline in his major paper published in Nature Magazine by splicing in instrumental temperature data into the curve in order to give the appearance that the proxy temperatures were rising in tandem with actual instrumental temperatures when in fact they were diverging. This became known as “Mike’s Nature Trick”
• Dr Mann’s original reconstruction did not extend past 1980, ostensibly because the research of traveling to remote locations to core trees was difficult, expensive, and difficult to get funding for.
• Dr Mann’s reconstruction had no Medieval Warm Period, a period where historical records indicate the Northern Hemisphere was much warmer than ordinary – with warm weather crops being grown in England and Greenland being capable of supporting subsistence farmers.
5. Several scientists raised the above objections to Dr Mann, either in papers they published or face to face in seminars or via direct emails. Rather than responding to them, Dr Mann engaged in scientific misconduct, namely:
   • a) Providing misleading information as to his methods and raw data
   • b) Attempting to have authors and editors of papers that raised objections fired from journals or, if they were academics, from their teaching posts
   • c) Lying to third parties about his actions or the actions of people he was engaged in disputes with.
6. Dr Mann was assisted in this misconduct actively by senior members of the CRU (the organization whose mail server is the source of the emails), and the knowledge of the chairman of the IPCC, an organization that is supposed to be a transparent, non-activist advisor to national governments.
7. Separately from the Issues affecting the Hockey Stick, the CRU was also dealing with people trying to reproduce their database from raw data by stonewalling them, primarily by telling them that the raw temperature data was confidential and that CRU did not have permission from the organizations supplying them to provide the data.
8. The people being stonewalled eventually resorted to using Freedom Of Information Act requests to attempt to pry loose data such as which meteorological stations were the source of raw data that was then processed to produce the database of global temperatures.
9. When confronted with these FOIA requests, senior scientists at the CRU attempted to delete emails that were covered by the FOIA.
10. The raw temperature data was not being produced because Dr Jones of the CRU, who curates the data, had lost track of which stations he had used to produce the database.
11. Dr Jones & members of his team, with the knowledge of the FOIA officer conspired to mislead the people submitting the FOIA requests in order not to admit that they had lost their intermediate work.
12. An inspector general investigating the deletions concluded that these officers willfully and knowingly violated the FOIA, but that having evaded detection for more than six months, the statute of limitations had run out on the crime making it unprocecutable.
13. Simultaneously the scientists conspired with officials in the BBC to suffuse climate change alarmism into the BBC product. This conspiracy went as far as having BBC reporters prep scientists at the CRU how to maximize the impact of their interviews on news-magazine shows.
14. The Scientists who presented a united front that equated anyone who questioned the Mann reconstruction or the CRU database as being on the par with Holocaust Deniers in their emails to each other admitted discomfort, confusion and doubt with their pronouncements in private.

The overarching tale that I see in this whole sordid affair is the usual one; it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup. Losing data, doing sloppy work can be very embarrassing. Had Dr Mann been willing to contemplate that he might be mistaken, instead of assuming that everyone who disagreed with him or raised questions about his work were members of a secret cabal working for the fossil fuel industry and seeking to destroy their reputations, he might have been able to recover his reputation.

In their zeal to not admit weakness, to not consider the possibility that they were mistaken on any of their pronouncements, the scientists in question did a great deal of damage:

1. Researchers who used the CRU/Mann analysis as part of their own work probably wasted time and money that cannot be recovered.
2. The chilling effect of their actions almost certainly quashed research that would have given invaluable evidence to people attempting to deal with climate change.
3. Citizens and politicians were manipulated through fraud and deceit into making decisions that they might not have made had they been provided with accurate data

The theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming has been very lucrative to government officials, scientists who are seen as visionary experts and to NGO’s involved in the environmental movement. This wealth has been extracted from people who deserve to use it for their own ends. For the very poor it has made it harder to make ends meet. The fact that the head of the IPCC was cc’ed on attempts to fire professors who published dissenting views and did nothing damns the UN involvement in the affair.

I’ve long called for the separation of Science and State, which I recognize is a pipe dream. In the absence of this, it is time for people to cease trusting the organizations that permitted the misconduct above to continue.  The efforts to mitigate climate change are interfering with economic development that is needed to bring much of humanity out of the misery of poverty, increasing the cost of living for most people living in the developing world and is creating crony-capitalistic institutions that are ripe for corruption. To steal from Dr Covey’s analogy about cutting a road through the jungle, we are probably cutting a road through the wrong jungle, and there is no point in proceeding until we figure out which jungle we should be seeking out.

Owings built ”Wild Bird” as a permanent home at Big Sur in 1958. In the early 1960s, he and his wife joined neighbors in organizing to limit development along the scenic highway of California Route 1. This small step into the world of political activism led to Owings further involvement in conversation and preservation campaigns.

“I got mine; the rest of you can go screw yourselves. I don’t want you encroaching on my view.”

Pretty well sums up the preservationist movement, doesn’t it?

H/T: Jim the Realtor

His resignation  letter is worth reading in full:

1. 10:10 is a voluntary emissions reduction campaign for any person, organisation or business to commit to cutting 10% of their emissions in a 12 month period starting in 2010.
2. 10:10 is an inclusive campaign. Every person, business and organisation is welcome to join.

The video below (the original has already been deleted from their website) depicts what they mean by the word voluntary.  Those who can’t handle graphical depictions of school children being blown apart shouldn’t watch this, and parents should be advised that this is the sort of material from which some of you may wish to shield your children.

Here’s their current explanation as to why they deleted their own video:

They may have deleted the video, but the Internet has a very long memory, indeed. I’m sure political opponents of the environmental movement will be using this footage for years to come.

So what’s getting this apolitical consumer advocate so worked up concerning Earth Day?

Answer: the fact that the environment has become a Left/Right political issue. The Left uses the environment to ‘fear monger’ citizens into accepting bigger government while some on the Right dismiss the need to combat pollution altogether. Isn’t there a middle ground?

Martino hit on two main points about improving the environment which bear repeating: environmental education and technology. I know first hand that the construction industry’s big mantra right now is ‘sustainable design.’ Engineers, architects, MEP professionals, contractors, and designers at every level are receiving training for LEED certification to make their designs more energy efficient and better for the environment. Being LEED certified helps these individuals become more marketable in a very difficult economy (I’m considering receiving this training myself) and nearly every new building design has a LEED rating or some sort of sustainability rating.

The latest CAD and BIM software packages have better tools to calculate energy use, water use, emissions, and the overall carbon footprint of the building in the construction phase as well as the overall expected life of the building. There is definitely a market demand for efficiency in these designs; one does not have to buy into man made global warming or be of a particular political philosophy to realize the benefits (both from an economic and environmental standpoint).

The market plays a role and yes, sometimes reasonable government regulation does as well. Who among us would like to return to a time when automobiles had 12 mpg or less and belched giant black clouds of smoke? One only need spend a few minutes behind the tailpipe of one of these cars* to appreciate just how clean burning modern engines are. It’s in the auto industry’s best interests to make their vehicles even more fuel efficient and cleaner burning, not because government demands them but because consumers demand them.

Perhaps Earth Day is a political day but it doesn’t have to be. I tend to believe there are a good number of people out there who have a similar view of Earth Day, the environment, and environmental policy as Tom Martino who just happen to not be as outspoken as he is. It’s definitely nice to hear someone verbalize and broadcast what many of us are already thinking and is certainly a message worthy of recycling.

*Probably a car which has been exempted by the state government from having to comply with emissions standards because it is registered as a ‘historical vehicle.’

Rick Moran writes a piece for Pajamas Media today that illustrates the bait and switch Obama pulls on the American people.

Sounding for all the world like someone who just experienced a “road to Damascus” moment on energy, Barack Obama embraced offshore drilling for oil and ordered wide swaths of previously pristine ocean open to the depredations of greedy and rapacious oil companies.

Or if you’re not one of Obama’s wacky green supporters, Obama gave the go-ahead for tapping the biggest expansion of energy reserves in history.

Or did he?

In fact, what Obama giveth with one hand, he taketh away with another. Some leases already in motion have been canceled while potentially huge deposits of oil and natural gas are still off-limits, including the entire Pacific coastline of the United States from the Mexican border to Canada. In addition, in order to expand drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the president must get the authorization of Congress. This would have been a snap when gas was $4 a gallon, but is much less a certainty today.

Other leases that had been approved in Alaska have also been canceled for further environmental study. Of course, the president didn’t even bother to mention the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — sacred calving grounds of the porcupine caribou — which would yield as many barrels of oil as all the areas the president opened for drilling combined. And the slow motion approval process guarantees that I will be retired and getting to and from our little grocery store here in Streator, Illinois, riding a donkey before a drop of that East Coast oil makes it to market.

What is the point of this welcome but ultimately less-than-half measure to expand our domestic oil production? Note the word “drill” used in just about every headline in the media about this story. The president is sending a signal to the American people that he has heard their cries of “drill, baby drill” and has deigned to respond favorably. Citizens will think better of him for it, despite the fact that it will not increase domestic oil production until the president is long out of office and considered an elder statesmen. Perhaps he will have been elected president of the world by then, but if we’re still in Afghanistan I wouldn’t bet on it.

Yeah, so much for “drill, baby, drill”. Plus, Obama made this announcement in front of a F/A-18 Hornet fighter that is slated to run on a mix of 50% jet fuel and 50% biofuels on Earth Day. This “drilling” announcement was designed to position Obama towards the center while at the same time bribing squishy Republicans who are open towards voting for cap and tax along with “moderate” and “conservative” Democrats who are reluctant to vote for it. As expected, state run media lapped it up and dutifully reported it as Obama wanted them to and to complete the disinformation campaign, they even found far left politicians and activists who were outraged.

Ultimately, this proposal is simply just an early April Fool’s joke by Barack Obama on the American people. It takes away existing oil leases and ultimately does not expand drilling in the US while at the same time giving Obama political cover to push cap and tax and the rest of his “green energy” subsidies. Unlike most April Fool’s jokes, this one is not funny. Instead, it will ultimately cost the average American family at least $1500 more a year in energy costs.

These are trucks that are from an emissions regime (in Japan) harsher than ours and that have three times the gas mileage of the trucks they are replacing. But apparently the EPA doesn’t have rules for them and doesn’t know how to categorize them, and anything a bureaucrat doesn’t have rules for must be illegal, right? So now we are forced to go back to full-size pickup truck purchases until the EPA can catch up with the market.

Your government at work. Causing higher pollution and higher domestic energy usage by banning imports completely until they can fully study the matter — rather than allowing a variance and continuing to import from a more stringent country while doing their study.

But hey, I’m sure Government Motors is happy for the business Coyote might end up sending their way. No conflict of interest there, right?

Catastrophe Denied: The Science of the Skeptics Position (studio version) from Warren Meyer on Vimeo.

Warren is local to me (he lives about three miles away actually), and runs both the excellent libertarian small business and economics blog CoyoteBlog, and the absolutely essential climate blog Climate Skeptic.

TARP: Notwithstanding the wide-ranging areas this money was targeted to (i.e. auto bailouts) and the fact that when it was determined it would lose less than planned the difference would be spent elsewhere, this was nothing more than a bald-faced attempt to shore up balance sheets to forestall economic reality. I said at the time that much of this activity was designed to slow down the contraction and hope that the economy could grow out of the doldrums in the meantime, but that it risks causing rampant inflation when money velocity actually picks up. Worst, it had the potential for the government to buy the worst garbage paper the banks had on offer, essentially being an economic sinkhole of major proportions. Luckily it has not been as bad as anticipated, largely because government meddling in the internal affairs of banks has caused them to try like hell to pay it back quickly and get themselves out from under its terms.

Stimulus: The stimulus was billed as a way to jumpstart shovel-ready infrastructure projects, but it was quickly apparent that the only thing shoveled was a load of BS. Stimulus was little more than a giveaway to state and local governments to continue spending beyond the ability of their states to support and reward them for overspending the proceeds of economic expansion as if the bubble would never pop. While employment has plummeted in the private sector, government is growing — never a good sign to a libertarian. Here in high-tax California, we need to slash our state public sector, not bail it out.

Cash for clunkers: Billed as a stimulus and environmental program, cash for clunkers was pure destruction of economic value. Cars with an average market value of roughly $1500 — productive, useful assets — were rendered completely inoperable. In a perverse unintended consequence, it dried up the supply of older used cars (and thus increased the price of said cars), hurting some of the poor who might not be able to afford better vehicles. Paying people to dig and then fill up holes would have been economically stupid, but cash for clunkers is the equivalent of asking them to put uranium in those holes so that hole could never be safely dug again. Pure economic insanity.

But Cash for Caulkers is somewhat different. For those unfamiliar with the proposed program, it gives tax subsidies to people who work to make their homes more energy-efficient. The draft would provide a 50% rebate on materials and labor up to $12K per household. As a libertarian, I don’t much believe that the government should have the responsibility to fix economic burst bubbles. But this particular policy has several features that make it much more effective and efficient economic stimulus than much of what the federal government has done.

• This policy primarily targets those in the building/construction trade, arguably the hardest hit of the economic downturn. Since the housing bubble was partially created by bad government policy, it is at least preferable to help these folks find a more orderly transition than the welfare line.
• Home weatherization and energy efficiency is often a large initial expense with a long time horizon to pay back. Due to increased social and geographic mobility, it is often ignored by homeowners who don’t know if they’ll be in their homes long enough to make the efficiency gains worth it. Thus, improvements in home energy efficiency are underproduced by the market.
• Because this will reduce energy consumption in some homes, it may have the positive externality of reducing demand on energy for all users (thus hopefully lowering price). Again, this positive externality suggests that energy efficiency improvements are underproduced by the market.
• Finally, unlike Cash-for-clunkers, which destroyed and replaced useful economic assets, Cash for Caulkers actually improves existing economic assets. There is a lasting economic benefit to reduced energy usage for the present and future owners of these homes.

Of course, I cannot claim that I’m in favor of this program. The positive aspects I list above are ascribed to my ideal cash-for-caulkers policy, which I am certain will not closely resemble what comes out of the sausage-factory on Capitol Hill. Waste, fraud, and abuse are certain to be rampant. In a cost-benefit analysis of the size of the program, one can’t assume Congress will determine either cost or benefit rationally. It is picking economic winners and losers, which is partly responsible for getting us into the Great Recession in the first place. And finally, while it might have been an interesting idea BEFORE the TARP, stimulus, and cash for clunkers, I think we’ve already gone so far into deficit spending that it’s a good idea to stop while we’re only a few trillion behind. It appears that the country has hired Barack Obama to dig a deficit hole and [hopefully] fill it back up, but he simply refuses to stop digging.

So if I’m not in favor of the program, why am I writing this post? Frankly, it’s because I saw the level of derision that the policy got on several fronts (including from Jon Stewart). Done properly (which I don’t expect Congress to be capable of delivering), it would have been a timely program that helps those who are most affected by the housing crash while improving existing assets that might not be otherwise improved. Done properly, it could actually be seen as an investment in our future — and by that I mean an actual investment, not simply “spending”, which is politicospeak for that word.

It might sound silly, but home weatherization actually has potential at being smart policy. After a year of horrible, bad, not-very-good-at-all government spending and giveaway programs, to see one that actually has promise shouldn’t cause scorn and derision as its primary reactions.

They (Jason and UL Assistant Editor Brett Bittner) recently honored me be asking that I join them as a guest on their podcast, which you can find here or on iTunes.

Topics ranged from the Federal Reserve and Ben Bernanke, to health care, to home weatherization (a topic where I nearly defect from doctrinaire libertarianism), immigration and Copenhagen. All in all, I had a lot of fun and hopefully some of you may enjoy the listen.

The root of the conflict is very simple: curbing emissions produced in the territory of poverty-stricken nations would require them to regress to a poorer state of being.  The politicians ruling over these nations recognize that such attempts would probably inspire revolts that would topple them and earn them an appointment with a noose and a lampost.  In the meantime, the politicians ruling developed nations also recognize that if they allow people living in the developing nations to produce CO₂, that global economic production will simply be moved to those territories.  And the newly unemployed will come after the politicians who screwed them over with pitchforks.

By the time Obama landed in Denmark with his entrourage of bodyguards, the conference was doomed.  The failure lay in the groundwork;  having failed to prioritize effectively between his desire to take over the medical industry, the financial industry, the automotive industry and the manufacturing industries, and having spent money like a drunken sailor with a fist-full of Continentals, the Obama administration was in no position to offer a credible deal of any sort.

Most politicians outside the U.S. recognize that the days of U.S. hegemony are almost over.  The vast welfare state and creeping state takeover of industry have emptied the U.S. treasury, and the U.S. government is having an increasingly difficult time borrowing the money it needs to meet its current obligations.  Had Obama eschewed the “spend-your-way-into-prosperity” approach of George Bush, the U.S. government might have been in a position to make credible offers both to curb CO₂ production.  Instead, he showed up at the conference with a track record of leading a government that had no backbone, a reputation for rhetoric over substance, and a fiscal state that is laughably shaky.  Moreover, he also has been consistently lying through his teeth throughout his time in office. For these reasons, no promise or offer he could make would carry serious weight.

If the AGW alarmists are correct, the situation involving the production of CO₂is an externality; Those who produce CO₂ through economic activity gain the benefit of the wealth produced while the costs of warming are suffered by everyone.  Thus, those who decide not to produce CO₂ suffer, while those who engage in production gain  the benefit of of the wealth they create.

The proper way to handle an externality is to internalize it: to establish a regime where the people who cause ‘harm’ suffer a loss commensurate with the harm the do.  This is not simple with the atmosphere.  The plan favored by most alarmists, which essentially amount to requiring nearly every source of CO₂ to require government permission to operate, permission that in essence controls how much CO₂ is produced, are functionally equivalent to the centrally planned economies of the now defunct Soviet block.  In essence they recreate the crippling economic coordination problems that Ludwig von Mises identified in Socialism.

Obama seems to be oblivious to the economic collapse he is dicing with in his attempts to build a more fair world. For this reason, I am grateful for his incompetence.  The socialism that he and many of the delegates in Copenhagen were advancing has a demonstrated track record of creating incredible misery particularly for the masses that are not politically connected.  As a result, we are fortunate that Obama’s incompetence has postponed the AGW alarmist juggernaut.  By the time the next meeting is held, the temperature trend will likely give lie to the dire alarmist predictions that gave the alarmists much of their political momentum.

Or do they?

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann wrote a very interesting article which makes very much the opposite point.

The goals of the climate change crowd are not reduction in global warming but the enactment of a world-wide system of regulation which puts business under government control and transfers wealth from rich nations to poor ones under the guise of fighting climate change. Should the emissions come down on their own, as they are doing, the excuse for draconian legislation goes, well, up in smoke.

The facts are startling. In 1990, the year chosen as the global benchmark for carbon emissions, the United States emitted 5,007 millions of metric tons of carbon (mmts). Kyoto specified that emissions must be reduced to a level 6% lower than in 1990. For the U.S., that means 4,700 million metric tons.

American carbon emissions rose year after year until they peaked in 2007 at 5,967 mmts. But, in 2008, they dropped to 5,801 and, in 2009, the best estimate is for a reduction to 5,476. So, in two years, U.S. carbon emissions will have gone down by more than 500 mmts – a cut of over 8%.

President Obama has pledged to bring the U.S. carbon emissions down by 17%. He’s halfway there.

All this without government regulation, taxation, or phony “carbon credits”.

In all honesty, I really don’t know what to make of the science behind the man made global warming debate* but I have been a skeptic since the issue has been part of the public debate (and long before the whole ClimateGate scandal broke). I don’t doubt the phenomenon of global warming at all; the earth has warmed and cooled many times over billions of years without the intervention of man. Why wouldn’t the earth warm up again regardless of man’s intervention?

My skepticism aside, the fact that carbon emissions are being reduced on the part of private actors without government force isn’t all that surprising. Over the last several years, global warming “awareness” has been broadcast on an almost daily basis and the market has responded.

As a general rule, I believe that reducing waste and increasing efficiency is not only good for the environment but also cost effective. Being environmentally conscious should not mean sacrificing quality or increasing costs.

A good Capitalist wants to have the car with the best mpg rating without sacrificing safety. It’s not because the Capitalist is necessarily concerned about man made global warming nor that s/he wants to “stick it to the BIG oil companies” but simply s/he wants more bang for his/her buck (greedy Capitalist!).

On a personal level, I use the reusable shopping bags not because I am overly concerned about too many plastic bags filling up the public landfill but simply because the reusable bags are stronger. I am quite willing to pay the $2 it costs to buy the stronger, reusable bag because it means fewer trips between my vehicle and my home without fear of the bag tearing in the process.

Many of these “green” innovations have benefits beyond combating pollution.

But even if everything Morris and McGann writes is true and even if the Kyoto targets are met (or even exceeded), this will not be enough for the global warming extremists**. If carbon emissions are reduced by 17%, they will move the goal posts and demand 20 and 25% reductions. When these goals are not met, the extremists will demand more government regulation despite what the free market has achieved on its own.

*I’m not a climatologist and neither are most people who will read this post.
**As they also point out.

So we’re stuck with two basic sides:

Skeptics: “This shows that we’ve been right about you trying to stonewall us, and thus we won’t accept your conclusions unless you show us the source data and methodology, which you’ve tried to avoid for years. Your behavior suggests you have something to hide, and these emails show that you’re hiding it. Now put up or shut up.”
AGW Crowd: “This is regrettable and we all think there should be more transparency in the process. But it hardly invalidates the claims, which are from source data available elsewhere and which correspond with the claims of other climate researchers working independently of us.”

The debate largely stays at this level, because like most political debates, few in the media or in the public are comfortable looking at the deep dark bowels of all of this — numbers.

As an engineer, though, I am not stricken with such numerophobia, and thus wading through data sets and statistical methods. As such, I’ve seen a particular critique which bothers me greatly (as described here by Eric S. Raymond (via QandO)):

From the CRU code file osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro , used to prepare a graph purported to be of Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions.

;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)

This, people, is blatant data-cooking, with no pretense otherwise. It flattens a period of warm temperatures in the 1940s 1930s — see those negative coefficients? Then, later on, it applies a positive multiplier so you get a nice dramatic hockey stick at the end of the century.

All you apologists weakly protesting that this is research business as usual and there are plausible explanations for everything in the emails? Sackcloth and ashes time for you. This isn’t just a smoking gun, it’s a siege cannon with the barrel still hot.

(Note: Raymond points out later that he missed the 0.75 modifier, so what is shown here (at the maximum) as a 2.6 deg correction in the graph is likely a 1.95 deg correction. This appears to be an older version of the graph.)

One caveat — this is the only “smoking gun” I’ve seen thus far, and I personally haven’t scoured these files at all to determine exactly how important this particular file is to the whole picture. I’m likewise a bit concerned that we haven’t seen more of these “corrections”; if this is purported to account for the northern hemisphere, what about the southern?

But at this time, that’s beside the point. Absolutely NO voice on the pro-AGW side that I’ve come across has even attempted to answer this critique. They may think it’s not serious, or know that it’s being misinterpreted, or they may simply believe that if they don’t give it an answer, it’s obscure nature to most innumerate people will let a true critique be ignored. I’m not sure.

So here’s my question to readers: Have you seen any credible answer to the charge by Eric Raymond that this is blatant data-cooking? Barring that, have you seen any non-credible answer or off-handed dismissal of this charge? What I’m trying to find out is if there are actually voices trying to answer this, or if it is being ignored.

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they’re missing.But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school–we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked–to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can–if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong–to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

Richard Feynman Cargo Cult Science

Last Friday an explosive bit of news swept the Internet. Someone had posted a giant zip file containing hundreds of emails, several data-sets and some software code online that appeared to have been authored by the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University.

The CRU is the organization that compiles much of the data and analysis used in modern-day climate research. It is, at this point, impossible to calculate how many papers used data compiled by the Climate Research Unit.

Unfortunately, it appears that much of the data and certainly much of the analysis is unreliable; there are numerous gaps in the sparse documentary trail between raw data and the final results of the analysis, while the computer programs used to produce many of the datasets are buggy and are poorly understood.

Many of the emails focus on the efforts of Michael Mann and his fellow researches to prevent auditors like Michael McIntyre and Willis Eschenbach from gaining access to their raw data, attempts to pervert the peer review process to deny “skeptical” papers and theories legitimacy and discussions as to how best to “spin” results in order to promote politicians and the general public to react in a manner that they thought would be appropriate to the threat they perceived as being posed by global climate change.

This was as textbook a case of the Cargo Cult Science that Richard Feynmann warned about as one can ever expect to see, and the fact that the CRU team was not doing real science was apparent to many scientists familiar to their work, based on the misgivings hinted at in the email dump.

That being said, the process of scientific analysis being rather well developed – having been designed to arrive at truth by overcoming the natural human instincts at self-deception – we have to ask how could the process have broken down so spectacularly?

The answer lies, as it often does, it the corrupting intersection of universities and the government. In short, researchers in universities are trying to behave anti-competitively and have unconsciously made a deal with the devil with regards to using the government to get funds.

To understand what happened, we must first review what science is. Science is the systematic application of techniques that test theories describing systems producing observable phenomena through the collection of empirical measurements. It is decentralized, rather than a single authority coming to conclusions, anyone is free to make observations, generate theories and to come to conclusions concerning their accuracy and applicability. Moreover, the process is based on skeptical inquiry, assertions and claims are scrutinized by people who try to find holes or errors constantly.

The people who carry out scientific inquiry, scientists, generate, gather observations and test theories. These activities are documented and communicated to other scientists formally thorugh formal publication of papers. The process of formal publication requires anonymous reviewers of papers to approve of the paper prior to publication (a process that is as complex as that in any court of law and whose details are beyond the scope of this post). Scientists can incorporate the work of other scientists by citing their published papers. This decentralization and lack of authority is supposed to ensure that ideas are judged on their merits and not based on who asserts them.

The primary judgment of the quality of a scientist is his or her reputation. This inherently politicizes science since reputation is based on the perceptions of others. The history of science is legion with instances where people gained that perception through fakery and were eventually caught. Moreover, science requires resources. Since a scientist is not taking part in a income producing venture, per se, he or she must acquire their funds either by taking part in some income producing activity such as teaching at a university, or acquire a patron. Acquiring patrons is often highly dependent on not only the reputation of the scientist, but on the patron’s perception that the scientist will satisfy the patron’s goals in deciding to fund a scientist – hence the numerous studies calling into questions the link between smoking and lung cancer published by epidemiologists employed by tobacco companies.

Wen the patron is the government, the patronage is dependent on how well one pleases the civil servants and politicians who make the funding decisions. For politicians, a scientist who supplies them with dire warnings of emergencies that require heroic and visionary action are a godsend: they can pund the table and appear to be visionaries. For civil servants, the benefits of encouraging alarmist publications is simply the expanded power as funds are appropriated to cope with the emergency.

Moreover when government officials control the lion’s share of the funding, they are able to behave monopolisticaly, letting them down can doom one to poverty of teaching lots of classes with little money and time for research.

We will probably never know precisely why the senior staff at the Climate Research Unit decided to quit being scientists in order to take up the profession of Cargo Cult Scientist. It could be the celebrity of being known as leading researchers. It could be a genuine fear that if they didn’t lie, humanity would make the “wrong” decision and render the Earth uninhabitable. It could be a totalitarian desire to rework society according to blue-prints that were pleasing to them. It could be because they wanted the lucrative grant money. It could be that they feared being viewed as has-been or never-were hacks.

What we can tell, though, is that their fraud was predicated on their inexhaustible supply of grants from governments, grants that transferred an uninterruptible stream of taxes into their coffers. The system was such that these Cargo Cult scientists were able to establish themselves as authorities, and suborn the skeptical review of and replication of their work, and, for a time, act in an environment that lacked negative consequences for their misconduct. That is, until someone blew the whistle.

You’d think that’d be enough… But the hits just keep on a’comin… Researchers at my alma mater, Purdue, suggest that the increased land usage necessary to meet the demand for ethanol might disrupt migration patterns for dozens of species of migratory bird:

A new Purdue study suggests the demand for ethanol could fuel the decline of migratory birds by driving the elimination of small woodlots on farms, which many birds use for protection during migration.

…

Over two years, researchers found 76 species of migratory birds using those small wooded landing zones during their flights between Canada and South or Central America.

Dunning and Packett’s study suggests that the woodlots are as important to protect as larger forests.

Those trees are among the limited stopover areas birds have as they migrate over land. Open fields or cities could leave the birds susceptible to predators. The wooded areas also provide food, not just shelter.

But Dunning said there is concern that with the increased demand for ethanol, farmers and others may not see the value of the wooded areas and may cut down the trees to make more room to plant corn there.

“There are strategies for conserving forest for migratory birds, but those strategies emphasize the largest patches of forest,” Dunning said in a news release. “We found that even very small woodlots were filled with migratory birds at times. It makes us believe we also need to conserve the little patches of forest, not just the big ones.”

Sometimes I think it’d be hard to come up with a worse policy than ethanol.

But rest assured, as long as we have a Congress, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of contenders.