The champions of climate science moved onto other fronts, leaving climate scientists to hold down the fort. However, this approach ignored a basic principal of conflict – victories must be defended.

Before focusing on how to reframe the debate on climate science, it’s fair to ask whether it’s worth the effort. In the wake of the Nobel Prize-winning IPCC report on climate change three years ago, with climate science seemingly well established, advocates for climate protection focused their attention and rhetoric on the power of clean technology to fuel economic growth and create green jobs. This strategy was driven in part by the sober realization that abstract science is very limited when it comes to reaching and mobilizing mainstream audiences in the U.S. Fancy PowerPoint charts describing a threat arriving 100 years in the future just won’t cut it when your job is on the line right now and rent is due next week.

With the IPCC report well publicized, the champions of climate science moved onto other fronts, leaving climate scientists to hold down the fort. However, this approach ignored a basic principal of conflict – victories must be defended. Not surprisingly, the opponents of climate protection took advantage and mobilized to attack the science. They understood full well that, while the science is insufficient by itself to mobilize public will, it does provide the foundation for building the moral outrage than can and does move Americans. Poll after poll has found that highlighting the threat global warming poses to our children’s future is one of the few compelling arguments that gain traction with mainstream audiences. But that threat is meaningless if the science is not believed.

At the same time, the scale and pace of change required to avoid catastrophic climate change can’t be summoned simply by highlighting the benefits of investing in clean energy. The benefits from changing over to a low carbon society are too diffuse, and the few big winners are yet to be known. Meanwhile the losers know exactly who they are and understand that they stand to lose, and they have the deep pockets to fight long and hard. Choosing between highlighting the benefits of change or focusing on the danger of inaction is a bad strategy. Both benefits and risks must be illuminated.

Choosing between highlighting the benefits of change or focusing on the danger of inaction is a bad strategy. Both benefits and risks must be illuminated.

Science is the question (and it shouldn’t be)

Currently, media coverage of climate science is framed such that it defines the fundamental question as an issue of science, not politics. In this setting, the more the science is debated, the more the science is defined as debatable. There is simply no way to “prove” the science in a sound bite or a new story. Debating the science in the news is a no-win proposition that perpetuates public doubt.

There are four dimensions to the frame of every issue. And there is an opportunity to recast every dimension of climate science debate.

The Messenger

When audiences read news stories and attempt to make out the underlying issues, they take an important cue from the identity of the messengers. And currently, climate scientists are almost the sole messengers defending climate science. While this is problematic on a number of fronts, it is particularly challenging for the framing of the debate. Putting a scientist in the messenger role reinforces the notion that the fundamental issue is a question about the science. If scientists are doing the debating it is only natural to assume the science is debatable.

Beyond the question of identity, many scientists don’t make for a good messenger when the issue is politicized, such as with climate science. They are loath to call out the politics and step into a controversy outside their area of expertise.

Putting a scientist in the messenger role reinforces the notion that the fundamental issue is a question about the science. If scientists are doing the debating it is only natural to assume the science is debatable.

Climate scientists must be joined by other messengers who are willing to stand up and speak out against the attack on science: farmers whose children would inherit dust-bowl farms due to the delay urged by climate deniers, generals who understand the national security threat, and business leaders who understand that every year of delay in investing in clean energy costs the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars.

The Message

When debate becomes poisoned and opponents are engaged in distortion and deceit, it becomes critically necessary to call out the politics and highlight the consequences of arguing in bad faith.

Climate advocates should document and highlight the funding and industry ties for the current wave of climate deniers. While the new generation of critics is often driven by partisan politics as much as by direct industry interests, their partisanship is fair game for reprove, particularly when it comes at the expense of our nation.

Advocates for climate protection need to go on the offensive.

They need to go beyond saying what the attacks don’t do (”they don’t undermine the science”) and spell out what the attacks do achieve: costly and dangerous delay.

Calling out the politics is a way to bridge the debate, to move away from debating climate science to highlighting the impacts of climate change as well as the opportunity to invest in a clean energy economy, an opportunity jeopardized by the delaying and stonewalling tactics of climate deniers.

The Audience

The audience forms the third dimension of a news frame. Tell the same story to a different audience and you can end up with a different story. In the context of the climate science debate, addressing the ultra-conservative audiences served up by Fox News is a low priority. The focus should be on independent audiences in key states. At the same time, it is important not to ignore liberal bloggers simply because reaching out to them is seen as preaching to the choir. That choir makes up the much talked about echo chamber, and if you don’t give the choir a songbook, it doesn’t know what to sing.

The Setting

It’s critically important to do more than defend the IPCC. Debating 1,000 page science reports is not a compelling setting, and the rehabilitation of the IPCC brand will not happen overnight, despite the fact that the damage was done by erroneous attacks.

A better setting for talking about climate science is a real time impact of climate change, be it a record heat wave or record heavy rains followed by heavy flooding. There is no denying what your eyes can see. Last fall’s record setting flood in Atlanta was a textbook example of the kind of impact that should be highlighted. Only months earlier, NOAA had released a consensus science report documenting the trend of increased heavy precipitation during the fall months in the southeastern United States. NOAA identified climate change as driving the trend and predicted more of the same for the future.

If you don’t give the choir a songbook, it doesn’t know what to sing.

Some have argued that focusing on current weather can be tricky. However, advocates were forced to do just that when opponents focused on the recent snowstorms as “proof” that global warming was oversold. Advocates were successful in pushing back on climate change deniers in that instance, and the same effort should be applied to upcoming heat waves, droughts and flooding, events that fit the pattern of increasing extreme events that scientists have clearly documented and predicted will only increase as the impacts of climate change intensify,

Another useful setting can be the courtroom, where the plaintiffs are real life people who’ve suffered real losses from climate change. In this setting the question is not whether or not the science is solid, but whether the fossils fuel industry should be held legally liable for the billions of tons of carbon pollution it has dumped into the atmosphere.

Other useful story lines could highlight different governments, companies, and stakeholders such as water managers who are already making decisions and taking action based on what the science is dictating, reinforcing the notion that the science is settled–and urgent–with dramatic consequences for their business and communities.

Fending off the attack on climate science does require a concerted rapid-response defense simply to set the record straight. But winning the debate requires going beyond defending the science. It requires asking different questions, such as who wins and who loses.

This is a guest post by Hunter Cutting, his blog can be found at talkinthewalk.wordpress.com. This piece was first posted on the Huffington Post.

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• SealevelGate — Real Climate cover the true IPCC sea-level scandal. Must read.
• Climate of fear, Nature editorial (free access) — “The integrity of climate research has taken a very public battering in recent months. Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight.”
• Overview of all the ‘Gates — very useful brief run-down of the last 4 months.
• Short must read: Climate Change and the Media — “What’s truly infuriating about this episode of journalistic malpractice is that, once again, it illustrates the reasons why the East Anglia scientists adopted an adversarial attitude towards information management with regard to outsiders and the media. They were afraid that any data they allowed to be characterised by non-climate scientists would be vulnerable to propagandistic distortion. And they were right.”

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The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee met yesterday for a one off evidence session looking at the disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. This blog post is a brief summary of the key issues. [Apologies for the use of some jargon that crops up because of the nature of the CRU emails.]

Lord Lawson and Dr Benny Peiser were first up. They represent the Global Warming Policy Foundation who, amusingly, failed to plot 8 temperature values correctly in their logo — I’m not sure that this gives them the authority to question 25 years of academic research on climate data but let’s see what they had to say…

Lawson’s main point was about the fundamental importance of transparency in science (not that Lawson or Peiser have ever been scientists). However, he would not answer the question put to him about who funds his organisation — this was a bit of a cheap shot but it helped make the point that transparency is only important to them in other organisations.

Evan Harris MP did excellent work in setting Lawson up for a fall in his questions about the “…hide the decline…” emails. Lawson was claiming that the details of dendroclimatology divergence were not discussed in any of the subsequent key papers on tree ring based climate reconstructions. Harris then got Lawson to agree that if the CRU scientists could show that they did discuss this matter in their publications then this was not an issue. This comes up again later.

Lawson also brought up an incorrect criticism of satellite measurements, which was subsequently corrected, and claimed that the hockey stick graph was “fraudulent” and periods of it were based on only one tree, claims which he has no evidence to back up.

Ian Stewart MP also asked some questions about work that the GWPF plan to do that highlighted their lack of scientific credentials or ambition. Lawson also brought up an incorrect criticism of satellite measurements, which Prof. Julia Slingo (MetOffice) would subsequently correct, and claimed that the “hockey stick” graph was “fraudulent” and periods of it were based on only one tree, claims which he has no evidence to back up.

Next to be questioned was Richard Thomas CBE, UK Information Commissioner (2002–2009), who provided some quite technical details on Freedom of Information – I’m not too sure what he added to the session. I suspect I do not understand enough about FoI laws but my interpretation of his evidence was that CRU may or may not have done anything wrong and that methodology, if documented, has to be distributed under FoI requests but there is no requirement to document it.

I felt that the most important witness, Prof. Phil Jones (accompanied by UEA vice-chancellor Prof. Edward Acton), did not look particularly well and spoke a bit shakily. He went over quite a bit of the background to CRU’s work and data policies and delt with most of the issues. However, he could have done much better when asked about reproducibility of CRU’s gridded surface temperature products by others: all he needed to say was that as long as someone spent the time collecting the data from meteorological organisations and read some scientific papers then they could, with a bit of work, re-produce the CRU temperature product! Reproducability does not mean that you have to give anyone everything you’ve ever worked on.

This was typical of his statments — it seemed like he missed the point of many of the questions — this was quite a contrast to Lawson who was obviously more comfortable with the rhetoric required to successfully get through these sessions. In particular, Jones’ statement that he’d sent some “awful emails” was probably meant as a joke but it didn’t get any laughs.

It seemed like Phil Jones missed the point of many of the questions — this was quite a contrast to Lawson who was obviously more comfortable with the rhetoric required to successfully get through these sessions.

Evan Harris MP completed his manoeuvre of highlighting Lord Lawson’s misunderstanding of the divergence issue – Phil Jones described that the “trick” was discussed in a Nature paper, where he suspects they were the first group to use the term “divergence”, and that they were explicit in subsequent papers about this issue. I suspect that this will be a key point in the committee’s report.

Harris appeared to be the only member of the committee that understood the background enough to have devised a consistent line of questioning to the witnesses. Indeed, some of the questions from other committee members made it clear their understanding of peer review and research methods was not great.

My live streaming of the event cut out as Sir Muir Russell (Head of the Independent Climate Change E-Mails Review) took the hot seat so I missed his and Prof. John Beddington (Government Chief Scientific Adviser), Prof. Julia Slingo OBE (Chief Scientist, Met Office) and Prof. Bob Watson’s (Chief Scientist, Defra) statements but, reviewing the Gaurdian live blog of the session, there don’t seeem to have been any more bombshells. The most important development was that the quite negative Institute of Physics evidence submission came up — the final group of witnesses felt that it pre-judged the outcome of the enquiry.

My overall impression was that the committee, as well as the GWPF, didn’t seem to understand enough about the scientific process to make progress in this case: papers don’t have a right to be published – they have to be good enough; scientific methods are discussed in papers but no-one publishes computer code of how the analyses were performed (this should probably change though). Phil Jones was also not well prepared to answer general questions from a non-specialist panel and would clearly prefer to deal with arguments in the pages of peer-reviewed journals.

My overall impression was that the committee, as well as the GWPF, didn’t seem to understand enough about the scientific process to make progress in this case.

Update: The Institute of Physics have recently ‘clarified their position’.

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These are strange statements, given that climatologists have meanwhile willingly acknowledged and corrected genuine errors, and offered suggestions on improving IPCC processes. The journal Nature published a series of suggestions from five prominent climate scientists on ways forward for the IPCC. The Guardian ran a similar story full of scientists suggesting reforms. Climate modeller William Connolley critiqued the thoroughness of IPCC Working Group II, while defending its use of “grey” literature. Other scientists suggested separating the IPCC’s Working Groups. The evidence suggests the scientific profession puts reflection, doubt and criticism at the heart of its practice.

By contrast, the media’s reluctance to address its own failings is stark. Recent weeks have seen a deluge of “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information” in climate change reporting – precisely the kind of material it is the Press Complaints Commission’s (PCC’s) stated role to guard against. But, as its exoneration of Jan Moir’s falsehoods over Stephen Gately’s death has highlighted, this “self-regulatory” industry body remains toothless.

On climate change, various recent journalistic performances have been particularly outrageous. Jonathan Leake of the Sunday Times attacked the IPCC over a “bogus” and “unsubstantiated” claim on the Amazon’s sensitivity to reductions in rainfall. Yet Leake was well aware – having been informed by two leading experts, one of whom he went on to selectively quote – that the IPCC had got its facts right.

Leake later accused the IPCC of inaccurately connecting climate change to more frequent extreme weather events – citing its (allegedly) problematic treatment of a single economic study. “UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters”, Leake’s headline screamed. Barack Obama had mentioned the link, we were told. The issue of developing countries’ adaptation funding was predicated on it.

This was transparent nonsense. The group behind the study exonerated the IPCC’s “fair” and “appropriate” treatment, which included “suitable caveats”. The IPCC had obviously not based all future projections of extreme weather events on one economic study – as it quickly pointed out. Adaptation funding – which covers impacts of all kinds – was obviously not founded on one study on extreme weather.

Then there’s the infamous David Rose – a journalist who persistently promoted the fictitious Iraq-Al-Qaeda connection in the run-up to the Iraq war. Rose recently mangled the work of climate scientist Mojib Latif in the Mail, portraying him as dissenting from the scientific consensus – a claim Latif said he “cannot understand”. Rose conflated the man’s climate forecasts with spells of cold weather that “are not related at all”, in Latif’s words. “You can’t compare the two.” Latif’s work suggested that climate change might be offset by short-term variations up to 2015 – not a “mini ice age” lasting up to 30 years. “I don’t know what to do”, as Latif exasperatedly put it. “They just make these things up.”

Rose subsequently smeared the IPCC. On its Himalayan glaciers error, lead author Murari Lal, Rose claimed, “admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders”. Rose quoted Lal directly: “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.” Both claims, Lal revealed, were simply false.

These are not isolated mistakes: the press have bent over backwards to misrepresent climate scientists in recent weeks. The Times claimed that Bob Watson had identified an “apparent bias” in the IPCC’s errors. Watson stated: “I was interviewed for an hour, and it was obvious that the reporter wanted me to say that the authors were biased – I said I did not believe that.” The mistaken Himalayan glacier melt forecast repeatedly described as a “central claim” of the IPCC was barely reported at all when its report was released – unsurprisingly, since it appears nowhere in the summaries where its “central claims” can be found. Rajendra Pachauri was excoriated for calling criticism of this error “voodoo science”. He was criticising a report that mentions neither the 2035 claim nor the IPCC.

These are egregious journalistic failings, well within the PCC’s remit. Sadly, its handling of similar complaints has been woeful. Nine months after the Telegraph’s Christopher Booker penned an article calling sea-level rise “a colossal scare story”, for instance – prompting a complaint from Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute – the Commission ruled that “It is not of course for the PCC to make findings of fact on where the truth about climate change lies”. The body is of course obliged to make judgments on clear factual inaccuracies, and Ward had exposed a whole selection. Yet Booker was exonerated; his article remains.

In effect the PCC relieves columnists of the obligation to base articles on facts – a tendency which has now reached absurd heights. In theory, the body requires newspapers “to distinguish between comment, conjecture and fact”. Yet it recently ruled that the words “the fact is” – prefacing a review of published research findings – did not indicate a statement of fact. A shocking betrayal of readers this may be – but it is fortunate for papers. Fundamental inaccuracies permeate innumerable comment pieces on climate science – and not just on climate science. Far from deterring “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information”, the PCC acts as a rubber stamp.

The UK desperately needs a press that does not defraud the public on matters of basic science. A responsible media requires accountability: without effective regulation, through the enforcement of legally binding standards by a genuinely independent body, this will inevitably remain a distant prospect. Sure, the IPCC could arguably use some reforms. But the PCC needs to be replaced.

A version of this post was first published on Left Foot Forward.

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Scientists who challenged the possibility of catastrophic sea level rise in coming decades have retracted their argument. Mark Siddall, whose paper claimed sea level rise from global warming could not be more than 82 centimeters (32 inches) by 2100 — despite other estimates of up to 1.9 meters — asked for the conclusions published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience to be retracted, accepting corrections from researchers who had made the higher estimates. The Guardian misleadingly presented the news with the headline, “Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels“:

Study claimed in 2009 that sea levels would rise by up to 82cm by the end of century – but the report’s author now says true estimate is still unknown.

If all one read was the introduction, a reader might get the false impression that sea level rise from global warming is in doubt. The misleading Guardian headline was picked up — as per usual — by the Drudge Report and Marc Morano’s conspiracy site Climate Depot. Right-wing bloggers, unsurprisingly, latched on to the headline without any comprehension of the story:

Betsy Newmark: Another global warming claim that has had to be retracted because of problems with the data.

Sammy Benoit: OOPS Never-mind! Climate scientists withdraw IPCC-related article claiming sea is rising.

JammieWearingFool: Another global warming myth comes crashing down. No warming since at least 1995, no melting glaciers and now no rising sea levels.

Jules Crittenden: Warmal scientists are compelled to admit (again) that they don’t know what they’re talking about, retract study that predicted up to a nearly three-foot sea level rise by 2100.

Law professor William A. Jacobson: But now the seas are not going to rise? My dream of a waterfront home is melting away faster than the glaciers.

Caleb Howe: Yet another card removed from the geodesic dome of cards that is AGW hysteria.

However, the retraction instead admits that the paper’s calculations for an upper bound to future sea level rise were incorrect, and sea level rise could be much worse. Siddall’s study, “Constraints on future sea-level rise from past sea-level change,” used paleoclimate reconstructions to predict that sea level rise from global warming would be constrained to between 7 cm and 82 cm (3 to 32 in) by the end of the century, in line with the estimated sea level rise in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which excluded possible effects from ice sheets.

Unfortunately for the future of human civilization, the best scientific estimates of future sea level rise continue to worsen, as it becomes evident that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass much more rapidly than estimated before 2007. December’s “Global sea level linked to global temperature,” published by Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences projects a catastrophic rise of 0.75 to 1.9 m (2.5 to 6 feet) by 2100:

Figure 3: Projection of sea-level rise from 1990 to 2100, based on IPCC temperature projections for three different emission scenarios. The sea-level range projected in the IPCC AR4 for these scenarios are shown for comparison in the bars on the bottom right. Also shown in red is observed sea-level (Vermeer 2009). The estimate from Siddall 2009 that contradicted Vermeer has been retracted.

Over the past twenty years, actual sea level rise has been at the top of estimated limits since the first IPCC report in 1990. By 2200, scientists warn, the oceans could rise by more than three meters, submerging cities like Los Angeles, Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, and lower Manhattan.

The right-wingers promoting this news are ironically supporting RealClimate.org scientists, who blogged about the problems with Siddall’s paper in August, 2009. As WhiskeyFire’s Thers notes, “This is getting monotonous.”

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• RealClimate | IPCC errors: facts and spin
• Defusing the Methane Greenhouse Time Bomb: Scientific American
• Richard Alley’s keynote at the 2009 AGU AGM — If you want a primer on the role of CO2 in the ancient climate, this is it.
• At least one journalist at the Telegraph understands risk
• More Grumbine Science: Cloud-temperature feedback — Great run through of cloud feedbacks, what we do know & what we don’t.
• A Historian Looks ‘Back’ at the Climate Fight — Dot Earth Blog — “But this was the first time the media reported that an entire community of scientists had been accused of actual dishonesty. Such claims, if directed for example at a politician on a matter of minor importance, would normally require serious investigation.”

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As the years passed by, media coverage deteriorated further. Claims by researchers who never published scientific papers to back up their claims were reported in the newspapers as important new scientific breakthroughs, while at the very same time, evidence showing no link between MMR and autism, fully published in peer reviewed academic journals, was simply ignored. This was cynical, and unforgivable.

That last paragraph is particularly important because it shows one of the more common ways in which mainstream media outlets consistently distorts the truth by selectively highlighting particular claims and/or research on the basis of whether it conforms to an established narrative. Take, for example, yesterday’s Sunday Times, which devoted several hundred words to the uncritical promotion of the latest effluvial outpourings of  TV weatherman and all-round climate crock, Anthony Watts.

Left Foot Forward has some of the relevant background to Watts’ report, which he co-authored with another well-known climate change denier, Joseph D’Aleo, but what’s much more interesting and illuminating here a recent peer-reviewed paper by Menne et al (2010) [1], which was published last month in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Menne’s paper, which is usefully summarised at Skeptical Science, takes what was, at the time it was written, Anthony Watts’ assessments of the quality and siting characteristic of 43% of the surface stations included in the US Historical Climate Network (USHCN) and does something with that Watts’ appears not to have even attempted. It analyses the temperature records of these stations and looks specifically for evidence of biases associated with poor siting.

For anyone not familiar with Watts and his Surface Stations website, his personal contribution to climate change denialism has been to use his website to recruit an army of volunteers to go out and photograph the location of surface stations included in the USHCN network in order to evaluate the siting of those stations against published quality standards.

The belief is that this photographic evidence proves that the warming trends evident in the US surface station record are not being generated by climate change but are, in fact, nothing more than the product of microsite influences; the siting of surface stations near car parks, airport tarmac and air conditioners. These, Watts argues, introduce a warming bias into the temperature record.

By examining what has rapidly become the climate change deniers’ holy grail, the raw, uncorrected, temperature data for all the stations that Watts’ had assessed up to the point at which they started work (43% of the total number of sites included in the USHCN), Menne and his co-authors did, indeed, find clear evidence of a bias in the raw data associated with those sites that Watts had assessed as being of poor quality.

Unfortunately, for Watts, this bias turned out to be exact opposite of the one that he predicted.

The poor quality sites included in the USCHN, and identified by Watts, have actually imparted a cooling bias on the raw US surface temperature record since the 1980’s for reasons relating to changes in the instrumentation used to create the records.

(The technical explanation for this is covered by Menne et al’s paper and by Skeptical Science, both of which are linked earlier)

Although Watts’ survey of USCHN surface stations has proved useful here – which Menne openly acknowledges in his paper – what it doesn’t provide is any scientific evidence to support Watts’ proposition that climate change is a complete fraud and one based squarely on the deliberate manipulation of temperature records by climate scientists.

In fact, nothing that Watts does could reasonably categorised as actual science.

This is well evidenced by his response to Menne et al, which consists of yet more surface station photographs and the rehashing of an old critique of the use of homogenised data in a previous NOAA analysis – which is debunked here. None of this has any relevance whatsoever to Menne’s research, which used the unhomogenised raw data for the surface stations included in its analysis and cannot, therefore, be said to have been manipulated by climate scientists.

In short, Watts’ response to a paper which blows a major hole in his pet hypothesis is to post a couple of photos and then quickly change the subject.

To devote several hundred words to a puff piece that promotes Watts’ screed as if it were the work of a genuine scientist is, as Ben Goldacre points out, both cynical and unforgivable – and all the more so in view of the GMC’s recent findings on Andrew Wakefield. These should have given the mainstream media pause for thought but have, instead, been roundly ignored in terms of their implications for the conduct and behaviour of the press in its reporting of scientific issues and evidence.

To make matters even worse than usual, unlike the majority of the news coverage of Wakefield’s fraudulent research, which was written up by non-specialist journalists, the article on Watts’ report carries the byline of Jonathan Leake, the paper’s Science and Environment editor, who really has no excuse for being unaware of Menne et al’s paper…

…is he’s doing his job properly and carrying out the necessary background checks on his work rather than simply churning out wire copy and whatever press releases are being thrust under his nose.

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Suppose you have a child, a son — he’s 10. You want to know whether or not he’s growing normally, so every day you measure his height with a tape measure. You’ve done so since he was 5. You even plot the data on a graph, and notice two things about it. First: the measurements show a fair amount of jitter, sometimes they’re a wee bit higher, sometimes a wee bit lower, there’s noise in the data. Second: there’s also a trend. Your kid is a lot taller at 10 than he was at 5, in fact the trend over the observed time span is upward and reasonably steady. You even do a statistical analysis, estimate the growth rate, and determine that it’s definitely statistically significant — so it’s not a false trend due to noise in the data, it’s real. Your son is growing normally.

Then you’re interviewed by a reporter from the Daily Mail. He asks, “Can you prove — with statistical significance — that your child has been growing since last Tuesday?”

You reply that no, even though the trend over that time span is upward, it’s not statistically significant.

The next day you read the article in the Daily Mail which is titled, “Growthgate U-turn as parent admits: There has been no growth since last Tuesday.”

You protest. “I never said my child wasn’t growing! I just said that the data over such a short time span didn’t show it with statistical significance! That’s only because on such a short time scale, the noise obscures the trend.”

Alas, it’s too late, the damage is done, because 3500 blogs have repeated the article from the Daily Mail and child protective services has been asked to investigate your fitness as a parent.

Sound familiar?

Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate has this to say about the Daily Mail’s horrible misquoting of Phil Jones:

What Jones actually said is that, while the globe has nominally warmed since 1995, it is difficult to establish the statistical significance of that warming given the short nature of the time interval (1995-present) involved. The warming trend consequently doesn’t quite achieve statistical significance. But it is extremely difficult to establish a statistically significant trend over a time interval as short as 15 years–a point we have made countless times at RealClimate. It is also worth noting that the CRU record indicates slightly less warming than other global temperature estimates such as the GISS record.

It is extremely difficult to establish a statistically significant trend over a time interval as short as 15 years.

As ever, the wonderful Skeptical Science covers the whole affair in more depth.

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As well as kindly praising Tim’s analysis of the affair which you can find here on climatesafety.org, the piece includes a great summary of the IPCC and its processes:

“Assessment reports are published every six or seven years and writing them takes about three years. Each working group publishes one of the three volumes of each assessment. The focus of the recent allegations is the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), which was published in 2007.

“Its three volumes are almost a thousand pages each, in small print. They were written by over 450 lead authors and 800 contributing authors; most were not previous IPCC authors. There are three stages of review involving more than 2,500 expert reviewers who collectively submitted 90,000 review comments on the drafts. These, together with the authors’ responses to them, are all in the public record.”

They get to the real crux of the recent “scandals”, asking: Do any of them effect the basic climate science?

“In some media reports the impression has been given that even the fundamental results of climate change science are now in question, such as whether humans are in fact changing the climate, causing glacier melt, sea level rise and so on. The IPCC does not carry out primary research, and hence any mistakes in the IPCC reports do not imply that any climate research itself is wrong. A reference to a poor report or an editorial lapse by IPCC authors obviously does not undermine climate science. Doubting basic results of climate science based on the recent claims against the IPCC is particularly ironic since none of the real or supposed errors being discussed are even in the Working Group 1 report, where the climate science basis is laid out.

“To be fair to our colleagues from WG2 and WG3, climate scientists do have a much simpler task. The system we study is ruled by the well-known laws of physics, there is plenty of hard data and peer-reviewed studies, and the science is relatively mature. The greenhouse effect was discovered in 1824 by Fourier, the heat trapping properties of CO2 and other gases were first measured by Tyndall in 1859, the climate sensitivity to CO2 was first computed in 1896 by Arrhenius, and by the 1950s the scientific foundations were pretty much understood.”

As for their conclusion, we couldn’t have put it better ourselves:

“All of these various “gates” – Climategate, Amazongate, Seagate, Africagate, etc., do not represent scandals of the IPCC or of climate science. Rather, they are the embarrassing battle-cries of a media scandal, in which a few journalists have misled the public with grossly overblown or entirely fabricated pseudogates, and many others have naively and willingly followed along without seeing through the scam.”

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