The international consensus on global warming has seemingly experienced a spectacular slow-motion train wreck over the last few months, with “climategate” reports piling up in public debate like derailing rail cars filmed in freeze frame. The fascination for on-lookers, however, is that the science itself is largely blameless. Instead, the pile-up stands as a case study in how not to wage a political battle. And make no mistake; the attacks on climate science are pure politics. We have seen attacks on science before, just pick your favorite example: smoking, toxic pollution, seat belts, etc. However, until there is a fundamental reframing of the climate science debate, one that illuminates the politics, the current round of attacks will continue to enjoy success.
Media Politics ScienceGuest 21 March
GeneralRichard Hawkins 12 March
This week’s climate links
Dive right in:
- 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.”
Fresh batch of ‘leaked’ emails reveal no sign of conspiracy. Just climate scientists keen on public engagement.1
Another batch of private emails from climate scientists has been leaked/hacked/stolen/whatever. These ones, though, are very different than the last.
It’s a thread of emails from the NAS (US National Academy of Sciences), and these guys are mad. They are mad about vested interests skewing the discussion. They are mad that journalists have sat and lapped it right up without checking their facts. They are mad that the public is suddenly more confused than ever about a field of science that is more united than ever.
ScienceAndrew Russell 3 March
Jones et al. (2010)3
A brief summary of the Science & Technology Committee’s ‘ClimateGate’ hearing
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…
MediaTim Holmes 25 February
IPCC reform? We need PCC reform first3
As the ‘Climategate’ news cycle creaks on, pundits are busily delivering advice on how scientists can do their jobs better. “It is time for the IPCC to be disbanded,” declares Ann Widdecombe in the Express, “and replaced by a group of open-minded, fact-orientated, cautious scientists who are interested in truth, however inconvenient.” “Scientists, you are fallible,” proclaims Simon Jenkins in the Guardian. Climatologists “are no different from bankers, politicians, lawyers, estate agents and perhaps even journalists. They cheat. They make mistakes. They suppress truth and suggest falsity.”
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.
ScienceBrad Johnson 23 February
Climate Scientists Withdraw Journal Claims Of Limit To Rising Sea Levels1
Cross-posted from the Wonk Room.
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.
GeneralRichard Hawkins 21 February
This week’s climate links
Dive right in:
- 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.”
Media ScienceUnity 19 February
Sunday Times promotes climate denier2
A couple of weeks ago, Ben Goldacre bashed out a quick piece for the Guardian’s news desk on the subject of the General Medical Council’s damning verdict on the conduct of Andrew Wakefield, in which he said:
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.
MediaRichard Hawkins 18 February
GrowthGate0
Via Tamino at OpenMind:
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?”
Media ScienceRichard Hawkins 15 February
RealClimate on the media’s misleading coverage of the IPCC1
RealClimate have just published a really useful post discussing the IPCC and media distortion.
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?
