All over the net immense outrage has erupted in the wake of the released content of a number of emails between climate scientist Phil Jones of East Anglia University in Great Britain, and a counterpart at Pennsylvania State (mainly) and other centers. Two weeks ago, evidently, the cleint server's network was hacked - at East Anglia- and the e-mails accessed. Never mind this is a felony, and possibly even terrorism, what mattered more to the climate skeptic brigade was the content of the e-mails uncovered.
At one point, for example, an e-mail referred to "using tricks" to conceal that the climate hasn't warmed for about ten years. The word was taken literally to mean "shenanigans" or deliberately faking something. Amazingly, none of the scolds and critics could avail themselves of their short term memories to recall the "tricks" used some eight years ago to conceal a climate warming trend by researchers Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon. The details of how the pair employed 30-year intervals in one of their studies, in order to conceal warming, can be found here:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0007A664-3534-1F03-BA6A80A84189EEDF
I tracked Baliunas' illustrious history since 1993 on Google, and evidently she's written for a lot of conservative-right wing rags masquerading as peer-reviewed scientific papers, including Capitalism Magazine and National Review. No matter, the outcry against them was next to nothing, compared to the outcry against East Anglia's Phil Jones.
In other e-mails name calling was dredged up, and epithets hurled by climate scientists against the skeptics, who are often called "idiots". Again, why the shock and disbelief? I myself have often called climate skeptics idiots, because to my mind that's what they are. They invoke a specious, transparent pseudo-science to sow doubts on man-made global warming that are really driven by political -economic agendas. Over time, frustration grows that they can make huge inroads into public consciousness (compliments of an unquestioning media) and this leads to outbursts like calling them "idiots" - if not in e-mails, then in blog pieces, or letters to the editor published in online fora.
In an earlier blog entry I referred to this process of deceiving the media and public as agnotology. This term was originally coined by Stanford historian of science Robert Proctor who identified it as the the trend of skeptic science sown for political or economic ends - e.g. in imparting ignorance and faux skepticism. It is achieved primarily by sowing the teeniest nugget of doubt in whatever claim is made (and as we know NO scientific theory is free of these 100%, even such rich theories as quantum mechanics and special relativity).
Agnotology is derived from the Greek 'agnosis' and hence the study of culturally constructed ignorance'. Proctor notes that when a society doesn't know something it is often because special (often paid) interests have worked hard to sow immense confusion on the issue. People read 'A' then see 'B' ostensibly refuting it, and without a hard science background themselves (at least two years of university physics or chemistry plus calculus), are "lost at sea".
90% of the most recent bout of agnotology has been connected to the "global cooling since 1998" meme. I believe this meme is what Phil Jones was attempting to counter in his e-mails, it's just that he chose the wrong language and procedure to do so.
How did this meme begin? Most likely, in a May, 2008, Nature paper written by Dr. Noel Keenlyside et al, and which made a tentative claim for monotonic global cooling since ca. 1998. This 'jumped the shark' and become embedded into the warming skeptics' arsenal of disinfo and set real global warming science education back at least a decade in my estimation. Now, every hack and wannabe hack from Fox News to Limbaugh to ordinary know-nothing blokes cite it as some kind of mantra that man-made warming is "disproven".
At the root of this misapprehension by the faux skeptics is misinterpretation of the data appearing in the paper - not at all helped by the mainstream media which have also misconstrued it. (Hardly surprising, since these incompetent cheerleaders also let pass the contrived paper by Hany Farid- claiming he'd exposed the alleged Oswald-backyard rifle photo as genuine. Only ONE single article- by Jim Marr and James Fetzer- was ever published challenging Farid's methods and assumptions , in any kind of substantive online vehicle).
Even Editors who fully know the actual original source for the cooling claim still couldn't be bothered to consult it, they preferred to get their info 2nd hand (like from the 'Investor's Business Daily') then bloviate how global warming is "wrong", or "hyped" in sundry editorials. People prone to the denial weltanschauung then read these superficial reports, missed the key core clues, and bruited it all about that they (deniers, skeptics) were right all along.
They could have studied the paper's key figure,(3), the one that looks at past and (forecast) future global temperatures, "Hindcast/forecast decadal variations in global mean temperature, as compared with observations and standard climate model projections". The first thing they’d have noted about the figure -- indeed, one major source of confusion -- is that each point represents a ten-year centered mean. That is, each point represents the average temperature of the decade starting 5 years before that point and ending 5 years after that point. Thus, the statistics for potential “cooling” could not possibly have been justifiably extrapolated beyond 1998 + 5 = 2003. Yet imbeciles all over the place have insisted it is ongoing.
Second, the skeptics would have spotted the red line in the Nature publication and – if bright enough – beheld that it was the the actual global temperature data from the U.K.'s Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research. They ought to have asked: Why does the red line stop in 1998 and not 2007? Again, it’s a running 10-year mean, and the authors use data from a Hadley paper that ends around 2003, In effect, they can't do a ten-year centered mean after 1998.
Lazy deniers, however, have parlayed this simple statistical peculiarity of the data into believing that global warming factually STOPPED in 1998! Third, at least one genius denier might have spotted the black line in the Figure, which was actually one of the IPCC scenario projections, labelled 'A1B.' It denotes a relatively high-CO2-growth model -- but actual carbon emissions since 2000 have wildly outpaced it. A further check by skeptics of the solid green line - the "hindcast" of the authors – e.g. how well their model compared to actual data (and the A1B scenario) could also be done. The lazy morons would have seen that, if extended (in dashes) through 2010 and finally to 2025, it JOINED up with A1B!
Another grievous source of confusion that has been misused by the deniers is the authors statement:
“Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming”
But what they really mean by that statement is not what a simple reading of that sentence would suggest: They did not mean that "the global surface temperature may not increase over the next ten years starting now." What they meant was what the lead author, Dr. Noel Keenlyside, later provided in a clarification letter to the publicaton: They are predicting no increase in average temperature of the "next decade" (2005 to 2015- relative to their data timeline) over the previous decade, which, for them, is 2000 to 2010!
And that is, in fact, precisely what the figure shows -- that the 10-year mean global temperature centered around 2010 is the roughly the same as the mean global temperature centered around 2005.
Now, instead of resorting to "tricks" in future statistical presentations, THIS is what Phil Jones and his cohort ought to have sought to make clear to an increasingly skeptical public. Thus, a better e-mail, more sensible - to his U-PA counterpart, Mann, would have been:
"You know, I think we need to go back to that Keenlyside paper and try to make its statistical content more understandable to the public. It'll take a lot of work but it will be worth it".
Alas, he chose not to do that, but to opt for short cuts, which is the human way.
At the end of the day, the science still holds irrespective of the e-mails. If it didn't, then the American Geophysical Union would have removed its position statement on climate - as the largest climate research scientific organization in the world. However, at last check, it is still up there - as it has been, and in the same words, for the past two years.
http://www.agu.org/outreach/science_policy/positions/climate_change2008.shtml
Of course, in the midst of the obfuscating political haze, it is not suprising many commentators got it wrong when they attempted to provide insight into the e-mails. For example, writing in The Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell (Nov. 28, p. 7) asserts that :
"The emails do not in themselves undermine the IPCC's science, but they are evidence of groupthink. "
To justify the latter, Caldwell then cites the email authors agreeing "to destroy their emails - to defend their work, not against error but against scrutiny"
This must be understood in context. No scientist I know of has any problems defending his or her work against the scrutiny of PEERS. However, vs. laymen with an agenda - decidedly political, is a different matter. For one thing, what quality can the scrutiny assure when it's driven by political or economic imperatives? In this case, ANY weakness at all will be construed as meaning the hypothesis itself is flawed and must be chucked. This is exactly the form of scrutiny I believe the climate e-mailers - already under siege from the skeptics- were prepared to dodge. Was it the noble thing to do? No, but it was the expedient and cheaper, easier thing, given the time consumed by typical scientific research.
What is dismaying to those who have done the research is how deficient the average denier-skeptic is, and how difficult it is to impart correct interpretation of data minus the bogey of ideology which stalks every word written on global warming. (And as Prof. Porter has observed, agnotology always makes its greatest incursion into the most contentious issues - especially those with political or economic consequences. As one 'Physics Today' report noted two years ago, it is as if those political and economic facets actually trump the SCIENCE).
Better physics education may be needed, but I think a large dollop of critical thinking and training in scientific interpretation is also needed. We also desperately require a media less susceptible to political distortions, and especially the corruptness of think tank inputs. Since the Watergate era of the 1970s, mainstream papers - to survive- have gotten cheap in terms of process. By that I mean most now substitute PR flack pieces for hard news, and use widely circulated but "free" syndicated think tank pieces, churned out by the Hudson Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the American Heritage Foundation, and the Independence Institute, as opposed to individual columns. Of course, the latter mean that decent payments must be made for the well thought out pieces. It is far cheaper and easier just to sign on to the circulated tripe from think tanks and let the chips fall where they may.
Those "chips" now constitute a largely brainwashed public - which grasps little or no science, but is prepared to be driven politically into one corner regarding global warming.
Alas, it is the wrong corner.
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