Updates on the politics and finances of warming

The UK's left-wing Guardian has a report on battered warming alarmist Phil Jones, the principle participant in the Climategate controversy. You will remember that Jones was the man who told a skeptic that he wouldn't release his data because the skeptic would be looking for errors in it.

Jones appeared before a Parliamentary Investigation and was asked about his refusal to release data so that it could be scrutinized. Jones said replied: "I have obviously written some very awful emails." MP Graham Stringer asked again: "But you wouldn't let him have the data." Jones replied: "We had a lot of work and resources tied up in it."

The Guardian said that was Jones "digging himself in a little deeper." Truly it is, but does reveal something that is true about human nature that explains a lot about the politics of warming. This is an example of what Tyler Cowan would call the "inner economist." People invest in things, and when they invest, they don't want to know that their investment was wrong or misguided. They want confirmation and don't want bad news. There is a natural tendency to seek out what verifies our beliefs and avoid material that doesn't. Jones was protecting his investment.

Jones admits that he didn't give out the material because he had a "lot of work and resources" invested in his theory and he simply didn't want someone finding the flaws. That is an honest admission. It is also one of the reasons I try to reconsider my positions on issues with some regularity—hence the reason I recently changed my mind on hate crime legislation (which is not the same thing as hate speech legislation which I oppose). My reasoning is at the end of this post.

Jones brought his vice chancellor, Edward Acton, with him as part of his support and defense. Acton made an important concession, and Jones didn't repudiate him when he did so:

Acton conceded that not everything pointed in the same direction. It's acknowledged that several hundred years ago Earth became much warmer. If we knew why, we could explain a lot. "The early medieval period is something we should spend more time researching," he mused. This was probably the first time anyone had said that to a parliamentary committee since Simon de Montfort ran the place.

In a previous interview with the BBC Jones admitted that there has been no significant global warming global warming since 1995. And he said that since 2002 the temperature trend has been toward cooling "but this trend is not statistically significant" as well. Jones also said that the if the Medieval Warm Period "was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today then obviously the late-20th century warmth would be be unprecedented." This is one reason the alarmists spent so much time and energy trying to eradicate the MWP. Many of them have gone so far as to say the MWP is a myth and didn't exist. So for the Jones "defense team" to admit "that several hundred years ago Earth became much warmer" is a significant concession.

Jones said he collaborated with climate units in the US, Russia and Japan and "We may be using a lot of common date." Telegraph columnist Gerald Warner says that is significant. "It is the raw data that matters. If that is wrong, nuances of interpretation based on it are irrelevant..."

A column published by the Australian Broadcasting Company makes an interesting point that is often neglected in this debate: almost all the funding pushes research in one direction. Joanne Nova looked at the "money trail" of the climate debate and said that the skeptics "are actually the true grassroots campaigners, while Greenpeace defends Wall St." She notes the skeptics are up agains "a billion dollar industry aligned with a trillion dollar trading scheme." Nova notes "that there are no grants for scientists to demonstrate that carbon has little effect. She writes:

...there is no group or government seriously funding scientists to expose flaws. The lack of systematic auditing of the IPCC, NOAA, NASA or East Anglia CRU, leaves a gaping vacuum. It's possible that honest scientists have dutifully followed their grant applications, always looking for one thing in one direction, and when they have made flawed assumptions or errors, or just exaggerations, no one has pointed it out simply because everyone who could have, had a job doing something else. In the end the auditors who volunteered — like Steve McIntyre and AnthonyWatts — are retired scientists, because they are the only ones who have the time and the expertise to do the hard work. (Anyone fancy analysing statistical techniques in dendroclimatology or thermometer siting instead of playing a round of golf?)

Nova notes the corporatist elements, how the State Capitalists (as opposed to free market types) stand to benefit from carbon trading schemes. She says there was $126 billion in carbon trading in 2008. "Every major finance house stands to profit as brokers of a paper trade. It doesn't matter whether you buy or sell, the bankers take a slice both ways. The bigger the market, the more money they make shifting paper." And this poses a problem for the skeptics:

Unpaid sceptics are not just taking on scientists who conveniently secure grants and junkets for pursuing one theory, they also conflict with potential profits of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, and every other financial institution or corporation that stands to profit like the Chicago Climate Exchange, European Climate Exchange, PointCarbon, IdeaCarbon (and the list goes on… ) as well as against government bureaucracies like the IPCC and multiple departments of Climate Change. There's no conspiracy between these groups, just similar profit plans or power grabs.

I have repeatedly tried to point out, to my friends on the Left, that their efforts routinely are corrupted by the political process. Any honest history of Big Business will show that the Left has routinely handed Big Business massive amounts of wealth, via the regulatory process, which they could not earn honestly in free, competitive markets. Nova is correct when she notes that Greenpeace is the ally of Wall Street.

Here is a great musical number from Evita that is appropriate.

Climate U-Turn or Explanation?

The controversy around climate alarmist Phil Jones simply won’t die. But this time he is feeding the flurry of reports with his own admissions. Meanwhile, defenders of Jones argue that one reason he can’t comply with Freedom of Information Act requests is that Jones is a sloppy researcher who has piles of unsorted paper and data just sitting all over his office.

BBC interviewer Roger Harrabin, who held the enlightening interviewer with Jones, says that colleagues of Jones said he was unorganized and careless with files and data. Jones admitted as much himself and said that helped explain his refusal to share data—he couldn’t fill the requests. Asked if he lost track of data he said: “There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be.”

Warming Trends

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm

The interview with Jones is worth reading because Jones makes some public concessions that isn’t heard often from the IPCC crowd and the politicians associated with the warming controversy. For instance when is the last time you heard admissions that the warming trend from 1975 to 1998 was identical to earlier trends that could not be attributed to human causation? The BBC interview said:

Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I've assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.

Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 periods is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different.

I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998. So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

Next Jones conceded that there had been “no statistically-significant global warming from 1995 to today. He said that the warming failed to be statistically significant “but only just.” He said: “I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.”

Since 2002 he also says there has been a trend toward cooling, not warming, but it was also not statistically significant. “The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.”

Asked if “natural influences could have contributed significantly to the global warming observed from 1975-1998” Jones pleaded ignorance, saying this “is slightly outside my area of expertise.” He said that natural influences “could have contributed to the change over this period.”

Jones says he is “100% confident that the climate has warmed” but when asked how confident he is that humans are responsible his response is significantly weaker, saying only that “there’s evidence” that could be the case.

Medieval Warm Period

One of the problems for warming alarmists has been the Medieval Warm Period, which previously was widely believed to significantly warmer than today. Alarmists have worked very hard to make the MWP disappear and Michael Mann’s famous, but discredited “hockey stick” graph showed no MWP so that today’s temperatures appeared unprecedented. Whether or not such a warm period existed is thus important. Jones conceded: “if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm that today, then current warmth would be unprecedented.”

It appears that Jones is skeptical of the MWP being global because: “There are very few palaeoclimatic records for [the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere].” As a result: “We cannot, therefore, make the assumption that the temperatures in the global average would be similar to those in the northern hemisphere.” Fair enough, if true. But neither can we assume that a similar trend didn’t happen, which is what the alarmists seem to do. A lack of evidence is a lack of evidence, not proof of an alternate theory.

This is like UFO theory. A UFO is an “unidentified” flying object. It simply means something in the sky, which can’t be identified. The lack of identification is used by UFO loons to claim that unidentified objects are then proven to be space aliens.

Jones is then asked: “If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the MWP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?” His reply is revealing: “The fact that we can't explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing.”

Jones seems to assume that only solar and volcanic activity, outside of carbon dioxide emissions, can cause warming trends. His interview, at the very least, gives the appearance he is saying, that since he dismisses solar and volcanic activity as the cause of warming, then only human action remains. That climate change may be caused by dozens of factors interacting with one another doesn’t seem considered. Climate change may not be mono causal at all. It may well be that numerous causes, none of which are individually significant, could work in concert to create shifts in planetary climate.