Reprinted with permission from Grist.org.
I wrote about the "Climategate" controversy (over emails stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit) once, which is about what it warranted.
My silent protest had no effect whatsoever, of course, and the story followed a depressingly familiar trajectory: hyped relentlessly by right-wing media, bullied into the mainstream press as he-said she-said, and later, long after the damage is done, revealed as utterly bereft of substance. It's a familiar script for climate faux controversies, though this one played out on a slightly grander scale.
Investigations galore
Consider that there have now been five, count 'em five, inquiries into the matter. Penn State established an independent inquiry into the accusations against scientist Michael Mann and found "no credible evidence" [PDF] of improper research conduct. A British government investigation run by the House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee found that while the CRU scientists could have been more transparent and responsive to freedom-of-information requests, there was no evidence of scientific misconduct. The U.K.'s Royal Society (its equivalent of the National Academies) ran an investigation that found "no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice." The University of East Anglia appointed respected civil servant Sir Muir Russell to run an exhaustive, six-month independent inquiry; he concluded that "the honesty and rigour of CRU as scientists are not in doubt... We have not found any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments."
All those results are suggestive, but let's face it, they're mostly... British. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) wanted an American investigation of all the American scientists involved in these purported dirty deeds. So he asked the Department of Commerce's inspector general to get to the bottom of it. On Feb. 18, the results of that investigation were released. "In our review of the CRU emails," the IG's office said in its letter to Inhofe [PDF], "we did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data... or failed to adhere to appropriate peer review procedures." (Oddly, you'll find no mention of this central result in Inhofe's tortured public response.)
Whatever legitimate issues there may be about the responsiveness or transparency of this particular group of scientists, there was nothing in this controversy -- nothing -- that cast even the slightest doubt on the basic findings of climate science. Yet it became a kind of stain on the public image of climate scientists. How did that happen?
Smooth criminals
You don't hear about it much in the news coverage, but recall, the story began with a crime. Hackers broke into the East Anglia email system and stole emails and documents, an illegal invasion of privacy. Yet according to the Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel, the emails "found their way to the internet." In ABC science correspondent Ned Potter's telling, the emails "became public." The New York Times' Andy Revkin says they were "extracted from computers."
None of those phrasings are wrong, per se, but all pass rather lightly over the fact that some actual person or persons put them on the internet, made them public, extracted them from the computers. Someone hacked in, collected emails, sifted through and selected those that could be most damning, organized them, and timed the release for maximum impact, just before the Copenhagen climate talks. Said person or persons remain uncaught, uncharged, and unprosecuted. There have since been attempted break-ins at other climate research institutions.
If step one was crime, step two was character assassination. When the emails were released, they were combed over by skeptic blogs and right-wing media, who collected sentences, phrases, even individual terms that, when stripped of all context, create the worst possible impression. Altogether the whole thing was as carefully staged as any modern-day political attack ad.
Yet when the "scandal" broke, rather than being about criminal theft and character assassination, it was instantly "Climategate." It was instantly about climate scientists, not the illegal and dishonest tactics of their attackers. The scientists, not the ideologues and ratf*ckers, had to defend themselves.
Burden of proof
It's a numbingly familiar pattern in media coverage. The conservative movement that's been attacking climate science for 20 years has a storied history of demonstrable fabrications, distortions, personal attacks, and nothingburger faux-scandals -- not only on climate science, but going back to asbestos, ozone, leaded gasoline, tobacco, you name it. They don't follow the rigorous standards of professional science; they follow no intellectual or ethical standards whatsoever. Yet no matter how long their record of viciousness and farce, every time the skeptic blogosphere coughs up a new "ZOMG!" it's as though we start from zero again, like no one has a memory longer than five minutes.
Here's the basic question: At this point, given their respective accomplishments and standards, wouldn't it make sense to give scientists the strong benefit of the doubt when they are attacked by ideologues with a history of dishonesty and error? Shouldn't the threshold for what counts as a "scandal" have been nudged a bit higher?
Agnotological inquiry
Beck, Palin, and the rest of Fox News and talk radio operate on the pretense that they are giving consumers access to a hidden "universe of reality," to use Limbaugh's term. It's a reality being actively obscured by the "lamestream media," academics, scientists, and government officials. Affirming the tenets of that secret reality has become an act of tribal reinforcement, the equivalent of a secret handshake.
The modern right has created a closed epistemic loop containing millions of people. Within that loop, the implausibility or extremity of a claim itself counts as evidence. The more liberal elites reject it, the more it entrenches itself. Standards of evidence have nothing to do with it.
The notion that there is a global conspiracy by professional scientists to falsify results in order to get more research money is, to borrow Quiggen's words about birtherism, "a shibboleth, that is, an affirmation that marks the speaker as a member of their community or tribe." Once you have accepted that shibboleth, anything offered to you as evidence of its truth, no matter how ludicrous, will serve as affirmation. (Even a few context-free lines cherry-picked from thousands of private emails.)
Living with the loop
There's one thing we haven't learned from climategate (or death panels or birtherism). U.S. politics now contains a large, well-funded, tightly networked, and highly amplified tribe that defines itself through rejection of "lamestream" truth claims and standards of evidence. How should our political culture relate to that tribe?
We haven't figured it out. Politicians and the political press have tried to accommodate the shibboleths of the right as legitimate positions for debate. The press in particular has practically sworn off plain judgments of accuracy or fact. But all that's done is confuse and mislead the broader public, while the tribe pushes ever further into extremity. The tribe does not want to be accommodated. It is fueled by elite rejection.
At this point mainstream institutions like the press are in a bind: either accept the tribe's assertions as legitimate or be deemed "biased." Until there is a way out of that trap, there will be more and more Climategates.
Reprinted with permission from Grist.org.
Follow David Roberts on Twitter: www.twitter.com/drgrist
Why is this a breach of scientific protocol? Because it is quite obvious to any reputable scientist that if a proxy is provably incapable of accurately tracking temperatures now, how could it possibly be good at tracking temperatures a thousand years ago ? If the bogus data at the end of the hockey stick is removed, then the temperature in the present (according to tree rings) is not any higher than in a number of other periods in the past.
This was the "trick" to "hide the decline". The decline that is being referenced is not in global temperatures, but rather the reliability of tree rings, which are dramatically off from current thermometer readings. This was done to provide a graph that would influence policy makers, as is CLEARLY revealed in the Email conversations between these researchers.
Please find another single instance of this sort of "trick" being used to hide the unreliability of a data set in any reputable study in a rigorous science. Good luck.
If you take as a standpoint the unchallengeable fact that scientists are infallible Dave, then it follows that nothing they could ever do or say could possibly be flawed. Suppose they state that ufos don’t exist. Then even the arrival of one right in front of you, would have to be the result of some mental aberration on your part. Since their understanding dominates all other considerations. If perchance you were ever brave enough to question that belief, would you discover the existence of a single anomaly in their assertions? A true believer might answer no. But then a true believer would never dare look. Because the detection of one unexpected contradiction would suggest that there were likely to be others. And that might spell the end of the spell, for a believer.
“Beck, Palin, and the rest of Fox News and talk radio operate on the pretense that they are giving consumers access to a hidden "universe of reality,"
But isn’t that what scientists do too Dave? And since no one, except a supernatural entity that science says cannot be proven to exist, knows for certain. Who is kidding who?
“Standards of evidence have nothing to do with it”.
We can base assumptions on our best interpretation of the evidence available to us. But if our interpretation is erroneous and/or sufficient evidence is not in evidence, all bets are off.
I know, I have studied linguistics and it's a favorite tool fo PR-firms and adverstising agencies.
The trick:
take two adjectives and hyphened them together so that an impression is given but to attack the phrase as whole or individually will look ridiculous.
For example:
If I'm a Verizon or some internet service provider who wishes to lobby for regulations that favor my monopoly I would use terms like "broadband-access" which can be interpreted any way you want and if I have the loudest microphone, my interpetation wins.
Frank Luntz does a good job for both Republicans and Democrats in crafting terms that sound cute-n-funny but are serious when you dig down underneath and find out what the real agenda is.
public-option, climate-change, global-warming, clean-air, renewable-energy, single-payer, toxic-assets, mental-health, pro-choice, direct-access, comprehensive-study, ethics-violations.
These terms make up the very vocabulary of politics, not science, and in many cases, not reality.
Global warming describes the cause. Climate change describes the effect.
If you said "warming-globe" instead you couldn't prove it without a doubt.
"Climate-change" is a pretty good linguistic trick because the climate is always changing and it could be interpreted to mean anything.
It's like saying "advanced dynamics" - what does it mean?...whatever you say it means.
Folks on the "climate change" side need to consider as well that if the world does what they want a lot of people are going to starve. You cut energy output by that much while you wait for "clean" tech to catch up and you are going to slash global output and raise prices. People will die. Are you really that sure?
But the fact remains, the science itself still holds. Your last statement assumes that AGW is wrong, because AGW is the real threat that will cause mass human suffering and death. And you assume that alternative means of energy will not make up the gap. Governments the world over are planning to make proper changes.
Hmmm... protecting our planet, seeking out alternative energy sources -- that is going to kill people? What do you suppose doing nothing will do?
But far more damaging to action on Climate Change are 2 rather intransigent facts:
1) In the US public mind, Climate Change is forever wedded to Global Warming - and the weather in the US refuses to cooperate. Which would be OK if the US didn't hold the keys to any global action.
2) The entire "alternate energy" complex of analysts, scientists, writers, etc.,etc. etc., together with their supporters in government, want to have it both ways - in other words, we can keep increasing consumption of everything geometrically AND get off oil and coal, etc. Well, as of this minute, that is a complete and total fantasy. There is nothing now, or on the horizon, that can be ramped up to the scale we're talking about in anything less than decades, with no clear winner emergent even after 30 years and hundreds of billions of dollars of research (all told).
It's time environmentalists ditched the nicey-nicey talk - this will be a tough, wrenching world of less.
Furthermore, Ice cores, which are another proxy for temp and supposedly co2 readings, have just been thrown up into the air as the result of recent findings that suggest that melting and refreezing does not just happen on the surface of glaciers, but from the BOTTOM as well. This would pretty much turn the assumption about ice core data on its head as well.
And the computer models? To suggest that data gleaned from computer models of global temperature are 90% accurate is simply ridiculous. There are so many unknowns and wrong or uncertain assumptions that impact them that they should be only mildly considered.
Climate Change is a very broad sum-what vague title unlike Global Warming which was a self explanatory. Honestly Climate Change could as easily mean Global Cooling as it could Global Warming.
Was there an explanation of that?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm
I know! It's just astounding to follow the 'shibboleth' in any number of articles that just happen to deal with caring for our one and only planet.
At this point, the evidence supporting human-caused climate change is piling up rapidly, with several new studies published in just the last two weeks. However, here is a web site that summarizes the scientific case (and doesn't require a subscription for access): http://www.skepticalscience.com/10-Indicators-of-a-Human-Fingerprint-on-Climate-Change.html. The site also has a section (accessible through links on the left-hand side) that addresses common arguments raised against climate change.
Money quote:
China has already surpassed the U.S. when it comes to the worst pollution levels in the world, and considering its rapid rate of growth — that number is only going to grow before it comes down. Currently over 70 percent of China’s electricity comes from coal plants, and the country is continuing to build more of them. As a result, China is now responsible for 24 percent of the global fossil emissions of CO2.
China is also supposed to see a surge in vehicular traffic to more than 1.2 billion by 2025, from 750 million today. India will be doing the same providing cheap autos for new drivers.
China's rising middle and upper classes want autos> check the death tolls, they won't be going down(600 per day> 200000 per yr). New drivers, pedestrians beware. Cheap cars fewer safety regulations for the under classes.. Do you think they'll have air-bags, use seat-belts? Hainan Island?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/world/asia/31hainan.html
Remaking the island(size of Belgium) into an ultra-rich playground. Investors are driving up prices of land and seafront properties and displacing local populations and industries. "no-holds-barred effort to remake Hainan into the Chinese equivalent of Monaco, Las Vegas and Hawaii." What about toxic exports, pirating intellectual rights(DVD/CD) and the endangered animal trade? Think they care about lightbulbs?
http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=389&catid=10&subcatid=66 >deforestation
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006-05/30/content_604228.htm >rivers
http://www2.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2010-09/09/content_11277493.htm> auto pollution
http://www.accidentattorneys.com/china-auto-acc-deaths.cfm > auto deaths
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,493033,00.html> india river pollution
http://www.corrosion-doctors.org/AtmCorros/mapIndia.htm> india air pollution
http://www1.american.edu/ted/russair.htm> russia air
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20090213/120116967.html> russia air
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/257934/russian_tv_blames_amur_river_pollution_on_chinese_sewage/ >dying river
http://alttransport.com/2011/02/u-s-says-beijing-air-pollution-is-beyond-measurable/# >worst
See next comment.
The only people who poisoned anyone's credibility are the right-wing money men and their media puppets, most especially Fox and the Rushes of the airwaves, who took a couple of sentences out of context and blew them up into a this huge conspiracy of climate scientists the world over. Oh, yeah: and the people who happily fell for it, like you.